Stunning one. You must have looked a bit odd taking it though

Splendid composition.

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..:: I am no prophet — and here's no great matter ::..

I think the people there are used to seeing tourists taking pics of odd things. They were glad to let me take pics of the dead fishies but asked for a photograph of themselves as well. Now that most (younger) people have an email, it is easy to send them their pics. I might post that pic as well one of these days.

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:: There is nothing new under the sun. ::

Thanks.

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:: There is nothing new under the sun. ::

Ah I see. Just curious, when you see an abstract, or take a portrait, do you take it many times, or do you know exactly how you're going to take it and only take one image?

Changes, really. The three pics I took of the fishies are each unique, because it was a crowded space, and I didn't want to block their stand for a long time.

With digital, there is little reason not to take extra frames if you have the time. For a street scene, I usually take 2-3 frames because I tend to shake or misfocus on at least half of them. When I am photographing something like a cowrie shell at home, I might try as many different takes on it as I can think of, say 10, and at least 3 frames of each for HDR. Then I choose one or two that are sufficiently different from each other, and do color and B&W versions of each, usually with several different settings. Then I chose maybe one color and one B&W pic to upload.

Personally, I don't see any value to trying to get everything 'right' in the camera, except maybe for photojournalism. All the photographers I admire did as much creative work in the darkroom as they did behind the camera, even if the darkroom work is 'unnoticeable'.

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:: There is nothing new under the sun. ::

Interesting read. Macro images I would say are the hardest to get right, as the angles are endless, unlike a street scene for example. For HDR I'm guessing you combine them in PS and not photomatix, as it kills the image effectively, and isn't it incredibly difficult to get good results from creative work in the darkroom?

Yes, PS. The results from Photomatix are too recognizable and too cliched by now. And more often than not, I do not actually use the HDR process, but just one of the HDR frames. But having them gives the option of getting the exposure exactly right if needed, and sometimes preserves the very delicate shades better. I think there is more to HDR than I am using at the moment, e.g. you can do very extreme curves adjustments with less artifacts, but they are a bit hard to get right.

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:: There is nothing new under the sun. ::

I'm beginning to hate that program.
What do you mean by extreme curves with less artifacts?

When you do curves, you are essentially doing arithmetic, multiplying the pixel values with a weight in the 0 to 1 range. The more bits you have to work with (which HDR gives to you) the less information you lose, and you are less likely to get banding effects and other artifacts. In reality, it doesn't work that smoothly, unfortunately, at least not for me.

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:: There is nothing new under the sun. ::