M. Hampson Photography

Designing a Macro Bracket, pt.2

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 20:29:00 +0000

Continued from Part 1

I'm sort-of coming to the conclusion that it's not worth making the plate myself. There are several straight brackets, some with cold shoes (or even hot shoes, with a PC terminal) for under $10 on Amazon and eBay. I feel like they'd be a lot more secure than the pre-drilled metal braces I've been using, and lighter, for only a few dollars more. I'm still looking for a good inflexible plastic plate, though.

I'm looking at brackets like this: a cheap Opteka and this Nikon. They're designed for a compact camera to use as a plate. I'm guessing that this is the sort of thing I'll be able to get for cheap on eBay, from a Fotodiox or one of the Hong Kong distributors.

Having a shoe on a store-bought bracket is actually not a selling point for me. I don't want the flash to be fixed in one spot, and I've been using a mini-ballhead, with the flash mounted on a short TTL coil cord. I'd like to keep using that, although I don't have a TTL flash. For one thing, it's very adjustable. For another, the connection is much more secure than a PC sync cord, which slips out of the camera's terminal very easily. I'm also hoping to move up to a TTL flash this summer, but I'll post on that separately.

Designing a DIY macro bracket

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:39:00 +0000

I'm starting to think about my macro rig for 2010, now the weather's getting nice enough to go outside again. I have a good general idea of what I want to do for a bracket, given my budget constraints and what worked or didn't work last year.

If you're just thinking about a macro bracket for the first time, it's a pretty simple build. It's basically the part of the rig that connects everything: usually a long flat plate that screws into the camera's tripod mount, with some sort of mount for the speedlight on the other end. The value comes from getting the flash away from the lens axis, to add depth and texture to the subject. The trade-off you're trying to minimize is the added weight of an off-axis light, and the hand-shake and fatigue that it introduces.

Over the next few weeks I'll build the thing, but here are my general parameters that I'm starting from:

Ergonomics
It has to have good balance. This is key. Wrist and finger strain are the number one reasons I'll pack it in before I get the shots I want. I picked up a Zeikos battery grip, partly to get my pinky in on the action and partly to move the center of gravity closer to my hand. I think I might get a hand strap as well -- that actually would help a lot, since it would take a lot of work away from the fingers.

Even with good balance, it still has to be relatively lightweight. I think a plastic plate will work better than the stainless steel ones I've been using. I could also drill my own mounting holes very easily. The trick would be finding one that's strong and inflexible.

Another problem with the stainless steel plate is that they scratch the camera body. I've already covered the one from last year with black duct tape -- it looks pretty good.

The plate can't slip. The weight of the speedlight provides a lot of torque when it's moving, and it'll unscrew the plate from the camera and the flash mount. Part of my problem last year was using flat-head screws on plates with beveled mounting holes, or bevel-headed screws on flat mounting holes. This wasn't by choice: I was using pre-drilled plates from the hardware store and had to work with what they had. I tried to counter this with rubber grip tape, but that costs a few turns of the screw into the tripod mount -- again, insecure.

Utility
The bracket should hold the flash in a good position: about 10 o'clock or so. This hasn't been a big problem for me. The mount for the flash should be adjustable; I've been using a mini-ballhead, and may replace it with a cheap geared umbrella adapter for more stability and fine control. It would be nice if the distance from the camera could be adjusted, too, and I'll be thinking about that when I look at plates.

In a perfect world, the plate and flash mount would be so secure that I could shoot in portrait orientation without having anything slip or sag. The challenge here is that the weight of the flash will often turn the mounting screws counter-clockwise...

The rig should include a diffuser for the flash, basically a mini-softbox. I've just built a new one that I have high hopes for, out of a large yogurt container and some translucent vellum paper. This will get its own post once I've really seen how it works, but the key is getting a large apparent size for the light in a design that stays securely in the flash head. If I end up using an umbrella adapter, I may consider building something like a small umbrella.

The flash should be close enough and strong enough to use a low power level - ideally around 1/4 or 1/16 at ISO 100, f/8-f/14. This is to get a very fast flash pulse, which in macro lighting acts as the shutter speed -- the faster the flash, the better it freezes the image. With my 40D, I'm willing to go up to ISO 200, and in fact shot there all last summer.

Value
The DIY rig should be no more expensive than a store-bought solution, and it should be as reliable as one of equivalent cost.

It should be stable and sturdy enough that I won't need to tweak the design or replace parts over the summer.

The parts, especially the plate, should be made of easily available materials. I don't want to get something custom milled at ridiculous cost. Ideally something from the hardware store that I can cut or drill myself. But no false economy, either: I don't want to pay half-price for a half-assed solution.

Part 2: More thoughts on the plate.

WhiBal and color temperature

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 21:47:00 +0000

I picked up a WhiBal color balance card and, though I haven't had the chance to do any really critical (or even really interesting) photography the past few weeks, it's already given me great results with some easy, casual shots. White balance is one of those subtle things that's hard to get right, but really stands out when it's wrong. Fairly or not, when I'm looking a photographer's work, it's the first thing that gives me an impression of their technical skill.

The card is a small, neutral piece of plastic that you use to determine an accurate white balance, either with a custom white balance before shooting, or as a batch setting in post-production. It comes in several sizes; I got one about the size of a business card, because I do a lot of macro and wanted a smallish one, but for larger scenes Amazon carries a 3.5"x6" Studio size, and there's a wider variety directly from the manufacturer. It comes with a stand, a lanyard, and a thin, cheap-feeling case; they also make a really small one that attaches to your keychain. One nice aspect of the card is that the color comes from the material, not a printed surface, so any scratches won't affect its effectiveness. There's a sticker on one side that's used for setting white and black points in post, and it has an autofocus target as well.

