photoKandy Studios

Want a Photographic Memory? Stephen Wiltshire has one, but it comes with a price.

2010-08-07T17:53:00.001-07:00

There are times when I'd die for a photographic memory, especially since my own memory is particularly bad. (For example, it can be a stretch to tell you what I ate for breakfast, or what particularly big things happened in my life when I was 8. Or 12. Or 16. And so on.)

Stephen Wiltshire, however, has the gift -- after only one helicopter view of Rome (as in the video), he was able to create a near-perfect panorama... from memory, with no help. Wow...

But that comes at quite a price -- he's an autistic savant, which means that his brain, while particularly suited to these kinds of mind-boggling tasks, isn't particularly suited for normal, every day life -- i.e., the kind of social interaction we tend to expect from most people. Stephen is able to communicate now (as shown in the video), but it came as quite a struggle, as his website indicates.

If you'd like to learn more, here's his website: http://www.stephenwiltshire.co.uk/

Amplify’d from www.petapixel.com

Stephen Wiltshire: The Man Known as ‘The Living Camera’
Read more at www.petapixel.com

[...] when he was only eleven, he drew a perfect aerial view of London after only helicopter ride. Even the number of windows in all the major buildings was correct.
Read more at www.petapixel.com

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/8gco

25 Incredibly Useful CSS Snippets for Developers

2010-08-07T00:35:00.001-07:00

URL: http://www.1stwebdesigner.com/development/useful-css-sn...

Stuff everyone who works with CSS should have in their toolbox.

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/8fl8

50+ Very Useful Free Vector Illustrator Patterns And Resources From 2010 | Little Box Of Ideas

2010-08-07T00:33:00.001-07:00

http://www.littleboxofideas.com/blog/design-resources/free-vec...

Some very nice vectors here. As always, be sure to double-check the use rights if you use these for one of your projects.

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/8fl2

Fancy Tables with some CSS3

2010-07-25T04:09:00.000-07:00

First off, honest -- this isn't a blog about web design entirely. And I haven't forgotten about the photography aspect either. But, hey, it's early -- haven't had my first cup of coffee yet, and I'm in a giving mood, so I thought I'd share this with you.

If you're like me, tables in web pages tend to get the least amount of love, which is rather nuts, if I think about it logically. So I finally decided to give those tables some love by applying some cool CSS3 effects. If this can help you out, great! (If not, oh well. Wait until my next post.)

So, to whet your appetite, here's what the tables look like in all their CSS3 glory:

Isn't that pretty?

So, to begin with, you'll need some CSS code:

.pkFancyTable
  {
    
    -webkit-box-shadow: black 0px 0px 12px inset, #888 0px 0px 12px;
    -moz-box-shadow: black 0px 0px 12px inset, #888 0px 0px 12px;
    -o-box-shadow: black 0px 0px 12px inset, #888 0px 0px 12px;
    box-shadow: black 0px 0px 12px inset, #888 0px 0px 12px;
    background-color: #444;
    border: 4px solid white;
    border-radius: 15px;
    -moz-border-radius: 15px;
    padding: 10px;
    width: 75%;
    margin: 0 auto;
  }
  
  .pkFancyTable tr.oddrow
  {
    background-color: #555;
  }
  
  .pkFancyTable table
  {
    border-collapse: collapse;
    color: #CCC;
    width: 100%;
  }
  
  .pkFancyTable table th, .pkFancyTable table td
  {
    border: 1px dotted #888;
  }
  
  .pkFancyTable table thead
  {
    background-color: #000;
    border-bottom: 1px solid #888;
  }
  
  .pkFancyTable table tfoot
  {
    background-color: #600;
    color: #FFF;
    border-top: 1px solid white;
  }
  
  .pkFancyTable table td div
  {
    font-size:80%;
    color: #AAA;
    margin-left:15px;
    line-height: 0.95em;
  }

Next, you need to build an HTML table wrapped in a DIV container like so:

<div class="pkFancyTable"><table cellpadding="5" cellspacing="0">
<thead>
<tr><th>Heading 1</th><th>Heading 2</th><th>Heading 3</th></tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr><td>Value 1 <div>
I'm a smaller, indented line of text.</div>
</td><td>Value 2</td><td>Value3</td></tr>
<tr class="oddrow"><td>Value 1</td><td>Value 2</td><td>Value3</td></tr>
<tr><td>Value 1</td><td>Value 2</td><td>Value3</td></tr>
</tbody>
<tfoot>
<tr><th>Total 1</th><th>Total 2</th><th>Total 3</th></tr>
</tfoot>
</table>
</div>

The outer DIV classed "pkFancyTable" gives the table the nice round borders and the dark background color. Then, the THEAD element will get the black background color for the heading row. The TFOOT element will get a red background color and white text, which could be used for a row of totals. In between, the TBODY has all your normal rows, and if one of those rows has the class "oddrow", it'll get shaded a slightly different color.

Also, if you put a DIV inside of a TD, it will be indented slightly and rendered with smaller text, which makes it great for giving further information about the cell without resorting to asterisks and such.

Now, for the red-headed stepchild of browsers: Internet Explorer. Yes, well, the fancy CSS3 effects are totally lost on this poor browser, but the tables still look decent. They get the nice dark background and alternating row effects, so unless someone knew there was supposed to be a nice border, they'd be none the wiser.

Now, go and have some fun with your tables! And I promise that I'll try never to leave a table naked again. ;-)

Until next time, keep writing with light.

Mastretta: ¡Vivan Los Músicos!

2010-07-06T20:36:00.000-07:00

Mastretta: ¡Vivan Los Músicos! is a fantastic, quirky, and odd album that I simply can't get enough of, so I had to write about it here. Maybe you'll find out that you like it too, or you might think I'm crazy. Either way, I'm in love.

I first came across Nacho Mastretta's music when watching a distinctly disturbing yet fantastic video on Vimeo entitled "Alma" by Rodrigo Blaas. The film itself is worth watching, so I'll let you go check it out for a minute.

So now that you're back (and slightly disturbed), the catchy music? That's Mastretta. And the album is more of the same quirky but catchy music with the same distinct sound, which I can't really come up with any words to describe. It's beautiful and surreal with Spanish musical influences, some Jazz thrown into the mix, and since I was introduced to the composer through "Alma", a good bit of creepiness. But it's a good creepiness, if you get what I mean.

The music itself ranges from cacophonous revelry to slow, sad instrumental solos, and everything in between. It's odd how things can be both harmonious and disharmonious, but it's the case here, and things can slide so easily between the two that you've barely had a chance to notice it until it's happened. And let me tell you, there's a lot happening in most of these quirky songs, and you'll have to listen for quite some time to pick out each little moment and twist thrown in.

The previous album by Mastretta (self-titled) does feature some vocals, but this one does not -- it's purely instrumental. If you're looking for music that both thrills the cockles of your heart and your brain cells, here is something new and interesting, and yes, slightly creepy.

Until next time, keep on writing with light. (And listening to great music!)

Adobe Lightroom 3 Noise Reduction

2010-06-29T23:24:00.001-07:00

One of the features in the new Lightroom 3 is a much-improved noise reduction algorithm. Lightroom 2’s version, to be blunt, sucked. It helped, to be sure, if you had nothing, and for minor adjustments it was okay. But when you started throwing ISO 3200 images at it, things degraded quickly, and you were pretty much assured of needing to use a third-party noise-reduction plugin (many of which are very good).

So when I upgraded to Lr3, I had to try the new noise-reduction, and frankly, was blown away. There are situations where the third-party plugins are better, but Lr3 is more than up to the task, as you’ll see in this post.

Note: Because Lightroom is non-destructive, and because noise-reduction algorithms tend to take some time to process, I find that Lr3 gets really, really fussy when you’ve turned the NR on beyond a few percent. Best to disable it if you’re doing other things, or you’re going to start tapping fingers on the desk really quickly. A few other features easily induce this behaviour as well (like distortion correction), so it’s not limited only to NR, but something I thought I’d pass on.

The Subject, and the Detail

So, a few weeks ago, I was out just doing a photowalk, and ran across this cute chipmunk on the root of a tree surrounded with some plants. The day was nice and bright, but the camera needed ISO 3200 at f/5.6, 1/250s at a 200mm focal length (400mm equivalent). I was using my Olympus Pen E-P1 which, while far better than a point-and-shoot, doesn’t fare quite as well as a dSLR with a larger sensor would fare, but still quite respectable.

Now, if I’d had faster glass, I could have avoided such a high ISO. I could also have tried to get away with a slower shutter speed, but I was pushing it as it was. So, ISO 3200 it is, and it’s a noisy image, as you can imagine. Lr2 couldn’t do anything with it, so to even get it out-the-door, I had to use a third-party plugin for my first publish on Flickr (View On Flickr). I still wasn’t happy with the result, but for now, that was it. I had other images to work on.

After Lightroom 3

When evaluating Lr3’s noise-reduction, I wanted a subject that would really prove the NR’s worth. So I picked the same chipmunk. And with that, let the evaluation begin. The original image is above, and 100% crops from three different areas on the image are below. The final version is at the bottom of the post. Full-size downloads are available at the bottom of the post, as well, but beware – they’re huge!

Focusing on the Eye

The 100% crops below focus on the chipmunk’s left eye and include some of the whiskers and foliage as well. This gives a good view of how well detail is preserved as well as how the background is rendered.


Eye: 100%, Lr2 rendering, Default NR	Eye: 100%, Lr3 rendering, 37% Luminosity, 67% Detail, 50% Color

Eye: 100%, Lr3 rendering, 67% Luminosity, 66% Detail, 50% Color	Eye: 100%, Lr3 rendering, 100% Luminosity, 66% Detail, 50% Color

Eye (Final): 100%, Lr3 Rendering, 32% Luminosity, 66% Detail, 54% Color

Focusing on the Background


100%, Lr2 rendering, Default NR	100%, Lr3 rendering, 37% Luminosity, 67% Detail, 50% Color

100%, Lr3 rendering, 67% Luminosity, 66% Detail, 50% Color	100%, Lr3 rendering, 100% Luminosity, 66% Detail, 50% Color

Final: 100%, Lr3 Rendering, 32% Luminosity, 66% Detail, 54% Color

Focusing on the Fur


100%, Lr2 rendering, Default NR	100%, Lr3 rendering, 37% Luminosity, 67% Detail, 50% Color

100%, Lr3 rendering, 67% Luminosity, 66% Detail, 50% Color	100%, Lr3 rendering, 100% Luminosity, 66% Detail, 50% Color

Final: 100%, Lr3 Rendering, 32% Luminosity, 66% Detail, 54% Color

Final Version

The final version ended up with 32% Luminosity NR, 66% Luminosity Detail, and 54% Color NR. Other settings were changed (white balance, etc.), but the other NR sliders were left to their defaults (0% Contrast; 50% Color Detail). These settings were picked because they seemed to render the most detail without looking overly fake.

Having gone through this evaluation, I think Adobe has definitely improved the Lr3 noise-reduction, and my suspicion is that it would rank quite highly if placed along several third-party plugins. In fact, I prefer the final version above to the version on Flickr. Every photograph and situation is different, of course, but from this example, I quite like what I see.

That’s all for now; hopefully this post has been informative for all you Lightroom users. So, until next time, keep writing with light.

Back to Basics: Welcome!

2010-06-27T18:07:00.001-07:00

Note: “Back to Basics” is a series consisting of short posts that intend to go back to the basics of photography. Hopefully these articles will be of interest to you – whether you are just beginning in your photography journey, or are an established pro. (View all posts in this series…)

Welcome to the first “Back to Basics” post! This series will cover the basics of photography from exposure to composition in short, bite-size articles. (Well, If anyone knows my penchant for being long-winded, the short part may or may not happen!)

The topics that this series aims to cover are as follows; the list is in no particular order, nor is every topic necessarily guaranteed, and I totally may add some other topics as time goes on.

Capturing the Image (the Sensor)
Capturing the Light (Exposure)
Squeezing the Light (the Aperture)
Letting the Light in (the Shutter)
Sensitivity to Light (ISO)
Measuring the Light (Metering Modes)
Positioning the Light (Composition)
Rendering the Light (Color and/or lack thereof)
Focusing the Light (Focus)
Changing Your Perspective (Focal Length, Zooms, Primes)
Bending Light Artistically (Bokeh, Depth-of-Field, etc.)
And more…

Oh, and just a “geek” moment: the image to the right is just a representation of the programming language I grew up on: Commodore BASIC. Ah, the fond memories of both that computer, and the language, and hence the image. (Back to Basics, get it?)

And with that, I’ll sign-off until the next post! Keep on writing with light!

Creating a Digital Background

2010-06-25T10:42:00.000-07:00

I posted this image a long time ago on Smugmug, along with the instructions on how to create something very similar, but I never actually blogged about it. So, I thought I'd share it with you today.

First off, what is a digital background? A digital background is an image that is suitable for placing behind the subjects in an image; thus replacing the original background. The original background might be a green-screen, other studio backdrop, or some other scene entirely.

Digital backgrounds should be made to complement the subject, and not to draw attention to the background, so realism is important. The background also should be fairly blurry -- a little detail is okay, but sharp edges will quickly draw the viewer's eye away from the subject. Lighting also needs to be considered -- think about how the light is hitting your subject, and then duplicate the lighting on the background. Any mismatch between the background lighting and the subject's lighting will cause a disparity in the image that the viewer will definitely notice (even if they can't say why).

The difficulty with digital backgrounds is that you will need to cut out your subject from the original image -- so solid colored backgrounds work best for this. Photoshop has some excellent tools for extracting the subjects from the background, and with practice you can get the cut-out down to a few minutes.

How to create in Photoshop

You can create a very similar effect in Photoshop (or similarly capable editor) by following these steps:

Create a new layer of the desired size (you'll want one large enough for most of your images)
Render clouds on the layer; you'll end up with a black & white cloud layer.
Add a Gradient adjustment layer, selecting a darker brown to brighter brown. Keep the colors fairly close together so things keep their blurry look.
On the cloud layer, warp it several directions so that it isn't quite as obvious that this is only the cloud plugin...
Create a group and add both the adjustment layer and cloud layer to the group. Make sure the Gradient adjustment layer is on top of the cloud layer.
Duplicate the group.
Inside the second group, rotate the cloud layer and warp or resize to your heart's content.
Modify the second group's blend mode from "Pass Through" to "Luminosity".
Alter the gradient adjustment layer in the second group to a different gradient until you achieve an effect you like. You may also wish to try different blend modes.
At this point you have a flat background; now it is time to add some lights.
Create a new layer and make a circle selection in the area where your main light will point.
Fill the selection with white and de-select.
Next, apply a 250 gaussian blur.
And, repeat the blur.
Change the blend mode to "Overlay" and fiddle with the opacity until you achieve a pleasing effect.
If you desire the vignette, follow these steps:

Create a new layer
Create an oval selection that fills the image, and then invert the selection.
Fill the selection with black
De-select all.
Apply a 250 Gaussian blur
Adjust the opacity to suit.

If you desire simulated noise, follow these steps:

Create a new layer
Fill with black
Set blend mode to Screen or Linear Dodge
Add about 9% monochromatic uniform noise.
Apply a Gaussian blur of 1.4
Adjust opacity to suit.

If you want to adjust colors after the fact, add a "Photo Filter" adjustment layer. You can either select specific "filters" (like the Warming filter), or apply color filters.

The image above is available for free under the Creative Commons License (share alike). Attribution is appreciated but not required. Commercial use permitted.

Smugmug Trick: Adding an Image to the Cart via Link

2010-06-19T00:29:00.000-07:00

Note: This article applies only to anyone using Smugmug. As always, use the information at your own risk. If your Smugmug account goes berserk, be sure you know enough to undo anything contained herein. As always, photoKandy Studios isn't liable for anything that might go wrong.

Okay -- legalese done-and-out-of-the-way, we can get on to it.

Sometimes when you're linking to an image on Smugmug, you would like to prompt the user to add the image to the cart immediately, rather than hoping that they will click the "Buy" button, and then click "This Photo". The reasons you might want to do this vary, but I've seen the question asked several times on the customization forums, so I thought I'd share how you can accomplish it.

So, first, a demo: http://sm.photokandy.com/Album/Buildings-and-Architecture/Collonsville-IL/12510869_HHeMy#897188584_yGPiS?addToCart=yes

When you click the link above, you should be taken to the photo's page. Nearly immediately, the "Buy This Photo" window should appear, prompting you to add the image to the cart.

