Spinners with SD-14

[Laurence]

I was on my way back from shooting a bog, and came across
this old water wheel.

These aren't presented as anything to crow about, rather I
received a couple of PMs recently, asking to give a little more
detail of what I had to do for settings on the SD-14 for various
types of light.

So, to honor and comply with the requests, here's the stuff:

This image used the SD-14 and the old Takumar 300/6.3. I
wanted to basically try to keep the angles within a small cropping
frame, so I used the telephoto to tighten things up. From that
angle I could not have gotten closer anyway, so I really had to
go with the telephoto, or just not shoot. Used a tripod of course.

Switched to SPOT metering, and took the reading off the "neutral gray"
of the water, because I wanted to find a "half way place" that would
keep the highlights from blowing out, and also try to preserve
some shadows.

Then, stopped down the aperture to lower the shutter speed
in order to give the water some feeling of texture and movement.

I hoped that the telephoto would "wipe out" some foreground
bushes that I couldn't get away from. As you can see, they are
showing up as blurry objects in the lower left part of the image.

This is also straight from the RAW....EXCEPT that I did use the
Photoshop Elements shadow/highlight tool at about 20% to crank up
the very dark shadow under the roof without affecting the rest of the image.


Beyond the Roof
Sigma SD-14
Takumar 300/6.3
ISO 400





This next image, I crashed through some brush and got what I felt
was a better angle and allowed more of the structure of the water
wheel to be in the image.

Switched to MATRIX metering on this one because the lights and
darks were about equal. However, I overrode the exposure by +1
to not let the shadows get too black.

Interestingly, the Foveon sensor "likes" a bit of overexposure, which
is not analogous to other types of sensors. So that was another reason
I gave a +1 to the exposure setting.

If I had used the K110D for this
shot, I would have only pushed the histogram to the right edge. For
the Foveon, I pushed it a bit BEYOND the right.

This was also direct from RAW, but I did manipulate the photo before
saving as a jpg. I used the shadow/highlight tool to again bring up the
shadows by about 10%.

Stopped down the exposure to give a feeling of movement of the
water wheel against the immobile mass of the building. Also, went
to a vertical format rather than horizontal, in order to make the flume
"jump out" from the left side of the image; also, to include the green
moss on the gearbox at lower left, adding more color to the image.

I've found the Soligor to be somewhat "flat" in contrast for other images,
but here the contrast was already very pronounced, so I felt that it
would be just fine for the image.

Spinner
SD-14
Soligor CD 35-70
ISO 200

[Jesito]

Really nice shots, Larry.
They look like film

Regards,
Jes.

[Laurence]

[GrahamNR17]

I think I need to carry a tripod more. In fact, I now don't go to work until Tuesday, I have no excuse.

Thanks Larry, you've inspired a weekend of tripod-mounted shooting with small apertures and slow speeds

[patrickh]

Laurence

As always - lovely. But may I ask why you used the shadow/highlight in PE rather than the tool provided by Sigma? It was a feature of the Sigma software that made the ardent fans of the foveon crow with delight.


patrickh

[Attila]

Many , many thanks! They are really like same as your best images taken with film !

[Orio]

Great results, Larry. Congratulations, you are really a Sigma master now.

[Laurence]