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ctfchallenge | all galleries >> CTF Challenge 169 - BUSY >> CTF Challenge 169 - Eligible > 6th Place - Busy Being Green - by Michael Shealy
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28-SEP-2008 Michael Shealy

6th Place - Busy Being Green - by Michael Shealy

Black Forest, CO

Canon EOS 20D ,Tokina 10-17mm f/3.5-4.5 AT-X 107 DX Fisheye

other sizes: small medium original auto
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ctfchallenge05-Oct-2008 14:17
Oh and I forgot to reiiterate how much I like this picy.
Penny Street
ctfchallenge05-Oct-2008 02:36
I don't know, Mikey, It still look great ... but to my eye now the contrast in the wood is a little off.
(I don't have the best monitor but I do compare everything to the same monitor - in other words, you should probably get some other opinions before changing anything based on what I tell you.)
Penny STreet
ctfchallenge05-Oct-2008 02:05
Thanks for the kind and helpful words, y'all. Debi & Brent, I took a bit of orange out of the image. This looks right to me in PS, so ... interestingly, with the two windows next to each other, the color I get with PS-CS3 is different (and less red/orange) than what I see on Pbase with Firefox. I think I'll go see if there are some different color modes available for Firefox. Thanks again for the comments. Cheers, -mikey
ctfchallenge04-Oct-2008 19:51
The PP treatment is perfect for this picture Mickey. This is really good. -COAmature
ctfchallenge04-Oct-2008 18:48
Very nice Mikey. I am usually not a fan of this kind of processing, but with the WA distortion it looks very nice. Quite a place you have there. I agree with Debi that the color might be a bit too orange- especially if I am seeing that on my laptop which tends to not saturate red very much. Great work!
~Brent
ctfchallenge03-Oct-2008 17:39
that shot below is one of the best HDRs I have seen, very natural looking. The image above is a bit too orange though - Debi
ctfchallenge01-Oct-2008 21:53
This certainly is busy looking Mikey, especially with the bright colors and the funny lines! :-D CJ
ctfchallenge01-Oct-2008 16:51
Thanks so much for taking all this time to explain. I promise that I will keep reading this, Mikey, and maybe someday I will understand it.
I can tell you that I like what I'm looking at though.
Penny Street
ctfchallenge01-Oct-2008 16:40
The demo shot was made with the Tamron 17-50mm @ 17mm = much less barrel distortion. Cheers, -mikey
ctfchallenge01-Oct-2008 16:34
Thanks for the comments, Penny & Rod. Rod, it definitely is over-saturated ... I'm not sure if I should tone down my vivid image or my life, or both, ha! This is how it looks to me, most of the time, thru my jaded eye. Remember, I AM Daffy. Anyway, on the distortion, I had a, as Tom mentions, rectilinear UWA lens (Sigma 10-20mm), and tho it produced fine sharp images, I just wasn't happy with the WA effect that I got from it. You could actually look at some of the pix it produced and not realize they were WA. Its the aspherical lens correction that does (or doesn't do, in the case of a fisheye) it. Wherever you see that designation on a lens (ASP), it is correcting the 'natural' barrel distortion.

I really like this lens and the shots its been producing for me. Rod, when it is set at 17mm, it still has considerable BD. If you look at the center of this shot and imagine the rectangle in the center that the 17mm would produce, you can see the amount of BD. When I want one without BD, tho, I put on the 17-50mm.

Penny, as for the technique I used to produce this shot; its actually 3 shots, using an AEB of +/-2 f/stops (automatic exposure bracketing), overlaid into one file and processed from there. The process is called high-dynamic-range (HDR), and I love it! PS-CS can produce (File>Automate>Merge to HDR) an HDR file, then its processed as a 'normal' 16 or 32bit image, from there. I downloaded the free trial of Photomatix Tone Mapping, fell in love with it, completely, and bought it.

To give you an idea what it can do, and again how busy my life is, I'm posting a reduced size of the pic that made up my mind. This is my house again, looking the other direction at our 'breakfast nook' (read: Marlice's office). First with a single "correctly exposed" and unprocessed shot, showing the dynamic range of the 20D, and second, the processed HDR image of the same shot. You can see here that the resultant image doesn't have to have overly "vivid" colors, tho I guess these aren't exactly 'bland'.

Without HDR


With HDR


Thanks again for the comments and thanks, Penny, for asking.

Cheers,

-mikey
Rod 01-Oct-2008 08:45
The curvatures really add to the busyness. The over saturated colours seem to help the curvatures to reproduce a sort of cartoon feel to the picy & I wouldn't be surprised to see daffy duck or the road runner outside. The lens is 10mm to 17mm & is called a fisheye but what would a shot at 17mm look like with this lens Mikey, would it be the same as my normal 17mm or would that lens still try to create a fisheye look to 17mm? The shot works great mate..............a:-)
ctfchallenge01-Oct-2008 01:27
I understand what the fisheye would do but I don't understand the technics of what you did here. I really like it though, particularly how you chose the saturation that matches the effect of the distortion. Penny Street
ctfchallenge01-Oct-2008 01:06
Thanks Tom & Lydia. Yah, Tom, definitely out of the rat race, here. Thanks for the words on the fisheye distortions, too. Yes, Lydia, we can see most of the llamas from these windows ":^). Its kind of like living outside. We have a bunch of bird feeders hanging on the structure you can just make out outside there and the squirrels and birds are there constantly. Foxes come by to invite one of them for dinner. My indoor growing season is just changing so not that much is growing in the planters right now.
ctfchallenge30-Sep-2008 22:41
To my eye, a bit of barrel/fisheye distortion is far preferable to rectelinear wide angle distortion effects. It's a far more natural way of representing peripheral vision and, in fact, if we allow ourselves to concentrate on what we are actually seeing, we will come to accept that straight lines are not at all straight but bowed by the spherical shape of the retina. It's the brain that fools us into believing that we see straight as straight when it is quite impossible. Most visual artists know this but "people" want their lines straight.

Anyway, this is well executed Mikey and appropriately busy. It makes me want to move there and get out of the NY rat race. -tv
ctfchallenge30-Sep-2008 21:47
Oh THAT's cool! Can you see your llamas from this room? It's a wonderful room... that distortion is great. ~Lydia