Comments on: Bryant Park

By: Dave

Dave — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 15:40:08 +0000

Hi Ira,

The 10-22 is one of my assortment of lenses. The lens itself is a Canon 10-22mm. Essentially, the field of view is so wide at 10mm that you get a kind of distortion effect at the sides which elongates everything.

Thanks very much for the compliments

By: Ira

Ira — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 00:44:27 +0000

hello XYLOID
that is a tremendous photo
you’re right, it is as if the buildings and trees are leaning towards the center,
it creates a HOLLOW-in-the-WOODS effect, an intimate feeling that is not typically Manhattan (where things tend to be vertical and ascending)
what is a 10-22 ? how does it create this effect ?
MARK told me about your photo site (I had written him an email about funny little BILLEH)
I live in Manhattan, I used to study at City University of NY, which is right at Bryant Park –
but the park was very different in those days (unpopulated, no corporate sponsors, even a little dangerous at night)
I will now go look at some more of your photos

By: Dave

Dave — Sat, 31 May 2008 12:21:55 +0000

This was a bit of a cheat on my part in post-processing. Unless you have a camera with a very large dynamic range, there's no way to get both very dark and very bright exposed correctly in one exposure. You have two options:

Create two (or possibly more) exposures and use something like Photomatix or Photoshop's Merge to HDR facility to create a HDR (High Dynamic Range) image.
Cheat and get the exposure somewhere in the middle, then raise the level of the blacks and lower the highlights.

I chose option 2 in this case because the foreground was very bright indeed due to the sun. But it's not always viable and adds noise to the bits you choose to overexpose.

By: Cap'n Refsmmat

Cap'n Refsmmat — Mon, 26 May 2008 21:54:25 +0000

How exactly does one go about shooting directly into the sun without having a black picture? I’d imagine manual exposure, but then you’d have a giant overexposed spot.