That sunflower reminds me of Little Weed in Bill & Ben the Flowerpot Men... a favourite from the era of B&W TV in the UK .

Steve

And now for something completely different...

For a few weeks every year, low evening sun shines through the leaves of the weeping crab apple in the front garden. I've often thought that there ought to be a photo or two lurking there, particularly when the leaves have some yellow and red in them. In May this year I did something about it and bothered the tree with a K3 + FA77 + 35mm tube. That should indicate to you that the aim wasn't super-sharp, super-huge depth-of-field pictures. Rather, it was to explore colour and shape in the small scale detail of the foliage. Since then, I've been playing with the files on and off, trying to find what they contained. And here is what emerged. Rather more post-processing than is normal for me. And a far cry from the stacked macro that has been occupying much of my time recently!

Well, what's life all about if you can't do something a bit different once in a while... .

Thoughts, comments etc. welcome as usual.

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Steve

Good luck Gareth. You've got right on your side. Please be careful that you don't get sucked in to interminable and unpleasant wrangling that stops you moving forward with life, family, photography etc. Knowing when to walk away and not waste any more time and effort is an important part of any negotiation (been there, got the scars...).

Steve.

There's an interesting book by Joe Cornish, title 'First Light', subtitle 'A Landscape Photographer's Art'. For each of the main pictures, there's a second that he took of the same or similar subject in different light, time of day, weather etc.. Most importantly, he explains why he prefers the main picture to the second one. You don't have to agree with his preferences but his reasons make you think about how you look at your own pictures and how you might do better. It isn't always a matter of waiting for the 'right' weather or time of day. Sometimes just a shift in position or even using a suitable filter can make all the difference (he was using film so for digital replace 'filter' by 'post-processing' :wink.

Steve

Harsh light isn't a problem for me, but the sloping horizon in No. 3 is... Having said that, the others don't quite work for me either - they seem a bit flat while at the same time the foreground and distance pull in different directions. I hope you don't mind, but I've experimented with different crops and giving more contrast by adjusting curves. Here are the results. But as always, it's all a matter of personal preference.










Steve

BOOM BOOM ![/quote][/quote]Basil Brush uses IKEA?

And that is how this thread started in 2010. Life going round in circles?

Anyway, now for something completely different. It used to be coat hangers. But now I'm finding it's allen keys that are breeding uncontrollably in dark drawers and cupboards . Is it happening to anyone else?

Steve

Thanks.

John - Interesting that you noticed the lighting. I've recently bought lots of clamps, magic arms, mini-ball heads and a Lume Cube in order to get lots of flexibility with lighting. The trouble is, with so many options now in front of me it's difficult to decide what to do!

Affinity Photo is what I now use for everything. It seems to have all that a reasonable person could ever need (and more) for manipulating photos and you get a perpetual licence, not an annual subscription. Stacking is almost trivial, just select the files that you want to stack and press 'start'. It does a pretty good job on straightforward images like this one. However, if it does fall short then there is no way of making it change how it does the stack, unlike with other (costing £££ ) specialist stacking software. The main thing that some people moan about re Affinity is that it doesn't have a cataloguing facility. However, that doesn't bother me as I like to think that I have an excellent filing system that is kept in perfect order - whether reality matches what I think is another matter!

Peter - The amount of work put in to get it was actually a lot less than hiking a few miles in the rain then waiting an hour until the light is just right for the perfect landscape then just as you're about to press the shutter button a cloud moves in front of the sun... .

Steve

Agree with what you say about electronic interpretation of what the sensor is seeing and the difference between 'A' and non-'A' lenses. And while I don't have a manual, non-'A' setting lens, it dawned on me that I do have an adapter for reverse mounting a lens on the camera, which eliminates all elecrical and mechanical communications between lens and camera. So I reverse mounted a lens with an aperture ring and get the same behaviour as with the Laowa. It is at least consistent!

But it's still puzzling because the in-camera electronics is definitely doing something to decide how bright to set the live view image. In fact, I can catch it thinking - quickly change the aperture on the Laowa or the reverse-mounted lens and the image brightness changes gradually, not suddenly. Sometimes it even overshoots before settling down to what the the electronics decides is the 'right' brightness. So since it is obviously doing some calculating to get the brightness to vary with the intensity of light reaching the sensor (which is what varies when aperture is changed), the question remains: why doesn't (or can't) it do some calculating to vary brightness with exposure time? Is it a fundamental impossibility which my brain hasn't thought of or just something that the software developers didn't think of putting in the software?

Interestingly, RobL started a thread 'Using flash in live view' back in Feb 2020 in which he wondered whether there was a way of making live view remain bright while deliberately underexposing for natural light. The only way to get it was a work-round (aka a fudge). Perhaps live view needs to be more configurable ...

Steve

The normal behaviour of live view with my K3 is that the brightness of the image on the rear screen depends on the exposure value - increase the aperture or exposure time and the screen gets brighter and vice versa. However, with the Laowa 25mm macro, that does not happen. Brightness varies with aperture (which is set on the lens, not the camera) but does not vary with exposure time. The lens is, of course, fully manual with no electronic connections for anything and no aperture lever. It seems reasonable that brightness varies with aperture because changing the aperture on the lens directly changes the amount of light reaching the sensor. But the exposure time has nothing to do with the lens and the camera has all the information it needs to vary brightness with exposure time - it just doesn't do it.

So my question is whether this behaviour is found with other lenses which have limited of no communication between lens and camera (I can't check because I don't have any others). Or is live view behaviour with the Laowa just weird? Or is there an obvious reason and my brain is rotting with age ??

Steve