So, if you'd like to add this functionality to your site, it just takes just a little bit of javascript, and the willingness to "tinker", but it isn't too hard to get working.

First, add the following code to your "Bottom Javascript" block in the "Advanced Customizer". (This is located in your Smugmug Control Panel)

function addToCart ()
{
  if (window.location.toString().indexOf("addToCart=yes") > -1 )
  {
    var uri = window.location.toString();
    var hashLocation = uri.indexOf ("#");
    if (hashLocation > -1)
    {
      var qmLocation = uri.indexOf ("?");
      var img = uri.substring(hashLocation+1, qmLocation);
      var imgSplit = img.split ("_");
      addCartSingle(imgSplit[0],imgSplit[1]);
    }
  }
}

YE.onDOMReady ( addToCart );

The code isn't all that complex; here's what it does in a nutshell:

window.location.toString() is the web address of the page. In the case of a photo, it's the huge, long link like I used in the demo.
indexOf("addToCart=yes") searches the web address for the "addToCart=yes" portion. If it's there, the script knows we need to show the "Buy This Photo" window.
We can do this using addCartSingle, but we need to know the image's unique key (the "897188584_yGPiS"), and we need it in both pieces (before and after the underscore).

First we find the "#" in the link; the image's unique identifier comes after this. We do this with indexOf ("#").
If we find it, we next search for the question mark we have to put before "addToCart=yes".
Once that is found, we split the string at the underscore and call addCartSingle which then does all the really hard work.

Next, you should be able to link to the image from other sites (like blog posts or Facebook, etc.) and if you just add "?addToCart=yes" to the end, it'll prompt the user to add the image to their cart automatically. Just remember that the code as presented above is really picky -- any variation in the case or spelling is going to cause it to fail, so make sure to spell it exactly and use the correct case. (If you're a programmer, though, you could change the code to accept all sorts of things...)

Pretty nifty, right? (I thought so. If you don't think so, maybe the next trick down the line will be more up your alley... I'll cross my fingers!)

So for now, I'll close the bag of tricks and trot one out sometime later. Until then, keep on smugging along!

Telling Secrets: I use AUTO ISO

2010-06-18T23:49:00.001-07:00

I know, shame on me, right? I mean, seriously? But yes, I do use AUTO ISO, and happen to use it quite a lot. It's not that much further a step beyond using Aperture or Shutter priority modes, and it can definitely help in lots of situations.

Why I use AUTO ISO

Ok, so on a brightly lit day with the sun high in the clear, blue sky, there's little reason to go beyond ISO 100 or 200 when outside. Anything more is just asking for noise and a lower dynamic range. But in anything other than ideal situations, letting the camera pick an ISO setting for me significantly raises the number of keeper shots from any particular shoot, especially when the capture is absolutely critical. Noise can be reduced quite a bit using today's software, so while an image captured at ISO 1600 or 3200 may require a bit more work to make acceptable, having the image itself is better than not having the image at all.

That's really the only real reason I use AUTO ISO: to get the image. I can massage it all I want later in Lightroom or Photoshop or any number of post-processing tools, but if I don't get a good image in the first place, then no amount of processing will create one from thin air.

Getting Rid of the Blur

The biggest reason to use AUTO ISO is help reduce motion blur from those pesky, shaky hands of ours. I'm not exactly shake-free, by any means, and while AUTO ISO isn't a panacea, it will do its very best to make sure the shutter speed never falls below the inverse of my focal length when I'm shooting in Aperture Priority mode (Av on your camera's dial). Which means that I have a pretty good chance at getting a blur-free shot. (Of course, this doesn't account for moving subjects.) When shooting in Shutter Priority (Tv) mode, the camera won't let the shutter speed fall below the selected shutter speed, so if I want to capture every image at 1/1000s, the camera will adjust its ISO accordingly to allow the shot at the desired shutter speed. This is particularly useful when working with sporting events where you want the action to be frozen and sharp.

When Not to Use AUTO ISO

I've mentioned both Av and Tv modes above, but what about Manual (M)? Here's when you might get into unexpected exposures if you use AUTO ISO while also using Manual mode. Some cameras will simply set your ISO at a fixed value (like 400), and others will adjust the ISO for you (essentially reacting like Shutter Priority mode, except you also select your Aperture). Neither option is all that great -- both are a bit unexpected, and unless you catch it quickly, chances are good that you won't end up with what you intended to capture. For those cameras that adjust the ISO, it also means you'll end up with radically different exposures for the same shutter and aperture settings, something else you may not desire. So, just something to remember: when shooting manual, make sure you manually select your ISO as well. (Of course, this rule can be broken if you really did want to shoot with AUTO ISO on Manual mode. I'll leave that to you.)

The other time I use manually selected ISOs is when I'm looking at a decent period of time where the light will remain the same, and where the scene is unlikely to change dramatically. At this point I'll drop to the desired ISO (like ISO 100 outside) -- this way I can ensure that the camera doesn't go off and decide to pick ISO 1600 for a shot or two. Usually the camera is pretty good at knowing when to use a low or high ISO, but just like any other type of auto-exposure, the camera can guess wrong.

Don't Forget Metering Modes

Your camera is figuring out the AUTO ISO setting based upon the same metering it is using to determine Aperture and/or Shutter Speed, so if the camera meter decides on a funky exposure, the AUTO ISO will be similarly funky. That's probably pretty obvious, but is something to remember.

AUTO ISO Range

Just an FYI: some cameras will let you select an AUTO ISO range. The Olympus PEN E-P1, for example, lets you select a minimum and maximum ISO of anything within the camera's minimum and maximum ISO settings. This means that one time I may only wish to go to ISO 1600, but another day I may want to allow the camera to go all the way to ISO 6400. Some cameras won't make this a range, but instead use expansion modes you have to enable. And some will simply use the entire range available regardless of what you want.

Hey! The Camera Picked an ISO I Can't Pick!

So you get home and review your images and you start seeing images with ISO 64 or ISO 250 or ISO 5000, but when you look at your camera, you find that you can't pick those ISO values yourself. That usually means you're not using the "pro" version of the camera where you can select those settings. Thankfully most camera manufacturers let their non-"pro" cameras pick the ISOs in-between even if you can't do it yourself. Consider it one of many incentives to upgrade! ;-)

In Summary:

AUTO ISO isn't bad -- but understand what's going on underneath.
When in Av mode, the camera will select the minimum ISO that allows a shutter speed faster than the inverse of your focal length.

Of course, if things are too dark, the shutter speed may still be too slow to capture a blur-free image. Time to pull out your flash!

When in Tv mode, the camera will select an ISO and aperture that will capture a properly exposed image at your selected shutter speed.

Of course, if things are too dark or bright, and the camera can't adjust both ISO and aperture to avoid the problem, you'll end up with an under or over-exposed image.

When in Manual, don't use AUTO ISO.

Unless, you really, really, really want to, and know what to expect.

See if you can select the ISO range so you can either limit the maximum ISO or expand it, depending on the conditions you'll be shooting in.
Don't be surprised to see ISO numbers you can't physically select on the camera body.
When things get too light or dark, the camera will still have problems. AUTO ISO can't fix everything.

So, with that, I'm going to zip up my bag of secrets and put it away for now. I'll bring it out sometime in the future an share another "horrible" secret, but until then, keep writing with light!

Some Thoughts on the New Lightroom

2010-06-13T23:21:00.001-07:00

First of all, I'm in love with Adobe Lightroom. I purchased it when it was around version 2.3 or so, and have kept it up-to-date when Adobe released a new version. I've added plugins that assist my workflow, and I've got a lot of presets and settings tweaked just the way I like them.

When Adobe released the beta of Lr3, I downloaded it just about immediately and played with it. And then I couldn't wait until the final version was released, knowing that it was going to have all sorts of great features, fixes, and improvements. So, naturally, the day it was released, I bought the upgrade and downloaded the software and proceeded to install. And then, once installed, I had to play around.

Since that first night with Lr3, I've done some more work with the new version, and let me say this: hands-down, it's the best version of Lr there's ever been. Does it deal with everything I'd hoped would be dealt with in the new version? No, but it gets really close. So, all that said, here's some thoughts on the new version, and some tips and tricks that might help you get the most out of your new version of Lightroom.

Pre-Installation

Ok, so some of this should be common sense. Some of it isn't:

Back up your Lr2 catalog first. Lr3 has to upgrade it when you open it in Lr3, and while it should work, you don't want to take risks with your data.
If you use any plugins, check to see if there are new updates for them in Lr2. If there are, update them. (I didn't. And Lr3 went a little berserk when I tried to use those old plugins.)
If you haven't optimized your catalog in a while, it won't hurt to do it now. Lr3 has to process your catalog upon first open, and optimizing can only help it process it that tiny bit faster.

Installation

Have your Lr3 product key handy!
If you're installing the new version on a new computer, you'll also need your Lr3 product key.
Installation went without a hitch on my Windows 7 64-bit machine. Lr3 asked for my product key, and then went merrily along its way, just like previous updates did.

First-Use

Okay, so the first time you open up your Lr2 catalog, Lr3 will complain and tell you it needs to upgrade it. Hopefully you don't have anything pressing, because if you have a lot of imagery in your catalog, this is going to take awhile. As in, go take a nap or mow the lawn or something that takes some time.

Sidenote: the upgrade process took the longest on the image previews, it seems. So if you don't have many or don't render at 1:1, your upgrade might not take as long.

Once you've got the new catalog, I suggest you check all the settings in the catalog, verify that the images look good, and then back it up again.
Next, check your plugins. They should be functioning if they are compatible with Lr3; if they aren't, you'll either want to disable or delete them. (Keeping in mind that they may complain by throwing odd error messages when you try to do so.)
Remember the five rules!

Things Worth Mentioning

There are some notable improvements under-the-hood when it comes to RAW processing. Some of these are only applied to new images by default, leaving your old images looking pretty close to the way they looked in Lr2. If you want an old image to use the new settings, you can do so by changing its "process" to 2010 in the calibration panel in the develop mode.
To me, anyway, it does seem much faster at rendering RAW files. (At least from Canon.) That is, until you start doing other funky things, like adding lens correction. That's not a simple task, and since Lr3 is non-destructive, those things must be processed at each render and edit, so if you start doing lots of things in your images, be prepared to sit a little.
The clone tool seems noticeably slower than Lr2. Something to watch for so that you don't think things have crashed.
The new noise reduction process is absolutely fantastic. I love, love, love, love it. While I'm sure the more expensive tools can still beat Lr3 (perhaps only because they have more settings), Lr3 beats Lr2 hands-down, and is no longer a fish-out-of-water when it comes to noise-reduction.
Lens Distortion Correction is new, and Adobe has included some useful presets for many different lenses from different manufacturers. If you've used Canon's DPP (or your camera's RAW processing tool), and then moved to Lr, you probably wondered why things looked a little different. The answer was that Lr2 didn't do any lens distortion correction, where your camera's software probably did. The difference isn't huge, but it's enough. Keep in mind, though, that this kind of processing slows things down, which is why it isn't enabled on every image by default.
Manual Correction is also new, and can do wonders with correcting the perspective on tall buildings shot wide-angle, and more. There's just one option missing: skew. Oh well. That's what Photoshop is for, I guess.
The new import dialog is really cool, and much renders image previews much faster as well.
Publish Services is the new "export", though that option isn't going away. Essentially Lr3 as recognized that we are publishing images to services, and we want those images and services to maintain that connection, even after edits. Publish Services lets you do just that. Now I can upload an image to Flickr, edit it, and have Lr3 replace the image at flickr, instead of deleting the old one and uploading a new one. It's not perfect, but it's a good start.
Performance is hit-and-miss.

Interactivity in the library view is quite nice. No longer do I get the feeling that I'm waiting on things to finish working before I can go to the next page, enter that next keyword, etc.
Interactivity in the develop view is a little better than Lr3 in some ways, worse in others. For example -- the clone tool performs far worse in Lr3 than in Lr2. But image rendering (until you've piled on a thousand adjustments) is faster.

Is It Worth It?

Yes. A million times yes. The new features (many of which I haven't even got to yet) are fantastic. For that matter, the only feature could have been noise reduction, and I'd have upgraded. But Adobe's managed to improve a lot of other things as well, and it shows. There are bugs, and there will be bugfixes, as always, but Lr3 is definitely a worthy successor to Lr2.

Changing Clothes

2010-06-13T01:59:00.000-07:00

If you haven't noticed already, there's a new look to our site! It's not 100% complete (the Blog and Smugmug portions use the old design), but a good portion of the site has been converted to the new look and feel.

(Update 6/14/2010: The Blog has been updated to the new look and feel. Yay!)

There was nothing wrong, necessarily, with the old design. I love that design. But I happen to love this design as well, and I felt it was time for a "change of clothes" for the site. The previous design has been in place for quite awhile, and I'd learned a lot since I first coded the original design. A lot about how best to present a photograph in a site, and a lot about how to better code a site in general.

So, if you haven't already checked it out, go take a peek at the new design and see what you think. Then come back and see why the design evolved the way it did. (Or not. It's up to you. Regardless, please, leave your thoughts!)

Everything is White!

Okay, not quite everything, but this is a big change from the old design where the primary background was black. While pictures look great on black, I happen to think they look great on white as well, especially when appropriately framed.
White gives a sense of "airiness" -- that is, white isn't claustrophobic. Black can be oppressive and containing, while White (if used properly) can feel open and relaxing.

Fonts

There are some really cool fonts out there. But they still don't really play well in the Web world (although there are a lot of solutions out there that help). Even so, I like to limit the fonts I use in a design to as few as possible. In this case the font in the header area is the same font throughout, though it doesn't match the remainder of the site since it isn't a font available on lots of computers.
The body text is Arial / Helvetica, but the headings get to be Garamond or Georgia. This helps provide a visual distinction between the content and headings.

Color Scheme

Other than the change to a white background, the color scheme has remained mostly intact. The red element is used throughout the site, often as link colors and background colors. Otherwise text is a dark gray (not quite black) for primary content.

Logo

If you look closely between the old and new design, you'll notice that the logo has changed. Slightly to be sure, but it is a change.

New Slideshow

We're using SlideShowPro now for the homepage slideshow which will cycle through all our portfolio images. It's a fantastic value for what you get, and it has built-in integration with Smugmug's RSS Feeds. How cool is that?
Plus it's super-customizable.
Oh, and resize the window a bit. Up to a certain height, the slideshow will adjust to the size of the site and maintain a nice aspect ratio while filling the content area. This is done with some simple Javascript that, remarkably, seems to work with every browser. (Except for IE6, probably. Oh well. Upgrade, please?)

Flexible Content Width

1000px used to seem so big. And then I got a bigger monitor. And a bigger one. And so on. Suddenly 1000px looked downright ridiculous on the large monitor. And so this new site can grow between 1000px and 1400px.
1400px was chosen as the maximum in order to keep line lengths reasonable. Long lines of text get really hard to read, and a 2000px wide site isn't exactly readable.

Redesigned Sidebar

Each section of the sidebar now has a box around it to help separate it from the other sections in the sidebar. Each section has a specific purpose, and the boxes help make that point.
Each link is uneven. This is a growing trend in a lot of newer sites, and I find I like it here. The difference in background color (white) to the box's background color (gray) also makes the link stand out a little, so hopefully people get the idea that the links are clickable.
The top part of the sidebar (under "Sections") still adjusts itself according to the section of the site you are in, so that hasn't really changed a lot.
The Freebies section isn't really new; you could get all the content (except for a couple features not yet implemented: Backgrounds and Tutorials) using other links on the site, but now they are consolidated and available on just about every page in the site.
I love having social media links in the footer of sites and design most sites that way. But this time I wanted to do something different, and so you have the links to the various Social Media sites in the sidebar.
Subscribing hasn't always been terribly obvious, so it gets its own box as well.

Homepage Tweaking

The homepage is the most obvious benefactor of this changing of clothes; the new slideshow is the best part, but the remaining content has also been tweaked. Below the slideshow is the "recent photos" area, which looks slick in any CSS3 compliant browser, but still adequate in IE.
Below the recent photos are two recent blog posts on the left, and four recent tweets on the right. The tweets are styled differently to indicate that they aren't blog posts.

