Christian Photographers Community

Here are the first pictures of Bentley the Second.

Aaaaahhhh .... How old is he? 

What a cute little guy!  Just had to stop in an say that....must go and make an apple pie for my SIL's dinner tonight.  My daughter said he will think he has died and gone to heaven.  Hope the meal doesn't send him there......

Keep the great pictures coming, Scotty.

I'm not sure how old he is, but we've had him for a few weeks now.

Bentley the Second is really cute---for a rodent!    Great photos, Scotty!

That third one is nice and sharp where it should be.  Do you have a photo editing program, I think it would be really nice if it had some brightening to it.  Do you mind me playing with it a little?

 Go for it! As long  as you post the end result, so we can see it.

I'll go back and mess with it, too.

Here you go.  I don't have my regular computer at the moment so all I've got is the free GIMP program.  I'm also not quite comfortable with exactly how the colours are on this computer so I think the picture may be a bit too yellow.  BUT...you can see what a curves and levels adjustment can do to your picture.

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hmm...looking at it now that it is posted I'd say I went a bit far but still...it gives you an idea.    The three pictures you posted were under exposed, so brightening them up gives them more life. 

Oh yeah. Very nice.

Bentley is sooooo cute.  I had a big smiley laugh with each shot of Bentley!!  You made my day, Scotty!!

Scotty, I thought I'd give it a go with the Gimp. I hope you don't mind. Here's what I did. I did about the same thing Ellette did. I adjusted the curves. I started out by moving the end nodes of each of the channel curves to match up with the edges of the histogram. This helps to expand the tonal range and the contrast. I tweaked the centers of the curves a bit to adjust for white balance. Here are the curves dialogs.





I adjusted the values curve for the overall brightness of the photo and to increase the contrast. Notice the shape of this curve. It's a standard S-Curve.



Here's the final output.


I shoot everything in RAW, so I usually do my white balance and curves adjustment within RawStudio or UFRaw. I use the Gimp to fix defects (dust on the sensor mostly) and to merge two exposures together. I have used the Gimp to give the colors a LAB boost. If you want, I'll find the tutorial I used.

This is far from perfect, but I hope you get the idea. Let us know if you decide to play around with your photos. It's a lot of fun.

Like John, I ALWAYS shoot in RAW.  If you under expose your pictures like you did with these three, you have much more control and can adjust it to where it is right.  I don't think yours are so underexposed that adjusting it in RAW wouldn't fix it.  There is only so much that you can do with RAW of course...my program I use lets you go about 3 stops in each direction.  IMHO, it is always better to underexpose a little (less than this would be best) than to over expose, because if you end up with your highlights blown (pure white areas with no information) there is nothing that adjusting in RAW can do about it.  You will actually find that if you get your exposure right in camera, your focus will generally be better too.

That's one thing I need more practice and information on... getting the exposure right in the camera. I find that my histograms are too narrow and right in the center. I can get a decent picture out of it, but they have a lot of noise in the shadows.

When I am shooting something I care to get right, I'll take a few shots of it at different exposure settings. I try to get at least one that shows up as slightly overexposed on the histogram. The reason for this is there is more information in the highlights than there is in the shadows. You can't recover detail in underexposed shadows but you can in overexposed highlights. Ben Long does a good job explaining his reason for this in his Complete Digital Photography book. It has to do with the mathematics of light and sensors.

I keep looking back at the pictures of your hamster and the composition is great on them. He fits in very nicely with the surroundings you shot him in and his expressions are cute. I love rodents.

Yeah, I'm quite jealous.  I'd love to have a rodent.  Saved some mice from a science lab when I was in university...and Bently is absolutely adorable.  You have a great model, so I hope you practice some more.