Chungking Express' photostream  

2nd interpretation of this--I'm still not sure if this is the way I want it. I may yet upload the 1st interpretation. :)

Horicon National Wildlife Refuge. This is along the auto tour, a spot I'm especially fond of.

Flickriver view recommended. (Could someone please let me know if that link is wrong somehow? Thanks...)

It was interesting trying to export a version of this that wasn't totally destroyed by Flickr's autosharpening. I've heard so many people complain about that, and been somewhat affected by it myself a few times, but never had I seen an image that was just wrecked by it the way this one was. I finally took Lightroom's sharpening control and put it on the minimum setting and disabled export sharpening, which seems to have done the trick...mostly.

The other thing issue I've resolved (I guess) is the colorspace issue. My first two tries for this were sRGB and AdobeRGB--I did a back-and-forth comparison between the two in Lightbox view here, and could see no difference whatsoever in the colors. Absolutely zilch. So any color issues I've been having I am guessing are due to the limitations of 8 bit per channel colorspaces overall, rather than which particular one I'm using. It might be a side effect of JPG compression too, actually.

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The moon, but not quite full yet...

This was still pretty early in the evening, which is why the color is a little yellow. I debated twiddling the sliders to make it a neutral gray...but decided against it. The sky was actually lighter than this, but I underexposed it by 2 stops to avoid blowing out the moon, and then reduced it down an additional stop in post. That gave me a black sky, so I actually had to bump the curves up a bit on the low end to give a little of the color back to it. Not too much, though, because I didn't want to mess up how the moon looks.

There were some heat waves in the air this evening, so I'm actually surprised this picture turned out as well as it did. Focusing this precisely is very tricky! Manual focus using live view zoomed up to the maximum is pretty much mandatory. At that magnification, you can easily see the moon moving, which is fun, but that also makes it more of a challenge. Also, at that magnification every little teensy vibration is clearly visible, even lightly touching your fingertip on the focus ring, or every little puff of breeze. I ended up cranking the shutter speed and ISO about three stops higher just to alleviate that sort of problem (there is no stabilization on the lens I used, unfortunately). Creating this shot really gave me a new respect for astrophotographers.

I shot this with the Nikkor 300mm f/4 AF-S prime lens, and the Nikon 1.4x teleconverter, on a D7000. This is cropped. If it was uncropped, the moon would be about 35% of the diameter it is here (or about 12% of the area). I am unsure whether the teleconverter was a benefit or not. I am guessing I was slightly better off using it, rather than cropping the photo even more from a lower magnification, but only actual experimentation would decide that for sure.

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Horicon National Wildlife Refuge, this was taken along Hwy 49, looking south.

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AdobeRGB, noncompliant browsers may show colors inaccurately.

I was surprised to see the Main Dike Road still open this late in the year, but I suppose it's due to the lack of snow so far. Also, there were some government scientist guys out there this day pulling up some wooden stakes, so I suppose they needed to leave the gate open. :)

Amazing what a little tweaking can do to a photo that was originally pretty dull and lifeless.

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AdobeRGB, noncompliant browsers may show colors inaccurately.

Warning: I am doing an experiment with this one (and the other two I posted January 1). I decided to export the JPG in AdobeRGB instead of the incredibly lame sRGB. Unfortunately, I am guessing that browsers that are not color-aware are not going to display this photo properly. Oh well. I have decided that I don't really care.

Part of why I'm doing this is because I am sick and tired of how some browsers refuse to get up to date on an issue that, frankly, should have been solved already 10 years ago (and also because sRGB was never an adequate standard for this sort of photography). I believe recent versions of Firefox should be ok, as should Safari. I even think recent versions of Internet Explorer for Windows are now compliant. Opera is still not compliant, as far as I know. Neither are the older versions of Internet Explorer for Windows that are still very commonly used. I have no idea whether Chrome is compliant or not. As for mobile devices, I don't even have one of those, so I am utterly clueless. I suspect an iPhone or iPad would not have any problems, though.

I may also export a standard sRGB version of this, just to be nice. It depends on how many problems I run into by doing this. :)

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