Natures light...

[kaichu dento]

Thanks! Now how about some of your early morning/late afternoon desert pictures? You must have some with the sunbeams cutting down through the clouds?

Hey, OT, but, never mind, I'll make another thread for the flag...

 

[kaichu dento]

Some absolutely gorgeous photos above. This is one I took a couple months ago with my Verizon Incredible phone. It looked even more impressive in person.

It looks pretty impressive as is, but isn't that the frustrating thing with digital; it loses a lot of the subtlety that film (when used right) can deliver.

 

[LuxLuthor]

It looks pretty impressive as is, but isn't that the frustrating thing with digital; it loses a lot of the subtlety that film (when used right) can deliver.

Absolutely! I have never seen anything like that including the lighting, and I was at least happy I had this new phone with its 8 mp camera since I was at the park...but I would have given anything to have a REAL camera with me in the 10 minutes that it exploded into such brilliant color.

 

[Black Rose]

 

[kaichu dento]

Honey pot of gold huh?

That reminds me of one I've got to find where the rainbow ends at a crashed airplane!

 

[cityevader]

I always thought rainbows were so far away until one day one appeared along the highway and down into a valley with many trees for perspective. It went right to the ground and was only a couple hundred yards away.

 

[blasterman]

it loses a lot of the subtlety that film (when used right) can deliver.

Mine was shot with film.

Also, do you have examples of the "improved subtlety" of film?

 

[derangboy]

Photo of a recent thunderstorm. ISO 400, F2, 8 sec. That's about the limit of this camera. I was impressed to see a few stars in the picture too!

 

[kaichu dento]

Mine was shot with film.

Also, do you have examples of the "improved subtlety" of film?

The quote you're replying to had no connection to your picture so I'm not sure what you're after here.

However a couple good examples would be your picture and the one that statement was made in regards to.

Still trying to find my other rainbow shots...

 

[derangboy]

"Moon light-ning"

 

[Linger]

Impressive focus in that picture, you captured the (lightling lit) falling rain very well.

 

[PhotonWrangler]

lovecpf

 

[kaichu dento]

"Moon light-ning"

That is an incredibly fortuitous shot! I like it!

 

[Max_Power]

I learned about rainbow photography by trial and error when I lived in Honolulu, Hawaii - there are brilliant rainbows nearly every day there. Here are some useful pointers.

1) Use a circular polarizer. The light from a rainbow is strongly polarized. If you use a polarizer to favor the rainbow, everything else will be reduced in brightness, which makes the rainbow seem brighter in comparison.

2) Reduce exposure (manual exposure compensation) by about 1 F-stop. If the color looks washed out, reduce exposure some more. The rainbow is brighter than the rest of the frame, and if you are reaching 255 on the RGB pixel values, the rainbow will start turning white in the brightest areas of your photo. "To get more color, reduce the amount of light getting to the sensor."

3) I like to use the in-camera "vivid" setting for creating JPEG files in the camera, but I also save the RAW file in case I blow the exposure. You'll have to experiment with your camera to determine what works best for you. On my Nikon D7000 I find that Vivid +1 or +2 is plenty. Vivid +3 is just too much for most subjects.

4) Stop down the lens to get everything in focus - use a large F-stop number (5.6, 8.0, 11.0) if you can. This will make everything look sharper (increased depth of field), and it will also make the rainbow look more solid due to slower shutter speed. A high shutter speed will tend to make the rainbow look grainy because each raindrop will appear to be frozen in midair.


D7K_2559 by A_Super_Guy, on Flickr
Rainbow at the base of Yosemite Falls

 

[kaichu dento]

Those are some incredible shots and your tips make me wish for some more advances in compact cameras, notably built in filters. A couple of my favorite filters when I had an SLR were the circular polarizer, cross filter, and split filter used to darken the sky while letting all the light come through below the split.

Post some of your pics here next time - great addition!

 

[blasterman]

The quote you're replying to had no connection to your picture so I'm not sure what you're after here.

Lost track of this one.

