by Nitpicker » Fri Jul 11, 2014 11:25 pm
Chris Peterson wrote:Nitpicker wrote:Not sure what you mean exactly, but I think we are talking about two different kinds of "natural". And I'm not sure we'd see much natural blue sky with the Sun in any of those positions. The dynamic range of the human eye would probably allow the city to look not too dissimilar to the way it does in this APOD, whilst the Sun is rising as shown. Perhaps more difficult to achieve the same range with a camera. It is only really the Suns and the sky which look artificially dim to me.
Well, the Sun is "properly" exposed in the sense that the final shot is just shy of having any saturation. So we see all the white light surface detail, as well as a realistic progression of relative brightness change with altitude. The sky is also natural for the cityscape- that is, we're seeing a realistic, unaltered image of the predawn city and sky.
The discordance comes from the that- the Sun in a predawn sky. But I don't know how it could be more "natural". Certainly, the scene could be composited using a postdawn city and sky, but that would be a lot more work in Photoshop, and I'm still not sure it could ever give a sense of naturalness, since with our eye we never see the Sun looking like this.
My thoughts are it would be more "natural" if either the whole image was filtered, or the whole image was unfiltered -- with the city largely in silhouette, either way -- but this would have resulted in an inferior image, in my opinion. I agree that it would also be unnatural, if the city component of the image was from later in the day, with the Sun risen out of frame. Downtown Brisbane is prettier at night than in the day.
[quote="Chris Peterson"][quote="Nitpicker"]Not sure what you mean exactly, but I think we are talking about two different kinds of "natural". And I'm not sure we'd see much natural blue sky with the Sun in any of those positions. The dynamic range of the human eye would probably allow the city to look not too dissimilar to the way it does in this APOD, whilst the Sun is rising as shown. Perhaps more difficult to achieve the same range with a camera. It is only really the Suns and the sky which look artificially dim to me.[/quote]
Well, the Sun is "properly" exposed in the sense that the final shot is just shy of having any saturation. So we see all the white light surface detail, as well as a realistic progression of relative brightness change with altitude. The sky is also natural for the cityscape- that is, we're seeing a realistic, unaltered image of the predawn city and sky.
The discordance comes from the that- the Sun in a predawn sky. But I don't know how it could be more "natural". Certainly, the scene could be composited using a postdawn city and sky, but that would be a lot more work in Photoshop, and I'm still not sure it could ever give a sense of naturalness, since with our eye we never see the Sun looking like this.[/quote]
My thoughts are it would be more "natural" if either the whole image was filtered, or the whole image was unfiltered -- with the city largely in silhouette, either way -- but this would have resulted in an inferior image, in my opinion. I agree that it would also be unnatural, if the city component of the image was from later in the day, with the Sun risen out of frame. Downtown Brisbane is prettier at night than in the day.