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Tag: photography

Friday Morning Thoughts on My Photography Skills and Lessons Learned

Posted on by wotantx
Read Time:49 Second

I have to learn to stop trying to be a perfectionist. The boat and car are clipped in the raw, so there’s not really much I can do about it. But, they aren’t the subject. Unless you’re going to pixel peep, that “flaw” isn’t noticeable.


I’ve known a degree of shadow clipping can be acceptable; sometimes, things really are dark, and if there’s no detail in the shadow, it’s no harm, no foul. I’ve been treating highlight clipping as much more of a sin. Indeed, sometimes it is. Clipping the blue of a sky can cause a very unnatural color that can be hard or impossible to fix, depending on how bad it is. Clipping a tiny rock in a gravel road? Not so much.

As I’ve been teaching myself darktable, I’ve come to realize that I’ve been using my camera to hide my lack of skill, and then blaming the camera for it. It’s time to up my game and manage light properly.

Changing Philosophy Again

Posted on by wotantx
Read Time:1 Minute, 3 Second

The more experience I get with photography, the more I change my approach. Perhaps I am starting to overthink things. I’ve already changed how I approach my recipes, no longer emphasizing the highlights and shadows. My recipes are now much more about the color profile; after all, I’m not trying to emulate specific film stocks. For instance, were I attempting to re-create Kodachrome 64, I would need to get the contrast right.

I still find myself spending too much time trying to “fix” the histogram when I’m framing a shot. This leads me to second-guess myself. Instead, I need to be more concerned with getting the look I’m going for and using Raw Studio or Lightroom (depending on what the scene requires) to get the contrast right.

If I only shot jpegs, I would still have to figure all this out; jpegs are lossy, and it is much more difficult to “fix” them.

I think I will address this problem by switching all my recipes to use the DR-P Strong setting. Basically, I will start shooting everything flat. At the very least, this method will give me the most versatility in how I create the jpeg; sometimes, the DR-P Weak setting produces perfectly fine jpegs.

Some Early Morning Photos

Posted on by wotantx
Read Time:1 Minute, 44 Second

These three images, taken during my trip to Big Bend for New Year 2021-2022, have been some of my most challenging to work with. Some of that was technical errors on my part: I decided to trust my camera to pick the dynamic range, which it didn’t do a good job of; some of it was I likely had one or more filters, other than a UV filter, on my lens; and I think I chose the wrong lens for this. I was using my then-new Viltrox AF 33mm, which doesn’t appear to be great for landscapes with such great distance. The other issue I had on this entire trip was the type of cloud cover. The stratus deck I dealt with for much of the trip only served to scatter the rather feeble sunlight, leading to blown highlights and ground that was far too dark.

The camera-generated jpegs are pretty much useless.

I’ve tried editing these in LR and other software with mixed results. However, my recent work from the Texas Renaissance Festival (see Favorite Edits for examples) made me decide to work on them again. I think of previous attempts I had overused masking. My approach here was much more simple. I made general lighting and color adjustments (S-curve, pulled the highlights and whites down all the way, reduced the contrast), added a little dehaze, and softened the blues. I then used a linear gradient mast to add light, highlights, shadows, contrast, whites (where I could get away with it), and blacks (where I could get away with it).

The result of this approach was to remove almost all of the clipped highlights in the skies and most of the clipped shadows. While certainly not among my favorites, I think they turned out reasonably well.

All three of these were taken along FM-170 (the River Road), which runs along the Rio Grande, sometimes hugging it tightly. The particular location is known as the Big Hill, a very steep hill where the road climbs the flanks of a laccolith.

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Something New Here: My Photographs

Posted on by wotantx
Read Time:1 Minute, 45 Second

I’m going to try doing something a little different with my blog. I’m going to start sharing photographs that I take and explain a little of what I’m doing. Maybe this will keep me interested enough to keep the blog updated like I keep threatening to do. We shall see.

As a gift to myself for losing a substantial amount of weight, I bought myself a Fujifilm X-T30 digital mirrorless camera. I’d been thinking about getting a new camera to replace an aging Nikon DSLR that, quite frankly, I never learned to use to its full potential. I chose Fujifilm after a lot of research. They have some unique (not all unique anymore) features: their bodies are designed like film cameras with knobs and dials; they have a proprietary sensor that is not Bayer like pretty much every other digital camera has, and they have film simulations that have different palettes that mimic various film stocks and from those you can create all sorts of looks, mimicking various types of real-world film or create your own look to your taste.

I keep my pictures at my Flickr. Most of these are going to be from my Fuji, but some are with other cameras, such as cell phones or the old Nikon DSLR, or some older point and shoot cameras. For the most part, the EXIF data contains the camera info.

The older pics are generally marked as All Rights Reserved. Newer pics are Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). I intend to update the older ones to this license in the future.

Since I should probably include at least one pic with this introductory post, I’ll give you one of my most recent. This is one of the Bald Eagles at the Houston Zoo. Both of them are incapable of flight due to injury, and so it is possible to get close to them. This was shot using an 18-55mm lens and cropped. Aside from cropping and the watermark, this is an SOOC (Straight-Out-Of-Camera) JPEG. Enjoy.

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