A couple of my favorite pictures from the Beara Peninsula. A storm passed through the previous day giving us great skys in the morning as we set out. I made a conscious effort to turn my camera 90 degrees on this trip, especially with my wide angle. Both of these are at 16mm. I was also playing with ISO on this trip. The first was at 250, the second at 320. I took a lot at 400, because once upon a time I shot a lot of ISO 400 B&W film, but I found a lot of those to have a good bit of noise. I am using a Canon 6D if you are interested.
Do you guys adjust ISO? Do you have a max?
@Shawn, Am a student and learning by observations and discussions. At my opinion.
FIRST IMAGE: To me it looks over saturated. Horizon placement in composition disturbs. Nothing in foreground is even my struggle at field.
SECOND IMAGE: Land / water part is under exposed. with exposure correction, it has good potential of reflection in composition.
Looking forward. thanks.
You are right Vijay, I was adjusting up the blue saturation, but I didn't think I went that far. Although slightly unnatural, I was aiming for something like a polarizer. The biggest change I made on pic 1 was using a grad filter on the grass to bring up the exposure almost a full stop. I also used a good bit of dehaze, which distorted the sky a bit too.
Here is the 2 nd picture with 3 full stops of exposure increase on the bottom. You can see the water isn't too pretty. But I could recrop ect.
@Shawn, this is better version. this would be your quick work and later deserves more of your attention.
Bring up just the shadows there if you can, Shawn. Depends on software how one approaches that.
Thanks for the suggestion Chris. Here it is in practice. Here is the same grad filter as above, with exposure compensation at 0 and shadow comp at +70. As you are hinting at, it lands in-between the post and the edit above.
I agree with Vijay about saturation in the first, and that the shadows could be lighter in the mono, Shawn.
Digital and film are different worlds when it comes to ISO, Shawn. 400 film would always be grainy, but you can go into the thousands with all but the most basic DSLRs & mirrorless. I append an image taken at 3200 with a D700, a decade-old design. I used to use 3200 film in order to get spectacular grain. Depending on the subject, noise reduction in "post" can hugely help without destroying detail if you're careful i.e. watch as you work.
Personally, I always use the lowest "safe" ISO, and go as high as I need for the image, often 500-800 if it's dark and I'm using a longer lens. And a bit of noise or grain isn't necessarily the death knell for an image. Be meticulous & considered by all means, but don't let creativity be stifled by tech concerns.
Thanks Chris. I will find the right balance. I just don't shoot enough to get past the execution mistakes sometimes. I love skys and wide open spaces. I see that noise show up in the skies and distant objects where texture doesn't help hide the noise.
You've gotten great technical feedback here so I'll just pipe in with excellent composition! I prefer landscape format for landscapes and the first one might work better that way but the second is perfectly composed!