Chuft-Captain wrote:t00fri wrote:Chuft-Captain wrote:BTW. Judging by the color of the snow, your neighborhood is a lot cleaner than the
River Elbe. 
You might be surprised: While the Elbe was dangerously dirty before the Unification with Eastern Germany (due to bad pollution from the industrial Dresden area), the river has been completely cleaned since. It's now perfectly safe for swimming again and there is lots of (healthy) fish in there.
Fridger
I am surprised, but that is good news.
Not meaning to turn this into a photo forum (there's plenty of them), my guess is that you had the camera on auto exposure mode. (Check your EXIF info).
The trouble with the "so called intelligent" auto-metering systems in modern cameras is that they're not as intelligent as the person behind the lens. When the camera sees a scene with a lot of bright white like these shots, it assumes 18% grey as usual, and the result is underexposure of the scene, making snow come out as slightly dirty grey. (This can however be easily corrected on the computer if your camera handles a RAW format.)
If you're shooting in JPG, rather than RAW, it's more important to get an accurate exposure in-camera.
The solution in this situation is to either:
Put the camera in manual mode and use a grey card to lock your exposure, or if you don't have a grey card, spot-meter off an object in the scene approximating 18% grey,
or alternatively put the camera in Aperture or Shutter priority and use exposure compensation of 1.7 - 2.0 EV.
.... and maybe bracket your exposures.
There's my 2c worth anyway. Still nice photos though.
CC
EDIT: Oh, I see you used a mobile phone camera!! ( Disregard previous instructions!! They don't tend to have a manual mode, or Exp. comp.
)
Actually, for a mobile phone those are nice photos.
CC,
I was using the most fancy auto-metering method that is available for that mobile phone: it's
matrix based, with plenty of measuring points distributed over the entire image. The weighting algorithm is FFT based (Fast Fourier Transform) , Also, the white-level and color temperature can indeed easily be corrected /after/ the exposure. There is no RAW mode available in that camera. But I know pretty well how to handle JPG with a minimum of losses....
Incidentally, do you use a high-quality
digital TFT monitor with a
standard color rendering profile implemented?? If yes which one? If no, that would explain most of your comments
. Next to my high-quality digital monitor, I have a 19" analog monitor , that is simply unable to do a satisfactory color rendering of whites, grays etc.
From your other post, it seems that you rather use a simple, builtin
Intel 82xxx graphics chip with current driver problems? And all that in a laptop screen?
Corresponding color artefacts can easily be larger than those from good auto-meters of digital cameras
I think the color of the ice is quite like it actually looked like in these rather extreme lighting conditions (against the setting sun). A plain white color would have been incorrect simply for the reasons that
-- most of the shots were done right AGAINST the sun.
-- the sun was already low down (only one more hour to shine) with corresponding shifts in the color temperature.
-- it was quite hazy.
Moreover, I had to do a strong reduction from 2048 -> 700 pixels in width, which lowered the color quality somewhat.
Fridger
