That's all I used. It's easy to overdo it, but often a little is all that's needed.

And that control is in Photoshop Elements too.

The thing is, the shadow detail is still there, even in your "underexposed" one.

This version of it took all of 20 seconds to do, and looks a lot more natural than your merged version:




If you burn out the highlights, they're unrecoverable, so if you want the highlight detail, you have to expose for it.

I'd stop using the exposure compensation, for a start. This "the K10D underexposes in general" view is one I've seen before, and it's far too sweeping a generalisation to be useful, as you're clearly discovering.

You'll notice that not overexposing the highlight detail also avoids the pronounced purple fringing you get in areas of very high contrast.

Edit: it occurs to me that if it's that easy to do in Photoshop, a setting in the K10D's custom menu that let you boost the shadows and/or cut the highlights a bit might be very handy indeed for those that don't want to do too much post-processing. It's often not that the dynamic range isn't there, it's that it isn't rendered sometimes as we expect.

Look on the bright side - you don't have far to go if you want to have another go.

It'll be a while before I get the chance to repeat the ones I failed make the most of.

I took 1100 pictures in about 4 weeks in Australia. You lot sure as heck aren't going to see many of them.

Having recently returned from Sydney, and discovered that having iconic architecture around doesn't actually make it any easier to get good photographs, I was interested to see these. The days I was wandering around Circular Quay it was very bright, and I overexposed several of mine since the Opera House is so reflective. You've got good detail in it though. For my taste, though, the OH seems a little cramped in the scene, and the photo could do with being rotated about 0.4 degrees clockwise, to get the vertical lines in the wood vertical (not the water line horizontal).

I like the silhouette of the skyline very much - you've placed the Centrepoint tower in a commanding position and the overall shape makes a pleasant arc. Clouds always have potential once the sun is low enough to light them from below, and there's some good colour there.

Not so sure about the next one - the sky is a bit bland (haven't you got a stock of good skies? ), and the shape of the silhouette isn't as commanding as the previous one. The final one is even more bland, with little of interest in either the sky or the water. This forces the eye to the OH and SHB, and I don't think these stand out quite enough.

We didn't go to Luna Park - or indeed that side of the bridge at all - which I'm regretting now, although there's never time for everything. There was some interesting light about for this shot, but I find my eye flitting about and not finding anything for it to rest on. Pointing the camera this high with a wide angle lens also causes the verticals to converge a bit, which I find a bit distracting. It might have been better to turn the camera round to portrait, aim lower, and crop off what would have been unwanted foreground. It might also have been better to ignore the bridge in this composition, which I don't think adds anything, and find a way of making more of the colours and lights in the park.

I do like number two though. Much better as a silhouette, too, since you don't see that island on the left hand side. You could probably lift the water just a little, so that the reflection from the setting sun is a little clearer.

Ok, I'm not at all commenting on the photos or the judging.

I'm not even saying it shouldn't have been the way it was, since it's all in the absolute discretion of the judge each week, which is one of the things that makes it fun and varied.

However, I'd make this observation, further to my comment about captions a few days back:

Anything photographed anywhere has to be close enough to the photographer to be photographed, and it's obviously photographed at some point in the photographer's day. So anything at all would count for this comp.

Without the captions that shoehorned the connection to 'my day' into the viewer's thinking, there was nothing about any of the entries that makes them remotely anything to do with the theme, except in this completely general sense. The theme might just as well have been "Any photo you like".

That said, there's nothing wrong with having an 'any photo you like' competition.

But as a theme I think it was too broad, and I would suggest that on some level, everyone else thought so too, since not one single entrant failed to include a caption tying the photo to whatever the moment was in the day in question.

Personally I think it's a cop out to have to do this - an image should itself speak of the theme. Before anyone gets on my case, though, I fully concede that not entering at all is an even bigger cop out

But I just thought I'd share my 2p's worth.

Congratulations to the winners!!

It's the 'just' though.

One image to sum up one's day is actually exceedingly difficult, I think.

I've had an idea, but for it to be anything but dull, dull, dull, it's going to need some careful setting up and lighting, so it'll probably take me nearly to the end of the week to work out how to do it, if I'm even capable of it at all.

That occurred to me too. It might raise the bar a bit too high, since the theme is so general, but I'd certainly like to see entries where the connection to the theme was in the photograph, rather than having a photo that could fit almost any theme, with a sentence at the top saying why it's relevant.

Not sure a picture of me in my extremely untidy office would make a particularly good picture, so I probably won't be entering.

Just teasing a little. I ought to get out more...

This being a case in point, which has got only the most tenuous link to anything about photography at all. I'm with you on this one.

But you've done it again...

I know, you di'dnt menshun speeling.

Careful, Kim. This is the sort of post that ends up with an invitation to become a moderator...