Official BeyondUnreal Photography Thread
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How are you liking that lens? I've heard good and bad things about it. Nothing first hand.
How did I miss that ;p
Here's some awesome wildlife photography. I did post about it before so its a bit old(er) yet still very nice. But instead of bumping an ancient thread I'd rather re-post it here in a more appropriate one...
Or someone might get reeeeaaally mad.
Wild things photography
The wolves shots are my favourite ones.
Yeah, those landscape shots are indeed great. Juneau icefield... hmm..
Here's some awesome wildlife photography. I did post about it before so its a bit old(er) yet still very nice. But instead of bumping an ancient thread I'd rather re-post it here in a more appropriate one...
Or someone might get reeeeaaally mad.
Wild things photography
The wolves shots are my favourite ones.
Yeah, those landscape shots are indeed great. Juneau icefield... hmm..
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Man that website just devoured about an hour of my time before I could blink.
I liked the landscape shots the best, personally.
Festering Anus
Cheeto Hans
Those horse pics are pretty epic. Here's what I shot today. Weather conditions weren't optimal but I know I wont have a chance to go out until next weekend.
[SCREENSHOT]http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4083/5005490991_596bc10b03_b.jpg[/SCREENSHOT]
[SCREENSHOT]http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4148/5005508871_aa1ae4c522_b.jpg[/SCREENSHOT]
[SCREENSHOT]http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4107/5005506843_afb3c58694_o.jpg[/SCREENSHOT]
[SCREENSHOT]http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4149/5005494131_edf0b89ca8_b.jpg[/SCREENSHOT]
[SCREENSHOT]http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4108/5006104374_995918b847_b.jpg[/SCREENSHOT]
[SCREENSHOT]http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4092/5005503109_15815f3bc6_b.jpg[/SCREENSHOT]
[SCREENSHOT]http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4083/5005490991_596bc10b03_b.jpg[/SCREENSHOT]
[SCREENSHOT]http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4148/5005508871_aa1ae4c522_b.jpg[/SCREENSHOT]
[SCREENSHOT]http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4107/5005506843_afb3c58694_o.jpg[/SCREENSHOT]
[SCREENSHOT]http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4149/5005494131_edf0b89ca8_b.jpg[/SCREENSHOT]
[SCREENSHOT]http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4108/5006104374_995918b847_b.jpg[/SCREENSHOT]
[SCREENSHOT]http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4092/5005503109_15815f3bc6_b.jpg[/SCREENSHOT]
Very nice, Fearless.
At some point you guys should go back and compare some of your earlier submissions in this thread with the newer stuff, because it seems like the quality of submissions from pretty much everyone just keeps getting better.
At some point you guys should go back and compare some of your earlier submissions in this thread with the newer stuff, because it seems like the quality of submissions from pretty much everyone just keeps getting better.
[screenshot]http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4108/5006104374_995918b847_b.jpg[/screenshot]
Lol. That's the sort of thing I'd like to do. I tend to draw stuff where I shouldn't.. sometimes people complain, some are cool with it.
Lol. That's the sort of thing I'd like to do. I tend to draw stuff where I shouldn't.. sometimes people complain, some are cool with it.
Ah, thanks so much...that's really nice of you to say, but I must warn you (in Kill Bill 2 voice) "I am very susceptible to flattery"
Seriously, it's genuinely nice when someone else tells me that something I've done makes them feel something, or be inspired. So thank you for that.
As for getting out of England...do what I did, do a TEFL course I only meant it as a way to travel and earn money for a couple of years...that was 16 years ago. Seriously, do a one month certificate and the world just opens up to you. I work for the British Council in Lisbon, and we're so short of teachers this year that we're recruiting people straight off the course.
Kantham said:
Thanks as well. As for head shots....well, that's Mike's area and I have to admit to being pretty clueless about that aspect of photography. Photography is such a huge area, and there are so many parts of it that I like looking at, but wouldn't know where to start when it comes to doing it myself. Macro is a great example of this.
