FACzen Tech Tips

Posting Pictures on the NAPP Forum

2012-02-11T10:16:00.000-05:00

Posting your pictures on the NAPP forum

Note: this will likely become obsolete when the planned upgrade to the NAPP forum takes place. They may change the interface. I'll come back and comment here and try to update this article when that happens.
This post is intended for NAPP members who are having difficulty posting pictures on the forum and are therefore not participating in some of the activities.

It’s actually quite easy to upload pictures to the NAPP forum. There are some other threads on the forum that give you various choices and methods, but here’s how I like to do it.

Choose your picture or pictures and resize them to a maximum width of 800 pixels.

Upload them to a site on the internet.

Copy the link to that image

Select the “picture” icon in the post you’re writing

Paste the link into the field in the popup box.

You’re done. Now here’s a little more detail…

For consistency and of course file size constraints, the NAPP forum allows you to post JPEG images up to 800 pixels wide.

If you’re using Lightroom, simply export with that size limitation. Mine go to a designated folder on my hard drive called, “NAPP” (creative, huh?). I also try to limit the file size to 100K but occasionally they go over that if they’re complex. In Photoshop, the best solution is usually “Save for Web and Devices” and again you can set your size limitations there.

Generally I try to name the files something simple so I can type them easily later. I also like to put a watermark on the pictures, unobtrusive, in the lower corner. It just makes me feel better.

You need to have a place to put them on the internet, that you can link to. There are a ton of free places: Flickr, Picasa, Photobucket… I’ll leave that to you. But choose one where you can link to the photo, not to the page it’s on. For instance, you can put your pix up on SmugMug (if you have an account) but finding the link to that particular picture is convoluted.

I have my own website at a big web host, that allows me to FTP my files up there (I think it costs me all of $2.99 per month, for my own Domain name!): and I called the folder I put them in, (ready for this?) “NAPP”. I personally use a couple of different FTP clients, but my favourite one is something called “WinSCP” which is free, and has sticky settings which means it’s only one keystroke to get it going!

After I upload a picture, I’ll navigate to it so that I know I’ve typed the filename correctly and I’ll copy (ctrl-C) the URL.

Now I write the message I want to post on the forum. I put the cursor where I want the picture to appear (looks best with a couple of blank lines before and after it) and I click the “picture” icon in the menu bar. A window pops open that lets me paste the URL I copied in step 3 into the field and when I hit <Enter> it automatically puts the following code in the message:

[IMG]http://www.urllocation/NAPP/filename.jpg[/IMG]

After I’m done, I usually like to go back and highlight that line, then click the “center” icon because I think it looks better if the picture is centered in the post.

Just to make sure you got it right, click “Preview Post” before you actually publish it. It also gives you a chance to (a) correct all your typos and (b) think about deleting all the nasty things you were going to post before they actually get up there!

So that’s it. A really easy way to post images to the NAPP forum. Make sense? Any questions? Give it a shot!

— 30 —

Approximating Line Art

2011-12-07T18:35:00.001-05:00

This is about approximating line art in Photoshop.

Now credit where credit is due: I didn't invent either one of these methods, I found one of them in a column by Larry Becker in the Dec-11-Jan-12 issue of Photoshop User Magazine (which you get if you are a NAPP member — click here) and the other one in a tutorial that I found via the forums on the NAPP site (again, — click here!). The tutorial is one of several by Dee Dee Martin (Swampy) who is also a NAPP denizen. Please visit her tutorial site here. Her video tutorials are excellent.

Thank you Larry and thank you Swampy for two great tips on using Photoshop.

Some background: I wanted to do a different treatment for some images I shot the other day. I've been thinking about line art and I remembered reading something about emulating line art in Photoshop (it was the Becker article but I couldn't remember where I saw it) so I posted the question on the forum and I quickly got the two links above. Both methods work, both are brilliant and both are entirely obscure! No way I would have found them on my own! I still don't understand why they are where they are in Photoshop but why look a gift horse in the mouth? As usual there are 80 different ways to skin a cat in Photoshop!

So I'm posting this here for two reasons: (1) to share what I've learned and give my readers some ideas about some new things to explore, and (2) as a convenient place to put these tips where I can find them again! One of the biggest problems with Photoshop is how complex the program is, and how easy it is to forget how to do something if you don't do it regularly. These fall in that category, especially in view of how obscure they are.

So here goes:
This was a somewhat 'nothing' image that I took at the beginning of the party I was shooting, more for testing exposure than anything else. By the way, lighting came from my SB-600 flash mounted high on a light stand, controlled remotely from my D300 in Commander Mode. I had the Gary Fong diffuser on the flash, pointed towards the ceiling mostly (although the nature of the diffuser is that it also acts as a soft direct source). The pop-up flash was set for 1 stop under just for a little fill, and white balance was set to "flash" (some of you like details, I know!)

Nikon D300/Nikkor 70-200mm @ 155mm. 1/180 sec@ f/2.8, ISO 200.

First, the "Becker Method" from the magazine.

How do you do this?

■ Working on a duplicate of the background layer, select Filter→Blur→Smart Blur (note: you have to be in RGB 8-bit mode or it will be greyed out)

■ Change the Mode at the bottom of the popup to "Edge Only"

■ Play with Radius and Threshold until you get the right 'look' you're after

■ It will give you white lines on black. If you want, invert the image with Image→Adjustments→Invert (Ctrl/Cmd-I) to black on white

■ Change the opacity or the blend mode (or both) of this layer to let a little colour through

■ (and this is my change to Larry's method) apply a layer mask then paint on it to let more of the colour from the original through.

That's what I did in the above image. I like the charcoal-like texture of the lines and the subtle pastel colours.

Now the "Swampy Method"

It works like this:

■ Duplicate the background layer. Change the duplicate to a monochrome grey layer with Image→Adjustments→Desaturate (Shift-Ctrl/Cmd-U)

■ Duplicate the new layer and invert it to a negative with Image→Adjustments→Invert (Ctrl/Cmd-I)

■ Set the blend mode of this inverted layer to "Color Dodge"

■ Apply Filter→Other→Minimum and adjust the Radius slider to your liking

Here's what you have at this point:

■ Merge these two new layers together (Select the top one and "Merge Down" or Ctrl/Cmd-E)

You can add some colour at this point by reducing the opacity and letting the original layer leak through. You'll get something like this:

Alternatively, you can change the blend mode to "Luminosity" before merging the layers down

AND play with the opacity, yielding still a different result:

For what it's worth, every time I reduced the opacity, I found that a setting around 60% gave me the best result, but hey, it's up to you!

Two different obscure approaches, both of them work!

— 30 —

Comparing HDR Programs

2011-12-06T18:01:00.001-05:00

I posted this also on the NAPP forums. I got interested in the different results you get from different programs. I've done these comparisons before, trying to decide which program I like better but I've concluded that it depends on the image.

That said, up to now Photomatix has been my first choice but these results may change that.

The goal here was to produce the image that I liked best in all three programs. I did not look at the other images while working in any program, with the exception that I knew I really wanted colourful skies when I got to the third one (P'matix). And I was not trying to MATCH the images.

Workflow:
was to select all 5 source images (bracketed burst, 1 stop apart, RAW. I open them in the HDR program, then look through the thumbnail presets for the one closest to what I want, then I modify it with sliders until I had done the best I could. I then saved the files and exported them to CS5 for further tweaking.

Once open in CS5 I created a new layer and ran a hi-pass filter. I adjusted the image with curves, then I ran DFine 2.0, sky preset which I masked back in. Next I ran Viveza 2 to increase the saturation in the sky (except the CS5 one where I had to REDUCE the saturation overall).

Back to Lightroom where I tweaked a little and synced the cropping and metadata. I then exported each one as a 720 px-wide jpg for posting here.
Here are the images:

1. Processed in Photoshop CS5 HDR Pro

2. Processed with Nik HDR Efex Pro

3. Processed with Photomatix HDR Pro 4

Now remember, I was not trying to MATCH the images, just to do the best I could with a pleasant image.

Comments:
1. On first look, CS5 HDR Pro produced a very pleasing image with lots of detail and saturation, with the least amount of effort and fiddling. But the saturation came in way too high and there's very visible chromatic aberration.

2. Nik HDR Efex Pro gave me a really clean image but there was almost no colour in the clouds until i ran Viveza. Again there was some evidence of chromatic aberration but I thought the image was much smoother overall. This program gave me much more range doing details than the other two. I should take out a little colour bias from this image but didn't notice until I was posting this.

3. I maxed out almost all the controls in Photomatix and still couldn't get the kind of detail and sharpness I liked and again, there was no colour in the clouds. A small hue/saturation adjustment in Photoshop gave me all the colour I wanted but really bad artifacting so I backed it out. Microsmoothing helped a lot with the noise in the sky. There was NO evidence of chromatic aberration even when I viewed the image at 200%. I ended up with lots of Halo around the trees, though.

Conclusion:
Until I actually looked at all 3 images together, I didn't know which one I preferred. I'm not going to tell you, though, because that's subjective (well this whole thing is subjective!) and you may have a different preference. CS5 was the easiest one to use. Nik had the broadest range and lots of room left to play. Photomatix was maxed out but gave the cleanest result.

I know this is a silly comparison, using just one image and subjective rather than objective adjustments and inconsistent treatment. So please file it under "For What it's Worth".

— 30 —

ALT-NUMPAD ASCII Character shortcuts

2011-12-01T10:35:00.001-05:00

This isn't really about photography, but I find myself using these shortcuts all the time so I thought I'd share them…

I like to use properly formatted extended ASCII characters sometimes (technically they're "ANSI characters"). This post is about giving some of you some keyboard shortcuts.

Why only "some of you"? Well because I think they work on a Mac, but I'm not sure since I don't have one. I haven't found a way to use them on my iPad, and laptops without numeric keypads are a challenge as well.

I'm pretty sure this is not news to a lot of you, but there's a whole new generation out there who don't know what the extended ASCII characters are. If they want to insert a special character, well they're only familiar with the menu in the MS Office programs.

Since I have some typography background, I know, for instance, that an "ellipsis" is not just three periods in a row. I even know what an ellipsis is! If you don't, well Google is your friend!Do you know when to use a hyphen, or an en-dash, or an em-dash? I know I don't use them exactly correctly according to the book, but I find that an em-dash — surrounded by a space on either side — makes text read better than either of the other two, in my eyes anyway.

So without further ado, here's a table of some of the special ASCII characters that I often use in my workflow. Feel free to add to the list. You can look these up here, but it's rather a lengthy list — there are lots more characters that I don't use.My list only includes the ones I use regularly.

These characters are typed by holding down the alt key ('option' on a Mac?) and typing the 4-digit ASCII code (don't forget the extra zero) on your numeric keypad. The regular numbers at the top of your keyboard don't work. On a laptop, you need to turn on the numlock which, on my Lenovo, is done by holding down the fn key and hitting scroll-lock.

(Blogger doesn't want to let me insert a table. So forgive the lack of formatting here. I used "Courier" font to maintain the spacing)

…     alt-0133     Ellipsis
‘     alt-0145     Open single smart quote
’     alt-0146     Close single smart quote
“     alt-0147     Open double smart quote
”     alt-0148     Close double smart quote
•     alt-0149     Round Black Bullet
■     alt-254      Big Square Black Bullet (no extra zero)
–     alt-0150     en-dash
—     alt-0151     em-dash
™     alt-0153     Trademark symbol
¢     alt-0162     Cent symbol
©     alt-0169     Copyright Symbol
®     alt-0174     Registered Symbol
°     alt-0176     degree Symbol
±     alt-0177     plus/minus Symbol
²     alt-0178     superscript "2"
³     alt-0179     superscript "3"
¼     alt-0188     one quarter
½     alt-0189     one half
¾     alt-0190     three quarters

The web page I linked to also suggests using one or more of these characters in a password, which would make it much more difficult to crack. But I'll leave that for the geeks among you. Oh wait, I am one…

Here is a formatted .pdf of the above list for you to keep handy near your computer. Enjoy!