The WhiBal looks like a typical Kodak gray card used for exposure (in that both are gray rectangles), but the two are used for different purposes. A gray card has a standard 18% reflectivity, so your camera's light meter gives you a consistent exposure with them. But they're not entirely neutral in color, and they aren't even the same color in different types of light -- so using a gray card for white balance will give you the wrong color temperature, and it won't even be a predictable amount of wrong in different situations. On the other hand, the WhiBal isn't 18% gray, and using it for exposure will be a bit off; I'm not sure by how much, or how consistently, but I'll bet you could experiment with exposure compensation to meter off the white and black sticker.

In a RAW workflow, you use the WhiBal by placing it in the scene you're shooting, adjust the angle so you don't see any glare on the stickers, and taking a shot of it. Then you go on shooting as normal. If the lighting conditions change, take another shot. Once you're in post-production, you can use the "click white balance" tool of your digital darkroom on the card, and then copy that setting across all the images in those lighting conditions. All the software I've used has a batch-copy tool to make this simple. It's supremely easy and consistent -- it takes about five seconds to shoot the card, and another five to set the entire shoot's white balance.

By the way, in case you're interested, I've measured the color temperature of my Vivitar 285HV flash as 5750 degrees, with a tint of -2 in LR. My 40D's on-camera flash measures 6400 degrees, with no tint adjustment.

The image of the robin above was balanced using the WhiBal card, and for the photography I do -- which is very nature and animal oriented -- it's a great example of the card's impact. Auto white balance was totally off. The Daylight setting I was shooting in was just slightly too warm, and like many images I've taken in the fall and winter, the dried leaves just looked subtly wrong. It's not terribly visible in the comparison image, but it's something that's bothered me for a long time, and I picked this specific image because the WhiBal's setting made the colors of the dead foliage feel "right" for the first time.

So the verdict is good. It's easy to use, tremendously helpful, and not terribly expensive, even for a low-budget photographer like myself. I wish I'd gotten one earlier.

Image straightening, DPP wishes, and kill Zoombrowser

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 17:41:00 +0000

The latest version of Canon's Digital Photo Professional software (v3.8) is due to be released soon, and it's bringing the ability to straighten images -- a feature whose absence has often added steps to my own workflow. It probably won't be as easy as Lightroom's straighten tool, where you basically just draw a line across the image and LR rotates the image until it's straight, but however they implement it will be a lot easier than moving the whole image into a second editor.

DPP is pretty handy. I wish the Edit Image and Main windows were better integrated, and until it lets you edit metadata it's going to be basically useless for most serious workflows, but it's not hard to use and the image quality is fantastic. There are a few things I would really, really like to see though.

First: Smarter sharpening tools. I don't mind if they're a bit slower than Lightroom's fantastic mask-based sharpening tool or a high-pass filter overlay in Photoshop, but they do need to give similar control. Right now the sharpening tool is a blunt instrument that beats your image softness into submission, instead of a subtle precision tool.

Second: Better batch tools. There's no easy way to copy individual settings across multiple images. You can copy and paste a 'recipe', as Canon calls it, from one to several, but you can't tell it what that recipe includes or excludes. I may want a consistent white balance across a whole shoot, but groups of photos with different exposure and sharpness needs. This should be an easy feature to add, so perhaps I'm just missing it.

Third: Ditch Zoombrowser and integrate metadata editing into DPP. That's the only thing ZB can do that DPP and EOS Utility can't. Zoombrowser might have a place for point-and-shoot users who aren't shooting RAW and just need basic editing and library tools, but there's really no need for it to be part of the EOS software suite, except for metadata. And honestly, given the alternatives out there, Zoombrowser looks and feels like legacy junkware: iPhoto, Picasa, and the built-in Windows media tools, all handle basic adjustments, library organization, and metadata better than ZB does. If it's easier for me to deal with keywording after I've uploaded my images than it is to use the bundled software that handles keywording, then there's something wrong with the bundled software. DPP should have a metadata tab in the Edit Image window, and it should be easy to batch edit multiple images.

(I know that one was a bit of a sidetrack, but as long as Canon thinks of Zoombrowser as a useful part of the EOS software suite, DPP's not going to get decent metadata tools.)

My last and biggest wish for DPP is smart noise reduction. I'm actually really happy with the NR tools in general, but there's an opportunity here for Canon to make them even easier and faster. Here's my thinking: Canon knows how my 40D's sensor generates noise in response to ISO and exposure adjustments. It knows how that's different from the sensor in a 1D or 1000D. What I want DPP to do is look at those factors in each RAW image and figure out how much luminance and chrominance noise reduction to apply. Give us defaults to tell it what baseline to go for, like "light", "average", or "heavy", and then DPP can set the NR sliders for us. It would take some cleverness to add this feature, but the hard part -- understanding the sensors and the RAW data -- is already done. It'd be taking advantage of Canon's main strength in the post-processing arena, which is why you'd use DPP in the first place.

I don't honestly need DPP to connect to online services or handle other post-export file handling, though I wouldn't necessarily mind it as long as my other wishes come true first. I don't really need brush adjustments either. There are things that Lightroom and Aperture will always do better than DPP, and for the price I don't mind going over to GiMP or some other third-party program to do them. The fine line, for me, is where the third-party programs sit in the workflow. If I'm moving an image to GiMP, I don't want to spend more time waiting for it to open than I spend actually doing whatever it is I need to do. So picking out dust spots is fine, but sharpening is not.

