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Wow. You guys make me smile. Thank you very much.

I assure you, I’m an amateur. Three kids, a wife and 60 hour work weeks sort of get in the way of my photography hobby. 🙂 Then again, the girls are beautiful (and available) subjects. And the radiologist gig keeps me in good glass.

My Fark-fu has been strong the past few weeks. But I didn’t recognize that stat Elsinore posted. Pretty cool.

A likely story. All super-heroes need a cover, so I’ll accept this, provisionally.

However (there’s always that ‘however’), as a true fan of Dr. Horrible’s Sing-a-long Blog, I declare you to be my Hammer. Not Johnny Snow.

It’s a brand new day.

Muah-ha-ha-HAH-hah. Working on it. Some people forget the laugh, and that’s about standards. You think Bad Horse didn’t work on his whinny? His Death. Whinny. E-mails!!!

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Congrats to U-Man this week!

You just ‘copy-paste’ this weekly, don’t you?

If photos were scripture, and divinity in the lens of a camera, I’m pretty sure U-Man would be God.

I only aspire to be a little angel (ok–demon, but semantics, schmantics) in this little world.)

U-man inspires me. To quote Jack N. in the original ‘Batman’ movie, “Where does he get such fabulous toys…”

rav

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Holy crap. Downloaded the Canon software, started toying. I have some learning to do (lots and lots, but I’m a quick study, I like to think, but I’m LIKING IT!! And for the moment, it will have to do. It allows me to edit in Adobe color format for one. Here’s a pic that I thought was good in its original, but I’m loving the edit (though some cropping is called for). Naturally I’ll need to figure out the details, but for 1/2 hours work with 0 experience, I think I did okay:

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Well now that I have some photo tips from the group, I’ll be doing some editing this weekend, I think. Good thing I’ve saved most of the 15K pictures I’ve taken in the past couple of years!! Most of which have never seen the light of fark. It’ll be hard to decide what to submit (assuming I either have or can get decent editing hardware; I’m sure I have my Canon camera software cds, I just never installed them.)

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Thanks for the tips, sleeping, and from what Silverstag did, I think I’m going to have to buy me photoshop. Assuming I can get an older version online used, whould that be enough, or do I have to get the latest-greatest stuff? I remember photoshop used to be numbered (3.0, 4.0, etc), then they went to letters (cs, etc); waht are they up to now and what would a suitable older version be?

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Shooting RAW is a good start, but only if you convert your images correctly. I don’t know what program you are using for RAW conversion but I would assume it is Canons DPP. Don’t be ascared to play with saturation & exposure settings in RAW or in whatever program you are using to edit the JPEGs. Thats what they are there for. We frown on garish saturation levels but not adjustments that make the photo pop.
…
Canon spent tons of money on R&D into that processor to make it produce a decent photo. Sometimes it even does a better job than what you can do yourself. (esp if you are not familiar with RAW conversion) Conversly you can shoot both a RAW file and JPEG in camera and see if you can do a better job processing the photo than the camera.
Another big tool is sharpening. I sharpen everything to 150% @ .3 pixels by default. It’s a bit heavy but I like it. I will back it off if it looks too unnatural but I find it to be the best overall setting.

Other than that I would say composition is the key. Look through U-Mans photos and you will see that even the ones that are not technically perfect his composition is what makes the photo.

And…Photoshop is the best tool on the market for editing bar none. PS CS4 cost $500 bucks for a reason.It’s a pro tool and nothing comes close.However, PS elements will do most stuff that an amateur photog need for under $100. Save your pennies shop around, you won’t regret it.

My canon shoots RAW and JPEG in combination, and it’s pretty much how I shoot everything barring casual family gatherings. Anything I shoot for the love of photography, I do edit in RAW–just not here, as I thought that was phoe-paw (sic). The JPEGs are identical to the RAW, but don’t edit as nicely, so they just show up as an afterthought by design of the XTi. I will certainly take advantage of this as I can saturate pretty well without making it look like a cartoon. Typically I do my adjustments in irfanview, which does a fairly good job w/o a lot of technical stuff, but I’ll see what my Roxio can do, and elsewise, will check out the PS elements. I certainly don’t have $500 lying around at this time. I’ve never tried the Canon software but will run the disks (there in this apt somewhere) if you think it would work better.

And I know composition is key, and I do try. The photo with the flower on the spider-thread (it looked like popcorn) I thought was a nice one compositionally speaking, but fell flat in comparison to others. I will have to check on if any of my programs (incl. Canon’s) have a sharpening feature.

And just serves me right for posting diatribes–you’d commented and answered about 1/2 the stuff I asked Orionid about while I was typing it out.

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… Go out and shoot for fun, try different things. Play with the manual settings on your camera and see what they do. Keep notes (mental or otherwise) of what you like or don’t like.

/Gets off soapbox
//Hopes to see you keep coming back

Hey, you! Back on the soapbox! 😉

Your shots are fantastic (those I’ve seen), but let me clarify:

I’ve had my camera for a couple years now. I understand some basic concepts, and logistically try to employ them:

Lower ISO=sharper image but higher exposure time, Higher ISO=grainier image but shorter exp. time.

