Critique Welcomed Downtown Orlando Across Lake Eola

[Keith Hollister]

Downtown Orlando, FL looking across Lake Eola. Just found this image from 2012 while searching for something else in LR, so I processed it and uploaded to my site. Nikon D800 & 24-120 f/4 VR. I have to say this puts a similar shot taken the same day with my E-M5 to shame (it should).

This probably look a hair too dark & flat on the embedded image, but interestingly enough, the version on Zenfolio if you click through doesn't (at least to my eye). The difference is slight, but before you say it needs a curve adjustment, take a look at the rendition on Zenfolio.

I left the horizon roughly in the middle of the frame to get the reflections of the trees in the water.

 

[Pete Askew]

It's a nice shot anyway but does seem to have more impact on the Zenfolio site - I suspect it is a lot to do with the black background. It has quite some 3-dimensionality to it, especially the trees and I like the framing a lot.

 

[Paul Lange]

I like it because of the colours; nice balance of greens and blues, as well as the general compo and subject. I think the viewing makes a difference on the Zenfolio site as well, the resolution displayed here is not as high.

 

[Beth Carter]

beautiful photo, but it does look better at zf. never heard of lake eola, but there are 1000's of lakes in that area. blue springs state park on the st john's is still one of my favorites places in the state. i'll probably end up down in that area in the next few months.

 

[Keith Hollister]

beautiful photo, but it does look better at zf. never heard of lake eola, but there are 1000's of lakes in that area. blue springs state park on the st john's is still one of my favorites places in the state. i'll probably end up down in that area in the next few months.

Lake Eola is in downtown Orlando. There is a walkway that runs the circumference of the lake with sculpture scattered along it. It also seems to be a favorite hangout for homeless folks downtown. There is a bandshell and they sometimes have concerts there.

Blue Springs is quite nice. Probably the most scenic place like that in Florida is Blue Cypress Lake south of Melbourne. A few of us here are looking into renting a pontoon boat for a photo expedition next year.

And thanks for the comments, everyone. Not sure what is going on with the embedded links from zf here. I have noticed this on other images as well.

 

[Peter McCullough]

Hey Keith;

Lovely PUNCHY photography, dynamic and vivid. Love the strong colours and reflections on the water. Did you use a polariser filter to help add the strong colours, or just digital editing ?

Very nice Sir.....!

 

[Keith Hollister]

Thanks, Peter. No, I did not use a polarizer. I never use them anymore unless I actually want to control reflections in water, glass or chrome. There really isn't a point for intensifying color and they are very hard to adjust with the EVF's on my Olympus and Fuji cameras anyway.

This is a single D800 exposure. I pulled the Highlight slider all the way down & the Shadows slider all the way up to maximize the DR. I gave it a shot of Vibrance and used the grad filter tool in LR to get the gradient on the sky. I then brought it into Color Efex Pro and used Tonal Contrast (masked of the blue sky portions via control points) and Pro Contrast. Back into LR for a final curves tweak and that was it. It was a very low contrast image coming out of LR after using maxed out highlight & shadow recovery - otherwise I would likely not have used the Pro Contrast filter in CEP.

Frankly, it would have probably been impossible to get this result with any other DSLR or mirror less camera except, possibly, the Sony A7r which I understand shares the basic sensor with the D800. I wouldn't have had the shadow detail in the treeline without using HDR.

[UPDATE] forgot to mention WB/HSL adjustments in LR. I am almost never satisfied with the color on Nikon RAW files in LR/ACR without adjustments.

 

[Beth Carter]

have you tried pulling a copy of the embedded photo on rpf and the copy from zf into photoshop and checking pixels with the eyedropper to see if there is a difference in tones? if there isn't a difference in tones, it could just be the difference between the black background and the white.

 

[Milan Vjestica]

I do like the compo on this. The reflections do lend themselves to it too.

Interesting that you have taken the sliders for Highlight and Shadows to opposite ends. I have done this a little more lately as the D800 gives you that range. It works especially well with night shots I find.

 

[Keith Hollister]

Thanks, Milan. The D800 has amazing DR, so I can aggressively recover shadows and highlights in stead of using HDR like I would have on previous cameras.