I think grab shots can be of great value! I often find myself reviewing my day's shots, and finding ways to crop my grab shots into photos that almost seem deliberate and thought-out!

I'd consider 20% of the photos in my portfolio to be "grab shots" that were carefully cropped into something nicer.

EDIT: Sorry I can't comment on your photos until I get home from work tonight; Most image hosting sites are blocked on these computers.

I hate that Flickr loses the hotlink image url when you replace a photo. Oh well. Here is a reposting of what I feel was the best of both shoots:

Ah. I guess I see that now. I was too happy with the quality of each individual image that I forgot about making them harmonious with each other.

Thanks for the feedback.

Here are some more!




Here is a link to the larger size.

And here I'll copy and paste the Flickr description I wrote:

No photoshop - all editing done onboard the K7. Trying out some diagonal vignetting today - never thought I'd use that!

This time I took an excursion in the industrial area of town. And this time it was with my better 50mm, the old Asahi.

While shooting the image you see on the bottom left, I was trespassing a little bit. A guy in a balaclava and driving a forklift zoomed over to me and asked me to leave. I apologized and did so. (Easier to ask for forgiveness than permission, as they say). But as I left, I said a quiet "Yesss!" to myself - Because I knew I got the shot I wanted.

That bottom left shot amazes me. Look at the original location. Now look back at the finished photo. Aren't cameras amazing?

Thanks for the kind words, guys.

Oh, thank you very much.

Not sure to which you're referring. They're all kind of burnt-out looking. Anything wooden is of a fence I happened to come across.

The basics; crop, resize, exposure, white balance, vignetting (with many shapes and strengths to choose from), B&W conversion(with choice of R,G,B or "infrared" channels), basic tinting, soft focus, selective desaturation(or colour isolation, as it's known), basic things like sharpness, saturation, contrast, hue shift, barrel distortion, etc.

There are many others, but they're not really worth using. Things like invert colour, pastel, hand drawn, star burst effects, fake hdr, a "slimming" feature, a polaroid imitation mode, etc.

All in all, it's pretty fun. And like I said, I'm pretty sure the K-x has even more than this. *grumble* stupid little K-X comes along and has many little improvements over the K7. *Hmph!* It's supposed to be an entry level camera!

I never thought I'd take it seriously. Not ever. But The other day, I decided to take a walk outside of town with nothing but my K7 and the 50mm F1.4. I sat in a grassy field as I experimented with compositions and then played with the various editing options on the K7. I have to say, I'm pretty impressed!




See it bigger here.

These photos are not photoshoped at all. They are all edited in camera. I only used my computer to piece them together.

Anybody else have good luck with the on board editing of any of the Pentax Cameras? Apparently the K-x is quite good at it.

Right. We're just talking about what you see through the viewfinder, and how there are discrepancies between that and the captured image.
I'm embarrassed to say I can't, I'm sorry.

I'm sorry, this is incorrect. It sounds strange, but it's true. Your DSLR meters wide open, right? Well look through your viewfinder and pay attention to the DOF you see through it. Then take the shot wide open and look at the photo you just took. The DOF will be thinner. As a general rule, the DOF in the viewfinder is about 3 times deeper than the captured DOF.

That's just the way it is, and different style screens can modify this effect.

I'm looking for a screen that gives me a shallow DOF in the viewfinder and does NOT rely on a split prism aid.

Manual focus with the stock focus screen is not very easy, so I assume that the people who claim manual focus is fun and quick must be using custom focus screens. Is that a fair assumption?

For my K7, I have a custom screen from focusingscreen.com. (It's the K3 focus screen). It has a split prism in the center and is very bright. But I recently learned that different focus screens can give you different levels of DOF in your viewfinder. A very shallow DOF in the viewfinder makes it very easy to see where the focus plane lies. Apparently, if a screen is very accurate(has a shallow DOF), it's usually at the cost of being significantly darker to look through.

What I want is an accurate focus screen that makes it very easy to see my plane of focus. I don't care how dim the screen is. Apparently, a "precision Matte" screen is ideal. And apparently, many pros recommend screens that do NOT have the split prism in the middle, because it's a distraction, and not nearly as useful as a plain, but precision matte focus screen.

What do you pros have installed? Do you have recommendations?

Right right. Thank you. Manual. I completely forgot.

Well it's still upsetting that TaV and PTTL can't get the shot at all, then. What do you think the solution to that problem might be?