Photodigitary

Flower Photography Workshop

Just a short blog here. If you are interested in flowers right now, and maybe even tired of winter a bit, you might find my workshop at the Light Photographic Workshops of interest. The Magic of Flowers will look at the bold blooms of flowers along the Pacific Coast by Morro Bay, California, and we’ll be photographing flowers from close-ups to landscapes (March 29-April 2).

And here’s a flower tip to consider. Get down low and close with a wide-angle lens for a different look at flowers. This gives a look at the flower in a big landscape, so obviously you need to have a good looking landscape around the flower. It is important to get in really close to the flower, probably as close as your lens will focus. You can also use an achromatic close-up lens (such as the Canon 500D which will work with any brand lens with the right filter rings) to get closer.

Posted in Digital camera techniques, Workshops and Classes, nature photography | No Comments »

Noise and Dfine

I have often mentioned that Adobe products only do an adequate job with noise. Lightroom 3 has some promising improvements, but from what I have seen so far, I still find Nik Software Dfine to be superior. There are other good noise reduction programs on the market, including Noise Ninja and Imagenomics Noiseware, but I find Dfine is easier to use and offers one thing that no one else does, the ability to control where and how much noise reduction is applied based on color and tone. Often noise is stronger in certain colors and tones, plus sometimes you don’t want to reduce noise in a color or tone because that can help hold sharpness better.

Now I have said these things before and once got a comment from a photographer who felt that the program wasn’t that good and the only reason I said it so was because I must be paid by Nik. I am not paid by Nik, although I admit that I think so highly of their products that I would never feel bad about doing any work for them. From what I have seen of Dfine on my images, I have to think this critic either had not used Dfine or did not know how to use it. But to be fair, I should show you real results rather than just talking about it.

I took my G11 to a banquet yesterday and decided to shoot a cheese cake sitting in front of me at ISO 3200. That ISO is really not usable straight from the camera, I think, which is why I used it for this test. The resulting image is not all that great (it has had some basic adjustments). Small, it will look okay here, but look at the magnified portion of the image. This would be good if you like special effects!

Then I put this into Dfine. Look at the difference.

That is actually now a usable image.

I did feel that the leaves were a little overprocessed, so I reduced the amount of noise reduction on the leaves. I am not sure you will be able to see the difference here, but there is a distinct difference on screen that will translate in the print as a better leaf.

To me, this is significant. It means that higher ISOs on the new cameras become even more usable.

Posted in Digital camera techniques, Equipment thoughts | 4 Comments »

An Important Question

I think that one of the most important things a photographer can do as he/she is looking at a subject or at images is ask a simple question, “What is this photograph about?” When you know the answer to that question, then you can decide what you need to do to make the photo clearly about what it is supposed to be about.

I see this all the time in student’s  work from my classes (especially at BetterPhoto.com where everyone submits photos for critique in each lesson). Compositions get confused because the photographer is taking a picture of a subject rather than looking to see what the photograph is really about. If you photograph a subject, you simply surround the subject with your viewfinder. The problem comes if the light, color, focus, etc., does not support that photo.

You see, the viewer looks at your image not as you do (with your history of actually taking the photo and being with the subject), but as a unique entity that they can understand only from what is in the photograph. If your subject is a stream, but the light is highlighting a rock at the bottom right corner, the composition is conflicted. The viewer thinks you mean the stream, but that rock is getting a spotlight on it, so obviously it is very important (just like in the theater, a spotlight emphasizes what we should look at), so the viewer looks at that. Yet the rock doesn’t seem all that important to the stream other than another rock, so the viewer is confused.

This happens all the time. You think your subject is the bird you have focused on, but there is a bright red shape in the background (from a stop sign, perhaps). The bird has its drab winter colors, so guess what attracts the viewer’s eye — the red shape. Or maybe there is a cut-off, odd shape that is very sharp in a corner (you know it is a tree branch, but the viewer cannot tell) — that again becomes a distraction because the sharpness implies that it is important to what the photograph is about.

Another problem that can come when you are not considering what a photo is about is too much stuff in a photograph. This comes when the photographer says the photograph is about this … and this … and this — but they are all unrelated things. So you end up with a  kid holding a rabbit in one part of the frame and her brother digging in the sandbox in another part of the frame. The photo becomes confusing. What is the photo about? “Well, it is about my daughter and her rabbit plus her brother playing.” Visually, it looks like they were pasted together. There is no visual connection. If the photo were to be about both things, the answer to the question would be, “It is about my daughter and her rabbit showing how this is all part of our family activities.” Notice it is not about A plus B, but about A integrated with B, which requires a different mindset for the photograph and will more likely result in a photo that looks like everything in it belongs together.

