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I understand the purpose of the theme

You mean gratuitous Transformers references? 😀

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I don’t think it’s worth adding that (no cropping) as a difficulty – I know I have some older stuff on the “maybe” list and I couldn’t tell you if it has been cropped or not at this point. But I would discourage people from going overboard with it….

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I’ve got to say, shooting film is…well, hell, it’s special. It takes time, patience, practice.

It *can* be that way, but it doesn’t have to be – there are all kinds of film cameras that have a lot of the advanced functions you’d get on a DSLR (and you can get them very cheaply these days). With a decent AF body and a motor drive you can blow through a 36 exposure roll in a minute or two quite easily if you stop paying attention to what each frame costs…

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It could have been done with a tilt/shift lens (first ones came out in the 60s, but I don’t know how wide they were), but it’s far more likely to have been large format with bellows. The perspective is completely distortion-free.

The other way to do it is to use a really wide angle lens and shoot parallel to the building and crop out all the wasted foreground (but I agree, a view camera is the most likely thing).

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There’s a couple things you can do to check it out:

– Make sure the slow shutter speeds seem about right. You can’t really judge the accuracy of the faster speeds by ear but if the slow ones are OK there’s a good chance the fast ones are too. If it’s a 100% mechanical camera you may be able to get it back working by exercising it a bit – shoot 20 or 30 blank frames and see if it improves any.

– Make sure the lenses are stopping down to the shooting aperture correctly. Open the back of the camera and point the lens at a light source, then look at the back of the shutter and shoot something like a 1/30 sec exposure at F16 or so. What you should see is a flash of the aperture stopped down to a small hexagon shape (or however many blades the aperture has). If it’s still closing during the exposure, or if it doesn’t close at all, that lens needs work.

– Check out the light seals – any foam around the edges of the film compartment door and stuff. If it’s all soft and sticky it will almost certainly need to be replaced. It may need replacing anyway, but the only way to know for sure is to stick some film in and see if it comes back OK or not – don’t shoot a wedding or something on your first few rolls of film, and it’s a good idea to take the camera outside of any cases and make sure it’s getting exposed to direct sunlight for the first rolls you shoot just to verify that everything is OK.

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I’ve had a couple of ideas lately that would’ve been enhanced by smoke but I wasn’t sure how to go about it. Any pointers you’d like to share on generating and photographing a good smoke wisp?

Cheat: http://photojojo.com/store/awesomeness/smoke-drops/

(I’ve been tempted by that stuff, but it’s kind of pricy…)

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Bs – I shot a couple other alternatives for Feuilles mortes:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/awrose/5215523779/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/awrose/5216113622/

And I had considered sticking with Debussy for all three, with Brouillards (Mists):
http://www.flickr.com/photos/awrose/5037900636/
and Feux d’artifice (Fireworks):

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So what makes something “tone mapping” as opposed to merely adjusting contrast and exposure compensation? Because there’s obviously a lot more to tone mapping than merely contrast/exposure compensation.

Standard brightness controls will preserve the existing relationship of light and dark tones in an image. Tone mapping won’t – it’s basically increasing local contrast by (more or less) lightening the brightest parts of shadow areas and darkening the darkest parts of highlight areas.

It’s also why so many HDR images wind up looking so flat – if done to excess it increases local contrast so drastically it destroys most of the contrast between highlight and shadow in the composition overall….

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The way I understand it, they don’t all have to be taken with the same prime, only that they are taken at a time when you are shooting only with that prime.
Is this correct?

That’s right.

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I also cropped it slightly and killed a dust speck or two….

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_MG_8790 by awrose, on Flickr
1) Custom white balance, exposure +0.90, fill light 69, clarity +68, vibrance +47 in Camera raw
2) Smart sharpen 100%/1px
3) Topaz denoise (light)
4) Duplicate layer – Overlay blending mode – High pass filter @ 62.7 px (enhances local contrast). Toned layer opacity down to 29%
5)Slight S curve adjustment layer
6)color balance adjustment layer – increased red, decreased blue and green slightly in shadows

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I think I have a problem with the bottom half of an image being exposed one way and the top half being exposed another way with the final image being basically a composite of the two.

That isn’t really what’s happening here though., there’s really only one exposure, the final image is just combining darker and lighter versions of the same exposure that were created with standard darken/lighten controls.

And yet, there is a whole area of HDR that relies on creating HDR from a single exposure by taking darker and lighter versions of the same exposure (or taking a RAW file with more and less exposure compensation) and stacking it into an HDR.

Sure, but I don’t think that’s particularly comparable. Running a single exposure through an HDR processor like that isn’t going to increase the dynamic range of the image any more than you could using the fill light/recovery tool (or equivalent) in a raw processor anyway – the only point of the HDR in that case would be to introduce tone mapping artifacts into the final image (Photoshop CS5 actually has tools to tone map a single image without even doing the multiple raw images now…)

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I think I have a problem with the bottom half of an image being exposed one way and the top half being exposed another way with the final image being basically a composite of the two.

That isn’t really what’s happening here though., there’s really only one exposure, the final image is just combining darker and lighter versions of the same exposure that were created with standard darken/lighten controls.

The fact that it’s done using layers isn’t actually all that relevant to the final result, there are (as usual with photoshop) any number of ways to accomplish the same thing with other tools.

The big reason experienced photoshop users rely so heavily on layers is that they are non-destructive to the original image – if, for example, you start painting on the main layer with the dodge and burn tools, you’re destroying the original data and it’s not easily reversible.

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So if you’re submitting 3 shots, do they all need to be taken with the same lens or focal length?

That wasn’t my intention, but please see this note from the original thread:

Well, I didn’t want to suggest a bunch of rules that would wind up being completely unenforceable, but the idea was to encourage people to go out and shoot with only a single focal length available to them, not “images that happened to be shot with a prime lens”, if that makes sense.

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I use Gimp, so I don’t know how to get to the curves tool in Photoshop. But a couple Google searches says it’s “Image -> Adjustments -> Curves” to bring up the tool.

For Photoshop users I’d recommend Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Curves (that way it remains adjustable later, which can be handy)

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