Winter morning Sun-star / Just After Sunrise / over Miller's Mountain, Arkansas

 

Open field / Kessler's Mountain / Fujifilm X-T1 / Samyang F2.0 12mm

After this morning's dog walk I was taken by the scene behind our neighbor's house which is currently for sale.

 

Low Ceiling on Miller's Mountain / Fuji X100s

Frosty Morning Sky / Sony A7 / Voigtlander 15mm

Carnival Splendor / Cozumel / Leica X1 / Wide angle / Topaz

Sony NEX 6 / 16mm pancake / wide angle / Big Sky Cloud Drama

I've always admired large format photography. Photographers lugged big cameras with tripods and large plates in an attempt capture the vast beauty of nature. Think Ansel at Yosemite. I can and do cheat with digital by shooting a series of images vertically then stitching them together. PS knows to turn them 90 degrees as it makes it a seamless picture. I shoot these all the time and post those I like best here. The sky is a constant source of drama. Changing weather patterns display cloud formations of varying density from shades of white to shades of gray. The sky adds the contrasting blues in the background. The sun lights it all up to heighten contrast. I can't always do the scene justice but I keep trying.

Downtown Disney / Legoland / Sony A3000

Carnival Fascination / Norwegian Sky / in port Nassau / Fuji X-F1 / wide angle / HDR / Topaz

Carnival Fascination / Carnival Dream / Norwegian Sky / Fuji X-F1 / wide angle / Topaz

Canon G10 / Marin headlands / San Francisco pano / City by the Bay

Going wide on a rainy day A850 @ 19mm

Just had a tornado warning and one just cut a 200 yard wide swath through the natural bridges area. Stuck inside for a bit while it storms and since this week I seem to be stuck on wide shots out back decided to go traditional and get a full frame with a wide lens. This from an A850 w/ 19-35mm Quantaray (Sigma) lens at 19mm. Not a great lens but serviceable. I got the camera used with a couple of lenses and this was one of those. Bracketed three shots and processed through PS HDR Pro. Since the process brings the older Macbook Pro to its knees, I shot in medium rather than fine mode to reduce the file size so I could process it in the Mac. I tried to maintain something of a photorealistic look rather than go over the top with the hdr. I had it shooting jpegs in landscape color which provides a little more saturation (not much but some) so the shots were contrasty to begin with, prior to the hdr processing.

 We sure needed the rain.

Sony recently introduced the RX1, which is a full frame compact camera with a Zeiss 35mm f2. The examples of its photos I've seen are just outstanding. 

Sony sensors are just top notch. The Kodak in the M8 is also a great rendering sensor. The A850, along with the M8 will be mainstays of my personal cameras for a "long" time. If I really need a guaranteed usable shot, I grab one or the other. I know there's some vignetting and I've got a corner of the roof on the upper right but it's just an example of the full frame and 19mm showing nice color on a really dull day to compare with some of the other wides I've shot this past week with a fisheye and some paste ups. It's also a decent example of high dynamic range that isn't overdone. It just punches it up a notch or two.

Here's an earlier shot around sunrise using a 15mm CV Heliar on a XP1 using an M lens adapter. f5.6. Two shots side by side photomerged. I did bracket the shots hand held and at f5.6 but they weren't usable as it took too long for each shot for the handheld to be close enough to blend without stereo edges everywhere. So the middle of the brackets were used for the merge. The 15mm on the XP1 translates to around 22mm with the crop factor.

What Would Bugs Do with a Samyang 8mm

I'm unsure why most people get into photography. For me it's emulation. I see something I like and I want to see if I can achieve something approaching that model. Of course artists strive to produce something unique that pushes the envelope. I guess I'm not an artist because I simply want to be able to manage competency in producing a photograph. I try to please me, of course. Chuck Jones said he and his fellow cartoon artists at Warner Brothers produced Bugs and Daffy cartoons to make themselves laugh. In that respect I'm like Chuck and the boys working on Looney Tunes. I want to see something that pleases me. I've always liked classic black and white in medium and large format. The large plate film cameras don't produce the level of barrel distortion you're seeing here. You can get medium format digital cameras with great glass and avoid it but here we have an APC camera with a fish eye that's been straightened a bit. But even though there is distortion you do get a capacious feel to the scene, which is what I'm after. We're taking in pretty much the whole room and seeing a bit of outside. I chose the level of contrast to match a particular aesthetic perhaps lost in the translation. I won't bore you with the technical aspects of what I went through to produce this particular photo but I will display one of the composite shots that went into making it. What's hilariously ironic is at least half or more of viewers will likely like the original better than what I was trying to achieve.

And even though I said I wouldn't do it, this is from three shots combined to produce an HDR in Photoshop (this shot was in the middle of the three exposures) using a Samsung NX10 camera with a Samyang 8mm fisheye lens. Here's the camera and lens:

 It's a manual focus lens but with it's field of view and standard aperture setting pretty much everything from a few feet to infinity is in focus anyway. Great snapshot lens on a small build format, APC sensor camera. Here's one more shot from the combo:

 This was another three shot combo processed into HDR, which sort of works well with the super wide shot.