[Toad]

Leica M9 / 50mm Leica Summicron-M, ISO 160, F13, 1/125 sec

[nia]

Wonderful dear Robert, You did a great shot... I loved it.

Thank you,
with my love,
nia

[Irma]

I love it! Beautiful landscape, Toad.
I like the format a lot... I find it very comfortable to look at. I imagine printed very large in a big room giving the idea that you can just step in and you'll be there.

About composition I see three layers of different textures very well balanced. Beautiful pattern in the foreground because of the crops, and then the second layer with lots of interest to look at. Lovely Italian campiña, with those zigzag roads and the houses at the top of the hills. The play of lines and curves is very sweet, and great detail with those lonely trees along the landscape.. I like the top layer with not much detail in the sky so it doesn't distract you.

I see it very clear, very sharp all details. About the color palette I see a limited color palette, maybe a bit desaturated ?

I don't know your weather conditions on this particular picture but I am missing a bit more contrast as a bit of drama, passion...

Maybe I am wrong and you wanted to deliver a different idea, as a more relaxed view of the landscape.

Thanks Toad for sharing this beautiful landscape ...

[NT73]

Very smooth is the way I would describe it, and natural looking. A lot of detail and a lot of depth.
But I thought you said you did not do landscapes?

[Toad]

But I thought you said you did not do landscapes?

No - I only said that I don't do them well... Thanks for the comment

[Toad]

Thank you nia.

[Toad]

Irma:

Thank you for taking the time to write such a thoughtful comment. This photo is about as close to straight out of the camera as anything I do can ever be - basically just a haircut, and some VERY light exposure compensation. The saturation and color are natural - it was very strange light. I see what you mean about adding contrast to heighten the drama of the scene - and I will give that a try in subsequent processing sessions - that is a very good suggestion.

I have to admit that I struggle with landscapes, and this one is no exception - I always try to put something of myself into my photos, and I have never quite figured out how to do that with landscapes - it is so much easier with something edgier or more abstract. This particular photo has an additional challenge in that it is among the first ones that I have processed in my new iMac environment - and I am not quite used to how the new platform relates to the real world yet. The contrast is so high on the 27" super screen that it is easy to under-do the contrast and color. I can clearly see when I look at this on my work computer how the contrast needs to be boosted.

Thanks for feedback - it is a learning experience for me. I got a lot of landscapes in Italy that I thought had merit, but I knew that this one had potential the second I saw it.

[Pavel]

Robert:
This is a hauntingly beautiful photo with a lot of mood and open spaces - I loved it when I saw it in Italy, but I was never able to capture what I saw as well as you do here.

That said, I was not comfortable with the colors as they appear on my calibrated monitor. I was not quite sure why, but I suspected that there is a significant shift in white balance. When I temporarily downloaded your photo and adjusted the color towards "cool" in NIK, the sky regained the blue and the field had a natural-looking green color. The color I see on my monitor seems like "army green" and does not appear natural to my eyes.


I found in the past that applying graduated neutral density software filter in software is very effective in removing the "haze" effect and so i9t depends whether or not you wish to have the haze. I am not sure what i would do here, but I would probably try it without the haze and see how it works.

The composition and lighting are exquisite, but perhaps a gentle enhancement of (color ?) contrast would help, to give the photo a bit more snap and to emphasize the the subtle differences between the lit areas and the areas in soft shadow.

The photos like this one are quite popular and taken by many photographers. I really like the photos of this guy - he has similar photos to yours in his stream.

[Toad]

Pavel:

Thanks for the comments. Totally agree about increasing the contrast, and I think that will help with the haze although the haze is a quintessential feature of the Tuscan landscape and light - so not sure I would attempt to eliminate it (I suppose this sort of decision is why I rarely do landscapes).

I think that the colors of the photo accurately depict what I saw, and certainly are replicated in videos taken at the same time. The sky was not blue - but grey blue as in the photo, and the field in the picture actually had that weird shade of green (at least in the off light that evening). Having said that, I think that increasing the contrast might help with some of that.

Thanks for taking the time to comment - I appreciate it.

[Toad]

Pavel:

I played around with your WB suggestion, and it looks quite nice - not how I remember it, but a great suggestion..