If you start asking yourself regularly, “What is this photo about?”, it will become an automatic thing that you don’t have to think about. Ask it while you compose the shot, when you review the image in the LCD and when you look at the photo back at the computer.

Posted in Digital camera techniques | 1 Comment »

Composition and Focal Point

I have often been asked if a photo has to have a focal point in its composition. Ask this question at a camera club and you will surely get a lively discussion. It is actually not an easy question to answer because … it depends!

Good composition is about creating an image that is clear and directly connects with the viewer (unless you are doing obscure fine art photography, which is a whole different discussion). That can happen with one focal point or many. Frequently, landscapes have either multiple focal points or none that stand out. The key is to create some sort of underlying structure to the image that shows clear relationships among the elements of the photograph. That simply means that the photograph is clearly understandable as to what it is about.

One composition might be muddled and unclear with multiple interesting points of interest, while another might be perfect. One composition might be muddled and unclear with one focal point (because of a distracting light or background that has no focal points, though), while another might be perfect. The key is not to think “rules” — i.e., does it or does it not have a focal point, but instead to look at the photograph and see what it is really about. And then, is that clear. Photos often get muddled because the photographer did not made a clear decision as to what the photograph is about. This can happen even with a single, clear-cut subject when there is something else in the photo that the photographer wanted to include but did not integrate it into the composition or with the subject.

If you were to look at the work by Eliot Porter, the great nature photographer of the middle of the 20th century, you would find that very few of his photos had a single, clear-cut subject. However, everything in each of his photos belonged there and there were always clear relationships among the pictorial elements within the composition. Relationships are key.

Sometimes what is more important than a focal point are these relationships. They cause the viewer’s eye to move around the photograph (which also happens with a single focal point — there are still relationships). A viewer’s eye should move around the photo, but not to competing picture elements, but to related picture elements. That is important. Research has shown that when a viewer’s eye moves throughout an image, the viewer will stay with that photo more and get more from it. That does not mean an eye moving from unrelated things that compete with each other. Then the viewer gets annoyed and moves on. That also tends to happen with centered compositions using a single focal point. What happens then is that the viewer sees what the photo is all about in a single glance, is done with it, and wants to move on.

The first photo is from a class I worked with last spring on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington. The last photo is from the chaparral in the Santa Monica Mountains outside of Los Angeles (it is also HDR — no camera can handle that tonal range).

Posted in Digital Photo Techniques, Digital camera techniques, landscape photography, nature photography | 1 Comment »

An Easy Special Effect

This photo is our family’s Christmas photo. The background “angels” are a special effect that can be easy to do and can be used for all sorts of photos beyond Christmas.

This is essentially an optical effect related to depth of field. Let’s first look at depth of field. The following shots show a street corner at night — the first image shows it in focus, the next images show it progressively out of focus. This was shot with a telephoto focal length to increase the depth of field effect, i.e., the circles getting bigger. The circles are the lights out of focus. Any out-of-focus bright lights or highlights will take on the shape of the inside of the lens. They become more pronounced with more telephoto and a wider aperture. In this case, the lens was shot wide open, which gives the circles. A lot of lens designs now strive for a circular aperture (or f-stop) at more than the widest f-stop so that this effect shows up at more f-stops, although the largest circles at a given focusing distance will occur with the widest f-stops (f/2.8, f/4, etc).

This can be done during the day, too, by deliberately using bright, out-of-focus highlights behind your subject — this especially works well with close ups. I’ve done this a lot around water, looking for a sparkle in the water from backlight, then shooting flowers in front of it with the lens wide-open to get this effect.

Now to the angels. Remember I mentioned that out-of-focus lights and highlights will take on the shape of the inside of the lens? If you shoot with your lens wide open, then put a cover over the front of your lens with a cut-out shape in it, that will take on the shape of the highlights. So what I did was take a paper punch with an angel shape (I had gotten it on sale after Christmas last year), and cut an angel hole in the middle of a piece of cardboard that fit over the front of my lens. I actually cut a circle of cardboard to fit inside a lens shade, then punched the hole in the middle of that. So now the lens acts as if its aperture or f-stop had the shape of an angel!

