Ranmore Common

A well known spot here in the hills near Dorking. Got a few from the top a couple of weeks ago and tried a few different approaches.

All with the K7 and Pentax 'M' 75-150 f4.



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9.




Thanks for checking them out and for all thoughts.

The thing that strikes me is that I'm not sure what you want the picture to be of!

What are the most important items and how are you going to show it.

Prefer no. 4 - like the PP, and
[quote:3496ace15f="doingthebobs"]The thing that strikes me is that I'm not sure what you want the picture to be of!

the car makes the difference!

Thanks for the input guys. Oh yes, that car, I was going to clone it out - lucky I forgot to

I think you're saying there Bob that there's not a clear enough point of focus, a centre or subject? Fair enough. The images for me are of the 'place', of the 'scene' - I wanted them to convey an impression of the experience of being there at the long vewpoint and scanning around taking it all in. I was attracted to the strong lines, both soft of the tree groups, and curvy of the the roadway, and the way they pull the eye around. Thats the theory at least! Lucky I didn't use the 14mm

The B & W follows on from recent experimenting - does it work for this type of image?

Compositionally (is there such a word!) the only one that does it for me is number 9.
The others are 'nice' shots and convey the sort of thing that tourists would take to remind them of a nice area. I can see what you were attempting but IMHO I don't thinks it's quite there.
However No. 9 looks composed and thought about to me. It is framed well, it clearly defines the road as the subject and the 'space' above puts it in context. However I do think it looks a little bit 'flat'
I think it could do with similar PP to no 4 & 8 but with a boost to the contrast to make the snaking roadway stand out.

By the way the B&W actually looks green to me. Of course it might be my eyes or the fact that I'm jealous or the lovely views

I like 7

I like tones of no.3, Nigel. It may be an even stronger image if the top was cropped, leaving the viewer to concentrate on the "S" curve of the road.

Nigel, my preferred image is #7 - I like its composition. However, I would prefer it to have the level of colour saturation of #9, in which the greens look about right to me. But, of course, you might not be aiming for a "correct" look!

Cheers.
Philip

9 is a crop of 7, its the same photo but looking on the website now I see there is a slight difference in colour intensity - I have no explanation for that at all - it was just opened again in PS CS2, cropped down more then resaved the exact same way using the 'Save for Web' dialogue. Could it just be the automatic 'bicubic sharper' algorithm working on a smaller number of pixels on the cropped one?

I've used 3 of these images to make 2 versions each, one a tighter crop, to get feedback on what works best. And of course same with the mono versions, just to see how people find them.

I havn't tried hard to make them look 'correct' - they were shot in fairly strong cross / back lighting making contrast fairly low in fact, and it was very hazy, so I used processing to draw out the effects of this, like the sheen on the trees and gritty detail on the grass. You can see the dramatic difference when I turned the other way and shot the views towards Dorking town.

Ralph, you're right about the mono tones - after the conversion and contrast work I used CS2's 'colour balance' tool to apply a little toning, mainly a touch of green, red and / or yellow. Just an instinctive thing to do really, I liked the results.

Thanks again to all contributors here, No 7 & 9 seem to be the favourites.

#7 - not keen on anything else.

Oh, really? I'd have thought the 80's postcard-style shots of olde Dorking town would have held a sort of nostalgic appeal? What about how I've managed to almost eliminate the pea-soup-like blue haze that blighted the far distance beyond the tree line on the Dorking ones, near-matching the contrast levels with the closer treeline? That took some skill!

Skill in PP doth not a good picture make.....

I'd be interested in what technique you use to get rid of haze, though....

It can go some way towards it though ... now PP is part of the package of skills and experience that a digital shooter needs. Yes, you've got to see the shot and catch it right, but good presentation and optimising the image data can only be a plus surely?

The shots here would be worse if they were poorly edited, so that implies some inherant value to that editing?

of course there's some value to editing.

On the haze, if it was in the background that would have helped provide some depth and probably should have been left in.

However, knowing Alien takes pics from high altitdue I can see why removing haze is more important in that instance.