Portraits
By sirsnapalot | March 19, 2008
I did a little demo today of the effect of telephoto when taking a portrait. Generally, the further away you are, the better the person will be represented in the photograph. It is better to stand back and use a little zoom, which will flatten the features a bit and put them into a pleasant perspective.
My demo was to take 6 photos of myself against a brick wall. I started far away, and moved the camera closer with each successive shot, but changing the zoom so that my face stayed the same relative size. The changes in the first couple of shots from 80mm zoom to 49mm weren’t so dramatic, but quickly the difference is notable.
I have assembled these 6 shots as an animated GIF to show you the difference. Since I took these photos solo, you will see some slight orientation differences, but pay attention to the nose and glasses with respect to the ears.
Progressively zoomed in
I’ve added the Zoom data from each photo’s EXIF data (viewable in Photoshop and some other image editors, as well as on Flickr). Notice that as the camera gets closer and the zoom decreases to keep the size the same, my nose and front of my face start to pop out towards you. The final shot is very distorted and my face looks very round at the end.
So, the lesson is, unless you are trying to be funny or unusual (not a bad thing occasionally), back off from your subject just a bit and try some zoom- 70mm or so should work well enough.
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Simplicity
By sirsnapalot | January 27, 2008
The other day I saw a photo in one of my contact’s photo stream that smacked me in the face. I’ve learned a lot in the last year with the Picture365 project, and learned a bit about framing and composing, but it’s always hard to put into words. This photo easily summarizes that a photo doesn’t have to be complicated to be attractive.
What’s Up? (by Christian Faggionato)
This photo, by Christian Faggionato, has many of the basic elements one looks for in a photo- shape, lines, colors, a point of focus. There is no texture in this one- another element, but it’s not needed. The “Rule of Thirds” is not followed here, and to good effect (remember it’s OK to break the rules sometimes, as they are really only guidelines).
So, here you have three colors- black, blue, and a spot of yellow. The black and blue are evenly split, but at a slight angle, which is what makes the violation of the “Rule of Thirds” work- if it were split vertically down the center, the symmetry would be too much. As it is, you have a little more black at the top, a little more blue at the bottom.
As a point of interest, you have the bird’s head just sticking over the edge, with the yellow beak as the highlight. So, it near a perfect picture in terms of elements and a great capture of a moment in time (and a likely non-repeatable one). It’s effectively what modern art strives to be- a distillation of the elements, eschewing the complexity of everyday life.
Not that all of your pictures should be this way, but this is a great example of simplicity in action, and in real life.
To see Chris’s picture, go to http://www.flickr.com/photos/20965952@N04/2198998293/.
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RSS Feed Now Works
By sirsnapalot | January 26, 2008
If I have a complaint about open source software, it’s that the documentation is dismal, and what exists is written by the developers for the developers- it’s not straightforward and you have to dig through many examples to find what you want.
Creating RSS feeds is not my specialty, and honestly, I spent several hours looking through the Wordpress website to tease out that all I needed was http://www.sirsnapalot.net/?feed=rss2 to give you an XML feed. Instead they give me all this stuff about the_Loop and the_ID written in a way that assumes I know where everything is and exactly where it should go. By developers for developers- no consideration for those who are not well-versed in PHP.
That said, I guess I get what I pay for :) I’m thankful for Wordpress and that it’s free. In any event, the RSS feed should now work- paste the URL above into your feed reader, or click on the RSS icon at the top and put it in your reader. If you don’t know what RSS is- it is a way to be notified when an update to this site is one. I don’t write blogs everyday- in fact I’ve been averaging maybe two a month. So to save you from checking something that infrequently (at times) changes, you can just use an RSS feed to tell you when I’ve posted a new entry. Read up on them- I suggest FeedDemon or Firefox’s Live Bookmarks for starters.
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Do I Have Enough Megapixels?
By sirsnapalot | January 5, 2008
I may revisit this topic in the future, but for now I wanted to point you to a couple of links a friend of mine sent me (thanks Kris!), regarding how many pixels are enough.
The first one discusses how many pixels are enough when purchasing a digital camera. That depends on your final use for the shots- enlargements or just candids, or somewhere in between. Check out this article for a perspective:
http://www.peachpit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=27285
The next article compares megapixels to old-fashioned film grain, and gives you some guide to how well your digital may perform against your old film camera. Of course there are many variables besides the film that you may have used, but this does a pretty good job of covering the topic:
http://pic.templetons.com/brad/photo/pixels.html
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Flash Diffusion- Indirect Lighting
By sirsnapalot | December 28, 2007
The other day, my mother-in-law asked me to photograph some of her paintings hanging on the wall of their house. The shiny oil finish, however, was reflecting the flash right back at me, and some were behind glass, making the flash reflection even worse.
