Discovering Photography

Waterfall Along Seven Falls Trail

2011-06-13T22:28:00.001-07:00

Waterfall Along Seven Falls Trail, a photo by Chris McCormick on Flickr.

Via Flickr:
This past weekend I got to steal away for a hike with my friend Steve. We decided to tackle the "Three Pools Beyond Seven Falls" trail in the mountains just behind Santa Barbara. The trail is steep and exciting, and follows a creek that was surprisingly full for this time of year.

The trail was pretty overgrown, though, and gingerly picking our way through all of the poison oak bogged us down a lot. We ultimately ran out of time before we could reach the pools, but the falls and small pools we saw on the way were well worth it. Next time, we decided, we're wearing jeans and bringing a machete :).

This waterfall was a highlight--it's right at a point on the trail where the only way onward is to scale a 15' boulder to the left of this scene. Definitely got my heart racing :).

Dragon's Teeth

2011-06-13T22:27:00.001-07:00

Dragon's Teeth, a photo by Chris McCormick on Flickr.

Via Flickr:
We had a lot of fun exploring the northern coast of West Maui. There are many spots along that part of the coast where you can find some amazing lava rock formations jutting out into the ocean, and walk down to get a front row seat to the ocean's fury (more of that to come :) ).

The unique formation on this particular point is known as "Dragon's Teeth".

I thought the HDR treatment here did a nice a job of accentuating all of the wild jagged edges, which is really what makes this spot so unique. The HDR process ruined the sky, so I replaced it with the original, and also blended back in some of the original ocean to soften the affect there.

I used the HDR tool in a trial of CS5 (instead of Photomatix), and I have to say, I really liked it. I may have to make the upgrade from CS4... :)

Maui Tide Pool

2011-05-25T21:28:00.001-07:00

Maui Tide Pool, a photo by Chris McCormick on Flickr.

Via Flickr:
This was part of some tide pools out in front of The Gazebo, a popular breakfast spot out in West Maui.

There wasn't a whole lot of life in the pools, but I liked the crescent shape of these urchin, and they were in some nice soft light in the shade of a boulder. I didn't realize at the time how much color was hiding under the water!

There was glare on the water that made everything look kind of muddy (check out the unedited original). This would have been a perfect use of a polarizing filter to cut the reflected sunlight (I even own one!), but I either didn't bring it or didn't think to put it on :(. I managed to workaround the glare in processing by pushing the exposure and pulling up the blacks to add more contrast back in.

Maui Sea Turtle

2011-05-18T20:46:00.001-07:00

Maui Sea Turtle, a photo by Chris McCormick on Flickr.

Via Flickr:
For our vacation to Maui (without the kids!), we decided to pick up an underwater point-and-shoot to play with. We settled on the Canon PowerShot D10. I'm so glad we got it!

It was tough to use at first... You have to look past any water drops or fog in your mask at a small LCD screen, and it can be really tough to make out what the camera is actually pointed at. And, to make an interesting composition, I think a lot of the time you want to get down close to the ground and shoot up at the fish, so that you have the blue ocean as your background and not the sea-bottom. So you have to hold your breath, swim down (fighting the salt water and your bouyant gear to stay down), try to hold the camera steady, and make out the composition on the screen. Yeah, it's as hard as it sounds.

I feel like I've started to get the hang of it, though (for one, I've found it's easier in deeper water), and I think this shot proves it's worth the effort :).

Campus Point Moonlight

2011-03-08T08:00:00.000-08:00

This was from my first real outing with our new Canon 7D. It was glorious :).

I took my test shots at ISO 3200 and f/2.8, then multiplied the shutter speed by 64 to shoot the final image at ISO 200 and f/5.6. The exposures were a little over six minutes.

Luckily, I was with Patrick, and he spent that six minutes with me while I stressed over how close the waves were crashing to my tripod :). Check out his shot here.

Hendry's Sunrise

2011-01-27T23:00:00.000-08:00

6 sec @ 17mm and f/22, ISO 100

This was from a beautiful morning last October; I can't believe how long it's been since I took this!

I'm sitting on a pile of unprocessed images right now--the problem is it takes me a good 2 hours to process and share a photo like this, and I prefer to do it all in one sitting. It's a little rare lately that I have that kind of time, plus the energy to be able to commit to seeing it through.

On top of that, they all feel like "4 out of 5 stars", so I'm not dying to share them. It seems important, though, to finish what I started, and to get my work out there so I have something to show for it. And if nothing else, I want to be able to look back at what I've been shooting and watch my progress!

I shot this image at f/22 to slow the exposure, even though I knew my sensor was pretty dirty. The resulting dust spots were a nightmare--I did a rough count of my spot removals in Lightroom... There were 60!

Here's the original, unedited image.

Line

2011-01-18T23:00:00.000-08:00

The line formed by the foam on the leading edge of the tide

Before I go into explaining what I'm doing with a post filled with nothing but boring pictures of lines... a little background. A relative gave me a book for Christmas titled Talent Is Overrated, by Geoff Colvin. It's been an exciting read--it argues that world-class performers, from Mozart to Tiger Woods, got that way not through an innate giftedness (it's tempting to attribute people's achievements to talent that we can never have), but through grueling practice and effective coaching. Colvin ascribes their greatness to a particular style of practicing that specifically targets your weaknesses (making the practice fundamentally draining and not fun), and that uses exercises that can be performed in high-volume. He presents a lot of compelling evidence from studies and from details of the lives of legendary athletes, musicians, chess players, and business people.

One of the biggest hurdles for me has always been the fear that without some inborn artistic ability I would never become a decent photographer. My experience has gradually taught me otherwise, though, and the arguments in this book have completely blown that thinking out of the water for me.

I'm excited, now, to apply these concepts to improving my photography. Over the years, I've gradually learned that becoming a great photographer is not so much about learning how to use all the features on a camera and all of the tools in Photoshop, but more about becoming an artist who can recognize the beauty in a scene and use those tools to bring it out.

I'm not going to photography school, or even photography class (at least while there's two toddlers at home), but I do have some good books and friends to help guide me. I'm going to have to be mostly self-taught in my spare time, but I'm encouraged by Colvin's anecdote of Benjamin Franklin, who practiced to become an accomplished writer while working full time at a printing press and relying on the works of other greater writers as a guide.

The edge of the cliffs against the sky is a common line in my photos.

For my first exercise, I'm exploring the concept of line. The exercise has evolved a bit as I've worked on it, but here it is in the form of an assignment:

Take at least 20 pictures of line, with 10 in man-made environments, and 10 in nature.

The emphasis is on form over content--the images don't have to be interesting, just demonstrate a concept.
In the man-made environment, the images have to be unique in terms of what type of contrast (light and shadow, different textures, etc.) creates the line. This is because man-made lines are abundant.
In nature, I didn't apply this restriction--the images can be of any naturally occurring line. This is because I mostly shoot in nature and I simply want to learn to recognize all of the lines I encounter in the places I typically shoot.

The line formed by the border between two materials or textures

The emphasis on form over content is helpful because it means I can shoot these images easily at any time, even on my lunch break when the light is harsh and terrible :).

Also, I quickly realized that there are many different uses for lines--horizontals, verticals, diagonals, and curves all have different qualities. Some lines lead the eye along them, others serve as a frame or a lens to focus your attention.

For this exercise, though, I focused on simply what defines a line. I want to be able to recognize all of the lines in a scene--both to recognize what lines are available to use in making my composition, and to recognize any lines that might be interfering with my shot. All too often I pull the images off the camera at home and spot distracting lines that I didn't see while I was shooting.

A series of objects can form a line, such as a row of rocks at the beach

With all that out of the way, here is the full gallery of my results!

The images also seemed to become an exercise in minimalism (if I'm using that label correctly), because I always tried to isolate the line as much as possible from any surrounding distractions.

Overall, I think the exercise was a success. I'm finding that when I look at a scene or an image now, I'm paying much closer attention to where there is contrast. Perhaps most significantly, I think practicing this as an exercise has also caused me to look more critically and deliberately at a scene--to be less distracted by the exciting natural beauty and to be more focused on what design elements are available in front of me.

The line formed between light and shadow can be very strong

Finally, it's been abundantly clear while doing this that "line" is far from everything, and there are many more forces at work in an image to learn about. I'm excited to move on to the next one!

Leadbetter At Night

2011-01-01T23:00:00.000-08:00

I love shooting seascapes, but it's tough right now to get out at sunset to capture those exciting colors. Luckily, shooting the beach at night seems to be just as satisfying, and a lot more manageable time-wise!

You just need a relatively low tide to expose some good rocks, and a mostly full moon to provide light, both of which I had on this night in December.

At f/5.6 and ISO 200, a 6 minute exposure seemed to be the sweet spot. I pride myself in my ability to enjoy solitude, but I have to admit the 6-minute exposures got to me. I used the count down timer on the iPhone to time it, so I'd get an alarm when six minutes was up, but I still found myself anxiously checking the timer every 30 seconds. Next time I'll have to bring a friend, or maybe a book and a reading light or something :).

One lesson learned--with these long exposures, make sure there's plenty of room between you and the tide line. During this shot, I watched the tide slowly creep closer and closer to my tripod. There were two especially far-reaching waves that sent water up past one leg of the tripod. This caused the sand to settle and the leg to sink ever-so-slightly. The result is very noticeable in the stars and the oil rigs--you can even make out how it moved twice!

The tide was coming in quickly and threatening to trap me at the end of this point, so I didn't get a chance to retake. I like the image enough that I decided to just leave it for now, though, and do better next time :).

Editing Details

For this photo, I wanted to take the opportunity to share in depth the steps I took to edit it. I think there's a lot of value in sharing this stuff in detail:

It helps me solidify my understanding of the techniques I used.
It gives me an opportunity to reflect on the approaches I took, and maybe recognize some areas for improvement.
To my more experienced readers and friends, I hope you'll point out anything I might have done better.
Finally, I hope you learn something from it!

The original image:

Some initial work in Lightroom:

1. Rotate -.67 degrees, it was just a touch crooked. To get my landscapes level, I generally take a test shot (in this case with high ISO and wide aperture to make it quick), then zoom in and compare the horizon to the frame of my camera's LCD to check if it's level.

2. Color Temperature to 3100K. When shooting at night, I use the 'tungsten' white balance setting to get it close (this ensures the sky comes out nice and blue). I shoot in RAW, though, so I can always tweak the white balance later. Here, I wanted it just a little cooler.

3. Darken the left-hand-side with a gradient filter in Lightroom. The glare from the moon is visible here, so I wanted to counteract that to balance the image, and applied a graduated filter of -2/3 stops. From playing with the image in both Lightroom and Photoshop, it seems that Lightroom has an advantage here because it's working with the original RAW file.

I made a similar adjustment to the top right corner of the image to lighten it a bit.

Now into Photoshop

I screwed around in Photoshop a lot, but here's what I landed on.

1. Apply a curve to the sky to control the contrast there. I added a curve adjustment layer to the image, and after a lot of tweaking, decided on the following curve.

I think my reasoning for this curve goes something like the following. This is where I'd love any input on my thought process.
- I know I want to add contrast, so I know I'm going for some kind of S-shaped curve.
- The highlights in the clouds are far from maxed out, so I push those up hard.
- I use the pointer tool in the top left of the dialog to select a dark part of the sky, then click, hold, and drag down to darken the sky. There's not a lot of deliberate thought guiding how far I go with this--I'm just going off my instincts for what looks good. I don't really trust my instincts yet, but I'm stuck with them for now!

I use a feathered brush to paint a vector mask for this curve adjustment layer so that it's only applied to the sky, and not the cliff. I also masked out the oil rigs to protect the highlights there. For the oil rigs, I reduced the brush's "flow" to about 20 to apply a lighter mask there.

Tip: You can hold option and click on a vector mask to see it as in the above screenshot.

Roll over the below image to see the before and after of just applying this curve.

2. Apply a levels adjustment layer to the cliffs to add contrast there. I'm not entirely sure how I decided to do levels on the cliffs rather than another curve. It's likely that I just tried it, liked the result, and kept it.

You can see that I just brought the white point in to push the lighter parts of the cliffs up, then moved the grey point to darken the cliffs back down a little.

I wanted these levels to apply to just the cliffs, so I used an inverted version of the mask from the curve layer for the sky.

Tip: You can hold option + shift, then click on the vector mask from one layer and drag it to another layer. This copies the mask and inverts it in one step (holding 'option' makes a copy of the mask rather than moving it, and holding 'shift' inverts the mask).

3. Finally, a few basic adjustments.
- Added a brightness and contrast layer. I boosted the contrast some because I was still looking for more contrast in the cliff and in the clouds against the sky. Also, I nudged the brightness up a bit just to lighten the image.
- Added a hue and saturation layer. I actually desatured the image some, because I felt like the curve had made the sky's blue overly rich.

And that's it!

Butterfly Beach Sunset

2010-12-22T08:00:00.000-08:00

This was from a pretty spectacular sunset back in November that I had a tough time figuring out how to shoot.

Early on, the clouds were exploding with some amazing color, but they were all overhead rather than out over the ocean.

Instead, I spent most of my time focused on the moon, hanging low in the sky (and looking huge, though I've learned this is just an illusion!). There were also some colors to the sky itself that I don't think I've seen before--the sky was actually teal close to the horizon, as you can see here.

I've been trying to work on managing the contrast available in my images. Here, I pushed the highlights to bring out contrast in the clouds and in the reflection of the moon on the water. I kept the rocks in the foreground purposefully pretty dark in hopes of bringing more attention to the reflection from the moon.

Here is the unedited original.

Three Friends

2010-12-04T08:00:00.000-08:00

.5 seconds at f/5.6 and 17mm

I definitely went through some Photoshop heroics to pull this one together.

I blended separate images for the foreground and sky--the range of the scene was too big to capture in a single exposure. After some editing, there's about a 3.5 stop difference between foreground and sky.

There's some barrel distortion here, so the horizon is ever-so-slightly curved. This meant I couldn't use a simple gradient to blend the exposures. Instead, I created a selection of the sky and used the Select -> Refine Edge tool to blur the edge, then created a layer mask from the selection. Good Photoshop practice!

One issue I ran into, though, was that I made a crop and then continued to make a bunch of other edits. I'm used to being able to go back and tweak the crop in Lightroom, but in Photoshop it seems to be permanent. Any suggestions anyone? I guess I should have waited till the end to crop!

The original, unedited foreground and sky.

Point Mugu

2010-11-23T08:00:00.000-08:00

I met another photographer recently who was a student at Brooks in Santa Barbara and has been shooting around the area for a while.

With a favorable "partly cloudy" weather report, we drove 45 minutes down the coast to a spot called Point Mugu for some sunset seascape photography. The sky looked great as we left Santa Barbara, but got progressively worse as we drove farther south :).

The clouds never ended up breaking, but it was still a great time.

Santa Barbara has mostly sandy beaches, and doesn't have this kind of dramatic meeting of jagged rock and violent waves. So just being there and watching the waves crash was awesome.

Getting to shoot with a much more experienced photographer was a lot fun--I pummeled him with questions the whole drive down, and it was interesting to watch someone else work. Probably the best part, though, is getting to compare results and see a different perspective on the scene. Have a look at his image!

Let's shed a little more light...

2010-11-19T22:10:00.000-08:00

1/2 sec. at f/8.0 and 200mm

This is the same spider from the last image, taken on the same night. I wasn't sure if my exercise in "ambiguity and delay" was going that well, so I decided to try a more traditional approach in case my experiment didn't pan out.

Both were taken at night, with the only light coming from a street light across the way. For this one, I actually grabbed a halogen work light from the garage and lit him up :)

The best part is that this guy is still out there, in the same spot, almost three weeks later! I've actually discovered the particular leaf that he hides behind during the day, and I've been checking on him periodically. It's supposed to rain a lot this weekend, though, so I'm curious to see if that does him in.

If he's still around, I may tear his web down and try and get a timelapse of him creating a new one. We'll see...

Happy Halloween!

2010-10-30T21:56:00.000-07:00

I've been reading an awesome book on composition and design in photography called The Photographer's Eye by Michael Freeman. There were two concepts I learned about recently that I tried to apply in this photo: "ambiguity" and "delay".

Ambiguity is simply where the image isn't obvious and straightforward, and is "slower to read". One of Freeman's examples was to focus on a subject's shadow rather than the subject itself. The viewer becomes more involved in the photograph when they have to complete it. "In a sense, it is like hearing a clever joke--just understanding the point is rewarding."

Delay is a closely related subject that I thought was really cool. The idea is that you hide an important part of the image by applying design techniques to draw the viewer's eye to other places first. Delay is essentially how you create ambiguity in your image.

When I saw this huge spider on the side of our house, and then its shadow, it seemed like a great opportunity to apply these concepts. I've tried to enhance the contrast on the rose as much as possible to make it "pop" and grab your eye first. Hopefully your eye moves next to the shadow of the spider, which gets your imagination working about the creepy critter. Finally, further scanning the frame should reveal the spider itself, though it's camoflaged and out of focus.

My biggest regret here is that the background is pretty confusing--the shadows of the leaves are a mess and I have to imagine it's hard to make out here that you're looking at the side of a house. You'll have to let me know if you think it worked!

Lightning

2010-10-01T08:00:00.000-07:00

Anyone else enjoy the lightning last night?

I set the camera on the tripod on our back porch / landing, set up a 30 second exposure, then locked the cable release. It fired away while I went and put Logan to bed :).

I caught maybe fifteen strikes, this was one of the best (most of them didn't show much of a bolt). This is a single exposure, but I can't testify to whether or not there were multiple strikes in it.

This is from downtown Santa Barbara, looking out towards Hendry's beach. The view from here is great for figuring out whether there will be a good sunset at the beach :).

Here's another one. This one is three separate exposures merged in Photoshop.

There's Still Hope

2010-09-28T08:00:00.000-07:00

This photo outing was encouraging for a number of reasons.

First, the EF-S 17-55mm proved once again to be a fantastic lens, and I'm really pleased with how big of a difference it's making in the sharpness of my images.

Second, it was pretty painless to edit, and only took me about 30 minutes of tinkering, so I'm definitely building confidence there.

Finally, I dragged the whole family with me, including the ~2 year old and the ~2 month old, and it wasn't impossible to make that happen. We piled in the car just before sunset, drove up the road a bit, and spent about a half hour at the beach, and nobody was too upset about it.

Basically, I was able to pull together an image that I'm really excited about without having to make a huge investment. It was reassuring to see that there's still hope for me in this hobby, even with two young kids and precious little free time! :)

Isla Vista Steps

2010-09-17T08:00:00.000-07:00

This photo was taken last December on one of my all-time-favorite photo outings.

Isla Vista is a tiny town which is home to most of the college students attending UC Santa Barbara. The town butts right up against some small cliffs along the ocean. When the tide's at its peak, the beach along IV is completely submerged, and the waves crash against the cliffs. On one end of the town are these steps which lead down to the beach and are submerged at very high tide.

