Finishing Up My 3D Book
By sirsnapalot | September 23, 2011
Sorry for the long silence on this blog- I only have bandwidth for so many projects! This summer I have focused on writing a book and some other activities around 3D photography. These have consumed my free time, so the blog has suffered. I will be back- the book is in draft state, so I will post news about that as well as some more photo tips from my experiences (including new improvements to my macro photography!).
More soon-
Jeff
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Auto White Balance on a Cell Phone
By sirsnapalot | May 31, 2011
Just to follow up on the previous article about “natural light”, when shooting on a cellphone, you will almost always have the phone set to AWB, or Auto, on the White Balance setting, if your phone even has an adjustment for it (iPhone native app does not, for example). Since I use a Nokia phone to take photos, by default, I have a lot of control over my settings.
Take this picture of some limes at a local farmer’s market:
Limes, with Auto White Balance
They look bland, washed out. Standing right above the limes and looking at them, and then looking at the display, it just wasn’t a satisfying shot. So, I tapped the White Balance adjust (I use ShutterPro, available in Ovi), and selected Sunny, which is close to natural lighting, which is what your eyes are use to. The following picture was the result:
Limes, with White Balance override
This was far closer to the real look. Later, I realized the room had fluorescent lights, and I could have also tried the fluorescent setting, but looking at the photo on the display of the N8, right next to the limes themselves, this was very close to the actual color.
(I love that we have a farmer’s market (Rosemeade Market) just 1/2 mile from our house- lots of fresh and great fruit, much of it local, even if limes come from a bit further away than Dallas.)
Another thing- when photographing a subject that fills the frame with a single color, any camera, SLR or cellphone, will likely skew the colors since these are not “normal” pictures. Most cameras calculate white balance based on a scene averaging of colors. So again, as always, you are better to manually set the white balance to really get the shot you want.
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Shooting in Natural Light
By sirsnapalot | May 19, 2011
In the past year I have become a major proponent of shooting as “natural” as possible. One element of that has been RAW- which captures more of the information in a scene, allowing you to get more out of the picture. Another is shooting in what I call Natural Light.
Back in the days of film, this was not something you had to worry about, at least with negatives or slides. Film was set for a particular color temperature, and nearly all mainstream film was set for outdoors, daylight. This equates, give or take, to 5100K (Kelvins- the temperature of the light), which is approximately midday, or the brightest, sun.
What you had to worry about in the past (and there was not much you could do about it) was a film lab automatically correcting your pictures so that color cast was taken out. Most people don’t notice this, but if you just sent your film to a typical mass production lab, the colors of dusk would be “normalized” to midday lighting, and that warm sunset or cooler-looking dusk colors would be missing. If you went to a private lab, usually you had a knowledgeable person that knew the context of the picture and would dial-back the automatic correction.
In digital cameras, you have Automatic White Balance, or AWB. This is always on be default, and always, IMHO, ruins the lighting in the evening or with a sunset. Maybe it is good if you are indoors shooting in artificial light, but I always prefer turning it off outdoors.
Take the following shot of a bullfrog I took a few days ago:
Bullfrog, in natural light
I just love this picture, as-is. (Well,l it might be nice if the foreground branch wasn’t there, but that wasn’t a choice I had). The picture neatly captures the frog’s colorful eyes, and the reflection of its underbelly. Also, it captures the mood. It was dusk, the sun was diving below the horizon, and this was a shaded, scummy pond in a nearby nature preserve. By comparison, here is the shot with AWB turned on:
Bullfrog, in "corrected" light
While this picture does show the frog’s true colors as we perceive it, the mood has been stripped away from it- this could just be taken at any time during the day. The picture is fine, I just prefer the more natural version, shot at 5100k, or approximately normal, unaltered colors. For reference, the second picture has been “corrected” to 7500k.
To set your camera depends on what model you have. Nearly all digital cameras have some sort of manual override (at least true cameras do, byt not necessarily all cell phones). In cheaper cameras, you can simply set the “Scene” to Sunny, which pretty much means midday. By doing this, you can easily override the corrections. On a DLSR, you usually will be able to precisely set the white balance, which is also called Color Temperature, and is measured in Kelvins, the unit of absolute temperature measurement. I set mine to 5100k, though any setting in the low 5000′s will give similar results. I’ve seen advice to set it at 5500k, too. It’s not an exact science, since it is all based on human perception anyways.
