Larry Cloetta
Veteran
Thanks, Doug, everything I do is postprocessing trickery, one way or the other🙂
I have never before had a digital camera whose RAW files contained as much tonal and color information as this camera’s files do. The question every scene confronts me with is what should I do with all that information, what to show and what to hide.
This one was midday sun, single exposure (so the trickery didn’t include any HDR manipulation). Some dodging and burning to even up the tones, slight vignetting applied, and, because I just seem to have a thing for dark skies, I selectively increased the saturation of the blue in Capture One before converting it to monochrome.
Is it “too much”? I don’t know, maybe, just depends on the viewer, but of all the things I tried this was the one which gave me the most of what I was seeing/ felt like when I stood there and shot it. It’s a bit “unnatural” but in a way that just did with the scene what I thought the scene wanted done to it. Maybe so, maybe no, up to the viewer. FWIW, whether someone would like the result or not, and I can understand not, I could not have teased this much information out of a RAW file from any other digital camera I have ever owned. And the sterile🙂 modern lens, which in this case is sharper than the 50 APO Summicron, and with better (ruh-roh) bokeh. But it’s bigger! 🙂
My biggest misgiving about the Z7, which explains why I more often than not take a film body with me when I go out the door, is that it’s just too easy. Maybe I will eventually get over that.