Portfolio

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 17:40:00 +0000

Smugmug added a new feature this week that it's calling Smart Galleries, essentially a way to place virtual copies of an image into more than one gallery. It's something like Flickr's sets and galleries in one.

Anyway, I've made a "best of" gallery as a portfolio for my nature photography, so when I point someone to my website, I can give them a single link that shows off what I'm most proud of.

Check it out here!

Back-button Autofocus

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 01:07:00 +0000

If you're shooting with a camera that supports it, look into using back-button autofocus, which separates the autofocus system from the shutter button. Then, the shutter button starts and locks the light meter, and the AF button, pressed with your thumb, starts the autofocus magic.

Mid-range and pro Canon DSLRs will often have a dedicated button for this ("AF-ON"); the Rebels can use the AE-Lock ("*") button for it. They all have a custom function that can let you select, basically, which of all these buttons do what -- there are actually several ways to map different functions to these buttons besides the one I'm talking about here, one of which might be even more perfect for your work style. I can't speak to Nikons from personal experience but I know they have this ability, and I assume other brands do as well -- my EOS A2 can do this, so it's not a new idea.

It takes a little bit of effort to retrain your thumb and forefinger, but not much. And for a lot of photographers, it's worth it. If you think about it, having one button control the focus, the light meter, and the shutter all at the same time doesn't make a lot of sense to begin with. A lot of times, the subject of your image is going to need be in focus and exposed properly, sure -- but that's no harder with back-button AF, whereas photos where that's not the case are going to be much harder to manage without it.

Imagine trying to shoot a person against a bright, colorful sunset with fluffy clouds, and mackerel sky. You're visualizing a mid-distance portrait with her silhouetted against the background, so you switch over to partial metering, because you don't want the light meter to find some ugly middle ground by looking at everything: this scene is about contrast and color. So in aperture-priority mode* for shallow DoF, you meter off of the sky to bring her exposure down by two stops, full black, and AE-Lock it. Then you autofocus on the person, but the light meter wakes up again: your shutter speed drops to bring her exposure up higher than you want, the sky gets overexposed, and everything is either noisy or blown out. With back-button AF focus, you could have held the exposure with the shutter button, then focused with your thumb, without the light meter knowing or caring.

*Shooting in manual mode would also avoid this sort of problem, except of course that the light is fading fast in this hypothetical situation, and somebody's got to keep an eye on the light meter, whether it's you or the camera.

Another situation where this comes in useful is when you're shooting in low but shifting light, where the AF drive has to work hard to find its subject in the first place. Imagine shooting a street corner on a cloudy day, with the street signs in focus and readable, and moving cars and pedestrians around it. You get the street sign in focus easily enough, but clicking the shutter button will send the AF hunting back and forth for whatever it thinks you want.

Sure, you can switch the lens AF off, but that's is a workaround, and it's easy enough to miss a shot because you forgot to switch it back on again. Back-button AF means you don't have to think about working around slightly complicated, everyday focus/metering issues like this because they just don't come up. It's no harder than having the shutter button do all the work, and in many cases it's just a lot easier.

2:1 magnification

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 15:40:00 +0000

I picked up a set of super inexpensive Pro Optic Extension Tubes. They feel pretty cheap and I doubt they'll last for years and years, but they come with electrical connections at half the price of the Opteka, a third the price of the Kenko, and a hell of a lot cheaper than Canon's. If I could afford the Kenko tubes, I'd probably have gone with them, since they'll last a lot longer, but as long as they keep the lens on the camera and pass through information to stop down the aperture, extension tubes don't need to be fancy. There's no glass in them: they work by moving the lens farther from the sensor, so it projects a larger image. It's a lot like a film or slide projector, where the farther it is from the wall, the larger the picture. But dimmer too: you have a fixed amount of light making up the image, and the larger that image, the 'thinner' it's going to be.

We're covered in snow and slush here in Boston, so my macro expeditions have been limited to the far corners of the kitchen, where I found the exotic Chlorophytum comosum: the spider plant. With the 100mm f/2.8 USM macro lens, the full set of tubes gives about 2:1 magnification. At this point, you really need buckets of light in order to get an aperture with a reasonable depth of field: my flash was set to 1/4 power and was only a few inches away. Unlike bugs, spider plants don't run away from the camera, so I used a tripod to make these a bit easier.

Shooting manual

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 15:41:00 +0000

Shooting with the camera in manual mode is probably the most intimidating skill to new photographers. It's not that it's particularly hard, and there are definitely more complicated skills to grasp, but it's one of the most visible challenges when you first pick up a camera: how do I use the M on the dial? It's a sign of status, separating the real photogs from the snapshotters.

Which is crap, because placing technical skills on that kind of pedestal is losing sight of that fact that only the final image counts. Your audience won't give you bonus points for shooting in one mode or another, and knowing how to shoot manual does not automatically give you the vision to use it. If you're taking boring pictures in automatic, you'll be taking boring pictures in manual. Composition is entirely in your eyes and your brain, and all manual mode, or any other feature of your camera, will do is help you translate your vision into a photograph.

That said, learning how to use full manual or one of the priority modes gives you control over the image. The camera cannot read your mind, and unless you understand how aperture, shutter speed, and ISO interact to control the exposure and depth of field, you're going to up missing shots. Guaranteed. Technical skills are vitally important, and you can't ignore them without sacrificing your potential as a photographer -- not to mention if you spent a lot of money on a camera that can give you this control but refuse to learn it, you'd have saved a lot of money by getting a cheap compact.