The blurred shapes are moving car tail lights. You can do this with any shape you like. I knew a photographer who did this once with the logo of a company he had as a client. Detailed shapes can be done by making an inverted tone shape (i.e., do the shape in Photoshop, then invert it so the background is black and the shape white) and printing it on clear plastic (there are some special “overhead” sorts of media that this can be done with using a printer). You then cut out this new “filter” and put it in front of your lens.

Now the people. I have done this effect by simply having my subject in front of the lights and giving the subject a good exposure from flash. The problem I had is that our kids no longer live at home and so I had to get the family when I could. I didn’t have the perfect background for the lights yet, so I shot them at night with no background nearby (this allowed me to make the background completely black while they looked fine from flash). I cut them out in Photoshop and put them against a background. This had an advantage in that I could pick a favorite family shot and a favorite background shot (the moving cars meant this changed) and put them together. One trick to this, besides working to clean up the edges, is to create a new, top layer in Photoshop over the subject and background layers. Then use the eyedropper to select a color in the background (you might have to do this multiple times as I did). Take a small, soft-edged brush (how big depends on the photo) and paint over the edges of the subject. Change that layer to a Color blending mode (click on Normal and select Color from near the bottom of the big list), then change the opacity of the layer as needed to help it blend in. This layer really helps connect the background and the subject.

Posted in Digital Photo Techniques, Digital camera techniques, Photoshop techniques | Comments Off

What are the rules, anyway?

This past fall, I had a great group of photographers with me on a GAPW workshop in the Eastern Sierras (I will have one on the wildflowers of the Eastern Sierras next June). One morning we went to Mono Lake a little before dawn. Some of the group went right down to the water, some did not. I hung out with some photographing tufas not down by the water. The sun came up and there was beautiful light on the tufa formations. Then I decided to walk down to the lake and see how the rest of the group was doing.

On my way there, a whole mess of people were leaving, heading back to their cars. One person says, “You’re too late. The light is all gone. The good photos are over.”

Now let’s think about this for a moment. The light was still low and creating some wonderful shadows, and creating some excellent textured light on the tufa. The man who spoke, who seemed to reflect the whole group, was that there was only one possible way of photographing at Mono Lake and the tufas. I heard later from one of my students that there were a whole horde of folks all lined up facing the same direction, the sun rose, they finished shooting and all left.

I found this rather sad (as did my group who merrily continued shooting). Yes, light and color are affected by sunrise and conditions do change. And yes, it is possible to get to a light that is unattractive on a landscape. However, the latter had not happened. What seemed to be happening is that these folks were photographing according to some unwritten rules about how to photograph Mono Lake. Which is probably one reason why I found a lot of Mono Lake photography pretty, but also without a lot of originality. How often do we need to see the same sort of pre-dawn colored tufa? Or their silhouettes against the sunrise?

Whenever you do anything of a creative nature, whether that is photography, writing or somethings else, there are no absolute rules to guide you. Sure, there are things you must know about the craft of photography, etc. You need to know how to get a sharp photo, for example, or how to expose properly. But beyond that, “rules” tend to be more ideas that someone else wants you to do either because they have a limited sense of right or wrong or they are scared they are wrong if no one else follows what they are doing.

This can be very restrictive to a photographer’s growth, a photographer at any level, from beginner to expert. It is very true that as you try new things, you can feel a bit insecure about them. So when someone comes by with the “rules”, it is easy to quit doing what is true and right for you, just because it seems to be “against the rules.”

The photo above is not the typical shot of Mono Lake and I like it because of that. Before I ever visited Mono Lake, I thought that the tufa were so common that you saw them all over. Wrong! They are only in a few select areas. This photo shows Mono Lake and some tufa in early light, light that shows the lake and the setting well, and shows largely an open lake (which is truer to the location than many shots of only the tufa). To make the lake look stronger in the composition, I had to make the tufa look less dominant. Because they are tall, they cut through the lake and into the sky from normal camera heights. I put my camera on my tripod, set the self-timer, pressed the shutter and hoisted the camera on the tripod high over my head. I had to do a few shots to get it right. And to do this, you often need to shoot manually. But it does give a different view of the lake and its tufa, giving a perspective of what the place is really like. I like the strong, early light after sunrise here.

Posted in Digital Photo Techniques, Digital camera techniques, Uncategorized, Workshops and Classes, landscape photography, nature photography | Comments Off

Snow

In many areas of the country, snow is now becoming part of the winter landscape. Even in “sunny” California, we are getting snow up in the mountains. Snow can be a wonderful addition to a scene and can create some beautiful images.

