Friday, December 9, 2011

Another one of those shots where the sun burns a whole in the fabric of reality

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4 comments:

  1. Bill, I'm doing my annual year-end round-up of bloggers' work in about a week - what would you nominate for your own best post of 2011?

    Incidentally, re: the photo above, were you using filters or other tools to capture a certain quality or is this a fairly accurate representation of what it looked like to your eye at that moment? At first glance there seems to be some sort of solarization effect going on but the closer I look, the less this seems to be the case. Pretty remarkable colors...

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  2. By best post, Joel, I assume you mean my best movie post. I guess I'd say my post Disney Agonistes: Night on Bald Mountain.

    As for the photo, no filters used. But as for being "a fairly accurate representation of what it looked like to your eye at that moment"—on that I can't say. After all, I'm shooting into the sun and you simply can't look at the sun for long. Half the deal in such shots is moving the samera around to catch just enough sun peeping around a tree or some leaves, so there's a second or three of dancing with the camera while looking through the view-finder before I actually take the shot. I talk a bit about such shots in this post.

    Many of those photos are pretty dark right out of the camera; I don't recall the state of that particular one. So I've got to do a bit of photoshopping to pull out an image, generally some gamma correction, equalization, and adjusting brightness and contrast. I may also boost the saturation a bit, but nothing major. So, without some photoshoppering there wouldn't be much of an image, but it's nowhere near being a painting either.

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  3. Thanks, Bill. Actually it can be movie or non-movie; some of the other posts will be non-movie related. Up to you. I'll put this one into Blogger but if you'd rather another, just let me know by the 15th.

    Just checked out your other sunspot post; really fascinating stuff. "So, without some photoshoppering there wouldn't be much of an image, but it's nowhere near being a painting either." It's an interesting phenomenon - when a photograph is "straight" representation (really never, but when is it close enough?) and when it is something else, something created...

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  4. Right, Joel, a photo is never just 'straight' representation, but then, one can argue that neither is what the eye sees. I DO have a sense of ethics about the limits of what I do, though I'd be hard pressed to spell it out.

    I'll think about the post a bit, but I really do like the Bald Mountain post.

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