High F-stop=more dof, higher exp. time, Lower=less dof, lower exp. time

Exposure time relates to capturing a hummingbird with wings barely beating or that ‘Arizona Highways’ milky waterfall effect. (Or, in astrophotography, it’s simply a must to get any good shot–my extension shutter cord is on it’s way from Atlanta as we speak, for in A-focal photography through my 11″ 2800mm focal length lens [i.e., my telescope, purchased when the economy and my finances were far better], 30 seconds isn’t enough and I can’t in ‘bulb’ hold the shutter still enough without it.)

These things I get.

But what makes color pop, other than saturating a picture? And is that allowed (understand I know ‘cartoonish’ isn’t what farktography is about, but should I be employing it judiciously?)

And I never got the ‘white balance’ thing. How dost that work?

Rules suggest cutting the quality of the photo so it’s nearer to 60kb, which I do by lowering the jpg ‘save percentage’ rate, but when I do, my pictures seem to look ‘fuzzier’ than those posted by people like you, shoosh, staplermofo, and Elzanore. What tricks do you employ? If I can’t capture attention on a small version, I can’t see anyone clicking through for a bigger version, realistically.

I’ve taken 15K pictures with this camera, I kid you not (actually, I’m only up to 14,729, but close enough). I have some pictures I think are compositions of art–to me, at least–but consistently, nothing pops like a good percentage of what I see in the contests–and I’m not just talking the content of the image. Colors. Vibrancy. I’ve done the morning and evening light shots.

And while living in a desert (Arizona) doesn’t lend itself to many vibrant colors, I know they are out there, and I know my lens hath focuthed upon them (sic).

For example. Using my flowers in my dad’s reptile garden where he keeps his tortoise (which also houses the velociraptor statue–hey, they’re both reptiles) the shot was taken about an hour after sunrise, in full shade. It was a 1/20th second exposure, ISO 400, F-stop 20 for depth of field quality, using a 28 mm focal length for the wider view.

Here’s the original shot (which I gamma corrected to 1.25 to post) resized to 800w x533h:
http://fossilspringsaz.com/pics/2010/apr/28/raptorplain.jpg

And here’s one I just tweeked, in saturation and gamma:

http://fossilspringsaz.com/pics/2010/apr/28/raptortweeked.jpg

With the tweeked one (or even just the gamma), it’s pretty easy to spot the raptor (or so I thought–nobody did).

Is this kind of editing allowed? Is this what everyone else does to get the vibrant colors?

I noted one guy posted vinyards with mustard growing, and a few shots later posted a similar shot that CLEARLY (to me) must have been HDR’d, which I thought was EXPRESSLY forbidden.

But is some ‘corrective’ valuating perfectly fine and dandy?

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p.s., I’m not talking about WINNING a contest–screw the contest. I just want the technical quality of my pictures to be more comparable to what I see from most others. If I can get that part down, then at least I’ll be in the same ballpark, content aside.

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Wish I saw this about two months ago!!

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I guess I wasn’t the only one with problems posting links to the larger images? Only one went through.

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Oh, goody then! I’ll post the pic. It’s probably not going to win (mine never do), but those who catch it will have a laugh.

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Which makes me wonder, Elsinore, if I should include one of my three entries. The focus is plants (specifically flowers–*yawn*), but I’ve added camouflaged reptilian goodness, with hopes that an astute observer will notice. A little humor, so to speak, but not at all predominant in the composition; in fact, intentionally NOT predominant. (And technically, I didn’t add it–it was already there; I just made sure I carefully got it in the shot in the background.)

As for Olavf’s pic, it would seem to me that part of planthood is reproduction, and for a great many plants, that means insects. And you certainly must be correct about the casual farkers’ posts–I wouldn’t be surprised if someone shows up smoking weed because pot is a plant. My vote is so long as plants are the main gist, they should qualify. Where’s the theme suggester? I would think Clouddancer should get the final say-so, if available.

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I’m not a mod or anything (not even a punk…), so my opinion won’t count for much, but I don’t think that spider in the photo you posted in the gallery forum would disqualify your picture for this week’s competition.

Let me put it another way: after you mentioned it, I spent FIVE minutes trying to find the damn thing 😕

LOL, but I DID mention the color yellow!!

And if that’s the case, PLEASE look carefully at my third entry this week. Camouflage is an art form.

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hm. I hadn’t consider that personally. There’s one or two I’d like to consider, but hadn’t because of the insects or whatever that are in it – even if they are ancillary.

Actually, I flet like a little bug amidst the flora would be cool. It doesn’t happen that I’ll use one, but only because I figured everyone and their mother would be posting them. I strived for unique this time. (Okay, except for that one shot…)

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I’m happy to report that I got more plant pictures than I know what to do with. It’s not often I shoot 200 pics and come out with over a dozen spectacular ones!

I’ve chosen three rather unique ones for the contest. Anyone care to see some others posted in the gallery section?

No?

Tough. I’m gonna post some anyway. Critiques welcome.

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