Getting through airline security

I've realized that with all my discussion of what I was shooting in the southwest, I completely forgot the one thing that had me concerned in the time leading up to my trip- how to get my gear out there safely!

I started off with a hard side Hardigg case I got from my boss for pretty much nothing, but would I would need to make new inserts for (It looks like it once held a formula car transmission- clean, but the liner will not work for me).

The more I thought about it, the more I had issues. Originally, I was looking to ship my gear to myself at the hotel, because there is no way I was going to let airline baggage handlers anywhere near it. In talking to the shipping guy at work, the normal carriers' insurance rates are pretty high (something on the range of $5 USD/$100 value), and they have a cap which would not even come close to the total value of what I was bringing. They would only cover up to the retail value of my rentals- the D800 and the (beautiful) 14-24mm f2.8 lens I brought with me. Along with that, the case has no way for me to lock it, and is pretty damned big at 32.5' wide, 16" high, by 18" deep. Basically, two trains of thought were killed in one shot.

The next idea was to bring it as carry on luggage. One of the main reasons I was originally trying to avoid this was the idea of getting searched by our wonderful Transportation Safety Officers. But the more I thought about it, the more this seemed to be the way to go.

So I bit the bullet, and ordered a Pelican 1514 case (1510 case with foam dividers) and a matching lid organizer. I have another Pelican case I picked up for my speedlights and pocket wizard triggers, so I know the suckers are strong. I ended up having to drill a couple holes on the inside of the lid to mount the organizer, but I'll leave that for another time. As it turns out, I could fit almost everything I was bringing with me in it, with the exception of my tripod which I checked in my suitcase.

D800 and 14-24 f2.8 missing from photo

In the main case, I loaded both camera bodies (D300, D800), 85mm f1.4, 14-24 f2.8, memory cards, batteries, vertical viewfinder, battery grip for the D300, 50mm f1.8, 24mm f1.8, 80-200 f2.8, 100 f2.0 macro, and a couple expodiscs. The lid held a storm jacket (in case of inclement weather), Lee Filters Base Kit with mounting rings, Lee ND grad kits, tripod plates, compass, remote shutter trigger, and a couple other odds and ends.

My next concern was TSA. I should mention now that my experience was a good one, but you should still allow plenty of time just in case your trip doesn't go as smoothly as mine. I had heard about a few things that can hold up passage through security checkpoints, so I was reasonably well prepared, save for one minor hiccup.

I knew not to have anything that could be considered a weapon on my person, so I checked my pocket knife in my luggage. I also knew that I would need to remove my shoes at the checkpoint, so before I got there, I untied my shoes and tucked the laces into them so I wouldn't be tripping on them. Once I got through to the scanning area (I also forgot to remove my sunglasses at the stand where they check ID to boarding passes- no big deal), I grabbed a gray bin, put my shoes and jacket into it, took my laptop and iPad out of my shoulder bag, and stacked them on top of each other. This was the hiccup. A Transportation safety officer saw me do this, and came over grabbing two more bins and put my electronics in their own bins... my bad. While he was there, I told him what was in my carry on, since I was still expecting for them to search it. I passed through the metal detector, collected my gear, and continued on without any further delay. Awesome! The bugger was that I was then left with another 2.5 hrs to chill out at the airport. Plenty of time to go grab a beer.

On the way back out of Albuquerque, the experience was similar... didn't even tell the TSO about the contents of the case, and not a word was said. Again, these results may not be typical. As a matter of fact, before the trip, I was talking to a friend who works at TSA about the trip, and he's the one who told me to let them know what was in the case, and what to say when they wanted to open it- basically that it was expensive, delicate equipment, and that if they had any questions, please ask; and to let them know that I would be more than happy to re pack it. Primarily, DO NOT be argumentative of defensive. That would only make matters worse.

Some basic adjustments in Lightroom 4

In a previous post, I showed a before and after test shot of the canyon at Tent Rocks National Monument. The new tools in the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4 [LR4] develop module made the corrections incredibly easy.

In Lightroom 3.6, the basic panel looked like this:

These controls gave a great change to making adjustments to photos from Photoshop where several adjustment layers used to be needed for most corrections.

There are new tools in LR4:

This gives even greater control over the light and dark sections of a photograph, like the one I shot to test.

I shot the frame above to test both the tonal response of the new Nikon D800, and the recently released LR4. Due to the depth of the canyon, and the bright sunlight at mid afternoon, both the highlights and shadows are nearly completely blown out, as indicated by the histogram.

This shows that almost all of the tonality is at either end of the spectrum, with almost nothing in the middle.

The first thing I did was bring up the dark areas a bit with the shadows slider.

Which yielded this:

OK, I've gotten a lot of detail back in the bottom end, but the highlights are still too much, so I naturally went for the highlights slider.

Now we're getting somewhere... the details in the rock just right of center at the top of the frame are back. Unfortunately it brought down some of the detail in the shadows... so lets hit the blacks (clipping) slider...

Which gave me the end result:

To look at the histogram, the tonality is much closer to the middle of the range (OK, it's not dead center, but it's not clipped out anymore- and heck, it WAS really dark in there!)

Total time for the adjustments was about two minutes, and no layers were needed. I absolutely love Lightroom for how much easier post-processing has become.

Desert wildlife...

The other day, I was showing a friend some of my photos from my trip to the southwest and she asked me an unexpected question... "how did you find so much wildlife in the desert?"

