Photodigitary

Who’s Looking Over Your Shoulder

I’m not trying to increase anyone’s paranoia in this blog. I do want to talk about something that affects all of us as photographers, and often badly.

First, I have to tell a story that explains the idea. My son played baseball in high school. A friend of his was a very good pitcher. He was consistent and evidently had a wicked curve ball that was hard to hit. One day my wife and I went to a game when this friend was pitching. He was terrible. We had never seen him do so badly. The coach kept him in for a bit, obviously hoping he would settle down, but he didn’t. It had to be one of the worst games he had pitched.

So what changed? Did he just face a tough team? No. He had done very well against them before. Was he having problems in his life? No. He was came from a terrific family and was a solid kid. The difference was … there was a new girlfriend and she was in the stands that day. He had quit pitching with focus and attention on the game and was pitching with part of him paying attention to what the girlfriend was thinking.

We all do this. Instead of focusing on the work at hand, we start worrying about someone else and what they might think about what we are doing. That someone could be a spouse, a boss, a competitor, and so forth.

This gets really bad for photographers. What will a client think? What will camera club members think? What will my spouse think (especially since I just bought this new camera supposedly to get better photos)? What will the workshop instructor or other students think? I do it to myself at times. I have been shooting for a project and I start thinking too much about what this person or that person with the client will think? Will they like this photo? Will they dislike it? Should I waste my time shooting something if they aren’t going to like it?

Let me tell you that this can freeze you and keep you from getting good photos. Now I have to qualify this by saying that when you shoot for a client of any kind, of course you need photos that will make them happy. However, just like my son’s pitcher friend, you will not do your best work if you are letting them “look over your shoulder” in your mind.

I believe it is so very important to find what pleases you and work with that. Sure, you can modify what things you are taking based on how your photos might be used, whether that is in a camera club competition or for a client, but you have to find what excites you about the world and about photography.

It is very difficult to do good work when you keep focusing on someone else’s possible ideas about your photographs before you have even taken the photo. Tell that person in your head to shut up and go away. You have more important things to do than listen to them, such as actually responding to the beautiful world in front of you. Whatever subject matter turns you on, be excited about that and respond to the subject and your photography from your own perspective, not the skewed perspective of someone looking over your shoulder. Look at the playback of your image on the LCD and think about what it is that you like about the photo, or you dislike about the photo, and what that means to you. Later, you can pay attention to a real person looking at your work, whether that is a spouse, a boss, or a camera club person doing a critique, but you will do it from your perspective and what your photo means to you. Your strongest work will come when you care about the subject and the photography enough to honor your vision and strive to express that.

Posted in Digital Photo Techniques, nature photography | No Comments »

Getting Neutral Tones Where You Need Them

A friend of mine is a pilot and was frustrated by photographing clouds. He could never get the color right.

I gave him some ideas, something he might try for color in clouds, and thought my readers would be interested in this, too. While he was talking about clouds, the techniques here work for any situation where color is off. I will give this for Photoshop and Lightroom/Camera Raw. The key to doing this is to understand that you are using a control that works to make neutral tones neutral, i.e., whites, grays and blacks without color casts. You do need to have an idea of where the neutral tones are in a photo (parts of clouds are typically neutral, to use my friend’s example), but this does not have to be precise. You simply click on whatever you think should be neutral and keep clicking new spots until the photo looks good. If some of your clicks look bad, so what? Just click somewhere else. Here are the steps:

Photoshop and Photoshop Elements:
1. Open a Levels adjustment layer over your photo.
2. Click on the middle eyedropper of the three eyedroppers in Levels in order to select it.
3. Move your cursor onto the photo (the cursor will look like an eyedropper).
4. Click with the bottom of the eyedropper on parts of the photo that should be neutral (the middle eyedropper is for taking color casts out of neutral tones — you can click on white, gray or black sorts of tones).
5. Keep clicking until you are close, but a little over-adjusted.
6. Use Layer Opacity to control how strong the layer is applied.

Lightroom and Camera Raw:
1. Click on the White Balance eyedropper (in the toolbar at top with Camera Raw, in Basic in Develop in Lightroom).
2. Uncheck auto dismiss (in toolbar in Lightroom below photo)
3. Move your cursor onto the photo — it will be an eyedropper.
4. Click with the bottom of the eyedropper on parts of the photo that should be neutral (the WB eyedropper is for taking color casts out of neutral tones such as white, gray and black).
5. Keep clicking until you get what you want.
6. Tweak adjustment if needed with Temperature and Tint adjustment sliders.