It had been raining for days, and was supposed to keep raining that morning. Packing the night before, I grabbed a rain coat and an umbrella in case it was still going. The clouds broke, though, and made for quite the sunrise.

We had recently purchased a Flip video camera, and I took it along to share the experience a little bit. Check out the video below.

Lighthouse

2010-07-20T08:00:00.000-07:00

The coast guard has a small lighthouse on the cliffs on the mesa. I think it's more like a small rotating spotlight than a lighthouse, but I don't know what else you'd call it. It sits on a piece of property owned by the coast guard which includes about eight homes occupied by coast gaurd members, half of which have unobstructed views of the ocean. Not a bad deal!

This was a couple hours after sunset with a mostly full moon shining behind me. It's a three minute exposure, and the lighthouse light was rotating, so that's why the starburst is a little funky.

This was shot from Thousand Steps, and was one of my first outings with our new EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 IS lens. I'm very pleased with how sharp it turned out!

The original, unedited image.

Tide's Coming In...

2010-07-10T12:11:00.000-07:00

A couple weekends ago my mother-in-law was in town to help Jess around the house and with Logan, so I had some more flexibility than usual for photography. To take advantage of the situation, I rented my current dream lens, the EF-S 10-22mm, for the weekend.

The lens was great--very sharp, and I really appreciated the extra wide field of view.

I'm excited with the results from this outing, though not necessarily about the images themselves. There wasn't any color in the sky, so the images are missing that drama that I love. I'm excited, though, because I think I finally nailed the exposure in terms of balancing the foreground and the sky while still getting the water effect that I was after. Now I just need to wait for a dramatic sunrise or sunset to come along, and I should be golden!

The original, unedited image.

Also, here are some more details / notes that I posted in the comments:

A couple notes on the exposure:
- I shot in full manual
- I zoomed in on the rock and metered off of the foreground, which ended up being about +2 stops overexposed for the whole scene.
- I experimented with different shutter speeds, from about 1/4sec to maybe 1sec.
- I occasionally took a 0ev exposure to capture the sky in case I wanted to blend it in. Turned out to be unnecessary in this case; I just used a virtual grad filter in Lightroom to bring down the exposure of the sky.
- I shot in RAW, then I sent the saturation through the roof in Lightroom.

Finally, I picked a rock that was mostly out of the water, waited for a wave to hit, and then started the exposure just about as the water hit the rock. I experimented with starting the exposure at different points there, too. You can never really predict what the water's going to do or what it will look like, so experimentation seems key :)

Chris

2010-06-29T08:00:00.000-07:00

My brother Matt braved the mosquitos with me for some night photography on the beach in Galveston, Texas.

It ended up being too dark for the kinds of shots I had in mind--there was only a partial moon and it was hiding behind clouds--so we decided to mess around with some light painting instead. We used a AA maglite and took turns running in, trying to write our name, then running out and waiting for the 60 second exposure to finish. We had about 8 failed attempts before I finally got this one--the trick ended up being to write slowly, and move in between each letter.

After that, we decided we couldn't tolerate any more mosquito bites (despite copious amounts of bug spray! I even got a bite or two through my t-shirt!), and headed back in before Matt had a chance to redeem himself :)

There seem to be frequent thunderstorms in Galveston, and I had hoped to catch one while we were there, but wasn't lucky enough. Had fun hanging out with my brother, though!

The original unedited image.

Harbor Under Fog

2010-06-24T21:40:00.000-07:00

One last image from my harbor outing back in May.

As I was heading back to the car, the fog was starting to roll over the harbor in broken chunks. The moving breaks in the fog created the nice gradation of light you see in this image.

Also, the white balance was a big key in editing these photos. Most of the light sources in this shot, particularly the light from Santa Barbara illuminating the glow in the sky, are very orange. If you look at the original image with auto white balance, it's overwhelmingly orange.

I shot these in RAW and brought the color temperature way down to turn the orange glow into a cool blue. The original white balance is probably much truer to what my eyes saw that night, but I think the blue just has a much better atmosphere.

I've learned that the white balance can have a huge impact on your night photography. If your images are coming back with an orangish-brown sky, try bringing down the color temperature and--poof!--you'll have a blue night sky. (Or, when you're out there, try shooting with your camera's "tungsten" white balance mode).

The original, unedited image.

Another image from that evening. I didn't like how it turned out enough to put it at the front of my photostream, but I thought it was at least a cool idea.

Saturate your Sunsets!

2010-06-20T21:34:00.000-07:00

I made an interesting discovery today that's left me feeling a little cheated. As Jess and I have felt our way through editing over the past five years, one thing we've learned is that you have to be careful with saturation. It's great to have your colors "pop", but you can easily overdo it--the colors start to bleed and you start losing detail and variation of tone. So, as a sort of rule, I never push the saturation very far, in either my photographs of people or my landscapes. I'm realizing that was a mistake, at least for my sunset shots.

This past week I started to create a Flickr gallery of seascape images that inspire me so that I can spend some time pulling them apart and learning from them. One of the things I've realized so far is that a lot of the great sunsets on Flickr are heavily saturated, and it's even pretty clear that detail has been lost in the sky for the sake of emphasizing those dramatic colors.

So I grabbed one of my recent photos, and pushed the saturation slider farther. It looked pretty good! So I pushed it farther. Even better! I pushed it all the way to +100, and it looked awesome.

Check out the before and after. The 'before' is how it looked when I originally posted it last week. I had boosted the saturation some, but only to about +23. Also, since I was spending some more time on it today, I tweaked the exposure some and brought up the foreground--so look at the difference in the sky more than the difference in the water and sand.

Move your mouse over the image to see the change

I can't believe that something so simple has eluded me for so long!

One thing that may be worth noting is that I always shoot in RAW format, and this may have been important in allowing me to push the saturation so far. We always shoot RAW because Lightroom makes it so easy--it's essentially transparent to us that the images are RAW and not JPEG.

I'm looking forward to sharing more about the Flick gallery when it's finished. I think the other thing that's become very apparent already from assessing others' work is that my shots are underexposed. I've got to fix that next time I go out!

Stormy Sunset

2010-06-18T21:52:00.000-07:00

Another one from my outing to Hendry's back in April.

In hindsight, it would have been nice to have kept the shutter speed the same, but overexpose it by a stop or two to get the foreground exposed better. It's hard to know exactly what shutter speed is going to look best when you're out there. I am learning, though, that I have to overexpose it some to get the foreground right, and then I can pull the sky back down in post processing.

I did bracket this exposure, and blended in some of the overexposed image to recover detail in the rock. The water only looked this cool in this exposure, though, so the rock was all I could take from the other one.

Here's the original, unedited image. It's so off-level that you'd think I was drunk! This was one of my last outings with the $30 tripod before I got the new one, so that's probably what happened there. It needed to be cropped in anyway!

Everything's Bigger In Texas

2010-06-16T08:00:00.000-07:00

This was taken on Galveston island in Texas at a place called Pointe West. I was looking inland, across the bay towards Houston.

That cloud is huge. it's probably over 25,000 feet tall--taller than any mountain and probably more massive. You'll never see anything like that in Santa Barbara :). Check out the original size for some nice detail in the clouds.

This is a panorama, stitched together from 5 vertical frames at 17mm.

Here is the original, uncropped and unedited panorama.

Harbor at Night

2010-06-12T12:22:00.000-07:00

Another shot from my outing to the harbor back in May.

This is the Santa Barbara harbor at night, viewed from the breakwater. At the left of the frame is the yacht club, and the brightest lights in the middle are the SB City College stadium.

There were so many different sources and colors of light in this scene, I think that's what excited me most about it.

The atmosphere of these harbor shots is coming from a layer of fog over Santa Barbara--that's what's producing the glow along the horizon.

The original, unedited image.

Huge Beetle

2010-06-09T08:00:00.000-07:00

Jess was out pruning the roses and came across this monster beetle hanging on to one of the stems.

Here's a less interesting, but more informative photo of the thing that I buried in my photostream:

This photo is a good example of how you can get a decent "macro" shot with your kit lens. The focal length of the lens doesn't affect the minimum focusing distance, so you can focus as close as possible then zoom all the way in to 55mm and get pretty good magnification. I wrote my very first blog post in 2009 about this subject, and interestingly enough it's by far my biggest source of traffic.

If you agitated this guy, he'd buzz something in front of his mouth and make a chirping sound; here's a little clip of it.

Here's the original, unedited image.

The Lizard That Swallowed The Sea

2010-05-26T22:00:00.000-07:00

My friend Wyatt and I headed up to Lizard's Mouth on Saturday morning. Sunrise was ridiculously early, so we didn't get up there until about an hour after. So the light was decent, but not amazing. It was a really clear day, though, with a beautiful view of the city and the islands.

This was shot from a pretty similar perspective to this image, with a different focal length obviously. I was probably standing on the next rock over :).

Lizard's mouth is a great spot. It's almost a shame, though, how easy it is to get to. I think Wyatt and I were both feeling like we would have enjoyed more of a hike that morning.

This is a handheld 3 exposure HDR at -1 1/3ev, 0ev, and +1 1/3ev. Here is the original, unedited, 0ev exposure

Throw a photographer into any scene and it instantly gains some interest for me. Thanks for livening up my image, Wyatt :)

The view from Lizard's Mouth on a clear day like this one is fantastic. This is overlooking Goleta; Wyatt's standing in front of the view of the airport, and the UCSB campus is to the left of his head. The big island on the horizon is Santa Cruz Island.

I tried a panorama from up there but totally botched it. Good thing I lugged my tripod out with me :). Maybe another time.

The original, unedited image.

Harbor at Night

2010-05-25T19:00:00.000-07:00

I'm changing things up a bit with how I share photos on this blog. Basically, I've decided that Flickr is a better place for me to try and develop community and share my work (after all, that's what it's designed for!), so I'm planning to put my primary focus there.

That said, I know that my blog (and the fact that you can subscribe to it) is how most of my "real life" friends get to see my work, so, I'll continue to post all of my photos here, and the descriptions will just be identical to whatever I write on Flickr.

Also, I'm still very passionate about sharing what I learn about photography, and I think this blog is still the best medium for lengthy discussions of a given topic. So it will continue to be more than just a clone of my Flickr photostream. If I write an 'article' on the blog, I'll just link to it in the description of one of the photos on Flickr.

Up until now the role of my photostream versus my blog has been a little fuzzy, and I'd often write slightly different things in each place, and occasionally link the Flickr photo back to the blog post. I'm hoping this will clean things up.

If you follow my work on Flickr, you can just follow it there and you won't miss anything. If you follow my blog, you can just follow my blog and you still won't miss anything that way, either.

So, to get things started, here are a couple recent photos with their descriptions from my photostream.

This was my first outing with my new tripod--a set of Manfrotto 055XPROB legs and a PhotoClam PC-33NS ballhead. Up until now I've been making do with a really cheap ($30?) tripod that came bundled with a camcorder.

It turned out the biggest benefit I saw with the new tripod had to do with composition. Because the legs are so tall, I can stand up very comfortably while looking through the viewfinder. I see now, too, why ballheads are the preferred choice for landscapes--the ballhead made it very easy to adjust the framing. All of that added up to me being able to be a lot more patient in getting the scene composed well.

The fact that I can trust my camera on it enough to step away during a 2 minute exposure is nice, too. :)

Another shot from the harbor that night. I really liked the light on the inside of the sea wall.

Just upgraded to a Flickr Pro account today, woohoo!

Thousand Steps

2010-05-14T19:00:00.000-07:00

8 sec at f/16 and 18mm

Towards the end of the day on Wednesday there were some really cool clouds in the sky, it looked promising for a sunset. I checked the tide tables and saw that there was a really high tide right at sunset, the tide was just over 5 feet. When the tide is that high, there are a lot of places around Santa Barbara where the beach completely disappears and the waves crash against the cliffs. A fun side effect of this is that some of these beaches have stairs that lead down to them, and with that tide height the stairs lead straight into the waves.

There's a set of stairs nearby called Thousand Steps (it is a lot of steps, but the name is an exaggeration--there's nowhere close to a thousand) that I've been wanting to shoot under these conditions.

This was a nice quick trip; I already had a clear idea of the shot I wanted, and there weren't many other options to try. I got there, set up, took a handful of shots, and was out of there pretty quickly.

This was one of my first outings with my new tripod--Manfrotto 055XPROB legs with a PhotoClam PC-33NS ball head. I'll gush about this tripod more in another post, but I have to say the biggest benefit I'm finding with it is that it makes is much easier to compose my shots. I'm able to comfortably and patiently assess the composition and make fine adjustments to it. With my old, cheap tripod, I'd tend to give up a bit because of the painful difficulty of getting it positioned just right.

One of the things I've learned about recently, which was relevant on this outing, is the problem of "barrel distortion". I had read this term a number of times, but never bothered to look it up until recently. Barrel distortion is a problem with wide-angle lenses which causes the scene to bend slightly away from the center at the lens's widest angle.

This becomes a problem when you have a clean, straight horizon in your shot, as it will appear curved. The solution is to not shoot at the absolute widest angle of the lens if your scene has a strong horizon line.

I took my first photos at 18mm, my kit lens's shortest focal length. With the image preview on the back of my camera, I zoomed in and saw this curve on the horizon.

It's clearer when the horizon is right up against the frame.

Not so bad, really, but I ended up deciding on a square cropping of just the stairs anyway. I really liked the texture of the water in the first picture and wanted to bring the focus to that and the stairs.

Sunset at Hendry's

2010-05-12T19:00:00.000-07:00

.8 sec at 18mm, f/16, and ISO 100

This was a great trip, I came back with a ton of exciting photos that will probably take me months to process. This was one of the best.

The trip was also made extra awesome by a special companion.

Logan and dad at Hendry's beach

I've found it really hard over the past year to be flexible enough to make it to the beach when the sunset is looking promising. Things have gotten a little more relaxed lately, though, (now that "sunset season" in Santa Barbara is over!) and I think I should be able to steal away from time to time for some sunset photography. One idea Jess had suggested was for me to try bringing Logan along, since he's old enough now to have a little fun at the beach. Initially I was worried that it wouldn't work because I'd never have enough time to set up a shot before I had to pick up the camera and chase after him. He can't really get into much trouble out there, though, so I think it could actually work in general.

It turned out to be kind of a terrible day to bring him... It was really cold and windy, and the tide was pretty high. I bundled him up as best I could, and I ended up setting him down on some rocks in a little alcove (you can see it on the right side of the photo) that mostly kept him protected from the wind. Someone probably would have called child protective services on me if they saw us, but the beach was completely cleared out by the weather :)

You're a trooper buddy!

Editing this one was rough. It was a promising photo so the stakes were high, and I kept second-guessing myself. I knew that I had to get it done in one sitting (or else I'd let it sit "almost done" forever!), so I brewed some tea, put some music on, and cranked away for a good two hours straight. Below are the before and after.

I'm still trying to perfect the technique for this type of photo. A lot of photographers use graduated filters on their lenses in order to expose for the foreground without blowing out the sky. Filters can be expensive, though, and the horizon is rarely a straight line all the way across (for example, the cliffs to the right in this one), so my hope has been to use clever editing to pull it off.

In theory, I want one exposure where the foreground is well-exposed and the water is how I want it, and then I want a second exposure where the sky is exposed well, and I can blend those together. I've yet to pull this off, though. I think a big part of it is just that I get too excited when I'm out there and don't give the technique enough thought. The other problem is that the sky and foreground can't be too far apart in exposure or it won't look natural.

I'll have to think it through some more and try to be more on-task next time. I may have some photos lying around that I can at least try this technique out on. In the meantime, I do ok with just a single exposure that I apply a "virtual" graduated filter to, but I'm often stretching the foreground exposure to its limits.

Photographing Kids - Lighting

2010-05-07T19:00:00.000-07:00

I know that a lot of you guys have found your way here through my wife's blog (thanks honey!), which means you probably have, or will soon have, kids, and would probably be interested in photographing them. You've also probably seen that Jess has taken some great photos of Logan and our family that she's posted to her blog. So to reward you for your support, I thought it might be fun to write some posts sharing some of her/our secrets for creating those images.

Rather than just list out every helpful tip I can think of, I thought I'd try and choose one topic at a time and explore it more fully.

I wanted to start with lighting. I think one of the best things you can do for your portrait photography is to be intentional about where you take your pictures and what kind of lighting you're going to find there.

What to Avoid
There are probably creative ways to make the lighting in any situation work for you. In general, though, try to avoid shooting in direct sun, especially during the middle of the day. Direct sun will make your kids squint, and will cast really harsh shadows on their face. If you're not intentional about your lighting, most of your shots will probably end up being in full sun.

Things to Try

Shoot in the shade
Your best bet is to shoot in some form of shade. A partly cloudy day, where there are some clouds covering the sun, is the most convenient source of light for this. You can shoot anywhere that's normally in full sun (which is most places), but the clouds will soften and diffuse the light. The below photo was probably taken on a partly cloudly or overcast day. You can see the light is really even and there are no harsh shadows.

Tip: Shade and White Balance
White balance is an important part of portrait photography in general, but it's especially important when shooting in the shade. The light on a cloudy day, for example, will add a bluish cast to your photos. Use your camera's white balance settings to correct for this, or adjust the white balance in your editing software to warm up the photo.

The other good source of diffused light is the shade of a tree. Some spots will provide full shade, but others often give you mottled light with small patches of shade and diffused light. In the below shot of me (with quite the mop growing on my head) and Logan, we're under shade from a tree and a shrub, and there are patches of light making their way in.

That's a very nice motorcycle helmet you've got there, Chris

I'm not completely sure what I think of patchy light versus perfectly-even light. I guess they're just different--patchy light may be less ideal for getting a clear and detailed capture of someone's face, but it seems to add some lightness and fun to the atmosphere of the portrait.

Pay attention to the edges of your shade
Something that can look pretty bad is having most of your image covered in shade, but large parts of it exposed to the sun. A mistake we've made a number of times is to shoot in the shadow cast by our house, but to include in the frame some of the yard or fence which is hit by full sun. This is especially bad because of the rigid outline of the house--the edge of the shadow becomes a very bold and distracting line.

Back-lit subjects
You may think that a back-lit subject is hopeless, but back-lighting can actually be used to great effect. Try back-lit photos in the early morning or late afternoon when the sun is low in the sky and the light is soft.

Isn't she beautiful!? The little guy, too :)

There a number of things which make this whole back-lighting approach work well. One is that all of the light on your subject is being reflected off of other surfaces, so it's diffused and even. Another is that you will often end up over-exposing the background, which can help remove distractions and bring the focus to your subject. Finally, it can have a pretty cool effect on your subject's hair, producing a sort of golden halo around their face.

Our friends Sarah and Wyatt. Way to model back-lighting, guys!

The key to back-lighting is to exercise some control over the exposure. The background will often be very bright compared to the front of your subject. Your camera will take the average brightness of the scene and calculate an exposure based on that, but it will probably result in under-exposing your subject. Figure out how to use the exposure bias on your camera (even point-and-shoots have this feature!) and "over-expose" the shot by a stop or two.

