Souvenier photos from a hike this afternoon

rjlittlefield · Post by **rjlittlefield** » Sun May 06, 2007 8:10 pm

"There must be something down there worth tackling!"

"All I have to do is figure out how to get into this thing!"

"Slurp!"

Hope these make you smile a little!

--Rik

Technical: Canon SD700 IS, ISO 80, auto everything else except (oops!) "tungsten" color balance. The files report: pic 1, 1/400 @ f/5.6; pic 2, 1/640 @ f/2.8; pic 3, 1/250 @ f/5.6. Cropped, sharpened, color re-balanced. One obnoxious in-focus twig blurred to background.

Ken Ramos · Post by **Ken Ramos** » Mon May 07, 2007 4:40 am

I find it kind of ironic that we have a Crab Spider here

and I really like the bee the best. Seems I can never get a good photograph of one to my liking, though I have photographed a number of bees. Nice series of images here Rik.

I have a question though and maybe its answer is quite obvious but why is there a blue cast to these images?

rjlittlefield · Post by **rjlittlefield** » Mon May 07, 2007 7:52 am

Yeah, I thought the crab might tickle one or another of your fancies!

If you think they're blue now, you should have seen them before I rebalanced the color. I was surprised, when I got home from the hike and popped up the pictures on my monitor, to see how very blue they were. Turns out, I just now discovered when I rechecked, that the camera was not set on "auto everything" as I had thought -- in fact the color balance was locked on tungsten! This camera won't shoot raw, jpeg only, so actually I'm surprised they came out as recoverable as they did.

--Rik

rjlittlefield · Post by **rjlittlefield** » Mon May 07, 2007 8:11 am

rjlittlefield wrote:...you should have seen them before I rebalanced the color.

Hah! Well, in fact for the crab spider, you were seeing it before I rebalanced the color. Last night I didn't notice the bad camera setting, was just responding to the appearance of the pictures, and apparently I was so struck by the intense yellow of the flower that I failed to notice it wasn't as yellow as it should have been.

I just took a quick cut at fixing it up, and replaced the image. The original that you reacted to is here . (You may have to control-reload the page or flush your browser cache, to get the new version loaded.)

--Rik

Ken Ramos · Post by **Ken Ramos** » Mon May 07, 2007 8:14 am

You know it never occurred to me that the color balance on the camera could be set wrong but usually that is the first thing I check when shooting through my microscopes, in that some of the filters I use have a dark blue color to them to enhance contrast and so I have to correct for that on the cameras when taking photos. Well...I guess that explains that.

rjlittlefield · Post by **rjlittlefield** » Mon May 07, 2007 8:25 am

Since you like bees...

Here's a different crop of the same image.

This was one of only three bee shots I got all day. The other two were ghastly, but hey, this is arm's length macro!

--Rik

Ken Ramos · Post by **Ken Ramos** » Mon May 07, 2007 9:12 am

You know I like this better as a verticle, though the first, the horizontal gives an impression of flight and height, the verticle defines it. The bee is well positioned in the photograph and at a very nice angle, giving you a somewhat "bees point of view" and the flowers accent the verticle. Nice composition Rik, ya did good in my opinion.

beetleman · Post by **beetleman** » Mon May 07, 2007 1:04 pm

All three are great Rik. I too like the second crop of the bee. I think it gives it a sense of being in the field with the bee...like flying next to it. The spider and fly are very sharp.

Ken Ramos · Post by **Ken Ramos** » Mon May 07, 2007 1:43 pm

Ah we must have cross posted on the spider comments. I see now that the spider has not so much of a blue cast now but more of a green one.

Picky, picky, picky,...

Hey I even give myself bad reviews, at least you don't have a flash bouncing back in the middle of the image.

No really though Rik, the spider does look much improved.

rjlittlefield · Post by **rjlittlefield** » Mon May 07, 2007 3:06 pm

Ken Ramos wrote:I see now that the spider has not so much of a blue cast now but more of a green one. Picky, picky, picky,...

Yeah, and worse, it depends on where you look in the image. It's really hard to completely fix up color problems, starting from a JPEG that was far off as this one. Not that there's any theoretical problem, mind you, it's just that to get the correction correct, I would need to know close to the exact shape of the intensity-to-pixel-value curves used by the camera. Those are way too much trouble for me to find out, so I hacked these images with a "simple" Level Adjustment layer, sliding the various min's, max's, and gammas until the image looked OK, whatever that meant at the moment I made the decision.

The real take-away here is "Don't set the wrong color balance to start with." I just fouled up, left it set wrong from some earlier work, and didn't notice when looking at the camera's LCD in the field. But I guess I won't beat myself up too bad for this faux pas, considering that the main purpose of the hike was to clear my mind from wrestling with other problems. That camera went along 'cuz it was easy to carry, easy to use. (Just not quite easy enough, apparently!

)

--Rik

Ken Ramos · Post by **Ken Ramos** » Mon May 07, 2007 3:29 pm

You know I got to agree with you on ease of use, that is if you just want a camera for those spur of the moment shots and something to look back on for remembering a pleasant experience. I still carry a Sony DSC-W1 with me in the field for just that kind of thing. It doesn't take as good a photo as my EOS cameras but it is good enough for occasional stuff and fun. Really it comes in quite handy because I do not have to do all that f/stop'n, speed set'n, flash adjust'un, and cuss'n and stuff. Its a good thing North Carolina does not have parrots native to the area, can you imagine some of the language you would hear out in the woods at times.