| Joined: | Thu Apr 19th, 2012 |
| Location: | United Kingdom |
| Posts: | 4424 |
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Eric wrote:
I just took some kitchen photos for a customer. ( yes I have retired but it was a series of 6 kitchens that should have been finished and done before April) The customer ( who makes and fits the kitchens) came back with an email saying "STUNNING IMAGES!". They were over the moon with the quality.
I thought they were average ...in fact ....part of me was already saying †I've retired...so if they are no good, what the heck, they just won't ask me again...good!â€
The point is ...taking images to meet an average albeit acceptable standard doesn't do us any favours.
I think you are perhaps too hard on yourself Eric, YOU probably feel you could have done better, and that is what keeps your standards as high as they are. Some jobs I have done are a complete codge, but the client has been over the moon. I don't see the point in striving for absolute perfection when it isn't necessary. When the need arrises then wheel out the perfection, otherwise near enough IS good enough.
Indeed, as far as image resolution is concerned I feel you can have too much detail in many photographs. I feel the absolute detail over the entire image is a bit of a distraction from the subject and the eye of the viewer, yes it's nice to see the texture of the plumage of a distant bird but we don't need to see each filament of the feathers.
I have seen some of the finest botanic drawings ever made, the detail is stunning, the interpretation so good but they were made with quite blunt pencils with a gross resolution and paint brushes comparatively broad, yet the artist made these blunt tools portray to 'perfection' their subject, with no ambiguity about what they had drawn and coloured.
What I am trying to say is the simple resolution is not as important as the execution of the work, the skill of the artist.
Your client who was stunned by your Kitchen photographs wasn't looking at the resolution, he was looking at your artistic product. That does not require infinite definition, in my opinion, just adequate for the job.
Well you may have a point or two there but my benchmark as far as bird photography is concerned is the clarity and definition of the whole bird. Most of the bird photos we have seen on here and elsewhere do not just have the eye sharp...the whole bird is within the zone of sharpness. It's fairly easy to lose the background when working with 800mm but less so if you only have 300mm and need to crop. Especially if the bird is sat on water. Lol Its also harder to keep the desired point of focus on the bird when it's twitching and moving erratically ...so a smaller aperture gives a margin for error.
But I suppose this is where the sophisticated dynamic focusing may play its part. If it is able to sense and compensate for those rapid movements then larger apertures may be equally successful in keeping key detail sharp. Having said that, there will still be a trade off in optical quality going wider.
On a personal note...I hate those artyfarty shallow dof pictures of things like meals ...where the front sprout is sharp but the rest of the meal is oof.
Can't see the point in restricting the viewers attention to a tiny part of the meal. It's ok for portraits where people's eyes are important and ears not so...but carrying that technique into other subjects is plain daft. IMHO.
Maybe. Coming from the commercial sector where the client want to show ALL the detail in the room, the installation, the machine...I have become locked into f8/f11 too much.
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Eric