1867 - Quiet Moments


Today was another sunny day and I went photographing at around noon. This is not what people call “good light”, but it’s plenty of light for the camera, and I wanted to see what kind of quality I can get when I’m not always forced into higher ISOs.

It’s a mixed bag. For this particular image I have the feeling that its quality has been improved by working from RAW. It’s not free of noise, but it has excellent detail, rich colors, I got rid of the effects of haze nicely, so basically I’m perfectly satisfied.

This is not a general rule though. For some images Panasonic’s JPEG engine produces fairly nice images, and when I try to reproduce them from RAW (for instance because I want to fiddle with white balance) I fail. What I mean by fail is, that I smudge too much away with noise reduction, introduce too much noise by sharpening, and that in the end my result is noticeably worse than the JPEG straight from the camera. Of course this is disturbing and for me it is an indication that I’m always working on the edge. Image quality of the FZ-150 is fairly good, the camera’s JPEG engine is nothing short of impressive, but when you fiddle with the images, the smallest mistake is enough to make the image fall apart.

April asked me in a comment if the images are “print quality” and I confidently answered yes, but I really should note that the slightly lower quality, although probably not visible in prints, might prevent certain kinds of manipulations in Photoshop.

The Song of the Day is “Quiet Moments” from Chris De Burgh’s 1979 album “Crusader”. Hear it on YouTube.

Update: I’ve re-worked the colors and added some more contrast.


There are 4 comments

Roland   (2011-11-28)

There's so much tranquility in this scene. All I personally need is more faith in simplification on your side. 🙂 I see two distinct scenes that are beautiful in itself, but in the combination, it gets too much for me. Sometimes, richness can overwhelm and here it does - for me. cheers ®

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andreas   (2011-11-28)

No chance. I mean, it happens sometimes, "In The Warm Room I" is an example, but in general I currently like complexity. May be a function of the absence of shallow DOF in these small cameras, may be The Twig Photographer's unholy influence (always a strong one), may be a fad, in any case it will go away - though never completely 😄

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Flo (tonebytone)   (2011-12-01)

Andreas, normally I like complexity, but many people do not and many of my images have been criticized for having too much detail. It's extremely hard for me to find simple subjects, or to be able to find an angle from which to shoot a complex scene/subject to eliminate the details. Now, it's interesting that while I'm trying to simplify, here you are in a current fascination with complexity! You know something? In the case of this image, I agree with Roland, lol!

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Roland   (2011-12-01)

Well, Andreas... its the same with pictures as with spoken words: some will try to explain beauty with 12 volume encyclopedia and some will contemplate until 17 morae can tell you all in a Haiku. I always felt, trying to simplify without sacrifying is high art. 🙂 cheers ®

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