The easy answer is that I was looking. The longer one is that I remembered something I was taught back when I was in the boy scouts- be quiet.

The general concept is easy- the more noise you make, the more the locals will hear and be scared off.

I did explain that it wasn't so much that the animals were coming up to me as they weren't necessarily running away.

Another benefit to being quiet is you're less likely to wake up creatures that you don't want to upset.

admittedly out of focus, but I had a compelling urge to not be there

On my first hike (actually, all hikes), I was carefully checking the pockets under and between boulders for snakes, and sure enough I found one. I quickly snapped a shot and moved away; since I was miles from any assistance, I didn't want to take a chance of being bitten.

These birds really do move like the cartoon. It's really funny to watch.

When I reached the turn-around point on the same hike, my memory card was nearing full when I saw a road runner. Since the trail out went right through the center of the "canyon," I figured I wouldn't see anything else but sagebrush, so decided to top off the card with a couple shots of the bird and head out. Just as I topped off the card, I was joking to myself, "where's Wile E.?" No sooner did I think that, and turn, then I saw a coyote not 40 yards away. Unfortunately, I couldn't get my card swapped out before he ran away.

My buddy LeRoi hanging out on a boulder.

The following day, I started on the west end of Petroglyph National Monument at the Volcanoes Day Use Area. I kept hearing rattlers in the distance, but didn't see any. What I did see was a lot of lizards, like the collared lizard above that was just hanging out in the sun. I decided to move sideways and kind of around him to get a better vantage point, in case heading straight for him might freak him out- I was originally directly in front of him. I popped off a couple shots, thanked him, and went on my way.

About half an hour later, I found this guy hanging out in the shadow side of one of the volcanoes hanging on the vertical face of a boulder.

Finally, much later that afternoon, this guy and several family members were all running around apparently trying to scrounge up some food. I couldn't believe how big they are. The guy above was likely a little over two feet tall.

Being from the east coast, I never would have imagined that there was so much diversified life in the desert.

Never believe the display on the back of the camera.

I'm still going through the photos from my trip.

Before I went out there, I had several ideas for what I wanted to try to shoot that I can't do at home. One of the main ideas was to try to get a nice star field shot. At home, since I'm in the middle of what William Gibson once called the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Area, it's difficult for me to get away from light pollution. If you see a night shot of the United States from orbit, the entire east coast is lit up. Once you combine that with the depth of the atmosphere and the general humidity, it's a really bad mix.

One day (actually it was the middle of the night) while I was out there, I was sitting at the desk in my hotel room, and decided to give it a shot. I pulled out my iPad and started up Sky Safari to see where the Milky Way was. I looked down at the compass that I had on the desk and got an idea, so I headed out to the Volcanos Day Use area of Petroglyph National Monument. The park closes at 7PM, but the gate closes at 5, so there's an outer parking lot to use if you're going to be there later. About 15 minutes before I got there, these clouds (truth be told, it could have been smoke from a wildfire in the SW corner of the state) started moving in. Since the park was closed, I was not going to go in, just stay in the parking lot, and try to get the Milky way trailing down onto one of the volcanoes. I popped off a couple shots, chimping the entire time, which I usually try not to do (chimping- def.: constantly looking at the LCD on your camera, saying ooh ooh ooh.). I was basically disappointed by what I saw, but know better than to believe it until the shots get loaded onto the computer and I can view them on a better display.

When I got home, I was pleasantly surprised.

On the back of the camera, the glow from the city was overwhelming. When I opened it up on my real display, I really did say ooooh. I'm glad I didn't delete it out of hand.

Home from New Mexico

I got back two weeks ago tomorrow, and am still going through my photos.

First, I have to say that the Nikon D800 is an amazing piece of tech, and I've decided that I need to save up to get one. I was actually debating on the D800e, until I got to look at the files when I got home... even just looking at the RAW files in Lightroom, it almost looks like I've over sharpened them; the resolution is that good. I'm almost thinking that the lack of the anti-aliasing filter would possibly be too much.

I do LOVE the built-in three axis level, which can be programmed to turn on with one of the two programmable soft buttons on the front of the body right near the lens mount that are reachable with your right hand. Also, the M-UP (formerly tripod mode) availability on the mode dial is incredibly useful. No more rooting through menus. The low light response is incredible, as is the tonal response through the entire range of the sensor. I read somewhere that it's pushing 14 EV (nearing that of slide film), and I tend to believe it...

Slot Canyon at Kasha-Katuwe as shot

Just as an experiment (for both the camera and Lightroom 4), I shot this on one of my hikes with the meter set for full matrix metering, trying to get the shadows and highlights to just about start clipping out because the scene was so extreme. I wanted to see if anything would be salvageable at the high and low ends of the exposure without having to resort to HDR. After some minor tweaking with some of the new controls in Lightroom's Develop Module, I got this:

Same frame after some minor adjustments.

I then started thinking about 13 years ago when I got my first digital camera, a Nikon E950, this kind of image recovery would have been nearly impossible; but then again, this camera has nearly 20 times the resolution of the E950.

A couple posts ago, I mentioned that I was debating which camera body/lens combination I wanted to use for the eclipse- either my D300 with my 300mm lens, or the rented D800 with my 80-200. I decided on the latter for a couple reasons. First, the lens is much higher quality. The second was that while the native crop factor of the D300 makes the lens effectively 1.5 times longer, with the D800 I could crop 50% of the frame away, and still have more data in the file.