Other Pages

Other pages haven't seen as much of a change, but that's coming. I'm never averse to reviewing and changing copy where necessary, so those pages will probably change in the future. In the meantime, though, very little was necessary to make them fit the new design.

Footer

The previous design had a pretty busy footer. The new design is much simpler. It has just two components: a "quick" contact form and the legalese. That's it.

Now, I'm sure there are plenty of bugs in this -- I was simply too excited to let it marinate much longer, so out it went. (And at a horrible hour, too. Sigh.) So if you do find something odd, let me know, and I'll add it to my todo list. And rest assured the blog and Smugmug portions of the site will follow suite very shortly. (Thankfully the hard part of web design is almost always the design, not the implementation. Unless you're talking about Internet Explorer. But that's a rant for another day.)

So, I hope you like the new look -- I sure do!

Cradlepoint MBR900 Wireless Broadband Router

2010-03-29T21:34:00.000-07:00

It so happens that where I live has sucky internet access. Period. None of the options are very good. Cable doesn't reach me, nor does DSL. Satellite isn't an option, and so the only other thing left is wireless internet with a cellular modem and an expensive bill every month. But, at least, it did get me internet.

Things were fine if you only needed one computer to access said internet at a time, but I'm a geek, so I have several things in my home that can call out into the cloud -- my bluray player, my Wii, all my computers, my BlackBerry, etc. And if someone came to visit, getting them online was a major pain in the rear as well.

See, I had to set everything up with a wifi router connected to one machine that used Microsoft's Internet Connection Sharing in order to share the connection to all those machines. Which worked great in theory, and less so in practice, because you had to set each device up with special settings just to get anything to work.

Then, for some reason, the cellular modem and my computer would suddenly not see eye-to-eye, and the only option would be to reboot the entire computer. A computer which also happened to be my DVR. Not a good option there.

I had looked online several years back for the perfect fix -- a router that could connect directly with my cellular modem, and provide that connection to all my other devices. Back then it was expensive ($300+), and so I didn't jump. But I looked again, just recently, and discovered that there were many wifi routers that would happy accept a cellular modem and provide it to the other devices that didn't burn a hole in my purse!

I ended up with the Cradlepoint MBR900 for $150. (view website) It was just about as plug-and-play as you can get -- give it some power, plug in the cellular modem, and watch as it takes over from there. Of course, that would be it, but you'd have an insecure wireless network, so I set that up as well, but all of it was very easy to do.

The cool thing is that this is a regular router (so my bluray player can connect to it via wires), and also wifi, so my Wii and Blackberry can connect. And there aren't any oddball settings to apply -- just the key to log on to the network. Yay!

Now I haven't had the device long enough to discover much beyond the fact that yes, it works, and it works pretty well. And it frees up my DVR computer to be a DVR, and lets those guests connect without setting a lot of complicated things up. And it's actually kinda cute. (Which is always a winner, in my opinion!)

Now, granted, this is a pretty niche product, but what's really cool about it is that if you just happen to have both a cellular modem and a cable/dsl line, you can set this thing up to fail over to the other connection should the other fail. That's the really cool part that I'd love to have fun with, except, of course, I have no wired options around! But maybe you do.

Also, it really has nothing to do with photography. Except for the fact that without my internet access, all my business activities would be much harder to accomplish. Not impossible, but really, really painful. And so, I'm officially in love with this little router. It wasn't expensive, has proven reliable so far (knocks on wood), and does just what I need. How cool is that?

The Day the ISO Went Berserk...

2010-03-22T22:59:00.001-07:00

(With apologies to Ray Stevens fans, but the title is the furthest my creativity goes tonight.)
It was evening. The sun was getting low in the sky, and the light was quickly fading from the landscape. But the animals were out and about enjoying the fresh air, and me? I wanted some pictures! I had, after all, just bought a new lens for my recently purchased Olympus E-P1, and needed to play!
The lens happened to be the Panasonic 45-200 f/4 – f/5.6 m4/3rds lens, which you can get online for around $270. It happens to be a pretty good lens, too, though it can’t match my Canon EF 70-200 f/4 IS USM lens for image quality and sharpness. But it doesn’t have to – it’s lighter, smaller, and sometimes that’s just what one wants.

Anyway, the light was low, so that meant any images taken would be at high ISO. Normally I try to keep the ISO at or below 800 for the E-P1, but tonight, it was at 3200 quite frequently. And while it made for “noisy” images with a lot of missing detail, that high ISO let me capture some perfectly good images that work quite nicely as black and white captures. With more massaging, they might have even worked as color images, but it happened to be late, and I didn’t want to do that much work.
And so, being at such high ISO, I embraced the noise. For one thing, I rather like the E-P1’s noise – it’s very film-like to me, and I’ve yet to see any problems with banding on my particular camera. (Whereas my Canons will both band, though my XSi more frequently than my T1i.) So, while Lightroom will naturally reduce a little noise (and I could’ve gone all out and reduced it by quite a bit), I decided to turn off all noise reduction to enhance the noise. If you’re going to live at ISO 3200, you may as well have fun with it, right?
And with that, here’s four of the best from tonight – all of a squirrel doing his best to have his supper in peace, while I was doing my best to poke my lens where he felt it didn’t belong. (Oh, and btw: all are at ISO 3200, a focal length of 200mm, an aperture of 5.6, and close to a shutter speed of 1/200s.)

Supper in a Tree

Coming Down

Slip and Slide

Not a Step Closer!

Before I go let this squirrel finish his evening in peace, let me point out a couple of things that helped keep reasonably good detail in the images:

1. Shoot RAW

And no, not meat. I mean shoot with your camera’s RAW format. Where noise gets to be a really big problem is when a camera gets a bit over-sensitive about getting rid of any and all noise, and the place it does that is in the JPEG. So an ISO 3200 JPEG will appear noisy, but blurry and smeary and generally unusable. The RAW image, however, hasn’t had any of that smearing and blurriness applied to it, so it can be used to achieve a good effect.

2. Overexpose

Yes, this seems a bit counter-intuitive, but I like to overexpose my high ISO images by around 1/3rd of a stop. (Your subject and lighting conditions, of course, determine if this is even an option.) Technically this is called “exposing to the right”.

3. Spot Meter

The sky was still pretty bright, as far as my camera was concerned, but the objects on the ground weren’t. If I were to use the camera’s evaluative metering, it would expose for the sky, and render most everything else too dark. Since I happen to want to capture the things on the ground (and not in the sky), I used spot metering instead to meter directly for the subject. (Which will cause blowing out of the sky, as seen above, but the sky wasn’t the point of the image.)

4. Embrace the Noise

And, finally, if you’re going to have noise in the image, and lots of it, why not embrace it? These kinds of images usually make for good black and white images, since, for some reason, we seem to accept noise in a black and white image better than we do in a color image. And, unless the noise is distracting, it adds a bit of texture to the image which can also help obscure (a little) the loss of detail you suffer by shooting at such a high ISO. (However, some cameras have distracting noise. You know who you are. It’s best to avoid high ISOs in those cams.)

And now, squirrel, you can go enjoy the rest of your evening. I’ll leave you alone, I promise. At least until the next photo opportunity!
Until then,
Keep writing with light!

Trek in a Cemetery

2010-02-20T19:21:00.001-08:00

Okay, so this isn’t usually the place that most people go for pictures. But, for some reason, I like cemeteries, and today was a gloomy but warm day, and I just had to go wandering through a cemetery before I did other various errands. These were all taken with my Lensbaby Composer at f/2 using the double-glass optic.

Praying Statue

I love how the Lensbaby lets you direct focus – in this case, on the face of the statue. I also like what it does with the bokeh – there are some interesting shapes back there.

Faceless

I don’t know why, but this reminds me of a statue without its face. It’s not a statue, though, just the top of a tall tombstone.

Memoriam

This flag was next to a gravestone, and I wondered how it would look from above. This is what I got. The ground this time of year is awful, but the bokeh (plus the processing) makes this appear to be something other than dirt!

The Skeleton Hand

Perhaps a propos regarding my location, this is a tree branch that reminded me of so much more. The green comes from a nice preset in Lightroom – I think this would be a perfect halloween pic, don’t you?

Flag on a Pole

There was a flagpole in the cemetery, and I decided to take the flag from this angle. I think it looks rather interesting!

Red Flowers

Pretty typical for cemeteries, but these flowers are fake. I still like the result, though.

Subatomic Particles

I suspect this makes me think of subatomic particles because I’ve seen one-too-many documentaries on the Large Hadron Collider or some other sort of similar thing, and besides – I happen to like science. Of course, short of a miracle (in more ways than one), this isn’t an actual representation of these miniature elements – instead, there was a…, well, bowl, for lack of a better term, that looked like a nest hanging next to a gravestone, and all this fibrous stuff was in it. With some post processing, voila – the above is the result.

Well, that’s all for now, so until next time,
Keep writing with light!

More LensBaby Fun

2010-02-10T21:37:00.001-08:00

I’ve stated in several places that I absolutely adore my EF 24-70 f/2.8L USM and my EF 70-200 f/4L IS USM lenses, and that my 50 f/1.8 is wickedly sharp, especially considering the price ($100). All of these lenses produce excellent color, sharpness, and contrast. And yet, I’ve fallen in love with another lens: my new LensBaby. This lens isn’t about sharpness, saturation, or contrast – at least not in the ways we think of now-a-days.
I’ve posted the results of my first experiments, and in that vein, here are some more results of experimentation. For all of these images, I used the double-glass optics with an aperture of f/2.

Behind the Curtain

Break in the Walk

The above image beautifully shows how the lens can adjust the sweet-spot of focus; here it is near the top of the image. I used live-view to confirm focus.

Sparkles

I love shoes, so of course a shoe would be a subject of a LensBaby experiment!

Berry Blur

The above was obtained by focusing on the closer berries, and shooting with a long exposure (1/4s) handheld. I’m not sure about you, but I found the bokeh rather interesting… Like the one that follows…

Flower in Marble

The above is a real flower above snow, but both the bokeh and focus effects render it in this manner. There’s something fascinating about it in an abstract vein.

Alien Eyes I

Alien Eyes II

The above two images are the results of shooting with a flash into both the headlight and taillight of my car. I just love the way the out-of-focus highlights are shaped. That, and for some reason, I keep getting the feeling that I’m looking into the eyes of some alien spider…

Because the lens has no electronic communication with the camera, everything needs to be done manually. I used both Manual and Aperture Priority modes for these images. An important thing to remember, however, is that if you use both Auto ISO and Aperture Priority, the camera can’t appropriately modify the ISO in order achieve a shutter speed of faster than 1/50th of a second, because the camera doesn’t think there is a lens attached. Just something to think about if you use Auto ISO. If you don’t, then you can forget this tidbit. ;-)

Another thing to remember is that the EXIF information will record only ISO and shutter speed, again for obvious reasons. It’s just a little strange to not see the aperture value or the focal length in the EXIF when that’s what you are used to all the time.

That’s it for this post… hopefully you can see some creative possibilities in your own photography!

So until next time, keep writing with light!

Lensbaby Composer

2010-02-07T19:55:00.000-08:00

Note: Reposted because of a trigger-happy finger and a delete button. D'oh!

The LensBaby Composer is the third iteration of the LensBaby concept – a lens that you can tilt to achieve all sorts of creative effects. You can drop in different optics – from double-glass optics (relatively sharp), to plastic optics (think lomo), and even pinhole or fisheye optics. Needless to say the variation you can get out of this is amazing, as long as you’re willing to experiment.
I bought my Composer on Saturday, and so I haven’t had a lot of time to play, but of course, it was a new toy, so I had to play a bit. It was really cold & windy outside, so instead I coerced my puppy stuffed animal to pose for me:

Pose #1 (Double-glass Optics, f/2, 1/125, ISO 100)

Pose #2 (Double-glass Optics, f/2, 1/125, ISO 100)

Pose #3 (Pinhole Optic; 25 seconds; ISO 400; look closely and you can see that my sensor needs cleaned!)

Pose #4 (Plastic Optic, f/2, 1/125, ISO 100) Pose #5 (Plastic Optic, f/5.6, 1/125, ISO 400)

(Just like regular lenses, stopping down can often dramatically increase sharpness!)

Pose #6 (Double-Glass Optic; f/2, 1/125, ISO 100)

Ease of Use

The LensBaby Composer itself is very easy to use. Make sure that the front element is centered (pointing straight forward), then focus using the focus ring. Once focus is achieved, you can move the front element around (you may have to loosen it first by rotating the second black ring on the mount).
Switching apertures requires the use of a magnet to lift out the aperture in the optic; the Composer comes with the necessary tool. It’s not hard to get out, and then you can just drop in a new aperture ring.
Switching optics took a bit of work the first try; in any new optic package, a tool is provided that you use to press in and rotate to unlock the existing optic. Once unlocked, you can drop the old optic out into your hand, put the new optic in, use the tool to lock the new optic in place, and put the old optic in a safe place. It’s not hard to get used to, but that first couple times might be a bit of work trying to get the original optic to budge.
Each optic provides very different effects based upon the position of the front element, aperture in use, and lighting conditions, so while the lens itself is very intuitive to use (focus, move, shoot), it will take experimentation to be able to repeat, to any significant degree, what you come up with the first time around.
If you’re used to auto-focus, you’ll have to get used to focusing manually, without AF assist (at least for Canon). You’ll need to make sure your diopter is set correctly; a few pictures at various focus settings provide mine was set right and when it looked in focus, it was.
There’ll be more to come in the future as I get acquainted with this lens and its optics and characteristics. So far I’ve had a blast with it, and look forward to shooting all sorts of subjects with it.
Until then, keep writing with light!

Welcome, 2010

2010-01-17T21:28:00.001-08:00

Here we are, 17 days into 2010, and I’ve yet to write my first post of the year on this blog. Shame on me! I’ve done tweets and facebook posts, but not a blog post. And that’s not for wont of trying – I’ve two posts that I’m working on – but they aren’t ready to be published just yet. But rather than put it off, I figured I’d get the first post of the year out of the way, and with it, some of the recent happenings on the site, and my hopes for this year.

Recent Site Happenings

In case you haven’t noticed, we added a client area a while back. It lets clients see a list of their events, their quotes and invoices, and also provides links to their galleries after the fact. If you haven’t tried it yet, and are a client, give it a go here: http://www.photokandy.com/clients
We recently rolled out a mobile version of our site at http://m.photokandy.com. It works well in Opera Mini, the Blackberry browser, and should work in a lot of other browsers. It isn’t a full version of the site, but it includes recent images, tweets, blog posts, and lets you browse the image gallery itself. This was a fun little project that really took only a day or two to build as some of the pieces came from the primary site (like the blog feed), but the fun part was really trying to come up with a design that would work on small screens.
The most recent change was a revamp of the home page. This includes a revamped logo (not too different than the old one), a background image for those with large screens, and a much larger slideshow in the middle. This slideshow is also much more focused on a “portfolio” presentation – images are grouped together in frames, and only a few are shown. You can get to the most recent images by clicking “Recent Photographs”, or just clicking “Albums”. There are still a few bugs to be worked out, but overall, I like it.

The main bug is that the slideshow on the front page doesn’t link directly to the photograph being clicked on. For one, this is hard to do with the slideshow because more than one photograph may be on display. Even so, we’re working on a way to deal with this better than we are now (right now we just link to a generic keyword page).
Also, the slideshow increase means larger pictures being downloaded, so we may have to work on timing for transitions a bit. Not to mention that people with smaller monitors may not see the bottom area of the page (but they should see the entirety of the slideshow, unless they are on a really small monitor).
The bottom of the page is now divided into three: popular photos on the left (just like in the old design), the twitter stream and site updates in the middle, and the blog post on the right.

Going Forward

Professionally:

More Site Tweaks

I’m a web designer too, so this is pretty much a given. I love to fiddle! That said, I’ll try not to unleash anything horrible!

More Blog Posts

This is where I’ve really let down – and given that I’m 17 days into this year isn’t a good sign. But hey, I’ll try, anyway. I want to publish some more educational posts about photography as well as my experiences with various equipment and such. If you have an idea for a post, please – let me know!

Software Tips and Videos

I love using Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop, and sometimes it is easier to explain something visually rather than in a blog post. I also use SmugMug to host portions of this site, so if I come across something really cool, I’ll share it with you too!

Lots More Pictures

Who knows – I may even do a project 365. Let’s see how that one goes!

