I know what you are saying: it's the difference between perception and physics.
We see colour: instruments including cameras can ony record wavelengths
(colour is NOT a physical quantity). Within limits the eye-brain system
seems able to do it's own on-the-fly white balance.
I happy someone got what I was saying :-)
My point was that Jim's shot already looks exactly like I would expect the
scent to have looked through the viewfinder. My untrained eye is quite
happy to see (without on-the-fly correction) the warmth of late afternoon
sun. Automatic scene-based white balance is doomed to fail when the predominant
tones in an image really were (and were perceived to be :) ither than neutral.
I whole-heartedly agree that for a majority people Jim's shot is spectacular. I'm a film shooter because of circumstance, not choice and when I saw the shot my first thought was, "Gee, I'd love to have taken that, but I would have used tungsten film to pull out the (in my perception) excess yellow." Maybe I'm hypersensitive because as a printer I was always pulling out that yellow. I don't know. I was just sharing my thoughts.
Another observation on perception and photographers - in my experience, in most cases if I printed what I thought was the desired perception rather than "raw" or "straight" our clients were more pleased with the results. This was often true even of the shooters who'd get really up set if they thought I "messed" with their images.
To be fair though, not all photographers fit that bill. A small but significant percentage of the shooters I worked with knew exactly what they wanted and how to ask for it.
As someone said: if you have taken a sunset because of the rich red of the
sky do you really want it grey?
I don't shoot at sunset for the rich red ;-)
Cheers, Shawna http://lightwriting.net
