March 26th, 2009 Rob Sheppard
Recently, I was in the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area northwest of Los Angeles. This is a fantastic part of the national park system. It has spectacular views and locations but it is a bit too fragmented to be an actual national park.
I had gone to Castro Crest, a high point covered with chaparral. Chaparral is a native shrub-based ecosystem that covers much of the mountains of southern California. It is an underappreciated, and definitely under photographed, part of nature. I have started a personal project of really exploring and photographing the chaparral of my now adopted state of California. It really is a very important and significant part of the natural world here, but most nature photographers have ignored it, sadly.
One reason the chaparral is hard to photograph is that the plants making up the community are mostly dark. So, photographing in early light, toward the sun is challenging, to say the least. When I was up at Castro Crest, there was a cloud cover in the valley below, which made for a very interesting scene. And even more challenging as no camera built today could handle the tonal range of bright clouds near the sun to dark chaparral. As you look at the photo at the beginning of this text, you may have taken it for granted that this is “normal” … and it is, but for our eyes, not for the camera. The exposure range is way outside of the camera’s capabilities.
So I shot with HDR in mind. I made many exposures of a number of scenes. I then put them together in LR/Enfuse with Lightroom. I like the workflow for this program, plus it allows me to optimize images in Lightroom for better output through LR/Enfuse (okay, technically, LR/Enfuse is an exposure blending program, not true HDR, but it works very well for the purposes stated here).
One of the final shots is shown at the beginning of this text. I put three of the exposure variations for that shot below.
Posted in Digital Photo Techniques, Digital camera techniques, Nature, landscape photography, nature photography | Comments Off
March 22nd, 2009 Rob Sheppard
I often hear that you don’t need to choose a white balance setting when shooting if you are shooting RAW, so I am coming back to white balance once again. I see so much poor and compromised color from this that I would like to help digital photographers better understand and use white balance.
White balance is something I have worked with for nearly 30 years. How can that be when digital photography is not that old? White balance started with video and I first started shooting video in about 1979 — video was always white balanced. We always did it manually (actually white balancing off of a white card — which still works), even though it could be changed later in the edit suite. It was a workflow issue. Set white balance correctly in the first place, and there is less work later (plus it meant concentrating on other things than white balance).
It is important to understand that all images have a white balance setting attached to them, including RAW. If you are not choosing a specific white balance, you are using AWB regardless if you are shooting RAW or not. AWB will be the color setting that comes into Adobe Camera Raw, Lightroom or any other RAW conversion program with the “as shot” default. Camera Raw, Lightroom, etc., recognize whatever white balance the camera set (whether AWB or one you chose). When you choose a white balance setting from that drop down list, you are not getting the camera manufacturer’s white balance controls, even though they have similar names. You are getting Adobe color interpretations of the data in your image file.
By not setting white balance on site, you are adding an extra step to your workflow. I do very little adjustment of white balance in the computer (I shoot RAW) because I usually have the right white balance from the start. In addition, I so very, very often see a color bias in student shots that I cannot recommend AWB for serious shooting outdoors, regardless if you shoot RAW or not. What happens is that you are now adjusting based on a “standard” that is already biased (i.e., all of your images from a shoot).
AWB is inconsistent and generally gives a compromised color compared to choosing a specific white balance setting. While this can be adjusted in RAW, so very often I see this is not done so I know people are adjusting “blindly”, i.e., not based on the scene, but on what they see on screen. When AWB is inconsistent, then which photo do you choose as correct? And if the only reference you have to what is correct is the AWB “as shot”, and it is inconsistent and with poor color, you cannot expect to get the best color in the end.
Posted in Digital Photo Techniques, Digital camera techniques, Lightroom, Photoshop | 4 Comments »
March 18th, 2009 Rob Sheppard
Right now I am at the Palm Beach Photographic Centre in Florida doing a workshop on nature photography. Our group went up to Jonathan Dickinson State Park north of Jupiter yesterday where we found an area that had been recently burned. This was a prescribed fire in the coastal scrub area of the park — fire is a natural part of this ecosystem, so the area is burned every 3-5 years.