Personally:

Exercise more, Lose weight, and get Healthier

I swear, this is the bane of my existence. So, I’m pronouncing to the world that I’m going to do my very best to shed some pounds, exercise more (my Wii really helps!), and be healthier overall. I think that doing so not only will help me mentally, emotionally, and physically, but also photographically.

Step out of my comfort zone

This can mean so many things – in this context, I mean photographically. It’s easy to get into a rut photographically, and so I’m going to do my best to shake things up – see things from new angles, try things I’ve never done before, and see what happens!

Have More Fun

Goodness knows that I love photography. It is so fun for me. Even so, I want it to be even more fun this year. I want to see new things, meet new people, and learn lots of new things!

Relax

Stress is a fact of life. But, I’m going to try my best to find more places in my life where I can just relax and let the stress melt away. The exercise bit will help some, but I also want to do things and go places that help me relax. I don’t know yet where that will lead, but it’s a plan!

Adieu ‘09, Bonjour 2010

So with this post, I officially say goodbye to 2009 (and to some parts of it, “good riddance”), and hello to the new year. I’m sure there will be plenty of obstacles, and it probably won’t be a boring year, but here’s hoping that it is a good year. Not just for me, but for you too.

Helping Haiti

Of course, for the Haitian people and their families and friends, the start to this year is anything but good. Keep them in your thoughts and prayers, and if possible, donate to help out. Not all of us can up and volunteer on the ground, but every penny can help feed someone in desperate need.
If you want to donate, may I suggest visiting the Red Cross to give online, or texting “HAITI” to 90999 to give $10 via your phone.

A Trip to the Zoo

2009-12-01T21:40:00.001-08:00

Some photographers have the wonderful privilege of going to these exotic (and not-so-exotic) places to see all kinds of animals and make photographs of them, but not all photographers are quite so lucky. For the rest of us, zoos are a wonderful place to experience the beauty and majesty of these animals, even if it is a bit limited by the confines of the zoo itself.

While down with my family celebrating Thanksgiving, we had this absolutely gorgeous day – seventy degrees, gorgeous sunlight, all the trimmings. We knew this was likely the last day of the year to be this nice, and so we just had to do something special to enjoy it. And so a trip to the zoo was in order. After a little bit of finagling with our GPS (road construction confuses these poor things like nothing else), we arrived safe and sound. And… so had everyone else. We weren’t the only ones who figured this would have been a good day, and so the zoo was quite packed. Even so, we moved at our own very leisurely pace and picked up, I think, some fantastic photos.

Flare through Lamp Post (1/250/sec @ f/20; 75mm; 100 iso)

The day was a gorgeous day, as the above image attests. We arrived at the zoo at around 1:30pm, so the sun wasn’t at its peak, but that really didn’t matter; it just meant a bit harder light to deal with. The non-photographer in me was fine with that – I hadn’t seen 70 degree day for what felt like eons, let alone a nice, bright, sunny day. The photographer in me would’ve liked to have had softer light, but you can’t have your cake and eat it too!

Not Just Animals

The zoo isn’t just full of animals, but it is full of gorgeous flowers, plants, and trees. Although most of the flowers and grasses had, justifiably, put up for the winter, a few just couldn’t resist coming out on this glorious day and strutting their stuff.

Still in Bloom (1/250/sec @ f/5.6; 200mm; 160 iso)

Cute Plant (1/250/sec @ f/5; 200mm; 640 iso)

Photographer’s Side Note: Just a tip, if your camera supports it – get a circular polarizing filter! It’s not just for making blue skies bluer or for dealing with reflections in water or glass, but it can also saturate colors – not just blue. It does introduce some light loss (about 1 stop or so at full), but the results are well worth it.

Birds

The zoo has a lot of birds – especially inside, but that gets really difficult to photograph. I have lots of blurry images on my computer now, or images that are sharp but very, very, very noisy due to the low light. Not to mention that a lot of these birds were fairly active, and wouldn’t stay still long enough to get a blur-free image – so even if I had a tripod, I’d have had problems.

But the zoo also had birds outside and in an outdoor bird house (which was impressive on its own), so I was able to get some good shots:

Nitpicking: Standing on one leg, this bird is preening and cleaning. I suspect he's been napping, too.
(1/200 @ f/4; 200mm; 200 iso)

Turquoise Eyes: From a distance this bird didn't look all that interesting -- for one reason, he was preening quite frequently, and didn't let us get a good look. But when I got home, I noticed his gorgeous eyes! Aren't they beautiful? (1/100 @ f/4; 200mm; 1600 iso)

I See You: This bird was just showing all sorts of attitude. I think he's rather used to being photographed!
(1/200 @ f/4; 200mm; 320 iso)

Look At Me! This male peacock was out wandering the grounds, and definitely wasn't afraid of us humans getting up close. He did eventually get tired of us photographers stalking him though, and eventually wandered off to get away from our cameras.
(1/80 @ f/4; 200mm; 1600 iso)

Animals

The zoo is also full of all sorts of animals. Most were taking full advantage of the fantastic weather and sun – either taking a nap or sunning themselves. Some were far more sociable than others… I have an image of a cheetah, but like most cats, it just didn’t want to appease us by making an appearance where any of us could get good pictures. But others just posed and posed, while others could care less what we were doing!

Bush Dogs: Awww, aren't these cute? These bush dogs were so enjoying the gorgeous day and taking a nap out in the sun seemed the perfect way to do it. (1/250 @ f/4; 200mm; 320 iso)

Red River Hog: I rather think this guy is rather cute, although he is definitely a hog, snout and all. He was busy foraging in the grass and dirt for some tasty grub, and was apparently finding some.
(1/160 @ f/5; 200mm; 1600 iso)

Sleeping Hyena: This hyena wasn't being very sociable when we arrived, and was curled up in its cave aways back. Thank goodness for long lenses! Though I think they look rather funny when up and prowling around, this one is managing to pull off "cute" quite successfully. (1/80 @ f/4; 200mm; 400 iso)

Dwarf Mongoose: I nearly missed this guy -- they are really small -- not much bigger than a large rat or something, but they are kinda cute up-close. He was enjoying the very warm rock, apparently, although he was definitely keeping an eye on us.
(1/200 sec @ f/4; 200mm; 1000 iso)

Having a Laugh: Technically I'm sure this Asian Elephant is doing anything but laughing (she's actually eating), but this frame just caught this expression. Who knows? Maybe she really is laughing at us... (1/250 sec @ f/4; 200mm; 250 iso)

Bull on the Prowl: At first this Bull Asian Elephant didn't seem to want to have anything to do with us, preferring instead to prowl in the distance. But something brought him striding proudly forward, and then he stopped to pose for us for quite some time.
(1/250 sec @ f/4; 200mm; 250 iso)

(FAKE) SNAKE ALERT!!!! (FAKE) SNAKE ALERT!!!! (FAKE)SNAKE ALERT!!!!

Okay – so even though the snake below is fake, he’s pretty realistic. If you don’t like such things, click here to skip right on by. Otherwise, scroll down and enjoy:

Fraud: This snake -- while rather realistic -- is totally fake. (I wouldn't be so close if he was real!) But still, he's a bit menacing, isn't he? (1/250 sec @ f/4; 200mm; 1250 iso)

END (FAKE) SNAKE ALERT!!!!

And now, back to our regularly scheduled programming:

Leave Me Alone: This bear was out enjoying the warm weather, and you could almost swear he was fake -- he was stock-still in one position for quite some time, and then did this. I think he was annoyed at all of us interrupting his siesta, since he wandered off to his cave shortly after. (1/250 sec @ f/4; 200mm; 200 iso)

Wanna piece o' me?: Something about this prairie dog just screams "attitude". I think he's got loads of it, and he's not afraid to let it stick out all over him! (1/200 sec @ f/4; 200mm; 500 iso)

I've my eye on you...: This prairie dog wasn't fooling around, keeping a keen eye on us when we got close, and for quite some time after we left. (1/200 sec @ f/4; 200mm; 160 iso)

Gorilla Antics: This image is just prior to this gorilla and another deciding that it would be a good time to ram each other and fight a bit. Not sure if they were really angry (their expressions sure looked it) or if they were showing off for all the onlookers. Regardless, they bonked each other so fast that I didn't have a chance to catch a picture of it!
(1/160 sec @ f/4; 200mm; 1600 iso)

Arf!: These sea lions were out basking in the remnants of the day (it was nearly sunset), and they were generally just in one pose: noses up in the air. But occasionally they'd make these movements at each other and bark a little.
(1/50 sec @ f/4; 121mm; 1600 iso)

Being that the days are pretty short, sunset was upon us by the time we hit the sea lions, and even though the photographer in me wanted to keep going, my feet (and the rest of me) said that it was time to go. And so it was back home, confusing the GPS even more, but we made it. Of course I couldn’t just not see if anything came out, so it was straight to the computer to check to see if the photographs were any good.

Finally, over the last few days, I’ve been able to edit the few you see here. I’ve got a lot more on my computer that may or may not ever see the light of the internet, but these give a pretty good representation of what we were able to see. One thing is for sure: I’d love to go back – the place is too large to explore in one afternoon (even too large for one day).

Photographer’s Side Note: I use Adobe Lightroom to post-process my images – just like film, digital images straight-out-of-camera are rarely exactly what I want. To maintain a consistent “feel” to the images, I also used the same Lightroom preset as a starting point for all the images, and tweaked to suit. I call it “Purple Shadow Vignette”. If you use Lightroom and would like to use this preset, download it here.

Ubuntu 9.10 Netbook Remix First Impressions

2009-11-15T13:35:00.001-08:00

Ubuntu 9.10 Netbook Remix First Impressions

I adore my HP Mini 1000 netbook. It's got a fantastic keyboard (one I can actually type on), and the screen is gorgeous. It's a little cramped for space, though, given that it uses a solid-state drive, but in general that's not a problem -- this isn't my primary machine, after all. (Just don't expect it to handle your entire MP3 collection!)

But Windows XP didn't get along well with the SSD. I don't know why -- it should handle it just fine, but XP would often freeze for no apparent reason and then come back after a few seconds, and I tracked that down to accessing the SSD. So anytime an application needed to load a good bit of data from storage, the entire computer stopped. That gets annoying after awhile, to say the least.

I was originally going to just install Windows 7 on it, hoping it would do a better job, but that 16gb SSD kept nagging at me -- that's not a lot of space for XP; Windows 7 would eat even more. Not only that, but there was no guarantee that performance would be acceptable on the netbook, and so I bit the bullet, and switched the operating system to Linux -- Ubuntu 9.10 Netbook Remix, to be exact.

My first impressions are very favorable. There were some installation difficulties, and I just wish that Adobe would release their products on Linux, but other than that things are going really well. The OS starts up far faster than XP, and once going, the OS is fast, responsive, and actually pretty. Not only that, but the HP is more than capable of supporting Compiz, which adds some pretty nifty effects to dragging windows, switching desktops, etc.

Installation

Installation was not as simple as it should have been, in my opinion. For one, of course, is the lack of a CD or DVD drive -- this is a netbook --, but Ubuntu provides a nice utility for putting the OS on a USB stick and installing from that. Which does work, but with a very big quirk that wasted a lot of my time.

Because some people use the stick as their primary storage (which means they can take the OS anywhere and use it on any machine that can boot from USB) the USB stick tool assumes that's what you're going to do. Nowhere is it obvious you have to select the option to discard all your changes (like documents, etc.) when the OS is shutdown. For one, that's a scary way to phrase it, and two, the install fails if this isn't selected!

So, check the option, and relax; the install proceeds normally, and you're left with a machine that runs just fine, and since you're installing to internal storage, the scary "discard" word isn't a problem -- you'll be saving to your hard drive, not to the USB stick.

That problem solved, the installation went without a hitch, and WAY faster than any Windows install I've ever seen. Granted the UNR version of Ubuntu is a smaller OS than the full version, but it's still pretty cool to see an OS install in something like seven minutes. ;-)

But wait, that's not all...

So everything's installed, and I'm pretty impressed. The machine responds quickly to any of my actions, and exhibits none of the slowness and freezing that XP exhibited. Score one for Linux.

And then the next problem: no wireless. Uh oh - that's a pretty big problem -- I'm not always going to be hooked up to a wire - that's part of the point of a netbook.

So I scour the web, and it turns out that the wireless isn't supplied by default because the HP uses a Broadcom Wifi controller, and there are some legal issues that means that Linux can't use it out-of-the-box.

So I follow as many instructions as I can, and end up installing b43-fwcutter and try that. It's supposed to work, but fails for some reason. No matter what I do, no wireless. Even more annoying, I keep losing my wired connection at random, forcing a reboot to get it back.

And then, by magic, I find a post that indicates that Broadcom has released their own drivers. Downloaded, installed, rebooted, and...

*poof*

No go. Crashed computer. Ick.

Reboot. No wifi. Ick.

And then, after a few more tries, suddenly after a reboot, the wifi controller is there. (!!!) I don't know how it got there, but it was, and so I wasn't going to complain. I set it up to connect to my network, and voila! I had wifi access! YAY!

Elation aside, however, this is where Linux tends to fall flat on its face for new users. I've had experience with various flavours, and am pretty tech savvy, so I was able to eventually get things working. But a new user who knows none of this is going to get stopped by either the first failure (getting the OS to install), or by the second (getting drivers to work). So until Linux gets better at this, it's never going to beat Windows or OS X.

Happy Days Are Here Again...

With the Wifi enabled, happy days officially started. Mostly ;-) Being that this was a brand new installation, there were all sorts of programs I needed to install to get a familiar environment. Here's a few that I installed:

Adobe Air
Tweetdeck
Google Chrome (Dev)
Last.FM
Mozilla Sunbird
Gimp
RawStudio
AbiWord
MonoDevelop
Audacity
Hulu Desktop
Wine

(Yes, Wine. I know it is heresy to install something that would allow some Windows applications to run, but hey -- you never know when you'll need it. And no -- Lightroom does not work under Wine. *Sigh*)

After all that, and configuring each application (like adding plugins to Chrome, getting Flash working, etc.), I have a machine that I can use without feeling frustrated at it because it feels slow or keeps freezing. Responsiveness is amazing, even when I push it. If an application freezes for any reason, the rest of the system still works, which wasn't always the case with XP.

Minor Glitches Remain

Not everything is 100% rosy, but it isn't enough to cause me to drop Linux on this machine. Here's a bit of what is glitchy:

Flash: sucks. Period. While it technically works, it quickly slows any browser or application that uses it to a crawl. I suspect this may be in part to my use of Compiz and extra desktop effects, but seriously -- I like me my eye candy. So watching Hulu in my browser or via the desktop application is a bit painful, but any other flash use is too. It could also just be that Flash for Linux really isn't all that optimized, but whatever the cause, I'll only be using it whenever necessary. (For that reason, I've got FlashBlock installed in Chrome.)
The UNR interface, while very nice, occasionally breaks down when using an application that isn't aware of the limitations of my display. (Chome, I'm looking at YOU.) Granted, UNR is just window-dressing, but it'd be nice to have some way to get to parts of windows that have decided to be off screen because surely no one would ever think to use the application on a screen that's only 600px high.
Also, some portions of the UNR desktop could use extra customizability. Granted, this is supposed to be easy for end-users, but I think we could all grasp moving icons around on our desktop, something I haven't convinced it to do yet.

Even so, Things Are Grand

Even with the glitches, things are grand. Most things have improved, including:

Responsiveness - the HP now hums along beautifully.
Speed - No longer does the HP feel like it's struggling to keep up -- programs open quickly, desktops change fast, application switch is quick, and the machine is even able to render some 3D effects reasonably well.
Compiz - The closest thing I can compare this to would be Windows Vista Aero, but Compiz is really a bit more than that. You can have the things Aero gives you, and so much more, and the HP handles many of these with aplomb. Not everything is within its capabilities -- this is a built-in video card --, but for the most part things are nice and smooth.
Audio - Somehow the drivers supplied with XP made the audio sound like crap. High-pitched, tinny, lacking any punch. I originally chalked that up to the small speakers in the chassis, but the same applied to listening by headphones. So then I assumed the chipset was just crappy. But the Linux drivers have surprised me -- it's not excellent sound, but it's WAY better than under Windows. There's actually some bass involved, and it doesn't sound like I'm listening over a bad telephone connection!

Our Future Together...