— 30 —

Two Superb Lenses

2011-10-31T11:43:00.000-04:00

This week I'm babysitting my friend's lens. We're heading up to Lake Superior for the Gales of November workshop, I'm driving up with a couple of other photographers and Ron is flying up, so I offered to take his extra stuff in the car. He cautiously gave me his "baby", his Nikon 600mm f/4 lens and told me I could 'play' with it if I wanted to.

What he didn't give me was the Wimberley mount and tripod... so I was a bit limited in what I could do. That lens is heavy! And of course, with the 600mm super telephoto focal length, handholding it is a challenge. I've held a lot of rifles that weigh about the same or more (the lens is 10 lbs by itself, without the body attached) but with rifles you have a shoulder stock to help steady it to counteract the muzzle-heaviness. I have read that some people (Moose Peterson comes to mind) regularly handhold this lens. I guess I have to start lifting weights again if I were going to.

So the old "1/focal length = slowest shutter speed" rule goes by the board. I cranked the ISO up enough so I was shooting at 1/1000 sec or faster, which met with some success. Most of the time, I rested the lens on top of a soft suitcase.

Anyway, this is a superb piece of optics. It's not meant for shooting landscapes, it's for birds and for long distance reach-out-and-touch shots of dangerous game. So I looked for a dangerous animal to shoot and sure enough, I found one.

This wild beast had to be 1/4 mile away. This image has been post-processed, I did everything I could to sharpen and enhance it. Then I cropped it slightly just for positioning, so you're not really looking at what I saw exactly through the lens.

This next image hasn't been touched, though. Well not really: I cloned out the head of a calf on the right edge and ran Nik Sharpener (pre-sharpen RAW) but that's all. It's not even cropped. This is exactly what it looked like through the lens. I didn't even level the horizon.

My title says "TWO superb lenses". The other one is my old standby, Nikon 70-200 f/2.8 VR. It was like holding a helium balloon in my hands after the big guy! No weight at all! Anyway, I took a couple of comparison shots of the same scene. Here's one:

Shot at 200mm, 1/500 second at f/8, ISO 400. Nik Sharpener RAW pre-sharpening, clone out a couple of ugly houses in the background and straighten the horizon.

The same tree, shot with the 600mm, 1/1600 second at f/4 handheld, ISO 400. This one has not been sharpened: I ran presharpen on it but didn't see any discernable difference, so I'm showing the original here.

So the 600 shows outstanding sharpness and contrast. You know how we say, "you can't take a bad shot with the 70-200"? That's partly because of the quality and partly because of the beautiful isolation you get with the shallow depth of field and great bokeh. I want to say the same thing about the 600: look how the tree jumps out with the shallow DOF!

Here's a direct comparison:

What you have to understand is that the shot on the left is only 250 px wide after cropping. Incredible sharpness given the huge enlargement. The contrast on the 600mm shot is excellent. And look how it jumps out with the small DOF! As indicated, they're both shot at f/8.

So two wonderful lenses. It was fun comparing them.

Using LensAlign to fine tune your lenses

2011-10-22T20:35:00.001-04:00

This is an evaluation of the LensAlign MkII product, designed to help you microalign or microadjust your lens/body alignment on higher end DSLR cameras.

Every manufactured product has tolerances. You might have the most precise milling machine in the world, but whatever you produce, if you're shooting for 1.00000 in, the resulting product will not be exactly that, it will be off by a small amount. So if you're a high end camera manufacturer, the fit of your lenses to your camera body might vary by a few thousands of an inch. That's enough to affect where the camera actually focuses when you press that shutter release and activate your autofocus.

And it can change. Using your camera, swapping lenses, firing that shutter 50,000 times, it's going to change. If you're at all fussy about it, you're going to want to tune the alignment of your lens and camera body to give you the best possible focus. That's what the LensAlign product is for.

I was given a LensAlign MkII package to evaluate. I made it clear that if I did so, my evaluation would be 100% unbiased, I would report on my experience exactly as it happened, good and bad. I have no interest in this company and/or product, and the device will be going back to them after this is complete. I was not paid in any way for this evaluation.

On a scale of 1-10, 10 being the best, I would rate the product like this:

(a) Not adjusting your lenses........... 3
(b) Adjusting your lenses using a cobbled together setup with a tape measure.......... 5
(c) Adjusting your lenses with the LensAlign product......... 7
(d) Sending your camera and lenses in to a professional to do the job............ 9

Now let me explain, then we'll get into the procedure.

Most people don't have to microadjust their lenses (for the sake of saving typing, I'll just call it 'aligning lenses' from now on. It's actually 'microadjusting the alignment of a specific lens with a specific camera body by using the software in a high end DSLR'). Now why do I say that? Well because most people aren't pushing the edge of the envelope. If you want to focus precisely, you do it manually, not with the autofocus. And the only time it really matters is if you're shooting with a shallow depth of field, and you've damped out all vibration that would affect sharpness, and... you get the picture.

But if you do want that expensive lens to give you the best results with that expensive camera body, well, you're going to want to take the trouble to align it. There are 3 ways to do it. Let me skip ahead to option (d) for a second. Sending it in to the factory or a service shop to do the alignment for you is the best way. When you get it back, somebody with fingers smaller than yours and eyes that work better than yours, and the skill to take apart the camera or lens if necessary, and a machine that probably cost more than your car to do the work, will have done a fine job. He'll probably have taken 2 weeks or more to do it and the bill that he hands you is not going to be trivial, but he'll do a great job.

The question is, what is your time worth? It took me about 90 minutes, from start to finish, to align two lenses with my D300 body. It took me a bit longer than that when I did it a couple of years ago (September 2009. Here's the writeup) and it cost me nothing. I put the camera on a tripod, stretched out a tape measure at an angle, and did pretty well the same thing that I did with the LensAlign product. The results were similar if less precise, but this isn't something a professional or fussy enthusiast would do. It works, though.

The LensAlign product is reasonably professional. It's made of thin plastic, though, and I could see that you might have some troubles with it after repeated use. Assembly is very straightforward, even for a numnutz like me (I don't fix things. If I look at them the wrong way, they break. My aging eyes don't work as well as they used to and let's not get into arthritis in my hands...). I wanted to do it right, so I used the instruction sheet and it still took me only 5 minutes. It's designed to be disassembled so you can transport or store it in an 8x10 envelope. Here's what it looks like when you're done:

Edit: This original shot was done at night in lousy lighting. I took the LensAlign outside today before putting it away, and re-shot it. You fit those 7 plastic pieces together and mount it on a tripod.

Here's the thing. You want that target thing on the left to be parallel with your shutter plane. That way, the scale on the right is the right distance — the SAME distance — when you focus on the target. And if your focus sensor is not exactly in the middle, it doesn't matter because everything is parallel and equidistant.

Here's where I had the biggest problem. Getting it parallel. If you blow up the picture, you'll see that there's a hole in that back panel, in the red dot in the centre of the circle. There's also a hole in the centre of the front target. If you align it so that you can see the back hole through the front hole, through the lens, it's parallel. Oh yeah? HOW? I figured out that if you look through the back hole and move the assembly so that you can see the lens of the camera (which is of course mounted on a second tripod), then it's lined up. But the lens is black... so I tried to fool it by taping a piece of masking tape with an "X" on it to a lens cap... I thought that worked but in the end, it was still off by a bit. You can see red through the target, but not the centre of the hole.

Edit: it works MUCH better in the daylight. It helps when you can actually see the camera.

Here's the next problem: nowhere in the package were instructions on how to do the alignment. Now I've done it before, so it wasn't hard to figure out, but why not put an instruction sheet in the box? I went to the website, and tracked down the instructions. Pretty simple: align the target and the lens, open it up all the way (the lens), shoot a picture using autofocus (remember, the target and the "0" point on the ruler are exactly the same distance away if it's parallel). Blow up the image on your LCD (nah. you're kidding, right? Use the computer, but see the paragraph below on "Tethered"). Find "microadjust" in your camera menu (they don't all have it, only the higher end ones. RTFM). Adjust it and shoot another shot. Keep doing that until you get it right.

Each lens has to be done separately. In fact, a zoom lens at different focal lengths will behave differently. For me, the longest focal length was the most critical, so that's what I based the adjustment on. Here's what I got:

Nikkor 70-200mm at 200mm f/2.8, unadjusted. You can see that it was forward focusing around 3 units (whatever they are) where the arrow is pointing.

Nikkor 70-200mm at 200mm f/2.8 after adjustment. This is set to +12 on a scale of -20 to +20. It's still not perfect, but it's close.

Nikkor 24-120 at 120mm, f/5.6, unadjusted. This is harder to see because the DOF is higher because it's a slower lens. The sharpest focus is around +8, backfocusing.

Nikkor 24-120 at 120mm, f/5.6, after adjustment. It took much less adjustment to align this one, about -5. I probably should hav dialed in -4 or -3 to be precise.

So once you get everything set up, it's a pretty easy task — just shoot and examine and adjust, shampoo, rinse, repeat until you're done. However if you have to take the card out of the camera, load it in the computer and upload the pictures between each shot, it will take you all day. If you're doing this, you have a high end camera. Probably you can shoot tethered to the computer (here's an argument for getting Lightroom!). That's what I did:

No comments from the peanut gallery. Shot with my Blackberry in, like, the dark. I loaned my P&S to Rosa so that's all I had to shoot with. You can see that the camera is tethered to the laptop on the left, the target is under the floodlight that illuminates my artwork on the wall. Not the greatest lighting.

Edit: Here's another shot I did today in daylight with the 200mm, now properly aligned. You can also see that I got the hole in the target properly aligned with the lens so everything is parallel now.

OK. Does the LensAlign MkII work? Yes. Is it worth the $80 list price? Again I'll say Yes, if nothing else than because it's a more professional way of doing things than laying out a tape measure. Should you own one of these? Well if you're fussy and you have a lot of money invested in cameras and lenses, then Yes. Remember I said that usage of your camera, especially if you regularly swap lenses causes things to change. When I did this two years ago, the 70-200/D300 combo needed a setting of +7. Last year after i got it back from Nikon, it went to +15. Now it's at +12. If you're a macro photographer and you're shooting focus stacks with rails, then no. If your thing is landscapes at f/11 on a tripod, then no.

And that's all I have to say about that.

— 30 —

Shooting with a 10-stop Neutral Density Filter

2011-09-27T13:53:00.002-04:00

I recently got a 10-stop ND filter and wanted to share some tips about shooting with it. As time goes by and I gain more experience or get more hints from other people, I'll re-open this page and add to it. Check the version number here to see if there's new information you haven't yet read.

This is the initial post, version 1.0 on September 27, 2011
Updated: October 3, 2011 (bottom of post)

Background:
I had a variable (up to 10 stops) ND filter that I was really unhappy with. Not only was it extremely unsharp but also it generated a terrible interference pattern when used with my wide angle lens. The concept is interesting, because you can screw it onto the lens and change exposures just by rotating it, so you could focus, meter, compose, etc., then spin it. But the results were just too unacceptable. There are better brands available: Singh-Ray and Fader are well-thought of (the former apparently is clearly better, but pricey). But I realized that there was no real reason to use in-between values, like 6-stops or 7-stops, so I might as well go whole hog and get the 10-stop filter.

