dpReview – Dismay at poor photo quality in Challenges
Posted today at dpReview…
Today I went through and voted on the 116 shots for the Western Canada challenge. There are some lovely images that truly convey the characteristics of Western Canada. Unfortunately, I must admit to some dismay over the poor quality of the majority of the entries. First of all, to get only 116 entries for such a vast and truly beautifully photogenic area is disheartening in itself. But the quality of many entries was substandard for a Challenge open to photographers the world over.
I am not trying to be a troll here. Nor am I trying to be self-important in critiquing the work of others. My hope with this post is to encourage dpreview users to work a bit harder on carefully selecting images and carefully processing them before entering. Here are some specific comments/concerns:
- Too many HDR-style/look photos when HDR is not required, nor is the look adding to the aesthetic of the image;
- Not enough critical cropping. There are a couple of photos which make excellent use of negative space, but many others would benefit from a proportion other than the 3:2 or 4:3 that the camera dictates. Crop to fit your subject, not the camera format!
- Too many blown-out highlights. When you make your exposure – carefully check your histogram to ensure you haven’t lost detail in clouds/sky. When you are processing, toggle on highlight/hot & cold clipping to reduce the chance of burning out the highlights.
- Not enough careful composition/cropping to eliminate unnecessary distractions. This is of even more importance before you take the picture. Check the corners and the edges of the frame. Find the distractions then eliminate them – maybe you need to move from where you set up. More often then not, taking a few steps forward will solve many problems (provided you are not already on the edge of a cliff, lake or river!)
I realize many of the users here may be new to photography, but when you enter a Challenge, you should be posting your absolute best work. Perfect exposure, composition and focus are just the beginning of excellence in photography. It’s not helpful to put up poorly exposed and composed photos as this is not a critique session where you receive active and helpful feedback – it’s only a Challenge based on votes.
Take a look at some of the high quality photography sites around the net to see what the standard is. Learn the basics of good post-capture processing to enhance your images. Keep working towards achieving a high standard and blow us away with your best work!
Disappointed with Olympus
I must admit to being more than a little disappointed at Olympus for packing it in at 12.3MP – the sensor size of their latest “flagship” camera, the E-5. There has been a lot of discussion of the quality of Zuiko Digital lenses on the E-5 being amazing (which they are on any Oly body), which is great, but the limiting factor is still sensor size.
Lenses were the be all and end all of IQ, but that was way back in the film days. Back then, lenses meant more because from body to body there were fewer image quality differences – the differences were in the film you chose and the lenses on the body, especially when shooting transparencies which were a direct product of the lens on the camera (essentially a raw image, as opposed to prints from negs which were second-generation and greatly dependent on the enlarging lens, as well).
In the digital world that has changed. My RAW image quality is dependent on three factors:
(a) quality and size of the image sensor;
(b) in-camera software that processes the pixels; and
(c) the lenses out front.
Oly has (b) and (c) covered well, but there is no way that an E-5 will ever stand up to the full-frame Sony Alpha system (A850=$2000) with Zeiss lenses (24-70 f/2.8=$1600).
Many will argue that I am making an unfair comparison here – no I’m not! I’m a pro shooting landscapes and close-ups, out to get the best-possible IQ at the best possible price point and a 24MP sensor with Zeiss lenses will out perform any Zuiko Digital lens simply because it has 24 million quality pixels rather than 12 (sorry, 12.3).
8x10s look the same with either camera and, yes I can make 36″ prints from 12.3MP, but they don’t look nearly as good as ones made with 24MP.
Listen, I have used Olympus since the 1970s: OM-1s, OM-3s and OM-4s with gorgeous Zuiko lenses. My IQ was NEVER COMPROMISED because I shot Kodachrome 25 ad 64, then Velvia 50 and 100. I bought into the Olympus digital system with the E-1 and their great zooms then upgraded to the E-30 with the 12-60 and 55-200 – always with the expectation that Olympus will catch up to the others with a competitively-sized sensor. Now that they haven’t it’s time to move on because I am not waiting another 3+ years for a professionally competitive sensor that Nikon, Canon and Sony had TWO+ YEARS AGO!!
Despite not being an original DSLR-maker, Sony must be the most innovative DSLR company out there – they are doing everything right! I guess I should have kept my Minolta XD-11!! Look where they are now!
Lightroom Update
Now that I have over 25,000 images in various Lightroom catalogues, I can perhaps give you a better perspective on how well it’s keeping up.
In a word – amazingly well! Sorry, that’s two words.
Every time I open and work with Lightroom (3.x especially) and push it a little further, I discover nuances in its work flow or tools that make life easier. I am working on a draft of an article describing my Lightroom workflow that, once finished, should help photographers to better understand how and why it is better option than Photoshop (CS or Elements), Picasa, etc.
16.000+ images in one catalogue does not slow it down at all. I do not use a desktop workstation – only a MacBook Pro laptop. To save hard drive space, only my catalogue is on the hard drive – my photos are on a portable (3.5″) 500 GB external USB hard drive which is literally plug-and-play.
For the first time, I have all of my images at my fingertips – anyone or group of which can be called up by keyword or text search in a matter of seconds!! Brilliant!
Some of these images are raw files, tiffs and jpgs made 8 years ago on an early 5MP digital camera. They have come alive in a far superior way and in far fewer key strokes than when I first processed them through Photoshop. It is like re-discovering old negs!
I have a number of different catalogues: a luxBorealis catalogue for my fine art and stock images and a catalogue for each of my clients.
So far, I am, at the touch of a few keys, producing web galleries, prints, slideshows, Flickr uploads and email-sized images. These processes have been customized by creating and tweaking a number of presets – perhaps Lightroom’s single greatest feature. While I have found presets on the ‘net, they have been most helpful in providing a starting point for fine tuning according to my tastes. The bottom line is that once you have something you like – create a preset of it. Then, when you tweak it to make it even better, right-click and “Update with Current Settings”.
Enough for now. I don’t own shares in Lightroom, nor am I paid by Adobe or anyone else for saying this, but I can’t help thinking how much more productive I am now that I am using Lightroom for processing my images..
Website Redesign
It takes a lot of work to redesign a website, but I became increasingly tired of the dark “LR style” look (it’s one of my pet-peeves with LR) typical of many photo websites. All should be working except for the “Locations” part – still working on that.
August Newsletter published
Here it is – http://luxborealis.com/newsletter/2010-08-luxBorealisAugNews.pdf
Photos from Canada’s East Coast, info on cropping and some great readers’ photos. Enjoy!
luxBorealis Blog 