So yesterday I had a crazy idea. I thought of making a 300km+ trip through the night just to arrive in time for blue hour at Eltz Caste, Germany. As I wasn't planning on staying overnight I needed another driver for the 3.5h journey, so I asked a friend of mine if he'd fancy keeping me company, , fully expecting him to tell me to f* off.
He said "Why not."
So I skipped sleeping, fetched him at around 2am and we were on our way. Everything went like a charm. We didn't get the sunrise we had hoped for, but I'm looking at around 900 pictures (-> timelapse) and sifting through them to find some keepers. This is the first one I found and edited.
thorsten my friend you have given me tutelage that i need to toss back at you ...you have given the the wisdom of checking the details ...please delete the annoying blue light coming from what i believe is the picnic area and the white tent to its immediate left. beautiful sky ..can you pull out any of the pinks/purples from the right of the sky? i love the glow of the castle light is there any way to make it a bit more dramatic by boosting the darks or shadows in the surrounding foliage.. or is the morning fog preventing it?love the image love the site can't wait to see more
Ah, but much to learn you still have my young padawan ;-)
I know about the blue light, but I can't for the love of cookies see how it could distract from the image so I left it in.
As for anything else, that's the way I want it to look, it sets the mood of the image. I was actually hoping for more fog, so I'm glad I got this little bit of haze at least. This is called isolation by the way, the background is there to support the subject, not to distract from it. Were I to enhance contrast and detail in the surrounding trees that would direct attention to them, which is exactly what I don't want.
To some post processing is a means to maximize about anything, sharpness, contrast, saturation, you name it, to pull out every little bit of color they can find and turn those pictures into monstrosities that are difficult to look at.
This picture doesn't have any of that. Ok, I used a high pass filter to carve out the details of the castle a bit more, but only marginally so. I dodged the tops of the trees where the light hits them.
This isn't a shot that I had plenty of time to adjust settings for, it's one of almost 900 pictures and I had to squeeze it into a 2.5s interval. Everytime the light changed I had to decide what to crank up or down next, with just seconds to make my decision.
With that in mind, I think this picture does pretty well.
haha much i still have to learn indeed. apparently we are only on chapter 2 of our book. i have also been watching Nigel and Thom on you tube both of which are great shooters and also have great opinions and ideas, as they say just shoot for yourself.
It is a great shot, i guess I'm gauging on what i like to see as opposed to taking in each artists own style and that is a fault of my own. i love the shots if intense drama and thats the direction i feel i would like to head kind of like the work of Alfonso Maseda Varela for example but then i also love the subtleties of of shooters like Nigel Danson.
as mentioned i still have much to learn ....so about these "cookies"?