Quake3World

That's in London

Some street photography:



A discarded hospital bed I took today:



And an empty room, also taken today:



I'm documenting a mental asylum at the moment as a personal project that I plan to exhibit once the building has been demolished and copyright issues no longer apply. All of the grungy images I post come from there.

One more before bed. Been up all night processing these inbetween working on some canvas prints.

Took this one a while ago, and did some adjustments in lightroom. now i can finally upload pictures again yayyyy

I screwed up the focus but like the colour. Cheap powershot camera and no processing. Took it in the flower gardens at Napier.

http://img24.imageshack.us/img24/116/img2006y.jpg
http://img24.imageshack.us/img24/6128/img2407q.jpg
http://img24.imageshack.us/img24/8278/img2279ud.jpg

These were shot with the default color profile and minimal post-processing. Are these images as sharp as I should expect without post processing from a 70-200 f/2.8L IS lens?

colour profile is sRGB standard, not sure what you're on about?

these are shot at f3.5 & f2.8, the lens is sharpest at f8 to f11ish.

Seem sharp enough, could be better. all digi-cams need a little sharpening thanks to the low-pass filter.

lets see what the master of everything says, form.

Doombrain wrote:colour profile is sRGB standard, not sure what you're on about?

I mean that I don't have any of the sharpness settings dialed up in the camera. I think their term is "picture styles," not color profiles, sorry about the confusion.

So, even if the subject is in perfect focus at f/2.8, the same subject in perfect focus would be sharper at f/8-11?

Yes, most lenses have a sweetspot that sits in the middle of it's aperture range. F8 is generally the sweetspot for most lenses.

Assuming you have applied absolutely no sharpening to those pictures, I would say they are acceptable. If you have sharpened them, I would say you have a technique problem. Handholding at 200mm isn't a walk in the park.

depends what you mean by 'perfect focus'. try stopping up the aperture to f8 - small enough to get sharper shots, but not so small you end up with low shutter speeds with the risk of camera shake

Yeahso wrote:Yes, most lenses have a sweetspot that sits in the middle of it's aperture range. F8 is generally the sweetspot for most lenses.

Assuming you have applied absolutely no sharpening to those pictures, I would say they are acceptable. If you have sharpened them, I would say you have a technique problem. Handholding at 200mm isn't a walk in the park.

Yes, no sharpening has been applied to those.

I read about sharpening images with the high pass filter in photoshop this weekend. Doing so made me look over my own photos and compare them to ones I like, ultimately leading me to realize just how not-so-sharp a lot of my photos were.

I always read people discussing how sharp this lens is, which made me wonder if something needed to be cleaned, or if I just needed to sharpen in post processing.

The few halfway decent shots from my Colorado trip. Two of them were already posted in my Colorado thread.

Then I would say your lens is perfectly fine, and it could just be your handholding technique at the time you took the shots. Don't worry about people pixel peeping and worrying about how sharp their lens is. Internet forums are full of these people, none of them seem to post very good pictures, they just seem to post stupid charts and graphs. Almost all of them are in their late 40's and have to ask their wives permission to purchase what they're moaning about.

The high pass filter and the USM both have their places. I use the USM if I'm only concerned with edge sharpness on a small image, but if it's a large image or I'm going for texture detail, I find high pass layers work a bit better. Plus they're more flexible.

I sometimes use an unsharp mask to sharpen everything and bring out texture detail in a large image, then once I resize the image, or the web, a customer, or whatever, I'll apply a very low radius USM on a new layer and then mask out the parts I don't want oversharpened.

The 70-200 2.8 is a great lens though, definitely one of Canons best.

Also, Inolen, are you shooting in RAW format and converting to JPEG?

I've started to do that after recently learning that RAW files weren't just uncompressed RGB values (as I always assumed they were), but the work flow doesn't seem to be as efficient as it is working with jpegs.

Mainly, Photoshop's RAW importer window needs a history window (or perhaps it does and I missed it) so I can experiment with the individual slider values and undo/redo and compare and contrast over and over. Right now I change one value, can't remember what it was set to by default and then have to reset all settings back to default. This makes adjusting more than one of the settings near impossible.

Anyways, workflow and jpeg compression issues aside, I still don't understand what exactly from a technical standpoint the RAW format gives me greater control over?

Doombrain wrote:all digi-cams need a little sharpening thanks to the low-pass filter.

What is the purpose of this?

Found my dad's old Yashica Electro 35. Sadly, no film in the house and battery replacements look like they are hard to come by. I may try to make my own batteries by rigging up some modern day replacements.



http://www.mattdentonphoto.com/cameras/yashica_gsn.html

I do like rangefinders.

inolen wrote:I've started to do that after recently learning that RAW files weren't just uncompressed RGB values (as I always assumed they were), but the work flow doesn't seem to be as efficient as it is working with jpegs.

Mainly, Photoshop's RAW importer window needs a history window (or perhaps it does and I missed it) so I can experiment with the individual slider values and undo/redo and compare and contrast over and over. Right now I change one value, can't remember what it was set to by default and then have to reset all settings back to default. This makes adjusting more than one of the settings near impossible.

Anyways, workflow and jpeg compression issues aside, I still don't understand what exactly from a technical standpoint the RAW format gives me greater control over?

RAW is the image presented in an uncompressed format retaining the values present at the time of the image.

Let's say you take a picture of a high contrast scene in both JPEG and RAW. The average sensor is capable of around 8-10 f-stops of dynamic range from shadow to highlight. The figure is usually about 8, and post processing can bring up an extra 2 f-stops of detail in an image. A RAW file will hold the full dynamic range, even if you can't see it. The blacks will retain more detail, as well as your highlights. A JPEG will strip this information and make it impossible to recover. So if you have an image that underexposed by a couple of stops, if it's show in RAW, you'll be able to properly adjust the exposure without introducing digital noise into the picture.

RAW basically gives you the maximum amount of non-destructive control over the image. The amount of extra detail in a raw image compared to a JPEG is fucking massive. JPEG's will always look better straight out of the camera, because they have in-camera colour profiles added to them along with sharpening applied. A RAW file is completely neutral and unsharpened. You do it all yourself, and the images look 100x better for it.

Doombrain wrote:I do like rangefinders.

Have you seen the M9 yet? I'd really like one of those, but they're way out of my pricerange.

no, had a play with an M8.
i have an RD-1. it's gathered a layer of dust though, more of a winter camera.

Niiice, I'd love one of those for street photography. It's hard to be subtle when you've got a giant black brick in your hand, that's the only downside of SLR's.

I might see how much those RD-1's are going for second hand, been a while since I've checked.

Yeahso wrote:Handholding at 200mm isn't a walk in the park.

VR ftw

makes your shots soft

no it doesn't

sorry son, I'm afraid you're wrong. But hey, thanks for playing.