But full-manual mode is probably less important than understanding metering modes, white balance, or shooting in RAW and post-processing, for example. It's easy to do, by the way, once you've learned to read the camera's light meter in the viewfinder -- you're not expected to just know what shutter speed you need to get a proper exposure with a given aperture.

But bear in mind that setting aperture and adjusting the shutter until the meter looks good is no different than shooting in aperture mode and setting exposure compensation, unless you need more exposure compensation than your camera can do -- which isn't likely, except in specific circumstances. If you trust the camera meter to tell you when you've turned the dial far enough in manual, you can trust it to turn the dial for you. Just remember you can't trust it to turn all the dials for you.

(Exposure compensation, in case you haven't used it before, is easy and useful. Most of the time your camera is metering with the assumption that you want the scene to be, on average, an even, neutral gray -- in terms of brightness, not color. Setting the EC will adjust the target exposure, in case you want it brighter or darker than that, or if you're shooting something that will fool the meter. For example, it's hard for the camera to know that snow is really supposed to be white in color, and it usually needs about +2/3 EC to get it right. Or if you don't mind underexposing just a touch to get a slightly faster shutter speed, you can use -1/3 EC.)

Anyway, if you're intimidated by the big M, try using shutter or aperture priority. Experiment with those modes until you have a good sense of what you're doing when you're changing the aperture or shutter, and I promise you your ability to create images you're proud of will increase 10000%. And don't listen to anybody saying 'real' photographers do this or that. There's nothing wrong with mastering one new thing at a time, at your own pace, and shooting manual does not have to be at the top of your list.

Cambridge, Charles River (also: free photomerge software)

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 13:29:00 +0000

Cambridge, Charles River
Originally uploaded by mehampson

This image was made from seven photos taken on a bridge over the Charles River, in Harvard Square. The night before had seen strong, warm rains, and a cooler front was moving in, causing high, thin clouds and choppy water.

I made two copies of this, in Photoshop CS4 and in the open-source Hugin. Both of them struggled a bit, since I was using the wide end of the 28-105mm f/3.5-f/4.5 USM II zoom lens -- there's a bit of distortion in each shot that they had to account for, but both did a pretty good job in the end. Flipping between the two merged panoramas, I don't see a great difference between them. This image is from CS4, because it happened to be in exact 3x5 proportions and didn't need any further cropping; otherwise it would have been a coin toss which to upload.

And I also made a copy in Canon's Photostitch. The interface was so simplistic and the results were so bad (it laid out each of the seven photos next to each other in a fan shape and blended the edges, with no overlapping or exposure blending at all) that I couldn't see ever using it for any serious work. Useless. I uninstalled it.

I'm only using CS4 as trial; it's a bit easier to use for panos than Hugin is, but Hugin isn't hard. I know how silly it is to not post the Hugin image alongside for comparisons, but the images are big, and frankly look basically the same; at any rate, Hugin is open-source and free, so I'd say just download it and give it a try.

Domke F-6 Ruggedwear review

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 22:35:00 +0000

I don't have a huge camera kit, so when I came to the conclusion recently that I needed a better way of transporting my gear than an old messenger bag with a widening hole in one of the seams, I opted for the modestly-sized Domke F-6 Little Bit Smaller Ruggedwear Bag. The practical design caught my eye, and so did the simple, unassuming appearance -- it's nice to look at, but it doesn't draw attention to itself. The "I am not a camera bag" bags may not look like neoprene lunchboxes with $4000 worth of gear in them, but people are still going to notice them. I guess you could say the F-6 is more classy than stylish.

Now, I have to admit, I can compare the Ruggedwear model to the regular Domke F-6 Little Bit Smaller Bag because I was a bit dumb when I bought it. I ordered the plain F-6 (black, since olive was out of stock) to help me schlep my stuff back home from New York, where I was visiting family for Thanksgiving. Unfortunately, I had the bag shipped to my home in Boston, where it was not going to do me much good, and in the half-hour it took me to realize this, Amazon had already prepared it for shipping. So I had to order a second bag, and thought again about spending the extra money on the Ruggedwear model. The two bags are identical, except for the color and finish, so most of this review applies to both.

The "Ruggedwear" material is a cotton canvas treated with paraffin wax for water resistance. It's the same as their "Waxwear" treated bags, which I believe were only offered as a limited run. It's a dark brown color, and looks in photos like it would have a soft, suede-like feel to it, but it's a tough, flexible fabric to the touch. Not that it's abrasive at all; it's quite smooth, and there's no oily smell or residue. The logo is a subtle tan color on the front; the black canvas F-6 has a bright red logo, which frankly I don't like at all.

I've heard that normal canvas bags tend to shed small fibers as they age, which can get on DSLR sensors. The waxwear bags are so new, I don't know if they've been around long enough to tell whether they suffer from this problem or not.

Water beads on the surface, but it's not watertight -- the sides near the strap rings are a bit exposed, and I would expect some water to get in if you're caught in a driving rain. Folding the sides of the top down after you close it will nearly eliminate the gap, but it won't quite do this on its own. I'm not sure how much water the bag will wick off of the gear its carrying, but probably less than a normal canvas Domke. From what I hear, even the normal Domkes are at least a little water resistant as well. I hope you'll forgive me for not doing an exhaustive test comparing the two, but I think if absolute waterproofing is a high priority for you, you're looking at a whole different class of bags anyway.

