D800, ISO400, 1/250 sec @ f/3.5, Tamron 90mm, off-camera SB-800
D800, ISO400, 1/125 sec @ f/2.8, Nikkor 50mm
D800, ISO400, 1/125 sec @ f/3.5, Tamron 90mm
That’s what happens when the weather gets (or has been) wet(ter) the whole summer. But it makes for some interesting sceneries…
So I promised to do a side-by-side.
Here you go:
Top image -> laptop, uncalibrated, crappy, 13″ glossy worthless piece of sh!t
Bottom image -> desktop, calibrated, 27″ matte sweet widescreen
D700, ISO200, 30 sec @ f/5.6, Nikkor 50mm, off-camera SB-800 (flashed manually several times on the mushrooms near the end of the 30 second exposure)
Same as above, but the post-processing was a bit better 😉
Of course you can argue that I could’ve tried harder and got the same result on the laptop, but there’s only so much you can actually see on a piece of sh!t which isn’t made for this kind of work. I tried desaturating the road (primarily red and yellow channels) on the laptop (just like I did on the desktop), and all I got was a load of banding and other unwanted ugly side effects. It just didn’t work.
It may not have been mainly the calibration problem, but also the fact that this screen can’t handle all these colors… Owwell, anyway… The difference is here, and obvious (and yes, I know, if I spend a bucketful of money I can get a very expensive laptop which can handle the colors, but that’s beside the point right now 😉 ).
…(and the reasons why you should have a good, calibrated screen for doing image editing and/or color corrections on photographs)
When I was driving home from work the other day I passed (again) this particular part of the route. There’s a little bench there that I’ve been meaning to take a picture of for years already, but never got around to.
Neither did I this time. But I noticed something else which I hadn’t noticed before, for some reason. Funny, because from the looks of it, they’d been there already for awhile, and they were almost ON the street. Instantly I thought “Light trails, long exposure”, and I decided to come back in the evening (with camera, duh).
And so I did. And I sat on my knees in the grass for almost 40 minutes, trying to get the right picture. Cars slowing down all the time, because they thought I was a cop photographing speeders 😀
It was a bit tricky, because of my positioning. I didn’t have much choice here, since right next to the mushrooms was a massive tree that I didn’t want in the picture, and a bit further on the road was a curve which would give a good swing to the light trails. But that meant that the cars coming towards me would shine there headlights pretty much straight into my lens.
And so it didn’t quite turn out the way I wanted. I had to make, or try to, separate exposures for tail lights and head lights and combine them in post-processing.
That worked out quite ok in the end.
But then there’s the thing with the screens. One image (the bottom one) I did on my desktop computer, with big, calibrated, graphic screen. The other one I did on my laptop, which, quite frankly, is a piece of crap graphically speaking. Sure, I tried calibrating it, but that only makes things worse. Glossy screen, reflecting the sh!t out of everything near and if you bat your eyelashes the color changes. So apologize you me for the bad quality of that first image. I will make a post in the coming days, when I get back to my good computer, where I put the two side by side: one done on the laptop and the other one done on the desktop, and see the difference.
Anyways… Fall wasn’t quite over yet.
D700, ISO200, 30 sec @ f/5.6, Nikkor 50mm, off-camera SB-800 (flashed manually several times on the mushrooms near the end of the 30 second exposure)
D700, ISO200, 20 sec @ f/8, Nikkor 50mm, off-camera SB-800 (flashed manually several times on the mushrooms at the beginning of the 20 second exposure)
So last week I shot those mushrooms (of which I still don’t know what they are, help me out here, people!!), and well, yeah… Since they’re right next to my place I pass there pretty much every day. You can imagine my surprise when the other day when I passed there I saw some movement in the undergrowth.
I set up camp to lure out what was hiding, and geesh… You will NEVER guess what turned up… With a bit of patience… It’s crazy!
D700, ISO200, 1/125 sec @ f/9.5, Nikkor 50mm, 2x off-camera SB-800
D700, ISO200, 1/350 sec @ f/2.8, Nikkor 50mm, 2x off-camera SB-800
D700, ISO200, 1/125 sec @ f/9.5, Nikkor 50mm, 2x off-camera SB-800
I promised to add some autumn pictures… More will probably follow still. It’s so beautiful right now! 🙂
D700, ISO800, 1/125 sec @ f/8, Nikkor 70-200
D700, ISO200, 1/4 sec @ f/11, Nikkor 70-200mm