2012 Annular Eclipse

The eclipse was definitely something to see, and I'm absolutely thrilled I decided to go. The Bugger is that I filled an 8GB memory card with just this at varying stages.

Horizon at full annularity.

The part that I found amazing about the eclipse was how much light was still available. The above two photos were taken within a minute of each other.

Due to where I was, the moon's shadow was still present on the sun at sunset.

The line across the bottom of the sun is the horizon, and you can just about make out the corner of one of the volcanoes in Petroglyph (the high points in the horizon shot above).

Hello again! Once again, I'll edit at a later date with photos.

After three full days in the high desert of New Mexico, i have some strong recommendations. Firstly, HYDRATE. Back home in the Philadelphia suburbs, I thought I drink a reasonable amount of water- 1.5-2 liters a day. I've discovered that's not enough. Keeping in mind I haven't just been wandering around town (yesterday was day one at Petroglyph National Monument), yesterday I put down over three liters, and this morning I'm still a little dehydrated. The air is so dry, a Philly boy like me tends to not notice that it's (1) a lot warmer than I think it is, and (2) that sweat is actually evaporating like it's supposed to, as opposed to clinging like it tends to in the humidity of the east coast. Also, I'm not sure if it's the altitude or what, but my legs are really taking a pounding. I thought That I'm in pretty good shape for what I'm doing, since my day job has me walking six miles a day, but my quads are jello.

If you're exerting yourself like I am, the obscene food portions you find in many restaurants is not necessarily a bad thing, as long as you watch what you're eating. I've been finding that the New Mexican places are not actually that bad for you... lots of beans, lean protein, veg, and of course, CHILE! They're not kidding when they say that the official state question is' "Red or Green." Chile sauce goes on everything. So far, I haven't come across anything too overwhelming, even for people who don't do chiles like I do. I'll get more into food later.

Breakfast burrito from the restaurant at the hotel (Sheraton Uptown Albuquerque).

Clothing: light weight, wicking, and if you go to a place that has clothes labelled with sun protection numbers, pay attention. I haven't seen any clouds worth mentioning, and with the thinner air up here, the sun can be brutal. Also, if you're planning in checking out the natural or ancient man-made wonders around here, solid footwear is a must! Running shoes/open-toed sandals will not cut it.

Really happy I brought the Zamberlans with me.

Watch out for snakes (rattlers), scorpions, et cetera. This is no joke. I saw my first wild rattler yesterday. Just keep an eye out for shadowed pockets under or between rocks, as this is where snakes love to hide out during the day. I was also staying clear of odd holes in the sand (usually an inch to inch and a half in diameter from what I saw) because I really didn't want to know what dug them, and I have to assume that anything that lives in this kind of environment is pretty angry by nature. Just the flies swarming around me by the end of yesterday's hike were acting like they hadn't seen water in years.

Ok, this one is admittedly out of focus, but I did not want to be there long.

Finally, make sure you know where you're going, or at least have GPS with updated maps. I tried to go to the Volcanoes Day use area of Petroglyph National Monument yesterday, and drove right past it, as it wasn't clearly marked [edit- and National Park Service maps leave a lot to be desired]. This left me driving further through the desert than I intended, and left me on the edges of a pert of town I had not yet been to. If not for GPS, it would have taken me A LOT longer to get back to home base. At this point, it's time for me to check out, time to go hiking.

Greetings from New Mexico!

I will be editing this and the next couple posts to include photos... My laptop has decided to stop functioning fully. This is the first time I've tried to post from my iPad, so we'll see how this goes.

As I mentioned before, this Philly boy has left the east coast for the first time in an embarrassingly long time for a photography trip. I spent a good portion of yesterday driving around Albuquerque trying to find a decent view for this evening's annular solar eclipse, and the latter portion of the day catching up with family that live out here.

When I got back to the hotel, I put in for a 3 AM (!!!) wakeup call, to try to get far enough out of town to shoot the particularly bright flyover of the International Space Station. That little trip was a total bust. All I can say is NEVER try to use unfamiliar equipment in total darkness. Due to the short duration of the flyover (roughly 6 minutes), there is very little time to correct any error in composition, exposure, etc. My problem (entirely my own fault) was that in the center of the Nikon MC-36 programmable shutter release cable/intervalometer is a four directional touchpad- think the digital pad on a game console controller- with a button in the center. In my rush to get the shot in total darkness, I didn't realize that the center button is not the shutter release button where I would have put it. It was awesome to watch, though. I'll have to make another attempt at that one at a later date, and also write about how to find out the details of when it will be visible.

This evening's shoot should be interesting. An annular eclipse is much like any other solar eclipse in that the earth's moon falls between the earth and the sun. This type is different from a total eclipse in that while the moon is centered over the sun, it is too far away from the earth to totally block it, leaving an annulus (ring) still visible. I've brought far too many toys with me, leaving a great debate. Do I go with my questionable quality Sigma 300mm lens on my D300, giving me an effective focal length of 450mm; or do I use my 80-200 on the rental D800 with its 36Mp, which will let me crop out a good portion of the field and still have a pretty good size file?

I should also mention that you should NEVER point your camera (much like your own eyes) directly at the sun with no filtration. After a couple hours online, I found a company in Arizona called Thousand Oaks Optical that manufactures astronomical filters of all kinds, including the screw on type needed for your camera.

