gwilliams6

I know it when I see it, and I am fortunate to have several lenses that have it from Sony, Sigma Art and Tamron.

The Palace of Fine Arts, San Francisco, California, USA. Sony A7RIV, Tamron 17-28mm f2.8 lens . 17mm, f5.6, ISO 800, 1/60 second, sunset/dusk ambient light

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Just guessing that it takes a reeeeally experienced skater to grow and keep that thumbnail ;-)

WDCash Loc: Milford, Delaware, USA

I can't get in that position, let alone doing it on askateboard ateboard, (well I might get in the position but I won't get back up)

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Perfectly legit question to my mind, but acoarst I have a quibble. I’m gonna take us from your popcorn to my pizza !

The concept of “make or break” is OK for power switches or Olympic gold, but it is unsuitable where you applied it.

An image can be great eye candy, or jerk at our emotions or it can be the perfect moment, and yet it can still lack that “special something”.

Likewise I’ve eaten a long lifetime of pizza. Some outstanding, some I trashed after a bite or two. But the one pizza fondly recalled as having the glorious “special something” seemed likely to be just a decades-enhanced ancient falsely glorified memory.

After 30 years in exile I wandered off from a family reunion and the pizza joint was still there. My sister and I bought slices mainly for auld lang syne ... or so we thought. Two bites, and we saw the look in each other’s face ! The “special something” was real. We had NOT AT ALL assumed it would be real. We were just patronizing our ancestral homey as a salute to our origins, and had expected a “very decent” pizza, but nothing more.

“Very decent” is NEITHER “make” nor “break”, yet is actually verrrry decent. But the “something special” was plainly evident. It set that pizza apart. But it doesn’t render all the very decent “also ran” pizza into losers. The others have included many winners, but not every winner is an Olympic champion !

gwilliams6

gwilliams6

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

I know such a neighborhood pizza joint in Charlotte, if the same family is still running it. It always blew us away. The owners were from Amalfi, Italy. They used real everything— much of it imported from Italy. We lived too close to it!

R.G. Loc: Scotland

IMO what we don't need is terminology that's unhelpful or even confusing. I suspect that what's referred to as microcontrast is simply a mixture of better contrast and saturation resulting in more clarity and sharpness. In fact I'm tempted to think that the word "clarity" sums up most of what microcontrast is about and it doesn't need to get any more complicated than that.

Post processing can go a long way to mitigating all sorts of shortcomings and faults, but in most cases it would have been better if there wasn't any need for PP in the first place. Usually mitigating means a lot of extra work and there's usually a limit to what can be achieved. Much of PP is about trying to restore clarity, and life would be much simpler for most of us if that clarity hadn't been lost in the first place. The end results would be better and it would be easier to achieve those results. I wouldn't describe that as essential but I would describe it as very desirable.

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Here in exile, there is a pizza joint and import groceries family, located in the local Little Italy. They have their own “special something”. In good weather you can eat in the back yard alongside their big garden plot of tomato plants !

Acoarst you can’t garden enough back yard tomatoes to run a pizza biz. The garden is for the grocery/deli. Rocko insists that the only really legit farm grown tomatoes come from a special small farm on the opposite coast. Thaz why his pizzas ain’t cheap ! But even my sister awards De Fazio’s Pizza the “Pizza Olympics” gold.

My sister is critical about food. One day, lunching by the pier where Malcolm Forbe’s yacht was tied up, right next door to Billy Joel’s “summer house”, she complained “This is not worth $200. Supper was only $175 !!!”. She’s also a seeeeerious art collector. The imagery Hogsters admire on the famius name websites is hanging on her walls. Nope, not the late beard-and-hat guy. She’s waaaaay beyond that.

All of which is to say that awareness of the “special something” runs in the family, whether it’s fine pizza or ancient Chinese art and artifacts. (Yes, acoarst I have a fancy BFA. WDFA ! )

And to whoever complains that the OP didn’t ask about pizza, or my sister, I would remind that page three has gone by loooong ago ;-)

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

Most Americans don't know what real tomatoes are. Supermarket tomatoes are cross-bred to look appealing and survive transit times from farm to market to table. By the time we get them home, they've lost a lot of nutrition and flavor (that they often didn't have in the first place.

Big Agriculture companies have engineered and patented so many seeds that finding genuine, un-altered, natural plants of some types here is damned near impossible. Europe has mostly avoided that problem, and their crops taste better and are more easily digestible, as a result. Ask an Indian farmer (from India) what he thinks about that, and you'll get an ear full of angst.

gwilliams6