White Night, Melbourne

[mugge]

We went to a White Night recently. I took my Olympus m1 mark 2 and a 45mm 1.8 lens. The lighting was terrible. I decided that my best option was to convert to monochrome because of that. This is my first try at this sort of photography. C&C most welcome.

P8230088-Edit-Edit-Edit by Ole Hansen, on Flickr

P8230064-Edit-Edit-Edit-Edit by Ole Hansen, on Flickr

P8230061-Edit-Edit-Edit by Ole Hansen, on Flickr

P8230036-Edit-Edit-Edit by Ole Hansen, on Flickr

[pschlute]

The second one looks like it might be good to me, but the images are all far too small. 600px on the long side and these are just tiny on my monitor.

[Tronhard]

I had no idea what a White Night was, so for those as ignorant as me here is a link to hopefully cast more light (pun intended) on the subject.
https://www.theage.com.au/entertainm...22-p52jpu.html

[Shadowman]

Hi Ole,

Was event photography or black and white conversion your first attempt as you stated? Nice series, a bit soft in focus on some but for this style of scenery has some appeal.

[mugge]

Hi Ole,

Was event photography or black and white conversion your first attempt as you stated? Nice series, a bit soft in focus on some but for this style of scenery has some appeal.

This was my first attempt at night/event photography. The photos was shot at f1.8 and I was banking on soft focus because I thought it would be more effective that way.

[Manfred M]

This was my first attempt at night/event photography. The photos was shot at f1.8 and I was banking on soft focus because I thought it would be more effective that way.

The general "rule of thumb" in photography is that if you've missed proper focus, you can throw out the image. I have rarely (actually never) seen an image of mine where this did not apply.

If you are thinking about motion blur, rather than focus, having some level of motion blur in an image can be quite effective but generally some part of the subject needs to be reasonably sharp. In general, I would say that if this was your intent, the second image might work, but as Peter has mentioned, the second one might be okay, but these images are so small, it's difficult to tell.

My experience with mirrorless cameras has not been good at event photography; the contrast detect focus tends to be too slow versus the phase detect used in DSLRs. I understand the technology has improved, but in general, the statement is likely still correct.

[DanK]

The general "rule of thumb" in photography is that if you've missed proper focus, you can throw out the image.

In generally don't care for out-of-focus images, but I think that statement is way too strong. If one accepts that as a rule, you have to throw out the entire Pictorialist movement, including Alfred Stieglitz. I actually don't care for that school. for example, I think Weston's work became great when he left that influence behind. Nonetheless, I don't think one can so easily dismiss it.

Re lighting: I do a little urban night photography, and I have occasionally converted to B&W because the lighting mix can be so extreme that there is no way (at least, within my skill set) to get a reasonable color balance throughout the entire image. However, I never assume that, and since I shoot raw, it doesn't matter. When I find potential keepers, I almost always try processing in color even if B&W is where I end up.

This is one that I fully intended to do in color and had actually printed in color before I decided that the remaining color casts were too severe:

[Shadowman]

This was my first attempt at night/event photography. The photos was shot at f1.8 and I was banking on soft focus because I thought it would be more effective that way.

Whenever I do night/event photography the biggest challenge besides focus/sharpness is acceptable level of noise, if I'm willing to accept some or a moderate amount of noise I can usually nail the focus/sharpness. For your particular event, a bit of frenzy seems reasonable for the subject matter being captured but agree a bit of in focus areas would really pull the composition together.

[Manfred M]

In generally don't care for out-of-focus images, but I think that statement is way too strong. If one accepts that as a rule, you have to throw out the entire Pictorialist movement, including Alfred Stieglitz. I actually don't care for that school. for example, I think Weston's work became great when he left that influence behind. Nonetheless, I don't think one can so easily dismiss it.

I should have been a bit more clear. That is certainly the current view in world of contemporary photography and for the most part that is what we generally see on this site. If anything the purist contemporary photographic form is to have an image that is sharp from back to front.

Purists would also argue that modern Pictorialists should be shooting using large format view cameras, preferably using home-made glass plates rather than modern commercial film. Modern digital Pictorialist images are generally looked down on in the world of contemporary photography.

My comment on Stieglitz and et al is that they lost and the Modernists (including Weston) won... It seems that our views of the modernists are are aligned Dan.