On a totally separate note, I'm loving the food out here; and the official state question, "red or green." It seems that everything comes smothered in chile "sauce," being some concoction of chopped or pureed red or green chiles. I've even heard that you can get chile burgers at McDonald's, which I may have to check out. I've just discovered that for some reason (lack of flash?) that I can't upload photos using my iPad, so I'll have to post those later.

Once again, it's been WAY too long.

The day job's been keeping me more than busy, and I've been working on my first real vacation in an embarrassingly long time. Yes kids, an actual vacation.

I was originally thinking about heading to South Dakota and doing a photo tour of the Badlands NP area. Then, one day, a guy I went to High School with posted on Facebook about an upcoming solar eclipse. I did some poking around, and found out that Albuquerque NM is dead center in the path, right at sunset. I thought for about two seconds, and realized that this would be a great photo opportunity. Add to that the fact that I have family in ABQ that I've barely seen in longer than I'll admit to, and the decision was made.

I've spent the last couple months putting together things I think I'll need for the trip. Besides the fact that I'm pretty sure I didn't own any clothes I might need to be wearing in the high desert (we don't see any weather like that in the Philly 'burbs), I needed luggage, and some way to transport the photo gear, as well as some gear I didn't have.

After a couple hours of searching, I found a source for solar lens filters at thousand oaks optical. The eclipse is going to be an annular eclipse, meaning that the moon is going to be too far away to fully block the sun; so there is going to be a good portion of the outer ring of the sun still in full view. I definitely DO NOT want to point my camera at that, so I ordered a few filters to protect my sensor.

Since I've been shooting mostly landscapes lately, and I'm going to be in the desert, I decided to do something about the fact that my 24mm lens on my camera (Nikon D300) is not quite wide enough. I decided to rent a Nikon 14-24 f2.8 zoom from lensrentals.com. While I was thinking of that, the thought that THAT lens on my camera body was OK, but let's look at a body that it would really perform on. Originally, the thought was a D700, but then they got the brandy-new D800 in. I'm happy to say that I'll be writing a daily review of that. The only thing that's worrying me at this point is the idea of putting it back in the box and sending it back. (36Mp DSLR!?) From what I've seen so far, they've fixed several of my gripes about the last couple bodies in that range, But I'll get to that at a later date when it's been in my hands.

Let's put it all together

I should first start off with wishing everyone a happy holiday.

     In the last few posts, I've tried to explain what each of the three main parts of an exposure do individually and now I'll try to put them all together.

     It all comes down to controlling the amount of light entering into the camera. Say for instance it's a really bright sunny day, and you want to use a wide aperture to reduce your depth of focus. Your options would be to reduce your ISO setting number (I always shoot with the lowest number I can get away with), Or increase your shutter speed.

     In the above example, in the same light and same lens (Nikkor 85mm f1.4 D IF), I shot the image on the left with the aperture wide open to reduce the depth of focus, and got away with 1/50th of a second shutter speed. The image on the right was made with the aperture closed to the ideal minimum on my camera (I start to lose image quality smaller than f16), and the shutter speed reduced to 2.5 seconds- thank goodness for tripods, I never would have been able to hold the camera steady for that long. Due to the much smaller aperture, the image on the right is far more in focus from front to back, but due to the much longer shutter speed, it would have been the epitome of blurry because of camera shake if I had tried to hand hold it.

In this example, I was aiming for a clear image that was focused evenly from front to back, so I stayed with f16 on the same lens as before. At first glance, they're both reasonably decent shots. The first one, again, would have been impossible to hand hold at 2.5 seconds. I turned the ISO all the way up to 3200 and got a more respectable 1/10 of a second for the exposure, which still would have been tricky to hold, but not as much as before. The drawback to that is that with the ISO that high, I've introduced a good deal of noise to the image. If I were to hand hold it, I likely would have compromised a bit on the aperture (widen it a bit) to let more light in so that I could use a faster shutter speed.

ISO demistified.

     Most cameras these days have an adjustable ISO setting. The numbers relate directly back (like it was all that long ago) to the days of film, when the same numbers related to how quickly the film reacted to light. The lower the number, the slower the film was. Typically, slower films also gave much finer photographs. Most of the film typically found was rated at 100, 400, and 800; although there were many others available at higher end photography outlets (I actually still have a roll of Ilford 50 in the freezer I purchased for a shoot that never happened). The differences were both in the film carrier itself, as well as changes in the chemistry of the light sensitive layer. Back then, you had to have an idea of where you were going to be shooting, and load film accordingly. Bright, sunny day? load up a roll of 100. Family gathering at grandma's? Load up 400 (or sometimes 800, depending on how dark grandma's house is).

     Since you can always shoot at smaller apertures, or faster shutter speeds to reduce the amount of light getting to the film, you can always just have 800 in camera (or now, have it set for 800), right? There's the rub. Yes, technically you could, but there are a couple drawbacks. First off, decent high speed film got expensive. Second, due to the difference in chemistry, it was also much grainier. The following photo is actually a digital photograph that I ran through a graphic editing filter that does a particularly good job of simulating different films.

     The left half is simulating Kodak TMax 100 speed, which will be familiar to anyone who took a photography class. The right half is of Kodak TMax P3200, which was the fastest film you could typically find at the camera store. The difference could be used for the effect alone, I frequently did it myself on many occasions, depending on what I was shooting. Many times, though, the grainy effect would not benefit the final image.