[Pavel]

Great Robert - I am glad you gave it a go. At the end, it is of course the artist's vision that matters and I just suggest based on what i would do.

Personally, I do not feel bound by the specifics of how I remember the places looked like when I was there. I try to capture how I felt when I was there - how the place made me feel. I got into photography as a way of expressing myself artistically, as I would be hopeless as a painter or a sculptor. I try to capture my relation to the places I photograph (my personal take on them) and so few of my photos are attempting to capture reality.

[Zig]

Like others here, I could well have my own ideas about how I'd have done this shot: I quite identify with Pavel and Irma in many respects, especially Pavel's notion of capturing a feeling rather than a representation, and indeed Irma's thoughts on contrast.
Now, this is in fact moot as far as this shot goes, to my own eye: I love absolutely all there is about this shot. I definitely, definitely resonate with your description of the light, Toad: the first thing I noticed when in Italy was indeed light behaving very strangely...up here in northern latitudes I have an expectation that lights will do certain things. Yet in Italy, it bounced around, filled shadows with reflected ambient light, hit the umber and siena in the earth and blatted an otherwordly irridescence about. If I(or you in this case) had adjusted the raw to auto-correct, yes, it would restored normal expected parameters...and become totally unItalian.
I thus think you have captured that inner glow of Italian landscape..and especially so given it is early Spring....the colour temperature would now be waaaay up if you were to take such a shot now, with the earth and resulting colours having a more "burnt" feel to them.
The low contrast is brilliant...I reckon you're going with the lens' strength here, as any attempt to heighten contrast could easily supplant the ethereality..and I'd hazard a guess that this is where Leica (and Zeiss I have to say) just burst into a rendering-quality all of their own...and of course having the sensor and lens capture all that detail and tone(which I really do think is beyond, let us say, a differently-coated lens, for the sake of diplomacy), would make it a an odd thing to sacrifice for the sake of an increase in contrast.
I think the texture, treatment, rendering, light are quite remarkable....then on top of this matched in every way by the oh so slooowww compositional lines. Amazing: there is no rush here, just contemplation, yet there is movement and life in everything; you've used every part of the frame with nil wastage...indeed, the edges themselves work so well. And I'll again quote Hockney as saying if yer edges are OK, then everything else will be.
Precise, yet dynamic and yet fluid; I think this is a superlative image; if I'd taken this and produced a similar outcome, this would be cherry on the icing on the cake of the whole trip, as far as I'd be concerned. Absolutely first-rate.

[Toad]

Wow. Thanks very much, Zig. I truly appreciate your comments.

Speaking on the subject of the *light*, the evening that I took this shot had the best light of the entire trip. We pulled out of Multepulciano about 6PM, and right off I noticed that the bright relentlessly even light of the day was giving way to a much "stranger" version. A storm was rolling in, and the air became electric with expectation as it approached. The light just continued to mutate, moving from one dynamic mode to another. I pulled over maybe 25 times in a 2 hour drive and blasted away as the light got stranger and stranger - constantly changing - and constantly fantastic. I have some amazing shots of storm clouds over hill towns and valleys full of mist from this same evening.

The photo in this thread was about half way through the changes - not yet storm - but beginning to threaten. When I saw this scene from the road, I knew before I even had my camera to my eye that this was the "money" shot, and I was happy to see that it proved to be so.

This scene really shows the 50 at its finest - and illustrates why I am not taking a 90 to Iceland (28 and 50 only). The best thing about the 90 is the way that the subject can be isolated from its environment in true "portrait" mode, but I also feel that the 50 delivers that quality in spades - so simplify, simplify, simplify..

I have been so busy lately, and switching from PC to Mac has also consumed a lot of my valuable time and resources. Nevertheless, I wanted to get at least one more Toad's Italy out before I leave for Iceland at the end of next week.I suspect that you will be seeing Toad's Italy and Toad's Iceland chapters for some months to come (I fully expect to mine those twin veins indefinitely). I already have 3 or 4 Toad's Italys on deck that I just haven't had the cycles to publish.

Thanks for taking the time to comment, and for your kind words.

/best
rob

[matthew]

Well, I don't know what I can add, but I like it.

[Toad]

Thanks Matt