Snow can be hard to deal with for exposure because it is white. Generally, you need to give at least one stop more exposure than the meter says. Now that will vary. If you are shooting snow that is mostly in the shade, but there are some sunlit highlights, then you want to expose for the highlights and not for the snow at all. Watch your histogram — you want to be sure that there is not a big gap on the right side, but also, no clipping of whites on that side either. It is very easy to underexpose snow badly which will crush the dark tones all together and make it very difficult to bring out a good tonal range in the image. However, it is also easy to overexpose small areas of snow in a larger scene of dark tones so that you lose detail and texture in that snow. Watch your highlight warnings and be careful of clipping of the whites on the right side of the histogram (clipping looks like a cliff at that side rather than a mountain slope that comes back to the bottom line of the histogram just before reaching the right side).

You will probably find your snow looks best shot with any of the daylight white balances. This is tricky because no matter what you do, you can get blue snow and that can be absolutely correct. If the sun is out, then shadows will be reflecting the usually very blue sky of winter. If you overcorrect for that blue, then the highlight areas can look too yellow or too amber. I find that a cloudy setting works well, sun or clouds, with snow, but this is going to depend, to a degree, on the camera model. With a scene mostly in shade, you may do okay with shade white balance, but you may find that that does not completely remove the blue, especially if you are shooting at altitude. You may have to go to your Kelvin settings (if the camera has them) and set something upwards of 9000K. You might also find it helpful to do a custom white balance (which can be done on clean snow as it is a good neutral tone).

And finally, sometimes snow just looks right with blue in it. This is especially true at dawn and dusk.

Posted in Digital camera techniques, landscape photography, nature photography | Comments Off

Camera Models

I sometimes forget that digital photography is a relatively new technology. One place you see that is when you photograph with different camera models from the same manufacturer. Even if you set everything identically, you often get slightly different results due to differences in sensors.

I had recently purchased an Olympus E-620 as a back-up camera. It is lightweight, small, but it still has a tilting LCD which I love (actually, I am so used to using such an LCD now, that when I pick up a camera without one, I feel much restricted). I did something with that camera that I highly recommend to everyone buying a new camera. I went out and shot with it over a few days … only with that camera. It is very hard to learn what a new model camera can and cannot do if you simply integrate it into the rest of your camera gear. By shooting with just that camera, you get to experience directly what that camera can and cannot do. You learn its idiosyncrasies, its quirks, its strengths and weaknesses.

By doing this, I learned how the 620 felt in my hands, how it balanced, how its controls functioned. While cameras from a specific manufacturer will have similar controls and functions, these controls will change from model to model. When you force yourself to work with the new camera, you learn these things. You also learn surprising new controls, and sometimes, you discover, as I did, a control on the new camera that you did not know was on your other cameras.

I also definitely learned that the 620 sees colors a little differently than my E-3. Again, this is typical for most camera models. I did not do any “tests” — I’ll be honest, I find a lot of the tests boring and not all that useful. I am more interested in what a camera will do in real-world situations than how well it photographs a test target. However, if you just shoot with one camera, the new one, and shoot a lot of different subjects, you will start to see differences. I found, for example, that the white balance settings were different enough to affect how I would shoot with white balance. By this I mean that Cloudy on my E-3 was not exactly the same as Cloudy on the E-620. This is simply a reflection of two things: the relative newness of digital photography technology and the fact that white balance does not have an international, agreed upon standard.

That doesn’t bother me. It is simply information to be used the next time I use the E-620. I know I have to work with white balance differently on that camera, and that’s fine. Such changes are consistent, so once you figure it out, you can use new settings with confidence. The photo is of a salt marsh at sunset near Los Osos, California, and was shot with the E-620 and HDR exposure technique.

Posted in Digital camera techniques, Equipment thoughts | Comments Off

Noise and Exposure

Noise, that annoying sand-like texture in a digital photo, has been seriously attacked by all major camera manufacturers. It is unwelcome in most photography, but especially nature photography. You can actually get away with more noise in certain types of photography because viewers accept it there, such as low-light photography of people and news. And some photography, such as travel and fashion, will use noise in creative ways. But most photography needs “cleaner” images, meaning less noise.

Most cameras today have better sensors and noise-reduction algorithms built into cameras to keep noise low even at high ISO settings. With some of the newest cameras from Nikon and Canon using full-35mm-frame sensors, noise levels are extremely low, even at high ISO settings (low noise at high ISO is a good reason for a full-35mm-frame sensor). In addition, programs like Nik Software Dfine do a terrific job in reducing noise (it makes my smaller sensor Olympus E-3 perform much better at higher ISOs for example).