Professionals will apply a technique called "spot-metering", where they change the metering mode of their camera, zoom in on the subject, press the shutter release half way and use that metering for the exposure settings. Jess and I are generally a little lazier, though. We just pick an amount to over-expose by (a somewhat-educated guess based on the lighting), try it and check the image on the LCD. You can usually tweak your exposure a little after-the-fact, too, in your editing program.

An interesting point for those of us living on the coast is that back lighting also tends to be about the only way to get a good picture at the beach (when there are no clouds in the sky). Jess and I notice this a lot in professional engagement photos at the beach. The sun is behind the couple, and the sky is completely blown-out (over-exposed) in order to get a good exposure of the subject.

Conclusion
I hope that helps some; have fun shooting your family and friends!

And if you take some pictures with some intentional light choices, be sure to share them in the comments below!

Deep Rock

2010-04-30T19:00:00.000-07:00

200mm at f/10

Lightroom offers some awesome features for managing and organizing your photographic work. I imagine it's less ideal for managing snapshots from your vacations or parties, but it's great when you use it for organizing your "portfolio" of artistic work.

Lately, the number of photos I have sitting around waiting to be processed has gotten out of control. I've also been perusing some older photo shoots and finding some hidden gems. All of this has lead me to put some thought towards finding a way to keep track of all these photos that I'd like to "eventually process".

One of the tools available in Lightroom is the ability to apply a color label to each of your photos. I've decided to label all of my "published" photos (that is, photos I've uploaded and shared) blue, and to label all of my photos that I think merit some future attention yellow. I can then easily filter my entire library for yellow photos, and when I feel in the mood, I can pick one or two to process and share.

I mentioned I've found some older photos that looked promising. I think what happened with these is that there was some creativity in the composition, but the light, color, contrast, or whatever didn't work out and they didn't look that great straight off the camera. Now that I'm more confident in my editing skills, though, I can play some tricks to highlight the good elements of these images and make use of them.

Also, the more I learn about design and composition, the more interested I've become in the photos where the composition is more of the focus than the actual material--basically, I've started to have a greater appreciation for my more abstract images.

The image at the top of this post is of a rock in the San Francisco Bay. It was taken in 2006 from the Golden Gate bridge with a long zoom lens. I like the perspective--I think the overhead view makes me feel like I'm hovering above it about to fall into the bay [shudder].

It was middday and the rock was pretty harshly lit, and it's also covered in bird poop and dead grass. Overall, the face of the rock was just a distracting mess. I used a Lightroom preset here called "Cold Tone", which I think had a great effect in creating a simpler, almost monochromatic image with a mysterious vibe.

Sensor Dust

2010-04-23T19:00:00.000-07:00

Scenic photography seems to be plagued by sensor dust. It shows up most visibly against skies and clouds and when the lens is set to a small aperture, which it often is when you're shooting a landscape and want a large depth of field.

Take a look at this photo from my last post. This is the output straight from the HDR step. The HDR process "enhances detail" and so it tends to worsen these dust spots.

Here's a zoomed-in look at an especially bad part of the sky. Yuck!

It's not the end of the world, though. Even basic editors like Picasa have tools for removing dust spots. So the next step for me is to go in and heal all of these nasty little spots. Sometimes they can be tough to spot; I find that it helps to drag the photo around--your eye seems to notice them better when the picture moves.

Here's a screenshot from Lightroom showing all the places I had to remove dust. What a pain!

So what do you do about it? Well, many of you probably have newer camera bodies which have some automatic sensor cleaning and "dust-delete" technology built in. Our 20D does not, though, so I just constantly gripe about it and say to myself all the time "man, I really need to clean my sensor sometime!".

I'm finally getting around to cleaning it, and I thought I'd share the experience with you as well as record some notes for myself for future cleanings.

For starters, cleaning your sensor sucks. It's difficult, scary, and not very cheap. I haven't been perfectly happy with my results, either. The first time I did it, a little fiber managed to make its way into some part of the viewfinder and I haven't been able to get it out. So, with that cheery outlook...

Test shot
The first step is to take a test shot that clearly shows all of the dust on your sensor. Do this with a long focal length (I used our 50mm f/1.8 lens), the lowest ISO (100 for me), and the smallest possible aperture. Focus at infinity and take a picture of a blue sky or an evenly-lit, light colored wall. With these settings, it will probably be a really long exposure, but don't worry about it. Motion blur doesn't affect the dust particles on the sensor, and could even help by blurring out any unwanted detail in the wall.

Here's my initial test shot of a cream-colored wall.

You can zoom in on this photo and spot the dust. To really highlight the dust, though, bring the photo into Photoshop or the GIMP.

Go to Image->Levels Adjustment and adjust the levels to create some crazy contrast. Bring the black and white sliders all the way into the edges of the histogram, like so:

This should get you a crazy looking photo that really accentuates the grossness. The color can be distracting, so at this point I turn it to grayscale. Here's the same test shot with those adjustments:

Now you have a baseline and you can try different cleaning techniques and see how much they improved things.

Cleaning the sensor
I find that anyone who says anything online about cleaning a camera sensor always adds a scary disclaimer to avoid any liability. So here's mine: do not treat this post as instructions for cleaning your sensor. If it reads like instructions, it's because I'm writing them to myself for cleaning my sensor, not for you to clean yours.

First off, you need an environment to work in that's as dust free as possible. I've read suggestions to use a tiled bathroom or kitchen with the windows closed.

Our home was built in 1928 and the weatherproofing is hopeless. The first time I cleaned my sensor, I did it in our bathroom, and I literally watched a few dust particles fall into the camera body. This time around, I did it in my cube at work at the end of the day--definitely a pretty sterile environment, provided I cleaned off part of my desk.

You'll need a tripod to hold the camera while you work.

There are a variety of methods for actually cleaning your sensor. There are two that I've been using: a blower and sensor swabs.

I start with the blower. I use the tripod to point the camera at an angle downward to encourage dust to fall out and discourage dust from falling in. Your camera should have a function for locking the mirror up and out of the way so that you can get to the sensor. Mine is labeled "Sensor clean." and is one of the very last menu options. On the 20D, this locks up the mirror until you power off the camera.

The first step, then, is to lock the mirror up and use a few forceful blasts of air to try and blow dust off the sensor. I did this and took another test shot; here's the before and after comparison.

It's hard to tell with the small images side by side, but this did make a difference. Still pretty bad overall, though.

The next step is the sensor swabs. At this point, unfortunately, I don't really remember the research that went into choosing a brand of swabs and cleaner. If I remember correctly, I picked both the blower and the swabs up from a local camera store because they weren't any cheaper online. Also, I went with an off-brand sensor swab.

Using the swabs has never gone that well for me. The instructions are to apply the solution to the swab, then wipe in one direction across the sensor, then the other direction using the opposite side of the swab. I think this means that you should only have to put the swab in and out of the camera once, since you're basically wiping one way then wiping back the other.

I find the edges of the sensor to be the hardest part. After swabbing and taking a test shot, I ended up with what looked like some moisture residue along one edge of the sensor, plus a fairly large fiber. I decided to go in for a second swab, and it didn't get much better. I got rid of the fiber, but a couple large spots showed up in the middle, and the residue was still there along the edge.

Unfortunately that's pretty much where I left it. I tried a few more blasts of air but no luck. I've done a little more reading since then and found some other techniques to try. There's a relatively cheap "sensor pen" that looks promising. I have such a tough time with the swabs and the edges; the pen seems like it would be a lot easier to use.

In the meantime, I guess I'll just keep doing spot removal when I process the images!

There are a lot of articles out there on sensor cleaning, so I'd suggest reading up before you try it. Here's one that I read this time around which had some helpful tips.

Good luck!

Knapp's Castle

2010-04-17T00:00:00.000-07:00

6-exposure HDR of Knapp's Castle

After a hard week at work, I was craving a little outdoor adventure. This morning, Jess and Logan and I drove up to a set of ruins called Knapp's Castle at the top of the hills behind Santa Barbara. It turned out to be a great place to take the family-- the ruins were only a half mile from the trailhead. And what a great spot for photography!

I created this image by merging 6 exposures to HDR in Photomatix. I had 11 to work with, but the most underexposed ones didn't have any valuable detail in them, so I just used the brightest six.

The output of the HDR had a pretty "grungy" sky which looked cool but was too crazy to be believable. I took one of the original exposures and tweaked it a bunch to get a good dramatic sky, then brought them both into Photoshop and blended them together.

The HDR output

One of the original exposures, edited to enhance the sky

The original sky exposure, pre-crop

Some random thoughts and lessons that may be helpful:

I used a circular polarizer on my lens for these shots. This proved to be really helpful--it was one of those days where the clouds were high and almost more like haze than clouds. The polarizer really helps there to add good contrast to the sky, bringing out deeper blues and cutting through some of the reflection from the haze.
I've been frustrated recently with the stability of my cheap ($30?) tripod. I'm planning to replace it with a really nice one soon, but I learned a good tip recently that helped here. Whenever possible, don't extend the center column of your tripod. The closer the camera is to the ground, the more stable it will be. That wasn't very ideal here, where I really wanted to be looking down at the ruins, but I think it did make it more steady. Either way, I can't wait for my new tripod :)
If you compare the above images, you may notice that I removed some distracting trees from around the arch of the chimney. I did this with the clone-stamp tool in Photoshop. I use the spot healing tool in Lightroom a lot, but had never used this tool. It worked great for this job--spot healing is good for removing things like sensor dust, but when you need to remove something larger and odd-shaped, the clone-stamp tool can do it. You alt-click to tell it where to sample from, then paint over the area you want to remove, and it does a nice job blending for you.

Have a great weekend!

The Curves Tool

2010-04-09T19:00:00.000-07:00

200mm, 1/1250sec. at f/8.0

Curves is a powerful but complicated tool that is available in more advanced photo editing software like Photoshop or the GIMP. It deserves a thorough, well illustrated, and well thought-out explanation, so I'm not going to aspire to do that here. What I do want to do, though, is bring it to your attention and show you how it helped me greatly enhance this recent photograph. Then, I'll point you to some well written tutorials where you can learn about it in more detail.

I'm going to oversimplify things a bit and say that curves is a tool for adding contrast to your images, as well as controlling the relative brightness or darkness of different parts of your image.

Here's what the tool looks like in Photoshop. Understanding the real meaning of this graph is valuable, but it's a hard place to start--it's easier to start with a more superficial but practical understanding.

In the curves tool dialog, you can click and hold anywhere along the line, and drag up or down to add a gentle bend to that part of the line, creating a "curve". The simplest application of this tool is to create a slight "S" curve which will add some nice contrast to your image.

(The curves screenshots in the rest of this post are from Lightroom, which is where I normally use the tool.)

Hehe, that's a great photo. Jess took it; you can read about it here if you're interested.

This basic contrast is great, but curves may be overkill for just adding a little contrast to your image. A simpler photo editor will usually have a contrast slider which may be just as effective and easier to use.

Curves becomes a much more exciting tool when you think of it as a way to control the brightness of different tonal ranges in your image.

In my morning outing to Hendry's Beach that I posted about a few weeks ago, I took the photo at the beginning of this post. I'm almost always shooting wide-angle at the beach, but this was a moment where I was glad to have a 55-200mm zoom lens in my bag.

Take a look at these before-and-after images, showing the original image and the tone curve that I applied.

Using the curves tool, I essentially told it, "make just the 'light' part of the clouds a lot lighter, and make the 'dark' areas a little darker". This creates a much more dramatic and higher contrast image.

Both Lightroom and Photoshop also provide a great intuitive tool for working with curves. It allows you to click anywhere on the image, and adjust the part of the curve which corresponds to the point in the image where you clicked.

I'm tempted to try and explain the curves tool more, but I know I won't have time to do it justice. If you're serious about editing, you should look into curves. Take a look at these great tutorials, and I'll do my best to answer any questions you leave in the comments.

I have to admit I haven't fully read through this one, but it appears to be very thorough and well illustrated, and I'm looking forward to reading it and maybe picking up a few new things. It goes to show just how much background is required in understanding this tool.
http://www.chromasia.com/tutorials/online/curves/

This one is from one of my favorite sites for tutorials, cambridgeincolour.com. It's a little shorter and more to the point, but also more technical. You may be able to get going quickly with this one without completely understanding it, then re-read it over time and gradually build your understanding.
http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/photoshop-curves.htm

End of a day

2010-04-02T15:20:00.000-07:00

50mm at f/8.0, 8 exposures merged to HDR in Photomatix

Jess and Logan and I went for a walk last weekend along Cabrillo Boulevard, the road which runs along the coast in front of downtown Santa Barbara. I liked the light shining through these palm trees, and I had been itching to try making an HDR image using more than 3 exposures. So I set up my tripod and made Jess and Logan plop down on the grass to add some interest to the scene. Keeping Logan "posed", of course, meant holding him down and tickling him :).

This is an HDR image composed of 8 exposures, and for once, it's not super noisy! At first I chalked that up to the 8 exposures as opposed to 3, but I tried processing it with just 3 of the 8 images and that wasn't noisy, either. There may just be something unique about the lighting of this scene that made it less noise-prone than my other attempts. Either way, I'm happy to not be complaining about noise!

Here are all 8 exposures laid out. They range from -3 1/3 stops to +3 1/3 stops, but they're not evenly distributed within that range.

Figuring out how to take all of these exposures quickly was an interesting challenge. I used a combination of the camera's auto-bracketing feature and exposure bias. I set the auto-bracketing to take 3 exposures at -1 1/3, 0, and +1 1/3 stops. I then used the exposure bias to take three bracketed shots each at -2, 0, and +2 stops. For those of you keeping count, that's a total of 9 images--I must have misplaced one or something.

An interesting part of this process is that it takes some time to take all of those exposures, and subjects can easily move in that time (especially when one of the subjects is a toddler!). This movement results in "ghosting" in the final image. Here's what Jess and Logan looked like straight out of the HDR process.

Those faint lines come from their changing positions in the different exposures.

To fix this, I picked one of the exposures where Jess and Logan were exposed well and looked best. I happened to pick the 6th exposure. I made a little effort to adjust this image so that it at least somewhat matched the HDR image in terms of exposure and color.

I then brought this exposure plus the HDR image into Photoshop, auto-aligned the two images, and then used a layer mask and a brush to replace the ghosted version of Jess and Logan with the one from the good exposure. If you look closely, I didn't do a very stellar blending job there; hopefully my technique will improve over time.

Sadly, I don't think there's anything to be done about the huge streak of lens flare on Jess' back, but what can you expect when you shoot straight into the sun?!

This was a lot of fun, and had me all giddy to try this "many-exposure-HDR" technique on some other subjects. As I'm writing this, I've already had a chance to apply this technique on a recent sunrise at the beach, and I'm excited to share the results with you when I'm finished :).

Happy Easter Weekend!

The Sun and The Moon

2010-03-26T19:00:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago I had a great morning outing to Hendry's beach and I've finally been getting around to processing some of the photos.

When I got there, I was pleasantly surprised to find a full moon sitting low in the sky. The sunrise didn't become dramatic until a good 20 minutes after it crept past the horizon, so this gave me a good subject to play with in the mean time.

Once the sun was up, I took a handful of bracketed exposures to try some HDR. Something that's been really discouraging with my HDR attempts so far is that they end up with a horrendous amount of noise. The colors and lighting look great overall, but in detail everything ends up looking really grainy.

I recently read through this HDR tutorial, and it suggests that you can reduce the noise some by making the image from a large number of exposures (he uses 10) instead of the more common 3. I'm eager to test this theory out and hopefully see some improvement!

At the same time, I'm encouraged to see that the noise isn't really noticeable in the compressed 1024x768 image on Flickr. Also, the noise reduction tool in Lightroom seemed to help some.

On top of the noise, this shot wasn't very sharp to begin with--I'm not sure whether that's because of a cheap tripod, or poor focusing, or what. Also, even the +2ev exposure wasn't light enough to record detail in all of the shadows, so I didn't really capture the full dynamic range.

All complaints aside, though, it was a beautiful sunrise and a decent capture that I'd chalk up as "progress" :)

Point-and-Shoot Fun

2010-03-21T22:16:00.000-07:00

A different take on the family photo

A couple things led to the photos in this post.

One was an article in a photography magazine showcasing a particular photographer's work. When asked about what she shoots with, she mentioned that she carries a point-and-shoot with her religiously.

I like that idea--I hear of other people bringing their camera bag with them wherever they go, but I can't really hog the SLR all of the time, since Jess uses it as well. Also, it's pretty impractical!

We have a small point-and-shoot that we got four or five years ago. It easily fits in my pocket, and while it's no SLR, I think I know enough now to understand what I can and can't accomplish within its limitations.

Logan's Crocs, as he sees them

The second thing that motivated these was seeing some photos on flickr which were of simple, ordinary things, but were heavily stylized in order to bring out some aspect of the composition. This inspired me to try taking more photos that rely less on the inherent interest of the subject (like gorgeous sunsets ;) ), and more on the composition and design.

I had just read a chapter on "lines" in a composition book...

I'm planning to add our compact to the little pile of things that go in my pockets when I head out the door. Hopefully some fun shots will come out of it!

Lizard's Mouth

2010-02-22T22:00:00.000-08:00

55-200mm lens at 88mm. 1/125 sec at f/6.3 and ISO 200.

Lizard's Mouth is a great spot on the ridge of the mountains overlooking Santa Barbara and Goleta. It's named after the distinctive rock that these three hikers are sitting on.

Oil rigs dot the horizon when you look out at the coast from town. From this high up, though, you can see some depth.

Lately, I've been feeling motivated to go through my older photos and give them a second chance. My editing skills have gotten better, and I have much better software to work with now. It's been fun going back and remembering the adventures, and there's something nice, too, about how looking at these photos reminds me of the types of things that I love to photograph.

With this photo, I wanted a rich sunset without darkening the ocean too much, so I used Lightroom's graduated filter tool at the horizon to darken the sky without darkening the ocean. Normally this would be trickier, since the rock juts above the horizon, but since it's already just a silhouette, it doesn't hurt to make it any darker!

The other big change here was in the white balance. If you're unfamiliar with color temperature and white balance, have a look at this great tutorial. Basically, different sources of light create different color casts. On a grey, overcast day, everything tends to have a bluish cast, while the light from the tungsten light bulbs in your home is much more orange. Your camera's auto white balance attempts to correct for this, but you can adjust it further if you don't think the camera go it right, or if you just want to warm up (or cool) your image.

In this photo, the camera's white balance made it pretty yellowy, so I brought the color temperature down to correct it.

One of the advantages of shooting in RAW instead of JPEG is that the RAW image does not have the white balance applied yet, so you can adjust it on your computer without losing any quality.

Finally, I applied a subtle vignette using the technique I learned from Highton Ridley, which I explained in this post. I usually use Lightroom to add a simple vignette, but I liked Highton's approach for this because it allowed me to apply the vignette to the sky without applying it much to the ocean in the lower right corner.

Highton Ridley's Video Tutorial

2009-12-12T11:00:00.000-08:00

18-55mm lens at 18mm. 1/100 sec at f/18 and ISO 200.

