Paul's 52 Week Project

[Mike Farley]

Very clever. Shame that you just clipped off your toes on your right foot, but I can appreciate that accurately framing the shot would have been somewhat awkward.

The border police say "move on, nothing to see here"!

[davidc]

Very good, x-files style!

[Paul Heester]

Visited Spring Park Pond today to find a solitary dragonfly who made my job difficult by posing from a distance amongst the reeds. Very hard to get a clear shot and had to use my zoom lens, rather than macro to get close. In the cloudy conditions the image wasnt tack sharp so used the high-pass sharpening technique to bring back some detail in the wings.


Week 28/52 by Paul Heester, on Flickr

[davidc]

Nice bokeh

[davidc]

What's the high pass sharpening technique Paul?

[Paul Heester]

Its covered in this months Practical Photography so thought I would try it out, here is a more detailed description - http://www.photoshopessentials.com/phot ... high-pass/ Its a good alternative to using the Unsharp Mask in PS.

What's the high pass sharpening technique Paul?

[davidc]

I might do a comparison between it and the USM on the same image

[davidc]

I'd be interested to know what others think about the framing/"need" for cropping on this.

[Mike Farley]

Its covered in this months Practical Photography so thought I would try it out, here is a more detailed description - http://www.photoshopessentials.com/phot ... high-pass/ Its a good alternative to using the Unsharp Mask in PS.

What's the high pass sharpening technique Paul?

There is another good tutorial from Adobe which gives advice on how to reduce colour fringing which can occur when using High Pass sharpening.

http://www.adobe.com/designcenter-archi ... arpen.html

[Mike Farley]

I'd be interested to know what others think about the framing/"need" for cropping on this.

There are certainly some judges who would want to trim the left side of the image and make it rectangular.

If the left hand side of the image did not have any patterning in it, I would tend to agree that some cropping would be required, but as the space is not entirely empty and there is symmetry with the background patterns on the other side of the image, it works quite well here. For me, this particular photo works in both square and portrait formats. It also helps that the dragonfly is on the right hand side of the image, where the eye naturally tends to dwell when viewing pictures, so not having so much happening on the left is less critical as the eye spends less time there. The image would definitely not have the same impact if it were flipped horizontally and the insect were to be on the left.