A couple of my favourite images

thereyougo! · Jun 1, 2010

New to this forum, but been enjoying my photography. Had a glorious week in Scotland in the winter having travelled up by sleeper train from London. Had one particularly sunny day in the snow around the head of Glen Coe. The skies parted for a few hours. I didn't have any filters with me at all, and I'm not really very proficient at Photoshop, although am exploring Lightroom. As a conswequence these 2 shots are au naturelle.

They are of one of my favourite mountains, Buachaille Etive Mor. Taken at the wide end of my 16 - 35 with an aperature of f/18. One is composed with the road running directly towards the mountain:

and the other that shows the road further on twisting towards the main road to Glen Coe:

Would be very intersted in CC

Toller · Jun 1, 2010

Hi. New to this however IMO lovely. 2 is my favourite. I prefer the composition...the way the road bends round to the mountain, and the fact that it is more prominent in the picture. I feel with 1 the road is the focus of the image, and although the terrain is unlikely to be flat, the slightly sloped horizon is a little distracting. Saying that, I'd be very happy had I of taken them. :thumbup:

thereyougo! · Jun 1, 2010

Toller said:
Hi. New to this however IMO lovely. 2 is my favourite. I prefer the composition...the way the road bends round to the mountain, and the fact that it is more prominent in the picture. I feel with 1 the road is the focus of the image, and although the terrain is unlikely to be flat, the slightly sloped horizon is a little distracting. Saying that, I'd be very happy had I of taken them. :thumbup:

Thanks for that. I have to admit that as I am often walking fairly long distances as well as taking photos (I walked 14 miles on the day I took these) I tend not to have a tripod with me, and I always do a bit of photography alongside walking. So my horizontals can be a bit wonky occasionally. My wife tells me that I buy too many mags, and to be honest most of my shots are just what feels natural. I really need to start shooting RAW and start using Photoshop, but just can't get my head around it. No 2 was my favourite shot of the day. I was walking around in wonder at the beauty of the place and the light. The great thing about winter was that this was taken after noon (in February) and the light felt good

altitude604 · Jun 1, 2010

i agree, #2 is really great!

looks really good for un-modified!

sleist · Jun 1, 2010

I'm surprised at your choice of f/22.0. I think a larger aperture might have produced a better image for you. Judging by the shutter speed (1/100) I would think you could have gone down to between f/11 and f/16 without too much difficulty.

I try avoid f/22.0 to reduce diffraction which degrades the image.

thereyougo! · Sep 30, 2011

Well I had forgotten that I had registered on this forum and came across it on a google search. Over the last year I have started using RAW and learning more and more about photoshop. I've also gone into medium format both on film and digital. I have gone back on this shot and reprocessed it, although had I been shooting RAW then I could have improved it more, I am happy with it now. tell me what you think. It's still one of my favourites! I've sharpened the image, plus brought a bit more life to it with levels. I am now using a tripod more than before. Using the pentax 645D has shown me how sharp photos CAN be, I made a point of getting a good carbon fibre one!

the shepherd by singingsnapper, on Flickr

Infinite_Day · Sep 30, 2011

Stunning shot - very good processing on it. Damn, I wish I could figure out a way to move to Scotland.

MissCream · Sep 30, 2011

Sounds incredibly stupid but I swear I had a dream about this place...

biggoron · Sep 30, 2011

what did you edit on the photo of the curved road to make it look so much clearer? what settings/tools did you use?

thereyougo! · Sep 30, 2011

biggoron said:
what did you edit on the photo of the curved road to make it look so much clearer? what settings/tools did you use?

The first thing I did was to calibrate my laptop's screen with Spyder3pro. I tended to have my macbookpro set a highest brightness so thought that the shot was bright enough. Compiled with this was the lack of a circular polariser which would have been very useful, but as some of my lenses have an 82mm thread, these can be difficult to get from a shop, so I tried underexposing it a little to make the sky a darker blue. WhenI calibrated my screen, a lot of my photos looked a little dark - this one included, so used levels in CS5 to brighten the shot. This wasn't problematic as I always try to shoot with the lowest possible ISO. Having said that, I have sometimes been a slave to this and found with shots I took in the English Lake district that I was using 50 ISO which meant me getting twilight shots with motion blur in them. If I had taken the ISO to say 250, the shot would have been much better with no real noise issues.