I'm mainly interesting in photography as a means of capturing spontaneous moments, whether it be travel or landscape shots, and 99% of the wedding work I do is candid, and not posed portraits. I'm not saying any one aspect/style or type of photography is better than another..just different, and they require different skills and abilities.
For head shots, I assume you mean posed portraits and stuff like that, right? That involves using multiple light sources, reflectors, soft-boxes, those umbrella things that I haven't got a clue about, as well as being able to direct a model in posing....two sets of skills that I really don't have.
Anyways, here are a couple of shots from various weddings this summer (and ironically, after what I wrote above, one of them is actually a posed shot, but the others are all candids).
Brilliant shots, I'd love to have the chance to shoot something like that. I really loved the second shot, the composition, the focus...I hope you don't mind, but I played around a little with some processing, cropping it a tiny bit, de-saturating and sharpening it a little.shadow_dragon said:
OO7MIKE said:
I think you define how good a lens is by how often you reach for it. When I'm shooting landscapes I never go out without this lens...and after my 17-35mm, it's the second most used lens I have for scenics. Those two are always in my bag, and I'll use the 80-400 MUCH more than a 24-70 (or one of my other mid-range zooms).
It's the perfect landscape telephoto for a Nikon. The focal length is perfect, it's sharp and contrast-y, and it's not too large or bulky to carry on long hikes.
It is however, VERY slow to focus, and neither does it have a particularly wide minimum aperture. Not a problem with landscapes, but I'd NEVER use this lens for weddings or fast-moving wildlife. For what I use it for though, it's just a great lens. I've uploaded some examples with it (I'm pretty sure I've submitted some of these before, but I haven't shot many landscapes this year, so apologies for repeating stuff)
Tuscany, dawn in Val d'Orcia. 200mm
Peaks in Glen Coe, Scottish Highlands. 80mm
Late light in fields near San Quirico d'Orcia, Tuscany. 80mm
Peaks of Sierra Nevada at dusk, Andalucia, Spain. 195mm
Capella di Vitaletta at dawn, Tuscany. 80mm
The village of Castelluccio, Umbria. 400mm
Handheld shot of the peaks of the southern Alps above the clouds. Taken through a plane window at around 25 000 feet. 210mm
Lightbeams above the Sound of Raasay at dawn, Isle of Skye. 240mm
Detail of peak in Glen Coe, Scottish Highlands. 175mm
jesus h!
once again, Isphrael puts the entire thread to shame.
but I'm also a sucker for texture
it makes ordinary shots extraordinary.
all these great submissions are itching my creative nerve.
I've been shooting candid crap at car shows for so long now, using the excuse that school/work is too busy for me to get out and try anything artistic.
no more!
it's time to dig out ye ole' macro lens and get my photographers eye in shape again. hopefully fall/winter will provide some new inspiration.
once again, Isphrael puts the entire thread to shame.
this is awesome.
but I'm also a sucker for texture
it makes ordinary shots extraordinary.
all these great submissions are itching my creative nerve.
I've been shooting candid crap at car shows for so long now, using the excuse that school/work is too busy for me to get out and try anything artistic.
no more!
it's time to dig out ye ole' macro lens and get my photographers eye in shape again. hopefully fall/winter will provide some new inspiration.
Israphel, your shots are just so amazing and as Igoy said, inspiring. How come you can't provide them in higher resolution? Because you're selling high resolution in other places or what?
Oh yeah, great pictures Fearless, especially the one with the little horse. Kind of cute actually
Oh yeah, great pictures Fearless, especially the one with the little horse. Kind of cute actually
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Festering Anus
Cheeto Hans
Thanks everyone!
Also Jacks, I feel the opposite. I really want to shoot some kind of public event soon
Also Jacks, I feel the opposite. I really want to shoot some kind of public event soon
I agree, you really know what your money maker lenses are based on how often you use them. Thanks for the info on the lens.
I'm really intrigued by your work. Landscapes are not my cup of tea. I have little patience for them in general.. though I might if I traveled to more interesting places. Some day I hope to incorporate my portrait work in with landscapes. Its a goal of mine for next year.