The F-6 is built well, and feels like a heavy-duty camera bag. There's no padding, except for the bottom and the insert, so the lenses are pretty well protected, and they're the most fragile bits anyway. The insert has four sections, and the Canon 100mm f/2.8 USM macro lens (non-L) with reversed hood fits exactly in one to give you an idea of the size. There's a zippered pocket on the underside of the top, and on the front. The clips that close the bag are amazingly strong, and take some effort to open, which I like. The strap has a pair of rubber treads along the underside, for traction on your shoulder, and adjusts easily to a comfortable length. It also has a removable hand strap.

I can fit a lot of stuff in this bag: a 40D with battery grip, the 100mm macro, the 28-105 f/3.5-4.5, a Helios 44-2, an old K-mount 135mm f/2.8, Vivitar flash, short off-camera cord, Cactus radio triggers, battery and charger, circular polarizer filter, a baggy with flash gels, some spare batteries, lens pen, the 40D's battery and charger, a case of business cards, and a mini-tripod. With this load, the bag is still very comfortable to carry. It's perfectly balanced, and doesn't tip forwards or backwards when you pick it up. It's incredibly easy to access the gear you're carrying; the balance is not affected by whether the top is closed or open, and it's simple to just grab what you want. There's no need to unsling the bag and unpack everything just to get a different lens or filter.

This is a great bag for carrying around a modest kit. If I had more big gear to haul, it wouldn't be able to carry everything, but it's not meant for the role of "whole studio on your back" anyway. I'm a big fan of carrying minimal amounts of stuff, and this is an ideal walkaround bag, or even storage bag for medium-sized kits. There's not much room for me to grow into this bag, but I'll definitely pick up a Domke 700-02A F-2 Bag (Brown Waxwear Finish) once I have the need.

As for the Ruggedwear vs. normal canvas, I'm glad I spent the extra money. I think I'd like the olive or sand color better than the black, but I do really love the weathered brown color of the waxed canvas. And I shoot in damp and drippy environments often enough that the extra touch of protection is probably going to be useful.

Update: One month later, I still love the bag, and I'm no longer concerned about the possibility of gaps along the side of the lid. This weekend I brought my gear with me to work, in a commute that involved, I kid you not, a ~1 mile walk through blizzard conditions each way. Despite the cakes of snow I had to brush off the lid before I could get to my camera once I got indoors, everything in the bag was perfectly dry.

By the way: Purchases made through the links provided here support this site and my photography. Please be sure that I stand by my recommendations, and only ever suggest items that I would spend my own money on.

Domke F-6 Little Bit Smaller Ruggedwear Bag
Domke F-6 Little Bit Smaller Bag (Olive)
Domke 700-02A F-2 Bag (Brown Waxwear Finish)

Floating foliage, reflections

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 22:53:00 +0000

Floating foliage, reflections
Originally uploaded by mehampson

Shot at a pretty high ISO, since I was using a circular polarizer and the light was fading. Digikam really does a great job of luminance noise reduction; with my noisier shots I'm exporting from there, with RAW noise reduction set to about 80-100, and then doing a selective Gaussian blur and unsharp mask in GiMP, both at a threshold of about 15-30, depending on the shot. The selective blur cleans up the last bits of noise in defocused areas, and the sharpness just tightens things up a bit.

Green metallic bee wings

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 14:47:00 +0000

Green metallic bee wings
Originally uploaded by mehampson

I'd stopped posting photos directly here for a while because I'd gotten a little lazy about considering them "real" posts, but hey, why not get some more pictures up here. I don't know how I missed this Agapostemon shot from this summer; lesson of the day, always remember to go back and look at what you got.

Best of the summer

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 18:00:00 +0000

Bug season is pretty much winding down here in the northeast, and I've been going through my work from the summer, taking stock of what I've gotten. This is the first year I've done this type of photography, and it's gratifying to see the improvement I've made.

I thought I'd post a handful of what I feel is my best work from the season. I've posted a couple of these here before, but these all reflect some aspect of how I've developed as a photographer this year. (This post was written for dgrin.com this morning, but I thought it would be worth posting here as well.)

This is really the first macro shot I was able to accurately previsualize and then produce; it's also my favorite image since going digital. On top of that, this shoot was the first time I learned about metallic bees, which I think are fantastically cool :)

An Asian ladybug on the fence in my front yard; like the green metallic bee, this was among the first images where I was capable of controlling the light in a way that gave me the image I was visualizing. This was taken on a pretty sunny day, not ten feet in front of the white-ish siding of my apartment.

A simple carpenter ant on some kind of flower. (Plant ID is a real weak spot for me -- I'd captioned one photo as an insect on 'some kind of flower', until my girlfriend pointed out that it was, in fact, a common rose.)

I don't think I'd have been able to get a shot with this degree of contrast, with the soft lighting of the buds, and with a hyperactive ant, earlier in the summer, without so much exposure and focus chimping I'd lost the shot. I've gotten good enough at those, particularly at focusing, that I can usually get the shot I want without having to do much of that at all; I find I take two or three shots out of habit, and all of them are technically fine.

I have very few good butterfly images. I definitely need to learn how to approach them, and then get an exposure that's not entirely blown out, since I was mostly seeing these cabbage whites this summer. This one is pretty standard as far as composition goes, but I do like the contrasting shapes of the animal and flower.

This greater angle-winged katydid was just fun to shoot. It was pretty mellow and climbed right onto my hand, so this is from one of the few times I got to shoot a single animal in different compositions over a somewhat extended period of time.

