Here’s an interesting website that concerns itself with LEGO robots, mosaics and diagrams made of Flickr photos and other “krazy” stuff:
http://krazydad.com/blog/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/krazydad/sets/140323/
After about 600 shot images I noticed a couple of things that I had been handling wrongly in my photo workflow until now. The following is a detailed description of my solution to these problems, including code excerpts. I hope that this will be useful to some of my readers, be it for photo editing or other areas.
I have learned a new photography term: Bokeh (pronounced with equal stress on both syllables since it is Japanese and not French). It describes the quality with which a lense reproduces out-of-focus areas. I am excited that my new Nikon AF 50mm/1.8D lense, one of the sharpest and at the same time cheapest Nikon lenses, has a very beautiful bokeh. In this picture, this is best seen on the vibrant twigs of the trees in the background.
Quote from an interview with nature photographer Tony Sweet:
Tony [Sweet] tells his workshop students that they’ll know they’re getting better by the number of frames they’re shooting—and the number they’re keeping. “The better you are, the fewer frames you shoot,” he says. “When you come back from a vacation or a field trip with five thousand pictures, you’re not a photographer, you’re an editor. The better you get, the fewer pictures you come home with. Fewer frames, more keepers—that’s photography.”
More about and from Tony Sweet can be heard in the first Nikonians Podcast, which I highly recommend.
To illustrate 1 Timothy 3:15b (“[The] church of the living God, [which is] the pillar and ground of the truth”) for our church newsletter, I was told to take a picture of a bridge pillar. Though I don’t get anything for it, it was well worth the experience. The Augustus Bridge here in Dresden made the perfect motive. After making a couple of dissatisfying attempts in daylight, I remembered the beautiful evening lighting on Brühlsche Terrasse. With tripod and remote release, I was able to take a good picture with four seconds of exposure which rendered the evening sky nice and blue. The ubiquitous tram cables were removed later in Photoshop. (Clicking on the picture opens a larger version in new window)
Not just Nikon photographers should find one of the largest Nikon user websites, nikonians.org, interesting. It contains a huge amount of information, such as workshops, reviews, user forums and so on. I particularly like the podcasts, and of those especially the “Behind The Lens” series. These are interviews with professional photographers who have been awarded the “Legends Behind The Lens” title by Nikon and tell interesting anecdotes from their lives as photographers. I wish there were more of those interviews.
One of them (MP3) was done with sports photographer Dave Black who became a photographer after taking side roads and due to the encouragement of a university teacher (who was incidentally named Bob White). On his website, he writes two mmonthly columns where he comments on his current work including all the gear he used and so shares his experience:
Workshop at the Ranch On The Road
I also recommend the older entries which are linked to on the lower part of the pages. Interestingly, Dave Black is a Christian, which I found out when I read this quote and one of his articles:
No man is an island. I owe a debt I can never repay to God for granting me life, grace, mercy and wisdom, thank you.
As mentioned before, digital photos in RAW format enable you to change the white balance or color temperature after the fact. What does this actually mean? Well, every light source has a specific spectrum that affects the perception of colors which are exposed to this light source. In order to be able to describe this effect, a color temperature scale in degrees Kelvin was introduced. It corresponds to the color a so-called “black-body radiator” emits that is heated to this temperature. For example, daylight has a color temperature of 5,500 degrees Kelvin and incandescent light one of about 3,000 degrees Kelvin.
Photographers should ensure that their recording medium is appropriate for the current lighting in order to avoid color shifts. Formerly, one would have to buy different kinds of film and perhaps carry several cameras, although color filters could be used as well. Today, white balance can be adjusted on camera for each individual picture and changed again later. To give you a sense of the kinds of improvements this can yield, here is an example from the inside of the Frauenkirche which I captured two days ago:
Today I have two photographic topics again. OpenRAW is an initiative that lobbies for open documentation of so-called RAW file formats for digital photos. In a nutshell, RAW is different from other formats such as JPEG or TIFF which represent fully “developed” pictures, so to speak, and which can be processed only minimally after taking the picture. RAW files, on the other hand, merely store the “raw” image information seen by the camera sensor and allow for post-processing modification of all parameters which can be changed in the camera (and sometimes even more than those). For instance, this lets you change the so-called color temperature of the lighting without sacrificing image quality. Also, RAW files offer a higher dynamic range, that is, more tonal values, which equates to more headroom for brightness and contrast changes. Two examples (the left half of each image is uncorrected, the right half corrected):
This is why I now shoot exclusively in RAW. The problem with RAW is that there is no standard as with JPEG or TIFF. Every camera manufacturer has their own, sometimes partially secret format, which may even differ across camera models. In a sense, photographers lose their power over and ownership in their pictures since they are dependent on software from specific vendors in order to view and edit their images. In the long term, looking at several decades, this is a dangerous dependency and limitation. Classic negatives, slides and paper prints do have their advantages …
The following story made me think, completely transcending all those technical discussions we may have. Bill Biggart was a photo journalist who stepped into the events around the World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001. When the second tower crumbled, he lost his life in the rubble, but his camera was found and his last pictures survived. More about this on the good but sometimes shocking website digitaljournalist.org.
A couple of days ago, I noticed a so-called Hot Pixel on some of my pictures. This is a faulty pixel in the camera sensor. In the magnification you can cleary see that there is something wrong, especially in the blue channel (from left: RGB composite, Red, Blue, and Green channels). It is also obvious that the final image is produced by way of interpolation from the sensor data, which means that the color values of each sensor pixel are partially spread to the surrounding pixels. This is rooted in the way the commonly used Bayer sensor is constructed, which I will not explain here (see, for example, Wikipedia).
At any rate, this is not a big problem since there is a Nikon Service Center here in Dresden which can solve the problem by re-programming the camera’s firmware. The hot pixel is “put out,” so to speak, and the missing information will from then on be gathered from the surrounding pixels. It is perfectly normal for a brand new sensor to have dead pixels, they are just programmed out right there in the factory.
Amateurs worry about equipment. Professionals worry about money. Masters worry about light.
According to this quote I am still an amateur, since I still worried about my camera or, rather, my decision for the Nikon D50, despite my earlier blog entry on this topic which I wrote about a month ago. Until today.
Today I went to a big photo store and had another close look at the “competition,” the Canon EOS 350D (called Digital Rebel XT in the U.S.). I finally came to the conclusion that I had indeed made the right choice and that everything is fine the way it is. What a great feeling! No matter for which of the two you decide, you cannot really go wrong. However, I personally prefer the Nikon over the Canon in terms of handling, finish and usability, even though the Canon has a more complete feature set in some areas. In any case, above all of this one should not forget to take pictures once in a while … some of which I will show on this site in the future.
(Camera pictures based on material © 2005 dpreview.com)