[Zig]

This was shot in contrasty but westering light with a very wide lens. The aperture was f11: there was no danger of camera shake with the shutter speed of 1/125s...f16 or even f22 would have been do-able. f8 would have given a microscopically sharper centre but I knew with this lens I wanted equal sharpness across the frame. Heck, it wouldn't have mattered, as this is one heck of a lens.
In a sense, I did nothing at all with this image...that is, nothing apart from really try and squeeze every ounce of information, tone, texture and detail from every bit of raw data recorded. This shot would have been totally beyond me with film. The dynamic range here must be around 6 stops...in fact I had to deliberately push the highlight and shadow detail to clipping, else the contrast would have been flat as a pancake. Yet with this combination of sensor and lens there is room for so much subtlety and gradation, so that with soft and semi-opaque brushes it was a matter of being extremely slow and gentle.
For those not bored already:
A low-contrast conversion to a tif was followed by compressing the dynamic range in Power Retouche's plugin, yet only as a semi-opaque layer. Flattening the resultant image, then burning in the foreground shadows, along with highlight-dodging the grasses, I was able to reveal the individual grasses. I could waffle on about selective diffusion but hey, I just wanted somewhere to place this image that I think is really special.
Man..that glow....for the pixel-peepers (like me) who want to see what an unsharpened 100% crop looks like, have a butchers at this as follows..... the main image is afterwards(obviously):

[matthew]

You know, I saw the first photo without reading the text or scrolling down, and I thought that the post in the grass was pretty good. Then I read more, and scrolled down, and wow – that's amazing. Very, very nice.

(If I was to be ultra-picky, I might wonder if the tops of the clouds are a little too hot. But that's ultra-picky, and that's it.)

[nia]

Just all I can say, "WOW", dear Zig. I loved the contrast and the colours, you are amazing. I am just watching speechlessly


Thank you,
with my love,
nia