Granted, I've only used this on my netbook for a short time. It's possible the same freezing problems will creep up on Linux too, but I doubt it. It's possible I'll run into some sort of horrible bug that'll ruin me on it forever, but again, I doubt it.

My only wish was that Adobe released Lightroom on Linux. Because if they did, I'd seriously consider switching on my primary computer as well -- I'm that impressed. While Vista x64 never really bothered me (x32 is horrible, though), I've never been all that impressed, either, and it quite often feels like molasses, even on a 2+GHz machine with dual cores, 4GB of memory, etc. Ubuntu on that thing would literally fly... :-)

But until then, I'll live in Windows on my primary computer, and keep Linux on my netbook.

My New Best Friend

2009-11-10T21:53:00.001-08:00

Okay, this post is totally not related to photography. At all. Instead, I wanted to introduce you to a new addition to my tech family: the Sony MDR-NC60 Noise Cancelling Headphones.

I had recently the opportunity to try out Bose’s new noise cancelling headphones, and was thoroughly impressed with the noise-cancellation. The first time you put them on, it nearly felt like you were going deaf. There were only two cons: a painful price ($299), and a lack of bass response (though mid- and treble-tones sounded wonderful).

And so, having discovered the joys of noise-cancellation, but wanting a little more in the bass department (I’m like my Dad in this – the more bass, the better) and not wanting to drop quite as large a chunk of cash, I went and found these babies, and for less than the Bose, they deliver excellent noise cancellation and good audio quality – especially bass.

The Sony MDR-NC60 headphones run on a single AAA battery, but you can run the headphones without if you don’t want or need the noise-cancellation. This is nice if you happen to run out of batteries, as you can still listen to your music (other NC headphones require a battery to play music). A battery tends to run about 30 to 40 hours – get a good set of rechargeables and you won’t be always spending money for new batteries.

The headphones also feature a special “monitor” button. When the headphones are cancelling noise, this button, when pressed, will enable you to hear the conversation around you (muting the music) – great for flying when the flight attendant comes by asking if you want something to drink! (Note: this button does not work if NC is turned off.)

For those times when you don’t want to listen to music, but still want the benefit of cancellation, you can actually take the audio cable and unplug it from the headphones so that it doesn’t get in the way. I can see this being useful in a lot of situations, though I’d make sure not to lose that audio cable!

Audio quality is quite good, though as with all NC headphones, there is a little bit of distortion, especially when playing loud music or when playing pure tones (like piano solos), but otherwise audio is quite good. Along with the noise cancellation comes the benefit of not having to blast your music, and so distortion at high volume is less of an issue. Also, depending upon the external noise conditions, distortion may appear even on quiet music; but this is common in all NC headphones.

While cancelling noise, bass response is excellent, but not overpowering. Midtones are rendered well, and higher tones are rendered with good clarity. (In many ways, you’ll hear things you never heard before in your music – especially if you’ve previously used only cheap headphones.)

When Noise Cancellation is off, the audio quality changes a bit; the bass response drops a bit, but the headphones are more able to render louder and purer tones. In other words, when I want to listen to a piece of Bach, I’ll turn NC off; otherwise NC is on all the time.

Build is quite nice; you don’t have the feeling that these will fall apart on you anytime soon. They are also very comfortable, being over-the-ear headphones, but the band itself is also very soft. My previous set of headphones would cause my ears to hurt after a time; these have no such effect.

The headphones come with a nice carrying case to protect them, as well as to carry the extra accessories that come with the headphones, like the adapter so that you can plug into airplane audio ports. It also has a nice little pouch useful for carrying along extra batteries. While it isn’t a hard case, it should protect against most typical issues (like dropping). Crushing, on the other hand… well… just don’t sit on it.

One thing to be aware of is the way noise cancellation feels. Due to the way NC works, you may feel a pressure on your ears – as if you were at high altitude. For some, this is uncomfortable, so I’d advise you to try a pair first and see if it bothers you. For me, the sensation was something I quickly got used to, and now barely notice it. But for others, it may be a different matter.

These are a tad pricey; you can get them at most stores for about $200, although if you look in the right places (like Amazon), you can find them at some very nice prices. And given that they are at least $100 (if not more) cheaper than the Bose equivalents and perform just about as well, I’d say they’re well worth every penny. All I know is that I love mine, even if they have nothing to do with photography, cameras, or expensive lenses!

Want a pair? Check them out at Amazon: Sony MDR-NC60 Noise Cancelling Headphones (List Price: $199.99, click-through for Amazon’s price.)

Lens Review: Canon EF 70-200mm f/4 L USM IS

2009-10-31T16:01:00.001-07:00

Quick Specs:
Focal Range: 70-200mm; 35mm equivalent for 1.6x crop sensors: 112-320mm
Maximum Aperture: f/4 • Minimum Aperture: f/32 • Diaphragm: 8 blades
Minimum Focusing Distance: 4 feet • Magnification: .21x
Weight: 1.7 pounds • Filter Size: 67mm • ✔FTM, ✔USM, ✔IS (+4 stops)

First Impressions

This lens is simply beautiful. From the light cream color on the exterior, to the feel of the rubber rings and the motion of focusing and zooming, you know this lens is built to last and scream “look at me!” – the latter part could be a bad thing or a good thing, depending on how you look at it!

This lens is not as heavy as its bigger brother – the EF 70-200 f/2.8 L USM IS lens, but if f/2.8 is important to you, the non-IS EF version is roughly the same size and weight. If you have a Rebel body, the EF 70-200 f/2.8 L USM IS lens quickly makes the camera look absolutely tiny. (Get a battery grip and that impression goes away.)

Usage

Focusing and zooming are as smooth as butter with enough internal resistance so that zoom creep isn’t an issue. All focusing is internal – as such the front element neither rotates nor moves. Zooming is also internal; this helps protect against sucking in dust.

Autofocus is generally reliable, though not as precise as the f/2.8 variety. But if focus is missed, the full-time-manual focus makes it a breeze to refocus on your subject. Anymore, this is very near to the top of my list of important items for a lens to have; switching to a lens without FTM is difficult for the first few moments as I realize I can’t just focus whenever I want.

One thing that initially surprised me about the lens was the sound it made when it was stabilizing the image. You get used to it pretty quickly, and it isn’t loud, by any means, but the first time you engage the IS, you wonder what’s going on in there to cause that noise. After using it for awhile, I barely notice it anymore.

Image Stabilization is also very effective. Canon claims 4 stops – in reality this will vary between 2 and 3 stops depending on how steady you are to begin with. I’ve had rare success at around 4 stops, and usually can’t count on more than 2.5. Even so, for still objects, this effectively makes the lens an f/1.8 or f/2 lens; but when you introduce a moving subject, all that goes out the window. If you’re going to be shooting moving subjects handheld and in low light, you’ll want to consider the pricier and heavier f/2.8 IS version (if IS is still important to you), or the roughly equivalent (in terms of weight and price) non-IS f/2.8 version.

It is important to note that using this lens will get you noticed. Photographers who don’t have a lens like this will whisper behind your back, wishing they had this lens, and most people immediately have “respect” for you as the photographer. Whereas when shooting with a point-and-shoot, most people don’t watch if they are getting in your way, they definitely take care when they see this long lens. Add the lens hood, and people really take notice; with the lens hood attached, you’re looking at one foot of extension from the mount.

Getting noticed can be a good thing (it actually got me a shoot!), but it can also be a bad thing. Security personnel are far more likely to keep a close eye on you, and some people who wouldn’t otherwise have minded being photographed will balk when faced with this monster pointing at them. One thing is for sure: this lens immediately brands you as a “pro”, and not a “tourist” – so if you want to do the tourist thing, take your P&S, or a much smaller walk-around lens.

Image Quality

Image quality is exceptional, as it should be with any L series lens. Contrast and colors are captured very nicely, and light flare is well controlled. It isn’t as fast as its siblings, meaning that I have to increase my ISO more than I would like, but on a modern body, that doesn’t usually present a problem.

Bokeh is gorgeous, resulting in a very creamy out-of-focus background at large apertures. Even stopped down, the bokeh is quite good. The effect is more obvious at 200mm than at 70mm due to the smaller depth-of-field, but at either end things look wonderful.

Color Fringing is virtually invisible on this lens. I’ve seen a few traces here and there, but of all the lenses in my kit, this one takes the cake in terms of controlling fringing. Flare is also exceptionally controlled; short of pointing this thing into the sun, you’ll hardly ever see any flare.

There is a little lens distortion at either end of the focal range, as is typical with any zoom lens. There are simply too many compromises that have to be made with a zoom lens versus a prime lens. While the distortion is evident in lab tests, I’ve yet to have the distortion be truly visible or worrisome in real life. For a zoom, this is fantastic, and while it isn’t quite as good as a prime lens, the ability to reframe without having to change lenses is a huge benefit.

This lens is, quite simply, tack sharp, even at the maximum aperture of f/4. This is really impressive for a telephoto zoom lens, and rivals (if not exceeds in some areas) the performance of the various primes that fall within the focal length of this lens. However, this only applies to this lens – the other lenses in the family do not have the same optics, and though they are also exceptionally sharp, they are just a little less so.

Macro:

This lens isn’t going to win any awards in the macro lens world. Even so, under the right conditions, you can get some decent closeups, but don’t expect anything like a 1:1 ratio. This lens is closer to 1:5, but if you need better, you can always add extension tubes. Even so, it makes for fantastic flower shots or portraits, so unless you need to get really close, this shouldn’t be too terrible a concern.

Pros:

Nice, constant maximum aperture of f/4
Good range of 70-200mm
Excellent image quality with minimal flare and negligible fringing in very high contrast areas
Full-time Manual Focus
Beautiful bokeh
Very well built
Tack sharp at all apertures; rivals primes in the same focal range.
Image Stabilizer can live up to the claimed 4 stop improvement if you’re very steady to begin with.

Cons:

67mm filter ring; most lenses in this range take 77mm, and so you’ll be buying more filters rather than re-using your existing filters.
Image Stabilization can’t stop a moving subject, so if f/4 isn’t fast enough, consider either of the f/2.8 variants. If you need faster yet, you’ll want to consider a prime lens.
70mm on the low end can be limiting at times; you’ll need to switch to another lens if you’re in even relatively cramped quarters. 200m is good reach, but if you want to bird, you’ll need a longer lens yet.
Price – Amazon has this lens for just over $1,300

Conclusion

If you want great image quality, good zoom range, with fantastic image stabilization, grab this lens. Your pocket-book will scream when it sees the bill, but once you start taking pictures, you’ll quickly forget about the price.

Lens Review: Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8 L USM Review

2009-10-31T15:22:00.000-07:00

Quick Specs:
Focal Range: 24-70mm; 35mm equivalent for 1.6x crop sensors: 38-112mm
Maximum Aperture: f/2.8 • Minimum Aperture: f/22 • Diaphragm: 8 blades
Minimum Focusing Distance: 1 1/4 feet • Magnification: .29x (@70mm)
Weight: 2.1 pounds • Filter Size: 77mm • ✔FTM, ✔USM, ✘IS

First Impressions

This lens is simply gorgeous. It feels very well constructed and the focus and zoom rings turn smoothly. It presents a nice bright image in the viewfinder, being an f/2.8 lens, and is easy to get very attached to. It is a tad heavy (2.1 pounds), but when you see the results you forget about the weight. (Besides, after awhile, you’ll build up your muscles and won’t notice it anymore!)

Usage

This lens is an absolute joy to use. Focusing is internal, so the front element never rotates – important for filters. What isn’t internal is the zoom – at 70mm, the lens is at its most compact, but extends an additional 2-3 inches when zooming out to 24mm. A little odd, but it doesn’t affect me in practice. When the lens hood is attached, the reason for this becomes obvious – the hood is always the correct distance from the front elements, whereas on cheaper (or other) lenses, the hood is really just made for one focal length, and out-of-place (or in the way) for all other lengths.

Autofocus is generally accurate on a Rebel body, and if the camera misses, the full-time manual focus comes in very handy. Honestly, this is very nearly the most important feature of a lens to me anymore – whenever I switch to a lens that doesn’t support this, it always takes me a moment to realize that I can’t manually focus after the camera has attained what it thinks is a focused image. (And on some lenses, doing so could screw up the focusing motors…, not good!)

It is important to realize that this lens does not have image stabilization. At wide angles this is not as important, but when you get out to 70mm, it quickly becomes an issue if you are shooting handheld and in low light. And, to be honest, even though this lens is a fast f/2.8, it would be a nice addition to have IS at the wide angles as well. Of course, that would add to the price and weight. (If, however, you do want IS, you could consider the 24-105 f/4 L IS USM lens, but you will lose one stop of light.)

Image Quality

Image quality is exceptional, as it should be with any L series lens. Contrast and colors are captured very nicely, and light flare is well controlled. That this is also a fast lens means I can shoot at a lower ISO setting – reducing the noise in the image.

Bokeh is very nice, even when stopped down a bit, resulting in nice, creamy backgrounds. You’ll notice this the most when at the far end of the focal range, as telephoto focal ranges result in a shallower depth of field.

Color Fringing isn’t bad, but not totally absent, either. Here the 70-200mm L telephoto lens seems to outshine this lens, as it is next to impossible to cause very obvious fringing. Even so, the fringing that is present in this lens is manageable, and is no where near what the cheaper wide-angle lenses generate. (I’m talking to you, 18-55mm kit lens!)

There is a little vignetting evident on some images on a 1.6x crop sensor; light fall-off will be more evident on a full-frame sensor, but not at all bad. Stopping down helps alleviate this.

Macro:

This lens isn’t going to win any awards in the macro lens world. Even so, under the right conditions, you can get some decent closeups, but don’t expect anything like a 1:1 ratio. This lens is closer to 1:3.5, but if you need better, you can always add extension tubes. Even so, it makes for fantastic flower shots, so unless you need to get really close, this shouldn’t be too terrible a concern.

Pros:

Nice maximum aperture of f/2.8
Good range of 24-70mm
Excellent image quality with minimal flare and only a little bit of fringing in very high contrast areas
Full-time Manual Focus
Good bokeh
Very well built

Cons:

A tad on the heavy side (2.1 pounds)
No image stabilization (though this isn’t a deal-breaker at wider angles)
70mm can be limiting at times – if you need more range in a single lens, try the 24-105mm f/4 L IS USM
Price – Amazon has this lens for just over $1,300

Conclusion

If you want great image quality, good zoom range, with excellent low-light capabilities, grab this lens. Yes, the credit card will wince a little when it sees $1,300 come across, but it is SO worth it. My only wish would be to have image stabilization on the lens, but that would add to both the price and the weight.

Side Note: On a 1.6x crop sensor this doesn’t give a tremendously wide angle of view – only equivalent to 38mm. If you need wider on the smaller sensor, you could consider the 17-40mm or the 16-35mm. You could also go after the EF-S 10-22mm, but this lens would not be usable on any non-1.6x crop camera.

Stop! Don’t Delete That Picture!

2009-10-30T22:45:00.001-07:00

Here’s a quick & dirty reason why you shouldn’t just delete pictures – at least not before you’ve given some thought as to how you could salvage them:

First off, let me say this: isn’t this little guy adorable? And yet the picture is obviously a “mistake” – accidentally taken with far too long an exposure, blurred, moving, etc.

My first instinct was to delete the picture.

Then a thought flitted into my head… “maybe I can do something interesting with it…”

And so I tried, and here’s the result:

Face of an Angel (1/2 second at f/7.1, ISO 400, 116mm)

I don’t know about you, but I think it was one of the best from the shoot. There’s just something so… beautiful… innocent… intangible about the image that I have fallen in love with it.

And, it was a perfect example for this quick lesson: before you delete a picture, think about what you could do to save it. Unless it’s a picture of the lens cap, chance are you can do something with it!

Until next time, keep writing with light!

Something Different

2009-10-02T12:23:00.001-07:00

When a gaggle of geese visits you every few months, you tend to get familiar with them – as much as they will allow, of course. But this year there’s something different in the midst of this gaggle:

“Something Different”

I’m not sure if this is an albino Canada Goose, or if it is a Snow Goose. Either way, it is strange seeing this white goose amongst all the other geese. Even more interesting is that this goose is tolerated in the group.

