Alright, Gary and you other photographer types, earlier this summer I took my first lighthouse seeing/photographing trip. I'd like some feedback, (polite) criticism, and ideas about my pictures. I'll just let you know that I had never heard of the thirds rule until I got back (too little, too late). The pictures were taken by me with a Nikon 6006. I used Kodak 400 speed film. You can find the pictures in the map room at the following thread:

http://www.lighthousekeepers.com/cgi-bin/forumscgi/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=15;t=000487

Thanks for the help!

The rule of thirds can still be applied to your images by cropping. In addition to cropping, I used photoshop to 'autobalance' the colors, increase saturation of the colors and to apply an unsharp mask to sharpen the images.

Wow John, that's pretty cool!

Lou,

You can also go the "Low Tech" route. Use lower speed film for better rendering of color and better resolution as some high speed films tend to be "grainy". Are you using a UV filter and polarizer? This combination will help reduce haze,glare,and give you some control of color saturation such as blues,greens,& browns.

And if you don't like the clouds that were out that day, it's not to difficult to generate clouds with photoshop:



There are those who say that images with after-the-shutter modifications shouldn't count.

Lou,

A word about filters. If you're going to use one, whatever it is that's fine. However don't stack them one on top of the next or you may end up getting vignetting - darkening in the corners of your images due to the filter mounting ring. If I want to use a polarizer, I generally unscrew the UV/haze filter and then screw on the polarizer.

For color saturation, you'd do better with a much slower film and shooting off of a tripod if you can. 400 speed films as was already noted, can be pretty grainy. I generally shoot with either iso 50 or 100 slide film (Fuji Velvia and Provia 100F) unless I'm planning to shoot somehting requiring higher shutter speeds - like waves breaking over a lighthouse on Lake Michigan on a cloudy, rainy, and very overcast day. The other thing that helps to increase saturation is to go to very slow shutter speeds and very small aperatures, like f16, f22, or smaller if your lens will let you go smaller (like f32). At sunset, this mandates a tripod and a cable release. Don't apologize for your N6006, I still have one that I use from time to time. There's nothing wrong with that camera body!

John makes a useful point about cropping to get to something resembling the rule of thirds that I mentioned on the thread -- Do you have any tips???? Please???? which the following URL will take you to:

http://www.lighthousekeepers.com/cgi-bin/forumscgi/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=40;t=000162

Using Photoshop or whatever image processing software you have, you can crop with wild abandon. It's always a good idea though to start by opening your photo and then resaving it as some other file name so you don't inadvertantly lose your starting image. Photoshop and other image processing programs are also useful in that they allow you to level your horizon, which can be an obvious flaw in lighthouse photography. The correction is easily done by drawing a cropping box and positioning a long edge at the horizon and the using the rotate command to adjust the horizon until it's parallel with the cropping box (which is always a true horizontal).

Hope these suggestions help, some....

Gary

Also, nothing to do with the picture it's self, but when scanning you may want scan it at a larger size that your planing on posting it at, when you scan at say 75dpi @100% you tend to get a halo effect around the edges to your objects as there are in the first two photo's in this thread, you might want to scan at 150 dpi or larger then resize it in photoshop later to reduce the halo effect.