Does the “twisttedness” add to, or detract from, the image?
When I view my image, it feels “uncomfortable”.
When I view your image, it feels “natural”.
Next time I’ll try both ways - but what are your thoughts? Is the “twistedness” good, or bad?
“breathing space”… yes!!!
I will try to remember next time.
Mostly true. For better, or worse.
I find it enjoyable to be creative every so often, but most of the time I try to capture what I want in the camera, knowing what I’m likely to do to the image afterwards.
In your opinion, which was Ansel Adams?
He saw the scene, and knew what he would do to/with it.
He was also VERY talented in so many ways.
I would like to be more like him, but all the things he had, I don’t.
He was a genius,. A visionary photographer with great technical skills who wasn’t afraid to modify images inorder to satisfy his vision. He was more than just a photographer, he was an artist. Practically anyone with a modern camera If told where to stand and where to point, can potentially capture a very decent photograph. But, Adams infused his photographs with a soul.
Mark
The real problem here with an optical viewfinder in a DSLR is that it gives you one interpretation of your motif that might totally differ from what your camera will record with the settings you have chosen to use or even NOT chosen for that matter because you happened to be in a time crunch and just had put your camera in full manual mode and had it set for a completely different situation.
From my experience I think the only way to be reasonably sure that what I see in the viewfinder will synch with what the camera actually will record, is to use a mirrorless and it’s EVF. To always be able to see in realtime how the camera will record a picture even before it is actually taken and with the camera’s actual settings is a thing that only can be possible with a mirrorless and an Electronic View Finder (EVF), I think. Already in the nineties it was popular to talk about WYSIWYG or “What You See Is What You Get”
It can happen now and then that what you see in an Optical View Finder resonably reflects what is recorded in a DSLR but it is far from a guarantee. It is totally dependent on your camera settings. Even a broken clock is correct a few of times a day.
No matter what you put in the way, it is your brain (not your soul or emotions) that interprets the light falling on your retina into an image. But it is your soul that attributes an emotional response and that response can be vastly different, depending on the size that you see the image.
Why do we (Helen and I) print our photos large? Because there is a totally different emotional response to being able to either hold such a joyous creation in our hands but, more so, when they are hung on the wall and they catch your eye on the way past, or when sitting in the room and they catch the corner of your eye. It is like rediscovering the photo anew. Helen walked past this photo on the wall the other day…
And, for the first time since I had taken it, she saw this detail…
No. Not “just in case” but by deliberate planning. The last thing you want to do is to start taking wider shots of everything. Only when you have calculated it will be necessary.
That depends on whether you want to evoke a feeling of unease or not.
But the majority of times I would bet he worked out what to do. Don’t forget, the majority of his photos were of things that weren’t going to fly away.
And that, Mike, is what the majority of photos, you have shown here, lack. But you need to understand that, in order to do that, you need to take the time to consider what you are going to create and take the time to analyse the process necessary to produce it. Ansel Adams called it “previsualisation”. What he did not do is grab snapshots of everything that caught his eye.
Attached is two versions of the same image. It is a crop of a much larger image of a lake in Tennessee with a large boat ramp. There is garbage on the ramp and what looked like a twisted guard rail and a large rubberized tarp of some sort. There were incredibly ugly and had no place on this otherwise pristine lake so I removed them.
Mark
With Garbage:.
Without Garbage
Yesterday I saw a painting where the painter deliberate added a few garbage bags in the view. I thought on this discussion when I saw it. Not meant to start it over again.
George
Dig that crazy perspective 
I know that street. If you mean the leaning houses, that’s how they are. Like all in the old part of Amsterdam. Deliberately.
I think it’s painted from an image.
George
That happens in the beginning of learning to work with his zone system. Lateron it gets more intuitive. He especially could treat every single sheet of film independently in terms of gradation and tonescale, but he also had a concept of how to expose, dodge and burn later in the dark room.
I’m not quite sure if a person like him who not only learnt it “the old way”, then created a better system than the old way was would embrace the digital photo possibilities.
Yesterday I found a documentary about a photographer named Steffen Diemer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yO3VaPX6nrk (in German, don’t know if there are subtitles). He was war photographer, therefore had to worry about “truth in his images” and stopped doing it after a friend was killed closeby.
Now he works in a very old-fashioned way: He makes his own wet collodion plates on hand-blown black glass, arranges flowers in front of a fairly massive camera and then obtains a single exposed unique specimen. There is no way to copy it, as each individual photo cannot be repeated.
Everything is opposite of what digital photography is today. This is truly “writing with light”. No possibility to manipulate the image after it’s developed.
Absolutely. We can but try to emulate that kind of working practice in the digital world.
I remember reading somewhere that he was looking forwards to digital. And, with a bit of sideways thinking, I have managed to transfer a lot of his ideas to the digital domain.
What can I say but, “Wow!, Wow!!, Wow!!!”. I do wish I could understand German but, nonetheless, I was still salivating over his beautiful cameras. Interesting to note his “meditative” approach - slowly thinking about how and what he was going to do with such a beautifully simple subject.
