More Lighthouses

[Manfred M]

The Pointe-des-Monte Lighthouse sits where the St Lawrence River and the Gulf of St Lawrence meet on the north shore, which results in tricky currents that claimed a lot of ships.






The Pointe-au-Pere Lighthouse is near Rimouski, Quebec and sits close to where the river pilots would board vessels heading up the St Lawrence River. It was built in 1909 and uses a concrete construction and is one of the more unusual lighthouse designs. It is very close to where the RMS Empress of Ireland sank in 1914, with a loss of 1,014 lives.







Another view of the Pointe-au-Pere lighthouse

[DanK]

Manfred,

I think the third is a very interesting shot. At first look, I think I would boost contrast selectively to accentuate the interesting lines. I might also play with texture/local contrast as well. the image is all about the lines.

The first two don't do much for me. They seem technically fine, but they confront the common problem: how to make a view look interesting and different from what one would see walking by. My own inability to figure this out in many cases is why I am such a poor landscape photographer.

Dan

[billtils]

+1 to what Dan posted. I struggle with getting anything other than a "picture postcard" of most landscape photo opportunities - they can be quite nice and better than the every day record shot but here's one of the few i was happy with.

I've posted shots here taken of the Falkirk Wheel in daylight and at night when illuminated with multi-coloured lights. I won't repeat them but here's the somewhat underwhelming daytime appearance:




and here's a "scrunched up" mono

[Manfred M]

Thanks for the comments.

The shots are quite documentary in nature and that was my purpose here. I generally use an "establishing shot" to set the scene and then dive in to explore the details.

Unfortunately, the lighting during the time I was travelling was quite bad (bright sunshine at mid-day) and of course, I was never where I needed to be to get strong blue hour / golden hour shots.

I am was also busily learned the features of the new camera and getting comfortable with it. I bought it and the lenses primarily for studio work, so the focal lengths are too long at the wide end 45mm / 36mm FF equivalent) and too short at the long end (200mm / 168mm FF equivalent). I'm getting up to 2000 shots and in the past I have found that Cartier-Bresson was right, it takes about 10,000 shots to become comfortable with the camera.

That being said, the Fuji lenses are extremely sharp and the image stabilization is very impressive. The viewfinder works quite well and I do like the features like the level function. So far, the only real negative (which I expected) is the battery life. Easy to fix (I bought two additional batteries and a charger that will charge two batteries at the same time). I wish that the buttons were a bit larger too as they are fairly small and have a low profile. This might be okay for the Fujifilm APS-C bodies, but not on a large pro body.

[DanK]

I don't know the details of that camera, but high-quality IBIS and in-EVF features like a level are now pretty common among high-end mirrorless cameras, I think. My R6 II has a level, the option of displaying a histogram, etc. etc.

[Manfred M]

I'm sure that is true Dan, the on screen displays are more talented than on a DSLR. I find that the DLSR can work better in low light situations.

IBIS works well for shorter focal lengths, but for longer focal lengths, in-lens stabilization works better. The advantage of the hardware I have is that the lenses are stabilized as well and the IS system has been designed to optimize the two stabilization methods. I was able to hand-hold a 200mm focal length down to around 1/15th second and get good results. That is doubly impressive given all of the extra glass in a medium format lens that has to be move by the in-lens stabilization. While Fujifilm marketing data suggests 8-stop stabilization, I feel that they are being a bit optimistic. That being said, I'm still impressed.

[DanK]

Re IBIS: Canon coordinates IBIS and in-lens IS. I don't know the details of how it works, but the two are tightly integrated. The on-camera menu doesn't separate the two; it just has one option for turning IS on and off for stills, and another for movies. If you turn off IS on the lens barrel, it turns off on the camera menu. The superiority of in-lens IS for long FLs was the rationale Canon gave for sticking with in-lens IS for quite a while. My guess is that they only changed once they could integrate the two effectively.

Re low light: by using the exposure simulation controls, I find my EVF fine in low light, though perhaps not as good as my old OVF. E.g., I have used it for studio shots of flowers, which I illuminate only with a maximum of 150W of halogen lighting, often less.