I bought a B&W brand filter made in Germany, and you can get it at B&H Photo — click here to access the page in their online store. This link takes you to the 77mm single coated version, you can find different sizes from there. The first thing you realize when you pick up this filter is that the build quality is superb. It's heavier than most other filters that I've had, for example.

There are a number of tutorials around. One of them is by Scott Kelby and there's a YouTube video here. If you're reading this on an iPad, I'm sorry but it's in Flash so you may not be able to view it. As usual, Scott gets quickly right to the point and his tutorial is great, but if you're new to using these filters, you may want a bit more information, so here goes!

There's LOTS to think about!

Here's what you can do with the filter, shooting fast water in the middle of the day:

Before:

This was shot without the filter. The exposure was 1/30 sec at f/11, ISO 100. The lens was the Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8, set at 70mm.

After:

Exactly the same setup, except the filter was screwed on the lens. The shutter speed was now 61 seconds (I was trying for 1 minute!). This was in the middle of the day and the sun was shining brightly, by the way!

One thing you have to realize when you shoot these kind of shots: It's not like your usual digital experience: you know, we live in a world where people complain about how long it takes to heat something up in a microwave oven! This is more like the old days, where you have to consider carefully what you're doing and go through a whole bunch of steps and a mental checklist to capture an image. It will probably take you 5 or 10 minutes just to set up the shot!

For those of you who remember the old days: essentially what you're going to do is set it up, compose it, take a few "Polaroids" to make sure you got it right, then finally do your image. If you're shooting long dawn or dusk shots, it could be 2 hours before you're done with just ONE shot — so make sure everything is right so you don't waste your entire time!

What you need:

Your camera, with a fresh battery and suitable memory card
A sturdy tripod
A cable release, preferably with a locking button
Your Neutral Density filter
Something to cover the viewfinder eyepiece to keep light from leaking in.

That last one is important (well, they all are!). Normally, your eye is blocking the viewfinder and of course exposures are shorter. Scott mentions gaffer's tape, which I don't like because I don't like leaving sticky residue on the camera. I usually just throw an opaque cloth over the camera, folded a few times. Brings back the old days shooting under the hood with a 4x5!

Remember also that holding the shutter open takes battery power. Don't run out in the middle, and if you have a Nikon with noise reduction, you'll have to keep it powered up for twice the length of the exposure.

If it's windy, even a dangling camera strap can move the camera too much. Weight your tripod if you can. Do it right — you're investing a lot of time to make it right!

Composition is up to you, but you need to think about how much of your image contains moving things (water, clouds in the sky...) and what's not moving (rocks, structures, old shipwrecks). There might be stuff that is moving that you didn't think about, such as trees, branches, leaves, grass, people... I like to try to think about the fixed, motionless things first and remember that anything that is moving is going to be soft and out of focus so it can't be the 'subject' of your image.

Set everything up without the filter. Focus carefully, then switch your camera to manual focus — your autofocus won't work through the filter, so the camera will hunt back and forth and maybe never find the right focus setting.

Take some test shots at the aperture you will be using to evaluate the depth of field. Use Aperture-Priority. Also find the right exposure for your shot. The metered setting may not be right. Note what the shutter speed is. You will need this for your starting point.

Most modern DSLR's are set up to default to 1/3 stop per click. Assuming you haven't changed this, you will need to click 30 times when you put the filter on. That can be any combination of stopping down the aperture, decreasing the ISO and lengthening the time the shutter is open. 30 clicks. Learn to count to 30 and try not to go the wrong way!

I find myself trying to calculate all this stuff in my head. Taxing for this tired old brain, even though I'm used to using the left half a lot! To make life easier for you, maybe this little "cheat sheet" will help. I created a .pdf file for you to download and print, it fits on both sides of a 3x5 file card which you can laminate and put in your bag. I did it in Excel, so you can also download the original spreadsheet and modify it for your own preferences.

Now carefully spin the ND filter onto your lens. I remove any other filters — skylight, UV, polarizing — the more glass hanging on the front of your lens the more distortion, reflections, etc. can creep in. Once it's on, you can't look through it any more so make sure everything is set the way you want.

Checklist:

Focus (where you want it and on manual mode)
Exposure mode: MANUAL
Aperture set to the opening you want to use
Shutter speed. Use 'bulb' and a timer like a stopwatch if it's over 30 seconds
VR OFF if you're on the tripod (the new VR-II is supposed to be better, but why introduce hunting if you don't have to?)
Exposure compensation and bracketing off
Shutter release: use "mirror-up" or "self-timer" and a cable release to minimize any camera shake
Block the viewfinder to keep light from leaking in
Long Exposure Noise Reduction ON.

Now shoot your image. Be prepared to wait for the Noise Reduction process to complete (if you have a Nikon. Not sure how Canon does it). This should take the same amount of time as your initial exposure.

Great! I hope you get some outstanding images! You may find that you have to color correct them (long exposures turn things blue) or tweak exposures in LR or PS.

You have not used the optimum exposure values for the fixed, non-moving components in your image. You may want to shoot them separately and merge images for the best results. In this picture, I took 5 bracketed shots without the filter, then I merged them to HDR (using Photomatix Pro), tweaked and corrected them, then I imported the long exposure image as a fresh layer, and carefully masked the layers manually.

Update: October 3, 2011

I had a disappointing couple of days in Algonquin Park this weekend, focusing on using my ND filter. I learned a few things (for I am but a grasshopper...).

I said it in my original post but I guess I didn't take it to heart: you can't use the water or any of the moving things in the image as the focal point of the image. They only enhance the composition that is already there.

My friend Dr. Ron put it succinctly and really well: you need to have something in the foreground which is sharp and not moving. The above shot is a great example of that, somewhat by accident, though. Don't just shoot fast flowing water, it's meaningless.

Long exposures and milky, silky water isn't for every shot. For instance, a really fast waterfall probably looks better with much shorter exposures because you wipe out any vestiges of detail with a long exposure. Also the transition between water and fixed portions of the image have to look natural, or else it looks like you just snipped and pasted it together. Here's an example (look where the rock meets the water)

By the way, long ND exposures do interesting things to the sky as well. I copied and flipped the sky and pasted it at low opacity into the water.

Don't skip the test exposures.

Your meter may or may not give you a proper starting exposure, depending on the settings, the lighting, the effects you're looking for. Shoot without the filter, find your starting exposure and calculate from there.

Don't forget to switch all the stuff off that you have to on the camera.

More than once, I found that I forgot to switch to manual focus, and once I had 5-shot bracketing selected. Stop and think!

The "cheat" sheet I created above is invaluable.

Counting clicks sucks. Especially if you also want to change apertures or ISO.

<end of update #1>

Drop me a line if you have any other comments or suggestions (or comment here). I'd love to see your results. If you found this useful and you feel like contributing to my lens fund (!), every little bit helps! I'm trying to spend more time and resources on these blogs and your encouragement will really help.

Color Label sets — an obscure Lightroom feature

2011-08-23T09:56:00.008-04:00

Lightroom and Photoshop are such incredibly deep and rich programs that there are many features most people don't know about. Although they're documented, users have to dig deep to find them and sometimes when you dig deeply enough, you find a gem.

Color Label Sets is one of those features. Here's another powerful way to classify, organize and search for specific images or sets of images in LR. Scott Kelby touches on it in his LR3 book but doesn't really say how to use it, nor did he point out the pitfalls!

This one reared its ugly head when I discovered that I couldn't retrieve the images that I had labelled as "Completed Keepers" in my 40,000 image LR database. The reason? Well, the other day I decided to do a little cleanup, so I happened to go into the Color Label Set menu item (you find it under the Metadata tab in the Library module). I had previously changed the labels associated with the color labels but not knowing any better, never saved them anywhere. Clearly, I had changed them more than once because, as I discovered to my horror, searching for a specific color label under Attribute only finds the ones with the current text title associated with it. I changed, for instance, the text associated with the green color label (you flag a photo green by hitting "8" in Library or at most places in Develop (not when you have a tool active!)). I changed it from "Editing Complete" to "Ready to Export". I changed a few others as well.

Then I went into my main image folder — my whole library — and in Attribute, searched for images flagged green. "NO PHOTOS MATCH THIS FILTER". WTF?

LR wasn't searching for "Green" labelled photos, it was searching for "Green (Ready to Export)" photos, and there weren't any. Don't panic, roll back to last night's saved catalog backup. No change. See this feature is a global LR feature and not tied to a specific catalog. Now panic.

I eventually posted the issue on the NAPP forum and a few hours later, I had a response from Michael Hoffman, one of the forum moderators, with the solution. Under Library Filters, use the Metadata tab, then change one of the columns to "Label" and the whole list of all the labels you've ever used appears. I could breathe again! Thanks, Mike.

Now I got to thinking: there are lots of ways to categorize images in LR but not really enough for all my purposes. For example, suppose I've completed editing some images, they're "Ready to Export". Some of them are really good, they're going up on my SmugMug page, or to my Blog, or to be entered in competition, or... and some of them were not that successful — I want to mark that they're done but they're ordinary. I don't want to throw them away... I'd like to mark them as "Edited - Archive". But I've used up all my color labels. Not so fast! Let's turn this sow's ear into a silk purse!

Create multiple Color Label Sets!

FIRST: So you don't lose the ability to find images you have already labelled, save your current color label set. In Library, go to Metadata then Color Label Sets and Edit.

Select the little arrow to the right in the preset heading

then "save current settings as new preset".

Now you can always get back to those labels and find all your old marked pictures by selecting that preset.

Now create a new set of color labels. Then save them as a new preset, like this example:

So when I import a bunch of images, and I want to flag some burst sequences that I intend to merge into HDR's, I simply change the color set I'm using, then hit "7" to flag them. Later, when I want to find them, I do the same thing — I change color label sets and search for yellow labelled images! Or I use the Metadata tab in the Library filter to find them:

Note: I created this color label set just to illustrate this article. Then I flagged a couple of random pictures just to test it. I'll go back and make some more logical sets later. I'm thinking one set for when I'm importing, one set for post-editing... etc.

BTW, here's a bonus: if you leave a color label name unchanged from one set to another, then you can find ALL of the images with that label. Notice the 930 images labelled "Completed". They're from both sets.

You could also create color label sets for specific assignments, or jobs, or events... the possibilities are endless.

Just another obscure but powerful feature in Lightroom 3!

— 30 —

Lightroom Workflow

2011-08-22T09:21:00.005-04:00

I recently participated in a discussion in which I described my Lightroom workflow in 4000 words or less (LOL). I thought it might be worthwhile repeating here.

This isn't everything I do, nor is it what I do 100% of the time (although I should). I thought it might help the relatively new Lightroom (LR) user to organize his or her procedures. It reads more complicated than it is. Look through it, and please add your thoughts and comments.

The beauty of both LR and PS are that there are 60 different ways to do things, none of them wrong. Whatever works: but the key is to stick with a system.

IMPORTING PROCEDURE

After a 'shoot', I import to LR in a dated subfolder hierarchy (Example: 2011/2011-08/august13) and flip through all the images quickly and rate them as follows:

First Pass

Images that deserve a second look get a "P" for 'Pick'.
Out of focus or just plain bad shots get an "X" and will get deleted from disk.

