Willy Lott's cottage

[Dave_S]

Willy Lott's cottage at Flatford Mill in Suffolk, as depicted in one of Jonh Contstable's paintings.

Taken late evening, with the sun low in the sky.

Had to try and balance the wide dynamic range in the picture, between the dark foreground water area, and the sunlit white painted cottage, using the 'curves' function in CS2.

I'm guessing that 'spot metering' on the mid-levels in the picture would have been a better option, as looking at the original (pre CS2), the camera seems to have metered on the large dark areas of the picture, tending to over expose on the white cottage and the sky.

EOS 7D (tripod mounted) - Sigma 18-50 f/2.8 EX lens - 1/15th at f/11 - ISO 100 - Aperture Priority.

Full res version here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/80192867@N06/7516637290/

Dave

[Northman]

Re: Willy Lott's cottage

Lovely scene enhanced by the reflection, but find the shadows on the left a bit distracting. May benefit from cropping this out and placing the cottage on the top left rule of thirds intersection. Looks like there is enough information in the sky to darken that too. Nice shot.

[Dave_S]

Re: Willy Lott's cottage

Hi Alastair

The shadow is from the large 'field study centre' building immediately behind the camera, and I guess the real answer would be to get down there a bit earlier, when the shadow wouldn't be there. It was around 8pm when the picture was taken.

I'm sure you are right, and there is more detail in the sky to be recovered. It was a complete 'white out' before I applied the 'curves' in CS2.

I'm very fortunate to live in Constable Country, and Flatford Mill, is just 10 mins drive for me.

Best to get down there after 6pm though, after all the tourists have left (lol).

Thanks for your comments.

Dave

[Macro Meister]

Re: Willy Lott's cottage

Dave

It's a pretty scene, no doubt about that. But you seem to have a problem of extreme exposures. You had your camera on a tripod, so you could have taken two exposures - one for the dark bottom half, and another for the bright sky, and then merged them in Photoshop. I would also have zoomed more - the main picture is the 60% area in the centre, which would have removed those shadows on the left, and the grasses poking up at the bottom of the shot.

[Dave_S]

Re: Willy Lott's cottage

Hi Rob, and thanks for your constructive comments.

I should really have thought about a dual exposure, because I use this technique in my astro-imaging, on objects such as the Orion Nebula, which has a very bright centre area (The Trapezium), a much less bright semi outer area, and quite faint dust clouds out on the fringes. For this I will take three different exposures, and 'layer' combine them in CS2.

Hadn't considered this approach for terrestrial imaging, but I will now.

Dave

[Macro Meister]

Re: Willy Lott's cottage

Hi Rob, and thanks for your constructive comments.

I should really have thought about a dual exposure, because I use this technique in my astro-imaging, on objects such as the Orion Nebula, which has a very bright centre area (The Trapezium), a much less bright semi outer area, and quite faint dust clouds out on the fringes. For this I will take three different exposures, and 'layer' combine them in CS2.

Hadn't considered this approach for terrestrial imaging, but I will now.

Dave

Dave

It's quite easy to blend landscape images. This video by Gavin Hoey explains it very well, although the auto-align tool only came in with CS3. But if you shot this in RAW you could try getting round that (as you are on CS2) by making two exposures from a single RAW. That way you don't need to worry about aligning them. There are other ways to do it - you can load the two exposures and use the grad tool in a layer mask, which does essentially the same thing, but is more suitable where you have a clean horizon line (which you don't in your shot due to the tree-line varying).

You can also blend images for focus, as well as for exposure. You can shoot a landscape with a very deep DOF on say f/8 (often the best part of a lens) and merge the two together.

[Dave_S]

Re: Willy Lott's cottage

Thanks for the 'link' to that video Rob.

The alignment wouldn't be a problem, as I have two astro image processing software programmes that will do that very effectively.

Although they are designed primarily to work with the FITS file format (the standard format for astro images), they will also handle TIFFs. So it would simply be a matter of converting the CR2 files to TIFF, importing them into the programme for alignment, then resaving as TIFFs.

Dave