Thank you so much for pointing this guy out.
The best we managed with a similar subject was this…
Taken with a Mamiya RZ67, with the flower on a sheet of white paper, in the light from the kitchen window and a white reflector to the left.
Beautiful tone scale! At the end of the day it’s not important wether the photographer’s way to this result is called “zone-system” (which was also improved a lot by Bruce Barnbaum) or something else, as long as you get the result you had in mind. And with photographic possibilities it’s a lot easier than painting with any colours and brushes.
Hmmm. Interesting. Now I’m going to have to spend even more time looking him up 
I can highly recommend his book “The Art of Photography – An Approach to Personal Expression” from 2010 or his “Visual Symphonies”. The first is his understanding and extension of the zone system, the latter is a very beautiful photobook.
I won’t argue with a word you wrote, but I’m curious, have you read the numerous books and videos from people who knew Ansel from a very young age, especially as he was developing his skills as a photographer? I agree, the “soul” as you put it, was what brought out his “genius”. There are many videos online, which describe his growing up, from people who knew him at the time. Yes, a “genius”, and an “artist”, along with his ability to not only “see” what was in front of him, but to also “see” his vision of the finished print. Then too, his camera gear, and his darkroom gear, was designed to allow him to create the images he “felt”.
This may be true for you, but Ansel looked at the scene he was about to photograph, and already imagined what it was capable of becoming. You prefer “mirrorless”. Others prefer SLR/DSLR. Others prefer LF, and others get to make their own choices.
I won’t put myself into this debate, but I will say that I prefer cameras that allow me to see what I’m shooting with my own eyes, and certainly not what I might see on a television screen. My Fuji X100f is technically a “mirrorless”, but I can flip a switch and see the real image or the digital image. Not that it matters - my thoughts are people can use whatever they want, limited only by what is available. All cameras have limitations. I guess those “limitations” are what make some cameras better for specific purposes, than others. If I was still shooting sports, I would most likely now have a D6 Nikon. …and all of this is also limited by my budget, something each of us probably need to deal with. Then too, some of us need/want to capture video, where there is yet another list of things to choose from. I’m glad you (and most people here) have found choices they enjoy. It’s not a “one size fits all”.
I need to think about this some more. With my old 35mm rangefinder cameras, with tiny viewfinders. I think that I used the viewfinder for “framing”, and my eyes, looking right at the scene I was about to photograph, for everything else. I also remember having an incredibly difficult time when the image was reversed and upside down. I never got good at that. Back then, it was just something we had to get used to.
The larger the viewfinder, the more I can see, but I remember squinting my eyes to get a blurry view of shapes and colors, that perhaps were for my soul to evaluate, rather than for my brain?
Agreed, a million times over. With a huge image you can more easily put yourself into the image, seeing it from within the image. I guess I should be able to do this on my computer, but it’s not the same thing.
Bad choice of words on my part - what I meant, is that when I take an image expecting to be twisting it around in editing, I should also take a wider view to allow me to do what you did, without having to invent pixels. With this image, I knew I was going to do all that, but I didn’t realize that the larger view might be needed. Gee, “Hindsight is 20:20”. I will plan better next time I take a similar shot.
The lens I took with me was 24-85. I did what I expected to do, but I prefer what you did, which needed more “image”. The second I saw the fire escapes, and the shadows, my brain went into overdrive, but in the future I’ll try to do better about planning ahead. …meaning I liked the image I ended up with, but I hadn’t even considered what you did with it. Using software to “invent pixels” bothers me. 
Agreed, 1000%.
But, in this case, the image I posted here is the image I wanted to capture. Seeing this through Joanne’s eyes, is something I was oblivious to. I did “pre visualize” as best I could. I was sure I had what I wanted. But, in retrospect, I could have done better.
Looking at those two images, the top one looks like something I might have walked up to, and captured an image. The cleaned up version doesn’t look “as real” to me, and it also makes me even more aware of the tilted pole with wires, which annoys me far more than the “garbage”. Just my own opinion. Everyone has opinions. It’s for the photographer to decide what to capture, if anything.
https://www.swedishscene.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/largest-cities-sweden-tin-1500x500.webp
If you look at this picture-link you see the present waterfront of the old City-island of Gamla Stan (meaning litterally Old City) in Stockholm.
In the twelve- / thirteenhoundreds when the City was founded the water level was about three meters higher than now, so all the buildings you see at the front was littrally built on the garbage people had thrown in the sea for hundreds of years. The foundation was a mixture of piles and stone filling. In some cases, halv of the house stands on the island’s cobblestones and half of it on the old sea shore. Over the years it made the houses lean both towards the sea and in some cases to one side or the other.
In the sixties something had to be done and they started to spray liquid concrete down into the graved bed under these houses like they did in Kyoto in Japan I was told when they restored some of the old temples there. That is a very smart way of building strong pillars under these houses in an easy and effective way. So now it is a lot more stable but if you walk down these alleys it is very easy in some cases to see the exact place where the old shore line once was.
