Fogey

Sounds, to me, like a political soundbite that can be denied/misinterpreted/circumlocutioned  at a later date.  Or am I being a cynic?

Well done Karl - a great shot.

If you want to protect the longevity of your SD cards, don't delete the images once transferred to the computer, just format the card.

Well done BP, a stellar image indeed.  And well done Clicker, a good choice.

Straight out of camera.

After

I use Affinity Photo for editing and this is a normal work flow.

I took the image into the development persona and lowered the black point to reduce the misty feel to the photograph.

Once I developed the image and was returned to the editing side of the package, I added an 'HSL' adjustment layer, (hue, saturation, lightness).

Each individual colour saturation was either increased/decreased to give warmth and colour contrast to the image to a point of total oversaturation.

The layer was then inverted, returning the image to it's original colour.  Then using the paintbrush at various opacities, I painted  the the saturated colours back in to the image to bring out a greater autumnal feel to the  scene.  I also tried to create a 3-D effect by laying a more intense colour over a washed out colour.

Hope this helps.

Merry Christmas everybody.

Have a good one.

32 minutes ago, MattGrey said:

I recently bought a variable 3 to 11 stop filter.  Have been pleasantly surprised.  Makes it so easy to compose a shot and mount the filter. I can set the ISO and aperture then slowly turn the thread until I get the shutter speed I want.  Very little faffing and only one filter to carry.

Have you got a link for that or a photo?

Had winner written all over it.  Well done.

I tried that once.  I couldn't get past the stage where I looked as though I'd eaten a manky cat.

Hello Steve. 

I have now gone into the configuration files of all the programmes that has any thing remotely to do with photo editing and disabled the auto-update. 

Now it's just a case of trawling the back-up archives to locate some very sensitive files that became inaccessible with this corrupted drive.  Once I got the corruption sorted out, it was a case of reinstalling the data files.

I have located the main image directory with some 10,000 image files from a back-up and I now need a large external drive on which to store it.

The real problem is every program is configured to keep re-installing the auto update, so wherever possible I have configured Microsoft to run these programmes as a third party - then I only have to worry about one update - and that will be on my say so.

..........and Hewlett Packard.............and Microsoft............A bigger bunch of finger poking twats I have ever come across.

Hewlett packard decided to update the drivers for the printer I'm using, and without telling anybody their bloody software did  it automatically and completely naffed up the printer.

While I was trying to reinstall the drivers that came with the disk, this bloody software was trying to update the firmware to accommodate the printer drivers that weren't working.  Meanwhile, Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, decided to  update their software resulting in my computer having a catastrophic crash, where half the drives I used to store photos and important data, suddenly became corrupted.
I had to spend an age reconfiguring the network, the router, the DVD drive, the printer and recovering the files that had all the details of my online banking.  The end result is that I had to format one drive, losing an awful lot of photos as they simply couldn't be recovered.
Fortunately for me, I had backed up the most important ones online, so all was not lost.

Interfering, finger poking bastards! 

Rant over.

Well done that man.  Worthy winner.

You really do have an eye for composition, Denis.  Well done Sir, a deserved winner.

Put's my hedge to shame.

Congratulations Ryewolf - an outstanding image.

Brilliant set, David.

Well done Ryebear, a worthy winner.

Great choice Clicker.

Congratulations, John.  A well deserved winner.

Yes Clicker, you are absolutely right.
The artisans of the day referred to Fibonacci's sequence as the Divine Proportions because this ratio was found so often in nature.  
Again the artisans of the day used this sequence during the Renaissance and even now, in today's architecture.  Look also in the classical musical compositions and you'll find the most pleasing to the ear will be following the same ratio.

I did find a fractal based on Fibonacci's ratio and that was interesting as it produced the same spirals and patterns found in the galaxies, as exposed by the Hubble telescope.

It's my view, for what it's worth, that Fibonacci's ratio is so profound it can be regarded as a building block on which the Earth is founded.

https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=videos+of+fractal+based+on+fibonacci's+ratio&docid=608026765111526605&mid=308DFEBEEC8EE7DCD49E308DFEBEEC8EE7DCD49E&view=detail&FORM=VIRE

Ah!  But this isn't as expensive as Wacky Baccy.

One of the most famous fractals  is the Mandelbrot set, also known as the father of all fractals. Firstly defined in the 1978 , it was later computed and visualised by the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot in 1980

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PD2XgQOyCCk&ab_channel=tthsqe12

I find these fractals  fascinating.  It's interesting to note a lot of the patterns generated can be found in nature with Fibonacci's sequence.

Well done Craig.  Great choice, Kate.

Congratulations, a great choice - it had POTW written all over it.

Well done Cheryl, a worthy winner.

Let me say from the outset - this is not a fishing exercise.

I recently had a one to one session with a professional wildlife photographer, as I felt that as an amateur photographer I would benefit from the professional touch, at a cost of £150.

This gentleman had a full frame camera and advocated using aperture priority and controlling the shutter speed by increasing the ISO, so high in fact he achieved a shutter speed of 1/3200th sec.

Now I have a 1.5 crop sensor camera, which means that if I followed what this gentleman said, then I would return an image so grainy as to be unusable.  He couldn't advance on my knowledge of the exposure triangle, although he did give me some valuable pointers of the better settings on the camera.

All in all, I would estimate the value of what I learned to be in the region of £50 - £75.  You live and learn.

One thing I did realise is that I have moved on from being an amateur to a seasoned amateur.  The moral of the story is don't do yourself down.  I certainly did and it cost me to find out differently.