Commons:Featured picture candidates/File:Gustave Le Gray - An Effect of the Sun, Normandy - 1987.54 - Cleveland Museum of Art.jpg

From Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository
Jump to navigation Jump to search

File:Gustave Le Gray - An Effect of the Sun, Normandy - 1987.54 - Cleveland Museum of Art.jpg, featured[edit]

Voting period is over. Please don't add any new votes.Voting period ends on 21 Apr 2024 at 21:45:19 (UTC)
Visit the nomination page to add or modify image notes.

Gustave Le Gray - An Effect of the Sun, Normandy
  • Gallery: Commons:Featured pictures/Photo techniques/Composites and Montages#Composites (Multiple images merged into one)
  •  Info created by Gustave Le Gray, uploaded and nominated by Yann
  •  Info Exploring the dramatic effects of sunlight, clouds, and water, Gustave Le Gray gained immediate recognition for his landmark photographs of the Mediterranean Sea and the English Channel taken between 1856 and 1858. At this time photographic emulsions were not equally sensitive to all colors of the spectrum, making it impossible to achieve a proper exposure for both sea and sky in a single image. Thus, for may of his seascapes Le Gray printed two negatives on a single sheet of paper, a technique called combination printing. One negative was taken of the water and the other of the sky. The overlap often apparent in such multiple negative images is not visible in this skillfully executed print. This picture is mentioned in several books about history of photography.
  •  Support 1856 example of what we call now HDR. -- Yann (talk) 21:45, 12 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  •  Support Cmao20 (talk) 01:49, 13 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  •  Question Was vignetting an inherent part of the process or could it be avoided? Charlesjsharp (talk) 08:44, 13 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • But if you look at photos from the same period here on Commons, for example Category:19th-century photographs of France in the Cleveland Museum of Art where this comes from, there is a mix of with or without vignetting. In those days, just like today, the quality of the photo depended a lot on the quality of the camera. It seems that this photographer had a slightly inferior camera that produced vignetting. If you look at old photos, they are sometimes cut as circles or ovals to remove some of this effect, as it was often inevitable. However, the vignetting also matched the practice of doing oval paintings, especially portraits that predated photography (some examples), so it was sometimes a desired effect. Vignetting has a long history of being a way of emphasizing a subject in paintings (Goya liked it a lot and even old Doré comes to mind), as well as photos, and still is. Commons FPC is one of the very, very few places where it is frowned upon or questioned. --Cart (talk) 17:39, 13 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • My question was technical Cart, not artistic. Was vignetting an inherent part of the process? You clearly know that some cameras of the period produced vignetting. Thank you for that fact. If accurate, it answers my question. Charlesjsharp (talk) 20:44, 13 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • In this case it looks like the technical and artistic reasons coincided, so I tried to cover both to answer you question as thoroughly as possible. The more in-depth technical part of vignetting is that for old cameras, it occurs when the diameter of the hole made by the iris in the lens approaches the thickness of the material the iris is made of. So a small iris hole (high f-number) for bright light and an iris made from thick material will give you more vignetting. Old cameras didn't have the thin sophisticated iris blades we have now, sometimes it was just a hole in a plate for the light to pass through. In simple terms you could say that the vignetting is the "shadow" of the hole's wall when the light passes through it. Imperfect lenses also added to this, and they hadn't discovered petal lens hoods yet. But people liked this, and if the effect wasn't strong enough naturally, it could also be added in the darkroom by the photographer. "Photoshopping" is as old as photography. ;-) --Cart (talk) 20:55, 13 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Confirmed results:
Result: 11 support, 1 oppose, 0 neutral → featured. /-- Radomianin (talk) 06:05, 22 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Retrieved from "https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Commons:Featured_picture_candidates/File:Gustave_Le_Gray_-_An_Effect_of_the_Sun,_Normandy_-_1987.54_-_Cleveland_Museum_of_Art.jpg&oldid=870107608"