Reginald P. Smithers III, Esq. wrote:
Boater wrote:
Reginald P. Smithers III, Esq. wrote:
Boater wrote:
Reginald P. Smithers III, Esq. wrote:
Reginald P. Smithers III, Esq. wrote:
Yesterday, my wife and I went to North Georgia to enjoy a quiet
Thanksgiving Day in the mountains.

We visited a beautiful waterfall, Minnehaha Falls, off of the
beaten path. It was about a 5 miles drive on a one lane
dirt/gravel road so it really was quiet and secluded, especially
on Thanksgiving.

Of course, I had to screw around with mother nature. Absolutely
NONE of my photos come close to the way it looked in real life.

This is the way it looks in real life:

http://www.fs.fed.us/conf/ne-ga-wate...ha-falls.shtml

This slide show shows how an amateur can screw up perfection:

http://outdoors.webshots.com/slideshow/568959352vWicBu

PS - If you move the mouse to the bottom of the screen an option
bar will pop up so you can speed up the slide show so each photo is
only up for 3 secs. No one really wants to look at them any longer
than 3 seconds.


You can also get entirely out of the slide show and look at the
shots individually, and at a larger size. When you do that, though,
they look fuzzy and out of focus, starting with photo #1. But I
suspect that has more to do with sizing/resizing for the photo site
than for the actual photos being out of focus. I liked #8322,
because it gave me a sense of the scale of the falls.

I think that was a photo of about 1/2 of the falls. When I tried to
get all of the falls in the photo, i didn't like the way it looked.
No detail, so I didn't even snap the photo. The photos were taken
using a tripod, and using the timer with a 2 sec delay, so my hand
was not on the camera when it was taken. So if they were fuzzy and
out of focus it was the result of operator error.


If that is the case, maybe you need a heavier tripod. What are you
using? D-SLRs are kinda heavy, compared to film cameras, and require a
chunkier tripod. But I wonder if "the problem" lies elsewhere, and not
necessarily with the "operator." Using a tripod and self-timer should
produce snappy results. I'm sure you can focus your camera properly.

I compared the original 16 MB RAW 8 bit/channel 3822 x 2592 240 ppi
photo/file with the reduce 120 kb jpg 640 x 428 96 dpi , and there is
definitely a large difference in clarity and sharpness. I used a batch
file to automatically convert these photos to small jpg's, so I am not
sure if this is a function of Lightroom's batch macro, or the size and
dpi. My guess is a 120 kb photo will always lose substantial clarity
and sharpness when compared to the original wither I used batch or did
them individually. I normally keep my photos in RAW and only convert
if I am going to upload them to a web site or send them out for
printing. When I print them, I upload them as full sized tif files and
don't compress or convert them to jpgs. I have been told that you get
much better print results using tif vs jpg, but I am sure this is
debatable.