The Official Head-Case Photography Thread.

[Knuckledragger]

In the summer of 2007 I hiked up Mount Sugarloaf in Sunderland.  I went up there many times in the '00s, both with and without a camera.  The view from it is spectacular and really shows off a pastoral and idyllic perspective of the Happy Valley.  The weather was fantastic and there were some hot ail balloons floating around merrily.  Unfortunately for me, on this date I took the always terrible Canon 75-300mm lens and I did NOT know what I was doing.  The photos came out terribly.  I sat on them for nearly 18 years until last month when I sat down and processed them with some modern apps.  I had to make deft use of Luminar 4, Topaz Sharpen AI and Photoshop to extract remotely decent results.  The sharpening was key, and a faustian bargain.  The 75-300mm is never sharp.  I wasn't smart enough to up my 30D's ISO to improve shutter speed so a bunch of the shots have lens motion blur.  The 30D isn't the most sharp thing to begin with in the best of circumstances.  Too much AI sharpening makes for weird and very obvious artifacts.  There is no perfect solution.  With all of this said, the end results here aren't half bad.  I rate this set a solid "Crank up that ISO you dumbass" out of 10.

 

I did take a few shots with the 17-85mm, which is is a Leica rangefinder lens in comparison to the 75-300mm.