If you have a cellphone, check your settings. If you have scene modes, then you are in luck- you can set that to Sunny, as I did with my Nokia N8 when I shot the following scene in Finland last month:
Finland Dusk, by natural light
This was taken out the window of a friend’s home. It really was a murky and wonderful blue (the sun had set and that is the moon rising). I simply set the cellphone’s camera to Sunny and fired off the shot. It may look unrealistically blue, but you have to remember one thing about looking at photographs. You are looking at it on a computer display, and by comparison to the surroundings, it is definitely blue. But when you are immersed in the scene, your brain adapts a bit and does it’s own AWB of a sort. Ever wear yellowish-tinted sunglasses? After a while, your brain filters out some of that.
So, you might ask, if the brain does an AWB, why not let the camera do it, too? Well, the brain never quite does a full AWB. If you want, you can always tone down the natural light a bit by splitting the different (especially easy if you shoot in RAW). I prefer to let the natural light show through. The mood at the time really was like it is shown in this picture- very peaceful and very pleasing to just sit and stare at.
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Time Exposed
By sirsnapalot | March 14, 2011
I’ve been wanting to try this type of shot for a long, long time. No, not waterfalls (those are great, too), but of the ocean. Last few weeks I was in California for the Cinequest Film Festival (for work- I work for Nokia) and was able to get away for a day through the Redwoods and to the Coast with my wife. While driving down the coast, my wife spotted on the map a place called Natural Bridge Beach and asked about it. Since it was so close to the road, we drove in. Was I in love with the place from then on.
We stayed for about an hour and I took a lot of photos. But, as it got somewhat darker, I realized I could take some time exposures of it (I had my tripod). I was able to get a maximum exposure of 8 seconds as it was not dark yet and we couldn’t stick around forever. So I put the lens on f29, which gave me 2-3s. I then added a polarizer to darken it even more- 4-5 seconds now. Finally, just to get more blur in the water, I decided on purpose to overexpose the image- voila, 8s! Since I shoot only RAW now, I had 14-bits per color channel per pixel (total 42 bits) instead of 8 per channel (total 24 bits). The is a phenomenal amount of exposure latitude and another reason why I will only use RAW from now on- I got the shot because I used RAW to get the longest possible exposure. The result?
Natural Bridge
The only think that would make me happier with the shot is if I used a neutral density to get an even longer exposure, but I’m quite happy with this one. So the article is on time exposure, first, as long exposures with clouds, water, etc… can make for a surreal scene. RAW is now a tool along the way and I wanted to reinforce that.
Next thing to buy is an ND filter. Alas, sadly, I had a very good one last year from Singh Ray. But it was a variable one (not a bad thing) and very, very heavy. I was taking waterfall picture in Yosemite from a bridge and the circular threads did not engage properly, and it fell off into a raging river. That was an expensive lost. Next one I’ll live with a bit cheaper and a square slider filter so I don’t have that risk. Cheaper ones can color cast towards magenta, but then again- I shoot in RAW, so it is easier to fix later 
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Dark Shadows
By sirsnapalot | February 27, 2011
Had a little fun a while back using my cell phone. Since I am taking pictures every day with it, I am forced to be creative (that’s a good thing!). We had some snow on our deck in early February, and the sunlight dappling through the trees made for a moody image. I had to boost the contrast a bit, so yes, it is a manipulation. However, I am becoming more forgiving of manipulations in cases where it is what makes the picture. I want to create art out of anything I see- to see beyond the scene presented to me.
To be true- I do not want to become an image manipulator to an extreme, just to have another tool and capability to expand what I do and increase my enjoyment of it. I love the Art of the Image…
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More Reasons to Get Out in the Rain
By sirsnapalot | January 23, 2011
Last weekend I was in San Antonio, and it had been raining. Knowing the place pretty well, I was rather excited to get out and get some photos, especially of the Alamo.
The wetness if the pavement adds so much more depth to this image, ironically overlooked by the Crockett Hotel
Next time it rains, wait until just after it stops (and is night) and get out and take some photos!
