Chuck_893 Loc: Lincoln, Nebraska, USA

Hokay. I've been sticking my oar in. Now I guess it's time for me to stick my neck out. Fortunately the Noo Rules require y'all to put down the rocks and bottles and back away slowly :mrgreen: . You can't be mean! :mrgreen: (Maybe this picture shouldn't even be here—maybe it should be in Post Processing…)

Seriously, this was a toughie. First it's mixed light sources in an art museum, from daylight to incandescent. The subject is by Alyson Shotz, White Wave, 2013. It is a HUGE string sculpture, probably 30' long, white string on white brads against a white wall. Can't light it. Can't use a tripod.

I work exclusively with a compact, in this case a Nikon P7100. I do not at present shoot RAW so the original is a jpeg, ISO-100, 1/50 @ ƒ/3.2, focal length 8.1mm, equivalent to 38mm on a 35mm camera. The picture was made hand-held.

Shooting the work straight on was a non-starter. It just disappears into the wall and anyway it's too big. To do it right would have required texture lighting. If I were tasked to shoot it I would do so at night so I could light it, but working with only the light available I concluded I'd get the most texture by working on an angle to the brighter daylight.

I've included the original and my latest rework. I know it's noisy. Noise never bothers me. The rework got some sharpening and some color adjustment. I used the floor at the far end to straighten it, and removed some distractions down there as well. I don't mind the crossover from tungsten to daylight because I had to increase the contrast anyway to even see the darn thing.

The original, only straightened, otherwise SOOC


My latest rework. I'm pretty happy with it, considering the circumstances and my current skill level. Looks a lot more pink on the left than it does on my PSE-11 work screen. Hm.

Heirloom Tomato Loc: Oregon

Hi Chuck, your edit is better than anything I tried. This one is above my pay grade!

Bill Houghton Loc: New York area

And tell me chuck, what DNA sequence are you looking for. I would strongly suggest in the interest of your sanity that you do this in in several photo's to bring the clarification up a few notices, then splice them to gather. You can put a marker on the wall to define which area the photo belongs to. This breaks up to much when going in close.

Hope this helps

Bob Yankle Loc: Burlington, NC

Chuck, first of all, let me compliment you on selecting such an intricate piece of art to photograph. Like you, I find hours and hours of inspiration in our various art museums and natural history museums. I chafe at the no tripod rule, but at least they would let me use a monopod.

I started with your rework, and applied some NIK Collection filters, Viveza 2 and Color Efex Pro 4. Viveza has this wonderful slider, "Structure", which does wonders for bringing out subtle designs and making them distinguishable. I also used the "Shadow" slider to add some more black value over the subject using a Control Point. Finally I used Color Efex Pro 4 and a slider called "Pro Contrast", which tightened it up just a bit more.

Anyone else notice the M.C. Escher effect going on here? The wall and the ceiling don't meet in a corner ..... if I were following the ceiling line I'd almost believe the wall was bending around a corner.

Variant on White-on-white String Scupture

R.G. Loc: Scotland

I'm not sure what kind of criticism you were looking for . If it's just PP fixes, maybe the PP section would be a better proposition.

However..... I did have a go at improving it.

Shallow DOF - even with the P7100's small sensor. So only some of it will be in focus. Usually if stuff is OOF there's not much to be done with it. However, with string there's probably more possibilities.

This is probably the laziest edit I've ever done :- Black point up to 100%, and a crop.

I suspect that Sharpen and Contrast aren't going to do much, so I'm not going to go there.