“Looking for Food”

It’s not obvious from these two images, though, that this bird is injured. This poor thing walks with a limp – not sure if he has a broken or simply malformed leg, but it is painful to watch him try to walk. He gets around enough to eat and such, and his wings look normal, so he can probably fly okay, but still, it is sad to see, especially when he is such a beautiful bird.

The next couple of images have nothing to do with this white goose; just some friendly geese from the same gaggle:

“Taking Flight”

These geese took flight as I was photographing the other white goose. This was the only decent photo I got before they were all behind the tree. The lead goose’s head was, in reality, already behind the leaves, but a little post-processing work, and you get to see the whole thing!

“Enjoying the Evening”

More like “watching me”, but there’s just something pleasant about this goose and the scene. He’s not really that far away from the rest of the geese; but he was on the outer edges of the pack just standing there with his eye on me. After a few more pics, I hurried on to my car – it was cold out! –, but he apparently didn’t mind the temperature. Must be all those feathers!

On a totally different note, I get to go down to St. Louis this weekend and visit family and get to see my two nephews… they are going to be so fun to chase around with my camera!!!! Here’s hoping for some great pics…

Music to Work & Relax By

2009-09-20T00:41:00.001-07:00

This technically has nothing to with photography. I just wanted to point you to some musical artists whose music I find inspiring and/or relaxing and/or easy to work or relax with:

I can’t imagine you’ve not heard of many of these before, but if you’ve not had the opportunity to hear their music, or just haven’t listened to them in a while, you may want to try them again (or for the first time).

Don’t Forget About Crop Aspect Ratios

2009-09-20T00:30:00.001-07:00

When cropping an image, it is very simple to get locked in to cropping using the original aspect ratio. But sometimes it can be worth it to experiment with other aspect ratios, including square and panoramic.

There’s an easy way to set up some your favorite crops in Lightroom so that you can use them frequently. Just do these steps:

Enter “Develop” mode
Go to “Crop” mode
Next to “Aspect” should be the current image’s aspect ratio, followed by a little drop-down arrow. Click it.
There are several pre-defined ratios, but they may not meet your needs. If a predefined ratio works, select it, but if you need to create a custom one, do this:

Click “Enter Custom…”
Enter your new crop (in inches; if it is too big, Lightroom will scale it back to fit the current image.)
Click “OK”

Your new aspect ratio should be selected, and you can crop your image as desired.

My favorite aspect ratios at the moment are square and widescreen (16:10 or 16:9 ratio) crops. The latter two make it easier to crop images for optimum display on newer widescreen monitors (rather than printing), but square crops intrigue me for some reason.

So next time you’re cropping an image and are finding it difficult to find a composition you like with the selected crop, pick another aspect ratio and see how that goes. I have several images that work best in a square crop instead of their original aspect. Just another way to help you get inspired!

Word of Caution: Unless you’ve a camera with lots and lots and lots of megapixels (and I mean lots), don’t get too carried away with cropping a large amount of your image, especially if you intend to print the image. A 600x400 image might work on the screen, but it won’t print a 12x8 print very well.

The Golden Hour + Lightroom Presets = Really Cool

2009-09-20T00:12:00.001-07:00

The Golden Hour is a fantastic time to take pictures – the light is amazing, and you get all these wonderful colors that just don’t happen when the sun is directly above you. But say you took those fantastic pictures and did a bit more with them after the fact?

First off, I love, love, love the Hodda Blue/Yellow split tone (available for free for LightRoom here). The first six in this post all use the preset at some point in their processing (along with the usual adjustment of levels, crops, and any spot removal needed…)

These first three are insect photos that I happen to like a lot. They were taken just before the golden hour really set in, so in reality everything was nice and green --- using the preset here happened to isolate the subject better by turning the green into a more “purple” background. It also gave the images a look not typically seen in nature photography – wherein the colors here aren’t really representative of the real thing.

The images above were taken just prior to the golden hour; the ones that follow were taken right in the midst. Here the split toning makes for some striking images:

The image below didn’t use the blue/yellow preset. Instead it used a lot of presets (including: WOW Gradient P09, Focus > Snow Detail, and Blue/Red Cross), but I like the effect:

And for the final image – sunset with silhouette trees, the image was spectacular without any processing. In fact, I almost let it go online without any processing. And then I got to playing, and when I used the ADB AGFA Cross Process preset, along with some vignettes, and some additional saturation / vibrance adjustments, this came out. I’m in love:

My last post on this blog was about the golden hour, so this makes two in a row about that subject. But it is an important time of day – the colors are just so gorgeous. But even though the image might be perfect before you do any real work on it, don’t let it stop you from trying things out. You might just find an effect you really, really like (like I did).

So, if you have Lightroom, and like to play with presets, here are some great sites to get you going:

Technical Note: all the above except the last image were taken with the Canon EF 24-70mm L USM lens + UV Filter + Circular Polarizer. The final image was taken using the Canon EF 70-200mm L USM IS lens + UV Filter. Neither lens is cheap, but if you shoot Canon and can get either one of these lenses, you won’t regret it. Aside from being great to build arm strength, they deliver fantastic image quality and ease of use. That said, you can get great image quality with less expensive lenses – so don’t let lens-lust stop you.

Oh, and one more final note – if you don’t have a polarizing filter yet, get one. UV filters can be of questionable value, but a polarizer can do things to colors and reflections that would be hard (if not impossible) to duplicate in Photoshop. You can lose 1 – 2 stops of light when using them, but the results are well worth it. (Just don’t get the cheapie $15 ones. Get something that’s in the $50+ range.)

So – until next time, keep writing with light… (especially the golden kind!)

Remains of the Day

2009-08-14T23:28:00.001-07:00

Sometimes the best nature pictures can come at the end of the day, when all the day creatures and plants start wrapping up their daily duties and preparing for the oncoming night, and while the nocturnal creatures and plants begin to make plans for the next several hours of darkness.

The remains of the day also happens to give some absolutely fantastic light in which to shoot – warm tones, golden hues – hence the term “golden hour”. And “hour” is about right, give or take a few minutes, depending on the season and where you live.

Even though each of the photos above have been post-processed to evoke a certain mood or feeling, they were all taken within the same one hour span prior to the sun fully setting. That the sun is low in the sky creates dramatic shadows, but at the same time warms the colors significantly. Most photographers are in love with this kind of light, for good reason – it’s beautiful, before and after post-processing gets applied.

You may also notice that in every one of the above shots, I’m shooting towards the sun. You don’t have to do this, obviously, but in the case of the top-left image, doing so created a very strong backlight effect on the plant. It also lent itself well towards the long shadows in the lower two images. Though you can’t really tell it, the sun was behind the silo in the upper-right image, making it really simple to come up with a striking silhouette, and lending a golden hue to the sky.

You can do all sorts of things with the light the golden hour creates. Depending on what you are shooting, though, you may need to increase your ISO, open your aperture, or bring a tripod. The sun may be out, but the amount of light getting into your camera is no where near that generated at high noon. Of course, the reverse can easily apply if you’re aiming directly at the setting sun and aiming to create silhouettes; drop your ISO to 100 and you’ll still have shutter speeds hovering around 1/500 to 1/1600. But for anything more than a silhouette, you’ll need to increase your ISO and open your aperture to let as much light in as possible if you plan on hand-holding (and don’t forget the inverse focal length rule – and having image stabilization really helps here!). If you have a tripod, on the other hand, keep your ISO as low as you can, and set your aperture for your desired effect, and go at it. No matter how you shoot during the golden hour, you’ll have a blast, I guarantee it!

P.S. If you’re not a night owl, but a morning person instead, the same rules apply to the rising sun. You’ll get fantastic golden light with dramatic shadows during the early morning hours. On the other hand, if neither the morning or evening are your cup of tea, you can still make great pictures, but I tell ya – you’re missing something special!

Until next time, keep on writing with light!

Resources: Photography Books and Magazines

2009-08-04T13:36:00.000-07:00

Below are some of the books I'm reading, or have read, with links to Amazon (more to come as I have time to read & post!):

A Digital Photographer’s Guide to Model Releases by Dan Heller	Digital Portrait Photography by Steve Sint	Photographer’s Market: Building Your Photography Business by Vik Orenstien
The Photographer’s Eye by Michael Freeman	The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Book by Martin Evening	Photographer’s Exposure Handbook by Jack Neubart
Digital Photography Masterclass by Tom Ang	The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 book for Digital Photographers by Scott Kelby	Stephen Johnson on Digital Photography
Photoshop Lightroom 2 Adventure by Mikkel Aaland	Canon EOS REBEL XSi/450D: Guide to Digital Photography by David Busch
Magazines I like:
Outdoor Photography	Shutterbug

My Almost Perfect Point-and-Shoot

2009-08-02T02:22:00.001-07:00

In a previous post I outlined my requirements for a perfect point-and-shoot while simultaneously lamenting the fact that the Olympus E-P1 didn’t fulfill my wishes. I seriously considered several cameras – from the Sigma DP1 and DP2 to the Canon G9/G10. What I didn’t count on was falling in love with a littler camera at half the price (roughly $230). I ended up purchasing a Canon Powershot SX110IS – the link for all the tech specs and more from Amazon is here.

Granted, this little camera has very few of my absolute requirements for the perfect point-and-shoot. But that’s okay – I went in to the purchase knowing that no perfect point-and-shoot existed. The Sigmas, while their image quality is excellent, are slow as molasses. The Olympus was just too expensive (fix the LCD screen and focusing speed, and I might reconsider), and the Canon G9 and G10 looked promising, but were ultimately overpriced when considering only image quality. (If I’m going to spend $500+ on a point-and-shoot, it had best have fantastic image quality. While good, the G10 is not excellent in this regard.)

And so I found myself playing with this little guy in the store, and very quickly fell in love with it. The controls are fantastic – it has the rotating dial in the back, which I adore, and it has a very nice 10x optical zoom (36-360mm equivalent). It only has 9 megapixels, which considering the 1/2.3” sized sensor is a good thing – this sensor is way too small for anything more (and really, it should only have 6 or 7MP). It also has a full range of advanced modes, including Av, Tv, and M. While one can argue about the benefits of these modes on such a small camera, I still find that I live in Av, even though the camera doesn’t have nearly the ranges my dSLR has. (It can go from f/2.8 to f/8.0 at 6mm, and f/4.3 to f/8 at 60mm.)

The camera also provides manual focusing controls, which are the best I’ve used on any point-and-shoot camera to date, and I can’t imagine any better, short of being able to have a focus ring on the lens. The camera can be set up to automatically enlarge a portion of the scene in order to help you achieve focus.

One unexpected bonus is the camera’s macro abilities. It can focus at 1cm (!!) at 6mm, which makes this thing literally able to focus on anything. It does have to be turned on – otherwise the camera limits the focus to about 12 – 18 inches. And, once you move out of 6mm, the 1cm macro focus is no longer an option. Even so, when most other point-and-shoots can go no closer than 5cm (if that), 1cm is fantastic!

It does lack a viewfinder of any kind, but at $230, I don’t expect one. The screen isn’t 930k pixels, either, but again, $230 doesn’t buy a screen that nice. That said, the SZ110is’s screen is a nice screen, even if it is only 230k pixels. And while the 10x zoom is very appreciated (and the included image stabilization helps quite a bit), there is a fair amount of barrel distortion at the wide end, and pincushion at the telephoto end. It’s nothing that can’t be fixed in Photoshop, but it’d be nice not to have to worry about it all.

It does support video recording, but unfortunately it maxes out at 640x480. Quality is good, but HD would’ve been even nicer. I don’t do a lot of video, so this isn’t something I worry about much.

It also natively lacked the ability to record in RAW. While it does a very nice job with JPGs, I’ve come to enjoy the versatility of RAW images – something the Canon G9/G10, and the other contenders, supported out of the box. But the individuals over at CHDK remedied that problem by having a beta version of their enhancements for the camera available for download. It’s really more of an “add-on” than a firmware update, because it never modifies the original firmware. It lives on the SD card and can be turned on and off at will.

CHDK does a great many things – far too many to elaborate on. It can be used to override various settings in the camera – even if the camera itself doesn’t support it (like bracketing or Av/Tv modes on lesser models), but what most attracted me was the ability to shoot in RAW, which means that I now have 10-bit per channel RAW images that I can edit in Lightroom or Photoshop, rather than 8-bit JPGs. Those extra two bits help a lot – going from 256 values to 1024 values per channel. The downside is that these files are larger, and require more time to process in camera (especially if using DNG auto-convert). (One slight problem with the DNGs out of camera: Lightroom and other RAW processors do NOT handle the color correctly – CHDK is beta, after all – but it was a problem easily fixed by applying a DNG profile to fix the problem; links at end of post).

CHDK is not for the faint of heart – it takes a bit of knowledge to get the files onto the SD card (and don’t use anything >4gb), and once you’ve got it properly installed, you’ll run your camera flat trying to figure out the best settings for you. But once you figure all that out, you’ll have an insanely powerful little camera in your hands! And even if you decide not to apply CHDK, the SX110 IS is a fantastic camera that still offers a good bit of manual control for those of us who are control freaks like that!

Overall, the SX110is is a point-and-shoot I’m happy with, especially with the addition of CHDK to the feature list. Image quality is good (although I’ll go no higher than ISO 200 except in dire circumstances – and don’t even bother at ISO 1600+), the zoom range is very useful, the macro ability is amazing, and the manual modes are very nice to have – especially manual focusing. And for $230, it is half the price of a G10, which ultimately made the decision to get this little guy instead a very easy one indeed.

CHDK:

Main Wiki: http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/CHDK
Forums: http://chdk.setepontos.com/index.php

SX110 IS DNG Profile Links:

http://chdk.setepontos.com/index.php/topic,390.msg34528.html#msg34528
- This is the one I’ve been using and can confirm it works quite well
http://chdk.setepontos.com/index.php/topic,3930.0.html
- These are newer versions that I haven’t tested yet. Given the success of the .103 version, .104 and .105 should be even better!

SX110IS at Amazon:

Canon Powershot SX110IS 9MP Digital Camera with 10x Optical Image Stabilized Zoom (Black)

Why Your Camera Should Always Be With You

2009-07-30T21:08:00.001-07:00

Because you never know what might be around that you’ll think makes a really cool picture. Case in point this little, tiny spider on the windshield of my car, after having gone grocery shopping – I had one chance (the light was about to turn green), and my little point-and-shoot that can do a macro focus at 1cm did the job perfectly. One thing it did pick up a tad too well was the dirt on the windshield – which means my car needs a wash (which it got – see last post).

And in case you’re wondering – the spider is on the outside of the car – which is why I could think enough to take the picture. It also helped that he was absolutely tiny (far smaller than this picture lets on). As to his well being after the light turned green, I can’t say – all I know is he was no longer attached to the car after the light turned green. (Poor little guy!)

Look What Happened On The Way Home!

2009-07-30T20:59:00.001-07:00

The weather forecast said a slight chance of thunderstorms. Well – it was right! During my drive home, I ran in to this:

Words really do not do the above pic justice, and the pic does not do the actual thing justice. That thing was spinning, I tell you. Granted, it was dying (It didn’t stay this way long), but STILL – it was a very nasty cloud. The rain was on the windshield was from a very heavy downpour seconds before sighting this thing.

Closer to home, the sun broke out and rendered this fantastic scene, with sun beams breaking through the nasty clouds in the distance. And yes, this after another (of several) downpour – as my windshield reveals.

And this is looking back at the monster storm. Okay – so it wasn’t that big of one – probably wasn’t even indicated severe at any point in its life cycle. But seriously – it wanted to be worse. (And now I’m attributing feelings, motive, and character to a storm. What’s that say about me?)

Another view of the receding storm – you can see some of the high thunderclouds way in the distance. And all that rain? I think my car sure feels like it went through all of it – it definitely got doused enough times to qualify as having a car wash!

Needless to say it was an interesting ride – rain, clouds, sun, rain, clouds, sun, rinse, lather, repeat. I’m just thankful that the storm didn’t have a chance to get nastier, and that it had stopped raining by the time I got home so that I didn’t get drenched!

Photography 101: What is Exposure?

2009-07-26T15:08:00.001-07:00

Exposure itself is a pretty simple idea – your camera (assuming it is digital) has a sensor buried inside that is light-sensitive. When you take a picture, you expose the sensor to light for a given period of time. However much light gets in determines the brightness (or darkness) of the resulting image.