I took the above shot back in July on a trip to Monterey. It was a beautiful day--there were these great clouds in the sky, and they were blocking the sun and creating some nice soft light. The water was amazingly clear, and there were all of these coarse, reddish-brown rocks at the end of the beach that added some great contrast in color and texture to the water.

When I tried processing the photo originally, though, I had a tough time getting the colors right and there wasn't really enough of a subject to make the shot interesting, so I kept giving up every time I tried to do something with it.

Then, a few weeks ago, I discovered this "high contrast black and white" workflow that another blogger, Highton Ridley, has generously shared on his site. I copied his workflow to create the above image, and I think the black and white works a lot better. It manages to highlight the awesome textures while mostly hiding the color issues.

Highton Ridley has created a superb video tutorial to share his workflow. Have a look at some of the inspiring work on his site, then take some time to watch the video; it's really cool! I think you'll also find his accent quite soothing :)

I learned a lot from his video. The high contrast black and white process is interesting in itself, but I also felt like I picked up some more general Photoshop knowledge from it.

I've included my notes from the tutorial below, mostly for my own benefit. Some of the techniques here are fairly advanced, and some of my notes probably won't make sense without having seen the video first, but here they are.

To perform the HDR, he creates three exposures from a single RAW file. I had kind of forgotten that this was a possibility! It works as long as the single exposure has enough detail in the highlights and shadows, and prevents you from having to align three separate exposures.
In creating the three exposures, he adjusts the exposure to get the tones "right" in a part of the image. I'm accustomed to just taking three exposures at -2, 0, and +2 and working with that. I'm curious if he gets a better result by choosing the exposures more carefully.
While playing with the HDR settings, he emphasizes preserving detail, bringing out textures, and creating a range of tones.
He seems to be using a trial version of Dynamic HDR, perhaps that program has a less intrusive watermark?
He does some perspective correction in Photoshop. I didn't notice the change, but it'd be interesting to learn more about this.
He converts to black and white using sliders to control how dark or light each color is represented. He begins by flipping through the different presets to find the best starting point.
You'd think it'd be easy to just convert to grayscale, but really there's a lot of adjusting you can do to get it just right! Again, he focuses on preserving detail and textures, and getting a nice range of tones.
He shares an interesting method for increasing overall contrast:

Add a curves layer, don't touch the curve (leave it linear), and hit ok.
Change the "blending mode" of the curves layer to "overlay".
Bring the opacity of the curves layer to 0%, then gradually bring it up (it looks like there's a way to simply drag the mouse left and right to adjust the opacity) (52% for his image)

He also shared an interesting method for adding a vignette:

Add a generic layer
Change the blending mode to soft light.
Press "d" to set the default colors, then fill the layer with black.
Choose the largest eraser, with a brush size of 2500px. Make the eraser as soft as possible--turn the hardness down to 0%.
Use the eraser, starting in the center and working outwards, to create a vignette.
Turn down the opacity of the vignette layer some (62% for his image) to make it more subtle

His last step is to flatten the image and apply unsharp mask.

There were a couple things I saw him do which I couldn't figure out...
- How do you use the scroll wheel to flick between B&W presets?
- How do you use the mouse to move left and right to adjust a layer's opacity?

Here is how I applied his workflow to create the above image.

I started with a single RAW image. In Lightroom, I straightened the horizon and removed dust spots, then created 2 virtual copies and adjusted their exposures, one at -2ev and one at +2ev.

I exported the three images as TIFFs (TIFF is a loss-less format) and imported them into Photomatix. I wish I had saved the Photomatix settings to show you, but I didn't. Here's the tone-mapped result, at any rate.

The color HDR output is pretty neat, but it needs some work to bring it back to reality. To publish the color version, I think I'd need to go in and repair the sky by masking in some of one of the source images, and maybe work on the rocks some, too. If I want to keep doing HDR, I need to get to the point where I'm comfortable doing that kind of sophisticated masking, but I'm not there yet. In the meantime, I think the black and white conversion hides some of these color issues and still looks great.

I took the HDR output into photoshop and converted it to black and white. Below are also the values I used in the black and white adjustment layer.

To wrap it up, I used his contrast and vignette techniques, which added a lot of punch (the above image looks really flat by comparison), then brought the result back into Lightroom to use its powerful sharpening tool.

Thanks again to Highton Ridley for sharing his knowledge and technique!

We're having a baby, what camera should we buy?!

2009-12-05T16:30:00.000-08:00

Or, the alternate title, "2009 Holiday Camera Buyer's Guide for Expectant Parents".

We have a couple sets of friends who are expecting babies this next year. We all want to remember our children's early years well, and our friends are interested in trading in their older compact cameras for something that will help them better capture their growing families.

Being their friend-who's-into-photography, I feel obligated to give some input. Now I should include a disclaimer here: there are a few reasons why I'm qualified to give an opinion, but probably more reasons why I'm not. Nonetheless, I care about my friends and have done my best here, and I feel pretty good about the conclusions.

It's an exciting time to buy a digital SLR! Jess and I use a Canon 20D, which is just about four years old now, and I can assure you that our camera is pretty low on the list of things which are holding us back from creating better images ("lack of artistic talent" being much higher on my list :) ). Even the cheapest SLR today can outperform ours in some important ways, so you'll be buying a really powerful creative tool!

First, a few general thoughts on buying a camera.

Don't invest too much
Cameras don't hold their value long after the next model comes out. Just like a car, a new TV, or any other piece of consumer electronics, cameras depreciate in value each month you own them. So try to resist the urge to spend too much on features that will be cheaper and more standard next year.

Canon releases a new model of its lower-level cameras about every 12-18 months. Check out the timeline at the bottom of this wikipedia article.

Ignore the Megapixels
I have to admit that trying to gain a complete understanding of the megapixel issue has been a big headache for me; there's a lot of incomplete information out there, and it feels like every time I learn something new it opens a few more questions. Fortunately, there seems to be a pretty consistent conclusion that unless you're intending to make pretty large prints, more megapixels aren't going to help you in any way.

I decided not to try and completely restate the arguments I've read--it was a lot to cover and I wanted to avoid accidentally proliferating misinformation. But here's at least a short summary of the big arguments.

Cameras you'll be looking at today have at least 8MP, which is plenty for the resolutions at which we typically view our pictures. Online and on our computers, we share and view images at much lower resolutions than an 8MP camera can provide. For example, to make a 1920x1080 wallpaper for your 24" widescreen monitor, you only need a 2.1MP image.

You can look online to find recommended maximum print sizes for a given resolution. Any camera you buy today is sufficient for making excellent 8x10 prints.

We tend to lust after more megapixels thinking that it will give us sharper images. But if your images don't look sharp, it's pretty unlikely that your camera resolution is the problem. It's more likely an issue with poor focusing, subject movement or camera movement at low shutter speeds, lens quality, image noise, or even the aperture used.

Megapixels are a deceiving measurement of resolution. It requires a large change in the number of megapixels to produce an appreciable change in resolution.

For a more in-depth discussion of the issue, check out this article.

All that to say, don't pay more to get 12 or 15 megapixels instead of 10. Look at the camera's other features like how it handles noise at higher ISOs.

The upside to the megapixels not being important is that the entry-level SLR you buy today will hopefully be sufficient for you for a relatively long time!

Shooting In Low Light
Alright, so don't let yourself spend more than you need to, and don't sweat the megapixels. What should you look for then?

What people seem to want most out of their cameras is to get great shots in the poor (low) lighting conditions we live most of our lives in, i.e., indoors or at night. We want to sit in our baby's bedroom and capture a great scene of him smiling and waving his arms around--never mind that there's not much light and the subject is moving around!

Instead, what we get is a noisy, grainy, blurred, or even out-of-focus image that's not at all what we saw. The easy solution? Spend lots of money on your camera! Buy a $2,500 Canon 5D with superb noise performance and spend another grand or so on a super-fast zoom lens. Problem solved, post written.

Oh, what's that you say? You don't want to spend that much? :) Well, on the opposite end of the spectrum, here's what I'd suggest. Keep the camera you have, and don't ask the impossible of it. Instead, go to the park, throw down a blanket under a tree, and take some photos in some nice, bright, diffused light. Your 4MP compact will work wonders.

That's not quite fair either, though. Staging all of your photos isn't that fun, and you'll probably never do it. Fortunately, there are some great entry-level SLRs which provide a happy medium between price and performance.

Why buy an SLR?
The main reason to buy an SLR is for artistic control, but there are still some very good reasons to buy one and just use it in full-auto.

SLRs are built with superior image sensors. I was glad I got to learn about this, it's always been a bit of a mystery to me. In order to make a compact camera small, camera manufacturers have to use small lenses with short focal lengths. To achieve the same magnification as an SLR, they have to then use tiny image sensors. These image sensors are very small--the sensor in a digital SLR is more than 13 times larger than the one in a typical compact camera! The pixels are packed incredibly tight, and its very difficult to achieve the same level of noise performance as a larger sensor. I appreciated the discussion of this difference in this review of the top-of-the-line Canon point-and-shoot (look for the section titled "sensor").

I've always wondered, why don't they make a point-and-shoot with the same sensors as an SLR? There's your answer--there are physical constraints which prevent the smaller cameras from using the nicer sensors and achieving the same performance as the bulkier SLRs. An SLR will fundamentally give you better images with lower noise at high ISOs.

Another good reason to go with an SLR is their shooting speed. SLRs include more powerful image processors which allow the camera to take a number of shots in quick succession. This can be really helpful when you're trying to capture a moving target like a child. You can hold down the shutter release to fire off a burst of shots and hope that one of them turns out well. Or just fire away with individual shots without having to wait in-between. Point-and-shoot cameras, on the other hand, typically involve a lag of a few seconds in between shots.

Finally, you can also buy nice lenses for your SLR with large maximum apertures. These will perform better in low light, and can also give a more artistic look to your photos by creating blurred backgrounds and drawing more attention to the subject. The fixed-length 50mm lens will perform very well and is very reasonable at about $100. I should point out, though, that a large aperture with a close-up subject means an incredibly shallow depth of field, and it can be tough to keep the subject in focus!

Entry-level SLRs on the market
That's all of the background, let's look at some actual cameras.

I'm going to keep the discussion focused on Canon models here because I'm talking to my friends, and Canon's what Jess and I shoot, so that's what we'd be best able to help with. If you have a reason to go towards Nikon instead, the Nikon D3000 is a solid competitor to the Canon Rebel XS (which I recommend below) and you can't go wrong with it.

Canon has an excellent entry-level SLR called the Digital Rebel, of which there are three models: the XS ($480), XSi ($570), and T1i ($690). I'll discuss each of them in a bit.

The XS, front and back

Buying a used SLR
With the "cameras don't hold their value" point in mind, I also looked at the option of buying a used Canon 30D. The 30D is in the camera line a step above the Digital Rebel models. The 30D was released in 2006 to replace the 20D that Jess and I use. The current model in this line is the 50D, released at the end of 2008, which is about $1,000 on Amazon.

Our local camera store, Samy's Camera, has a used 30D that's in great condition for $500. Talking to the guys at Samy's, this probably isn't the right direction, though. The 30D does not come with an image-stabilized lens, and it's reasonable to expect that the sensor in the newer rebel has better noise performance than this older but more professional model. The newer rebels also have some neat features built in for preventing and cleaning sensor dust, which has been a big pain for me with our 20D.

There were only two reasons that I gathered why you'd want to go with the 30D. The 30D has a larger, sturdier, and more durable housing than the rebel. It feels more substantial and has a larger grip. I was told that it has better seals than the rebel, and it'd be the better bet if you plan to shoot in some more rugged, dirtier conditions. Also, it can capture more frames per second than the rebel, which you'd care about if you were a sports photographer :).

Canon Digital Rebel Comparison
With that aside, here's what I've learned of the rebels. They all come with an image-stabilized lens, which is excellent. The image-stabilized lenses work magic in low light, and let you get away with hand-holding the camera at much slower shutter speeds. The caveat, though, is that they only steady the camera's image and not your subject. The subject has to hold really still or their movement will turn them into a blur. So they're not much help when your baby's moving all around, but could definitely help capture him sleeping or in a rare moment of stillness.

At first glance, the differences between the three models seem like gimmicks that Canon is throwing in to try and get you to spend more. Reading some in-depth reviews, though, revealed some interesting features and improvements added to the nicer models. They each have progressively better noise performance at high ISO, plus some subtle features which may interest a more serious photographer.

Here's what I pulled out as the most interesting features for each one. I've included the link to the full review that I read if you're interested in a more in-depth look.

I'll tell you upfront that I think the XS is the best bet. I think that the higher prices for the nicer models are justified and they aren't bad buys, but, since even the base model has a solid set of features, I also think it makes the most sense to get an SLR for as little as possible, and buy another one four or five years down the road when today's "high end" features become standard.

Canon Rebel XS ($480)

A fully capable SLR, there's no major feature missing here
10.1MP with great noise performance even at ISO1600
2.5" display
3.5 shots per second
Supports "Live View"--you can shoot using the LCD instead of the viewfinder. This seems like a neat feature for when you want to place the camera somewhere where it's impractical to get your face up to the viewfinder.
Here's the link to a detailed review.

Canon Rebel XSi ($557)

Slightly better noise performance
3.0" inch display
12.2 megapixels
9 auto-focus points as opposed to 7 on the XS.
If you get pretty serious about editing you may decide to shoot in uncompressed RAW format. The XSi can shoot 3.5 frames per second RAW, but the XS can only shoot 1.5.
Here's a link to a detailed review.

Canon Rebel T1i ($690)

Significantly better noise performance, with a higher maximum ISO
Higher resolution 3.0 inch display
15.5 megapixels
Shoots 1080p "full HD" video. This sounds cool, especially because you could use your nice SLR lenses to get wide angle or zoomed in shots. Apparently, though, it's pretty cumbersome and more interesting to people who want to play with artistic videography rather than shoot home videos. You can't control the aperture, which is surprising on an SLR, and the video doesn't auto-focus in the same fluid way as a simple camcorder. I wouldn't make this feature the deciding factor.
Here's a link to a detailed review.

Again, I think the XS represents an awesome low-cost opportunity to get your hands on an SLR, and it's not missing any major features that are going to make you want to upgrade in a year if you decide to get more serious.

Look out for the Rebel T1!
I wish we could end things there, but sadly, there's one very important thing to point out. If you look back at that Canon SLR timeline (at the bottom of the article), it seems likely that the Rebel XS is due to be replaced any month now. An internet rumor earlier this year even suggested that a "Rebel T1" would be coming out by this Christmas to replace the XS. That obviously hasn't happened, but it seems likely that it will be here in the next 6 months.

It's annoying being on a boundary like this. On the other hand, Amazon's price for the Rebel XS seems like a pretty steep discount, and it may be that it takes into account the fact that the XS has been around a while and its time is almost up. The T1 will probably sell for closer to its retail, making it a more expensive camera initially. If $480 really is a good price for the XS (and I don't know how to assert that), it seems like it might make sense get your hands on a new SLR for the lowest possible dollar amount, rather than pay more for some new features you may not need.

It's a bummer to leave things on that note of uncertainty, but I hope this gives you some good options to consider, and has you excited about purchasing an SLR! Good luck, you can't really go wrong!

Thanks
I want to say thank you to:

The reviewers at imaging-resource for their very thorough reviews and opinions.
Ken Rockwell, for his detailed articles and discussions.

The 50mm Lens

2009-11-28T10:00:00.000-08:00

At the beginning of the year, I bought my wife our 50mm f/1.8 lens for her birthday, and we've loved it! The photos of our son Logan in this post were taken by her with the 50mm lens.

50mm, 1/100 sec at f/1.8, ISO 200

If you're lucky enough to own an SLR camera, then I think you should also consider getting a fixed-length 50mm lens... and here's why.

First, a little background. 50mm is a special focal length in photography; a 50mm lens is also referred to as a "normal" lens. The reason for this is that, on a 35mm film camera, the perspective you get with a 50mm lens is the same as human vision. You can look through the viewfinder with one eye, and keep the other eye open, and you should be able to see normally.

So why did I mention a 35mm film camera? Well, 50mm isn't actually "normal" on our camera (a Canon 20D) or probably yours. The reason for this is that the sensor in most digital SLRs is not as large as 35mm film. Instead, our digital cameras use a sensor format called APS-C which is less than half the size of 35mm film.

The smaller sensor size has a magnification effect that's referred to as a "crop factor". APS-C has a crop factor of 1.6, meaning that a 50mm lens on our camera has the same field of view as a longer 80mm lens on film. To truly get a "normal" perspective on our camera, we'd need a lens with a focal length of about 31mm. Nonetheless, the 50mm lens has remained a very popular length for photographers.

50mm, 1/1250sec at f/3.2, ISO 200

Aside: Why are the sensors smaller in digital cameras?
Well, professional-level digital SLRs, such as the Canon 5D, do actually have "full frame" (35mm) sensors... and they cost more than twice as much as the next camera down. The reason for this is pretty simple--the cost of manufacturing semiconductor chips is pretty directly related to their size. You can only fit so many chips on a wafer, and larger chips means fewer chips per wafer. Creating cameras that use a smaller-sized sensor makes them affordable enough that you and I can have one.

One of the biggest advantages to a full-frame sensor is that it can have the same number of megapixels as a smaller sensor, but without having to pack them in as tightly. This makes a big difference in the noise performance of the sensor. A shot from a Canon 5D at ISO 1600 will look a lot cleaner than it does on our 20D at the same ISO. Another difference, which relates to the crop factor, is that full-frame sensors have a shallower depth-of-field for a given aperture, making it easier to achieve artistic blurred backgrounds.

Ok, so now we know why 50mm is a (historically?) significant focal length, but why would you want a fixed-length lens? Don't you want the flexibility to zoom in and out? Isn't being stuck at one focal length a huge pain?

There are actually a number of advantages to using a fixed-length lens (also called a "prime" lens) over a zoom.

A fixed-length lens is much simpler to design and construct than a zoom, and this has two important consequences. The first is that they can have much better performance than zooms. The simpler design and less lens elements means that they produce some of the sharpest images, and can have larger apertures (for low light and shallow depth-of-field) than any zoom. The second is that they can be made cheaper--much cheaper. To put it in perspective, my wife enjoys photographing people (especially our son), and would love to own the Canon 24-70mm f/2.8 lens.

Canon 24-70mm f/2.8
That lens alone costs about $1,300. Guess how much our 50mm f/1.8 lens cost us? $90! And note the difference there in maximum aperture--the $90 50mm can let it in more light (1 1/3 stops) than the $1,300 24-70mm zoom! I'd also point out that our 50mm only weighs 4.6oz, while the 24-70mm weighs 2.7lbs. That's half-a-pound more than our camera body, and literally almost ten times as heavy as the 50mm lens. That zoom lens is a beast!

Canon 50mm f/1.8

The fixed-length of the lens may seem limiting, but it can actually have some benefits to your work. It forces you to work within a single perspective, and to move yourself around and see things from different angles in order to frame your shot. The limitation can actually help inspire creativity!

