Photodigitary

Just Say No

I know I have mentioned this before, but it is an important concept for photographers — just say no. What does that mean? We have many choices when photographing. We choose a subject, an angle, the lens to use, the time of day to shoot and so on. But sometimes the subject and scene just will not make a good photograph. This is confirmed by what you see in the LCD if you do take the picture. To avoid a lot of frustration, this is the point where you make the choice of “no, I am not going to take this picture.”

Probably the most common area this comes up is in exposure. I find that a lot of “exposure” problems are not strictly exposure, although I will hear that the sun is too bright, the conditions are too bright, and so on (often with that “too bright” thrown in — rarely is a scene too bright for a modern camera). The challenge is usually the contrast, not the bright sun.

One thing I find photographers often doing is try to take a picture when it is impossible for the camera to get a good exposure. It is important to understand that cameras cannot see the world the way we do. Even though you can see detail in the bright sun and shade just fine, the camera often cannot. Good exposure then is not simply about taking a picture of what you see, but about finding scenes with light that the camera can deal with. This then becomes a choice that is important, to say no to a shot when you cannot get a photograph that deals with the scene well. By making that choice, you will look for the shot that you can say yes to.

The photo here is of a blue dick flower in Central California. I knew I could control the exposure to hold detail in the clouds and the flowers when I made this composition, so I knew this was a photo to say yes to. If there had been heavy shadows with important details, I probably would have had to say no.

Posted in Digital Photo Techniques, Digital camera techniques | 2 Comments »

Flower Time

I love this time of year with all of the flowers. One reason we moved from Minnesota to California was because of the long spring. In Minnesota, it is very short — green leaves are out around May first and summer starts by mid-June. I am basing this on flowers and spring growth. In Southern California, that same time starts about the end of January and ends in mid-June.

I was up in Los Osos doing a workshop with the great folks at Light Photographic Workshops two weeks ago. We were doing flowers and landscapes and the flowers definitely cooperated. Here are some images with some brief notes about them from that week.

The opening shot is of a blue dick flower. A lot of people don’t appreciate the high quality you can get with an achromatic close-up lens. This was shot at a telephoto zoom setting with my Canon G11 and an achromatic close-up lens (this one from Century Optics, though Canon makes some good ones, too). Blue flowers don’t always record as blue, which was true here, so I had to correct the color in the computer (hue adjustment in Photoshop or Lightroom).

Lupines on a hill at dusk after a storm. There  is no camera that can capture the full range of brightness in a scene like this even though we can see it fine. HDR doesn’t work because it was windy and the flowers were blowing, plus HDR affects the whole image. I shot two exposures, one for the sky and one for the lupines. I processed them in Lightroom then combined the exposures in Photoshop to get an image more accurate to the scene. I then added some traditional “burning in” (darkening) to the edges and bottom for more drama.

Telephotos for close ups give a really nice look with limited depth of field and a change in perspective. This makes the background a pleasing color and tonality.

I also like wide-angles up close. This gives the flower a context and environment. It places it into a specific ecosystem. The trick is to deal with the extended space and depth of field that can make the composition too busy. In this case, the low early light and the sky makes the monkey flowers stand out.

Here’s a good case for a tilting LCD. I had climbed a hill with the group where some bush lupines were. I decided to travel light with only my G11. I got this high angle by holding the camera over my head and framing with the tilting LCD.

In June, I will be leading a workshop on the landscapes and flowers of the Eastern Sierras. Late June offers some wonderful wildflowers in the mountains there. I will be working the area from Lone Pine, California, to Yosemite. GAPW June Eastern Sierras.

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

Make Autoexposure Work For You

It is very possible to use autoexposure and get excellent results. I do it all the time. Sometimes I do use manual exposure (I have to use it for video on my Canon EOS 7D). But I find I can use autoexposure quickly and accurately for exposure. My preference is aperture-priority exposure because depth of field (both deep and shallow) are important to me and I can always get a faster shutter speed by paying attention and choosing a wider aperture.

To do this, you have to understand a little about what the metering system is doing and then use exposure compensation. With a little practice, anyone can do that quite quickly and get excellent exposures that are as good as using manual exposure, yet are easier to do. I am not suggesting that anyone who has a good manual exposure practice change, but I am suggesting that manual exposure is not the only way to get excellent exposures.

Understand that a meter wants to interpret a scene and make everything middle gray from the exposure. In many scenes, that is fine, but not all scenes have a perfect balance of middle gray tones. The metering system tries to compensate for the emphasis on middle gray by metering multiple points in a scene and making some adjustments unique to those measurements (which is what the metering system is doing).

Still, if a scene is mostly bright (such as a scene with a lot of sky), the metering system will want to make it a middle gray which is darker than it should be. I will typically add plus compensation to such a scene immediately before even taking a picture. If a scene is mostly dark (such as a scene with pine trees filling the image), the system will want to make it middle gray which is lighter than it should be, so compensation on the minus side is needed. Knowing that allows me to interpret a scene right from the start.

I typically use the exposure warnings that appear in the LCD review of your shot as an indicator of good exposure. I think it is important that you set your camera so that this review is on longer than the default which is usually way too short (I like 8-10 seconds — you can always turn it off by touching the shutter release button). I adjust exposure compensation either plus or minus until the brightest parts of the photo just start to give the warning or until the warnings just disappear. It is important that you do not automatically accept an exposure that has no warnings as this could mean you are significantly underexposed. When you are adjusting your exposure this way, you are “setting” the brightest parts of the scene as the brightest parts of your photo. This is actually using a part of Ansel Adams classic exposure system, the Zone System, without doing a lot of study and work.

