Cycling: wheatfields (exciting new poppy photos!)

[Garry Russell]

Depth of field

Bet that one was accidental

[Tomliner]

Great shots again Ian.I love to see poppys among the grain crops.These are pictures to savour in the winter. EricT
ps I haven't tried shooting in RAW yet.I must look at my camera's software to see if it can process RAW.

[Tako_Kichi]

It's a Canon Powershot G12. I assume you meant the first of the last batch of pictures (the harvesting)? I used Av aperture priority and set the aperture to the maximum f8 and the camera set a speed of 1/250. ISO was 100 and the zoom was about 100mm. I hand hold and rely on the IS as I can't carry a tripod on the bike. This is the biggest problem as I'm usually out of breath and there's usually a wind blowing I shoot in RAW and use Canon's basic software for simple cropping, sharpening, brightness and colour tweaks.

Yes I meant the first shot in the last batch. I was impressed by how far the focus held it's 'sharpness', from close up to near infinity (the far distant hills were losing it a bit admittedly).

[Tako_Kichi]

Depth of field

Bet that one was accidental

It was originally accidental Garry but I did look at it after posting and before your reply and thought "DOH!".

[Garry Russell]

It's a cracker

[airboatr]

wheat grain crackers?

[speedbird591]

Great shots again Ian.I love to see poppys among the grain crops.These are pictures to savour in the winter. EricT
ps I haven't tried shooting in RAW yet.I must look at my camera's software) to see if it can process RAW.

Cheers, Eric. If your camera has got a RAW capability it's well worth using it. I resisted it for ages as I couldn't be arsed buying and learning photoshop just for snaps but my brother, who is a keen photographer, kept nagging me and told me to use Canon's free Digital Photo Professional (which comes with the camera software. My camera is currently set up to take each picture in both RAW and JPEG formats so I can compare - not that I need to any more! Opening and manipulating the RAW image only takes a couple of minutes and then when you're happy it converts and saves as a JPEG.

I'm not a 'photographer' so I'm sure an expert will soon correct me but with a JPEG the camera does all the processing and filtering on the fly. With a RAW all the available info is saved and you do the processing and filtering on your PC at your leisure. To illustrate, here are the two images of that harvest picture from my camera. The first is the camera's JPEG which I've simply reduced to 1024x768 and 250kb for the forum. The second is the manipulated RAW copy, saved as a JPEG and then reduced to 1024x768 and 250kb. The original file sizes on the camera were 3.5Mb for the JPEG and 12Mb for the RAW which shows how much data the camera rejects when processing a JPEG file! It's not a totally accurate comparison as I would have sharpened and improved the JPEG somewhat in Irfanview before display but it gives a general idea.




Hope this helps

Ian

[Garry Russell]

JPEG is a compressed format developed to make images smaller for sending. It should not be used for anything else.

Every time you re-save a .jpg image it loses something

If you have a .bmp and save as .jpg the image becomes a lot smaller. I save all my screenshots as BitMaps of whatever the fucntion has as a primary...psd...raw etc.

Basically, NEVER use .jpg unless you need to and keep the original

[Airspeed]

I'm always pleased to see open countryside shots like these, and on British documentaries. How they still exist when there are a squillion folks living on that little bit of turf is astonishing.
Thanks, Ian, great to see!

Hi Garry!
Thanks for the info about jpegs, never knew that stuff. You're like Marvin in The Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy. Well done!

[speedbird591]

Cheers, Mike, glad you like to see the English countryside. I've always lived in the country and I would miss it desperately if I couldn't get out and about. This is the main reason that I go trail riding and the activity side of it is incidental. It clears my brain of stuff and makes me happy Unless I fall off...

It never ceases to amaze me how empty the countryside is. As you say, this little island is the third most populous Country in the world, but fortunately most people live in towns and cities (90%) so you can drive or travel by train for miles and miles and not see any civilisation. On my rides I can often go for two or three hours without seeing another person and when I do we often stop for a chat. It's usually horse riders, other mountain bikers or bird spotters. I recently met a man deep in a wood who claimed to be the top mycologist from Kew Gardens who was looking for rare fungi. I gave him the benefit of the doubt

Thanks for the briefing about jpegs, Garry. The problem is that most modern compact cameras don't have an option to save in any other format than jpeg which means it's become more or less the standard for digital images despite the disadvantages. You have to go towards enthusiast cameras to get a RAW option. I keep my best pictures in RAW and jpeg but I never actually do anything with them

Ian