The class had great fun in the burned area. The greens of the newly sprouting plants against the blacks of the burned plants and ash were fantastic visual elements. This is a totally natural part of this system. Plants that look dead and destroyed are not — they resprout readily.
I talked to one of the rangers and she told me how misunderstood this was. The park people we talked to were glad to have someone understand the importance of this fire and photographing it to share with others. This is an important part of nature photography, I believe, the sharing of what we see with others. Nature photographers are the eyes of much of the public.
This really is shown by our experience at this burned area. So often, the only experience most people have with fire is the coverage of bad wildfires that destroy homes and other property. Smoky the Bear did too good a job and so everyone not only fears fire, but also believes it is always destructive to nature. In fact, it is a key part of many ecosystems and is not destructive, but regenerative. This was obvious from our visit to Jonathan Dickinson State Park.
It is interesting that nature photographers often avoid these types of photographs. I think this comes because fires seem to be destructive. Yet, most areas do regenerate quickly, and all areas that have fire as a natural part of the ecosystem really do “recover” and look very, very interesting for photography very quickly. This is an important part of nature and can provide some neat opportunities for photography.
Posted in Nature, landscape photography, nature photography | 1 Comment »
March 12th, 2009 Rob Sheppard
Last week, I was at the big photo show, PMA, in Las Vegas. You can read all about the new products elsewhere. I am not going to attempt any sort of overview. What I do want to offer is a personal summary of some products that I think will be very useful for photographers.
I went to a Sony press conference, and to be honest, I was blown away by their new compact digital camera, the DSC-HX1. This large-zoom (20x) camera has a newly designed 9.1 sensor (which is plenty big), but that is nothing special. The sweep panorama function is amazing. You literally hold the shutter down and sweep the camera across the scene — then a panoramic image is built automatically from that sweep. And it looks really, really good. Plus, the camera will do 10 fps at full resolution! That is really an amazing camera, and it will sell for under $500.
Panasonic introduced a remarkable new micro Four Thirds format camera. They had introduced the G1, which uses this format. Micro Four Thirds uses the same size sensor as Four Thirds, but has a different lens mount and no mirror, so it is an EVF camera (electronic viewfinder) not an SLR (single lens reflex). This also means the camera can use very small lenses, so the camera and lens is quite small. The EVF is also quite good, so that did not seem a loss from a standard viewfinder. The new camera is the GH1, due out this summer, pricing unknown. This offers HD video along with standard still photos, but it is a much better design for video than either Nikon or Canon’s cameras with HD video. Nikon can only use the built-in camera mic, which is not great and picks up camera noise. While Canon can add an external mic (critical for video), it has some strong limitations on using controls such as AF and exposure adjustment. Panasonic allows an external mic, has no limitations, and even has a lens specially designed for video (what is that, you ask? That means a very quiet lens in autofocus and zooming). It appears that Panasonic has really created a true hybrid camera, still and video, that does not compromise either.
Nik Software, who make terrific photo software, is now offering their programs as export plug-ins for Lightroom (they will be available in stages through June). That is really good news. I really like Lightroom for my primary imaging software, but I missed using Dfine (my favorite noise reduction software) and Color Efex in Lightroom. Now I can, although technically, it is not “in” Lightroom, but directly from Lightroom (sort of like Apple handles plug-ins in Aperture).
I also discovered a really cool “black box” from Western Digital that makes it very, very easy to show off slides on your HD television set. It is the WD TV. While it was introduced last fall, I had not actually seen one. You simply put your photos on a any USB drive (small jump drives to standard external drives), then plug in the unit to your TV and you can start showing off images there.
Of course there was a lot more, but these were a few things that caught my eye.
Posted in Equipment thoughts, Uncategorized | Comments Off