So I simply set your exposure as best as I can, then take a picture for a test. I will then check my review to be sure my exposure is correct by watching for those blinking highlight warnings. A quick adjustment of exposure compensation and another shot gets the right exposure quickly if the first exposure is off (and often it is correct). With practice, you can actually interpret what you see in the LCD to give a rough idea of exposure (it is not completely accurate, but it can be a start).

For difficult scenes, or when I am just not sure what the camera is doing, I will check the histogram. The important thing about the histogram is that you do not want large gaps at the right side with most of the histogram at the left (which is underexposure and an underuse of your sensor). A challenge is when you are constantly changing your shot so that the background changes and influences the exposure. For that reason, I pay attention to the shutter speed the camera chooses in order to make a good exposure with the aperture I chose in aperture priority. Then when the scene changes, I quickly shift the camera’s exposure compensation to give me that shutter speed for a specific shot. That way I am not constantly shifting back and forth between manual and autoexposure and my autoexposure is ready for changing conditions.

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

White Balance is Subjective

A lot of photographers use auto white balance and accept it. They largely accept it because they don’t necessarily know there is a better way. But I see the problems of AWB all the time — inconsistent color and compromised color outdoors (usually with a slight blue cast which really hurts red, orange and yellow, plus it mucks up neutral tones). I am teaching a class in Los Osos this week and we  are photographing the wonderful wildflowers that are out now. One of the students decided to test AWB. He found, indeed, that auto white balance is very inconsistent. The same flower, for example, would change color depending on the background.

But choosing how to set white balance is very subjective. It may help to consider this. For years, pro photographers shot Kodachrome and Fujichrome for all outdoor images, including before sunrise, sunrise, sunset and after sunset. These were daylight balanced films, although they were actually warmer than Daylight white balance on most cameras (there is no standard for white balance settings). They did respond consistently to light conditions and give consistent color, color related to their specific daylight balance. I find that a lot of cameras work well with the Electronic Flash white balance setting outdoors because it is close to these films for normal conditions. I also find that Canon cameras tend to overemphasize yellow when you use Cloudy or Shady in sunlight.

I have shot with Daylight, Cloudy and Tungsten before sunrise and after sunset. There is no rule to this. I find that Cloudy works best for me and does respond like daylight films responded to these conditions.  Try different settings and see what you like.

Posted in Digital Photo Techniques, Digital camera techniques | 6 Comments »

Cropping Photos

The question often comes up in workshops and classes. When should one crop? Is one allowed to crop? (Yes, that question does come up. Some instructors evidently are rather severe about cropping).

I believe that ideally, you should be looking for the best possible composition as you shoot. You should always be trying to have as complete a photo as possible captured when you take the picture. I don’t have any problems with cropping as long as one is not using that as a substitute for seeing the scene well in the first place.

The problem with cropping is that you can only crop what you have recorded with your camera. You cannot get a new and better composition of the whole scene because what you have recorded is not the whole scene, only part. So cropping can only give something less than what was available on location and cannot expand your options.

Another problem with cropping is that you lose image quality. I hear an interesting thing all the time — photographers who like the multi-multi-megapixel cameras because they can crop the image and still have high image quality. There are problems with that. It definitely means one is trying to substitute cropping for seeing the scene well in the first place. Sure, one can crop, but the real question becomes what did that photographer miss in the first place that means he or she has to crop now … and crop out of a limited view of the subject and scene (because what is in the photo is all you have).

It is possible to compose a full image right from the start, and that goes for anyone. If you start relying on cropping to finish your photos, then you are not getting your best images when the subject is actually in front of your camera. The way to use the whole image area is to really look at it and really see it. Years ago, I taught myself to scan the edges of the image every time I took a photo. This included photojournalistic work I was doing at the time and was hammered into me by one of my mentors. He allowed no excuses for a moving and changing subject. Now, with digital cameras, you can always check your LCD playback to see what you are getting and make adjustments to your compositional choices.

That said, you should always present your best version of your photograph. If that means cropping the photo, then crop the photo. We all get stuff along the edges of the image at times that we did not see, whether that is because of wind or dark conditions or just shooting too fast. So cropping is important to get rid of the junk. But regardless of the situation, you don’t need to say you cropped your photo. Your viewers don’t care, or at least, they should be so interested in your photograph that they don’t care.

The photo of Bridal Veil Fall in Yosemite National Park at the top of this blog entry is uncropped. That is exactly what I saw and captured with the camera. The photo of the snow plant below is cropped on the right side. I was shooting with the live LCD and the dark straps of my camera backpack blended in with the dark background — I did not see them hanging out along the right side of the photo. But I saw them when I opened the photo on the computer. I loved the shot, but the straps had to go, so they were cropped out.

By the way, I find Lightroom is a wonderful tool for cropping because it is non-destructive and you can change your crop as much as you want. A tip for experimenting with cropping is to make a virtual copy (or copies) of your photo and do crops on it so you can compare the results with the original.

Posted in Digital Photo Techniques, Digital camera techniques, Lightroom, Photoshop, landscape photography | 3 Comments »

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.

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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.

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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