Tis' the season

[rtbaum]

I bought a little flash. After 30 years of shooting only existing light, I decided that I should delve into this facet of photography as it applies to my style. I primarily shoot flowers at closeup to macro range and thus decided that a sb-400 would fit my needs.



Nikon D90
Tamron 90mm macro
f/13
1/60 sec

handheld, just messin' around after all!

nikon sb-400, 1/10
pringles snoot with bounty filter

C and C would be gratefully accepted

[Nicola]

Randy,
this is a good picture, I do like the detail and DoF
IMO, a warmer WB and a bit of saturation can be an imrovement
cheers
Nicola

[Donald]

I like the light you've got onto that flower head. You've definitely increased the options now that you have that unit.

[Dave Humphries]

Hi Randy,

I like it, but it seems a little dim to me, I was going to suggest increasing the flash area for a wider illumination, but then I saw you mentioned a "pringles snoot", which would confine the directionality of light.

I do appreciate you are still exploring options with your new flash.

On a separate thing entirely and this is not a criticism of the shot at all, just me trying to understand something I don't;

I looked at the histogram to assess the exposure and whether altering the grey point in Levels might help, I was expecting to see one with the hump fairly over to the left, but the histogram seems unusually 'flat' and devoid of 'pixels' (no hump at all).

Your histogarm:



A. n. other example image (as similar as I could find in 5 mins);



I have noticed this before on histograms of some (other peoples) pictures, but have never discovered the cause - perhaps someone else can help?

My thoughts on possible causes are;
Saved with too low a jpg quality?
Over-processed from a jpg capture? (posterized - but the subject doesn't show it as no smooth toned (textureless) large areas)
Black background (there is the expected big spike on left)
Combination of the above?

I think the median figure being zero (in yours) is a clue, but I'm not educated enough to understand it.

That said, the lack of histogram pixel counts at levels other than black doesn't seem to be visually apparent in the picture - very odd.

Apologies for high jacking your thread Randy, if this discussion takes off, I will split it off into it's own thread.

Hope that helps,

[Mike Buckley]

Dave,

There are different kinds of histograms but I don't know their differences. When I display the histogram of Randy's image in my cataloging software, which has limited editing capabilities, it looks very much like the histogram displayed on your system. When I display it in my editing software, it looks as I would expect it to look and is shown below. I see such a dramatic difference between the histograms displayed in the two software applications rarely, mostly because I don't usually use the histogram in my cataloging software, but it does happen as we can see here. EDIT: Now that I have thought a bit more about it, I actually don't remember ever seeing such a huge difference between the two histograms.

Now that both of us have managed to hijack Randy's very nice thread, I wonder if we'll ever be allowed back into this place.

[rtbaum]

Hijacking is welcomed. In reviewing the histogram in Lightroom 3, the peaks are well defined and similar to Mikes, when viewed in CS 4 the peaks are flattened. I performed no processing in Lightroom, only conversion to DNG for transfer to CS4. In CS4: Smart Sharpen @ amount 303%, radius 3.5 pixels: for posting at my standard size of 1600 pixels on the long side: USM @ amount 80%, radius 0.3 pixels, threshold 41 levels

One of many things that I want work at is my processing skills; this shot really was a 'playing around' type of shot. I will likely reshoot under more controlled situation. I have been visiting Strobist, a wonderful site, and following the lessons. I want to shoot this with flash off camera, and at different angles, etc. The "off season" is for working on technique for when prairie reappears next Spring.

Dave-the purpose of this shot actually was to test the efficacy of my high tech snoot, pretty much decided that I need a narrower snoot or need to coat inside with either black masking tape or pringles.

Dave and Nicola-I will play with saturation, I am still a wee bit of a neophyte with CS4 and will have to learn to some of the nuances of post processing.

[rtbaum]

Tweaked the saturation and contrast

[Mike Buckley]

Much nicer, Randy!

Tweaked the saturation and contrast

In so doing, you also increased the dynamic range by including brighter tones and you also increased the number of pixels displaying the midtones. All of this is shown in the histogram.

[Bobobird]

Very nice shot. As for the edits, personally I would have done it somewhere in between the 2.

[MilT0s]

Very nice shot. As for the edits, personally I would have done it somewhere in between the 2.

Agree with Bobo. A very nice shot but still not a perfect PP.