Second pass ("P" images only), or sometimes on the first pass

I rate very good, excellent and outstanding images "3", "4" and "5".
I rate images I intend to run HDR on "1". If an image stands out, I might also give it a "6" (red) for "EDIT NOW".

Now I go back and Keyword, if I didn't do it on import (if I have all shots from the same shoot on the import, I do it then. If they're mixed, I do it later).

After deletions, I have the following images in the LR database

No rating, no stars - junk that I don't have the heart to delete. I'm a packrat.
"P" rated, no stars - technically acceptable but really not interesting
"P" rated, 1 star - sequences to be merged into HDR's
"P" rated, 3-5 stars - the good stuff
"P" rated, red flagged (likely star rated too) - stuff I want to edit NOW.

I can select any of these groups in Library.

PROCESSING PROCEDURE

HDR Images

I currently create HDR's in one or more of 3 programs: NIK HDR Efex, Photomatix Pro and Photoshop CS5.
I generally get .tif files back from the first two, which I immediately reopen in CS5 and convert to .psd files. So I don't really care what they're named before I do that. NIK and Photomatix have different naming conventions, but I rename the files coming out of CS5.
I try to keep a vestige of the original filename, using the first one of the series of 3-7 images. I try (OK, I'll try harder!) to add HDR to the name - example: FAC_5233HDR.psd.
I try (!) to put the program used (HDR Efex, Photomatix, CS5HDR) in the keywords for searching purposes.
I rate with 3-5 stars (or if it's garbage, none)
I flag it with "7" (yellow) if I'm not finished editing it
I flag it with "8" (green) if it's ready to export.

Other Images

I have two kinds of files

Those I've edited in LR only - NEF files
Those I've exported to CS5 to edit - PSD files
I'll have a rare file that came from somewhere else as a JPG.
I flag it with "7" (yellow) if I'm not finished editing it
I flag it with "8" (green) if it's ready to export.

EXPORTING PROCEDURE

Exporting to a file
I have half-a-dozen presets in place depending on what purpose or location the export is going. It only takes a keystroke or two to modify them for specific use. They all go to their respective subfolders on the internal HD drive

Export for Blog: fit to 1280x1024 and add watermark
Export for DropBox: not resized, not watermarked.
Export for RHCC competition: 1280x1024, no watermark
Export to iPad 1024x1024 (the longest side becomes 1024px) no watermark. As part of the discussion, I came to realize that doubling the iPad screen size is a better idea so that the image looks better when zoomed in, so I'm changing that to 2048x2048.
Export to web 800x800, no watermark.
Export for NAPP 720x540, watermarked. These are the specs for the NAPP forum. I use the 800x800 format for uploading to my NAPP Portfolio.

Getting the images to the iPad is a pain in the a$$. I wish Apple would do something about this. Generally I transfer them to another folder in Dropbox and pick them up on the laptop (it's enabled as my iTunes machine), then move them into a dedicated subfolder that syncs with iTunes (feh. Ptooi). I could also pick them up individually via DropBox if I'm in a hurry, or if I can't connect the iPad to the computer. Advantage: they can be deleted from the iPad. Disadvantage: they can't be organized in folders.

Publishing to SmugMug

This works pretty well, assuming the folder on SmugMug has already been created. Technically, you can do that on the fly in LR but I've yet to be able to make that work. So I go to SmugMug, create the folder, then go back to LR and sync it and it finds the new folder.

Select the images you want to publish
Write captions (I like to caption the images on the gallery)
Drag them to the appropriate SmugMug publish collection
Click "Publish Now".

Publishing to Costco for printing

Select the images
Use "Export" because Costco doesn't show up under Publishing Services
Log into your Costco Account
Creating a folder is a pain in the neck. You always end up having to rename it later. Not important.
Click "Export".
Go to the Costco site (usually I have to log in again) and place your order
Pick up your pictures the next day.

AFTER EXPORTING

Re-flag exported images with "9" (blue) for "Completed".

By the way, you can rename your color label sets or create a new preset via Library->Metadata->Color Label Sets. However this can create a problem for Lightroom. The program ties the Attribute search to the Color Label Set currently in use. So if you change the name associated with a color label, it may not be able to find it. With a tip from Michael Hoffman on the NAPP forum, He found a way to work around it, but I also turned the problem into an opportunity. Before you do anything else, go into LR and SAVE YOUR CURRENT SETTINGS AS A CUSTOM LABEL SET (same menu item). I'll document this procedure in a separate post (here).

BACKING UP

All of my images are imported to my external 2Tb drive, and an automatic copy goes on the internal drive, in a folder called "Temporary Image Backups".
Every day, LR prompts me to do a catalog backup which also goes on the external 2Tb drive in the same folder
Once a week or so (when I'm being good) I run SyncToy and duplicate the Images folder onto a second external drive
Once a month I'll delete the 60-day old files from the internal drive.
Really critical stuff gets backed up elsewhere as well - multiple computers, the occasional thumb drive and, more frequently lately, up in the Dropbox cloud.

I know I need to address this some more. At the very least, another external 2Tb or 4Tb drive.

If I said I follow these procedures 100% of the time, I'd be lying. Sometimes I'll dive into an imported set of photos and start editing. But I'm going to give it 95%. Being able to find things later is one of the powers of Lightroom.

Perspective Cropping in Photoshop

2011-05-28T01:10:00.004-04:00

On the NAPP forum, someone was asking for advice because the pictures he was cropping were getting distorted, faces elongated. I suggested that perhaps he had the Perspective box selected when he was cropping. I still don't know if that was the problem, but the following is the answer I wrote. The question I was responding to was, "so what does the perspective box do?"

Some of the tools in Photoshop are mysterious when you haven’t used them regularly, if at all. I think the perspective cropping tool falls in that category.

OK, a picture is worth 1000 words. I just grabbed a shot of my grandson who REALLY, REALLY, REALLY needs a haircut. Here's the original, trimmed down to fit better here.

I decided to crop it to an 8x10 ratio.

Notice that this is without the perspective box selected. If I drag a corner, it keeps the same aspect ratio, just includes more or less of the image.

Now I did it again with the perspective box ticked:

Nothing else changed, except I dragged the top down and the bottom up. Doesn't look like an 8x10, right? But here's what you get when you invoke the crop by double clicking inside the selected area:

Elongated face! The reason is that with the perspective box selected, the cropping tool will take whatever's selected and make it fit in an 8x10 aspect ratio. It will stretch or shrink it as necessary to make that happen.

I'm guessing this is what's going on for you.

The perspective control is a very powerful tool. You can use it to make lines that are not parallel, parallel (couldn't think of a better way to say that. Oh wait: a picture is worth...)

Drag the cropping rectangle (OK, not a rectangle any more, a quadrilateral) until the sides are parallel with the things you want straight up and down or sideways

Magic!

Perspective cropping in Photoshop. That's how it works.

— 30 —

Button, Button

2011-05-05T22:43:00.004-04:00

This is a bit of a departure. This is about using Photoshop to create buttons for your website. It has nothing to do with photography. But everyone has a website, right?

One of the basic rules of design is to maintain a consistent look and feel and one way to do that is to make all your user interface buttons look alike, or at least similar. I set this up some time ago for my First Aid site, and I use the same devices on my other sites.

The idea is to be able to quickly change the text on a button, and possibly to change the colour of it as well, for example if you want it to change colours when you hover over it.

If you're already using Photoshop to create webpages, with sprites and slices and good stuff like that, this is going to seem rather simplistic. But if you're like me, and you only know a little HTML (and perhaps a smattering of Javascript), then this might work for you. Without further ado...

It took me less than 30 seconds to make the second button from the first one. Want to know how? It will take you a few minutes to create a master template then a new button is only a few seconds away.

Create a new document in Photoshop. Keep it larger than you're going to need, you can reduce it in your HTML. Don't worry, it'll be a small file.

Create a type layer. Use whatever font you want. You can scale it, resize it, change it any time in the process.

Create a shape. I used two circles and a rectangle to create an elongated button (I want room for a couple of words). The colours are just so you can see what I'm doing. Recolour them the same and merge the layers together.

Open the Layer Styles dialogue and make it pretty! I used a bevel and emboss, gave it a drop shadow and used a gradient overlay. Note that to keep the colour in place, the blend mode for the gradient has to be "overlay".

Duplicate the layer, open the Layer Style again and add a color overlay. You can change the colour of the overlay in the dialogue.

But we lost the gradient overlay. (OK, that was an "oops". But I have a solution which gets you a bonus too!)

Convert each layer to a Smart Object. That way you can change anything you want with ease. That's the bonus. Go back into the Layer Styles and add your gradient.

By the way, when you create a button, turn off all the unused layers because the drop shadow multiplies. It's outside the filled area.

Here's another hint. If you do a gradient and you make it darker on the top, the button looks concave. If you make it darker on the bottom, it looks convex.

You can edit the type layer just as easily. You can even add styles to it, change the colour, the size... anything! Move it to the top.

Of course, you have saved your work as you went along. In the end, you have a .psd file with a layer of text and as many layers for colours that you want. Normally you would use colours which are coordinated with your website palette.

To create a button, open the PSD file, choose the colour layer that you want, choose the type layer and modify it.

To save your button to use on your website, choose "Save for Web & Devices". If you make it a GIF file and leave Transparency on, the drop shadow will work with your web page background.

Complicated? Not really. Does it make it easy to give your website a consistent look? Can you create buttons in a few seconds? You bet.

If you never really used layers in Photoshop, this might give you a bit more understanding of how they work. Smart objects too.

-- 30 --

Non-destructive Dodge & Burn in Photoshop

2011-04-18T20:06:00.001-04:00

I came across a really neat trick the other day and I would attribute the concept if only I could remember where I read it! I didn't come up with this, I found it but it's so neat that I had to share.

You can always dodge (lighten) and burn in (darken) non-destructively by creating a duplicate layer and working on that layer not on the original or background layer. But if you want to change the effect, you have to do it the whole layer at once.

This trick works just like painting on a mask: you can reverse the effect by switching the colour (black or white or a shade of grey) that you're painting with. Here's how it works.

Open an image you want to work on and create a new layer

Fill the layer with 50% grey

Change the blend mode to "Overlay" (you can also use "Soft Light") and rename the layer "Dodge & Burn Overlay" so you don't forget what it is.

Here's how it works. In overlay mode (or soft light), blending 50% grey with your image has no effect. However if you LIGHTEN that grey, it SCREENS your image, or lightens it. If you DARKEN the grey, it MULTIPLIES the layers or darkens it.

Use a brush at relatively low opacity (say 20%)

Paint with black or dark grey on the overlay layer in those areas you want to darken

Paint with white, or lighter grey, in those areas you want to lighten.

Of course, you're looking at your original image while you're painting. If you turn off all the other layers, here's what the overlay layer might look like after you've painted on it:

Want to lessen the effect? Switch colours (the "X" key will toggle between the foreground and background colours) and paint over the area you want to change. Don't like what you've done? Paint with 50% grey and the changes are gone.

This works for saturation too! Not quite the same way, though. Create another blank new layer, and change its blend mode to "Saturation".

ANYTHING you paint on that layer will reduce the saturation of what's underneath it – doesn't matter what colour you paint with. Use a low opacity brush and paint over the offending brightly coloured bit. If you do too much, use the eraser tool on the saturation layer.

A really slick method of non-destructive dodging and burning that gives you precise levels of control, and it's easily reversible.