No doubt your images look great coming out of the camera but I think what sets your images apart from others is your processing techniques. I like how you make your images colorful and sharp without overdoing it. Do you find that you have to do post production work after capture NX or do you find that capture NX does everything you need? I'd like to get a glimpse of your workflow.
shadow_dragon
is ironing his panties!
Brilliant shots, I'd love to have the chance to shoot something like that. I really loved the second shot, the composition, the focus...I hope you don't mind, but I played around a little with some processing, cropping it a tiny bit, de-saturating and sharpening it a little.
That is a definate improvement, I've been put to shame with my own photograph, heh heh. I do have a couple of versions of it with alternate white balance settings but that is a good crop and your sharpening is nice too, how do you do that? I usually avoid those options out of fear they'll break the image in a way I won't notice untill it's printed.
@Neonite, Zxan and Jacks. Thanks a lot, glad you like them.
I'm pretty lazy when it comes to post processing, so I try to do as much in camera as I can. I don't have the patience (nor the time), and if I have to spend more than 10 minutes on an individual shot, then I usually won't bother. There are exceptions, but for the most part the average on a landscape shot is 5 minutes.
Ironically, my wedding shots generally have a lot more processing stages, but with weddings I find it easier to batch process, whereas with landscapes that doesn't really work.
I used to use LR and then switched to Aperture. Both worked just fine with my D80, and I never had any complaints. But my D3 files really looked washed out and lacking in contrast in both programs, and nothing has changed with newer versions of them.
So now everything goes through Nikon NX software.
The thing about NX2 is that it just works better with Nikon NEF files than anything else out there. It reads the camera settings for saturation, sharpness etc, and applies those to the RAW file in the same way that it would a JPG. This means that if you find time to get camera settings that you like, you save a lot of time in post as the RAW files come out looking pretty much as you'd like them to look.
Of course, in NX2, you can opt to not use the camera settings, or change them.
I use View NX2 to have a first look. You can do basic adjustments in this, but I don't bother....I just use it to quickly browse the images, delete the ones that are no good, mark the ones that look like they are worth working on, and apply any captions/tags/metadata.
Capture NX2 is like PS in that it's not a good program for quickly browsing and reviewing files, so I use View NX2. From there, I can open images in Capture NX2 and the two programs work pretty seamlessly side by side. It's a shame that you need two programs to do what LR or Aperture do in one, but the other side of the coin is that NX2 is FAR more powerful when it comes to editing Nikon RAW files.
First thing I'll normally do is bring the edges in on the histogram, then give the contrast curve a small "s". I rarely touch Saturation as the shots come out of the camera pretty saturating in NX2.
I'll work on any clipped highlights globally, and also shadows, but with shadows I'll usually drop a control point on the shadow area and pull them back locally using the d-lighting setting. NX2 uses Nik software control points, which are easily the most intuitive thing I've ever seen for local adjustments. D-Lighting is Nikons tool from putting more detail into shadows. You can set it in camera, apply it globally later, or just apply it locally with a control point.
Then I'll go to Nik Colour Efex Pro http://www.niksoftware.com/colorefexpro/usa/entry.php This is, quite honestly, brilliant software. You can get it for PS, LR and Aperture, but NX2 is the only software that integrates it alongside all the other adjustment controls, and lets you use it on the RAW files. I'll often apply a Glamour Glow filter, then with landscapes really reduce the opacity to about 20% so the effect is very faint. I use this filter pretty much on all my wedding shots, as well as the Cross Processing filters.
Then, I might work a little on local areas of colour or contrast using a control point again, just selecting a particular colour and/or area, and tweaking the contrast curve, colour temperature or the Gamma saturation.
Then, noise reduction (still in NX2) on local areas, again using a control point. Also, any dust busting.
Finally, Unsharp Mask (again, still in NX2) intensity around 50%, radius 3, threshold 0
That's it. It's very rare for the image to have any editting done on it in PS (unless there's some heavy duty cloning work to be done) and to print I'll just export it as a TIFF and send it to the lab.