Explanation: In any serious digital camera forum there are at least several film shooters who wander around and post comments about the mythical advantages film using vague terms and how it's superior to digital capture. Then when cornered and asked to show some examples they run off mumbling things about dead photographers like Ansel Adams, HCB, etc. With a good deal of experience shooting, processing and commercially scanning all manner and formats of film the digital capture I see today is superior to 99.9999% of anything I saw shot on film in the past 100 years, with the best thing being the shooter doesn't have to provision a professional lab to get those results. Likely why digital shooters today are better than most film pros of 20 years ago. That....ticks off a lot of old timers.

So, when I see a comment regaring some mythical property of film I ask the shooter to provide those examples because I use to handle film in a pretty technical context. I know exactly what it would take to beat my 60D in film format, and it ain't nothun on some silly 35mm format. So, it's just reflex

 

[Max_Power]

Those are some incredible shots and your tips make me wish for some more advances in compact cameras, notably built in filters. A couple of my favorite filters when I had an SLR were the circular polarizer, cross filter, and split filter used to darken the sky while letting all the light come through below the split.

Post some of your pics here next time - great addition!

Ah yes, the "split filter" you are referring to is a neutral-density gradient filter. The neutral density part means that there is no color shift, all you are doing is reducing the light transmitted through the filter, and gradient means that some area of the filter lets through more light than the other part. I use a set of Lee ND grad filters with my digital camera to reduce the brightness of the sky so foreground objects (hills, fields, etc) to show up as more than a black silhouette. I suppose I could get the same effect by using HDR, but nearly every HDR photo I have seen looks fake to me. The shots I get with the physical filter look genuine and don't require hours of work back at the computer. Also HDR doesn't work for fast-changing or moving subjects.


D7K_5797 by A_Super_Guy, on Flickr


D7K_5830 by A_Super_Guy, on Flickr

Hey! I'm using a tripod! I can use ISO 100 and just expose for 10-20 seconds... look how much finer the grain looks on this one. But the long exposure makes the clouds lose surface detail and look creamy, like those lengthy shots of waterfalls where the water looks like smoke:


D7K_6441 by A_Super_Guy, on Flickr

 

[Max_Power]

Lost track of this one.

Explanation: In any serious digital camera forum there are at least several film shooters who wander around and post comments about the mythical advantages film using vague terms and how it's superior to digital capture. Then when cornered and asked to show some examples they run off mumbling things about dead photographers like Ansel Adams, HCB, etc. With a good deal of experience shooting, processing and commercially scanning all manner and formats of film the digital capture I see today is superior to 99.9999% of anything I saw shot on film in the past 100 years, with the best thing being the shooter doesn't have to provision a professional lab to get those results. Likely why digital shooters today are better than most film pros of 20 years ago. That....ticks off a lot of old timers.

So, when I see a comment regaring some mythical property of film I ask the shooter to provide those examples because I use to handle film in a pretty technical context. I know exactly what it would take to beat my 60D in film format, and it ain't nothun on some silly 35mm format. So, it's just reflex

Film has a wider dynamic range than silicon sensors, so you can get a properly-exposed shot of the foreground and still have blue or orange (not blown out to white) sky without using a gradient filter. I've seen reports that there are now sensors in the works that adjust the gain on a per-pixel basis so you can get stunning dynamic range, but it is still compressing a wide range into a smaller space.

Film has more "pixels" than digital, although digital is catching up in that regard. 35mm film may be equaled by an 80+ megapixel sensor, which is just a matter of time. Your monitor is not going to show you the difference unless you are enlarging the photo to wall-size.

--Max Power

 

[kaichu dento]

Film has a wider dynamic range than silicon sensors, so you can get a properly-exposed shot of the foreground and still have blue or orange (not blown out to white) sky without using a gradient filter. I've seen reports that there are now sensors in the works that adjust the gain on a per-pixel basis so you can get stunning dynamic range, but it is still compressing a wide range into a smaller space.

This, along with better low light sensitivity are features I hope they bring to market soon - the lack of dynamic range is probably my biggest frustration with the present crop of EDC sized cameras.