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Picture365, the Mobile Edition
By sirsnapalot | January 2, 2011
I have kicked off 2011 with a new Picture365 project after a 1-year hiatus. This time, it’s the Mobile Edition- all photos will be taken on a mobile phone- any mobile, but a mobile nonetheless. I will allow some post-processing- a bit looser than my previous projects, but I intend to demonstrate just what one can do with a mobile device. I will not go overboard on post-processing, though- the images will at least be a facsimile of the original.
This inaugural, kick off shot of 2011 was a simple overexposure of venetian blinds, back-illuminated by a setting setting sun. I set the phone (a Nokia N8) to super-saturate the colors as well, and then made them a bit more vivid in Adobe Lightroom. I did not add the colors- they were simply an amplification of what was already there.
Keep up with the project at www.picture365.net!
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RAW- No Going Back
By sirsnapalot | December 30, 2010
Now that I’ve been shooting RAW for the past 6 months, and now, especially, that I am using Adobe Lightroom, I will never go back to just JPG. In fact, I may just go to RAW only, though that will only save me about 15% of my Flash memory that I take on vacation. Lightroom makes RAW processing so easy, and helps get so much more out of each picture, that in old film terms, it’s almost like going from expired color print film to Fuji Velvia in quality.
Take the following picture of an alpaca at a ranch in Texas. In the “old days” of my JPEG-only shooting (nearly all my digital photos were, unfortunately, shot that way, this picture would be a wasted.
Default JPG image from Camera
In this version- the camera did an overall average and tried to “best guess” how the image should look. It got it wrong- look at the fur on the neck, it is so washed out (blown out, as they call it) and nearly merges with the background on the left side. The animal itself is not all that isolated from the blurred, but cluttered background.
Processed from a RAW file
In this version, I operated on the RAW file, which is 14 bits per color plane (R, G and B), as opposed to JPEG’s 8-bits per color plane. It should be noted that the final result is still a JPEG file, but I start out by working with all the information there. I was able, for instance, to tone down the highlights so they were no longer “blown out”- restoring fidelity to the fur. As well, I was able to tweak the separation point between the white fur and the background to make the alpaca’s head more cleanly stand out from the blurry backdrop.
There are additional controls, such as “Clarity” that you don’t see in Photoshop (at least not in CS3) that let you adjust hard-to-describe, but tangibly visible elements of the picture to make it more pleasing. Clarity seems to smartly adjust brightness and contrast along edge boundaries, making the elements of the picture clearer (hence the name). Vibrance is another one- it affects saturation and brightness contrast together, rather than just boosting the primarily visible colors. With these additional controls, plus finely-tunes sharpness and noise reduction tools, I was able, in 1-2 minutes, to create this much better version.
RAW files are sometimes referred to as Digital Negatives (Adobe even has a DNG format for it). The parallel to the film world is very direct- the 14-bits per channel stored in the RAW file is akin to a negative in the old film days, while a JPG is akin to a print. Negatives always contained much more information than a print could, and in order to prevent blow outs or get shadow details (called recovery and fill light, respectively, in Lightroom), you would have to burn or dodge (respectively) in the dark room to get the same effect.
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With a Little Luck
By sirsnapalot | December 25, 2010
This is an old favorite from 1998. It seemed an appropriate shot for Christmas. My first year at Nokia saw many trips to Finland- this was taken in January. A friend (Kris) and I were touring around Helsinki to spend a weekend before we had to get back to work Monday, and stopped here in Uspensky Cathedral, at “high” noon.
In January, at its highest point, the sun is barely above the horizon, as was the case here. The sun was streaming in the windows nearly horizontally, the dust making it visibly and downright, well, awesome. This was taken on a Sunday shortly after services were dismissed.
Not every shot can be planned- I had no way of knowing I would get a shot like this. Take the camera with you everywhere, if you can (I had a tripod as well) and you’ll get some lucky shots as well. Now that I know, if I’m ever back in Helisinki in January, I’ll know what to do.
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Eye Catching
By sirsnapalot | December 20, 2010
Following up on my previous blog- the stunning detail in this shot is accentuated by the piercing eye in the center of the picture. The sunlight was strong, low, and the bird was pretty close to me, enabling the capture of so much detail.
However, his whiteness had overexposed the feathers on the face a bit and I had to use Adobe Lightroom to claw back the details. Still in all, the eye itself and the details and sharpness there are what complete the shot.
This was taken on a fishing pier in Monterrey, California, last June. The blue backdrop is the Pacific.
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