Here's an image I shot today that I used this technique on:

The rock in the foreground was too dark so I dodged it. The embankments in the distance were too light, so I burned them in. The orange leaves near the bottom were too brightly saturated. The rock face on the right needed to be darker. I made all these gentle changes by painting on the Dodge & Burn or the Saturation layers I created. The whole thing took 5 minutes, not including doing screen captures for this article!

This image itself wasn't that simple. It was a 5-shot HDR created in Photomatix Pro 4, then imported into CS5. These were slow exposures shot at ISO 100, with an 8x ND filter on the lens and aperture set to f/29. Shutter speeds ranged from 1/13 sec to 1.3 seconds. I selected the water and put it on a new layer and then applied Topaz Adjust 4 smoothing to it. I selected the underlying layer (everything else) and applied Topaz Adjust but in detail mode to that layer to bring out some sharp details. I did the dodging and burning I described above. Back in Lightroom, I used the adjustment brush to further soften the water, and we're done.

I'm not sure I got the effect I really wanted, but it's pretty close to what I had in mind.

-- 30 --

Shooting Tethered

2011-04-11T18:44:00.001-04:00

In this post we're going to look at shooting digital images while tethered to a computer. We'll look at what it is, why you might want to, what's involved, what you can and can't do, and a quick caveat (which means "beware!" if you didn't already know that). I'll be talking about Lightroom 3's capability to hook up your camera.

What is tethered shooting?

It means shooting pictures with your Digital SLR while it's connected to a computer. I've always wanted to try that, but (here's a Canon vs. Nikon thing where I come down on the wrong side!), Canon cameras had the capability to do it built-in, while if you had a Nikon, you needed to buy a relatively expensive piece of software to do so. I can't speak to the Canon side, but although I always wanted to try it, I didn't want to have to pay for it. So I never bought the Nikon software. All of that is changed with the advent of Lightroom 3.

What does it do for you?

There are lots of reasons why shooting tethered is a good idea.

Workflow. In the old film days, you shot your pictures, then either sent the film out to be processed or disappeared for a time into the darkroom, perhaps you could read a negative but you typically had prints or a contact sheet printed, and only then did you discover that the label on the can was upside down, or the lighting wasn't what you hoped, or it was out of focus.

With the advent of digital, that all got easier. Now you shot your pictures, took the card out of the camera, plugged it into the computer, uploaded the images and you could have a look at how they came out. It became 20 times faster and easier than the film days.

Shooting tethered, you could take a picture, then immediately look at it on your computer in all its wondrous glory and decide if the image is what you wanted. Immediately.

OK, you've got me. All of the other reasons I was thinking about kind of fall under the category described above. You save time. But the real advantage is that you can proof things instantly on a big screen. Is that exposure correct? Can you get away with shooting at f/8 or is that not enough depth of field? Did the model undo too many buttons? Did she blink or have a funny expression on her face? Does the client (who's looking over your shoulder) like the shot or do you need to keep going? It makes your workflow much more efficient and interactive.

One more thing. It's really, really cool.

What do you need in order to shoot tethered?

There are a whole bunch of solutions out there, most of which you have to pay for, to allow you to tether your camera to the computer. As I mentioned above, Nikon has something called "Camera Control Pro 2" which allows you to control your camera remotely. It costs $225 in Canada. It does allow you to do more things than the approach I'm going to describe next, though.

Lightroom 3 has the built-in capability to control your camera from your computer, provided your camera is on the list! The list is not long: there are 17 Canon models, 9 Nikons and one Leica on the list that I have. Open LR3, hit f1 for help and type in "tethered" for a list. There are some things it won't do, compared to the manufacturer's software, though.

So in order to shoot tethered, you need 3 things:

Lightroom 3 or better
A camera that's on the list
A USB cable.

That's it! Scott Kelby said it well: "It's so simple, Adobe did a beautiful job with this".

Open Lightroom. In the main "File" menu, pull down to "Tethered Capture" and click "Start Tethered Capture" on the flyout. You get a really simple little menu that wants to know where you want to store your images and if you want to do anything to them while you're importing them.

Click "OK". You'll now get a camera control bar that will recognize your camera as soon as you plug it in and turn it on. It looks like this:

You can see your camera settings, and that big button on the right is your shutter release! Click it, and you take a picture! A few seconds later, the image appears on screen in Lightroom and you can do whatever you normally would do in LR. You can blow it up, adjust it, crop it, export it, print it, anything! It's a normal image in Lightroom and you didn't have to transfer it in, it's already there! Slick.

What won't it do?

It won't let you adjust your camera from the computer. Just fire the shutter. That's pretty good, but it's too bad you can't adjust focus or tweak settings while looking at it onscreen. I would LOVE to be able to zoom in to 300% and adjust focus live. The manufacturer's software will let you do that. Maybe in Lightroom 4...

OK, here are some quick points to ponder.

While the camera is connected to the computer, it's sucking power out of your battery. More than normal, just like when you plug it in to upload images. Have some spares on hand, or use an AC adapter.
This isn't going to do you a lot of good while shooting an NBA game from courtside, or crocodiles feasting on kudu on the Nile river. But in the studio, or on location in a studio-like setting, you're going to love it.
If you use the shutter release button on the screen, you have to wait for the picture to be processed (a few seconds) before you can take another shot. If you use the normal shutter release on the camera, it works the same way it always does. The images get uploaded and you get to look at the last one, but you could scroll back and see the others if you want.
Your camera is connected to the computer by a cable. Nobody has come up with a wireless device for this yet (as far as I know), so you're stuck within USB cable distance of your computer. So what happens when someone trips over the cable? One of three things:

your camera goes crashing down to the floor.
your computer goes crashing down to the floor.
the cable rips out, taking with it some very expensive electronics. Be careful.

On Larry Becker's blog, "cheap shots", he talks about a cheap solution to hold the USB cable securely in the camera. Google it.

Here's a shot from my first tethered session yesterday. I took about 10 exposures to fine-tune it, to balance the light from the strobe illuminating the floor of the light tent and the light on the subject from the other two strobes. I would have had no idea how it looked any other way.

You're going to love shooting tethered. I do.

— 30 —

Using HDR for interior (architectural) shots

2011-04-03T19:28:00.007-04:00

I had my bathroom renovated and thought I would take a few pictures as the work progressed. I did, and you can see some of the steps on my Journal blog at http://www.faczen.blogspot.com/. Search for “renovation”. When it was all done, I wanted to take a shot that would show how nice the room looks now. And in the process, I realized that this was the perfect opportunity to use HDR.

In this writeup, I’m going to go through the main steps that took me from an ordinary photo to an image that I think captures the essence of the renovated room (OK, I know it’s a bathroom, and the ‘essence’ is not what we normally want to experience, but you know what I mean!).

The purpose is to show you some of the things you may want to do when creating an HDR, and a few other techniques for post-processing thrown in. Is this a step-by-step tutorial? No. My goal is to make you think about some of the steps you could take to create a final image and maybe to give you some ideas.

If you've been following my Journal blog, and especially if you're a member of the award winning Richmond Hill Camera Club (congratulations to all on winning the Stu Freedman Trophy at the Greater Toronto Council of Camera Clubs competition this year -- without my help this time! LOL), you would know that I created a presentation on HDR for the Imaging Conference, and I promised to convert it to a blog post. THIS IS NOT IT. But it will tie in nicely when I get it finished!

Is this a really great image? Nah. But infinitely better than the original!

Step 1: Visualization

I wanted to show the textures in the wood, capture the warmth of the lights (an aside here. There’s daylight from a window behind me. I didn’t think it would be enough. Also, the lights are not warm at all: I bought 6500K – daylight – bulbs and should not have. I’ll get some warmer ones and use these in my computer workstation area), and the really great colours of that towel hanging on the door. There are deep shadows on the front and sides of the vanity that I wanted to penetrate.

Step 2: Exposure

The front of the vanity is the darkest area in which I want to capture detail, so it needs to be in Zone III or more. So if I set the wall on the right as Zone V, I should be close. I had the ISO cranked ‘way up at 3200 and the aperture at f/4: as wide as it would go on the 12-24mm lens. I was hand-held – no room for a tripod – I was squeezed up against the wall in the bathtub. In the end, the lightest exposure was at 1/50 second. So I set the camera to 1/200 second in Manual mode, set the D300 to do 5 exposures ranging from -2EV to +2EV and banged off 5 frames in high speed mode.

Step 3: Merge to HDR

I have several programs I can use to do this. I chose this time to use Photomatix 4, directly from Lightroom. This image shows the workflow:

Now just sit back and wait for Photomatix to do its thing. There are a couple of choices you have to make, depending on if you were handheld or on a tripod (aligning the images) or if there was anything moving in the image (remove ghosting) but basically, just hit go.

Step 4: Toning the image

Photomatix is going to present you with some presets to look through. You’re not looking for the one that gives you your final image, you’re looking for the one that takes you closest. You’re going to be tweaking from there. In this case, I thought the “grunge” setting was the closest, although I really wasn’t looking for a rough image. Now you start playing with the sliders on the left. The first thing I did was to cycle through the five smoothing settings and in this case, I thought the most pleasing one was the middle one. The picture looks too grainy and bright for me, though

So I brought the Gamma up, added a little extra saturation and got rid of some of the grain and noise by adjusting the four smoothness controls. The critical one is the ‘Micro-smoothing’ but I didn’t want to crank it all the way up because you compromise apparent sharpness that way. When you’re done, hit “Save and Re-import” and your image will show up in the appropriate folder in Lightroom.

Step 5: Post-production

Well technically step 4 was post-production too, but we still have more to do. You could do some colour balancing adjustments, tweak the exposure, change the noise reduction and sharpness, all that good stuff in Lightroom now, but I wanted to do something else first, for which I had to go to Photoshop. So I did. Since I hadn’t done anything in Lightroom yet, I chose “Edit Original” when presented with that choice.

First Things First. I shot with a 12mm lens at an angle, so stuff is distorted. If you straighten the image to make the edge of the medicine cabinet on the left vertical, then the wall on the right is way off. That’s what you use “Perspective cropping” for.

Select the crop tool, clear any presets, then drag to select most of the image. You’ll get a different menu bar at the top when you do, and you’re going to want to select the “Perspective” tickbox as shown.

Now drag the bottom corners of your selection until the edges align with the features you want to be vertical. You may have to play with this a bit. If it doesn’t come out the way you expected, just step back in the history and try again. Photoshop will now create a rectangular image from your selection. If you used to use a view camera with a tilt lens, this is a similar effect. Click in the image to confirm. Magic!

Note that I could have levelled the image here too, but I like the way Lightroom does that, so I saved it for later. OK, what else? There was quite a bit of colour variation across the image. So I used hue/saturation adjustment layers with appropriate masking to vary the colours.I didn’t want the toilet paper roll in the lower right corner, so I used content aware fill to get rid of it. It didn’t work right away, so I had to take it, and the right wall, to a new layer and work there without distraction from other things in the image.

Since I’m really a fan of Topaz Adjust, I opened a duplicate layer with it and used just a little bit of adjustment – in this case I chose the “simplify” preset as a starting point, to smooth the image more. I added a little extra saturation and noise reduction too. Back in Photoshop, I copied the colourful towel to a fresh layer and boosted the saturation. The lights above the medicine cabinet were completely blown out. I copied them to a fresh layer and used the burn and dodge tools to give them a better look with a hot spot in the middle where the bulbs themselves are. There was still too much green in the image so I did a levels adjustment on the green colour channel.

