Hamish, you give yourself too much of a hard time! I would say its great. Some people might complain about the whited out bits but they actually add to the composition.
i never really got that issue with clipped highlights... i mean i know if you loose highlights to white, it technically imperfect ... but since when was all this milarky about perfection? ... i can understand it if you are doing product photography or ... well most studio photography... but not this sort of thing...
anyway perfection is boring, its the little imperfections that make things so ... well perfect... dont get me wrong, im not for one minute implying that this is a perfect image because of its imperfections ... im confused now... you know what im getting at anyway.
i like to give my self a hard time... keep my self on my toes
I actually think it's a nice shot, my 1st thought was Mr Chumley Warner.
The only issue I have with the blown highlights is the ones on the music sheet. If this could be recovered then that would complete the composition Organist-Music, I don't have any issues with the blown out bald spot.
Sometimes perfection can be a strange beast. When I 1st took up photography about 4 years ago I used to read on some web sites comments like ' I'm disturbed by XXXXX' and ' XXXX troubles me' I used to think wow how sad are these people.
A interesting composition will overcome any imperfections, we could all go out and shot perfect shots, but would they be interesting to look at? sometimes the perfect composition does not offer perfect conditions to shoot in.
I agree. A nice shot although I would try to recover a bit from those blown highlights as they do draw the eye a bit. The pose and composition draw the eye naturally to the music but the white side of the page dominates a bit. Nice hands.
And a good ramble there Vic! I agree with it all and could easily add some!!!
It's a shame I didn't have more time, I was in a church, supposed to be takin photos of the wedding that was happening...
The highlights are mostly lost, but I am gonna have a ferther tinker on the pointers from here...but the d3's dynamic range is less at higher iso's and this was shot at 3200 so some information is just not there...
The problem is you might just end up with the highlights becoming boring grey splodges. I thought some would mention the highlights, IMHO less is more powerful than more sometimes and leaving the viewer wanting to see more can be more emotive. Wow how many times can you get the word more in a sentance and it still makes sense!
(when I was very young my Grandad was the organ player at a local church.)
He is 98 now and still plays an organ.
If the music was more visible some people would look at it and know exactly what he was playing.
In a way not being able to see it makes you wonder what he was playing, so maybe is more intriguing.
based on all the comments i have come up with this revised version... less highlight cliping... more book(also aged), and i have tried to bring out the grain in the organ...and the veins in his hands... your thoughts, if you please
I prefer the 1st one, it seemed a bit more dynamic and the whiteout on the book didn't matter as it was in key with the other whited out areas. The problem with working on photos is that we can loose sight of the fact that we are trying to create an image to convey a meaning. In trying to achieve the technically best rendering we start to look at the image only in an abstracted way by discounting the meaning the image actually conveys.
There might be something lurking in one of the colour channels that's useable. Do you have a way of opening up directly in Camera Raw or is Lightroom your only option now?