50mm, 5.0 sec at f/22, ISO 100
All-in-all, the 50mm f/1.8 lens is one of the greatest bargains in all of photography. You get an incredibly powerful creative tool at a very low price (that is, relative to the crazy expensive world of photography).

I should point out that Canon actually makes 3 different 50mm lens. Amazon currently sells the f/1.8 model for $98, the f/1.4 for $375, and the f/1.2 for a cool $1,500. One thing that you'll notice about the f/1.8 (and probably an important factor in its cost) is that the housing is made of plastic. It's noticeable and not very sexy, but the savings are worth it.

f/1.8

f/1.4

f/1.2

If you decide to buy a 50mm lens, you can use any of the Amazon links in this post to buy it and I'll get a little commission for it. Or you can go straight to Amazon just to spite me :). Either way, go buy one and let it inspire you!!!

Beginning Editing (A Review of Google's Picasa)

2009-11-06T11:00:00.000-08:00

I think a lot of people are afraid of editing their photos. It's so complicated and involved--there's way too much to learn!

I wanted to step back and take a very elementary look at editing, and try to convince you that the basics of editing are not hard at all, and definitely worth your time.

To do this, I want to show you how to use Google's free and amazing image organization and editing tool, Picasa. There's no fancy software or equipment required here, just a point-and-shoot digital camera and a free tool you can find on the web. You can download Picasa for the PC here or the Mac, here.

Managing Your Photos
Talking about managing photos has always seemed boring to me, but trust me, you'll appreciate what Picasa can do here.

Picasa is a superb tool for organizing your collection of photos. Some highlights are that it allows you to create 'virtual albums' which allow you to create a collection of photos without having them all live in the same directory on your computer. Also, it automatically creates backups of the originals of your photos so that you don't have to invent your own file naming scheme for maintaining original vs. edited copies of your files.

I want focus mainly on editing here, so to get you hyped about Picasa's many other cool features, I'll just point you to a video Google has created to show off Picasa, here.

On to Editing
When Jess and I first started managing our digital photos from trips we had taken and outings with our friends, probably 6 years ago now, we used a Windows tool called Microsoft Office Picture Manager. It had an 'auto-correct' button, and we'd go through all of our photos and auto-correct them. Usually the result was great, but if it was horrible we'd just undo it and move on.

Picasa has the same feature, but with a bit of a Google spin to it, as it's labeled the "I'm feeling lucky" button.

If you're someone who likes to take and share pictures (and of course you are), but doesn't want to learn a lot about editing, just hit this button. You'll be blown away by the results on many of your photos.

Here are a few before-and-after images that have been auto-corrected by Picasa. I honestly only had to hit one button. These are snapshots we took on a trip to Italy in 2005 with a 4 megapixel Olympus point-and-shoot, so nothing fancy here!

Before	After

Eventually you will come across some photos where the auto-correct seems to do more harm then good. I think the "I'm feeling lucky" button is often just the same as hitting both the "Auto Color" and "Auto Contrast" buttons that are right next to it. Typically if you feel like Picasa didn't auto-correct the image well it's because it didn't get the auto color right. Try just hitting Auto Contrast and leaving it at that.

Plunging Deeper
Ready for a little more control, eh? There's a few other simple corrections you can make.

1. Fill Light
On the basic tab, notice the "Fill Light" slider towards the bottom. This is a handy, seemingly magical tool that fixes a common problem with photos. When we take snapshots, we rarely put much effort into getting perfect, even lighting on the scene. Your eye adjusts to different lighting conditions easily, so you don't really notice when, because of the direction or source of light, your subject is actually much darker than everything around it. The result is that your subject looks too dark in the final photo. Fortunately, the fill light tool can help. Push the slider towards the right and you will see your subject lighten up, as if someone had placed a "fill light" on the ground in front of you to brighten your subject.

This picture was taken in front of the Trevi Fountain in Rome. The fountain's in full sun, but we're sitting in the shade. I auto-corrected the image then added some fill light so you could still make out our faces. Man, we look young there!

Before	After

2. Saturation
Go to the Effects page and click 'Saturation'. Most photos can benefit from a bit of a saturation boost, which will give the photo's colors some more punch.

Show some restraint, though! It's easy to get carried away with saturation and end up with some electric colors that don't look natural. Watch the areas of your photo that already have bright colors. If boosting the saturation causes you to lose a lot of detail in those areas, you're going too far.

3. Contrast
Picasa doesn't include a contrast slider, but if you look at the 'Tuning' page you'll see a 'Shadows' slider which allows you to darken the shadows and a 'Highlights' slider that allows you to brighten the highlights.Giving each of these a bump can add some extra contrast to your photo.

Before	After

A little bump to the shadows and highlights can add some nice contrast
Experiment on your own
Picasa has a lot of other neat features, but I don't want to overwhelm you. Just play with what you've seen here, and eventually you'll be comfortable enough to start exploring.

For those of you who are already fairly comfortable doing some basic editing, I wanted to point out a couple other tools in Picasa that I think are really neat. One is the 'Retouch' tool, which allows you to easily remove dust marks and blemishes. The other is the 'Sharpening' effect, which applies some sharpening to your photos and can really help your photos look more crisp. Both of these features are things you usually only get in more powerful editors that you have to pay for, so it's really cool that Picasa includes them. I should say, too, that Picasa implements them very well and they're very simple to use.

Conclusion
Picasa's tools for helping you organize and play with your photos are a good enough reason to use it alone, but it also makes editing your photos so easy that there's really no excuse for not doing it. So go download it and have some fun!

Photomatix

2009-11-03T22:30:00.000-08:00

This past Sunday was my birthday, hooray! My generous parents bought me a copy of Photomatix as a birthday present.

In a previous post, I explained the basics of HDR and played with a trial version of Photomatix which put watermarks all over the final images. Now I've got the real thing, though, and I'm ready to rock!

It's almost silly how much magic this software works.

I took this photo a couple months back in an effort to get back into photography. Even though the sky was amazing, I had a really tough time framing the fountain, the mission, and the sky. I came home that night really discouraged, but I'm glad I at least captured what I did!

Thinking back on it, what I really needed to do was to get further back so that the fountain would become a smaller part of the composition. The problem was, that fountain is right next to the street and there was a huge truck parked right behind me, so that was as far back as I was going to get. Maybe next time I'll reserve the space by parking in it :).

Thanks again, Mom and Dad, for the cool software!

Time-lapse Sunset

2009-11-02T15:30:00.000-08:00

I think I've mentioned before that the back of our house has a great view of the sunset. The house sits on a bit of a hill, so the back end is raised pretty high off the ground, and we have a relatively clear view out to the west. Whenever I see a great sunset in the making out our back door (and they seem to happen pretty often around here), I tend to bemoan the fact that I can't be out somewhere interesting shooting it.

I've found a bit of a solution to that, though. The view isn't quite spectacular enough to make a single photo workable, but I think making a time lapse video can add just enough interest to it to make it fun.

Time-lapse Sunset, October 24, 2009 from Chris McCormick on Vimeo.

Technically, this isn't the first time I've done this. I shot another one of these over a year ago, but never really finished pulling the video together. I've learned a lot from these two attempts, and I think there are some good things that I can do to improve it for next time around.

Here's what I did to create this.

Taking the pictures
The video is composed of 159 shots each taken 10 seconds apart.

To take the shots, I setup the camera on the tripod, and hooked it up to our laptop.

Our Canon 20D came with some software called "EOS Capture" for basically controlling the camera from the laptop (for my own reference, you launch the "EOS Viewer Utility", then find EOS capture in the menu). One of the features is a sort of "intervalometer" which allows you to program it to take a certain number of shots with a certain spacing. I set it up to to take 180 shots at 10 second intervals, giving me 30 minutes. The camera battery wasn't fully charged, though, and it stopped shooting after 159. It's a bummer--you can tell from the video that there was still plenty of color left in the sky when it stopped!

As for the camera settings, I left it on aperture priority mode with an fstop of f/5.6. The lighting obviously changes as the sun goes down, so you need to use one of the camera's auto-exposure modes so that it adjusts. I chose aperture priority because I wanted to make sure that the depth of field stayed constant the whole time.

One thing I forgot about, though, was the white balance. I left it on auto white balance, which probably accounts for some of the shifts in color between different frames. Ideally, I think you'd want to have the same white balance the whole time.

I almost always shoot in RAW format, and with RAW you can go back and set the white balance after the fact. This time, though, I shot JPEG thinking that would save me a step, since the video software would likely need JPEGs. Oops!

Next time, I think I'll leave it on auto white balance, but shoot in RAW, and then go back afterward to apply the same color temperature to all of the shots.

Editing the shots
Yet another opportunity for me to rave about the merits of Adobe's Lightroom. It makes batch editing incredibly easy. You just select one of the photos, perform all of the edits you want to make--color, cropping, and all of that--then just copy those changes to all of the other photos. You select the photo you edited, click "Copy settings...", choose which types of edits you want to copy, select all of the other photos, and click "Paste settings". And that's it, it batch edits all of your photos for you. Sweet!

Knowing that this wasn't going to be much of a masterpiece, I edited the photos pretty hastily. I boosted the contrast and saturation, played with curves a bit to add more contrast to the sky, and cropped it into a 16:9 aspect ratio for HD video.

Creating the video
I was able to pull together the video in iMovie. I haven't used iMovie before, so it took me a while to figure out how to set the spacing between the jpegs. A couple notes for my own reference:
- Once the jpegs are ready, import the photos into iPhoto first, then from iPhoto to iMovie. If you go straight to iMovie, the order of the photos gets mixed up
- Set the frame rate by selecting the images and clicking the 'Inspector' button. Go to "Clip" settings and set the duration of the images.

iMovie would only let me go as high as 10 frames per second, but videos typically run at 30fps. I found that there's a powerful UNIX-based command line tool called ffmpeg which you can use to create these videos. Next time around, if my shots are looking more promising, I think I might put the effort in to using that tool to get a smoother video. The speed of the cloud movement was pretty good, so to balance out the increased framerate, I would try taking the pictures 5 seconds apart instead of 10.

Jail House

2009-10-24T19:30:00.000-07:00

While I was out behind the Mission last weekend, I found that one of the stone ruins back there was this old jail house with no roof. It seemed like the perfect subject for a shot of the night sky.

18mm, 2 minutes at f/4.0 and ISO 800

There was some wind earlier this week that blew away all of the haze in Santa Barbara, so I jumped at the opportunity to try out this shot on a clear night.

A recent gift from my wife came in handy on this outing; she got me one of those huge 4 D-battery Maglites. It made it a little less terrifying tramping along the trail in the dark, and was really helpful for lighting up the jail house so that I could focus the lens on it.

The funny thing was, once I had crossed through the park, I realized the jail house was on the complete opposite side, and there was a road literally right behind it! Oh well, though; walking through the dark made it more exciting :)

To set this shot up, I mounted the camera on the tripod at its lowest setting, maybe 8 inches off the ground, and used the cable release. I had planned to get more of the building in the shot, but there was a big bush there blocking me from backing up anymore. The trees in the background also constrained the angle that I could shoot at if I wanted the sky in the picture, so this seemed like pretty much the only way to frame it.

It took 5 test exposures to get it right. At these shutter speeds, I was out there for a good 30 minutes just to get those 5 shots. For the final shot, I opened the lens wide at f/4.0, then set the shutter speed to 'bulb' and timed the exposure manually with a sports watch for 2 minutes.

I had done one earlier exposure at 4 minutes, but found that at that length the stars movement is pretty noticeable. "Star trails" are a pretty cool effect, but if you go that direction I think you kind of want to go all the way, so I stuck with 2 minutes and bumped the ISO instead.

I probably spent a couple hours playing with this photo to get the look right. I discovered that an important problem with taking photos of a starry sky is the camera's white balance. If you're not sure what white balance is, there's a superb article on the subject here. The problem was that the light on the building came from the headlights of passing cars, and the headlights have a much different color temperature than the light of the stars.


Camera auto-WB, 4450K	2900K

Because of the complexities here with the colors, it was tempting to just go with a monotone treatment and make this a black & white or maybe sepia image. The contrast between the cool sky and warm light on the stone was just too good to pass up, though.

There were two different approaches I could think of to resolving this white balance problem. One would be to bring the image into Photoshop, divide the building and sky into two layers, and adjust their white balance separately.

Another approach, which I decided to go with instead, was to use the Adjustment Brush in Lightroom to select just the sky.

Selecting the sky using the adjustment brush

I desaturated the sky (not completely, though) and applied a light blue color (I have to thank Jess again for helping choose just the right color of blue for this). This had the added benefit of cleaning up what I think must have been noise in the stars--the stars were all slightly different colors in the original.

I read an interesting tutorial on creating really dramatic star trails, here. I hope I get a chance to try it out!

Mid-Day Shooting

2009-10-18T08:57:00.001-07:00

Parenting sure is a wild ride! Just when you think you've adapted to life with them in it, they change and you have to adjust to a whole new set of challenges.

A few months ago Logan learned to crawl. He's easier in a lot of ways now--he doesn't cry as much, I don't feel like we change as many diapers, and he's getting funner to play with every day. BUT, he's mobile now, and requires a lot more supervision (almost constant). No more sitting him on the floor with some toys and turning your attention to something else.

It's much harder now to find free time to enjoy more 'stationary' types of relaxation like reading, editing photos, or writing blog posts. It would also be asking a lot more of Jess now for me to leave her with Logan and go out shooting. So things have been pretty quiet on the photography front for a few months now.

I was whining to Jess yesterday about how I really wanted to get back into it, but didn't know how to make it work; right now I'm really needed at home at sunrise and sunset to help get Logan up and to help put him down. But Jess raised an interesting question: can I really only shoot at sunrise or sunset? My first response was yes; the light and the adventure during those hours is a big part of what I love about photography. But, she made a good point, and I decided that for the sake of getting back into the hobby, I'd find ways to shoot during the day.

I spent some time on flickr looking for inspiration (click here for a practically endless slide show of 'interesting' photography posted to flickr in the last 7 days). Here's what I came up with.

You still want nice diffused light. You can find this anytime of the day if you look in shade from plants (the light is diffused by the trees) or light fabrics.
A cloudy day will also diffuse the light, though it means you can't count on a blue sky for your image.
You can take a relatively bland image, then play with different effects during processing to create something interesting.
You can work with the harsh light to create a high-contrast image with both very bright and very dark areas.

There's a beautiful home nearby that has this awesome "cottage in the woods" feel to it. I thought it'd be fun to snap a pic of it, good-light-be-damned, and then play with the image to enhance that fairly tale feel.

I just cropped the photo down and used a Lightroom preset called "Aged Photo" to achieve this.

Here's the un-cropped original. Cropping really helped me out here--I was having a tough time framing this photo and was feeling discouraged, but a little cropping and I think it turned out great! The white security camera sure is distracting, too, so I cloned that out.

I took this next photo on some trails behind the Santa Barbara mission.

My wife gets the credit for editing this one. She cropped it, took the shadows way down, and added a vignette.

Here's the original.

I'm glad I've found some ways to get back into photography; hopefully you'll start hearing more from me!

Sunset at Hendry's Beach

2009-07-30T23:00:00.000-07:00

50mm, 1.3 sec at f/22, ISO 200

Just a few days after I spent the morning at Butterfly beach (the subject of my last post), I noticed some beautiful clouds in the sky towards the evening, which could make for a great sunset.

I had obviously already put a lot of energy into photography that week, and felt like I might have had my fill of adventure. I checked the tides anyway, and they were a perfect height for the rocks at Hendry's Beach (about 3ft).

Our house is great for "monitoring" the sunset. Out the front windows we have a great view of the mountains, and you can see how the clouds are looking there. Out our back porch, you can see where the sun goes down, and how the clouds are looking over the ocean.

Still undecided, I kept running back and forth across the house checking the clouds every 5 minutes (this has pretty much become a daily habit). Finally, I couldn't take it anymore, so I got permission to leave my loving wife with the baby, grabbed my gear, and headed to the beach.

After I got back that night, I was convinced I would never pass up another sunset again.

50mm, 6.0 sec at f/22, ISO 100

I hadn't yet had a chance to look over and process my photos from Butterfly, so I hadn't learned all of the lessons from that shoot yet. I had learned, though, to make sure that in my photos the water actually went past the rocks. In a lot of my photos from Butterfly, the water didn't even reach the rocks.

I was a little more careful with my compositions this time around, but it was still pretty frantic. I'd look one way in the sky and say, "wow, look at that!", take a few pictures, then look behind me and say, "oh my gosh, look at that!"

50mm, 5.0 sec at f/22, ISO 100

Looking over the photos, there are definitely a good number that make me wonder what I was thinking when I took them--the compositions are so bad I must have just been trying to fire off shots to capture some cool bit of light in the clouds. But, there were clearly a few that turned out great.

Overall, it was an amazing sunset and I had a lot fun.

18mm, 15.0 sec at f/22, ISO 100

Some thoughts from this outing:

I came prepared with some shorts and rubber flip-flops; in most of these photos, the waves went up past my feet and left seaweed wrapped around the legs of the tripod.
I put polarizing filters on the lenses I used. I'm not sure how significant the polarizing effect is in the evening, but the filters protected the lenses and hopefully cut some of the light to allow for longer exposures.
In composing these seascapes, you have to consider the shape of the clouds! Capturing the colors and the movement of the water is one thing, but taking the shape of the clouds into account makes this tough. Most of the photos just captured a segment of the clouds and their color, but cut off the edges. It would be really great to capture more of the cloud formation and tie it in to the rest of the composition.

Jess and I are taking next week off and I'm sure we'll be doing a lot of photography, so hopefully there will be some exciting stuff coming up!

Butterfly Beach

2009-07-22T22:00:00.002-07:00

A few weeks ago, I got up at the lovely hour of 5 am and drove down to Butterfly Beach in Montecito to catch the sunrise.

I always check the tides online before going to the beach, and this was the lowest I had ever seen it. I was kind of afraid that when I got there the ocean would be gone and I would be able to see all the way to the bottom.

Sure enough, "the ocean was gone", and there were some beautiful rocks exposed down by the waves.

To smooth out the waves, I made the exposure as long as possible. I set the aperture to the lens' minimum of f/22, and I set the ISO to the minimum of 100. This got me up to a 5 second exposure. The above photo, though, was actually overexposed and taken with a 20 second exposure.

While photographing these rocks, I knew the scene had a big range from dark to light, so I decided to bracket my exposures in case I wanted to try blending the different exposures. I bracketed the shot at -2, 0, and +2 stops. As it turned out, the +2 stop image (20 second exposure) looked the best. The water in the 0 stop image (5 second exposure) was pretty smooth, but it didn't have the same eerie atmosphere that this one has.