To understand the forces we are talking about the ice 10 000 years ago was a couple of kilometers thick over this little island. When it melted the island was covered with 100 meters of deep water instead. Old City-island is just one of the 30 000 island we have just outside Stockholm and there is supposed to be around 240 000 islands along Swedens very long shores in the Baltic Sea.
The land is rising still in the Stockholm area about 40-45 cm per 100 years but that is nothing compared to up in the north (about 700 km from Stockholm. Up there it is rising by a full meter per 100 years causing some old harbors end up far up after the slopes in just a few hundred years. So, the whole area of the Stockholm Archipelago is a sunken landscape full with islands with a to constance of around 25 meter above the sea level. A lot of tourists are now coming from all over to travel around in the archipelago and our small town of Waxholm that not even have 5000 inhabitants is visited by around a miljon visitors per year maily because it is the hub for all the boat traffic out here in the islands.
Not exactly. In Turkye the land is rising->sea level is falling. See the last earth quake.
I’ve been several time is Turkye on vacation, though long time ago. Twice I’ve been in Efeze. In the Hellenic time it was a harbour. Now the sea is far away, the sea is falling it was said. But then it should be vissible in Greece too. Since the last earth quake I understood that the land is rising.
In most parts of Holland there’s no massive underground. Houses are build on pillars. In my part of Amsterdam they where build on 10 or more meters of trees that where driven in the ground up to the first sand layer as it is called. Nowadays iron and concrete is used to go to the second sand layer, about 20 meters deep. I must have several photos of houses that uneven are sinking. If I found them I’ll show it.
George
I’ve always had software on my computers that could edit my photographs. Before PhotoLab, it was Adobe Lightroom. To me, it was a collection of tools (specifically designed for working with RAW images.
Sorry, but I don’t have a “main purpose” for PhotoLab. As my image editor, I use it for anything and everything, both to improve “poorly captured images” and to finish "already well captured images. With my camera, there are times when I just “do the best I can”, and there are other times when I think the captured image is already perfect.
Probably the number one tool for me involves “cropping”, ensuring that images are level, and that they mostly include the purpose of my image.
At Joanna’s suggestion, I did download Nikons NX Studio. My laptop also has Photomatix, Luminar, Photoshop, Lightroom, and an old installation of DarkTable. For various reasons, 99% of the time I use PhotoLab, Version 6. My desktop has several more photo editors, that I never installed on my laptop. I’ve also got the original version of NIK, and DxO’s version, neither of which I use.
I assume you meant “for you”. Any and all “fixing” that I do, is done in PhotoLab. For me, it’s an all-purpose do-anything software for people who shoot in RAW format.
Why am I paying for my subscription to Adobe’s “photography plan” and also buying PhotoLab? To be honest, that’s mostly due to people in this forum, especially Joanna. She shows me why I might “need” a new version, and I’ve now got versions 3, 4, 5, and 6. I never saw a reason to update to 7.
I think most people are “opinionated”, and that includes me. That, and "If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it".
Life would be very different for me, but for this forum.
No I do not mean specifically for me. PhotoLab wss never designed as a tool to fix problem images, either was Lightroom. The fact that they can fix many problems is a merely secondary advantage which is helpful for those with problem images.
PhotoLab was designed to help photographers bring their already well captured images to the next level. You just don’t use PhotoLab in the way it was intended. At most you tend to use it like a bandaid to make images with issues more acceptable. Even with regard to that you don’t take advantage of most of the tools which can make poorly captured images look so much better.
I’m guessing that you do not use, or even know how to use, between 50% and 75% of the functionality in PhotoLab. Considering how much you post and how much time you’ve spent here, you should be intimately familiar with virtually every feature in PhotoLab That is the reason I strongly suggested that you would do better to familiarize yourself with Nikon’s NX Studio.
By the way, when I refer to PhotoLab, I mean the entire PhotoLab suite including Viewpoint and FilmPack. Anything less is a serious functional compromise.
Mark
You are free to do whatever you want with your photographs and process them to any extent that makes you happy.
It has been my experience that the overwhelming number photographs taken by most people will improve dramatically if processed in post appropriately.
Mark
Let’s stick with this one thing, what is PhotoLab for. Here is the DxO page listing six reasons for going to PhotoLab:
What’s most important to me:
1 - lens corrections
2 - noise reduction
4 - local adjustments
5 - file management
6 - perpetual license
It does everything I want, and a lot more, including the things you want.
You’re right, there is a huge number of tools that I haven’t yet learned or taken advantage of. Maybe sometime. Also, to me, there is only other software package that comes close, Lightroom.
With much of the DxO software, I feel like an algebra student walking into a calculus class. It’s bewildering. But for PhotoJoseph, and Joanna, and their ability to teach others, I would be a lot worse.
Since nobody else is asking for assistance here, am I to assume that everyone in this forum understands PhotoLab as well as you?