Back to Lightroom. A little tweaking, crop to 8x10 proportion and we’re done. Here’s the final image:

The total time taken to process this image was about 30 minutes. It took me a lot longer to do it again with screen captures, etc so that I could write this up! One thing that amazes me is the lack of apparent noise, given that the camera was set for ISO 3200! And by the way, this was a small room: the width you’re looking at is only 6 feet and the camera was less than 8 feet from the door in the picture. Love that wide angle lens!

– 30 –

HDR: is it here to stay?

2011-03-22T15:08:00.000-04:00

I think so. In anticipation of an upcoming sequence of articles on HDR techniques, I offer the following thoughts, which I wrote for another blog I read. There were passionate comments from both sides, which evoked the following response from me.

People certainly are polarized when it comes to HDR. Either they love it or they hate it, and within those camps there are those who disparage anything not realistic and others who are captivated by the surrealistic or more extreme treatments.

In my humble opinion, the HDR concept is a valid approach to rendering an artist's (a photographer or pixel manipulator can be an artist) vision. The current software offerings have made creating HDR images available to the masses. There will be good ones and there will be bad ones and there will be ones you like and others you dislike.

An almost perfect analogue is typography. Everybody and his brother (or sister) who has MS Word has the tools to be a typographer. How few of them have the vision.

Ansel Adams was doing HDR's in 1939. He compressed 7 or 8 zones of light values into the 5 or so that could be reproduced on paper. Are there those who don't appreciate or like his work? Undoubtedly. Do some people think his technique was flawed? Sure. Does anyone doubt for a moment that he saw through an artist's eyes? I don't believe so.

Can one criticize technique? Absolutely. But is it fair to criticize an artist's vision?

HDR is just a medium. An art form. HDR is to digital photography as oil or chalk-and-charcoal is to painting. I for one enjoy seeing the results when a real artist creates an HDR image. And I'm going to keep trying too. One day, maybe, some of my images will match what I see inside my head.

What do you think? Your comments are more than welcome.

Time for a tune-up?

2011-03-11T12:06:00.001-05:00

Once in a while, you need to get a tune-up. I sent my camera in to Nikon for repair and I learned a lesson that I want to pass on to you.

I know we're all different, but I'm going to venture that you're probably better at taking pictures than you are at maintaining your finely tuned, very expensive equipment. Let's talk about that.

Are you exactly like me? Probably not, but I'll bet there are similarities (yes, I put my pants on one leg at a time. I sleep from time to time, I go to the bathroom, even the Queen of England passes gas from time to time [mind picture!]). We're all different but here's what I'm talking about:

I take my camera out every day. Rain or shine. Snow and wind and temperatures of -40°C. When I do, I shoot anywhere from a few frames up to a maximum of 500 or so. I come home, grab the CF-card(s), stick them in the card reader and upload them to the computer, being sure to make a second copy on another external drive at the same time (OK, that was nagging. Help me out: I'm trying to pretend I'm your mother here. Don't run with scissors and if you keep making that face it will stay like that).

Then I spend 'way too much time editing and sorting and printing and emailing and reading blogs and forums and newsgroups... and somehow I never get around to looking after my equipment. Until something overt goes wrong.

I'm not very good at maintaining my stuff. Some people are, but not me. I'm a really bad mechanic (I break things. Trust me - all I have to do is look at stuff and it breaks) so I don't try to fix things any more. Especially when they're little tiny precision things like you find inside cameras and lenses.

I spent all that money on Nikon gear because I knew it was rugged, war correspondents bang them around in combat zones, Scott Kelby gets them knocked over by NFL quarterbacks, they just keep on going and going and going... but sometimes they do break.

The focus sensor on my D300 broke. Well Nikon won't say "it broke", they said they 'adjusted and cleaned it'. Same thing with my 70-200 lens. They 'adjusted' it. They charged me $300. You know what? A fair price. Someone else I know dropped his D2X on some concrete steps and he paid $450 to have it fixed. Probably also fair.

Here's the thing: when Nikon (or Canon, or Sony or...) services your gear, they make it like new again. When I got it back, they had changed every soft part on the outside of the camera (those little rubber doors, the grip), they even replaced the escutcheon plate on the 70-200 lens where my fingers had worn out the white screened markings, because that's fresh and new.

They inspected everything. They even mounted the big lens on a projector and looked at every inch of a target. Then they tuned it so that it was factory perfect.

And they CLEANED it. I swear, it wasn't that clean when I bought it!

We all clean our stuff. You learn really early that spotless glass takes better pictures than ones with freckles. We've all learned how to carefully clean the sensor in our cameras. But not like the factory does it.

If you're going to Africa like Ron is, or you're going into wedding season like some of the pro's I know, or you just want everything to be perfect when the opportunity for that killer shot arises, think about sending your gear in for a tuneup*.

I spent $300 and got peace of mind in exchange. No excuses now: if something is out of focus or otherwise not correct, it wasn't the camera, it was ME. And every time that happens, I try to learn what I did wrong and not repeat it.

Pick a time when you can spare your camera for a couple of weeks, then, "just do it". And don't forget to floss, and sneeze into your arm. And it won't kill you to call your mother just to say 'hi'.

* I called Nikon to ask them what they charge. They (can't speak for the others) will inspect your gear and do an external cleaning for free, whether it's in warranty or not. Then if something is wrong, they'll give you an estimate for the repair (or adjustment, they call it. I think they don't want to admit anything can break!). Minimum charge for a tuneup for a body is $50, and they told me they charge $86 per hour for general repairs. They also have some flat rate charges.

Shooting for Micro-Stock

2011-03-03T17:34:00.003-05:00

If at first you don’t succeed...

You know how that saying ends. I don’t fail at a lot of things, and damn it, I haven’t given up on this one yet, but this is difficult.

I’m going to talk about shooting for stock. Most of us have surfed the stock photography sites, at least a little bit. Have you ever wondered about becoming a contributor? About shooting for stock photography?

Another saying:

Those who can, do.
Those who can’t, teach.
Those who can’t teach, write about those who do and teach.

OK, I stole the last line but it fits. Just so you don’t have to Google it, the original quote is “He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.” And it was written by George Bernard Shaw in Maxims for Revolutionists: Education. Man and Superman, 1903. Just another piece of trivia if you ever get to be on Jeopardy.

Here’s how this all started. A member of our club, Les Palenik, shoots for stock. He told me that I have some great images, and asked if I’ve ever considered it. I was intrigued and went online to research it. If you start by Googling “Stock Photography”, you come up with over 8 million hits so this is a serious business.

So I did some research, looked at Les’s links and went over to the big guy – Shutterstock – to have a look.

There are different levels of stock photography. Shutterstock (SS to the cognoscenti) is a “Micro-stock” site where you have to do big volumes to make anything. I think the maximum price you’ll pay for an image today is $28, and that’s for unlimited use, even if you’re creating a National ad campaign for Coke (that’s “Coca Cola”, not the other kind). Limited use of a screen-size image, if it isn’t free, will cost a buck. So you have to sell lots of photos to make any money at it. It’s a numbers game. Put 20,000 images up and some of them will sell to someone! They have millions of buyers.

Getty Images is different. I haven’t delved deeply into their structure but if you select an image as a potential buyer, they want to know what use you’ll put it to, and charge accordingly. I selected one at random and said I wanted to use it on the cover of a travel brochure and got a price of several hundreds of dollars.

Here’s the catch, though. Not just anyone can post images on these sites, you have to be authorized as a contributor. Getty has a very involved and onerous process, go to their site to read about it. http://www.gettyimages.com/.

What Shutterstock does (http://www.shutterstock.com/), is asks you for 10 images. Seven out of these 10 have to meet their criteria and be accepted, and then you get your contributor card. If you’re not approved, you have to wait another month before submitting again. Even then, all images you send them are vetted. So what are these criteria? I’ll tell you in a minute.

Here’s a really good thing. There are a set of forums for Shutterstock contributors and wannabe contributors and in one of these, there are people who will help you to understand the requirements. If you submit images to the forum, you will get critiqued. They will tell you what is right and what is wrong with the images. They don’t pull punches, they’re not out to make you feel good, they don’t care much about your feelings: they just tell it like it is. Put on your flameproof suit, leave your ego at the door.

So I dug out my best image and sent it in. They want a 500px wide image to look at, and a 100% blowup from within the image. Just figuring out how to do that is a challenge! Here:

No brainer, right? I removed the logo on the front of the canoe because I know they don’t want any logos. I cleaned it up and sharpened it. You know what reaction I got?
“OOF” (that’s short for ‘out of focus’). Too much noise. Artifacts. Unacceptable.

WHAT? You’re kidding me. OK, the very tip of the canoe isn’t totally sharp, but you’re kidding right? Nope. They’re serious. So I tried again. And again. And again. Bottom line – looking through over 30,000 images I found TWO. TWO. That the experienced moderators on the forum thought might be accepted. I spent a lot of time discussing and trying to figure out why. And I think I tracked it down: I overprocess my images. Too much sharpening produces artifacts. Imperfect exposures create noise. Excessive noise reduction makes it unsharp. It’s a vicious circle. The “RAW vs. JPEG” article I wrote earlier came out of my experiences at Shutterstock.

The premise is, at SS, that they don’t know what a buyer wants to use an image for, so all images on the site have to be technically correct and usable, I suppose, up to printing on the side of a bus. Also they are super-sensitive about any commercial identification in an image. If there is a car in an image it better not be a Ford (they’re really picky) and if you’re using an image in an ad for Subaru, that would be logical. If you take a picture of the Toronto skyline, you have to get rid of that “Bank of Montreal” logo on their building.

There is an exception: newsworthy images for editorial use only.

Want another example?

Here’s a shot of the Lynx at Muskoka Wildlife Centre. Nice picture, right? Sharp focus, good composition and lighting, interesting subject, right? Buzzzzzzzzzzzz. It would be rejected. The main reason: I was told, “OOF”. They’re seeing some motion blur, if you look at his whiskers really closely (caused by the fact that although I used flash fill, the shutter speed was slower than it should have been. I wrote this up here). And again, something they call “artifacts”.

What’s that about? Well if you sharpen a picture, you get little texture oddities in the smoother areas. If you try to get rid of them by using noise reduction, then you lose sharpness. You’re between a rock and a hard place.

I haven’t solved it yet. Here’s a picture of Cottonwood Manor that I did last summer at Lake Erie. Nice, huh? Not for Shutterstock. “OOF”. “Can’t see the textures in the bricks”. Can you believe that? Oh and by the way: that might be a recognizable building. You need to get a Property Release from the owner before they’ll accept it.

I haven’t given up yet, but it’s frustrating. I’m especially perturbed by the fact that I can’t seem to shoot a picture with acceptable focus, even using all the right techniques – tripod, cable release, mirror lockup, I had a suspicion that there might be something wrong with my camera because it’s common to all 4 lenses I have.

If you’ve been reading my blogs, you know that indeed, I had something wrong with the camera, but I have to admit that the problem may lie elsewhere. When I get it back from Nikon next week, I’ll be out of excuses and will have to look at my techniques, both behind the lens and at the computer. I’m pretty sure I’m over-processing my images.

Certainly, I’m not shooting the right kind of pictures for stock. First of all, I’ve developed a bad habit of thinking I should shoot a wider image and crop the bad parts out. I have to start thinking in terms of the full frame. If nothing else, it will certainly improve my composition techniques. Artistic pictures do not have that “CV” SS is looking for. “Commercial Value”. Saleability. Commercial appeal.

