Gabby Walking

Blue · Gabby Walking

Here is one of my first plays with my lensbaby. Be easy on me with your critique- I am still learning, LOL, but I did think this one turned out nicely. I know there are blown highlights- painfully aware of that, actually.

Evolution104 · Re: Gabby Walking

I like this a lot Blue.

The highlights don't bother me. Sometimes I think too much is made of that. If an area of an image which is important lacks detail because of blown highlights, then, yes, I agree that's a problem. But I've seen many professional images that have blown highlights, either in non-critical areas, or where they are intentional and part of the composition such that they help impart artistic impact or would be expected to be blown out when the human eye would look at it.

The bright areas here neither detract or would be expected to have meaningful detail. They simply look like the perennial gray skies we have here this time of year Sad

I think it's fine and makes for a very interesting image.

If you were to crop out that area of the image, I think much would be lost - both sense of place and balance.

John

hil26

been wondering about purchasing a lens baby for some time,

The image is very nice, and you can imagine a story behind the image. love the lensbaby effect.

Blown highlights - just remember that you will always get them, and in a vast majority of cases you can do nothing with them (nor would you need to anything about them), as the camera is recording what your eyes are seeing

Evolution104

Actually, I've had another thought after looking at this again.

With regular lenses which accept filters (I don't think a lens baby can), you could try using a graduated ND to better balance the brigher sky and the darker foreground (a common tecnique for landscapes).

But in this case, and especially since it's in B&W, in photoshop you can create a gradient map to simulate a graduated ND.

This will darken the sky a bit and may work wonders here.

here is one tutorial - there are many others out there, just google until you find one you like.

Blue

Thanks for the comments. Smile

Evo- that site looks interesting, I'll bookmark it. He's also got a tutorial up on infrared processing, which I have been wanting to try. I'll go back and try out a gradient on this and see how it looks.

The sky actually wasn't what was bothering me, as much as the left side of her face. Nothing to be done about that one.

Because I have a new camera which I haven't mastered, and now this new lens which is difficult to control, my outing was... challenging at best. I need to somehow turn off ALL of the camera's automatic exposure settings when I use this lens, because the camera was just going crazy. I had it in manual, and it was telling me the Ap was F0... ok, I understand the lensbaby is not communicating with my camera. But the shutter speed would not sit still. It was all over the place... from 1/15 to 1/8000. I would set it, take the picture, and then find it had changed itself during the shot. So a lot of my pictures ended up stark white. This picture, I had to lower 3 stops in RAW, and was surprised it was even usable. Basically, I just need to re-read my camera's manual and figure out how to stop the shutter speed from changing on it's own.

Gabby Walking

Re: Gabby Walking