This photo was a real goal of mine all summer. I was on my way home from the park the last week in August when I spotted this tiny orchard spider at the base of a shrub, and I got exactly what I had tried for with any number of less colorful spiders, by laying down behind the web and shooting upwards.

ISO 102400

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 13:51:00 +0000

Canon and Nikon have both released cameras recently that have ridiculous ISO ranges. My 40D can get up to ISO 3200; the just-announced-today 1D Mark IV gets a full five more stops of sensitivity. I haven't seen any samples yet, though Vincent Laforet says the camera can basically see in the dark, and that ISO 6400 is at least as good as what we expect from ISO 1600.

And then think of some of the new image stabilization technology. Canon's new 100mm Macro has a new system that apparently can work well at 1:1 magnification. I don't know how well, but even if it works respectably well, that might give us another two stops.

I think this is going to enable some tremendously interesting things for macro shooters -- it will let us take some of the weight off the camera, which means staying out longer and being able to move the camera easily for better compositions. Imagine a rig designed for daylight shooting, with, instead of a heavy flash and diffuser, a scrim and a reflector on flexible mounts to modify the natural light. Or lightweight flashes with low guide numbers that are working at low/fast power levels. Both of these will still be able to shoot around f/11 or so, without having to pay nearly as much in noise.

Hopefully, this technology will filter down to my personal price range sooner rather than later...

Flash pulse duration

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 21:50:00 +0000

Chuck Westfall's October Tech Tips is out, and he answers a question regarding the flash pulse duration of Canon's speedlites. Canon doesn't publish these numbers so there's quite a bit of speculation, but he points out one thing that I didn't know: at lower power levels, the xenon bulbs used in the flashes are not as efficient as they are at high power. Therefore, a flash firing at 1/16th isn't necessarily firing 16 times faster than it does at full power, since it's putting out less than 1/16th as much light per millisecond.

Without actual numbers or the tools to do some testing, it's impossible to say how much it matters. It's probably still firing faster than it would at 1/4 or 1/8, which is important in flash-based macro because your flash pulse duration is, effectively, your shutter speed.

The bit I find most interesting is where he says "I suspect that if you use a higher power setting on the 430EX to match the output of the 550EX, the flash durations from both Speedlites will end up being very similar if not identical." I've been considering the 430EX II over the 270EX, on the assumption that they'd have similar pulse durations at full power, and therefore the 430EX II would be faster since I'd be using it at lower power levels. It may be that the 270EX at 1/2 or 1/4 power isn't as much of a compromise in speed as I had thought; in terms of price and weight, it's obviously the better choice for macro.

This may seem like nitpicking, but it does have real application for the small animal photography I like to do. On a warm, sunny day, it's simply not possible to get a sharp image of a fast-moving insect without a flash pulse fast enough to freeze its motion. 1/250th of a second is a looong time in that shooting scenario. This photo was taken with the flash pulse at 1/4 power; the bee is quite noticeably blurred, even in the eye and legs, though I don't think it detracts from this particular shot.

Digikam

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 18:12:00 +0000

I'm a long-time user of Linux, and one of the minor annoyances I put up with in photography is the need to use Windows for an efficient workflow with good post-processing control. I've been dual-booting with Ubuntu for about a year now, and had frankly stopped really using it because of a few problems I was never able to resolve. I've always been more of a Gentoo guy, and what with their tenth anniversary this month, I decided to switch back. Except for this past year, I've used it as my primary OS since 2002, so even though it's a lot more DIY, I'm quite comfortable with it.

Anyhow, I've been looking more seriously into Linux RAW processing software. I know there are some really powerful options out there, but I honestly find a lot of that power is more than I need. I've currently got the latest beta of Digikam installed and I think it's about 95% of what I want, but there's still a lot I need to learn about it.

I'll be looking closely at its output later, and hopefully it'll turn out to be a good alternative to Lightroom or even DPP.

Lightroom vs. DPP comparison

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 17:12:00 +0000

I've put together two 100% crops of a recent picture, comparing the results from Lightroom 2.5 and Digital Photo Professional 3.6.1. Where I could, I processed them identically, but generally speaking Lightroom has much finer control than DPP, so to a degree I had to just ask myself how I'd normally process the image in that program.

View original

View original

The comparisons show the problem I have with Lightroom: the JPGs I get out of it lose their texture to noise. The second crop is a perfect example. There are places that are much sharper in LR, like the tip of the flower bud, but towards the edges of the in-focus region, the fine detail is lost in the noise very quickly, and there's even some color banding in the bokeh. The DPP crop, though not as detailed in the in-focus areas, doesn't have that harsh, noisy, almost plastic texture to the bokeh and nearly-bokeh regions. Lightroom's sharpening tool, incidentally, can mask out the low-detail regions, so it didn't touch the areas I'm unhappy with.

This image was shot at ISO 200, with +0.33 exposure in both LR and DPP. Noise reduction is 3 luminance and 1 color in DPP; 24 luminance and 34 color in LR. (The DPP scale is 0-20, LR is 0-100. The color slider doesn't have much effect in either on this image, as long as it's not 0.) I don't see much improvement in LR's noise reduction below about 90, which seems unbelievably high for an ISO 200 image from a 40D, even with the background a stop or two intentionally underexposed. So I don't know what's going on here -- I have to assume I'm missing something. Do I just need to crank up the noise reduction?