Of course, in real life, simple things aren’t always made simple. In general, there are three things that control exposure – and these things make up something called the “Exposure Triangle”:

Shutter Speed
Aperture (f/stop)
ISO (sensitivity)

Each one of these items together determines your exposure. If you change any one without changing the others, you will see radically different exposures because all three work together. Each of these items also has an impact on other factors in the image (such as noise, depth-of-field, and stopping/blurring the action), which we’ll cover in a post on each (Each one could fill a book!)

Shutter Speed

Quickly, though, each of the items above help determine the exposure in different ways. “Shutter Speed” controls how long the shutter is open – thus controlling how long the sensor in your camera is exposed to light. If the shutter speed is short, then only a little light can fall on the sensor. Conversely, if the shutter speed is long, more light can fall on the sensor. However long your shutter needs to stay open depends upon a few factors, namely:

The amount of light available (Is it day? Is it night?)
How still the camera is (are you hand-holding? Is the camera mounted on a tripod?)
Your Aperture and ISO settings

What matters most is that for the time the shutter is open and exposing the sensor, the camera itself should not move (unless you are after some artistic effects). This also applies to the scene the camera sees – if anything moves while the shutter is open, it turns into a blur. (And sometimes this is what you want. But not usually.) The biggest cause of blur is camera shake – the fact that we humans aren’t very stable and can’t hold anything still for a long period of time – thus, if we are handholding, a fast (short) shutter speed is a good idea.

A good rule of thumb: the shutter speed shouldn’t exceed the inverse of your focal length. For example – if my lens is at 50mm, then my shutter speed shouldn’t be longer than 1/50s. If I’m zoomed in at 200mm, then I can’t go slower than 1/200s. But if I’m zoomed out at 18mm, I can get by with 1/18s. If you want to be safe, halve the amounts – at 18mm, don’t go longer than 1/30s, at 50mm, don’t go longer than 1/100s, and at 200m, don’t go longer than 1/400s.

Aperture (or f/stop)

The next factor is the "Aperture”, or “f/stop”. This controls the amount of light allowed to get through the lens – think of it like a pipe. A large pipe can let a lot of water through, but a small pipe can only let a little light through. The same holds true for the aperture. A large aperture lets a lot of light through, but a small one only lets a small amount through. We usually express the size of the aperture in terms of “f/stops”.

f/stops are really a ratio between the size of the aperture and your focal length. Because of this, things get a little wonky when talking about them – especially for beginners. This is because a small f/stop means a large aperture, and a large f/stop means a small aperture. The benefit of wrapping your head around this is that f/8 is the same as f/8 on any camera and lens– it lets relatively the same amount of light through to the sensor.

The scale of f/stops is usually listed as it appears below. The important thing to remember is that increasing by one f/stop is the same as halving the amount of light that can get through to the sensor. Conversely, decreasing by one f/stop is the same as doubling the amount of light that can get through to the sensor.

The F/stop Scale: f/1.0, f/1.4, f/2, f/2.8, f/4, f/5.6, f/8, f/11, f/16, f/22, …

Most cameras let you get in-between the stops – usually by 1/3 or 1/2 stops. Repeating the scale above including all the 1/3 increments gives us this list:

f/1.0, f/1.1, f/1.2, f/1.4, f/1.6, f/1.8, f/2, f/2.2, f/2.5, f/4, f/4.5, f/5.0, f/5.6, f/6.3, f/7.1, f/8, f/9, f/10, f/11, f/13, f/14, f/16, f/18, f/20, f/22, …

Just remember that the smaller the f/stop, the more light is entering the camera, and vice versa. Also remember that your lens may or may not be able to reach the lowest (or highest) f/stops – this is usually indicated in the manual for your lens (or camera).

There are creative reasons you might want to use a small f/stop, vs. using a large f/stop, but we’ll cover these in a later post.

ISO

The last item is “ISO” – how sensitive your sensor is to light. In the digital world, this is really just amplification – think of recording a soft-spoken individual, then amplifying the recording to make them louder. The problem with amplification is that you don’t only amplify the person, but you also amplify everything else, including background noise. What was once a nearly inaudible hiss may quickly become a mighty roar, quickly obscuring the words of the speaker.

The same applies to the ISO setting in your digital camera. The lower the ISO, the less noise. The higher the ISO, the worse the noise gets, to the point of obscuring detail in the image. Most cameras offer a range of ISO 100 – 1600. (Some go as low as ISO 50; several can go higher – like ISO 6400). The typical ISO range is expressed like this:

ISO: 50, 100, 200, 400, 800, 1600, 3200, 6400, …

While most cameras only let the user pick from one of these settings, when using “Auto ISO”, the camera is free to pick any ISO setting, including ones in-between. (Which explains why you might see a picture at ISO 320 or ISO 64 instead of ISO 400 or ISO 50.)

So – you might ask – if using the lowest ISO generates the best image quality, why would I ever use anything else? The answer is that if you are shooting in low light (at night, or even just indoors), a low ISO may make your shutter speed too long, and you may not be able to get a sharp picture – so if you are hand-holding, or taking pictures of a sports event and need to freeze the action, you need to use a fast shutter speed – which means increasing your ISO (assuming you’ve already set your aperture as wide as it will go). It quickly becomes a trade-off of image quality (noise) vs. getting the image at all. It also depends on your camera – a dSLR with a large sensor will generate less noise at high ISO settings than will a point-and-shoot with a small sensor with the same number of megapixels as the dSLR.

Marketing Alert: Big numbers sell – fact of life. Unfortunately, camera marketers have latched on to the “megapixel” as the “big number” – which means that most people think a 15-megapixel camera generates better images than a 9-megapixel camera. This is, unfortunately, not true, because it really boils down to the number of megapixels and the size of the sensor. If the sensor remains the same size, increasing the megapixels will result in a noisier image – not a better one. This is why older point-and-shoot cameras can often out-perform their younger siblings when in low-light situations – less megapixels, meaning less noise. It is also why professional photographers buy dSLR or even medium-format cameras – a bigger sensor means more room for those megapixels, and thus less noise. (Of course, newer cameras offer their advantages – better battery life, better screens, HD video, etc. Just don’t let the number of megapixels be your only reason for picking a camera.)

Above: Example of increasing ISO and the resulting increase in Noise and loss of Detail
Camera: Canon Powershot SX110IS, 9.0 Megapixels, 1/2.3” sensor. A dSLR would
generate significantly better results at high ISO.

Exposure Compensation

There is one other item that I didn’t include in the list above: “Exposure Compensation”, or “EV Comp”. The reason this exists is simply because the camera has to guess at the right combination of settings to use in order to get a “properly” exposed image (one where the subject is not too bright, but not too dark either). Sometimes the camera gets it wrong, and the photographer needs to compensate – and it is here they use “Exposure Compensation”.

Essentially this controls the shutter speed – so the photographer could just adjust the shutter speed for the same effect – but not all cameras make this easy, practical, or even possible. (Especially point-and-shoot cameras.) Instead they make it easier to use the Exposure Compensation button (usually a +/- button). Usually a camera will offer a range of -2 stops (four times darker) to +2 stops (four times brighter) with 1/3 stops in-between.

Above: Example of Exposure Compensation, from -2 to +2 EV.
Camera: Canon Powershot SX110IS, 9.0 Megapixels, 1/2.3” sensor.

One Final Word about Exposure

I lied. Ha!

If you’ve read this far without your brain exploding, congrats! And if you haven’t, then come back again in a few days and try to read a little further. It gets easier, I promise!

As far as exposure goes, we do have a few terms we like to pair with the word in the photography world. Understanding them will help you understand what everyone else is talking about:

“Under”-exposed: The subject in the image is too dark. See the above image – “-2EV” is definitely under-exposed.
“Over”-exposed: The subject in the image is too bright, and may have lost detail due to “highlight clipping”. See the above image – “+2EV” is definitely over-exposed, and the whites of the subject have lost significant detail, meaning that detail proably can’t be recovered - (hence the term, highlight clipping).
“Correct” exposure: while this is in the eye of the beholder (if the image is what you wanted it to be, it’s correctly exposed), this would mean the subject isn’t too bright or too dark. In the above image, anything between “0EV” and “1EV” could be considered to be correctly exposed, depending upon what I, the photographer, wanted.

Metering Modes

So there you have it – almost. There’s an important detail I’ve left out in this discussion, and that’s called “metering modes”. There are several different modes, and each controls how the camera sees a scene. Nearly every camera lets you change the mode you use, but suffice to say that there are generally three modes on most cameras (some have four or more):

Evaluative, Matrix, Pattern
Center-weighted Average
Spot

The Evaluative/Matrix/Pattern mode essentially looks at the entire scene, goes through a big database, and determines the best settings to use based upon what it sees. If the top of the image is bright, the bottom is dark, and there’s a spot in the middle that is in-between, chances are you’re photographing a person against bright sky and dark landscape – and the camera picks settings that will make the person not too dark and not too bright.

The Center-weighted Average mode takes the center of the image and weights it above everything else in the image. Here the camera assumes that the center of the image is what you are exposing for, and adjusts the settings appropriately to keep whatever is in the center not too bright, and not too dark.

The Spot mode takes a tiny portion of the center of the image and bases all the settings on that tiny little area. If the area is dark, but the rest of the image isn’t, you’ll end up with the dark area properly exposed, but the rest will be way too bright. (And vice versa, if the area is bright, but the rest isn’t, you’ll end up with the bright area properly exposed, but the rest will be dark.) Not too long ago, this was how all cameras that did automatic exposure worked – but now the Evaluative/Matrix/Pattern mode is generally the best choice. (Really – lots of research, effort, and time has gone into making the evaluative/matrix/pattern modes work well – definitely more time than you yourself have spent figuring all this out.) About the only time you’d use Spot now is if you were taking pictures of small bright lights (either candles, Christmas tree lights, etc.), and wanted everything but the lights to be ignored.

Ok – I’m done, now, I promise!

Well – until the next time! None of this is very hard to figure out, but it does take time and lots of practice. But that’s a benefit of this digital world – if you take a picture and don’t like it, it didn’t cost you anything but a few seconds to create. You can delete it, try another setting, and try again, all without wasting money on film, developing, and printing. And that’s the only real way to improve your photographs – take lots of photos, practice with your camera settings, and experiment.

And so, until next time – keep writing with light!

Beauty All Around

2009-07-23T21:32:00.001-07:00

All too often we go through our lives without really stopping to appreciate those things that are around us – even though they may be small things or large things. They might be things we take for granted – like trees or flowers, or even things we find annoying or a bit frightening (like spiders, bees, or other creepy-crawlies). And yet, if we would pause but for a moment, we might just find out that there are truly beautiful things all around us – just waiting to be discovered.

If you are a photographer, chances are you’ve specialized in certain types of photography – like weddings, or sports, or portraits. And if you haven’t – or are discovering your niche – that’s fine too. Regardless of where you are in your photography, I challenge you to take some time and just look around you – you might be very surprised at what appears before your eyes.

Below are some shots taken on a photowalk at a small park in southern Illinois. I never got beyond the entrance – there were simply so many little flowers, bugs, beetles, bees, and dragonflies that were beautiful subjects that I didn’t need to go any further!

I’ve officially been bitten by the love of bumblebees. Not that I’m out to pick one up, mind you, but they are just so difficult to photograph well. The above image is one of my best bumblebees to date, and given the interesting flower he’s on, it makes the image all the better. I shot this with a 50mm lens at f/8 to ensure that I would get both the bee and flower in good focus.

The above image is fairly simple – just some yellow flowers cloistered together. But look at all the detail in each flower – it simply boggles the mind!

Given that there were dragonflies around, well – I just had to try and get some pictures of them. I’m not sure, but they may be harder to get than a bumblebee. Some where quite content to sit on a stem for awhile, but others would land and fly away, barely giving me enough time to catch a shot. The above was one of the latter – he landed on the flower, I took a picture, and he was gone. I will say this: having a nice long lens helps to capture these guys if they are staying still – you’re less likely to spook them when you are four feet away versus being six inches away! (By this shot, I was using my 70-200mm f/4L lens.)

(Side note: from this angle, even f/9 is insufficient to keep the entire dragonfly in focus; only his body and far wings are focused; the wings closer to us are blurry. But had I lingered to stop down the aperture, he’d have disappeared, and the shot would never have occurred.)

The colors in this beetle fascinate me. There are white spots, a bronze back, and a shimmering green head, which, as far as I’m concerned, makes this guy absolutely gorgeous. (And so is the flower, in case it feels left out!)

Simplicity works to your favor too – here the flower is the only thing in focus – everything has been thrown out by using a fairly wide aperture (f/5.6) at a long focal length (200mm), but had the background been closer, it would not have been as out-of-focus. It took some creative framing to get the angle on this guy just right.

It was this flower’s color that attracted me at once – the yellows, pinks and magentas are absolutely stunning. A smaller aperture (f/8) ensured that a good portion of the flower was in relative focus; f/4 would have resulted in a much blurrier flower. As it is, if you look closely, you’ll notice that the focal area doesn’t go much beyond the stamens and a bit of the petals. Even so, I like it.

I’d spotted bumblebees doing this earlier in the photowalk – and then I wanted to capture one actually doing this – exiting a flower after collecting some pollen. I waited and waited and waited (well – I took pictures and took more pictures, and yet more pictures), and finally caught this guy at just the right moment crawling out of the flower. There’s something cute and fuzzy about him, no? (He might disagree… having a stinger and all!)

More often than not, the dragonflies would land on sticks instead of flowers – but they still produced interesting shots. I was back at f/8 to ensure that most of the dragonfly would be in focus, but what really drew me to this particular shot was the way the setting sun was reflecting off his wings – the colors in there are gorgeous.

These wispy plants just go to show that even the most ordinary looking thing can be gorgeous when the right light is around. Having got down at just the right angle, the sunlight hitting these plants was absolutely wonderful. Look closely – there’s an astounding amount of colors there.

Beauty doesn’t have to be found in nature, either – just look around your home – there are bound to be fantastic opportunities for creative shots there as well. If you have pets, then opportunities abound, but even the ordinary can be turned extraordinary with a creative angle and creative lighting.

You can see all the processed images taken at this park here, or you can click on any of the images above for a larger view.

Until next time,

Keep Writing with Light!

Stormy Days

2009-06-21T22:35:00.001-07:00

I happen to like storms. I don’t know why – I just always have. Maybe it’s because I feed, somehow, off of the electricity in the air, or am excited at the prospect of watching something absolutely awe-inspiring and terrifying, with powers on display far greater than my own. Who knows. I’m weird like that.

So, on Friday, we had a whopper of a storm cell move through. I was fortunate enough to catch a couple shots of some thunderclouds in the distance, as well as those boiling (yes, I mean boiling) overhead, and then some shots once I got home. So without further ado, here’s some of the shots from the storm:

Storm clouds in the distance; power lines in front. I don’t think my city ever lost power, but I bet someone did…

Thunderhead up close and personal. Except, he’s actually several miles away – closer to Aurora, IL. The shape, however, was what most intrigued me – hence the shot.

And this – this was what was boiling directly above me. Yeah – fun stuff! At this point, though – no rain yet. I didn’t begin to see any lightning until I hopped back in my car and continued on down the road a while. Even so, I didn’t take a million pictures of this stuff. Better safe than sorry, right?

The view out my car as I pull into town. Rain, rain, rain, rain. Everywhere rain. And the wind. Goodness-gracious-me. At this point we were under a Severe Thunderstorm Warning – mostly for the wind gusts – which were, in some areas, over 60 mph. I don’t know that it was that bad in town, but leaves and other debris was definitely flying around, so it was strong, regardless.

After I parked in front of my apartment, it was pouring torrents and torrents of rain. So, to wait a little while in the hopes that it would slow down a bit, I snapped some shots out the car window. This was a clear one with a slow shutter speed so that the movement of the trees in the wind can be seen very clearly. This was probably the height of the wind part of the storm as these poor things were going all over the place.

Needless to say, I finally made it back into my apartment (else I couldn’t have processed these images), but it was quite the nasty storm cell. It went on to do quite a bit of damage closer to Chicago, from what I heard on the news, which just goes to say how dangerous these severe weather events can be. And how lucky I was to have made it close to home before really getting pounded by the wind and the rain!

