October 23rd, 2008 Rob Sheppard
I often get the question about UV or protective filters on a lens. I never use any filter except for a specific purpose visually. I don’t even own a UV filter and I know that most pros don’t use them much either.
The problem with any filter is that you can degrade image quality and increase the potential for flare (which can be significant). I know, the story is that you should protect your expensive lens with a cheap filter –it’s cheap protection. Don’t do it! I have heard from tech rep after tech rep at camera companies that this is a common problem — the cheap filters actually reduce the image quality from the lens. In addition, any filter creates a flat surface in front of your lens that is dying to act like a mirror to reflect light back into your camera lens and cause flare.
You can also have problems adding other filters because you can get vignetting (darkening of the corners). This happens because the filter edges start to stick up too far and get into the picture. I think it probably is a good idea to use a protective filter in bad conditions, but I don’t. I always use a lens hood (which helps with rain and such), plus I always keep my lens covered when conditions are bad and I am not shooting.
Posted in Digital camera techniques, Equipment thoughts, nature photography | 2 Comments »
October 22nd, 2008 Rob Sheppard
I was in Best Buy yesterday and overheard an interesting conversation in the camera department. I give the salesperson a lot of credit for being friendly and trying to be helpful to the customer. Unfortunately, what he told the customer was dead wrong.
He was trying to help the customer understand speeds of memory cards. He told her that a faster card would make the camera take pictures faster. Wrong. It cannot do that.
How fast a camera takes pictures is a function of the handling of the image by the camera’s internal processing units and how fast it can get images into the buffer (temporary storage). This happens faster than a memory card can work, anyway. Then the camera sends image files from the buffer to the memory card.
At this point, the speed of the card might matter as it can affect how fast this data is pulled out of the buffer. That is not a given, however, because the camera has to support that transfer speed. A pro camera will typically support the fastest cards of its generation (i.e., an older camera won’t support new speeds). That means that the buffer is downloaded quickly, allowing the camera to continue taking pictures (if the buffer is filled, the camera will stop taking pictures while the downloading catches up). If you don’t shoot a lot of action, a high-speed card will have zero effect on your shooting.
Lower level cameras may or may not support fast speeds, but even then, this has no effect on the actual speed of the camera, only on transferring image files from buffer to card. The lowest price cameras, and practically all compact digital cameras as well as point-and-shoots, do not support the fastest card speeds, but nor do they need to. The problem with the Best Buy salesperson is that he is giving unreasonable expectations to a customer, that if she buys the right card, she gets a faster camera.
So if a fast card has no effect on camera speed and you don’t shoot sports or other intense action, why do you need one? Good question — you might not. However, a fast card does support faster downloading speeds from card to computer (assuming your memory card reader works well with the card). If you shoot a lot of photos, there can be an advantage in downloading with a fast card.
Posted in Digital camera techniques, Equipment thoughts | Comments Off
October 20th, 2008 Rob Sheppard
I have long loved early ice as a photographic subject. When I lived in Minnesota, I used to pay close attention to the weather as temperatures dropped to see if we would get good early ice. My parents lived next to a pond that was perfect as it was very accessible and got all sorts of ice patterns and stuff in the new ice. But sometimes we would get snow along with the freezing lakes and ponds — that made unattractive early ice. So did wind or rain.
I was recently doing a workshop in Moab, Utah, outside of Arches National Park, and on the last day, the temperature really dropped. It wasn’t quite freezing in Moab, but it was in the mountains as I headed west and south to go home. I stopped for the night in Cedar City, Utah, in order to photograph at Zion National Park. Temperatures were predicted to be very low. I had gloves, but not thick ones, so a quick stop at Walmart got me a nice pair of fleece gloves with leather-like finger tips (fleece gloves alone are hard to use with cameras — they don’t grip — I find work or hunting gloves have coverings on the finger tips that really help).
