[Mastrap]

Just back from the arctic. This shot was taken in Iqaluit, the capital of Nunavut. The temperature yesterday was about -25ºC and windy.



Overlooking Frobischer Bay. Nothing but snow and ice for thousands of miles from here on.

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Lucky bastard. It's on my list of places to go

And great shots too. I love the clouds in the second one.

[Oisín]

The middle cloud in the second shot kind of makes it look like that little hut (?) has a halo.

[Jawbone54]

Very cool shots. The cloud looks like it's indicating the birth of a savior in the little shed below.

You're so lucky to be able to go there.

[ghporter]

I like both pictures, Mastrap. They convey the cold, but also the tranquility of the place (wind or not). Both also feel lonely or isolated-even the first one with the buildings in the background. Nice catches!

[OreoCookie]

If you were referring to this picture, then no:


It's a variation of the one I was commenting on:


And I actually did have the disabled/cancer/incurable disease association.

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Originally Posted by OreoCookie 

The focus (DOF) here is on an empty patch of road. Something is terribly wrong with this one.

[OreoCookie]

If you have a look at the other pictures on his flickr page, this might as well be on purpose. Not sure, though.

[Tesselator]

I wonder if that's just how far from the camera they got before the timer went off?

[Tesselator]

Originally Posted by Mastrap 

Just back from the arctic. This shot was taken in Iqaluit, the capital of Nunavut. The temperature yesterday was about -25ºC and windy.

I really like the lines in this shot! I would have cropped off about 10% or 20% of
the left portion but that's just personal taste. Is that digital? How does your DC
act in -25c weather?

[Tesselator]

Here's some more from me to beat up:


Shots around my church... err, umm, temple...

1/40s @ f/2.8 - ISO 100 - 8.0mm - Converted from RAW and cropped, no PS adjustments.


1/35s @ f/2.8 - ISO 100 - 8.0mm - Converted from RAW and cropped, no PS adjustments.


1/12s @ f/3.7 - ISO 100 - 16.3mm - Converted from RAW and cropped, no PS adjustments.


1/20s @ f/2.8 - ISO 100 - 8.0mm - Converted from RAW and cropped, PS USM on water only.

.

[Mastrap]

Originally Posted by Tesselator 

Is that digital? How does your DC
act in -25c weather?

Yes, it's a Pentax K10D. Great camera, and it worked flawlessly. Having said that, I kept it underneath the parka whenever I could, exposing it to the cold for as short a period of time as possible.

I consider myself very lucky being able to go up there. It's a totally different way of life, only three hours flight from Ottawa. And that's the southern arctic. Up to the northernmost tip of Canada it's almost a nine hour flight across nothing but icy deserts. It really brings home what a huge country Canada is, and how thinly populated.

This is a shot from the airport. That drifting snow on the runway is moving at about 30-40 clicks, even at 1/1000 of a second it still isn't frozen. Gives you an idea of just how cold it gets up there. I don't consider this a great shot, it's just here for illustration purposes.


Jawbone, there are a couple of shots in your flickr set I really like.
You've got linking switched off, so I took a screenshot. Let me know if you'd rather have me delete it:

[bishopazrael]

I've been looking at the last shots on the last couple of pages and I'm just in awe of your guys' talent. I love taking pictures but I don't have anywhere near the skill to do stuff like that. I've got a Samsung Digimax v700/v10. Lost the manuals WAY before I had an interest in shooting in a mode other than automatic. I keep telling myself one of these days I'm going to learn, but the last site I went to to try and learn was so above my head I'm ashamed to say I just gave up. Looking at the HDR pool on flikr though has made me want to learn again. I know I can't do HDR with this camera but I would love to be able to learn to take really awesome shots with it. If anyone has a site or something that can give me a boost of knowledge on how to use this camera better it'd be much appreciated.

Here's my albums on .Mac. My opinion, my best work was the Tulip festival in Woodburn Oregon.
My Photos

[Tesselator]

This: Steves Digicams - Samsung Digimax V700 - User Review ?
A second opinion: Samsung Digimax V700 Review: 1. Introduction: Digital Photography Review

That looks neat-o.. all rounded and stuff. I haven't owned a Samsung yet.

Here's your missing manual: http://org.downloadcenter.samsung.co...10_English.pdf

Driver and Software: download center SAMSUNG

[Tesselator]

BTW, you can do HDR with any camera. HDR started life as an assembled
format and the tools to do that assembly along with the needed instructions
for shooting are still around and also still popular - as 3D CG freaks still need
them. Also by looking at the specs for your camera it has a TIFF mode and I
think that just might be 16bit (48 bits per pixel) format - which is an HDR
format (kinda) though not as good as 96bpp. Basically 8bit and 16 bit capture
the same intensity range but the 16bit offers more luminous resolution. The
easy way to find out is to take a TIFF exposure, load it into PhotoShop and then
see if it says 16bits at window's top.