     The same type of thing happens in current digital cameras, due to the fact that as you turn up the sensitivity of the sensor, you're trying to get the same amount of information from less input. An audio geek or musician would refer to the outcome by discussing signal to noise ratio. Unfortunately, the effect in digital cameras is less photogenic than in film. The next photo shows exactly the same image taken in my digital SLR at two different ISO settings... the left is at 200, which is the lowest native setting I have available; the right is at 3200, the highest setting.

At first glance, it's really not to bad (it was actually lit reasonably nicely, so there was plenty of information for the camera to process). If zoomed in, though, the noise becomes more prevalent.

     I feel compelled at this point to mention that I did no manipulation to the above photographs, other than zooming in on the chess board.

     This is one of the few occasions that having a higher end camera comes in handy. For the most part, as I'm sure I've mentioned before, a camera is a black box with a controllable hole in it. Higher end cameras, however, do have much better electronics. The above photos were taken with my Nikon D300, which is by all accounts a decent camera. If I could afford, say a D3S (I wish), the noise at ISO 3200 would be significantly reduced; but at three times the price of mine, I'll leave that one to the pros.

Shutter Speed is your friend

OK, It's been an obscenely LONG time since I've been able to actually sit and write anything. It's been a rough couple months.

Only slightly (in my experience) better understood than the effects of the aperture is the shutter speed. Using this is how you either freeze or blur motion, make the difference where you get a decent hand held shot over needing a tripod, or in some circumstances, actually get your camera's sensor to do some strange things.

I'll start with an amateur car race I photographed right around the time that I actually intended to write this post.

I have to admit that I broke one of my cardinal rules, and I think it's well worth mentioning here as a little side note: Always have a list of intended shots! Since I was photographing the race (at least partially) with this post in mind, I came up with a list of what I wanted to show, but didn't write it down. In the excitement of the day, which included running back to the hotel to change- shorts are not allowed track side, as it turns out; I forgot a couple. If  I'd had a written list, or at least a note on my cell, I would not have so easily missed them.

On with the examples... First, stopping action. Generally speaking, the faster your shutter speed, the less time will be allowed for your subject (or in some circumstances you) has to move during the shot. Easy, right?

In the first example, I cranked up my shutter speed a bit (1/1600th of a second), and got an otherwise decent frame of this car.

The trouble is that you can't tell that this car is actually in the middle of the race. The wheels aren't turning, the grass is clear, as is the corner worker's truck in the background. I might as well have shot it sitting still in the paddock.

For the next frame, as well as turning down the shutter speed, I used a technique called panning. I was attempting to swing my torso in the exact direction as the car, at the same angular speed, keeping the car in the same spot in the viewfinder. At first it sounds reasonably straight forward (I know I thought so anyway), but the more I thought about it, the trickier it became. I have to admit, the first few frames didn't work out so well, but after a couple attempts I started to get the hang of it.

This Corvette was taken at 1/200th of a second- quite a bit slower than the first one.This time, you can actually tell that the guy was actually moving.

To be filed under the photographer moving category, as well as under poor technique, the next frame (taken at 1/320th of a second) shows what happens when the photographer (me) is moving during the frame. To be honest, I can't quite tell if I was swaying too much, or just wasn't panning with the car properly- I haven't looked at it that closely yet.

You'll notice that the car is totally blurry. We all get shots like this, especially when starting out. Considering that I had never even seen a car race before, let alone photographed one, I'm surprised I didn't get a greater quantity of these. There is a reason that every photographer I know goes through every shot from the shoot, and picks out the best ones. Nobody (except for a couple wedding photogs I've seen- and they should learn this rule, too) shows the client everything.

Also in the category of subject and photographer moving is the next one. About a decade ago (in the days of film), I was doing a lot of work with local bands, usually in night clubs. It was a lot of fun, and I had the opportunity to learn how to work in some of the most difficult lighting conditions I could think of. Anyway, I was looking through some prints from back then, and came across this one. Clearly, Wayne and I were both moving (notice the movement in the microphone stand- that's me moving), and due to the nearly total lack of light, I had my shutter speed way to slow to hand hold, but I actually kind of like the nearly surreal way this came out. I likely set it aside back then because it's technically very bad, but have grown to like it in a way. This is why I don't delete (or toss) anything, except for the worst of the worst, even if nobody else sees them.

Deviation from the plan.

This was originally going to be the next part in the "exposure" series, which was actually mostly written. An opportunity has come up that will allow me to get (hopefully) some decent frames showing different things you can get varying your shutter speed. Unfortunately, that's going to be in a couple weeks.

In the meantime, I've been playing with my new-ish macro lens. At some point, I'm going to have to put something together about lens length, distance to subject, and depth of focus (how much of the frame is in focus, and how your distance from it and lens choice will affect it).

First evening playing with Ferro Fluid

The above photo was taken during my first evening playing with ferro fluid. It's a suspension of tiny magnetic particles (their size is measured in Ångstroms) in oil. If you've ever done the iron filings on paper over a magnet trick, this is very similar, except it works in three dimensions, following the flux lines of the magnetic field. I'll be playing with this more later.

from wandering around the back yard

The frame above was from the first day after I had gotten the macro lens, and just wandered around the back yard, trying to get a feel for it (the lens, not necessarily the yard).

Aperture

The first, and possibly the part of the trinity with the greatest effect on the final image is the lens aperture.