Direct flash
You can see in the photo above the problem. I thought about it for a few minutes, and got the idea to deflect the flash away from the painting and off the ceiling. I asked my mother-in-law if she had a compact mirror, the type women typically carry in their purse if they want to touch up their make-up. She had one, and I positioned it in front of the flash angled upwards, which caused the flash to bounce off the ceiling.
Indirect Flash
You can see in this shot that the paining is smoothly lit. Because the camera is expecting the flash to more directly illuminate the shot, you will find it just a bit darker than you’d probably like, but this is easily compensated for with just about any image editor. Just adjust the brightness up a bit and you’ll come out with a decent photo, and likely less harshly lit and more pleasing to the eye. I find that flash photography tends to generate harsh images if not diffused somehow.
Another problem with indoor flash photography are shadows. Since the flash is always somewhat offset from the lens (unless you have a rare ring flash), this creates a shadow that may be visible depending on the orientation of your camera and scene composition.
Direct Flash
In the image above, the camera is turned sideways and the shadow of the vase dominates the background and is distracting. I used the mirror to deflect the flash towards the ceiling, and got this more evenly illuminated shot:
Indirect Flash
The picture is generally more pleasing without the harsh shadow, though I did have to brighten it up a bit since the lighting was more diffuse. Because it’s not so brightly lit, you don’t see the corrosion on the vase as boldly in the second shot, but then the second shot is more natural- it is more as it appears to my eye. And though you don’t see the bottom illuminated, I don’t think that’s a negative, unless you are documenting this for sale on eBay or something. Also, notice the background (the wall) is not washed out- you can see the paint texture with the indirect lighting.
Finally, here’s a shot of my camera with a handheld mirror.
On my Nikon, the flash is compact and pops up. It’s easy to deflect and diffuse if you have a low ceiling- those in a “normal” room with a 8 or 9 foot (up to 3m) ceiling. If you are in a large room with a high ceiling, you can try diffusing off a wall, if there’s one handy- just angle the mirror towards the wall instead.
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Take Your Camera With You Someplace New
By sirsnapalot | December 5, 2007
Try taking your camera with you somewhere different next time you go out. For instance, I like to run a few times a week, and the other day happened to run a little before sunset. The fall colors in Dallas are at their peak right now (a bit late in the year, actually), and the intensity and color of the fading light was perfect- almost setting the trees on fire visually.
So, a couple of days later I purposefully ran at the same time, only this time I took my camera with me, running a bit more slowly so as not to trip and damage it. Here are some of the results and some pointers along the way.
Fountain Grass
This fountain grass was in a neighbor’s yard down the street. It had turned red from the recent cold weather, and the tussles were set aglow in the setting sun. In cases like this, you get the best results photographing right into the sun, keeping it just out of the picture. In this case, I got four rays of sunlight at the top, which for me really set off the image. There is a little sun reflection in the lens at the very bottom, but it’s not too noticeable, and certainly worth the tradeoff to get the rays at the top.
Fountain Grass Close-up
This is the same cluster of grass, but I’ve zoomed in quite a bit. I’m still looking towards the sun, getting the backlighting, but it’s toned down more and softer on the eye. This less-bold look is richer in detail and very pleasing to look at.
Moi
After continuing for a half mile or so, I turned north and saw my elongated shadow in these trees, and the linear shadows from the railings made for an unusual shot. There’s not much I can say about the shot other than it contains three elements that aren’t all that related. It was an experiment with results that I was happy with.
Crape Myrtle
Another half mile up the road and I saw a Crape Myrtle tree. These trees are awesome spring, summer and fall. I love their foliage in the spring, the flower half the year (in Texas) and turn bright colors in the fall.
Here, I shot upwards towards the sky, and the sun is down and to the left. So, indirectly, they are still backlit, as the sunlight is streaming in on the top of the canopy. The result is a glowing orange explosion of color- I love this shot and it’s one of my better fall color photographs.
Sweet Gum
The Sweet Gum is another one of my favorites. I love the 5-pointed leaves, the trees grow tall (more so than the average Texas tree in the Dallas area), and in the fall, they turn orange and red. This one proved to be no exception. The only drawback to them are spiny seed pods, which I would happily tolerate to have these in my yard.