NX2 is certainly a lot clunkier than LR and Aperture, but the simple fact is that 1) images need a lot less work doing to them as they look better straight out of camera, and 2) I can actually get the finished image quicker, as I don't have to convert the image to a PSD to use plug ins like Efex Pro, I don't have to use PS, adn the control points are the quickest, most intuitive way of local adjustment I've used.
The one thing I religiously use PS for though is resize and sharpening for the web, because it gives me sharpening I just can't get with anything else.
I generally sharpen landscape images more than weddings, so this might not be of any use to you.
Basically, there's a formula for landscape images that is repeated and used quite a lot by landscape photographers on forums, and it's this:
Create a JPEG from the original RAW file at pretty much the original dimensions (4000+ along the longest edge on my D3) and open it in PS.
Decide what final size you are going to reduce to for the web. I usually use 800 or 900 along the longest edge. Here's the tricky part, reduce the image to x1.66 of your final image output size.
So, for example, if you want an image that's 800 pixels along the longest edge, reduce the image to around 1300 (800x1.66 = 1328). If you want an image that's 900 pixels, reduce to around 1500 (900x1.66 = 1494) etc etc.
Now, Sharpen (not Smart Sharpen, not Unsharp mask, just the regular Sharpen filter). Then do it again (the second time I often do on a New Layer so I can reduce the opacity).
The image should look pretty crappy and over-sharpened with nasty halos, but don't worry about it.
Resize the image to the final size you wanted, and all the nasty over sharpening will have disappeared. It will just look pin sharp
You can get all this done really quickly by creating Photoshop Actions for all the different sizes you resize to, so then it's all done in one click.
As I said, for the second pass of sharpening, I do it on a new layer, and then reduce the opacity a little after the final resize.
Hope that helps
I've outlined the sharpening I do (it's what I did to this shot) in my reply to Mike above...the bit that's written in grey is the relevant part.
Basically though, there's the final image that I keep for prints with just a little sharpening , and then for anything that is put on the web, I create a new JPG, and then do the resize/sharpen I've described above.
I'm pretty lazy when it comes to post processing, so I try to do as much in camera as I can. I don't have the patience (nor the time), and if I have to spend more than 10 minutes on an individual shot, then I usually won't bother. There are exceptions, but for the most part the average on a landscape shot is 5 minutes.
Ironically, my wedding shots generally have a lot more processing stages, but with weddings I find it easier to batch process, whereas with landscapes that doesn't really work.
I used to use LR and then switched to Aperture. Both worked just fine with my D80, and I never had any complaints. But my D3 files really looked washed out and lacking in contrast in both programs, and nothing has changed with newer versions of them.
So now everything goes through Nikon NX software.
The thing about NX2 is that it just works better with Nikon NEF files than anything else out there. It reads the camera settings for saturation, sharpness etc, and applies those to the RAW file in the same way that it would a JPG. This means that if you find time to get camera settings that you like, you save a lot of time in post as the RAW files come out looking pretty much as you'd like them to look.
Of course, in NX2, you can opt to not use the camera settings, or change them.
I use View NX2 to have a first look. You can do basic adjustments in this, but I don't bother....I just use it to quickly browse the images, delete the ones that are no good, mark the ones that look like they are worth working on, and apply any captions/tags/metadata.
Capture NX2 is like PS in that it's not a good program for quickly browsing and reviewing files, so I use View NX2. From there, I can open images in Capture NX2 and the two programs work pretty seamlessly side by side. It's a shame that you need two programs to do what LR or Aperture do in one, but the other side of the coin is that NX2 is FAR more powerful when it comes to editing Nikon RAW files.
First thing I'll normally do is bring the edges in on the histogram, then give the contrast curve a small "s". I rarely touch Saturation as the shots come out of the camera pretty saturating in NX2.