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Beyond Boring

I am not sure of all of the deep psychological reasons but there is no question that I get bored by certain types of photos, even my own. But I think I am not alone. The public will often get bored of seeing the same old types of nature photos, even if the photos are pretty shots. Such images then become just a part of the ever present visual “noise” that assaults us every day, stuff that we start getting immune to. That’s not a good place for our photographs.

I have to tell a story. Years ago, I worked for a production group that did photography and video production. We were owned by a large company. A friend in the group and I did PR portraits for the company. I enjoyed doing it as it kept me in contact with lots of interesting people in the company. However, I tended to get bored by the same sort of photos. Now honestly, PR photos should have a standard look and should not change. But I got bored and would change the light. Not enough to really affect the portraits, but enough that the images were not consistent. But that was me.

I am still that way. I get restless when I am in a location that I have photographed before or I have seen photographs from that area before. That, unfortunately because of my work at Outdoor Photographer over the years, means just about everywhere!

But that is not such a bad thing. It forces me to look for images that go beyond the typical photos of the area, to find images that are special to me and take me new places with the location. In today’s world of constant bombardment of visuals, that really allows my photos to be a bit different, to stand out. That also means that I tend to avoid the standard “beauty” shots of locations, which is not always good, because sometimes I would like them. Still, I prefer to find new ways of looking at a location. It is more satisfying to me.

You might not be as extreme as I am in this area, but I would suggest that sometimes it is worth sitting down at a location and just looking before you start taking pictures. I often do that. Find out what is really there visually and how you relate to it, not simply how you can capture another pretty picture of the location that will be forgotten quickly.

The two photos seen here are from the Eastern Sierras of California (where I have a workshop scheduled this June with the GAPW). The first is in the Alabama Hills looking toward Mt. Whitney. The second is in the Ancient Bristlecone Forest by Big Pine.

Posted in Digital Photo Techniques, landscape photography, nature photography | Comments Off

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 »

New Software

I want to tell you about some new software I am using, but before I do that, I feel a need to qualify this blog. I love software that helps me get better results from my photography and makes it easier and faster to work with photos — so I get excited about anything that does this. However, I realize that not everyone will share my excitement, and that’s okay. I don’t think everyone needs to do the same things with their images. I also cannot tell you if you will like this program, if it fits your workflow or your budget. I can only tell you what I like and how it affects my work. I say these things because I know that it is easy to get excited about software and not appreciate that the cost may be a significant factor for people who don’t work with these things for a living like I do.

Okay, the software. Nik Software just introduced Viveza 2, the latest version of this software. I like a number of things about it, including its original technology for carefully controlling adjustments in a specific area of the photo. I saw this technology, U-Point, in development years ago and was quite impressed with it at the time. U-Point technology is in a number of programs now for Nik Software, including Nikon Capture (also made by Nik), Dfine and Color Efex Pro (all very good, highly photographer-centric programs). Viveza uses the technology to create what is essentially an alternative to Photoshop’s adjustment layers and layer masks. You click on something in the photo you want to adjust.

You then adjust the brightness, contrast, saturation (which, by the way, is a far better saturation control than the one in Photoshop) and an area to be influenced. The U-Point technology finds similar color, tone and texture to what you clicked on and limits adjustments to that. You don’t have to do any selections or work with layer masks. In addition, you can add minus control points to places that are being adjusted to prevent them from being adjusted. This is just a click on the photo and you have control. The U-Point technology is very good at finding just the colors, textures, etc. that you want without a lot of work on your part.

Viveza 1 did all of that. What 2 does is add some very nice global controls that allow you to quickly and easily adjust the overall image, plus you gain a new adjustment parameter called Structure. I am so impressed with Structure (which can be used overall or with selected points using U-Point technology) that for nature photography, I find it alone is worth the price of the program.

Now do you see why I qualified this blog in my opening paragraph? I know that some people will think I am crazy saying that one small feature is worth the price of software that is not inexpensive. It all depends on your work and what you like to do. For me, Structure solves a problem I have long struggled with, and that is getting good detail and tonal rendition in the mid-tones, especially the dark tones. Clarity in Lightroom and Camera Raw is a good addition to those programs and does that to a degree. However, I find that clarity can quickly make a subject look harsh and you can lose subtle tonalities. Structure doesn’t do that. It gives great “structure” to tonalities without making them look harsh or destroying subtle tonalities. And to have that in both overall and local adjustments is great.

In the photos I have uploaded, you will see a first photo as it might come from Lightroom or Photoshop or Photoshop Elements. Then you see an overall adjustment to structure — notice how the granite rocks really become defined much better. Then I added some local adjustments to just the sky and the flowers. Bright yellow flowers can be difficult to really define because of the way that digital cameras handle bright colors, but Structure has allowed me to bring out their detail and even add some quality saturation (you can see this well in the preview at the bottom right — the left side is before, the right side is after).

