Canon 5D mark II in hand - Page 2

Upitnik · 03-31-2009, 11:56 AM

Cheers.

e side · 03-31-2009, 01:14 PM

Upitnik,

Seriously........you must be a pro. And, I have to say WOW.

You have captured beautiful moments of this young child.

I love all the photographs, but the I like RED roses best.
It just leaps right at you, grabs you and never lets go.

These are brighten up your day, kind of photographs.

Thank you very much for sharing them with us.

e side,

Averone · 03-31-2009, 01:22 PM

This is beautiful!!!

I have to get my hands on one!
What fantastic photos you have here!

Batman29 · 03-31-2009, 04:53 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Upitnik

Will do

, I'm taking the wife and kid to her parents and will be alone for a couple of days. A good chance to open some stuff up and take pics.
But can you believe this pic is ISO 3200??

Are you sure you read the ISO right, 3200? That is freakin incredible if that is true!

Upitnik · 03-31-2009, 06:16 PM

Thank you all for your kind words, photography is my way of finding out how beautiful the world really is through my daughter's eyes.

And yes 3200 ISO are some of these.
I've made gorgeous prints A3+ easy on ISO 3200. I even got away with some journalist black & white style photos on 25,600 ISO but small prints like 5*7 inches. The camera is that good.

thx217 · 03-31-2009, 06:58 PM

BEAUtiful pics! Thanks for sharing.

Kujo · 04-01-2009, 09:11 AM

Wow Upitnik - those are incredible pics!

Wish I had more time to take pics. I've hardly had the chance to use mine. Amazing camera though!

Trilogy · 04-01-2009, 09:35 AM

Incredible photography, Upitnik.

**Bullseye** · 04-01-2009, 09:53 AM

Beautiful photography. Can you share how you get the black and white feel to your pics and then the use of some colour is over the top. What software do you employ?

Upitnik · 04-01-2009, 11:30 AM

Thank you again, I know I get carried away with children pics, bare with me

Black & white conversion method without retouching: this is just one of the methods I use as it gives me the most consistent results for child photography.

Everything I shoot is in RAW so first I tweak it in Camera Raw in color mode because Raw is just that, unprocessed material which has to be manipulated somehow. JPEGs are processed in-camera and thats the reason they look better straight out of the camera.

When I open the pic in CS4 first I convert it with CS4s Black and white adjustment layer where you have 6 colors to mess with but it usually gives average results so then I apply the gradient map adjustment layer with the black and white option of course. Then I click on the gradient map bar and the "gradient editor" appears. There you have a bar in the middle that goes from black to white with some icons on the edges, you don't touch those but click beneath the bar in the middle to create one of your own. Then double click on the icon that appears and a "select stop color" appears. Drag the circle in the bottom left corner up and around playing with the colors until it gives the look you want. Click O.K. twice and that is almost there. I apply a little middle contrast curve layer and a levels layer in the end to up the contrast and give a deep black and white photo look if need be. Now just sharpen the photo, I usally use octave sharpening or high pass filter methods, and thats it.

If something is unclear feel free to ask.

Thats just black and white with a bit of color on top and just one method. An easy and quick one at that.
There are many more and this is just the one I prefer for child photography.

Duotoning, tritoning, quadtoning and cross processing are something different.

/TIP/

When shooting RAW convert to 16 bit as you'll have more headroom in processing but some tools can't be used in 16 bit mode like diffuse glow so do everything you can in 16 bit mode and then convert to 8 bit. And learn to use histograms and info windows(the one with color numbers), it will pay off.