Resources: Software Tools and Utilities

2009-06-21T22:04:00.001-07:00

As I find new software that I find useful, I’ll add it to this post along with a short description and the price (if it costs anything) as well as a link to the company.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.3

I use, love, adore Lightroom. It is just flat-out the best workflow and RAW/Image manipulation software for me. (That’s not to say it fits everyone – just that it works for me.) It’s a bit pricey at $299, but if you are serious about managing and processing your photographs, then it is money well spent.

It has a fantastic library module where you can import, manage, categorize, label, and essentially keep track of all your photos. Once categorized, you can take a picture into the develop module to apply any number of various effects to the image – control the white balance, the saturation, the sharpening, vignetting, etc. While these effects aren’t something you couldn’t achieve in any other photo-editing program, the ease with which Lightroom allows you to make the changes is, in my opinion, what sets it apart from everything else – especially if you are working with RAW images – there’s just so much you can do creatively. Beyond the Develop module, you have web, print, and slideshow modules to play with as well.

As far as the images on my own site, nearly all of them will have been processed via Lightroom. Occasionally something will need to be pushed into Photoshop, but believe me – it’s rare that I need to go that far.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is available for a free 30 day trial, after which you can purchase it for $299 from Adobe directly. View more info…

Adobe Photoshop CS4

Adobe Photoshop CS4 pretty much goes hand-in-hand with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. They integrate very tightly, and LR has support for PS’s smart object feature. If you can’t do something in Lightroom – you can do it in Photoshop. It supports everything you’d ever need in a photo editor, and includes something of large import for those who wish to print their creations – soft proofing. This enables you to get a “preview” of the photo as it might look on paper. It also lets you know if there are any colors that may not be printable (called “out-of-gamut”).

It’s a tad bit expensive at $699, however – though well worth it. However, if you can’t quite spring for that, you should look at several other tools, including Corel’s Paint Shop Pro, Photoline, Paint.NET, and more.

Adobe Photoshop CS4 is available for a free 30 day trial, after which you can purchase it for $699 from Adobe directly. View more info…

Microsoft Web Expression 2

This is a fantastic tool for publishing websites. While it does support a WYSIWYG method of creating pages, I prefer to work solely in the source view.

While the tool has its quirks, it also makes editing and maintaining my sites very efficient. The full version is $299, but if you’ve ever owned Frontpage, Office, or several other programs, you can get it for as low as $99 as an upgrade. You can try it for free, as well, for 30 days. View more info…

Note: all trademarks are owned by the respective companies. The product images are © their respective owners. My evaluations of the software are my own and based solely upon my own experience. There is no connection between the companies making this software and me promoting the software – just my genuine appreciation for a well-made product I happen to enjoy using.

My Perfect Compact Camera

2009-06-18T15:40:00.000-07:00

Is there such a thing as a perfect anything? No, but it would sure be nice to have something awfully close, wouldn't it?

If you were paying attention to any of the new camera announcements made this past week, you probably heard an awful lot about the Olympus E-P1 (image on the right, from the Olympus website). It looks very retro and stylish, and sports a sensor larger than most point-and-shoot cameras, although a tad bit smaller than most dSLRs. (The exception would be Panasonic G1 and GH1, but neither would I classify either of those models as a true dSLR - mainly because there's no mirror in them - but enough quibbling.)

I've been looking for a compact camera to replace my aging Panasonic Lumix LZ8. It's a decent camera, but it is also a few years old now, and, to be frank, didn't take great pictures (very, very noisy). It works as a P&S, but I want something better. And so I have refrained from making any decisions until Olympus made their announcement, in the hopes that their new camera would be the one I would buy.

I was all set until I found out the following things about this beautiful camera:

It has no flash. It has a hot-shoe, but no flash. (Granted - this is not a deal-breaker. But for the price - which you'll see in a moment - it should have flash!)
No optical viewfinder. Yes, you can buy one that sits atop the hot-shoe, but it does not represent the true image capture. (Granted, most OVFs on compacts don't either, but they are at least a bit closer to the lens. This thing won't be.)
No electrical viewfinder. This means the only way to frame my image would be to use the LCD - which, frankly, leads me to my next point...
Lousy LCD. Seriously. For the price, this thing should have 930k pixels on it. Instead it has 230k. Not. Sufficient. At. This. Price. Range.
... which is $750 minimum. That's no lens - just the body. No extras. Huh? What? !!!!???? If you want the 3x zoom the price is $800. If you want the ultra-compact pancake 17mm lens instead, the price is $900. If you want to add a flash, add another $200. And if you want the optical viewfinder (which, btw, you can't use if you are using the flash... this should be obvious), add another $99. A fully decked-out camera is going to cost something like $1,200. Um. No.

That's not to say that this thing isn't gorgeous. It is. That's not to say that I wouldn't love to have it. I would. But can I justify laying out $1,200 on a compact camera when I could put that money towards a nice "L"-series lens, or towards a new dSLR body? No. Could I justify it at all, knowing what my compact is really intended for? (And this is the intention: a throw-in-your-purse camera you can take everywhere and anywhere but still takes great pictures...) No. Not at $1200. Not at $800. Not even at $700. $500 and you might get there. (Honestly I'd prefer $300. But that's not likely realistic. The companies do have make some money.)

I understand the sensor is expensive. But at $750+, this thing should've been decked out from the start. Glass isn't cheap either, but at least include the 3x zoom in the price, or go fixed-length only. Include a crappy flash. Include a superior LCD screen. And include an EVF or OVF so that I don't have to rely on a 3.0" LCD screen to compose my photos. (Believe me, there will be a point, no matter how anti-reflective that LCD screen is, that it will be unusable in the light you have available. Not good.)

Okay - this is coming off more as a rant than anything, and that's not really the intent. My intent is to find the best P&S that I can get for a price that won't break the bank. Nothing out there will be perfect. But is it too much to ask a camera maker to make a $500 compact that has all of the features below? Then it would be perfect:

$500 price point
Large sensor (no smaller than 1/1.6", but preferrably APS-C/micro-4/3rds sized)
Nice zoom lens (does not have to be interchangeable for me...)
EVF/OVF. Absolute Must. I can't rely only on the LCD.
Nice LCD screen. But it no longer has to have 930k pixels on it at this price point, esp. when I'll be using the EVF/OVF 90% of the time.
RAW output
Full manual controls (or, at least Aperture Priority, though the smaller the sensor, the less useful this becomes for controlling DOF)
Manual focus
Flash. Seriously. There's no excuse not to have a little flashbulb in there. Yes, it will produce harsh, horrible light, but that's better than nothing.
Hot-shoe. Because I'll want to put a better flash on it.

I could add a lot more to that list, but then this post would be longer than it needs to be. (It already is.) At the moment, then, it seems my only possible cameras are the following:

Canon G10 (or G9, but oddly enough, the G9 is more expensive than the G10 is, at the moment)
Panasonic Lumix LX-3 (More $$$ than I want to go, but gets good reviews. Note that it has no EVF, but it does have a 460k LCD. Still, I'd prefer an EVF/OVF.)
Sigma DP1 or DP2 (Except for the fact that the LCD is 230k, no EVF/OVF, and handles like molasses.)

I'm not sure, but I think the mind just got made up. Canon G10. I want (no, need) an EVF/OVF, and the G10 has an OVF. It won't be like the captured image, but it's better than relying totally on the LCD. And that LCD? 460k pixels. All at around $500. It's not my perfect compact (small sensor, slow lens, ...) but maybe it is close enough.

If I get one, I'll let you know. If I get something else, I'll say so, and give the reasons why. And if I totally lose my mind and get the E-P1, well, you'll never find out, because my credit card will kill me!

Pictures Everywhere

2009-06-13T21:30:00.001-07:00

Even in the most innocuous of places there is a world of pictures just waiting to be taken. This is why it is so important to take your camera (or one of them, at least) with you all the time – there’s undoubtedly a picture waiting for you around the next bend, in the next room, or waiting to pop out at you five minutes from now.

Case in point: my recent stay in a hotel. It was late at night – after 9pm, and I was bored watching the TV. So as I wandered around the room, I discovered a plethora of interesting angles and objects. Here’s just a few:

An interesting angle from the bedroom into the living area and the door of the suite.

The reflection of my bed (prior to having been slept in, obviously) in the bedroom television screen. I think it gives it a rather lo-mo effect, even before the post-processing was applied.

This is just a lamp. But aren’t the textures on it gorgeous?

These happen to be my shoes. Not sure why, but they looked an interesting target for my camera!

So, even though it was late and I was in an unfamiliar place – there were pictures to be taken. I could easily have missed these (and others) had I not had a camera with me, or an eye for trying things. I’m so glad I had both with me – my camera, and my eyes – and I’m ever-so-pleased with the results.

Here’s the moral of the story, I suppose: have your camera with you, and experiment. You never know what you’ll capture! Until next post, keep on writing with light!

P.S. The above happened to be a wonderful reason to have some fast glass on your camera. I have the wonderful Canon 50mm f/1.8 II lens which, aside from being cheap ($80), is also sharp and faster than any of my other glass (f/3.5 and f/4). While the room appeared bright to my eyes – it was nothing compared to sunlight – so most of the images above were taken at ISO 800 with exposure times between 1/40 and 1/80 second. If you don’t have fast glass, but have image stabilization, you should be able to achieve similar results.

P.P.S. One more footnote: this also happens to be a really good reason to have a dSLR or a compact with a large sensor size. ISO 800 returned eminently usable results, but on a smaller sensor, the images would be gritty, full of noise, and lacking in detail. Take the noise you do see in the images above and multiply it by a few times to get a good image of what they would look like on a small point-and-shoot with a small sensor. That’s not to say you can’t get great results with a small sensor, just that it takes more work to do – and you probably won’t be shooting at ISO 800, either.

2009-06-08T15:59:00.001-07:00

Very nice site for designers - I always need more textures! http://ping.fm/l5ZdT (via @designshard)

What Is Photography?

2009-06-02T14:04:00.001-07:00

I’m a word buff, and I think I got that legally from my mother, who took the time to look up what the word actually means. We often consider a photographer as an individual who has taken the time to study, learn, and perfect their understanding of light, composition, film, post-processing, etc., but if we actually take the word apart, we might find something just a little different.

photo- means “light”, or “produced by light”, as given by Merriam Webster’s definition:

photo- (fōt′ō, -ə)

Etymology: < Gr phōs (gen. phōtos), a light: see phosphorus

of or produced by light photograph, photosynthesis

The postfix –graphy, means the following, again as given by Merriam Webster’s definition:

-graphy (grə fē)

a process or method of writing, recording, or representing (in a specified way) calligraphy, photography

a descriptive science or a treatise dealing with such a sciencegeography

Etymology: L -graphia < Gr, writing < graphein, to write: see graphic

So photography literally means “A process or method of writing, recording, or representing (in a specified way) light.” I like to think of it in a simpler term: writing with light. And a photographer is simply someone who writes with light.

Photography is simply a means to record (write) the light coming into the camera. There is a science to that, and an art to that, but in and of itself, photography is nothing more than making a record of the light present at that very moment in time. It’s how we manipulate that light, how we position our camera, how we post-process that record after-the-fact, how the photograph is presented to the viewer, etc., that embodies the art of photography. It’s the understanding of the physics involved in how light travels, how it is bent by lenses, how chemicals or silicon can record that light, etc., that embodies the science of photography.

We are in a world today where making a photographic record of an event is easier than ever – we have cameras in our cell-phones, we have small cameras we can slip in a pocket, we have cameras that can go underwater, and we have larger, more complicated cameras. We have cameras that record to film and cameras that record to a digital medium. All of this can be done without the art or the science of photography.

There is no definition of what makes a good or bad photograph. Unless there is something seriously wrong with the recording mechanism, the photograph represents the light the camera saw correctly (even if it is a shot of the lens cap). It is when we compare it to what the photographer wanted to express that we can move into the territory of “good” and “bad” – or more accurately, whether the photograph successfully conveys the story and context and ideas that the photographer wished it to express, or if it did not.

When a photograph is viewed by anyone but the photographer, any opinion is subjective – there is no right or wrong answer. One person may not like the image, while another may praise it as the best they’ve ever seen. Some may critique the image on its technical merits, but again, this is subjective – the photographer may have had something else in mind. Therefore there is no one “right” answer to what makes a photograph “good” and another one “bad” – it’s all in the eye of the beholder.

That said, learning the art and science of photography can help you become a better photographer – that is, it can help you more easily create a photograph that captured what you wanted to capture (not just what the camera wanted to capture). Rather than relying on the camera to make all the decisions for you, you can start to take control of the camera and record what you want to record. This doesn’t mean you’ll have to learn a set of rules and stick to them – no. Most photographic “rules” are made to be broken – but it helps to understand the underlying reasons of why a rule became a rule so that you know when to break it for the best effect.

Over the next few weeks, I hope to help you learn more about the science and the art of photography. I’ll try to avoid getting terribly technical, nor will I indicate any rules – just “guidelines”, that once you’ve learnt, you’re welcome to break!

With that said, let me present to you two very important guidelines. The first guideline in photography is this: experiment. Think outside of the box. You might be surprised what you create! (And the second guideline? Write what you did down – unless you happen to like not remembering how you achieved a certain look or effect.) You are welcome to break these if you wish – but try them out first – you just might surprise yourself!

So, until the next post – have fun writing with light!

What kind of camera do you have?

2009-06-01T22:12:00.000-07:00

Really? You want to know what camera I have? Aw.... I'm blushing.

But really - it doesn't matter. Why? Because it's not the camera that takes great (or poor) pictures. It is entirely the person behind the camera that's taking those great (or poor) pictures. (Okay - I'm going to be optimistic from now on... all the pictures are going to be great, right!?)

Think of your camera as a tool - a tool that records light, yes, but it isn't really any different from a piano or a hammer or a computer... All of these things help you (the wielder of the tool) do something. Can a better tool sometimes make your job easier? Yes. But the tool does not determine the final result - even if you might have had to work harder to get there.

The cameras of today are far superior to those fifty and more years ago, and yet the photographers of those eras took fantastic pictures, even given the limitations of the technology of the time. And, in a hundred years, I'm certain photographers will look back on us and say the same thing - that we took fantastic pictures, even given the limitations of our tools.

But picking up a fantastic camera doesn't guarantee a fanstastic picture. You as the photographer have to know the right settings to use, the right composition of the scene, how light works, etc., and then you've got to know how to post-process (develop) the image, and then figure out how to present it to your audience. All of those things are things you know - and the camera is only a small part of that equation. It can take fantastic pictures given the right inputs (from you), and it can take horrible pictures (again, given your input). (And there goes my optimism!)

So, regardless of the camera you have with you - even if it's a lowly camera phone - if you take the time to compose your image, use the right settings, light the scene effectively, etc., you can come out with a great shot. And if you find that you really want that big, expensive camera that you've been lusting after, then fine - but understand that it won't make you a better photographer - after all, that new camera is one more new tool you'll have to learn how to use effectively!

On this blog and in our workshops, we try not to aim our content at a specific type of camera. If you have a point-and-shoot, then the content in this blog should be of use to you. If you have a dSLR, then the content should be of use to you too. If you only have a camera phone, well - you might be a little more limited in your settings, but that doesn't mean you still can't learn something and take fantastic pictures with it.

And with that, our next learning blog post will be the start of a series on the basics of photography - something anyone can use regardless of the type of their camera! Hope to see you then!

We're Live

2009-06-01T22:02:00.000-07:00

Well, after a lot of hard work getting three different sites to look essentially the same, I'm officially declaring that photoKandy Studios is live. It's not perfect yet - some of the design needs a little tweaking, and some of the wording will doubtlessly change over the course of the next few weeks, but it's up - and lets you see some of my work, which is, at least, half of the point. The other half of the point is the education standpoint.

Photography isn't a trade to be horded - but a skill to be shared, in my opinion. And following that meme, I will, from time to time, post "learning" articles about photography. With some luck, I'll make sense, and you'll find it interesting. Hopefully!

I'm also working on several upcoming workshops in partnership with Nazarene Pages and The Rusty Shutter (their site is still in progress). These workshops will focus on the basics of photography, initially aiming at those individuals who are scared as all get out of the buttons and sounds their new camera makes. Look for an upcoming announcement regarding these workshops.

This isn't the only place you can follow me - I'm on several social networks (as seen on my contacts page), and you're welcome to follow me and send messages and comments or ask question. Or use the contact page to send an email to me.

Okay - here's to a year of great photography, meeting great people and clients, and a year of fantastic learning together!