Are you ready to see the before and after? Because I don't think you are... :)

Where'd the color come from, right? First, I brought the whole image down 1 stop in Lightroom because it all looked over-exposed. Then, I added a graduated filter over almost the whole image to bring down the sky by another two stops. This brought out the clouds which were hiding in there, but they were still pretty white-washed. So I added a blue tone to the filter, and that's where the color came from. I think it works well because, if you compare it to some other properly exposed photos from the morning, the sky color is actually a pretty close match, though maybe just a bit more surreal.

I also played some with the -2 stop image, since it captured the colors in the sunrise. It's probably not a serviceable image because of the obliterated foreground, but I liked the sky and the reflection too much not to share it.

The moon crept in there at the edge of the shot. The moon was blown away in the +2 image, but you can actually still see its reflection in the water if you look closely.

After editing the -2 stop exposure, I was stoked, because I was thinking that I'd just blend this image together with the +2 exposure and get the best of both worlds. I've read a few other photographers mention blending in different exposures to get the perfect "seascape" shot, so I figured I was golden. It didn't work out at all, though. That sky is just far too dark for how light the foreground is in the other one, and there was just no way to believably blend the two together. I'm really glad I tried the blue tone in the +2 image, otherwise I probably would have just given up on the whole shot.

This was my first attempt at using rocks as a foreground, so I definitely didn't have a clear idea of what I was doing. I pretty much spent the whole time running around experimenting--I wasn't focused on finding and composing a perfect shot. A few photos still turned out really cool, though, and I definitely learned a lot in the process.

I was amazed at how that 20 second exposure turned out, but the below photo is really more what I was envisioning that morning.

This photo was taken with a 1/2 second exposure, and I love the way it captured the movement in the water. The photo as a whole isn't too great, though. The wave on the horizon is distracting, and the original image was badly underexposed, so the final edit has a lot of noise in the foreground.

The next time I go out, I think I'll try taking more photos around this shutter speed. I should also be able to adjust the aperture and ISO to overexpose it a bit and bring out the foreground better.

One last photo from the morning before I leave you.

Thanks for stopping by!

Photo Editing

2009-07-08T21:00:00.000-07:00

A really important lesson about photo editing for me has been not to worry about it too much. Sure, if you spend more time tweaking the settings you might find a better look, but it's not worth it. This is especially true when you're still learning how to edit your photos, and don't feel confident with the tools.

The key is to remember that this is not the last photograph you'll ever take, and you're in the learning process. There will be other, better photos down the line, and you'll have more experience editing, so it will go quicker and you'll get better results.

If instead you put too much expectation on one photo, you'll stress yourself out trying to make it perfect. I find that if I spend too much time on a photo, I start to get less and less clear about what looks good and what doesn't. My instinct for the photo starts to fade. Worse, I get discouraged and may never finish it, which means all that effort was completely wasted.

Often I find myself looking at a photo that could benefit from some complicated edits. It's important to stop here, though, and ask yourself, is this photo worth the effort? Most often it's not. And if the photo isn't amazing, it's going to be all the harder to stay motivated as you pain-stakingly edit it. So if the photo isn't great to begin with, you should probably just move on.

The only exception to this that I'd make is that it's good to get practice, so if the photo is halfway decent, maybe it's worth going overboard on it just for the experience.

Laguna Beach

2009-07-03T21:45:00.000-07:00

For our four-year wedding anniversary, Jess and I left Logan with his grandma and went down to Laguna Beach for the weekend. We had a fun time overall, though we were pretty bummed that it was cloudy and drizzling all day Saturday.

The clouds did make for a great sunset, though.

I couldn't find anything interesting to put in the foreground for this shot, so I kind of gave up on the composition.

All of the best beach sunset photos seem to have a rock or some tide pools in the foreground. It makes sense--you need something in the foreground to give the photo depth, and what are you going to find on the beach except some rocks or maybe some driftwood?

Anyway, the colors were stunning enough that I thought I'd share the photo regardless.

There were also some interesting edits involved here. Check out the before and after.

When you expose for the sunset, the foreground is going to be too dark. Looking at some stunning beach sunset photos on flickr, you can tell that they always bring up the foreground.

Lightroom makes this really easy with its graduated filter tool. In the below screenshot, the filter is the three lines running across the horizon. In the pallete on the right, I can specify what adjustment(s) I want applied across this filter. For this shot, I increased the exposure by 1.33 stops to brighten both the beach and the waves.

You can also do this, of course, in Photoshop or the GIMP. Take a look at my Digital ND filter post for an example.

I boosted the contrast a bit, and brought up the darks as well.

For the saturation, I actually boosted just the oranges. I thought this added some nice punch to the sunset.

You can also do this with the saturation tool in Photoshop or the GIMP--they allow you to select which color you are adjusting.

Finally, I brought the image into Photoshop and did some sharpening and noise reduction. I'm still not very familiar with either of these two techniques, but I got a little help from a video tutorial I watched of another photographer showing what he typically does with his landscape photos.

The changes were very impressive. The best way to show you would be for you to be sitting next to me looking at the image in Photoshop, but I was able to zoom in on some parts and take some snapshots that I think show the effects pretty well.

The first image in each series is the original, the second adds the sharpening, and the third adds the noise reduction.

I sharpened using the "Unsharp mask" with a radius of .8 and an amount of 200 (the tutorial suggested a radius of .8 with an amount between 170-220). This made the waves look a lot better, it was really cool.

You can see in the sky, though, that it also added a lot of noise there. I then used the "Reduce noise" tool with a strength of 7 and "preserve details" set to 40%. I didn't really know what I was doing here; I hadn't found any good tutorials, so I just played around a bit. You can see, though, that this brought the sky pretty much back to where it was without affecting the waves much.

I'll be sure and share more about sharpening and noise reduction as I learn it!

Adobe Lightroom 2

2009-06-26T19:00:00.000-07:00

Lightroom is amazing.

Before purchasing Lightroom, I tried to learn what about it makes it so great. The answers I found were totally unsatisfying. Lightroom is generally described as a tool that "improves your whole workflow", from organizing to editing and publishing your photos. That's all true, but a statement like that doesn't tell you how it does any of those things.

After using it for a while, here's what I think makes it so amazing.

The main reason has got to be that it's actually designed for photography. As a result, it is far more intuitive to use than Photoshop, while still giving you most of the power of Photoshop.

The reason for this is that Photoshop is designed for more than just adding saturation and contrast. It's designed for photoshopping images. As someone described it on flickr, "You need Photoshop if you're going to paste in unicorns and rainbows"--you can't do that in Lightroom. Photoshop is for "compositing" images.

Lightroom also does some of the same things that you typically need Photoshop for, but with a much more intuitive interface. For example, one of the most important features of Photoshop over a simpler editor like Picasa is that it allows you to make adjustments to specific parts of an image. You can lighten someone's face, for example, or darken the background. You do this using layers and masks, and only Photoshop and the GIMP have support for layers and masks. While powerful, managing the layers and masks can be cumbersome, and it requires thinking of your image as a stack of layers, which isn't always intuitive.

Lightroom simplifies this with one of its coolest features, a tool called the adjustment brush. The adjustment brush allows you to literally paint an adjustment on to different parts of your image. This is a far more intuitive and manageable approach, and the interface they've created for it is brilliant. Take a look at this video tutorial on the brush, and I think you'll see why this is so exciting.

As for "improving your workflow", Lightroom has a very interesting approach to managing your photos that I really like. When you make adjustments to your photos in Lightroom, it does not actually make any changes to the original image. Instead, all of the adjustments you make to any of your photos are stored in a single database file. When you're ready to print or publish an image to the web, you export it and the adjustments are applied. This way, you don't end up with a bunch of copies of the same image--for example, the original image, your Photoshop or GIMP image which stores your edits, and the final image. Lightroom manages this for you, so you don't have to come up with some clever file naming and folder scheme to keep it all organized.

One of the greatest things you can say about Lightroom is that it costs less than half as much as Photoshop, and it may be all you need for Photography. With the power of the adjustment brush in Lightroom, there are far less things that you need Photoshop for. And if you ever do really need to do something in Photoshop, there's always the GIMP out there for free. I've also heard the argument that many of the features that you need Photoshop for, such as HDR, panorama stitching, and noise reduction, are done better by other smaller and cheaper pieces of independent software.

This video tutorial shows how Photoshop integrates with Lightroom, and in the process, he talks a bit about what you still use Photoshop for. The edit he does is pretty interesting--he uses the "warp" tool to basically slim down a model's hips. It's kind of scary to think that they can do that so easily!

If you're impressed by what you see of Lightroom, you should give it a try. Adobe offers a fully-functional 30-day trial of Lightroom on their website. Give it a spin and fall in love!

Exciting New Toys

2009-06-20T23:00:00.000-07:00

I'm afraid I've gone and done something that may make me less relatable.

For quite a while now, Jess and I have been using the desktop PC that we built for her in college six years ago. Because we built it ourselves, it's a bit of a Frankenstein, with different parts swapped out over the years. Anyway, it's time for a new one.

We wanted something with a more coherent look, so we were thinking about getting a Dell rather than building another PC. Jess was pushing for an iMac, though.

Here's how it broke down. The iMac is super compact, with no tower taking up floor space, and only one cord to plug in. It's also of course very elegant, which is really nice when you're doing artistic or design work--you want your "workspace" to inspire you.

Just weighing price and functionality, though, Macs don't make much sense. They are more expensive than an equivalent PC, while at the same they are less flexible, far more difficult and expensive to repair, and you can't carry components like the monitor forward to future computers. They also seem to be less efficient; compare the system requirements for a video game between a Mac and a PC--the Mac requires twice the horsepower.

In the end, though, I was won over by the elegance and form factor. Jess does a lot of design work, and we both do a lot of photography. We both wanted the work station to be gorgeous and exciting to work at, so we decided the price was worth it.

So we got the bottom-end 24" iMac. The main difference with the more expensive models seems to be the graphics card, which I've learned is not important for design work or photo editing. The most important factor is the amount of RAM, and all the iMacs come with 4GB.

We bought it refurbished, which cut $200 off the price and brought it down to $1299. The refurbished iMac is indistinguishable from the new one, the only drawback is you don't get the beautiful Apple packaging. I hear un-boxing a new Mac is something everyone should experience at least once.

The 24" screen is amazing. If you've used an editor like Photoshop, you know it covers your screen (and often the picture you're trying to work on) with a bunch of palettes. The wide screen is awesome because it affords plenty of room around the photo for all those sidebars.

So now I've estranged myself from my readers because I have a beautiful, fancy new computer that's inspiring to work at, and you're probably back where I was last month, editing on your 14" laptop. But wait, it gets worse.

Jess and I have made due without Photoshop for about four years now, since we started getting serious about photography. As Jess has started to do more design work and photography as well, we've gradually learned more about what we can do in Photoshop and the advantages it has over the GIMP. So... we decided to spring for it.

As you might imagine, I'm feeling mad with power at this point. The universe is pretty much mine to control. Who can stop me now that I wield Photoshop on a brand new iMac?

But have you looked at Photoshop CS4 on Amazon? It's a $700 program! It's an incredible tool, though, and if you know how to use it, it can be almost as crucial to your photography as your $1200 camera. So maybe that puts it more into perspective.

We've also heard people rant and rave about another Adobe program, which works in conjunction with Photoshop, called Adobe Lightroom 2. People will tell you this program revolutionizes photography, and we ended up throwing it in as well. I'm really excited to tell you about Lightroom, though I think it had better wait for another post.

So I feel that I've betrayed you all a bit. Up till now I've been, like many of us, relying on a smattering of free programs for editing, and jumping through hoops to accomplish things that can be done much more smoothly in Adobe's fine tools. Now, I'm sitting on some $2,500 worth of editing hardware and software, which makes more of what I do and share potentially inaccessible. I don't want that to be the case; it always frustrates me when other people share photography lessons with an attitude of "you're interested in photography, so of course you have Photoshop". Hopefully you won't find that here.

The reality is it's a lot to invest for someone still learning, and it makes sense to hold off on it for as long as you reasonably can. But don't let that stop you from taking great photos!

Santa Barbara Fair

2009-06-18T20:44:00.000-07:00

Back in April the Santa Barbara Fair was in town. I've seen a lot of cool photos of ferris wheels at night, so I was eager to go give it a try.

My family was also in town so we went and I brought my bag and tripod along. I was worried it would be pretty awkward walking around the fair with my camera bag and tripod, but you see, what I didn't realize, is that while I know that I'm just a floundering amature, no one at the fair knows that. In general people didn't seem to notice me, and if they did they probably just assumed I was super artsy and cool. I had a tripod and a shutter release, how could I not be?

A couple interesting things about shooting fairs at night.

I was happy to find that there's plenty of space around the rides to setup and photograph them. People are either in line, or walking through one of the main walkways, and there ends up being plenty of unused room for you to work in.

I was unhappy to find, though, that the lights on the rides are definitely not the only lights at a fair. The ferris wheel, in fact, was ruined by these big bright light poles surrounding and iluminating it. You couldn't take a shot of the wheel without getting one of those blinding white lights in it.

The photos were looking great on the back of the camera. Back on the computer, though, almost all of the photos were sadly out of focus (you can see this clearly in the first photo). I'm not sure what happened. My first thought was that I used too large of an aperture (f/3.5), resulting in too shallow of a depth of field. I probably should have tried a smaller aperture with a higher ISO to compensate; if nothing else, this would have given me more wiggle room in the focusing. The only problem with this theory, though, is that the above photo was taken at f/3.5 and came out just fine (it was the one exception). So it may have just been me failing to focus the lens properly, which is lame.

Better luck next time, I guess!

HDR Photography

2009-05-21T22:40:00.000-07:00

HDR stands for "High Dynamic Range". If you've spent some time looking at landscapes on Flickr, chances are you've come across some HDR photos, whether you realized it or not. Some are pretty overtly HDR, like the work of Stuck in Customs. Others are more subtle, and leave you wondering how on earth they managed to capture such stunning colors.

HDR is a technique which addresses the problem of a camera's limited dynamic range (refer back to this older post for an explanation of dynamic range). In an image with both very dark and very bright areas, the camera can't capture detail in both the dark and bright areas, it has to expose for one or the other.

To create an HDR image, you take multiple exposures of the same scene, each at a different exposure. Then, special HDR software combines the different exposures, pulling detail from each one. Finally, in a process called "tone mapping", the software compresses the dynamic range of the image so that it can be displayed on a screen (Not only do cameras have a limited dynamic range that they can capture, but screens have a limited range that they can display).

I'm still new to HDR, so I'm hesitant to explain in more detail until I understand it better myself. Here are some of my first experiments with the technique, though.

To take these three exposures, I used my camera's auto-bracketing feature to take exposures at -2, 0, and 2 stops. Since I'm just playing around, I made things simple and didn't use a tripod. Instead, I set the camera's drive to multi-shot, or whatever it's called. I framed the shot, then held the shutter release and it quickly fired off my three bracketed exposures before the camera moved too much.

There are two options for creating an HDR image. Photoshop includes an HDR tool, but the more popular program seems to be Photomatix. You can download a free, unlimited trial of Photomatix which places a watermark on your final image. This is perfect for playing around and learning the technique. If I decide later that some of the photos are worth having, I can plop down the $80 for the full version.

Here's the result from combining the above three exposures.

Pretty stunning for so little effort, eh?

The original images are all unedited, straight from the camera. And if you give Photomatix a try, I think you'll find that it's quite easy to use. You launch the program, press "Generate HDR Image", then select the exposures you want to combine. The initial image it shows looks pretty strange because it hasn't been tone mapped. The tone mapping screen gives you a handful of sliders and settings to play with. I think you'll find, though, that the settings aren't too overwhelming. You can reasonably just play around with them until you find what you like.

Stuck in Customs has a popular HDR tutorial at his website. There may be other better-written ones out there, though. I'll share what I find.

Here are some other HDR shots that I tried. This one was in the Alice Keck Park memorial gardens in downtown Santa Barbara (funny tidbit--Alice's last name was 'Park', so it's Alice Keck Park Park).

This is the Santa Barbara mission.

There was a small compositional trick I played in this Mission photo that I was proud of. The Mission actually has this big ugly asphalt parking lot in between it and the grass. By getting really low to the ground, I cut the parking lot out of the picture and added some foreground to the image (the grass).

The HDR technique seems to really exaggerate the dust on the lens in the photo of the mission. I need to look into that, I'm worried some of that dust may be on the camera sensor.

Anyway, I'm interested in learning and experimenting more with HDR, and I'm looking forward to sharing what I find!

Where'd you go?!?

2009-05-21T22:39:00.000-07:00

A little bit about what I've been up to, since I've apparently been MIA for quite a while.

Life's been busy, both with deadlines at work and with all the new joys and trials that our little baby has brought. I've been doing less photography, and I had begun to wonder if I might be losing my interest in it. I find, though, that I still jump at any opportunity to take an interesting photo (and whine a whole lot when I feel like I've missed one), so I'm convinced that I still love it as much as ever.

So rest assured that I haven't given up on our favorite hobby, and I'm still committed to sharing what I learn.

Fortunately, I think the subject matter of this blog is such that it doesn't have to be updated constantly for it to be interesting. I think I should have more time in the coming months, though, since we have less going on in the evenings during the summer.

Enough about schedules. Back to photography!

Meeting Another Photographer

2009-04-19T21:30:00.000-07:00

On Saturday, I got to talk with another photographer at a small party. He's my friend's sister's husband, and I knew that he was a fellow software engineer, so I'd have something in common to talk with him about. I ended up finding out, though, that he's an avid photographer and has taken some great pictures.

It's rather sad that this is the case, but this was the first time that I have actually had the opportunity to talk with an experienced photographer. He seemed willing to share, so I had fun picking his brain for a good hour. My wife was with me and joined in on the fun.

I thought I'd briefly share some of his pearls of wisdom.

On studying composition and the work of other photographers, he had some interesting insight. He actually advised against spending too much time on Flickr, saying that Flickr will "rot your brain". Why? Because the photographers you like may not really be that good, and you'll end up emulating their mistakes. Instead, he recommended studying the works of master photographers. Maybe that's a little harsh on Flickr, but I imagine you can't go wrong studying the work of really great photographers. By the way, I don't know who any of these legends are. I recognize Ansel Adams and Michael Kenna, and that's really it. Anyway, I'm planning a trip to the library sometime this week to pick up some books--I figure I'll just browse a bit and find someone who's work I like.

He had some interesting things to say about maximizing the dynamic range of your camera. I don't fully understand what he told me yet, but he gave me enough to do my own research. He explained that digital cameras store much more detail in the highlights of the image than the shadows, and that RAW images have more detail in them (they distinguish between more shades), which is lost when converting to JPEG. So he always shoots in RAW, and when he really needs as much dynamic range as he can get (his example was photographing bright, snow-capped mountains in Alaska with dark forests at their feet) he plays a trick where he over-exposes the image by a stop and brings it back down when he processes it. Once I've understood this better, I'll post about it again with some links to articles and what not.

It was great talking to him, and I think it's motivated me more to get out and meet some other photographers. Maybe I'll try joining a photography club eventually here.