Chuck_893 Loc: Lincoln, Nebraska, USA

I like this a lot! Very dimensional, which is precisely what is so hard to capture. Yes, it could have been shot as a panorama, but there was no earthly point. Shooting straight into it, it would have had all the contrast of a white cat on a sheet. Also, at 30' long it was pretty boring looking straight at it. Where it got interesting was when you got at an angle to it. I do agree this could have been waaaaay sharper, but it's pretty okay for what I wanted it for, which was not a wall print. I could have, should have shot it at ƒ/5.6. I could also, as Bill Houghton suggested shot it in sections and pasted it up, but I mostly wanted to see if I could get it at all. :-)

Chuck_893 Loc: Lincoln, Nebraska, USA

If you were working from the original, the one I did was minimally sharpened. I should have shot it at ƒ/5.6. I could have. It would have helped. The focus is about 1/3 of the way in but nothing is terribly sharp to start. The thing about a crop is that it loses the scale of the thing. It's enormous, but if you crop away the distant wall and door you can't tell. I even wondered about leaving that ghastly green exit sign in for scale, but yeah—no. Thanks! :-D

R.G. Loc: Scotland

I think you've self-diagnosed. There isn't anything - even in the original - to accentuate the scale of it. That's a doorway at the end of the wall, but it's not effective at giving perspective.

Bushido Loc: No Where and Every Where

Chuck, It is against my personal policy to work on other people's photos, however, this was to big of a challenge to pass up. This is my humble attempt at evening out the colors and balancing the lights in your original image. I only worked on it a few minutes so please for give any thing I missed. All the work was done in Lightroom in several steps because of the different light sources and intensities. Hope this helps.

Bob Yankle Loc: Burlington, NC

Chuck, what was it that you were hoping to accomplish with this photo. Was it to work on contrast so that you see the pattern in the string art? Or was it to balance the light sources so that it looked uniform across the whole work? Or something else altogether?

Chuck_893 Loc: Lincoln, Nebraska, USA

That is impressive, Bushido! What you dragged kicking and screaming out of it is probably what the artist would have liked it to look like—white on white. That's very good! I just went back and looked again at the original I posted; this is probably a lot closer to what it actually looked like. I don't have Lightroom. Maybe I should get it. I understand that it is different from Photoshop and that the two work well in tandem.

Chuck_893 Loc: Lincoln, Nebraska, USA

Great question, Bob. I didn't ask for anything specific because I didn't really know. I was certainly not happy with the original, but I knew that it was "in there somewhere." I believe that when anyone takes a photograph of pretty much anything, there is a kind of latent image at the back of the mind—the Mind's Eye, seeing ideally somehow. On some level photographers want to be able to "just blink," to capture what they see with the eye and the mind. The problem (Duh!) is that there is this thing [camera] between Us and It. I know what I saw when I made the picture, but I've never quite been able to get it back.

I've been tinkering with this thing for some time. I wasn't unhappy with most of my efforts, but joining The Hog got me rereading and retraining myself in Elements. I have a newer antique computer so I bought PSE-11 and the Dummies Book to go with it. I've read and studied on The Hog. I started experimenting and brought this one back to see if I could get anything better. I was not unhappy with the latest one I posted here, but I didn't ask for anything specific because I wanted to see what would happen, and what has happened is pretty amazing so far! :thumbup: It's said that Too Many Cooks Spoil the Broth, but then it's also said that Two Heads Are Better than One. I'm getting ideas, and I'm learning stuff, and that's what The Hog (ideally) is all about, so Thanks Everybody! :D :D :D

(Come to think of it, looking more and more at Bushido's take on it, maybe the thing should just be converted to B&W! It is, after all, white-on-white, so why am I struggling to keep all that awful mixed-light color?!)

Bushido Loc: No Where and Every Where

Chuck I deleted the image here because it did not transition well and looked a lot worse than prior to transferring.Will keep working on it. I love a good challenge.

Chuck_893 Loc: Lincoln, Nebraska, USA

Aw, do I ever miss the smell of hypo in the morning! I also just thought that maybe the whole thing would work way better in black and white! It's white-on-white, so why fight all that mixed-light color? I like what you did here. The contrast makes it stand out. :thumbup: Later today I think I'm going back and have a crack at just converting it. Some 80% of my work was in B&W, so now I tend to see everything in color—a reaction, I guess—but this might work waaaaay better with no color at all, and it was you who gave me the idea.

Bushido Loc: No Where and Every Where

Chuck every once in a while I have to open a bottle of fixer to remind me I'm still a photographer. I want to see if the lighting can be more even through out the image. As I said I love a good challenge.