baby pictures

Nice ride!!

 

Don't scare me like that! I saw a thread titled 'baby pictures' with Rancid13's name on it, and this is way too soon! How are you doing, Jennifer? Is he doing laps yet?

 

I like the little rainbow sticker :lol: I wasn't that brave, I just have an HRC sticker on mine.

 

All of the new babies are always beautiful. Now you need a Wee Pri to go along with it.

 

Oh! I saw the wheels of another car reflected in the side and my brain immediately translated those into dents. I felt bad for you for a second, but took a second and realized that's it's just really shiny, not dented

Nice shots. I do a lot of graphics work, so I have to ask, is the depth of field faked on that last shot?

 

I have also posted baby pictures! Look at the pictures at Wolf Creek. That was the day I picked up Belle. If Wolf Creek Montana seems familiar to you may have seen "A River Runs Through It" or better yet you have read the book! This is the URL http://web.mac.com/drygasfamily/iWeb/Site/...20Pictures.html

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Ichabod @ Aug 18 2006, 08:42 PM) [snapback]305649[/snapback]</div>

I thought the same thing - the background should get progressively less sharp the further away. I think the tip of the antenna got blurred.

Still - nice effect - your Prius really stands out and looks great!

 

Not to sidetrack the discussion of how much we love our pretty new cars, but I don't think there's any reason that you can't be a photo purist and extensively doctor your photos at the same time. In my view, any of the simplest darkroom processes is already a significant change from what's captured on film, so I have no problem extending the same philosophy to digital images.

I wasn't passing judgment on your photo edit, but I was pretty sure I could see your blur kernel, and might recommend using a different filter, a gaussian blur, or doing it in stages to mask the kernel. I'm a big fan of exaggerated depth of field, and when you have a camera that just can't give it to you, sometimes you have to fake it!

 

I try to take snapshots somtimes, but I always feel like a jerk doing it and end up putting too much thought into all of them

Regarding documentary, some patently unethical manipulation happens in news and documentary footage. It's a nice ideal to present factual events through photo/video, but very often someone wants to editorialize in a way that seems to retain the factual content, but really puts a troubling spin on the image. Just a blur or color correction can be enough to change an image from benign to sinister.

I do work in film/video/animation/fx where manipulation and compositing is the rule, not the exception, so I am admittedly biased in favor of those practices. Even so, traditional skills are still 100% essential to the modern pro since your image is still only as good as the [digital] negative. There's a little more that you can get away with now, but not that much.

I'm a little bit ranty about this right now because I just went to Siggraph a couple weeks ago, and I'm always blindsided by all the stupid research papers that seem to be attempting to do away with the need for artistic judment/intervention in digital imaging. There were certainly some very cool new tools and techniques presented, but I'm talking about things like this:

One paper propsed a method to tone map a snapshot image based on input from a "master" photograph. Their example: input your crap picture, and an Ansel Adams photograph: Voila! The computer analyzes the use of tonal range in the Adams picture and, through a series of digital acrobatics, your image receives the same quality of tonal range. They didn't take into account a couple things though: 1. composition (fairly imporant, I would say) 2. subject matter, e.g. they used an Adams photgraph of snowy mountains and tried to apply the same tone mapping to a desert scene, the result of which was awful looking because the desert scene ended up with a lof of bright white (due to the comparison with snow) where it really shouldn't have had it.

I could rant for ages. But I won't