Spring Time

2009-04-17T12:00:00.000-07:00

With my finger broken, and work and life feeling really busy, I haven't been going on any serious photo outings. I've mostly just been doing some photography reading, and looking forward to the day when I have the time and energy to plan out a fun shoot.

I have managed to snap a few pictures here and there, though.

A couple weeks ago, I went out at lunch for a walk along the bluffs in Isla Vista near UCSB. I brought my camera knowing that the conditions probably wouldn't be too great--I was out in the harsh midday sun, and it was a pretty hazy day--but it had been so long since I had photographed anything that I decided to go out anyway.

A couple thoughts on this shot. First, I worked way too hard for this composition. What you don't see in this photo is that in between that fence and the path is actually a four-foot-thick wall of bushes and shrubs. I was literally standing in a bush, holding branches out of the way to get this.

Something I'm learning, and this isn't a very profound insight, is that if you're uncomfortable when you're framing the shot, it's a lot harder to compose it well. One part of your brain is saying "I dunno... I'm not sure this composition is really doing it for me. I should keep looking," while the other part's saying "Just press the shutter release, dammit! I can't take anymore of this bent knee, twisted torso position, with one hand holding back a branch and the other trying to keep the camera steady." The second voice usually gets louder and eventually wins out.

I was thinking a tripod might be a partial solution to this, since it would allow me to take a break without losing the framing I was considering. It would slow things down, though, to be adjusting the tripod all the time.

I'm hoping the other solution is to simply get better at composition with practice, and be able to find a good one before my patience wears out.

The other point to make is that this photo really demonstrates why sunrise and sunset are much better times for these kinds of photos. The harsh light on the flowers and leaves really doesn't do the scene justice.

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I'm proud to say that the front of our little house is surrounded by a white picket fence, with rose bushes planted all around. My wife puts a ton of effort into pruning the bushes back throughout the year, but when spring finally comes, the bushes explode.

It's fun to watch people walk down the street and stop to smell them, then keep walking only to turn back and smell them some more.

A little technical tip I used on this second photo--on the front of your SLR near the base of the lens is a "Depth-of-field Preview" button. On our Canon 20D it's unlabeled, it's just a button near the lens base. Check your manual if you can't find it. This button stops down your aperture to the actual aperture you've set in your exposure settings. You'll notice when you do this the image gets darker, but more of the photo will be in focus.

Normally when you look through your viewfinder the lens is at maximum aperture in order to let in as much light as possible for you to see the image. This means that the image you see through the view finder is not exactly what you'll get, and depending on your aperture setting the viewfinder will usually have less in focus than the actual image you capture.

I don't hear this camera feature mentioned much, so it may be that professional photographers don't consider it that valuable. You're probably just expected to have a feel for the depth of field you're going to get at each aperture.

In this case, however, I took advantage of it to get the right level of blur on those palm trees in the background. At maximum aperture, they were so blurry they were indiscernible. At too small of an aperture, though, the background would have become more in-focus than I wanted and it would have distracted from the flower.

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My finger's pretty much healed now, and life seems to finally be slowing down a bit, so hopefully I'll be getting out for some more serious photography soon!

Other Blogs For Learning Photography

2009-04-03T22:00:00.000-07:00

It occurred to me recently that I would really enjoy reading some other blogs similar to my own. Specifically, blogs that go into detail about the process of creating the images.

So, I did a quick Google search for "learning photography blog", and after perusing the results and subsequently following some more links, I've found a few that I think I really like.

Art Wolfe's Blog

It only took a handful of posts for me to fall in love with this blog. According to his site, Art Wolfe is an experienced professional photographer with over 30 years of experience photographing "wildlife, landscapes, and native cultures". Take a look at the photos on his homepage. Wow.

It looks like he's hosted a number of photography television shows, and is currently doing a high-def one called "Travels to the Edge" that sounds like it'd be fun to watch.

A lot of his posts include nice videos. In this one, he provides a video explaining how he took one of his favorite photographs, and what he was thinking as he took it. He even shows you the "failed" exposures that lead up to his favorite one.

This post provides a quick but very cool Photoshop tip. I'd love to see more of these!

Digital Photography School

This site is a little overwhelming when you first visit it, but it becomes much more manageable if you simply view it by subscribing to it with an RSS reader (I use Google Reader).

It looks like a lot of the posts are actually articles submitted by different photographers. I found this one about taking outdoor portraits pretty informative.

I added a few more to my reader and I'll share them with you later if they turn out to be good reads.

The above two blogs are great because they provide great insight and advice from experienced photographers, but it would also be fun to read about someone's experiences more at my skill level. I imagine I'd feel a stronger sense of community with a photographer as equally amateur as myself. I'll have to keep looking!

Digital ND Filter

2009-03-26T18:00:00.000-07:00

Remember the post where we talked about dynamic range? Landscape photographs, and particularly photos of sunrises and sunsets, tend to have problems with the dynamic range of the scene. You have the bright sun and clouds in the background, but some darker details in the foreground, and your camera can't always capture both.

For simple compositions with bright sky on top and dark foreground on bottom, the traditional solution is to put a "graduated ND (Neutral Density) filter" on your camera lens. These filters are dark on top and clear on bottom, with a little gradient in the middle to smooth the transition. They let in less light on the top so that you can expose for the foreground without losing details in the sky.

The same effect can also be achieved using some Photoshop wizardry.

I took this photo in front of "Lake" Lagunita behind Stanford soon after we got our camera.

The sky and clouds are really stunning, but the foreground of the image is too dark for you to make out any details.

To apply the digital ND effect, I followed this great tutorial, written for the GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program), an open source alternative to Photoshop. The tutorial was well written and easy to follow, so I'm not going to re-write all of the details here. I think my post here should be helpful, though, in seeing the major steps and the overall effect.

I haven't thrown down the dough yet for Photoshop, so the GIMP is a good alternative in the meantime. If you don't have Photoshop, I highly recommend downloading the GIMP. It's interface is very similar to Photoshop, so any concepts or techniques you learn with the GIMP will translate easily to Photoshop down the line.

This effect takes advantage of the fundamental editing concept of layers and layer masks. I didn't have a good handle on these concepts until working on this image, but now they make perfect sense. I think this filter technique is a really good way to solidify your understanding of layers and layer masks.

Think of layers as a stack of transparent slides. The final image you see is what you would see if look down at the top of the stack. The idea is that each slide, or layer, will contribute something different to the final image. Separating it into layers means that you can make different adjustments to different parts of the image. You then apply layer masks to control the transparency of different parts of each layer. In other words, the layer masks let you specify which part of each layer will contribute to the final image.

Even if you don't go through the whole tutorial, I recommend reading through the section in the beginning "About Layers and Layer Masks". He explains it well and has some great images to demonstrate the concepts.

For this technique, we're going to duplicate the image so that we have two layers. We'll adjust one layer to make the ground look good, and the other layer to make the sky look good. We'll then apply a layer mask so that the sky layer only contributes its sky and the ground layer only contributes its ground.

I first created a layer for the ground and adjusted it to bring out the details in the foreground. To lighten the foreground, I adjusted the midpoint slider in the levels tool. The midpoint slider is a good way to lighten or darken an image because it does it without clipping off any parts of the histogram, which would cause you to lose detail.

You can see why the graduated filter is necessary here; lightening the image made the foreground look better, but it washed out the sky.

Next I selected the sky layer to punch up the clouds a bit. I used the midpoint slider in levels again.

This made the sky look even more stunning, but made the foreground even darker.

Note that in order to see the sky layer, I had to unclick the eye icon next to the Foreground layer. Currently the Foreground layer is completely opaque, so unless I hide it I can't see anything from the layer below it.

Now that I have my foreground looking how I want in the Foreground layer, and the sky looking how I want it in the Sky layer, it's time to combine them using a layer mask.

You right click on the layer to add a layer mask to it. Select the layer mask in the layers palette, then use the gradient tool to actually create the mask. You create the gradient by drawing a line on the image.

This mask modifies the top layer so that everything above the beginning (top) of the line will be 100% transparent, and everything below the end (bottom) of the line will be 100% opaque. The gradient will be along the line itself to create a smooth transition between the images in the two layers.

If you hide the bottom layer, you can see the effect of the mask clearly. The checkered areas represent transparent parts of the upper layer.

Once you make both layers visible, you have your combined image!

Here's the original again for comparison:

And that's it! If you're new to Photoshop, I think this is a really good beginning technique. It's helped me get a good grasp on the basics of working with layers, and made me much more confident working with the GIMP in general.

Ouch

2009-03-25T12:24:00.000-07:00

So a little bad news. Remember the wood chopping pic? Well, two weekends ago I set out to chop the last handful of logs in the pile, and on the first log, I missed the wedge and kind of squished my finger in between the sledge hammer's handle and the top of the wedge. It wasn't too terrible, but I did fracture it and it's been in a splint since then.

You know the finger you use to press your camera's shutter release? Yeah, it was that one (right index). So that's why I've been MIA for a while. The doctor said the splint should hopefully be off in a week or two, though.

I can't shoot anything, but I can still use a mouse! A broken finger tends to slow you down, so I haven't had as much time for photography stuff, but I have been sharpening my Photoshop skills a bit. I'll show you what I've been learning in my next post!

Goleta Beach

2009-03-10T14:00:00.001-07:00

A week ago Friday I went out for another early morning photoshoot, this time out at Goleta Beach. I wanted to actually capture the sunrise this time, so I got up at 5:30am to try and get there a little before 6:00 (the sunrise that morning was at 6:20).

This post has taken me a long time! I've spent a lot of time agonizing over the pictures I took. There were really only one or two that I was excited about and I put a lot of effort into trying to edit the other decent photos into something interesting.

I found it really challenging to take a good landscape shot of the sunrise. I've talked to BurnBlue a couple times through e-mail, and he's given me some good advice on landscapes. In all of his shots, he tries to have something in the foreground, midground, and background. With beach shots, the foreground is typically some interesting rocks, and the background is the sky. I'm less sure of what constitues the midground, but I'm guessing that's the ocean. I think this advice makes a lot of sense--without subjects on these different planes, the picture looks flat and doesn't draw you in.

Thinking back to the shots I took, I'm not sure what I could have used as a good foreground, so perhaps that was part of my problem. I think this was the most interesting landscape shot I took, and that's probably because it has some interesting things up front: the car and the tree's silhouette.

I've probably spent the most time playing with this photo--trying different things with the colors, trying different crops. I think the problem with it is that there's too much going on. In a way there are two photos here. There's a nice photo of a car looking out to sea, and there's a photo of a beatiful tree silhouette. Having both subjects seems like too much.

I did actually take a photo of just the car, but I think it's basically pointed the wrong direction--it's on the right looking into land rather than on the left looking out to sea.

I tried something new on this photo, I used the graduated tint effect in Picasa to punch up the blue in the sky. It took me a few tries to get something nice that I didn't later decide looked overdone.

The photo I was most excited about was this one of a water spigot on the pier. I loved the light and shadows on the rough metal, and I had fun trying to capture the water drop mid-flight.

Check out the detail on that drop!

I think I've learned a valuable lesson from my frustration this past week. My editing skills are limited, and I was taking some shots that weren't that great to begin with and then trying to salvage them by applying techniques that I haven't mastered. Really, I should have just picked the photos that excited me (in this case just the one), and been ok with letting the rest go. It was valuable to try and self-critique these other photos to learn what I could do better next time, but trying to edit them into something good was just discouraging and exhausting.

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There were a couple other fun stories from the weekend that I wanted to share.

After taking pictures at Goleta Beach, I went over to a friend's place to go jogging before work. He took me out along the coast to a part of Goleta I haven't really seen before. While we were out, we saw a whale a little ways off shore, blowing water and splashing around. We came across a couple researchers whose job it was to sit out on the bluffs from 9-5 everyday and monitor whale activity in the Santa Barbara Channel. They told us it was actually three grey whales out there mating (apparently it's not uncommon for two males to mate with a female)--I think they said it was around the peak of mating season. Sadly, I'm not in the habit of carrying my camera bag while jogging, so no pictures. Cool way to start the day, though!

The next day (Saturday), we went out to Santa Claus beach (perhaps it's so named to-highlight the irony of being able to go play at the beach on Christmas day?). While we were there, a handful of paragliders and one hangglider landed at the beach.

These crazy guys run off the mountains behind Santa Barbara with their chutes, float around for a while and eventually make their way down to land at the beach. I think the guy in these pictures actually botched his landing--he landed back in the shrubs between the train tracks and the beach. I'm assuming he didn't intend to do that because something about landing within thirty feet of a train with a big chute floating above you doesn't seem very safe.

My Journey So Far (Part I)

2009-03-09T22:20:00.000-07:00

Photography has been a hobby of mine for about three years now. Since I'm using this blog to chronicle my current adventures and lessons, I figured it would be good to dedicate a post to my past experiences with photography that lead up to this blog. I probably wouldn't remember a lot of the details, except that I have photographs to document them!

There have been a number of events and lessons that I would consider big milestones in my journey, so I've organized the post around those milestones.

My interest in photography began in 2005, soon after my wife and I got married. My wife is an artist and designer, and studied art in college. We had had some fun experiences doing art together in the past--we took basic art together in high school--and I thought it would be fun to find an art form that we could both do together. We decided on photography; I probably had some interest in it, and I imagine the technical side of it appealed to me as well.

Milestone 1: Buying our Canon 20D
My wife had taken a photography course, so we knew at least a little bit about photography, and we knew that we wanted to get a digital SLR camera. So we purchased our Canon 20D which I'm using today.

I remember how exciting it was taking pictures of anything with it. The images were so sharp! And the shallower depth-of-field (less of the photo in focus) that you can achieve with an SLR lens has a way of making everything look more artistic.

Milestone 2: Learning the basics of manual exposure
The quality of even the most boring images was enough to spur my interest. I read through the first few chapters of the book for Jess' photography course, and learned all about the basics of focal length, aperture, shutter speed, and ISO. I enjoy the technical side of things, so I ate this stuff right up.

I misunderstood the significance of shooting in manual, though. I had it in my head that you can't take artistic pictures shooting full-auto, and that exposing manually was going to make a huge difference in my photos. Shooting in manual is not the secret to great photos, however; it just provides you with some important tools to work with.

Other than allowing you to control the exposure, shooting in manual essentially gives you control over two artistic tools:

The "depth of field"--how much of the subject is in focus. This is controlled by the aperture.
How any moving objects (people, animals, flowing water--or even the whole frame if you're holding the camera in your less-than-steady hands) are going to appear, blurred or crisp. This is controlled by the shutter speed.

You'll often want control over the exposure or over these two things, and so you'll want to understand your camera's manual controls. But getting the right depth of field isn't enough to make a great photo--as I mentioned in my last post, there's so much more to it, and I hadn't learned any of that yet.

We went out on a number of outings to take photos around Palo Alto. I didn't have a great handle on composition, and I hadn't learned yet how to look for good light outside. I was also still figuring out the photo editing process, which can involve a lot of floundering about when you're not sure what you're doing. I only went out shooting five times over the course of the first five months that we had the camera, so clearly the results weren't inspiring me to shoot much. I think we also found that going out and shooting together doesn't really work for us; we're inspired by different subjects.

That summer we took a trip to Amalfi, Italy and we took a lot of photos. If you go somewhere beautiful enough and take enough pictures, you're bound to get a few good ones. Even so, I love these photos and they've helped motivate me to keep trying.

Milestone 3: Flickr
In 2006 we both finished college and decided we really wanted to move down to Southern California. The job search went pretty slow, and we were actually planning on just moving to San Diego and continuing the search from there, but at the last minute I accepted a job with Texas Instruments here in Santa Barbara.

I took these photos from the SB court house clock tower. The photo stitching tool in Photoshop made that panorama incredibly easy--I was blown away by how smart it was.

Around then I discovered Flickr. The site is really well designed for discovering interesting work from different artists, as well as for getting your work seen and critiqued by other budding photographers.

So what's so great about it?

Inspiration - There are some amazing photos on Flickr, and it's hard not to be inspired by them. And let's face it, photography can be really hard and full of disappointment. Whenever I feel like giving up, looking at some great work can remind me of the awesome potential, and I find the drive to keep shooting.

Getting seen - Having a place where you can share your work, and have some hope of it being seen and appreciated, is very motivating. Flickr provides a lot of ways to share (and discover) photos. You can submit your photos to pools of similar photos, you can look at the "photo streams" of the people who comment on photos you like, and you can look at the collections of photos which other people have marked as favorites.

I'm sure there are other great uses for Flickr, but those are the two that keep me coming back to it the most.

The other milestones, interestingly, have all occurred pretty recently. But I'll share those in the second part of this post!

Santa Barbara Harbor

2009-02-26T14:00:00.000-08:00

I've had some fun this morning!

My favorite type of photography has always been scenic and landscape photography--these are the photos that most inspire me to get out and shoot. There's an element of adventure to it that I really enjoy; getting outside in the early hours of the morning, waiting patiently for the light to be just right. It's something I've experienced only a few times, but the idea of it excites me.

Last night, I resolved to wake up early and go shoot something. I was excited, but I was also actually pretty nervous. I was sacrificing a good night's sleep for this--what if I got out there and didn't take a single worthwhile picture? If I go out there before sunrise, am I going to be able to see anything? What kinds of 'interesting' characters am I going to run into?

The sun rose at 6:30am, so I woke up at 6. That's probably not too early to a lot of you, but I typically go to bed between 11-12pm, and I need my eight hours to function. I had laid out my clothes and gear the night before, hoping to throw them on and head out. I ran into a few hiccups, though; I decided I needed some quick breakfast, and on my way out I got something in my eye / contact (my eyes are really dry in the morning) that had to be dealt with.

One of my intentions for this outing was to learn about the time around sunrise. When does it start getting light? If there are clouds, when are they lit up? When's the best light? I learned that at 6:00am, 30 minutes before sunrise, there's plenty of light outside for me to frame a shot with. I also learned as I headed out the door at 6:15 that the colors in the clouds happen just before sunrise... So I got to watch some gorgeous colors on my drive to the harbor, but they were about gone by the time I got there. That's ok, though, because not long after that, everything gets bathed in a beautiful warm light, and that's what I was really after this morning.

I'm calling this one "TIE Fighter" :)

Earlier this week I came across a great site full of good articles by a guy named Ken Rockwell. I particularly enjoyed his recent article on composition. This was my favorite part:

"In a nutshell, composition is all about balance. It's all about balance between light and dark, warm and cool, big and small, rhythm, pattern, line, curves, impact, negative space, texture and a lot more."

I've always understood composition as just the placement of objects and the lines and curves they form that lead your eye through the photo. But it's so much more than that! As he says, it's also about balancing the elements of the photo (I think another way to put that is that it's about contrast). What really excited me, too, was that I felt like I could recognize each of those elements of composition in his excellent photo at the top of the article. And hey, if I can recognize and appreciate them, I should be able to reproduce them!

I focused hard on these new elements of composition when I went out this morning. I especially tried to frame photos with both warm and cool tones, and to look for compositions with rhythm and pattern. Another point of advice Ken offered was not to let any lines "break the frame" (lead your eye out of it), and I think that helped me a lot.

