"Flowers #27"
This is an early shot taken with my new camera. I liked the rich colors here.
It is going to take me awhile to get my new workflow in place and know what camera settings work best with the new beast. The Pentax likes to shoot dark by default, but since I'm shooting RAW only now with it, this is (usually) easily corrected as I process the image into GIMP, which still only handles 8-bit/color images.
One of the interesting revelations on the Magic Lantern Guides for the Pentax I have is that digital cameras in general combine the worst features of slide and negative film. Transparency film is especially good in the dark areas, while negative film is great in the bright areas. Both types are very good in the mid-tones. Digital, however, is much more linear in response and doesn't do nearly as well at either extreme as the proper film type can. One is left to wonder why I haven't seen digital image processing software that takes this into account and can take a RAW image and get the most out of both the darkest and lightest areas of the image automatically and return an excellent 8-bit/color image yet. HDR overcomes a lot of this limitation, but at the expense of combining multiple images to achieve that result. Maybe I'll have to write such a processing program myself one of these days unless built-in to the camera HDR (the new Pentax K7 has it) becomes common and works well with hand-held shots.
I don't plan to identify all my new pictures by which camera I'm using since I haven't discarded my previous digital camera and will carry it places that I won't have the larger Pentax with me, but many should be easy to identify which one I've used by the slightly different aspect ratios between the two different cameras.
Or you may not care at all...
Taken by David Barber on 9/17/2009 in Oro Valley.
David,
Nice concept and a great start using the new camera. Since you gave so much description, I presume you want to discuss the image with someone. OK, I'll bite!
You are right: the colors are rich, but there's no detail in the yellow at the top end of the brightness scale. In this image, the problem you are fighting is harsh lighting. For a richly saturated and highly reflective flower like this, the lighting angle (sun) is important. You might have reduced the exposure but then the background leaves would have been pushed darker. Whether that would be good or bad depends on how you "see" the image. Assuming you like seeing the green leaves separated by shadows, then the contrast is too high to hold both the highlights and shadows on the tonal scale you are trying to reproduce here. Try reducing the contrast. The saturation may also be too high but I can't tell from this reproduction. Check the camera settings.
Is this an in-camera JPEG or did you process a raw image? It looks like a case of the camera's JPEG converter telling you what you wanted to see without understanding what you were looking at. If you have a raw format for this image, go back to the original image and drop the contrast first (then perhaps the saturation) and see if you can get the yellow to come down in intensity. HDR may not work in this case because HDR requires that each of the images be identical in relative placement. The whole image can move "rigidly" between frames, but the features inside the image cannot move relative to each other between frames. So, if there was even the slightest breeze, you may not be able to register these images, and you'll see ghosts on some of the features in the final image.
I definitely would not agree with the Pentax guide's characterization that digital cameras "combine the worst features of slide and negative film." Digital is an overall improvement over traditional wet-chemistry photography, although cheap or consumer-grade cameras often screw things up trying to give the user their "best shot" at showing what you intended to see. Had I written that book, I would have focused on the "positive" and not the "negative"! (pun intended) If there is a negative side to digital photography, it results either from using a lousy camera or from the photographer not fully understanding the medium or how to exploit it. In this case they are telling you that digital cannot handle the brightness range of this image. If a person has a lousy camera, that is true. Otherwise, the initial camera settings, lighting, and software processing will determine how the digital result compares with what emulsion photography could have produced.
Keep up the great work!