This is another photo taken after the freezing rain event of my previous post.
This is a three shot focus stack with primary focus being placed on the three ice drops.
Specific Feedback Requested
My questions are about composition. My main focus was the ice drops and I didn’t want diminish the subject size by pulling back to include curve of the vine or the junction of the vine and tendril.
Is is a mistake to have the vine enter the photo, exit the photo and enter and exit the photo a second time? The tendril is hanging down from the vine above. Also, should I have taken additional photos with the vine in focus?
I also have a question about the BG. Does the contrast between the BG and vine work? Should the BG be darker? There is also a whitish area in the BG above the ice drops. Should this area be darkened to match the immediate surrounding area?
All comments are welcomed.
Technical Details
Canon 5D IV | EF100 Macro | f5.6 | 1/60s | ISO 100 | 100mm
Post Processing in ACR and Photoshop
Three shot focus stack using PS.
The two hunks of ice and their “holders” are great and you do tell a bit more about the scene with the oof bits of the vine. I’m a detail nut so I would have gotten in closer and just shot the big “J” of the vine and the tendrils of ice. What you include or exclude is mostly “artistic chice” about the story that you want the photo to tell, although I do think this view would be better without the vine in the lower left. Alternatively, you could burn that area in to reduce it’s visual impact. The frozen “bubbles” in the right hand drop are excellent. BTW, your background here doesn’t show banding but does show some color noise. In Lightroom, that’s readily fixed in the “Detail” panel so I expect that PS has the equivalent capabilities…somewhere.
Hi Mark,
Thank you for your input. Which gave the idea that this photo would work better as a square crop.
I used ‘Content Aware Fill’ to cloned out the vine in the LL and UL. I also slightly lightened the area around the ice using the ‘Elliptical Marquee’, ‘Curves’ and ‘Gaussian Blur’. For the color noise, I played with the sliders in ACR, but I liked the results using Topaz better. I like this version better.
I like the rework very much, although the vines in the background didn’t bother me that much. The darker background helps with the new version as well, giving a crisper presentation of the ice itself. I wish all of the vine was as crisp. Maybe additional shots for the stack would have done it. Manually choosing focus points can be tricky though and I almost always miss something. Banding is still there though and I don’t know what else to suggest to get rid of that. Super shot though. I really like the shapes and tonalities.
The rework is nice, David. The original didn’t bother me though because the mind can give a sense of closure to curved/circular shapes that are cut off. Much harder for square/rectangular items.
I think this is absolutely fantastic!! And definitely another piece of jewelry! I prefer the cropped version, to better appreciate the details of the ice and vine. I think the BG color and tonality are perfect, but the color mottling could possibly be minimized. It may not show in the PS file and is probably an artifact of the JPEG conversion.
As to the color mottling or posterization in the BG, did you do additional darkening of the BG in PS? I would try another version where I did all the mid-tone tonal adjustments in ACR and see how that JPEG looks. If you did any retouching in the BG (in PS) a way to maximize the smoothness of tonal transitions is to put a Curves or Levels layer on top of the stack and push in both ends to maximize contrast in the tonal region you’re working in, and then as you do the cloning/healing on the layer underneath you can see the minor flaws that would be invisible without that contrast layer but could cause tonal gaps when you go to an 8-bit JPEG.