Each model lens has a different minimum and maximum size aperture, usually referred to by a decimal number, sometimes following a lower case f; like f2.8. The first image is a lens with an aperture adjustment ring, like I mentioned in my last post. The second is a newer lens built strictly for digital cameras, on which such manual controls are obsolete.

traditional, manual aperture control

new style, digital only lens

 

The number is referring to the size of the opening in the lens. It's actually inversely related to the length of the lens. In the case of my 85mm lens, the largest aperture is f1.4 so its diameter is 1/1.4 x 85, or 60.714 mm. None of this is necessary to know.

The size of the hole is controlled by a group of leaves that open and close based on the setting. The shape of the leaves can also affect the price of the lens- lower end lenses will typically have a straight profile, where higher end ones will sometimes have both more and curved leaves, creating a more circular aperture.

aperture wide open

same lens as above with its aperture at its minimum setting

Usually, more expensive lenses will also have larger maximum apertures (usually referred to as "faster," or “brighter”). This comes in handy for the ability to hand hold (not use a support like a tripod) a decent exposure without having to use a flash, and also the depth of focus, which I'll get to shortly.

Several years ago, I was doing a lot of work with local musicians, usually at live performances. At the time I was using a lens common to the off the shelf kits- a zoom telephoto lens with a maximum aperture of f4-5.6 (it varied based on how far I had zoomed in). The lens itself is decent; but with the extremely low light levels, it was difficult at best to get a decent exposure. When hand holding long exposures, you always run into a problem with you moving; and when photographing living subjects (people, pets, etc....), they will move as well. In contrast, I've done some similar work with newer, faster lenses recently, and found it much easier to get a decent shot due to the availability of more light.

Besides allowing for a shorter shutter speed, the size of the aperture also has a huge effect on the depth of space that's in focus. Don't worry, I'm not going to get into the physics behind this trick, I'll just give a couple examples.

In the image on the left (forgive me, but for a frame of reference, you'll be seeing this same series of shots several times), I shot the chessboard with the lens wide open, at f1.4. Notice the fact that most of the frame is progressively more out of focus, both toward and away from the camera, with just an extremely short section that's in focus- right at the knight's ear. The right image was taken with the same lens, except that the aperture was what I call "slammed shut," at the smallest setting, in his case f16. Much more of the frame is now in focus, including the back edges of the poorly assembled background.  The larger out of focus area comes in handy when you want to bring attention to only a small portion of the scene, but one has to be careful, because it's very easy to reduce the depth of focus too far, like in the second photo. I was focusing on the moth’s mouth area, but the front of the head is completely out of focus.

Another thing to keep in mind is that at the widest and smallest settings, even the "best" lenses on the market lose sharpness. One advantage they have is that the optics are almost always better, and a lens with a maximum aperture of 1.4 is natively going to be sharper at f4 than a lens with a max aperture of f4. Almost all lenses lose sharpness at their minimum and maximum settings.

Intro to photography 1

This will be the first installment in a series of posts intended to be an introduction to photography. I'll try to keep it as simple as possible, but being a geek by nature, I may go on a bit of a tangent here and there, so please bear with me. Also, I'm a Nikon guy, so most of the time, I'll likely using their terms.

Before I really get started, I have a quick note. I was recently asked by someone who is looking at getting their first digital SLR for recommendations on how to learn to use it. This was, not surprisingly, the final push for me to start writing these articles. My initial reaction was to say, "get out and use it." Since then, I've thought of another one. Read the manual. Don't expect to remember anywhere close to all of it, just get the basics of the controls, and know where to look for answers. I've had my current camera for a couple years now, and know the controls I use all the time like the back of my hand. Sometimes, though, I come across the need to use a feature that I've never used before, or one that I use so rarely, that I still have to look it up. That's OK. Modern cameras a so complicated, there are features that few people ever use.

On to the original point of this post...

A wise man once said that a camera is just a black box with a controllable hole in it. This is entirely true, and learning exactly what's going on when you change the controls opens up a whole new world of images. Most people never get past the "program" setting, which allows the camera's computer to make all the decisions. This is fine in some circumstances (I still use it on occasion), but the quality of the output is limited.

My intent in the next few (maybe several) posts is to help people get past this.

When I first started playing with cameras, once the film was loaded, there were two things in the camera that affected the exposure: aperture and shutter speed. With the advent of digital photography, a third thing was entered into the mix- ISO (film speed). Together, I'll refer to them as the trinity. I'll be explaining each of them individually later in separate posts.

Aperture refers to the size of the hole in the lens that lets light through to the sensor. If someone is discussing the details of an exposure, you'll see it as a decimal number: 3.8, 16, 5.6, etc. On lenses not made specifically made for digital cameras, there's a ring just in front of  where it mounts to the camera (not surprisingly called the lens mount) with the same numbers on it. This is where we used to adjust the aperture. There is some math you can do to figure out what the size of the hole is, and I'll touch on that later. For now, all that needs to be understood is that the smaller the number, the larger the hole in the lens, so more light will be reaching the sensor all at once.

The second part of the equation is the shutter speed. This refers to the amount of time the sensor is exposed to the light, usually refered to as a fraction, e.g. 1/250(th of a second)in the camera's viewfinder, it will likely be listed as a whole number with a quotation mark after it. This is an important thing to notice. When the viewfinder says 250, that's 1/250th of a second; when the viwfinder says 250", that's 250 seconds- huge difference. The longer the shutter speed, the more light will hit the sensor; it also means a greater amount of time that neither the photographer nor their subject can move without blurring.

