Thank you, Nigel. I now have several FA and DA primes and this year I have been out usually with just one of them on the K-5 and the 18-135 zoom in my bag - only using the latter if there is no alternative or if it starts raining; I am really enjoying working this way. You might be right about #1 (and it possibly applies to #2 also) - perhaps I should have waited for a small boat to pass by. Your comment re. saturation takes us back to those other recent threads about the natural image!

Thanks also to you, Steven - most of the swans, geese, ducks, gulls and pigeons gather along the river to the right, where adults and children feed them very well! As for the cars, being Sunday it was very busy so I had to be patient - in #3 especially I really wanted to capture all the straight and curved lines flowing through the scene, including those in the shadows on the road. Last year I did stroll between Maidenhead bridge and Boulter's Lock, so next time I will have to explore further.

Philip

These are some of the photos taken yesterday with the FA 35mm f/2 on a K-5:

#1


#2


#3




Hope you enjoy them - C&C welcome.

Philip

Brian, I like the composition of the second shot, but the dull flat light is not being helpful to your image. Perhaps it might add interest if you remove most of the grey sky and some of the left hand side, and increase the contrast and saturation of the remainder, e.g.-



Philip

Ronnie, I agree that some images should be dark, but I think you have overdone the undercooking on this one. The strong shadows (assuming that they are naturally present) indicate that there is quite a lot of bright sunlight reaching the woodland floor so, for a natural appearance, perhaps about one stop more exposure is needed.

Philip

In this thread I'm losing the will to live. It makes me wonder what will appear next - perhaps a post full of mathematical equations from quantum mechanics or chaos theory, to explain why it is impossible to contribute an example image.

For the pedants here, only someone who was standing on the spot at the moment the shutter opened (usually the photographer) could say whether the final image is completely natural, and it is quite likely that even he/she will have forgotten anyway, by the time the image is processed into a typically viewable form.

Of course there are many variables and balancing them is a process full of compromises. But surely people have, from their extensive experience of the real world, a reasonable idea of the natural appearance of most types of scene. And surely that idea, consciously or subconsciously, is in mind whenever we are post processing - in making decisions about how we process the final photograph to represent the scene, or when we choose to cause (areas of) the image to deviate from the natural appearance for artistic and/or evocative purposes.

John R asked us to post what we think are natural images in terms of light and colour. He also asked us to keep the thread simple - quote, "...let's not over-think things!"

This shot of a park scene on a sunny April afternoon (3.21 p.m.) was processed into three different images:



In my opinion:
The first is not natural - not bright enough for sunshine, and contrast and saturation are too low.
The second is not natural - too saturated, particularly the red/yellow tones are too strong for mid-afternoon.
The third looks close to the natural appearance of a scene like this one at that time of day:



Of course people will agree or disagree - but that is the point of this thread.

Philip

Ashridge woodland with bluebells:



Philip

A reminder of John's words -

Title: "Too bright, too dark, Just Right"

"Again, prompted by apparently widely different ideas as to how bright an image should be, let's have a look at what we all think is a natural landscape shot with correct colour and brightness."

"We have to have some idea as to what constitutes a normal image, surely? We also have a very good idea of what a sunny day looks like, or a misty morning, or anything else we've seen in our lives."

"That image (in John's 1st post) looks pretty much the same on my monitors, laptops, iPad, iPhone and daughter Hazel's Android phone, so let's not over-think things!"

"All I'm asking is that you post something that you consider accurate. It's out of interest, not something designed to trick you."

In the context of John's requests, some of the discussion in several previous posts IS irrelevant.

In the context of John's requests, I think Philip (Smudge) has succeeded because he has done what was asked - producing and posting images that look natural.

Presumably he processed the flat captured images with the aim of making them appear as close as possible to the actual dull weather scene he saw at that moment. I can see clearly that it was a dull autumn day from the natural look Philip has created in his images.

We should have some ideas of how an image's brightness and colours should appear, regardless of its format, because our experience of seeing real-world conditions (in different kinds of weather and even through any shape of window) guides our expectations of the appearance of those attributes in any natural scene.

Is it not the aim here to see if/how those ideas differ?

Philip

The natural field of human vision has an aspect ratio of about 3:2. We see a real-world wide or panoramic view by scanning that 3:2 field from side to side across the scene, when we move our eyes and/or turn the head.

However, I consider that further discussion of either the aspect ratio or the weather is not helpful in this thread, as they fall outside the parameters of John's challenge which, it seems obvious to me from his own contributions, is concerned with only the light and colour aspects of an undistorted image.

Philip

This comment makes no sense to me in the context of the challenge set by John R, as I understood it. Surely the objective here is to attempt to produce on screen an image of a scene that we think is as close in appearance as possible to what we believe we would see in front of us, if we were standing there looking at the actual scene at the moment we pressed the shutter button to capture the data for that image?

Philip

I agree with Steve that the crop is preferable but, despite the time being near to sunset, knowing the place and seeing the intensity of the light tells me that the image should be brighter and a bit less saturated.

Although you have used it to have a go at stitching images together, and it looks as though it has been well done, the panorama does not really appeal to me for this type of scene (it seems to work better for open landscape shots). The result is a vertically constricted "letterbox" format that conflicts with the approx. 3:2 (190 by 130 degrees) forward field of view of normal human vision. However, that might be exactly the effect that you intended - these are, of course, just my opinions.

Philip