If you’re interested, go to Shutterstock.com, sign in as a contributor, then access the forums under “resources” and go to the “critique” one. Stock photographers are another breed entirely and you’ll learn a lot, just hanging out there. Be prepared to be humbled.

In summary, here’s what they’re looking for:

Technically perfect images. Pin-sharp focus, perfect exposure, noise and artifact free, minimum 4Mp size. Don’t even think about using that el-cheapo 2x teleconverter. It won’t be sharp enough.
“Commercial Value” (CV). Images that people might buy. No ducks. Everyone sends in ducks. Nobody wants to buy them.
No identifying logos or anything else that might be construed as a copyright infringement. You can’t shoot a pair of basketball shoes because even if you’ve removed the Nike Swoosh, someone might identify them as being Nikes. You can’t shoot the CN Tower unless it’s only part of a skyline scene. You can’t include a car in a scene especially if it’s a Ford.
Any person in any image must sign a model release. Not only that, but his or her signature has to be witnessed by a third party. Ditto the owner of any recognizable building or structure. There’s an exception to this rule: if the image is topical or newsworthy, and then it might be approved for editorial use only. This is a very tricky category and new submitters are discouraged from sending in editorial images.
They want a broad spectrum of images in your first 10. Not all landscapes. Not all tabletop shots. No ducks.

Les has a couple of thousand images up on Shutterstock. Shooting them requires a whole new vision – some very mundane things have a high CV potential: the latch on a briefcase. A house with a 2-car garage. An old TV set. You don’t make much on the sale of an image – maybe 50¢ or $1 – but if you sell 1000 images a month... (Getty is different. You make more but it’s HARD to get hired).

I’m sticking with this because I know that if I solve the technical issues I will be a better photographer. The techniques will spill over into my other work. And besides, I don’t give up so easily! Stay tuned.

Using Flash Fill

2011-03-03T15:41:00.052-05:00

You know what “Dynamic Range” is, right? It’s the difference
in light intensity between the brightest whites in your image and the deepest shadows. Often it’s more than your camera, your monitor or your printer can handle. One possible way to bring it within the gamut of those devices is to fill in some of those shadows by throwing a little extra light in there. We’re going to talk about using your flash to do just that.

It has been written that the human eye can discern 7 octaves of light. Your eye is amazing. Look outside on a bright day and let your peripheral vision take in some dark objects around you. You can see detail in the brightest areas
and in the darkest ones (sometimes you can’t: like looking at your dashboard in the car on a sunny day. That’s when there are more than 7 octaves of light intensity). Film, or a digital sensor, can only handle 4 octaves. You need to set your exposure so that the brightest areas are not blown out, but then the shadows will all be filled in! So throw some extra light on the subject!

That’s an extreme example. More likely, you’ll deal with those situations a different way. “High Dynamic Range” or HDR processing is another way of handling it – you shoot more than one image of the same scene with different exposures and merge them together. If you’re shooting in RAW, by the way, you might be able to use a single exposure, make a copy or two, and adjust the exposures so that you’re covering all the light levels. HDR is a topic for another day.

Maybe you’re doing a portrait using that beautiful available light from a North-facing window. Or you’re shooting a picture into back lighting or with a bright snowy background and there are deep shadows on the faces, or they’re just underexposed. This is a job for fill-flash.

The little pop-up flash on your camera (unless you’re lucky enough to be shooting with a pro body like a D3x, which doesn’t have one) is next to useless for lighting an image with flash, but it might just do the trick for filling in some shadows. It will still suffer from red-eye problems because of where it is in relation to the lens, and it’s not very powerful so it won’t reach out very far (I get a real kick out of watching a stadium event, like a football or a basketball game, and seeing the flashes going off all around the stadium, even in the nosebleed seats. Don’t people realize that they’re not going to light up that Dwight Howard dunk from the 700-level with the little flash in their point-and-shoot?).

Back on topic: there’s a difference between lighting a scene with flash and just using it for fill. Find the adjustment on your camera to control the amount of flash. Set it to –1 EV or thereabouts: that’s one stop less than the ambient light, and give it a try. It might be too much or too little, but it’s a good starting point. That’s “minus one”, in case you missed that. Here’s an image I did at –1-1/3 stop, for example.

Eyes. Shot with flash fill. The flash output was 1-1/3 stops under the ambient light.

If you have an external flash, so much the better. Especially if you can control it remotely, so it’s not mounted on the camera. Light coming from an angle is much more interesting than light from directly above the lens.

Here the flash (Nikon SB-600) was held above and to the right of the flowers. Much better lighting than if it had been on the camera.

Now everyone knows that the duration of the burst of light out of a flash is short. When you reduce the amount of light coming out of the flash, you’re generally reducing the duration of the flash, not its power! So if you want
to freeze that hummingbird in flight, get the flash close and you might be able to achieve that 1/50,000 second burst of light. But that’s NOT what this article is about. In fact, I’m going to show you what can go wrong.

Everything comes with a penalty: your shutter speed has to be slow enough to sync with the flash (in most cameras, that means a shutter speed of 1/125 or 1/60th. The D300 goes to 1/320 sec). So forget that shallow depth of field shot,
you’ll be shooting at f/11 or f/16 on a bright day.

Here’s where I made my mistake at the Muskoka Wildlife Centre. I had the camera at the default 1/60 sec flash sync speed, so I got camera movement and even subject movement in many of my images. You know the rule: trying to hand-hold a 200mm lens at 1/60, even with VR, is iffy at best.

This exposure used ambient light with exposure compensation set at +1 to brighten the snow and the flash fill at –1 to fill in the shadows. I naively thought I could also freeze the motion. No such luck. In fact, I was shooting with a
200mm lens handheld, and the shutter speed reverted to 1/60 second. Not a chance. I was lucky ANYTHING was in focus (look at the green pine branch on the ground), thanks to VR. Just giving you something to think about and a reason to go RTFM (Google it) for your camera and flash.

The white light is from the flash bouncing off the ceiling. The green is from those horrible plasma lights.

Here’s another issue. Colour temperature. Now this shot is illuminated by flash, not just filled, but look at the differences in colour between the flash (daylight) and the ambient light (fluorescent plasma lighting). Can you say “ugly”? Here’s another example that makes it really clear.

The curling team was lit by my SB-600 flash with Gary Fong Diffuser. But LOOK at the colour of the light in the rink in the background! This points out the real difference in Colour Temperature that you will have to deal with somehow. This is NOT Flash Fill, by the way. It's Flash Illumination.

And another one. Remember that closeup of the eyes above?

The ambient light was daylight, all right, but it was filtered through some green trees. Look at the awful colour before I adjusted it in Photoshop! So if you’re going to mix ambient light with flash, be aware of colour temperatures.
Generally speaking, the unmodified flash runs around 5500°K which is the colour of a sunny day.

So here’s a summary:

Use fill flash to open up dark or shadowed areas in an otherwise bright scene
Expose for the normal ambient light and set your flash to put out at least one stop less light
If you’re trying to freeze action, light the scene with the flash, don’t just fill it.
Check how to set the shutter speed on your camera when you’re using the flash.
Think about colour balance with the other lights in the scene, and
Practice, practice, practice until it becomes second nature.

Here’s one more image where I used flash fill.

Surprised? I wanted a soft, long exposure for the mist and the background, but I wanted some detail and sharpness in the dock itself. So I gave it a little shot of flash at –1eV and exposed the rest of the scene for 1/3 second at f/22, ISO=100.

Winter Photography

2011-03-03T15:25:00.002-05:00

Shooting pictures in winter is just like shooting pictures in summer except:

(1) it’s cold. That affects you and your equipment. The last thing you want to do is take your camera and lenses into a warm environment then back out again. Condensation makes it impossible to shoot some times, and can’t be good for your stuff*.

(2) there’s this white stuff on the ground. It really messes with your exposures. You need to think it through.

: Spot metered on Lynx and exposure compensation set to +2/3EV. 1/60 at f/4.5, ISO=200

If you’re shooting with a spot meter, nothing changes. You’re metering on the subject, not the snow (well unless you’re shooting a snow scene). If you’re using averaging or matrix metering, your camera is going to try to make the snow 18% grey, not white. So your picture is going to be underexposed. So if you are trying to meter a scene and not an individual subject, it’s probably a good idea to overexpose a little. As a general rule, probably around one full stop, so set your exposure compensation to +1. That way, the subject will have a better chance at being properly exposed and you’ll have nice white snow.

Normal exposure. Nice "grey" snow. The camera tries for 18% grey. 1/2500 at f/2.8, ISO=200

This is the same shot at +1EV. The snow is blown out but the exposure on the huts is better.

1/1250 at f/2.8, ISO=200

Nice white FEATURELESS snow. Blown out. Overexposed. What to do, what to do. The dynamic range between the snow and the possibly dark subject is too high. Oh, wait: did I just use the phrase “High Dynamic Range”? HDR for short? I did, didn’t I. Not a bad idea, if you’re shooting a static subject, but what do you do when the subject is moving? Say like the lynx... you have to get the amount of light on the subject closer to the amount of light on the snow. Hmmm... what to do... aha! Flash Fill! Or use a reflector to throw more light on the subject.

HDR created from a total of 5 exposures – one at nominal, the other 4 at -2EV, -1EV, +1EV and +2EV. Look at the detail in the snowpile to the left and in the trees behind.

Generally, I'll bracket exposures like crazy in the winter. Sometimes you'll guess very wrong. And sometimes you'll be right, but use your head!

Spot metered somewhere on the lake surface, NO exposure compensation. White vignette added for effect. 1/5000 sec at f/8, ISO=200.

* I'm still waiting to find out. It looks like the continuous autofocus servo or the software controlling it failed on my D300. Last time it functioned was at the Minden Ice Races and I'm thinking the cold might have gotten to the camera. Nikon has it as I write this, so we'll see...

That said: to prevent condensation, go to a canoeing or kayaking store and get yourself a DRY BAG big enough for your camera and lens. Before taking your camera into the warm from the outside cold, seal it in the bag with outside air. Let it warm up to room temperature. Cold air contains MUCH less moisture than warm air so when it warms up it stays dry.

Photoshop CS5 Content-aware Fill Trick

2011-03-03T15:10:00.003-05:00

Today we’re going to talk about the Content-Aware Fill tool in Photoshop CS5. It’s an amazing tool but sometimes it seems to have a mind of its own! I want to introduce you to a trick I found to make it more predictable.

Content Aware Fill (CAF from now on so I don’t have to keep typing it) and the content-aware healing brush have dramatically streamlined the workflow, especially when trying to remove things like power lines or other objects. You can use the venerable clone stamp tool, but it’s more work, leaves behind lots of artifacts you have to clean up, and if you’re not careful, creates repeating patterns that are annoying and distracting in the image.

But sometimes, CAF produces unpredictable results. That can be good or bad: here’s a little ad image I created without intending to, when all I was trying to do was to isolate a couple of First Aid kits on a background. CAF picked up some unexpected content when I tried to use it. A very neat unanticipated effect!

: Original photo

: After CAF

: How I used it on the website. Some extra effects from Topaz Adjust 4

Generally, though, you’re trying to remove something from an image and replace it with what looks like the original background. If you’ve never used the Content Aware fill and healing brush functions, here’s a simple example. If you have, you can skip a few paragraphs.

Suppose I want to remove the sign from this picture.