But one thing you don’t hear too much about is how exposure is still a limiting factor. In fact, exposure becomes more critical with higher ISO settings. Higher ISO settings are not changing the sensor — they amplify the signal coming from the sensor. Manufacturers start applying noise reduction right on the sensor itself, then to the signal being amplified and more to keep noise down. However, as you amplify any signal, noise increases. What happens, in a sense, is that noise is just waiting to be revealed.

So if you underexpose a high-ISO exposure, you are likely to make that noise visible. The more the underexposure, the more likely noise will be noticed. You have more latitude with exposure with low ISO settings because the noise is less to begin with and not so close to the final image.

This also shows up when shadows from high ISO shots are processed. Shadows are essentially “underexposed” compared to the rest of the scene, making them closer to the noise, as dark areas will always hold more noise than brighter areas. That’s not a problem as long as those shadows stay dark. But as soon as they are brightened in Lightroom, Photoshop, etc., noise will quickly become obvious no matter what camera you use. You have less flexibility in processing an image when it is shot with a high ISO.

The solution to all of this is, first, be sure you expose correctly for a scene without underexposing key tonalities in that scene. Second, if you need to get the most out of an image, from shadows to highlights, expose properly and use a lower ISO. You will start hearing people say that you can shoot all the time at higher ISO settings. That can be a benefit for some photography, but remember, that as the ISO goes up, the exposure latitude goes down and the ability to get clean, noise free shadows also goes down.

Posted in Digital Photo Techniques, Digital camera techniques, nature photography | Comments Off

Sharpness

Sort of following up on the tripod blog earlier, I was reminded about photographic sharpness from a question I got from a student who wanted to know if a “full-frame” camera would give sharper results than a smaller format. This is an interesting question and relates to a lot of misperceptions about sensor size, too.

Full-35mm-frame (I like to use that term because “full-frame” is very misleading — if the 35mm size cameras are full-frame, then what are larger format cameras?) has no effect on sharpness. I shoot mostly with Olympus gear which is a four-thirds size sensor, smaller than most digital SLRs, plus some with Canon APS-C cameras, and even a small, compact digital camera often called a “point-and-shoot”, and I have no problems with sharpness due to sensor size from any of those cameras. That said, it is important to note that megapixels will affect ultimate image size, and that small sensors with high-megapixel counts can have “mushy” looking small details because of the processing the camera does to handle noise from the sensor.

From many years of classes and also from judging a lot of photo contests over the years, I can definitely say that the biggest impact on sharpness is from camera movement during exposure. This can be a big issue with less-expensive lenses, not because they are bad lenses, but because they are “slow” lenses (referring to aperture) and often mean shooting at slower shutter speeds that increase the possibility of unsharpness due to camera movement.

The only way to see how much this affects your work with your camera and lenses is to do some tests. Shoot a scene handheld at a variety of shutter speeds, then shoot that same scene with the camera on a tripod. Compare the shots. Most photographers are surprised at how quickly sharpness degrades with slower shutter speeds that aren’t necessarily that slow. Telephotos and close ups increase the problem with camera movement during exposure. Some photographers are capable of shooting at very slow shutter speeds — and I am jealous of them because I am not. It is really good to know what shutter speeds start causing you problems with sharpness.

A solid tripod can make more of a difference in sharpness than anything else. I will take on anyone who shoots with the most expensive lenses and camera possible, with me taking the least expensive camera with its kit lenses, but I will shoot on a solid tripod and they will shoot handheld. I will guarantee most of my photos will be as sharp or sharper than theirs.

There is one other thing to consider about sharpness and sensor size that affects how you deal with what is sharp or not sharp in the image. Full-35mm-frame does affect how a sensor sees what a lens sees. I have a new class at BetterPhoto.com about f-stops that looks a bit at how selective focus affects images. Selective focus is definitely affected by sensor size as it relates to focal length. Larger sensors will show less apparent depth of field with a given angle of view because they require a longer focal length to get it compared to a smaller sensor (e.g., a 100mm lens on a Four Thirds camera acts like a 200mm lens on a full-35mm-frame camera in angle of view, but gives more apparent depth of field than the 200mm).

The photo here is of prairie clover in a Crow-Hassan Park prairie west of Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Posted in Digital Photo Techniques, Digital camera techniques, nature photography | Comments Off