Viveza 2 works with Lightroom as an export plug-in, Photoshop and Photoshop Elements as normal plug-ins. Frankly, the average photographer could use Photoshop Elements and Viveza and do work better and faster than most photographers working with Photoshop alone.  Nik Software is at www.niksoftware.com.

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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.

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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

What Do Cameras Really Do, Anyway?

I find it curious that so many students feel they have to “confess” to doing perfectly normal “darkroom” work in the computer. So you added contrast and saturation to the image file. Often a photograph needs something like that to correctly interpret a scene.

I think this comes from a misinterpretation of what cameras really do and because people have gotten afraid of being accused of “Photoshopping” their photos. What the camera does not do is create an arbitrarily objective view of the world. The camera creates a very biased look at the world based on the limitations of the sensor, image processing done inside the camera (which is done even with RAW), and very subjective decisions by engineers and designers of the camera. Every camera is a compromise in terms of image capture because it must do a good job with all sorts of photographers, plus sensors have some issues with tonalities and colors, and camera designers know this. It is impossible to create a camera that could capture every scene of every photographer’s vision objectively because conditions are so varied.

All photography is interpretation. Nothing else is actually possible because you cannot put the real world into a picture. You can only capture a representation of it that is defined and limited by what a camera can actually do in capturing a scene. The great LIFE photographer, Andreas Feininger, talked about this many years ago in his photography books published during the 1960s and 1970s. He noted that a photograph is rarely the same size as the real world scene, it has only two dimensions to represent a three-dimensional world, it is limited to one vantage point that cannot be shifted, it includes none of the subjective things that we always react to when we are in the real world such as heat, cold, smells, sounds, and so forth (these actually do influence what we see), and more so that any photograph is always an interpretation of the world.

In fact, he went further and said that an unadjusted photograph is very often any inaccurate interpretation of the world (he called it a lie) because many of its elements are undefined in relationship to this interpretation. I believe this is important if as photographers we are to get images that truthfully and accurately interpret the world for our audiences. We have a responsibility as a photographer to be sure that the image appropriately interprets the world so that our audiences better see and understand our world.

I once had somebody tell me that they didn’t worry about this concerning nature photography because nature is perfect so all they had to do is take a picture of it. It may be true that nature can be perfect, but a photograph of nature is not the same as nature. A photograph of nature can be very imperfect and can even lead us astray from what is really important in the scene. Often we must make some corrections to the original photo as interpreted by the camera so that it more accurately reflects an appropriate interpretation of the scene.

Posted in Digital Photo Techniques, Nature, Photoshop, nature photography | 1 Comment »

New HDR Software

HDR continues to be an important new technology for photographers. I find that folks at my workshops nearly always want to know more. I also find that a lot of photographers in my classes are disappointed when they cannot capture a scene with their camera, a scene that they can see perfectly well, a scene that challenges the camera’s capabilities. The way they can get around that problem is with HDR.

I have used a number of HDR software programs. Photomatix has become the defacto standard, yet I find it is not ideal for a lot of photographers. It is rather complex and a bit challenging to use well. In addition, it is too easy to get what one of my students described as “science fiction photos” than realistic images (which are possible with Photomatix, just not always as easy as the funky looking ones). For many photographers, especially nature photographers, realistic images are important. We want a scene to interpret what is really seen by our eyes, not something that only exists from computer manipulation.

I have liked LR/Enfuse, a fusing program that works with Lightroom, because it gives HDR-like results with a very natural look and it fits the Lightroom workflow. It does have its limitations because it is not a true HDR program.

I have been working with a new program, HDR Darkroom, including working with it in classes, and find it to be an excellent HDR program for most photographers. What I like about it is that it is very easy to use, it has a simple and direct interface (that still includes added controls as needed), plus it gives really nice looking results. I did a nature photo workshop in October at the Light Photographic Workshops in Los Osos, California, and showed the program. The workshop participants all agreed that they liked the simple interface and really natural looking results. I often hesitated to recommend Photomatix because I saw how photographers struggled with it and because so many photographers were disappointed in the “science fiction” tendency of its results. I have no hesitation recommending HDR Darkroom.

HDR Darkroom also includes an interesting RAW conversion capability that uses their tone-mapping algorithms. I have not tried it. It might be very useful for those difficult RAW files.

You can learn more about HDR Darkroom at www.hdrdarkroom.com.

Posted in Digital Photo Techniques | 2 Comments »

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