Padstow

We went to Padstow on the North Cornish Coast, for an anniversary dinner at Rick Stein's restaurant, and stayed overnight at the hotel next door. My plan to get some blue hour shots of the harbour was foiled by a rainstorm, but I was up next morning before dawn with the weather still threatening but dry. Except when I was caught in a sudden hailstorm so thank goodness for Pentax weathersealing. Here are the results, all with K1 and 24-70mm f2.8 lens:












And a bit later on:


And finally, from the same position with the Sigma 70-300mm f4-5.6 macro at 300mm:

2 &3 work extremely well. You were blessed with a dramatic sky and the light it cast.

At some places, the light effects turned out so effective! Nice set of pictures.

Good use of the lighting Rob - a lovely mixture of gold, grey and blue set the mood nicely for this set

Great set of photos.. The quality of the Pentax lens sticks out a mile... Well it should really. Shouldn't it...

Thanks all, Stub yes the Sigma surprised me by being very sharp but there is CA and also the colours are very flat but that can be dealt with to an extent in processing. Roll on the new 70-200 f4!

I like No2 where the light just brushes the buildings beautifully, and the composition is nicely balanced. The last one (although it has dull light) has depth because of the sort of compressed look caused by the distance, and the eye is tempted to zigzag through the scene.

I would suggest you looked at the processing & boosted contrast a bit, plus they look a little soft, perhaps extra sharpening would help?

Thanks McGregni, Following your comments I took another look and yes they don't look as sharp as they should and whilst I have improved them a bit I think a few factors have caused this. Firstly, the light was quite dim but with bright patches so I was being careful to avoid blown highlights and underexposed slightly. At the time I didn't judge a grad filter to be necessary but was wrong and found I needed to apply one in PP, and raising the exposure introduced some noise which I hadn't noticed before. And finally I reduced the pdfs to import into PU which degraded the sharpness a bit more. These aren't meant as excuses but lessons for me to remember for next time, so McGregni your comments have been most constructive.

pdfs ?

John

Sorry, yes JPEGs of course, it was rather late!

Hi Rob, just in case you're not aware, when reducing image size for the web you should include an automatic algorithm that preserves quality. If you use a dedicated tool for sizing (eg Photoshop's "Save For Web") this will include choices for the scaling method. The one to choose is "bicubic sharper". This should produce an image that keeps the look and sharpness of the original

One other thing. .... If you are working straight from your full sized K1 files the scaling might just be too great, and causing quality loss. Even with my K7 I always produce a full size JPEG first, with quality number 11 .... That produces a file around 5-7mb (reduced from the RAW size of 12-14mb).Then with that JPEG open in Photoshop I carry out the further process of Save for Web.

So it's a two stage process, not jumping immediately from a big camera file.
I keep both JPEGs .... The bigger one for archiving and to use if wanting to get the photo printed, and the smaller one for web display, phones and iPads etc.

I set an output size in the save for web dialogue of 65% ( so chopping 35% of the resolution. .... You would have to chop a lot more) ...
Then with the quality slider I aim for a file size of around 500-700Kb ...I have not seen any visible quality loss with these figures for any of my photos when displayed on any screen.

Oh, right, I assumed that converting from a full jpeg to a smaller one would degrade more than from a source RAW file so thanks I will look at what Lightroom offers.

Amazing set of images. In some images, the light effect is looking beautiful.

Nice set Rob... super light throughout, and particularly like the framing/composition of the final one...

Best

That's some light