This was my favorite of all of the shots.

Despite my efforts, I still ended up with a mixed bag of compositions ("mixed" being a generous term, as it implies half-and-half. Try one-in-ten). And some that I thought were really clever when I was shooting turned out to be garbage. I am proud to say, though, that there were a number of times where I framed a photo, thought hard about the composition, realized it was mediocre, and didn't press the button. That takes a lot of restraint! I bet one advantage to film photography is just that each shot is going to cost you x cents to process and print, so it better be worth it.

Ken also notes that a good way to test your composition is by looking at the thumbnail. If the thumbnail isn't interesting, then your composition's bad. I tried hard, but I failed to find a good composition for this whale tail bench.

There's actually a small sculpture right in front of it that's hard to keep out of the shot. I took a photo anyway, and the full-size image is pretty interesting because it's an interesting subject with good light. As a thumbnail, though, it becomes less enticing, and the problems with it become apparent.

The last thing I'll say about my outing was that when I got back, I was really disappointed with the images. The colors were very muddy, and the photos were not very sharp. With some editing, though, I was really pleased with the results. They were most in need of an increase in saturation.

I edited them in Picasa, and did the same handful of things, to varying degrees, that I did with the army jeep:
1. Crop
2. Auto-contrast
3. Saturation
4. Sharpen

Here's the before-and-after of the flags.

Saturday Morning

2009-02-22T09:00:00.000-08:00

This past week all of my "photography time" went to preparing that post on histograms and messing with a timelapse sunset video that I've been rather unsuccessful with. So by Friday night, I was really eager to just go out and shoot!

Saturday morning presented lots of fun photography opportunities.

We live in the downtown area of Santa Barbara, which means an itty-bitty house and a pretty busy street outside, but it's a lot of fun to be able to walk downtown or out somewhere to eat. One of our favorite places to hit up on the weekends is The Daily Grind, a coffee shop that serves some good food and superb pastries. Our favorite is the raspberry streusel.

I noticed this Porsche Cayman pull in to the parking lot, and it had kind of a strange license plate, "LKYCAR2".

Then Jess pointed out the license plate frame...

Pretty crazy!

The Daily Grind attracts a lot of very beautiful, earthy people (Santa Barbara's full of them)--people loaded with character that would be fun to photograph--but I'm not nearly bold enough to point my lens at a stranger. Any thoughts from people who take these kind of pictures?

The real photography highlight for me was this old army jeep that's usually parked around our block on the weekends. Most weekends its parked on a less interesting part of the street, usually under a tree with little light and between some other cars. I've been meaning to photograph it anyway, though, but today I had a special opportunity--it was parked across the street from our house, all on its own.

Whenever I spot something interesting to photograph, there's a strong urge to just put the camera to my face and snap a photo, without much thought for composition or anything. I call these photos "tourist shots" because they're the kind of photos most tourists take while documenting the places they're visiting. I ended up with a couple tourist shots of the jeep before I came to my senses :).

The sky was a boring grey and the jeep was parked in front of a big green bush, so there wasn't anything to provide a good contrasting background for just a "shot of the car", so I mostly photographed its details. Here are a couple of the whole jeep, though, so that you at least know what I'm photographing.

This jeep is covered in interesting details, so I took it as an opportunity to practice some composition. I tried pretty hard here to think through each shot and compose them carefully. It's tough, though; I think I get impatient and fire away even if I'm not totally sold on what I've framed.

After that, we did yard work for a couple hours. One of my favorite things in life is chopping wood. You take big round logs and split them into beautiful little wedges ready to be tossed on the fire. It also reminds me of the scene in the book / film Shane, where Shane and the boy's dad heroically hack away at the old stump that's blighting their farm. And it's just fun to swing a sledge hammer!

There was a tree that had to be cut down in our front yard, and I've gradually been splitting the logs.

I've kept you here a while, now, so I'll just say a few things about the photograhps.

They were all taken with our new Canon 50mm f/1.8 lens, which we're loving. I think it's very true that working with a fixed-length lens can do a lot to inspire creativity. It also produces noticably sharper images, and allows for a very shallow depth of the field which was key for some of these shots. Not to mention, at $90, it's cheaper than either of our zoom lenses!

I was a little "lazy" with the processing of these photos... I just used Picasa for all of them. Picasa is an awesome editor; it has some very powerful features presented very simply, and it's got a surprisingly complete set of tools. It also has a small enough set of tools that you can safely experiment with them without feeling overwhelmed. There have been a lot of times where I've spent a half hour messing with a picture in PhotoShop trying different things, and never feeling that great about any of them.

I pretty much applied the same set of effects to all of the photos.
1. Crop
2. Auto contrast
3. Increase saturation
4. Sharpen

I also adjusted the white balance on some of the photos--it was a cloudy day, giving everything a bit of a blue cast--so I adjusted the color temperature to warm it up a bit. It bothered my brain to see the photos looking warmer than I remember the subject being, but I think the photos look better for it.

Histograms and the Levels tool, Part I

2009-02-20T22:20:00.000-08:00

There have got to be a million tutorials out there on histograms and the levels tool, and I don't have any conceit of writing a better one (Check out the links at the bottom for some really stellar articles). But, half the reason I write this blog is because I learn things well by reading and taking notes, so this blog is really kind of a way for me to "take notes" on what I'm learning.

Before we talk about the levels tool, we have to talk about histograms. A photo's histogram shows the number of pixels at a given brightness. It represents the distribution of pixels in the photo from light to dark.

If the histogram is bunched towards the left the image is going to look dark. If the histogram is really slammed up against the left side, a lot of pixels in your photo are showing up as 100% black and you've lost detail in the image. This means the exposure is too dark for the camera sensor to distinguish details in the shadows.

Our dog Maeby was kind of enough to pose for some example photos. This photo I under-exposed by two stops.

In the same way, if the histogram is pushed to the right side, the image is going to be very bright. And if it's smashed against the right side, you've lost detail in your highlights (photographers would say that you've "blown" or "clipped" the highlights).

This next photo I over-exposed by two stops.

On automatic exposure, your camera's light meter will try to expose the photo such that there's a nice even distribution in the histogram.

This last photo was exposed according to the light meter.

You can view a photo's histogram in your image editing program, or it's actually available on the LCD display of your camera as well. On Canon cameras, if you press the info button a couple times it will cycle to a view that shows you both the image and the histogram.

This is a really great tool to have built into your camera! It let's you get a quick idea of what the exposure was like--whether it was improperly exposed, or whether your scene exceeds the dynamic range of your camera (take a shot from inside your house through a window and you'll run into this problem--too dark inside, too light outside).

The concept of the camera sensor losing detail in shadows and highlights refers to the camera's limited "dynamic range", the range that it can distinguish between dark and light areas in a frame. Dynamic range is another photography term you'll hear thrown around a lot, especially with regards to "High Dynamic Range" (HDR) photography, a fun subject for another post.

The Levels and Curves tools allow you to manipulate your photo's histogram in your image editor. In particular, the Levels tool allows you to stretch your histogram to increase contrast and extend the dynamic range of the photo. I'll cover the levels tool in part 2; I think that's enough for now!

Further Reading -- i.e., better articles ;)
Luminous Landscape
Cambridge In Colour

Bath Time

2009-02-12T23:00:00.000-08:00

People complain that the internet is full of too many pretty pictures of babies, flowers, and sunsets.

Well, I'm going to choose to be part of the problem here and not part of the solution.

My wife Jess and I just became parents last November when she gave birth to our son Logan. Logan has a pretty wild story--after looking at the ultrasound the doctor told us we were having a girl. My wife kept up a nice pregnancy blog about preparing for little "Kate". We didn't find out that he was a boy until the doctor caught him and handed him over to us. What a shock!

The story gets juicier, but I'll let Jess' blog tell you the rest. She started a new one once we had our little man; here's the first post of the new blog detailing the drama.

Back to the photography...

One of our favorite things now is getting the whole family into the bath together. Logan loves it, we love it, the lighting's beautiful, and it's just dying for some photographs.

Baby pictures are fun because you get to just blast away. I took about 60 photos, about 10 of which were garbage, and another 40 were good memories but not worth sharing. Out of the rest I tried to pick a few that were blog-worthy.

A few things I learned:

One, where the baby's looking is all-important. The problem with a lot of the photos was just that he was looking down and to the right (like he always seems to be doing). The photos looked best when he was looking at the camera or at Jess; I imagine they would have looked cute if he was looking upward, too, but he never seems to do that :).

Two, I need to learn to use the auto-focus better. Things were moving too quickly for me to focus manually (and I often seem to do a poor job of focusing manually anyway!), and I had trouble getting it to focus on what I wanted. One of my favorite shots from the batch (below) turned out to be out of focus :(. I had some success with centering the image on something, holding the button down to focus, and then framing the shot. Just being more deliberate with that technique may be the key. Anyway, I think this calls for another post all about focusing!

On to the photo editing. The photos responded well to some work.

First, the colors came out a lot stronger with a good increase in saturation. The saturation alone seemed to really brighten up the image.

After that, everyone looked really pink! This was the first time I've made use of the "Hue" slider; moving the hue to the right made his eyes brighter and his skin greener, balancing out some of that pink.

I also increased the contrast a little, but it didn't need much.

Finally, before posting the image to her blog, Jess did some of her own work on the photo in Picasa. Picasa has some impressive tools that seem to work magic. She removed the little blemish on his cheek in Picasa using the retouch tool, and added some fill light to further brighten the image.

The other photos took the same adjustments to different degrees. I never touched the levels or curves directly for these--the sliders seemed to produce the best results.

Monstro

2009-02-07T17:50:00.000-08:00

Let's hope you don't have a sensitive stomach, because this one's going to get a little creepy-crawly.

When Jess and I moved to Santa Barbara two years ago from the Bay Area, one of the biggest surprises was the size of the spiders here. They're thick little fellas!

This little beast showed up in our front yard last September.

I usually knock down their webs, but this guy was so big, and his web was so huge, that I decided to leave him there out of curiosity. And to take some photos of course.

I was pretty disappointed with the original images I got. The problem was he spent most of his time sitting still in a little ball, with his legs tucked in. In order to get him to extend those creepy legs, I had to shake up his web by tugging on one of the long threads anchoring his web to the ground, the house, and the nearby tree (there was at least five feet between his web and every thing around him. How do they do that?)

That got him moving and being a more interesting subject, but then I had a different problem. Now he was moving and his web was swaying, and the camera's auto-focus had a tough time keeping up. As a result, none of the images turned out quite as sharp as I would have liked. Also, I hadn't yet learned the lessons that I did from my post on close-up photography, so I was also pretty confused about how to best fill the frame with him with the lenses at hand.

I think I was able to salvage a couple of the better photos with some pretty simple Photoshop work, though.

Here's the original of the first image.

The original looks very flat and almost hazy, and it's painfully noticeable that the spider's out of focus.

I used curves to bump the contrast by giving it a bit of an 'S' curve, and that helped a lot. I lost detail on the spider's body, but I think that brings more attention to his legs, which are more in-focus, and his general silhouette.

I also played with the white balance using a color picker tool. I clicked on the spider's body and got the green cast to the photo which I really liked. I can't claim to know what I was doing there--I was playing around and got an interesting (but not over-the-top) effect. That almost never happens; messing around usually just leads to some interesting, but ultimately silly and unmeaningful effects. I think what I'm learning, though, is that playing with the white balance can be a good way to change the color and tone of your photos while keeping them realistic.

The second photo was a simpler transformation. Applying an 'S' in curves made the colors pop and the web show up with more contrast against the background. Here's the original.

In my past two posts now, I've mentioned the Photoshop tools "levels" and "curves" and haven't said a single thing about what they are, as if I expect that you should know all about them already. Nothing could be further from the truth, though; I'm still learning how to use them myself. I promise I'll come back in a later post to cover what I'm learning about these tools.

If you aren't familiar with them, though, finding some tutorials on them is a great place to start in learning how to improve your photos in Photoshop or any other advanced image editing program. The "contrast" and "brightness" sliders in simpler photo editors are really just levels and curves adjustments.

Night Palms

2009-02-05T22:44:00.000-08:00

A few nights ago there were some high, whispy clouds in the sky. There are these palm trees across the street from our house that I love and I'm always trying to get some interesting shots with them. The thin clouds seemed like the perfect opportunity.

Night time photographs have always inspired me. Early on I discovered the work of a local photographer in Santa Barbara who takes the most breath-taking long exposures at night.

I've been dying to reproduce one of these ever since. It doesn't have to be a great shot or even a good composition, just seeing those colors come out of a night time photo would be amazing!

Here's how my little photo shoot went. I took about 40 pictures over the course of an hour or so. The exposures were in the neighborhood of 10 seconds, so each one took a while. I used our 50mm f/1.8 lens; the large aperture really helped bring the exposure time down!

They were also all done on a tripod, so if I wanted a different angle I had to readjust the tripod mount.

Here's a photo of me on the end of the driveway to give you a visual. Pretty ridiculous photo of me if I may say so myself, but we have to make some sacrifices here to share the experience :).

I look a little geared-up here--I've got a tripod and I'm holding a remote switch for the camera. Don't be intimidated, though; the tripod was a gift and was probably no more than $20. It's flimsy and not too easy to adjust, but it's light and gets the job done. The remote switch (RS-80N3) was more of a splurge, it's about $50 on Amazon. You don't actually need it here, though...

A remote switch serves two purposes for long exposures:
1. Pressing the shutter release on the camera body will move the camera slightly.
2. To get longer than a 30 second exposure, you need to switch to "bulb" and hold down the shutter release for the length of the exposure.

To solve number 1 you can just switch your camera to timer mode, so it takes the picture a few seconds after you touch the camera body. For number 2, my exposures were only about 10 seconds, so the "bulb" exposure wasn't really necesary.

So back to the story. I was having a lot of fun and was really excited--the photos were looking so good on the back of the camera! When I came back inside, though, I found out I had been making a fatal flaw... Almost all of the photos were out of focus!

It was really dark out and I could hardly see the palm trees through the view finder, so no wonder! I got the focus close, but not close enough. Here's an example.

I did a little processing of both of these photos in the GIMP. The histograms were very bunched up towards the dark end; I guess the originals were probably underexposed. I moved the slider in to brighten them up. For the first photo, I also used Colors -> Auto -> White Balance. This made the blue a little richer.

As always, let me know if you have any thoughts or questions!

Minimum Focusing Distance

2009-01-25T07:51:00.000-08:00

Against the Colors
Originally uploaded by tropicaLiving

When you take a picture of something small, like a flower or an insect, you'll try to get as close as possible to the subject in order to make it fill the frame. But with most lenses, you'll run into a problem--when you're too close to the subject, you won't be able to get your camera lens to focus on it. The lens has a "minimum focusing distance", a minimum distance that you have to stand from the subject in order to properly focus on it.

In general, shorter focal length lenses will allow you to get closer to the subject.

The minimum focusing distance for a lens is printed on the barrel next to a little flower icon.

Here are the distances for our three current lenses.

Our Canon 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 zoom lens will focus as close as 11 inches.

Our Canon 50mm f/1.8 lens is a little farther out at 18 inches.

Our Canon 55-200mm f/4.5-5.6 zoom lens can't get any closer than 48 inches (4 feet).

Ok, great, but wait a second... A shorter focal length will allow me to stand closer, but what really matters is that I fill the frame, and a longer focal length will let me zoom in more! So which one's really better? Which one is going to allow me to get more of the subject in my frame?

I decided to do some tests. I would have loved to be more scientific and accurate about these, but then the post would never have gotten done. Maybe I'll revisit this some day when I understand the underlying mechanics better. I think the results are still pretty valuable and pretty conclusive, though.

We took a walk this morning up to the Santa Barbara mission. The mission has some beautiful rose gardens that I was hoping to use as my test subjects. Sadly, they're pruned down right now and there were no pretty flowers in sight!

Determined to get my tests done, though, I picked a piece of wood on the side of a bench with a chip in it and shot away.

The zoom lenses have only one minimum focusing distance written on them, so I've been wondering, does that mean that the distance doesn't change with the zoom, or does the value only apply when the lens is at its minimum focal length? I would have expected the latter, but the results surprised me.

Here's how I took the photos. For each lens, I'd turn the focus ring all the way to focus as close as possible, and then I would move the camera closer or farther away from the bench until it came into focus. Once it was in focus, I measured the distance from the wood to the camera body with a tape measure. I had planned to use a tripod, but it would have taken forever, and I don't think the measurements needed to be very accurate here to prove the point. Here's what I measured.

18-55mm zoom
Printed distance: 11"
Measured distance at 18mm: ~7.5"
Measured distance at 55mm: ~7.5"

50mm fixed
Printed distance: 18"
Measured distance at 50mm: ~15.5"

55-200mm zoom
Printed distance: 48"
Measured distance at 55mm: ~45"
Measured distance at 200mm: ~45"

So for a zoom lens, the amount of zoom doesn't affect the distance!

Now, distance aside, which setup allowed me to fill the frame with the subject the most? Here are the photos, from largest to smallest. These are all un-cropped so you can see the difference.

1. 18-55mm lens at 55mm

2. 55mm-200mm zoom lens at 200mm

3. 50mm lens

4. 18-55mm zoom lens at 18mm

5. 55-200mm zoom lens at 55mm

Those results are pretty surprising! With a 200mm zoom lens, I had to stand four feet from the bench, but I was still able to frame it tighter than with a 50mm lens only a foot away. So really, the zoom factor plays almost as large of a role in filling the frame as does the minimum focusing distance. I say "almost" because the 55mm zoom, with it's smaller focusing distance, took the number one spot, but just barely.

Of course, standing farther back with a larger zoom meant that camera shake was more of a problem. At a larger zoom, small movements of the camera are going to translate into bigger movements of the frame, so in that regard it's better to get as close as possible to the subject. It's interesting to know, though, that if you can't get close to a subject, you can still do well with a large zoom.

Before we finish here, I'm sure a lot of people would point out that I'm using the wrong equipment for photographing small objects. I can do pretty well with the standard equipment I have here, but for really small subjects there's a field of photography called "Macro Photography". Technically, a "macro" lens is one that makes the subject at least as large on the film or image sensor as it is in real life. So if you took a picture of a 3cm long cricket on some 35mm film with a 1:1 macro lens, you would have an image where the cricket filled almost the entire frame. Macro lenses are a subject for another post, I think.

So here are what I think are the highlights of what I've learned:
- Zoom does not affect the minimum focusing distance, so zoom in!
- Zoom fills the frame almost as well as being close to the image, so don't give up just because you can't get close. You'll just need a steady hand or a tripod.

Welcome!

2009-01-24T08:26:00.001-08:00

I've always promised myself that if I ever became a good photographer that I would share what I learned with others.

Here I'll go over techniques that I'm learning and experimenting with, post articles or videos or even sample work that I've found helpful, and detail any Photoshop work I do on more interesting photographs.

I post my favorite photographs to my flickr stream, here.

I've also started taking more photos for my auto repair blog, here.

Hope you find something helpful here!