Third is the ISO. This is actually a holdover from the days of film (which aren't actually dead yet); when we would have to think about what the light levels would be like where and when we would be shooting, and choose a film speed accordingly. The differences were in the chemistry of the film itself, up to and including the size of the light sensitive crystals. The lower the ISO number, the slower it reacts to light. Digital photography has made this a variable option.

There are a couple reasons that all of this is necessary to understand. First and foremost, digital sensors act the same way as film. If you send too much light at them all at once, your image will be either way too light, if not full white. Not enough light has the opposite effect, everything fades to black.

Now that I've thoroughly scared off anybody even slightly interested, I'm going to stop to allow for a reread. I swear I'll do my best to explain how all this works together.

It's been a strange few months.

I realized the other day that it's been a while since I've written anything.

Since my last post, I've gotten a new job. After eleven years, I decided I needed a change. I now have a better schedule (I'm not working until 1 AM anymore), and the people I work for are MUCH nicer. My blood pressure is still coming down, and I've now been there almost seven months.

Which leaves me wondering about a project I was working on. A former coworker was talking about holding some photography classes, and asked if there was anything I would like to do. I thought about doing a couple about the trinity of exposure-  aperture, shutter speed, and ISO; and even shot some example frames. Since I no longer work there, What do I do with them? I guess I can put it here.

How technology has changed.

A couple weeks ago, my manager at my day job gave me a stack of old photography magazines. I've still read only one, but it was really interesting.

Practical photography, October 1958 cover story was about, " Automation an eye-opening report on the future of photography".

An add for a pop-on rewind crank for your Leica M-3 made of "high grade 303 stainless steel" first caught my eye. I realize that in my day job, I deal with a lot of what some old-school machinists would consider exotic materials, but 303 is barely more than high-grade dirt, as far as that goes. It took me a while to remember that this was '58, and stainless steel as a whole was barely more than ten years old. I'd love to know what they would have thought of 440-460 series steels.

The part that I really found interesting was later on, with a bit about "what will your camera look like in 1970?"

Is it me, or does that thing look like most of the compact digital cameras on the market today?

To look at it section by section, and see how close they were:

Zoom type lens- I've never seen anything like this on a 1970's era compact camera, but by the eighties that had mostly been figured out, and today's compacts have an even wider zoom range. I was just looking at a review of the new Panasonic/Leica V-Lux 20, which has an equivalent of a 25-300mm zoom.

Parallax correcting viewfinder- not really available on a compact until the advent of newer digital compacts.

Ultrasharp color corrected... lens- never did quite happen. Ok, some of the new compacts come close, but you still get a significant depth of focus shift through the zoom range on most cameras.

Automatic exposure adjustment- Got straightened out by the eighties. SOLAR battery? Wow!

Acceptance angle of photocell- Once the shift was made to Through the Lens metering, this got MUCH better.

Electric drive motor- Again, not so much by '70, but... as far as automatic rewind of film, I know some cameras did this, but sometimes I found it a nuisance. I liked my first Nikon- I had to hit two buttons simultaneously to rewind the film.

Exposure button advancing film and re-cocking the shutter- pretty much followed the motor drive.

Drop in Loading- remember that god-awful APS film a couple years ago? I guess modern flash memory cards would also count.

Built-in ring flash- sounds like a good idea. I've never seen it.

Universal color balanced film- Never happened. With many of today's digital cameras, the automatic white balance setting does a reasonable job, but even my DSLR gets tripped up on occasion. I really don't see any way (chemically, or electronically) to get this right 100% of the time.

All in all, most of what they spoke about has come to pass, although not in the twelve year period they were thinking.

Something else about this issue: the letter from the editor was about how automation in photography would make [professional photographers] obsolete. This has not happened. I don't have any stats on this, but I would venture a guess that there are at least as many (if not more) cameras per capita now than ever, and a correspondingly obscene number of BAD photos being taken. Yes, there seem to be more "professionals" now, as well- also of varying grades. No, I do not yet consider myself a pro, although I think I'm getting there.

-J

Open Letter to an Asshat

This is completely off of my intent in having this blog, but I can't bring myself to set up another site just for this, so please forgive me. It's just that I've had ENOUGH.

I was sitting at my local pub last night when a guy who was a year ahead of me in high school walked in and sat down next to me. He then started (again) to gripe at me about how much his life sucks... he's going to be 39 next month, has no driver's license, blah blah blah. He has no DL because he was hanging out with his coke head friends (more on that in a second), got pulled over, and refused to take a Breathalyzer test. PA law has stated for at least 20 years that if you refuse the test, you accept the penalty for DUI. To be honest, I'm not sure if it's a "no contest" plea, or a "guilty" plea, but it doesn't really matter. The "I only had three drinks" excuse DOES NOT apply if you refuse the test. After that, he started getting into his good friend/neighbor who also has "the cops keeping an eye on him," who also just got out of jail... he was in for felony possession with intent to distribute....  basically, class 3 narcotics in a baggie. OK, say you do have a prescription for those, they need to be in a proper container with the prescribing doctor's name as well as yours. If you put them in a plastic bag, that's automatic packaging for distribution. Back to the first guy... after griping at me about how much his life sucks, he smiled and started telling me about "this girl who will do anything for pills." The fact that you hang out with a crowd where you could possibly meet someone like this isn't a clue as to why your life isn't going anywhere?

OK. I'm done with that. This morning, I was logged into [name withheld] social networking site, and saw a post that really got me going. This guy was bitching at his "friends" for not asking how he was after a car accident last night "at 130 mph." First, what in god's name are you doing driving at least twice the posted speed limit almost anywhere in the continental US, unless in a sanctioned racing event? Second, what would possess you to drive like that on wet (it was drizzling last night) roads? Third, how could you POSSIBLY expect sympathy?