In this photo- another half mile down the road, the sun is behind and to my left, so this shot is not backlit like the others. Maybe I should have walked around and tried that angle out, too. Oh well, didn’t think of that at the time.
Oak Tree
And finally, yet another half mile on the loop, and almost back home, I passed an apartment complex that is full of decently-grown trees, including Bradford Pears and Oak trees. A part of this oak tree was beautifully backlit by the sun, now getting very low and streaming between the buildings. I used the flash on the camera to give some fill light on the non-illuminated leaves to make the photo more interesting.
Conclusion
The thing I want stress is that to break out of your mold, try something different. Take the camera with you on a walk through your neighborhood. Or, take it to work and stop by a park at lunch or on the way home. Just look around you, where you live, work and play, and you’ll find many things worth taking photos of.
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Digital Camera Display Discrepancy
By sirsnapalot | November 4, 2007
Something I’ve run across with a number of digital cameras is a discrepancy between what I see when I take my photo, and what I get when I view my image on my computer.
Digital camera displays ratchet up the gain and oversaturate the colors on the display so that the images “pop” when you first see them. That’s great when they are trying to sell you a camera- it looks awesome in the store where you aren’t able to view it on a monitor.
However, when you view it on your computer (or print it out), it’s darker. I’ve seen this with both my Nikons (older Coolpix 885, Coolpix 8800) and my Panasonic GS-400, a quite expensive high-quality video camera with a decent 4MP still photo capability.
Generally you just have to make an adjustment yourself to the images and re-save them. Alternately, if you are printing them directly from your memory card at a kiosk, you’ll have to adjust them on a case-by-case basis.
This is most likely to be an issue with darker scenes- bright outdoors won’t be a problem.
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Comments & Spam
By sirsnapalot | October 9, 2007
Just a short post- if you want to comment on anything, please feel free. Please accept, though, that there will be a delay before your comment is posted. I am daily getting spam posted through the comments feature, and requiring all comments to be moderated by me is necessary to keep this site focused on photography. Be assured that if your post is on the topic of photography and related to these blog postings, I will approve them. The stupid spammers ruin it for everybody 
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Cellphone Cameras Compared to Digital Cameras
By sirsnapalot | September 27, 2007
Nearly every cellphone in the developed world seems to have a camera today. I think that’s great- it makes people take pictures more, get those special moments recorded when they perhaps otherwise wouldn’t. Also, they can be helpful if you have a car accident and want to show what happened, or in one case, a kid snapped the license plate of a car whose occupant tried to kidnap him, leading to his arrest shortly afterwards.
So, I truly think they are great. And I think you can take some decent pictures with them under the right circumstances. Also, if you like to think out-of-the-box, you can experiment and try things you can’t get with your a expensive camera. Every quirk of a camera can be used as a feature.
I’d like to cut through some of the hype that is going on regarding cellphone cameras. Nokia says that it is the biggest camera manufacturer in the world. Taken literally, they are correct. And they (and other mobile phone manufacturers) have taken a bite out of the low end market of digital cameras. I find this a bit strange- they make a mobile phone with a camera in it, and they take OK pictures, but that’s about it. I work for Nokia, but in my role as a photographer, I’m just being truthful here.
Samsung has followed a more idiotic path, IMHO. They have a 10MP camera phone out, which is ridiculous. There is a physical limit to the resolution you can have with cheap optics, and having a 10MP camera phone is just marketing hype- do NOT buy this for the camera. At best you’ll probably get 2MP useful resolution out of it, if you’re lucky.
Nokia took a better path with the N95- they gave it Carl Zeiss optics- high-quality glass, which is certainly a step in the right direction.
So, to start with, here is an example of a decent daylight shot taken with my N80. It was near dusk, but the light levels were still good.
Taken with an N80
The detail is good and the noise isn’t too noticeable. More on noise in a bit, BTW. I’ve yet, though to see a cellphone do well in low light. Sometimes, as I’ve said, you can take a liability and use it to your advantage. In the following picture, also taken on my N80, I photographed my wife while we were having dinner outdoors at Cuba Libre here in Dallas. In this case, the wrong white balance warmed the picture to look like candlelight, and the noise in the camera sensor (always bad) created a sense of graininess, frequently used by old-school film photographers to create a romantic warmth with portraits.