Your cameras jpegs are 4:2:2 so avoid them when you can. 4:2:2 means that
the color plate is half the dimensional resolution. Think of that as having a grey
scale image for example at 1024x1024 and then a coloring layer at half that
resolution - so if there were a red and a green pixel right next to each other in
your camera's image sensor it would save as two yellow pixels to the camera's
memory card. This 1/2 rez color compression scheme (which is an option of
the jpeg file format spec) causes chroma-noise.


PhotoMatrix Pro is a pretty good start (on Macintosh) for making HDR images.
There's some tutorials on the site as well. Does your camera have a tripod mount?
If it does you're good to go.

[Jawbone54]

Originally Posted by Mastrap

I consider myself very lucky being able to go up there. It's a totally different way of life, only three hours flight from Ottawa. And that's the southern arctic. Up to the northernmost tip of Canada it's almost a nine hour flight across nothing but icy deserts. It really brings home what a huge country Canada is, and how thinly populated.

This is a shot from the airport. That drifting snow on the runway is moving at about 30-40 clicks, even at 1/1000 of a second it still isn't frozen. Gives you an idea of just how cold it gets up there. I don't consider this a great shot, it's just here for illustration purposes.

Looks mind-numbingly cold, but also beautiful. I watched a movie last night called "Steep" that had tons of footage of snow skiers doing their thing in Alaska. There's just something in that "Wshhhkkkrrk-wshhhkkrrrk" sound that makes it seem even more beautiful. Do you have any more from that trip?

I guess snow isn't quite as lovely for those of you who see it all winter long.

Jawbone, there are a couple of shots in your flickr set I really like.
You've got linking switched off, so I took a screenshot. Let me know if you'd rather have me delete it:

I don't mind at all. I forgot that I had linking switched off (whoorps). I appreciate the comments.

That shot was actually one of their three favorites. It's way up there on my list too. Not perfect by any means, but at least it's intimate.

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Originally Posted by Tesselator 

Here's some more from me to beat up:

1/40s @ f/2.8 - ISO 100 - 8.0mm - Converted from RAW and cropped, no PS adjustments.

1/35s @ f/2.8 - ISO 100 - 8.0mm - Converted from RAW and cropped, no PS adjustments.

1/12s @ f/3.7 - ISO 100 - 16.3mm - Converted from RAW and cropped, no PS adjustments.

1/20s @ f/2.8 - ISO 100 - 8.0mm - Converted from RAW and cropped, PS USM on water only.

Glad you say beat up, because like your first entry in the thread there's very little to like here.

1. Busy, blown out sky. Tree covers the main subject in an aesthetically displeasing way. Trying to save the blown out sky by lowering brightness caused a garish grey to appear.

2. Tilting right. Main subject has a pole slightly behind it. Uninteresting. Foul image compression/artifacted. Blown out sky.

3. Tilts left. Trees framing could have been good had they been on the same plane. Too much uninteresting stuff that needs to be cropped out on top - ESPECIALLY the yet again blown out dull sky. The main subject (gateway) needs to be brightened.

4. Blown out sky AND water. Dull colours (that goes for all of them - the light was just a disaster for this shoot). Poor composition. Building only partly in frame on the left should have at least been cropped out. Same with the half-tree on the right, although you'd still had that unsightly branch sticking in to frame.

My advice: Go reshoot, these shots may be worthy to the average point and shoot tourist, but not something I'd post in a critique thread.

[Tesselator]

Thanks. The blown out skies can't really be helped unless I want to edit in PS
or other and for me that's not really the point. Also I don't really care too much
about the compression errors of jpegs for the web. The rest of the crits are good
though. I don't agree with suggesting not to post them in the thread however, that's
not critique, it's snobbery.




And once inside:

0.8s @ f/2.8 - ISO 100 - 8.0mm - Converted from RAW and cropped, no PS adjustments.


1/8s @ f/2.8 - ISO 100 - 8.0mm - Converted from RAW and cropped, no PS adjustments.


1/125s @ f/4.2 - ISO 100 - 20mm - Converted from RAW and cropped, no PS adjustments.


1.2s @ f/2.8 - ISO 100 - 8.0mm - Converted from RAW and cropped, no PS adjustments.

.