Lightroom

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 13:45:00 +0000

I'm playing with the Adobe Lightroom trial again. I've used it in the past and wasn't happy with the JPGs I got out of it: there was a weird plastic texture that I think had to do with noise reduction, and the contrast just didn't seem quite there. Canon's DPP gave me much better results in that regard, even though the organization, tagging, and interface are so poor, so I never made the jump to Adobe.

But lately, the workflow issues around DPP have just gotten to me. I've caught myself letting photos sit on the camera because I don't want to deal with the ordeal of processing them in DPP. Don't get me wrong: individual photos are fine to work with, but sorting through 200 shots, deleting the rejects, and then getting to the individual picks is a pain. And that's not even looking at DPP's total inability to handle data like tags and captions, which means my DPP workflow often has to involve two, three, or sometimes four separate programs to get my work online. And Lightroom can do all that stuff easily.

So, I'm reading up on Lightroom again, and already found some good advice for dealing with sharpening and tone curves in it. I'm looking through old favorites to see what I can do with them, and we'll see how it goes.

Covered in bees

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 02:48:00 +0000

So, I hadn't really done anything interesting in about two weeks. I had to go out of town for a weekend, and on returning, I lent my roommate part of my macro rig for about a week. Then Boston started breaking all kinds of heat records... I know, it's no excuse. I hope you can forgive me, just this once at least. In penance, I offer up some new bee images.

One thing I really like is the effect you get when you shoot through the leaf or flower. Especially when you have something nice and neutral, like the grains of pollen on the back of the bee, to go and set your white balance to in post. The brilliant glowing effect is, I think, pretty striking.

This is a good example of where I think a TTL flash with low power settings would work better than my 1/16th-and-hope Vivitar. The flower still has detail, but not as much as I'd like. I could fix this in post, but I prefer chanting 'get it right in-camera' to justify a fancy upgrade I can't afford.

This is similar to a shot I took last month of a carpenter bee entering a hollyhock flower, but I absolutely love the eye peeking out from under that thick carpet of pollen. Worth mentioning is that this bee (an entirely black species I don't recognize) buzzed my face right after I took this photo. Not as mellow as most bees around here...

And, a tip I discovered on this photowalk: wear long pants when shooting bees, lest they be inclined to fly up your shorts and cause you much distress before they leave.

Keeping photos on Flickr safe

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 15:49:00 +0000

I noticed something a little odd while poking around in my Flickr settings. The recommended setting for "Who can download your stuff" is "anyone". Personally, I don't think is wise. Promoting this sort of image sharing is basically promoting image theft, since any Corporate Joe Schmoe can just click the 'download this image' link without even having a Flickr account. I've read a few discussions on the Flickr boards about it, and people say things like "well, what do you think photo sharing means", and "people like to let others download their pictures". That's fine for some people, but I'd argue that the majority of Flickr users aren't aware of just how much commercial image theft goes on -- it's an image sharing site, but the default settings turn it into a file sharing site.

I doubt many people would be offended by some random web surfer using their images as a wallpaper or screensaver, but that's really not what I'm concerned about. It's not uncommon to hear of people finding their work used, without permission, for commercial purposes -- _rebekka, one of Flickr's big success stories, famously found her photos for sale on microstock sites, including some self-portraits, as one example. Many other artists have seen their work used in magazines, newspapers, web sites, and other media without their knowledge or permission; their are too many 'copyright infringement', 'stolen images', and related groups and tags on Flickr to link to just one. Not only is this a problem for the individual users who find their work misused in this way, it's a problem for the photo industry at large, since even an dirt cheap royalty-free download on a microstock site is more expensive than a free download from Flickr. Those of us who rely on our photography as a source of income, even if it's not a very large portion, are competing with thousands of talented artists who don't realize it and won't see credit or compensation for their work.

It's basically impossible to avoid this if you're putting images online. If it can be seen in a browser, it can be downloaded and used inappropriately. But there are basic things you can do on Flickr to avoid it. Go to your privacy settings and review everything there. Each of these settings can generally be set to allow access to 'anyone', 'any Flickr user', 'contacts', 'friends and family', or 'only you'; which is safest for you would depend on how you want to share your images, and how you organize your contacts. Personally, any contact marked 'friend' or 'family' is someone I know and trust, and implicitly grant permission to use an image privately, but I want the general public to be able to see my work, so my privacy settings reflect this.

Under Global settings, there are three settings that allow access to the original URL of the image -- not the web page where the photo is displayed, which looks like 'http://www.flickr.com/photos/mehampson/3634916839/', but the address of the actual JPG, which begins something like 'http://farm3.static.flickr.com' and ends in '.jpg'. This is all that's needed to download an image from Flickr.

Who can download your stuff: Flickr can place a transparent GIF over your image to hinder (though not completely prevent) downloading your images, and this setting controls who can view your images without it. It also controls who can see the 'all sizes' button, which allows views to choose larger or smaller images. The default is 'anyone', which as I said above, I think is a bad idea. I set mine to 'only you', though I wouldn't have a problem sending someone I know a full-sized JPG.

Who can share your photos or video and Who can blog your stuff: I set these to 'friends or family', since there is a roundabout way of getting the original image's URL through these options.

Under Defaults for new uploads, there is another setting to think about.

Set a default license: If you don't mind people downloading your work, you should consider using a Creative Commons license, which allows you to keep your copyright while still letting others use your work in various ways, or you can put your images directly into the public domain.

Outside of Flickr, there are other things you can do. Some people watermark their images; I don't do this myself, since I haven't seen many that are both hard to clone or crop out of an image and minimally disruptive to the composition. I did see one the other day that I thought looked pretty classy, so I'm considering it, but we'll see.