Taken with an N80
Finding out a camera’s limitations and then exploiting them can be fun, however. Compared to dedicated digital cameras, cellphones typically have these major flaws:
- Poorer light sensitivity, which means a slow shutter
- Poorer color rendition
- More time lag from button push to capture
- Noisier
- Poorer optics
These can be exploited. Items #2 and #4 I exploited in the above picture of my wife- creating a romantic shot. Item #3 is mostly a nuisance- it doesn’t have any optical properties, just usually causes you to miss the shot.
Item #5 can create a Lomo feel to the picture- an out-of-focus, poor quality image, that depending on the subject matter, can actually work for the picture.
Item #1, I exploited in the next two shots intentionally. The first shot was taken indoors at a tradeshow in Orlando. I spun the camera while taking the shot.
Taken with an N80
In the next picture, I put the camera on 2-second delay and tossed it spinning into the air in my backyard at a high rate of spin. It took quite a few tries, but I got this near-perfect spiral as a result.
Taken with an N80
Side by Side
To give some comparison that megapixels aren’t everything, I’ve taken the same shot of a fire hydrant just down the street with three different cellphones- an Apple iPhone (2MP), the N80 used above (3MP), and an N95 (5MP). Here is roughly the same shot in that order. The iPhone shot was taken on a different day, but still was near sunset. The light was a little different, but you can still get a pretty good comparison here.
iPhone
N80
N95
In these three shots, all resized to 400×300, you can see the iPhone had the richest color, and the N80 fared the worst. In detail at this resizing, the N80 is the worst, and although the lighting is a bit different, I have to tie the N95 and iPhone. Even though resizing isn’t the best way to compare detail, the lack of detail in the N80 tells me there wasn’t much to work with even prior to resizing.
To compare apples to apples (so to speak), the following shots compare actual 1:1 pixels from each camera.
In this picture, showing 1:1 pixels, The iPhone and the N95 do the best job. Keep in mind the iPhone has only 2MP whilst the N95has 5MP. The N80 detail on the hydrant and in the grass is more smeared. The N95 is showing it’s superior resolution. However, with fewer pixels, the iPhone does a pretty good job itself (for a cellphone, keep in mind).
In this picture showing the grass in the background- all are pretty much the same area, but the N80 shot is a little lower and leaves out the hedge. However, the grassy area is about the same. Here, the iPhone wins out by a hair in my opinion. It preserves detail of the grassy texture and almost you can see blades (this lawn is golf course tiff, so it’s pretty fine textured). The N95 smears it out a bit more, and the N80 is just not nearly so good.
In the shrubs, the iPhone and N95 are comparable, even if the N95 is zoomed a bit more, the detail is a bit less at the zoom level. Differences in resolution and smearing could also be the results of the JPEG codec settings- all were set (where possible) to save with the best quality.
Verdict (based on this shootout)
Overall, in this shootout, the iPhone wins with better color and comparable real resolution. There are likely areas where the N95 will win out, perhaps in very bright light, but that will have to wait for another day- I have limited access to both the iPhone and the N95 at work. Stay tuned- I’d like to give both products a better workout.
Final notes
I would like to note that I also took this same fire hydrant picture with a Motorola RAZR, and I give them an F. Main reason? I cannot get the picture off the phone without paying Motorola $50. This is reprehensible, IMHO. The only thing you can do is send an MMS, which resizes it to tiny, which is worthless. (MMS is not worth much, if you ask me.)
Nokia at least gives you PC Suite and soon direct online storage. And, you can direct mount the phone as a hard drive, Bluetooth it to your laptop, IR it to your laptop, email it to yourself. Count the ways Nokia lets you get it, for free!
And Apple’s iPhone? Simply plug it into your PC (or Mac) and iTunes manages it for you. Just drag it out and put it wherever you want it. Don’t email it though- iPhone will resize it to VGA.
Final, Final Note
If you are serious about photography, then get a dedicated digital camera and you won’t be disappointed. Play with the cellphone camera and experiment with it, and of course, you almost always have it with you, so get the pictures you would normally miss. Cellphones are great for nights out on the town (well, low light’s a problem) or afternoon BBQ’s, etc… For vacations, little Billy’s birthday party, or grandma’s 80th birthday party, get a dedicated digital camera.
Topics: Cellphone, Comparison, Creative, Review | No Comments »
Commenting on Blogs
By sirsnapalot | September 4, 2007
Just a short note to say that you are welcome to comment or ask questions through the comment field. You will not see the comment right away- due to spam activity (it has started already), I have to approve the comment before it is displayed. As long as the comment is not spam, is proper, on-topic, even if critical, I will allow it to post. I will not allow (of course) spam, and I will not clear meaningless posts or posts that are completely off-topic.
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