More images of our furry boy, just before sunset again... but, this time with a real camera: my Sony a6700 with the 55-210mm zoom lens. This lens is my "reach out" lens - it is reasonably sharp, but the light was going fast... even with the ISO bumped up to 1000, 1/80th of a second was as fast as I could get with the shutter speed. I'm still pretty steady for hand-holding, but most of these images were taken with the focal length set around 135mm. When possible, I like the shutter speed to be "twice" the focal length, so somewhere around 1/250th or 1/300 would be my preference. With photography, there are always choices and compromises. That said, I sure do like shooting with a camera instead of a phone.
Here's our Murphy...
No, that bird is not sitting on his head (above) - that's on one of Joan's yard ornaments behind Murphy.
I see the difference. And then a quick shot of the last rays of light on South Mountain, while standing in our courtyard...
Not evening-looking enough for you? How 'bout this...
Those are from the same image. That is just scratching the surface of what can be done in seconds with Photoshop. One of the more recent features in PS is "Generative Fill" - you select an area (in this case, the sky), select Generative Fill, and tell it what you want to use to fill that space. In the photo immediately above, I typed in "evening sky"; in the photo above that, I used "sky/clouds."
With the extreme contrast between the sky and the last bit of light on the mountain, a choice has to be made: expose for the sky and the mountain will be too dark; expose for the mountain and the sky will have no detail. Pretty cool to be able to use the Generative Fill, since this is what it looked like to the camera...
No doubt there are some who will scream "That's cheating!" Photoshop is a tool. Mostly, I use it to improve the color, exposure, and contrast of almost every image you see on this blog; pretty much the same thing "the lab" did for you when you dropped off your film to be processed. Remember film? ;-)
The Generative Fill is an AI feature. Who's to say what the sky actually looked like in that image above where it is blown away? I don't use Photoshop to "cheat," I consider it more of an "enhancement." Photographers have used custom printing, dodging and burning to bring out detail in an image, since the early days of photography.
The handsomeness on Murphy is all natural - I didn't have to do anything to enhance that.
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