I'll work on any clipped highlights globally, and also shadows, but with shadows I'll usually drop a control point on the shadow area and pull them back locally using the d-lighting setting. NX2 uses Nik software control points, which are easily the most intuitive thing I've ever seen for local adjustments. D-Lighting is Nikons tool from putting more detail into shadows. You can set it in camera, apply it globally later, or just apply it locally with a control point.
Then I'll go to Nik Colour Efex Pro http://www.niksoftware.com/colorefexpro/usa/entry.php This is, quite honestly, brilliant software. You can get it for PS, LR and Aperture, but NX2 is the only software that integrates it alongside all the other adjustment controls, and lets you use it on the RAW files. I'll often apply a Glamour Glow filter, then with landscapes really reduce the opacity to about 20% so the effect is very faint. I use this filter pretty much on all my wedding shots, as well as the Cross Processing filters.
Then, I might work a little on local areas of colour or contrast using a control point again, just selecting a particular colour and/or area, and tweaking the contrast curve, colour temperature or the Gamma saturation.
Then, noise reduction (still in NX2) on local areas, again using a control point. Also, any dust busting.
Finally, Unsharp Mask (again, still in NX2) intensity around 50%, radius 3, threshold 0
That's it. It's very rare for the image to have any editting done on it in PS (unless there's some heavy duty cloning work to be done) and to print I'll just export it as a TIFF and send it to the lab.
NX2 is certainly a lot clunkier than LR and Aperture, but the simple fact is that 1) images need a lot less work doing to them as they look better straight out of camera, and 2) I can actually get the finished image quicker, as I don't have to convert the image to a PSD to use plug ins like Efex Pro, I don't have to use PS, adn the control points are the quickest, most intuitive way of local adjustment I've used.
The one thing I religiously use PS for though is resize and sharpening for the web, because it gives me sharpening I just can't get with anything else.
I generally sharpen landscape images more than weddings, so this might not be of any use to you.
Basically, there's a formula for landscape images that is repeated and used quite a lot by landscape photographers on forums, and it's this:
Create a JPEG from the original RAW file at pretty much the original dimensions (4000+ along the longest edge on my D3) and open it in PS.
Decide what final size you are going to reduce to for the web. I usually use 800 or 900 along the longest edge. Here's the tricky part, reduce the image to x1.66 of your final image output size.
So, for example, if you want an image that's 800 pixels along the longest edge, reduce the image to around 1300 (800x1.66 = 1328). If you want an image that's 900 pixels, reduce to around 1500 (900x1.66 = 1494) etc etc.
Now, Sharpen (not Smart Sharpen, not Unsharp mask, just the regular Sharpen filter). Then do it again (the second time I often do on a New Layer so I can reduce the opacity).
The image should look pretty crappy and over-sharpened with nasty halos, but don't worry about it.
Resize the image to the final size you wanted, and all the nasty over sharpening will have disappeared. It will just look pin sharp
You can get all this done really quickly by creating Photoshop Actions for all the different sizes you resize to, so then it's all done in one click.
As I said, for the second pass of sharpening, I do it on a new layer, and then reduce the opacity a little after the final resize.
Hope that helps
Glad you liked it. I don't normally do that to other people's work, but I was so blown away by that shot I really couldn't resist having a play with it. It really is lovely.shadow_dragon said:
I've outlined the sharpening I do (it's what I did to this shot) in my reply to Mike above...the bit that's written in grey is the relevant part.
Basically though, there's the final image that I keep for prints with just a little sharpening , and then for anything that is put on the web, I create a new JPG, and then do the resize/sharpen I've described above.
Lol. My join date should give you a clue. I played UT2k3 a bit on a mate's computer, then bought 2k4 pretty much when it came out and played it pretty religiously for about 18 months. After that, I kind of drifted away from gaming completely and don't have anything installed on my computer anymore.SleepyHe4d said:
Because I make some money here and there through licensing images. Most of the time it's for images around 1500 pixels or larger, and if I give my images away for free to anyone who asks, then it's not really fair for me to charge people who are willing to pay for their use.Rambowjo said: