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Guggenheim, Bilbao


mhanke

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The absolutely breathtaking black and white shots of Bilbao and the Guggenheim Museum, posted here by Jan Scheffner (telewatt) motivated me to make a detour to Bilbao, in spite of a pressing timeplan. At least a few pics from the museum's outside should be made. They are far behind Jan's work, but maybe you like them anyway.

 

M6, CV 5.6/12mm, Velvia 100F

 

Guggenheim2.jpg

 

Guggenheim1.jpg

 

Guggenheim3.jpg

 

Regards,

Marcus

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Marcus -

 

The angles you have chosen conspire with the very active sky and seemingly in-motion architecture to produce superb studies. Number one is so good, it knocks your socks off, as we say over hear.

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It really is a remarkable buiding and well worth the detour. The old coast road from San Sebastian is also very pretty and worth a trip.

 

I was here a couple of years ago, but only had Canon glass on my dSLR, so no pictures. The outside is a photographer's dream, but I was disapointed, as with other spectacular modern buildings, with the inside. I was expecting more. Plus the main exhibition was of Aztec art and that interests me as little as any art can.

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Marcus,

 

Really like the first one. You were very lucky with the light! Travel photography can be a bitch if you are not spending days at a location. Don't know how you manage that 15 so well. I'd be a disaster. :)

 

Can you post some links to telewatt's shots? There was only one other shot posted on the old Forum of this building which I really liked.

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Can you post some links to telewatt's shots? There was only one other shot posted on the old Forum of this building which I really liked.

 

William. Try this one:

 

http://www.leica-camera-user.com/architecture/222-bilbao-spain.html

 

All of telewatt's new threads, with all his shots, are available here:

 

http://www.leica-camera-user.com/search.php?searchid=102494

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I fully agree with the various comments about the poor contrast. Indeed, I always have massive problems to transfer the contrast and brilliance of the slides into the digital pictures displayed on the screen, or printed on paper. Most of the pics appear to have washed out whites and blacks, lack contrast, but also loose a lot of detail in the dark areas. These pics of the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao are no exceptions, but the most drastic case was my pic of the Spanish Penafiel castle, shown in an earlier thread.

 

I knew that my mistake must be somewhere in my workflow, since others have very good results with the same scanner (Nikon Coolscan IV). Finally, I stumbled on an article, written by one of my nature photography idols, John Shaw. Unfortunately, I now cannot find it on the web. He wrote it when he still shot slides, and scanned them on a Nikon 4000. His scanning workflow was very straightforward, and very similar my own, with two crucial differences: He also used the digital ICE correction feature, but I realized that I was far too cautious with the sharpening setting in the scanner software itself. I had thought that all sharpening should be done as last step in Photoshop, and never really got my pics sharp without loosing details or getting unnatural looking results. I saw that John used a 20% setting of the sharpness filter in the scanning software, only to compensate the sharpness loss caused by the ICE.

 

The other issue was that - believing what I had heard and read in the various fora - I did not use the scanner's 12bit-capability, and scanned everything in 8bit-mode.

 

As soon as I tried out John Shaw's scanner settings for the first time, all my previous frustration was gone, and I suddenly saw that the scanner was capable to deliver a faithful impression of what the original slides look like. The first slide re-scanned with the new settings, was the one of the Penafiel castle:

 

http://www.leica-camera-user.com/landscape-travel/14942-remember-penfiel-castle.html

 

Some others followed, and now I also re-scanned two of the Guggenheim pictures that were - in my opinion - mostly compromised by lack of contrast and sharpness. Here are the results:

 

guggenheim2a.jpg

 

guggenheim3a.jpg

 

I think that improvements in contrast and sharpness are evident, the whites and blacks are better separated. The apparent change in colour is the result of a higher colour neutrality, since I had tried to improve the overall impression of the first scan by tweaking the saturation sliders. :cool:

 

This time, I converted the scanned pic into the Lab mode, applying the Depths/Lights function and the unsharp mask there.

 

Best regards,

Marcus

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