If I decide to print this that is certainly what I will do.

Prieni

I think you found an excellent crop for this image. I do think your b&w version is going too far, though, as it doesn't leave any structure in the petals of the two main protagonists. So I would suggest to take the curves (or levels or whatever you used) a little back.

Prieni

In Germany at least you don't have to have your ID with you, that's an urban myth.
If you don't have it with you and the police want to ID you they take you to the station. That's what they would do in the UK as well. There is no fine or other trouble related to you not carrying your ID. (Which is, I believe, different for driving without having the papers for the vehicle and the driving licence with you. Again, no big trouble, you have to show them in a police station near you and get a smallish fine.)

Prieni

Well then, here are two further versions. First one up is the image as it came out of SilkyPix (i.e. a treated RAW interpretation):

[IMG]http://i156.photobucket.com/albums/t5/Prieni/_PRI7362ori.jpg[/IMG]

That I put into Photoshop and produced the posted version #2 from above. Afterwards I got my old copy of Corel Photopaint fixed in Windows 7 (I like to think that it was my computer whizardry getting it to work again where most probably it healed itself when I updated the graphics tablet driver). In Photopaint there is the nice "local equalization" function that creates this version:

[IMG]http://i156.photobucket.com/albums/t5/Prieni/_PRI7362leq.jpg[/IMG]

I then blended the two together (looking at the saturation it seems I used the layer mode soft light for the Photopaint result) to obtain the version posted first.

So all in all we have 5 versions of this shot (including Stefan's) and I do like all of them (and I'm a little bugged by the plastic bag behind the gate in all of them).

Prieni

That's what I do as well. But on the tripod it actually is off, as I always use the 2s delay on the tripod.

And yes, I'm often surprised when I want to take a shot and all goes dark in the viewfinder because I forgot to disable the 2s delay again...

Prieni

Stefan,

not surprisingly I like the version I posted first the best. This is because I had two layers, the second posted version and another one, more over the top than the first one. Then I adjusted the opacity of the OTT one to my liking.

I'll endeavour to post the OTT version tonight.

Prieni

You may have steady hands, but a tripod generally is steadier

The shake reduction (SR) is designed to compensate for your hands movement (I think muscles have a natural tremor around 10 Hz). At high shutter speed SR does not help (I have the feeling that it may be even affecting the image negatively at very high speeds 1/750 s or so; no trials made on this one so far, though).
My guess (and I would need to read up on this) is, that when the camera is on the tripod the SR's acceleration sensors don't give a signal but, being an electronic circuit, as noise is always present this leads to tiny accelerations being detected and therefore the sensor moved to compensate for these ghost motions.

When using the timer modes (2s or 10s, I believe) then the camera assumes that it is on a tripod (or put on a surface that doesn't move) and therefore disables SR. This is the only way for the camera to know (or better assume) that it is on a tripod.

BTW: For the K20 it is the same, mirror up is activated in the timer modes but no way to do it manually (or at least I never have used (or missed) such a setting).

Prieni

Thanks again!

David: Yes, I also like how the sea shell shot turned out. Part of the appeal, I think, is that it is a fisheye shot. But the PP also pulls out a lot of detail in the individual shells.

Stefan: As far as I can see HDR/tonemapping usually does use the full range of contrast (by definition). On the other hand you are right, the local contrasts are therefore reduced. With the two versions one can always mix and match. If you like, have a go, I have no problem with that.

Tim: You're right, it often is quite useful to look at the bigger versions of posted shots. All in all I find the resize function pretty impressive and it does help the readability of the posts.

Prieni

Thanks guys!

Here's #2 in another version, here I used only the shadow/highlight function of PS to balance the pic:

[IMG]http://i156.photobucket.com/albums/t5/Prieni/_PRI7362fca.jpg[/IMG]

So as you can see the first version does try to increase the local contrasts.

Prieni

Took me a while to get through all the shots from my September Venice trip. I've done up the last ones today and think that many of the Venice images take well to a "pseudo-HDR" style. I know that this might be a passing phase (as is the case with these things quite often).
Here are a few of those:
[IMG]http://i156.photobucket.com/albums/t5/Prieni/_PRI7366fc.jpg[/IMG]

[IMG]http://i156.photobucket.com/albums/t5/Prieni/_PRI7362fc.jpg[/IMG]

[IMG]http://i156.photobucket.com/albums/t5/Prieni/_PRI7382fc.jpg[/IMG]

[IMG]http://i156.photobucket.com/albums/t5/Prieni/_PRI7427fc.jpg[/IMG]

As always C&C welcome,
Prieni