: The original photo

Draw a loose selection around the sign. You can use any selection tool – I usually just use the lasso but in this case I used the quick selection tool then expanded the selection by 50px or so. If the selection is tight then you’re going to see seams and edges around the area after you fill it. Be generous – give it space to breathe! Then hit Shift-F5 to invoke the Fill dialog and select content-aware from the drop down menu. It’s sticky: it’ll still be selected next time you try to use it.

In this screen capture, I painted the edges of the selection so you could see it.

: Make a selection then initiate the "Fill" operation

The sign is magically gone. But the post is still there (I could have removed that in the same step but then I wouldn’t get to illustrate the CAHB -- Content-Aware Healing Brush). The background fill isn’t perfect but this is just a quick example. Paint over the post with the CAHB using a brush that’s about 50% bigger than the post (again, it needs room to breathe) and like magic, the post is gone, replaced with what Photoshop figures is what you wanted to be there.

: Now use the content-aware healing brush

Here’s the finished product.

: The finished image

What the CAF tool does is to look around the layer and using some very sophisticated algorithms, calculate what should replace the area you’re filling. I’ve just dropped a major hint about what the trick is. So if you’ve already figured out what I’m going to say, great! If not, follow me here.

OK, here’s another image I want to remove something from. The table at lower right shouldn’t be there.

So I make a loose selection around the table, hit shift-F5 <enter> and it’s gone! It even added in the wall duct, almost right down to the corner. But not totally seamlessly – it left some traces behind so I need to go in and fix it a bit.

Easy enough, right? Just make another selection around the area you want to clean up and do it again. Uh oh. Look what I got!

It picked up the leg from elsewhere in the image. Not what I wanted! I want it to pick up plain blank wall.

So let’s limit what CAF has available to it to choose from when doing the fill. Select only acceptable areas and copy them to a new layer (make the selections, then hit ctrl-J or cmd-J on a mac). In this case, you’ll have a layer that has only blank wall. Be sure to include the area you want to replace.

Working on that new layer, make a loose selection around the area you want to fix up and do your shift-F5 thing again. Sometimes it takes a few passes to completely clean up the image, but it’s relatively painless and quick. The last step is to merge the new layer with the original one. All done!

This is a lot less work and leaves a much cleaner blend than any of the other methods I’ve tried. OK well maybe not in this example, because I was trying to use one that was really obvious so you could see what’s going on. And I did it in a more complex than necessary sequence so I could show you how to do it and get the screen captures as I went along.

You could make your workflow even faster by creating a new layer first, either by selecting only the areas you want CAF to work from and hitting ctrl-J (Cmd-J) or by duplicating the whole layer then erasing all the stuff you didn’t want. Remember to leave enough behind for CAF to work from, outside the area you’re filling.

Any thoughts? The comment field is awaiting your input!

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Shooting Action Scenes

2011-03-03T14:54:00.000-05:00

Here’s the bottom line. If you want an action image with everything is focus and no blur, you’re going to have to use a fast enough shutter speed. But do we really want everything sharp in all of our images? There’s more than one way to skin a cat.

For everything to be blur-free, the slowest shutter speed you can shoot if you’re hand-held is “one over the focal length of the lens”. So for a 200mm lens, 1/200 second. For a 50mm lens, 1/50 second (there are some of you who are going to argue that cropped sensors – less than full-frame – are even worse. We could have that technical argument all day but bottom line, it’s the same). There are ways to get around that: shoot with a tripod or monopod. Have VR (vibration reduction) lenses or cameras. But even if the subject is not moving, that’s your limit.

If you’re trying for tack-sharp focus, think again. Double that speed, at least. To reach that high speed, you may need to compromise on your ISO setting. I’m shooting hockey action next week with my 70-200mm lens. Indoor lighting in an arena is awful. I expect I’ll be shooting at ISO 1600 or 3200, 1/1000 sec at f/2.8.

If the subject is moving, it’s a whole new ballgame. Or, by the way, if you’re moving. Sometimes you have to go a whole lot further. Picture a racing motorcycle coming right at you at 200 miles/hour. Good luck. Even if your autofocus is up to it, are you? What you need to do in that circumstance is manually focus on a point and when the racing bike hits that point, trip the shutter. Right. Good luck with that. The solution in that circumstance is to use your fastest cycle rate – in the D300 it’s 6 frames/second or 8 if you have an external battery. Hold down the shutter release just before the bike reaches the pre-focused point and pray.

So what about that same motorcycle travelling across your lens? Even with a high shutter speed, you’re not going to get the shot unless you pan with the bike. And never stop moving, even after you’ve released the shutter (trust me. I know, after the shot, who cares? But if you don’t, you’ll be bringing your camera to a stop just at the point of release. Follow through, like a golfer or a skeet shooter.

OK, now as I said, does everything have to be unblurred? Not necessarily. In fact, you give the impression of motion when the background has a motion blur to it. The trick is to pan the camera with the moving subject. Believe it or not, I’ve gotten pretty good images shooting a 200mm lens at 1/30 second. Pan smoothly – keep some part of your subject in the same place in your viewfinder – let’s say the driver’s door of that car or the wheel of the bike. This takes practice, lots of practice. Go out on the road and shoot at cars going by (Watch them slow down if you dress in black or dark blue when you do this. They think that’s a radar gun!). Think about what you want to accomplish in advance and try it!

: Stop Action. Doesn't look like he's moving but this is the sharper image. Shot at 1/1000 second, f/7.1, ISO=200.


: Panning with the moving car. Shot at 1/40 sec at f/22, ISO=100.

Even with such a low shutter speed you can get sharp images, but you have to practice, practice, practice!

JPEG vs. RAW: it's a no-brainer. Or is it?

2011-03-03T14:09:00.000-05:00

RAW vs. JPEG
We’re going to look at some of the issues revolving around whether to shoot in RAW or to shoot JPEG. This isn’t as black-and-white a decision as you may think.

Let’s first look at what we’re talking about here. Unless you have had your head in the sand, you know that pretty well all modern DSLR’s (and even some point-and-shoots) have the capability of shooting in RAW. Actually ALL digital cameras can shoot RAW, only some of them can deliver images in it. Some cameras automatically convert everything to JPEG before outputting them. All of your photo club buddies, the forums online, the sales people in the stores and the training sites like NAPP harp at you to shoot in RAW. “Anyone who shoots in JPEG can’t be serious”. We’re here to think about that.

So the RAW file is the basic full image that the camera has captured. Nothing has been done to it – every pixel, every level, everything that the sensor saw, is in the RAW file. A JPEG is the same picture after the computer (your camera IS a computer) plays with it. It does a bunch of stuff to the image that we’ll look at below, compresses it so that the file is smaller, and it does a lot of that by only affecting things you’ll never see. Most of the time.

You can’t use your RAW file for anything. You have to convert it – to a JPEG, to a TIFF, to a GIF, to something else before you can output it anywhere. That means to print it, to look at it onscreen, to submit it to your club competition, even to process it in Photoshop. But it contains EVERYTHING so it’s your best starting point. Sometimes.

A RAW file (by the way, there’s no real standard. Nikon has their NEF format. Canon has CR2. Other manufacturers have their own proprietary formats. Adobe is trying to get the world to go DNG which stands for “Digital Negative” but that hasn’t happened yet. And Sony wanted the world to go Betamax. Remember?) needs to be manipulated. You need to have a program that will do that – the most common are Photoshop and Lightroom, both of which use exactly the same engine: called “ACR” or “Adobe Camera RAW”. Yes there are other programs out there, but I haven’t used them for many years. And here’s where the problem arises.

When you import your RAW images into, say, Lightroom, you choose one of many presets – maybe your own custom one – to do some initial adjustments. Remember, you can’t use a RAW file without adjusting it: the image will be flat, dull, soft focus, and really big.

What prompted the writing of this article was a problem I’ve been having. All my images were oversharpened, but were actually out of focus because of the noise reduction I had to do to compensate, and were fraught with artifacts. I only discovered this when I tried to submit images to Shutterstock where they are REALLY fussy – another article will cover this topic – and they all got rejected. I was at the point where I figured there was something wrong with my camera and was preparing to bite the bullet and ship it to Nikon (along with my credit card info, making sure I had lots of available credit limit!). Then someone suggested that I shoot some comparisons between RAW and JPEG so I did: and almost fell out of my socks until I figured out what was going on.

: Look how unsharp the RAW file is!

Here’s what’s happening: your camera is a lot smarter than you think. It’s a computer. Before it gives you back your picture in JPEG form, it applies sharpening and de-noise algorithms, it sets your white balance, even the colour space, changes the Gamma and modifies the relative contrast, and much more.

Now that big, bad, computing machine that’s sitting on your desktop can do that too. Much more powerfully, and with greater flexibility. So which computer should you use? The little one in the camera or the big one on your desk? Depends how much time you have and how much attention you are prepared to give to your pictures. Depends on your skill level too: are you as good as that team of software engineers over at Nikon? Maybe not, but of course not all images are the same, so how can they know what’s best for a particular picture? Well, they can’t… but they can give it a ‘go’!

My problem is, I’m not that smart. I seldom “RTFM” (Google it!). I just wing it. And sometimes I fly like a brick. Coming back to those initial adjustments in Lightroom, I was overdoing it. I was setting my sharpening to “100” where “25” would be a better starting point. I even pushed the clarity and vibrance up on all images as I brought them in because, well, I like them better that way. But it shouldn’t apply to all images.

Here’s an example of a picture I worked on for this article.

: Look how much the camera already did to create the JPEG

The one on the right is the JPEG as it came out of the camera. On the left is the RAW file as I imported it to Lightroom and where I had set everything to “General – Zeroed”, so no adjustments. About 30 minutes later, I got it looking like this.

: Two minutes of fiddling with the JPEG got me this. The workflow for the RAW file is below.

Gee. Almost as good as the JPEG! Well if you’re just going to look at it on a computer screen, that is. Or send it in to a newspaper for printing (their process is really low quality). But if you’re going to print it or project it on the side of a bus, it’s much better. It has a wider dynamic range, there are more colour nuances (JPEG is limited to 256 colours for each channel – R-G-B. RAW has 4096 or even 16384 levels per channel), more detail.

Does it make sense to process hundreds of images individually? A typical day at the ice races yielded about 400 images, of which some 250 or so were ‘keepers’. Imagine 30 minutes each and for what? Yes, you can batch process – you work on one image, save the settings and sync all the other pictures to those settings. You’re doing what those Nikon software engineers are doing, but you’re starting with your own custom settings. That can be good, or that can be bad, depending on how smart you are.

You can do a LOT to a JPEG image in Lightroom, or in ACR. You can change almost anything that you can do to a RAW file (although the camera profile is fixed), except you’re working on an image that has already been reduced in quality, compressed and had stuff stripped out of it. The RAW to JPEG algorithms in your camera has already done most of the work for you, but, as I said, at a cost.

So. Bottom Line. If there’s the remotest possibility that I might want to do high quality printing on an image, I’ll shoot it in RAW. That means most of the time, when I’m out shooting casually, or I’m doing landscapes or portraits, I’ll shoot RAW. But if I’m going to shoot the ice races, or a hockey game or an air show or any other event where I’m going to have hundreds of images to work through and tweak, and where I’m not looking to print anything or do high quality output, I’ll shoot JPEG. If I’m not sure: my camera has a setting where I can actually do both: RAW + JPEG FINE.

And those photographer friends who look down their noses and sneer at anyone not shooting in RAW? Ask them if they’re so serious, why aren’t they shooting with a Hasselblad H4D? Then go have a nap while they stay up all night processing their images.

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Have your say! Comments are super welcome!