Another thing I do is to restrict the size of my uploads. I no longer upload anything larger than 1280 pixels on the long edge; I've seen other people restrict it to 800 pixels. This isn't foolproof either, since there are some pretty amazing upscaling techniques out there, but I don't see any reason to offer a full 10 MP image. (I do upload full resolution images to Smugmug though, since I sell prints there, and restrict the largest viewable size.)

I don't have a problem with people choosing a CC license or public domain, by the way. I don't choose it for my own work, but I totally respect the choice of artists who do -- my beef is with the exploitation of artists' copyrighted work, not with artists who grant permission for their work to be used broadly. Flickr isn't the only site where images can be stolen, and it's not to blame for the practice -- the people who actually download and use images marked 'All rights reserved' are. I just wish Flickr made it a little harder for them to do it by default.

The Albany Pine Bush

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 13:41:00 +0000

I was in upstate New York for the weekend, and took a trip to one of my favorite nature spots, the Pine Bush. It's a pine barrens, which means an ecosystem on dry, acidic soil -- usually sand -- dominated by short shrubs and grasses, and a modest growth of trees. Pine barrens would, in time, naturally be converted to more traditional forests, but the dry soil and abundance of low vegetation lead to frequent fires that clear out new trees that would, in other circumstances, out-compete the pitch pine, heaths, and scrub oaks that thrive there. New Jersey's coastal pine barrens are famous, but the Pine Bush is considered to be one of the best example of an inland pine barrens in the world.

The Pine Bush is home to a number of rare or unique plants and animals, and there is considerable pressure on it from developers, particularly Crossgates Mall and the Albany City Landfill, both right next door. It's terrible farmland, and one of my field guides quotes a 19th century author as calling it "as forlorn, miserable and unsatisfactory a combination of sand, swamp, and aridity, as the Union can produce", and "a mistake in nature". Now, of course, we appreciate such areas for qualities besides their agricultural potential, but for a long time they were something that needed fixing, and two-thirds of the pine barrens in the northeast were either destroyed for their sand and pitch, built over, or taken over by other ecosystems due to systematic fire prevention. I blame, in part, Smokey the Bear.

I visited the Karner Barrens section of the Pine Bush, and photographed some of the pitch pine/scrub oak community there. I was really hoping to see the endangered Karner blue butterfly, but was disappointed, not surprisingly. There was, however, a a controlled burn performed recently along the trail I walked -- the Albany Pine Bush Preserve Commission is responsible for fire management, and regularly burns small sections of the Preserve to maintain a healthy pine barrens ecology, and to avoid the build-up of fuel that would enable a larger, uncontrollable fire in the future.

My full gallery of photos from the day can be seen here.

Scarlet and green leafhoppers flicking away honeydew

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 20:58:00 +0000

Scarlet and green leafhopper

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 13:15:00 +0000

The bright red and blue-green of these scarlet and green leafhoppers is tricky to get right in post-production. It's very easy to end up with solid streaks of color with no detail left. I'm pretty happy with this one, though.

This is going to be my first image in a new 365 project on Flickr. I'll probably end up posting most of them here, but you can also follow it here.

Green metallic bee, spiderwort 2

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 15:30:00 +0000

Another green metallic bee, but I think these guys look great. I just replaced a few of the other Agapostemon shots with slightly retouched versions (nothing major, just some better sharpening and JPG output) -- the difference probably isn't noticeable if you aren't comparing the two versions side by side, but these should produce better prints. I just ordered some for myself yesterday, and can't wait to see them.

On that note, I've also removed the option to buy glossy prints from my gallery. The lustre prints have the same type of finish on a higher quality paper, and since there are so many size and paper options to sort through already, I don't see a real need to offer both.

If you're interested in ordering a print of my work but aren't sure what paper type to go with, you won't go wrong with lustre. Metallic prints can look incredible, but not every image works well with it. It gives images an incredible appearance of depth and vibrance, and handles dark and shadowy areas beautifully, though brighter highlights can look strange. I've got a few more coming in this latest batch I ordered, and hope to get a better idea of what kinds of image I'd recommend it for soon.

House spider cannibalism

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 12:58:00 +0000

These two house spiders (Parasteatoda tepidariorum) either just mated, or were about to, as far as the male, in the lower left was concerned. Unfortunately for him, sexual cannibalism is common in spiders, meaning a female will often eat the male who just fertilized her. Praying mantises are infamous for this, but it's really the arachnids who make a habit of it. Males of different species have different strategies to avoid this, whether by bringing a large piece of food, waiting until the female has recently molted, or just by being quick and sneaky. Some scorpion males will even sting the female to subdue her until he's safely away. But other arachnid males will let themselves be captured by the female, or simply don't have good luck in escaping freely.

Interestingly, these two are pretty close in size. The likelihood of a male being eaten by the female is pretty much proportional to the size difference between the two, since females are usually much larger. So it seems quite possible that this is a species where the male lets the female eat him.

If you look carefully, the male has some webbing wrapped around him, and his legs are curled in the classic spider 'death pose'; I stuck around for a few minutes and she immediately started biting at a joint in one of the legs, but I had to leave before I could see if she was just subduing him with venom or was actually starting to eat. He's missing his front left leg, and on a 100% crop a drop of clear liquid is visible in it; I wonder if the digestive enzymes spiders inject into their prey have already taken effect, but I have no idea if it would be visible in a leg wound like that.