They were needed. It was in the 20s the next morning. And there was new ice on the Taylor Creek in the Kolob Canyon part of the park (this, by the way, is a great area to visit as it is not overrun by visitors like the southern part of the park). There were many great patterns of ice, plus a lot of leaves imbedded in the ice to work with, too. This is a great time for close-up and macro work, but expect to get your knees wet (as you kneel, your weight melts the ice). I was also glad to have Gore-Tex boots on to make wading the shallow stream easy so I could quickly get close to the ice. This type of ice does not last long as the day warms up, but it is a great subject to work with.
Posted in Digital camera techniques, Nature, landscape photography, nature photography | 3 Comments »
October 15th, 2008 Rob Sheppard
Finally, my Photoshop Lightroom 2 for Digital Photographers Only book has arrived. I just got copies from my publisher, Wiley, so copies should be in the bookstores now or shortly. I really am pleased with this book. I love what Lightroom 2 offers photographers, and I love being able to share what I have learned in working with it.
My first Lightroom book was somewhat of a struggle as everyone was learning it as it developed from Adobe. Then when Adobe locked its interface in preparation for launch, everyone working on articles and books scrambled to complete their work. We had no long term experience with the program or could even go to anyone who did. It was new to all of us.
With Lightroom 2, we all had experience and even could learn more from other users of the program. I have been using Lightroom 2 as my primary way of working with images since it came out as a fairly stable beta (I actually liked what it was doing so much that I started using it in this way before Adobe recommended that — it would crash and cause some problems, but it was worth it). I have often said that I feel this program brings me back to the possibilities of the traditional darkroom. We have full, effective and efficient control of our images. Sure, you can do this in Photoshop, but it will take longer and not be as fun (I still use Photoshop as it does some things that Lightroom cannot do, but it is no longer my main image processing program).
I tried to express this in this new book. I feel Lightroom is more geared toward photographers and photographers’ needs than ever before. It is fun, fast and intuitive (though it does take some practice to really do all of that well). My goal is to help photographers gain control over their images with Lightroom 2 and help them have some fun doing it, too.
Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »
October 6th, 2008 Rob Sheppard
The camera sees the world very differently than we do. This is seemingly a no-brainer. This has been true since photography began. The LIFE photographer Andreas Feininger talked a lot about it in his popular photo books from the 1960s and 1970s (which I “grew up” with and are still outstanding, though no longer in print — you have to buy them used).
Yet, I also understand that the camera captures reality in such a way that it looks real. The camera seems to be capturing a representation of the world that seems to be “accurate.” This can be a real trap for photographers who want to photograph better. If it were true that the camera captures reality, then buying a more expensive camera would automatically give you better photos. If you bought the same camera that Joe McNally or Art Wolfe use (to name a couple of top pro photographers), then you should be able to take photos as good as theirs. And of course, you know that if you go to a great location such as the Grand Canyon, all you have to do is point a good camera at that great scene and you will get stunning photos.
Of course, none of that is true. Photography is not simply about the camera. The trap that many photographers fall into, and I see this all the time in classes, is that they respond too much to what they are seeing and interpreting with their eyes and brain rather than seeing what the camera sees. The camera often sees shadows and highlights totally differently than we do, for example. So even though we can see stuff in the shadows, the camera can’t. This can make us interpret the scene wrong because we try to capture what we see rather than what the camera is actually capable of “seeing.”
This can then color how a photographer sees his or her images when they get home from photographing. They can be convinced that a photograph looks a certain way not because it actually looks that way but because that is how the photographer is interpreting the image based on their experience with the scene. This is often described as a memory photo — the memory of the scene is more important than the photo itself.
But always remember that a viewer of your photo has none of that experience and can only respond to what is in that photo. The photo is it. You may remember a bright blue sky, but if the camera didn’t capture it, it doesn’t “exist” in that photo, no matter how much you remember it. As photographers, we need to step back from our images and try to look at them as if we had never actually seen that subject, i.e., how a viewer sees the image, and then decide what the photo really portrays or doesn’t portray about that subject.
Posted in Digital Photo Techniques, Digital camera techniques, nature photography | Comments Off
