Did you read my comments about lighting. Photography is ultimately about light. In the days of B&W we often would wait about for hours for the light to be right. Because in B&W the play of light and shadow is the only thing that makes the image, you have to know and work with the light deliberately. In color mostly you need to restrict contrast to get a usable photo, but if that is taken too far you get a flat looking picture no matter what your lens.
You used to be able to flip through no end of magazines and pick up lighting kind of by accident, but that was probably before many of the folks on the list were born. So how to do it now?
I would suggest shooting only B&W for a month or so. Take notes: direction and angle of the light, meter reading of the brightest highlights and darkest shadows (contrast range), the qualitity of the light (harse, soft, glowing, etc.). Then sit down with your photos and notes and see what looks good and what the conditions where when you took it. After abit you should begin to see what lighting conditions make photos that have that depth you are looking for. When you can do this without the notes you are beginning to get it. The final step is to learn how to translate this from B&W to color. Too begin with you need to limit the contrast to about 1/3 of what you use in B&W because color materials do not have the tonal range that B&W does, but otherwise the conditions pretty much hold throughout.
BTW, 90% of the time you will find that that glowing light works best. That is the kind of light you get with a hazy sky, where there are clear shadows but with soft edges.
As to digital workflow, I am not the one to answer that, I have little experience with it beyond the bare basics.
graywolf http://www.graywolfphoto.com "Idiot Proof" <==> "Expert Proof" -----------------------------------
Boris Liberman wrote:
Hi!
Hum...?
No one ever pays attention.
I always do.
Plasticity: A subtle quality of roundness, depth, and smoothness of a photographic image highly prised by artistic photographers. It is produced by subtle choice of uncorrected aberations by the lens designer. Pentax traditionally disigns lenses with this quality. The Limited lenses display this charactoristic particularly well.
Very well. So I used to right term after all, didn't I? :)
It is the reason why so many photographers over the years when asked why they prefer Pentax have answered, "Its the glass", without even knowing why that is so.
I do like my glass. I just need to know how to take full advantage of it.
As I have often said, Pentax generally designs its lenses for pictorial quality instead of high resolution and contrast figures that give such nice scores in magazine tests.
Indeed. So how one keeps these qualities in their final processed file to be printed?
That Pentax most always seems to be able to produce this quality in a lens with high resolution and contrast is one of the reasons I have alway preferred Pentax over most other 35mm systems. It tends to be more common in large format lenses where the absolute highest resolution and contrast is not quite as important as in 35mm.
That would be my impression from only some of the images I produced and from quite many images that I saw on PUG or PAW/PESO...
Boris
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