High Street, Amersham

Amersham; a famous stomping ground of mine years ago!

The Old Town is a treasure house of old buildings, but impossible to photograph, being cluttered up with and spoiled by parked cars 365 days a year. This is the very first and only street-level shot I've ever managed to get of the place.

It was taken with a 205mm (equiv.) telephoto lens.

Then you did a remarkable job, as usual!

Awesome shot! Stay well!

Admired in: www.ipernity.com/group/tolerance

At the far end of the Metropolitan Line...

Agreed. One generally has to aim upwards to miss the parked cars.

Which I was expecting to have to do, albeit knowing that it's usually obvious with pictures of old buildings that omit the street level that they've been composed in that way to hide eyesores (parked cars, modern shopfronts etc.) and which tend to be unsatisfying. So I was quite surprised to find a view (it needed the long telephoto lens which I'd packed specially) in which the ground floors and street itself could be included.

Having said that, your picture, above, isn't bad, though I'd have added some detail to the sky. That side of Market Square faces North and the fronts of those building never, I believe, get any sun on them.

I've driven or walked down that street a thousand times over the years, so finally to get a picture there was for me quite something.

You were indeed lucky to find a photogenic parking space.

Unlike you, I never add Shepperton skies: mine is a record of the weather as it was.
But you're right in thinking there was a better sky across the road.

The sky in my shot, above, was the real one. But real skies tend to become overexposed, and may need a bit of manipulation (darkening, contrast raising) to look how they did in reality.

Addendum: I no longer do (the obviously false) Shepperton skies. Nowadays, where the real sky is hopelessly "blown" or overexposed, or there's a large area of blank sky in the picture, I'll use a "stock" sky with some clouds in it, but BLEND it 50/50 or so with the real sky, and that gives a very realistic-looking result that isn't wholly artificial. That's particularly recommended where there are leafless trees, which don't do well when the sky behind them is replaced en bloc.

I don't have your expertise, and probably not the right software.
I'm still using your Elements 2.0.

So am I still using Elements 2.0. It has all the functionality I (or you) need, including the ability to replace and blend skies. To do that with Elements 2.0 isn't rocket science. It's so straightforward that I could talk you through it.

The only thing new that I've used in the last 16-odd years is RAW development software, which greatly extends the scope of what can be produced with a digital camera and the variety of subjects and lighting that can be turned into pleasing pictures. But only with a digital camera that has a RAW file option, which yours may not.

I've just remembered you gave me a book about it and I never got round to reading it!
I've just found it on my bookshelf and moved it to my bedside table.I hope it's not too technical.

Read it (or any technical manual) in bed and you'll be asleep in seconds. It's for reading next to your computer while you do the things yourself, step by step. From memory, it does tell you how to replace skies but only very broadly. To do it convincingly and well you need to be familiar with e.g. layers, but as I say, I could talk you through it. It isn't so difficult.

Okay, I'll put it back on the bookshelf for now, as I have more pressing matters, such as organising my new computer and catching up with my Ipernity backlog (including downsizing all those photos that YOU told me to save on max resolution).

Why do you need to downsize them?? Any downsizing required to upload them to Ipernity (or Flickr) is done automatically.

Downsizing should only be done for and during upload. If it's done beforehand, the detail lost by downsizing is lost forever.

Start from the beginning. You advised me some years ago that, after editing, I should save my files at the maximum resolution. I don't understand the advantage of this, but nevertheless followed your advice, and that was fine when we had unlimited storage space on Ipernity.

But Ipernity now has a cap of 100Gb, and my artificially enhanced file sizes take me above this to 129Gb, which means I have to pay extra on my annual membership. So I was trying to replace the larger files with normal-size files, when the 'replace' function stopped working and I was stuck...

Fair enough. But keep the full-resolution files; don't overwrite them with the downsized versions.

The unedited files are usually around 1.70Mb. The ones saved on the high resolution can be anything up tp 6Mb, and I don't see what's achieved by that, as it doesn't seem to make any difference to the picture.

Thanks for posting your wonderful picture to

www.ipernity.com/group/buildings

No, it won't. What I'm saying is: - don't overwrite the ORIGINAL files with lower resolution (downsized) ones.

1. If it doesn't make any difference, why did you tell me to do it?

2. I don't have the original files in their original sizes (because you told me to upsize them).
I am therefore trying to downsize the upsized files to something like their original size.

Sorry, I don't remember telling you to upsize them. There might have been a misunderstanding. Do you still have the correspondence?