Basically, I'm getting to the idea of accepting responsibility for one's own actions. I've done a lot of messed up stuff over the years. I've also gotten in trouble a couple times- both less frequently, and less severe than deserved most of the time. On the occasion I did get caught, though, I owned up to the fact that it was my fault, bad decision, etc. In the end, you bring it on yourself, and should not EVER blame someone else or look for sympathy.

I think I'm done now.

-J

Adobe Lens Profile Creator

I recently upgraded to Adobe Lightroom 3. For those who are unfamiliar with it, Lightroom is an amazing piece of software. I've found it to be a great help in keeping my photos organized, as well as make my post-processing MUCH easier to deal with. What used to take several layers and a lot of time, I can now get finished in a matter of seconds, especially when shooting camera raw.

Anyway, after the upgrade, I was poking around online for tutorials to learn how to use some of the new features, and found that Adobe had released something called the Lens Profile creator, which can be downloaded for free at http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/lensprofile_creator/. The program comes with a selection of PDF files which are black and white checkerboard patterns of different sizes (grid size and block size). Ideally, Adobe recommends (for a prime lens) at least nine different photos at each of three different distances at three different apertures each. Yes, this amounts to one heck of a lot of photos.

I decided to give it a whirl, because I've been using my wide angle lens a lot more than I used to lately, and much like most lenses of this type, there's a bit of vignetting (darkening) around the edges, and I really hate how straight lines get pulled, especially in the corners.

After a trip to Kinko's to have the largest grid printed (my printer can only handle up to 13" wide paper), I went into my studio space, and set up the first of the grids on a piece of foamcore (also from Kinko's) on an easel, and set up a pair of daylight balanced fluorescent bulbs equidistant from the board, and at 45 degrees to it. After about an hour, I downloaded everything to the computer and got started.

First off, if you're going to do this, one word of advice, WATCH YOUR EXPOSURE. because the grids are black and white, getting your camera's exposure meter to read everything correctly is tricky (it works on to try to get the mid point to match an 18% gray card. Since there's no tonal midpoint in these grids, it will likely get confused). Also, I had found some instructions somewhere that led me to believe that before you get started, you can make any normal raw adjustments before you import the photos into the program. Unrortunately, I found that if you're working in raw, for some reason, the profile creator WILL NOT look at the sidecar file. So after I got everything imported, and set up, I let the computer do its thing, for six hours! I think a lot of that time was because the exposures were a little less than optimal on a number of the photos.

one of the photos from the mid-distance group- notice that the lines aren't parallel to each other- this is normal with a wide angle lens.

So after all was said and done, I saved the lens profile, and got back to work. Here are a couple versions of the same photo from my Philadelphia trip, before and after applying the lens profile, with no other adjustments made:

Before

After

I love how the vignetting is gone, and now the lines are much straighter.

Photo Trip to Center City Philadelphia yesterday.

     Ok, so not exactly the brightest idea I've had in a while. Since I have the week off for the bi-annual plant shutdown, I decided to head downtown to work on some projects I've had in my head for a while. Unfortunately, I picked the hottest day in over a decade (official high 102 degrees).

     I started off the afternoon at the querilla skateboard park in South Philly, but there was nothing really going on (no great surprise,) so I headed up to center city. I had no idea how much they've done around the art museum. It's actually a really nice place to hang out.

     I wandered around the Waterworks/Boathouse Row for a while, a little before dusk, and then wandered a little bit down West River drive, figuring on shooting the obligatory Boathouse Row from across the river shot. I found a decent place about 45 minutes before it was going to get dark, so just hung out for a while watching the cars/cyclists/joggers (!?) go by. Thank goodness there was a breeze. I got a few decent shots in increasing degrees of dark, and then headed back toward the museum. Out the corner of my eye, toward the Waterworks, I kept seeing what seemed to me to be flashes of light, but I wasn't entirely sure. After working my way around to the north end of the 'Works complex, I set up my tripod for a 30 sec. exposure of the rest of the building. About halfway through, a very nice older gentleman showed up with his grandson, and his point-and shoot with the really annoying strobing orange redeye reducer and flash... totally buggered up my shot- thank goodness for digital. I also noticed that the flashes I had seen were people taking pictures of the building, and not turning off the flash. For anyone not familiar with it, The 'Works is a quite attractive Greek Revival building complex on the bank of the Schuylkill river, off the north side of the art museum (I will be posting photos soon- they're currently in post). The way the buildings are lit up at night offers a spectacular range of contrasts in shadows and shapes, which would be totally destroyed by camera flash.

I was asked a question the other day...

About midway through my shift, a coworker picked up a scientific calculator, and started asking me some math questions.... square root of 80 (didn't know off the top of my head, beyond 8.- something), what's pi (surprised I knew it to 5 decimal places), etc. I then threw a couple more in, like what are the sine/cosine of 45, etc. Another coworker chimed in with, "what's two plus two?"

Both the original coworker and I looked at her and said, "five."

Later in the evening, she asked me how that equation works. I tried, in vain, to explain that except in the cases of geometry and the straight arithmetic we were taught in elementary school, there are usually extenuating circumstances in the middle that tend to change the answer from what is expected. This reminded me of an old Sidney Harris cartoon from the New Yorker which has always been one of my favorites: