Photoburner

Photography Podcasts

2009-04-27T01:29:02Z

Viper 29

Podcasts

I have gotten into the habit of finding good audio material to listen to on my car CD player. Not just music but books on disk and also good podcasts. Podcasts are audio files created by what are essentially audio bloggers and there are thousands of them available. Among all of these podcasts are some very good ones on photography and a few which aren’t very good.

Jeff Curto

Jeff Curto is a professor of photography at the College of DuPage. He actual does two separate podcasts:

The History of Photography is my favorite podcast right now. Curto is broadcasting the class sessions of his History of Photography class which is underway right now. He also has links to class materials. This podcast is a look at the history of photography right back to the beginning and beyond that date. He has an excellent teaching style.

I was surprised to find out that the first manipulated photographs are seen in the 1850′s, twenty five years after the invention of photography. Point that out to the next person who makes a comment about photoshop. He has several interesting discussions about the flow of inspiration going between painters and photographers. It wasn’t all one way, Cubism for example is supposedly derived directly from Muybridge’s work on time lapse photography.

These are long podcasts 90 minutes to over two hours and packed with info so I have to listen to it when I can concentrate on the materiel. They are published as .m4p files and have the images he is talking about in the podcast attached to the files if you have the right viewer. Since I wanted to listen on my .mp3 and car CD player I converted them to .mp3 and lost the images. They are also very large files in the neighborhood of 100 MB.

Curto also does another podcast on his personal photographic experience called Camera Position. I haven’t listened to this podcast in quite awhile but recall it was also good. They are also in .m4p format. I think Curto runs photo trips to Italy and maybe other areas.

Derrick Story

Derrick Story is doing a podcast called the Digital Story. These are about 30 minute long podcasts on a photographic subjects and I found them to be well thought out and presented. Typical subjects might be Raw Workflow, Getting Photographic Releases or Using Fill Flash. He has a LOT of these podcasts, over a 150 and heading towards 200. Highly recommended. I’d say the teaching level is at about intermediate level but I picked up something on most of these. Story teaches Aperture on Lynda.com and has an active website.

Brooks Jensen

Brooks Jensen the publisher of Lenswork Magazine is doing podcasts. If you are familiar with the magazine you’ll have an idea of what these podcasts are like. Jensen is a highly opinionated (nothing wrong with that) fellow with a certain narrow vision of photography. The magazine is for Black and White shots only and only those which fall into a certain style. The podcasts are short diatribes on his thoughts, only about 5 minutes long. I found no material of any practical use in the ones I listened to. But I have to admit I only lasted thru 3 or so. A longer exploration of the podcasts may find material of more interest. There are roughly 400 of them so he has to be finding something to talk about.

Benjamin and Davidson

Dan Benjamin and James Davidson are doing a podcast called Tack Sharp. Frankly I quickly came to the understanding that these fellows didn’t know what they were talking about and shouldn’t be doing a podcast where they pretend otherwise. I listened to a couple of these with vague disquiet but when I got to the one they did on Bokeh where they insisted that it was pronounced as Boo-kay like a bunch of flowers and that it was an old Japanese term I finally understood how much they didn’t know. They also instructed the audience that Nikon should be pronounced Neee Koon which I don’t believe I’ve ever heard a Nikon user use.

Bokeh for those of you unfamiliar with the term was a word coined by Mike Johnson in 1997 and he is a Japanese speaker and based it on a Japanese word for blur. He says it is pronounced Bow-Kuh. He discusses the term here: Online Photographer.

Five minutes on Google would have revealed all of this to the Tack Sharp guys. They went on to make some other ridiculous claims and that was it for me and Tack Sharp. They only have about 8 of these up but you would be much better off devoting your time to Derrick Story.

Crawford and Hidden

To finish up on a less sour note, Bill Crawford and Ed Hidden do a podcast called Studio Photography podcast. They seem to have a different guest each week, mainly professional photographers. And they do an interview with the guest of the day. Generally good stuff. They do pack in a lot of adverts but they are paying the bills with that and they aren’t too intrusive. There are quite a few of these available, the webpage is something of a hassle to deal with since I could never find a way to easily download a number of these, but the podcasts are worth a bit of trouble to get.

I’m not sure how much info beginning photographers would get from the Studio Photography podcasts.

And that’s all folks for this post.

So You have a new DSLR: Step three

2009-04-24T23:28:58Z

Greek Shrine

Link to step one of this set of posts
And to step 2

Step three: learning to edit.

OK you have been taking lots of photos, you’ve been using jpeg + raw as your file formats. And you have been using the jpeg files to upload and do any printing. You are now ready to move up to some editing on the files. You can start with edits on your jpegs but in some ways that can be more difficult than editing raw files. Jpegs can take light editing, some sharpening and maybe some tonal adjustment. But any serious editing will cause the images to develop very ugly artifacts like banding and posterization. We will get into that when we talk about raw files in another post. Right now lets list some of the available free editing software on the web. So far as I know these editors will only work on non-raw file formats. Jpeg and .tif formats mainly. Some of the best known are:

Paint.net an excellent light editor for Windows developed by MS but now open source
Photoscape another pretty good Windows editor
Serif Photoplus another Windows editor
Adobe Photoshop Express online editor (this is not Photoshop) but it comes with 2 GB of free storage.
Picnik a web based editor.

And Mac users have a freebie that is included on their system, iPhoto or some such. Your camera also may have come with free editing software of modest capability. Canon cameras come with DPP and Nikon users can get the pretty good Nikon editor but it isn’t free.

Paint.net is an open source project and it has developed a large community of developers who are supplying a good variety of plugins which have greatly extended the capability of the basic product. This is a good choice for a basic editor.

Adobe Photoshop Express comes with 2 GB of free gallery space, and a free photoshop.com address, and it connects directly with Flickr, Photobucket and some other online galleries. The tools allow you to do basic editing like sharpening, cropping, resizing and other simple tasks. These are implemented with a wizard type interface which is simple and easy to use. If you select one of the tools you will see a string of thumbnails at the bottom of the image showing how different levels of the tool will affect the image. You click on the thumbnail to apply that level of the adjustment.

Editors with raw support.

Sooner or later you will want to move to real editor. And the three best supported editors are:

Why Adobe products?

Why do I limit the list above to Adobe products? The primary reason, in my mind, is the fact that there is a vast online support community for these products. You will find literally thousands of online websites, tutorials, podcasts, and video tutorials on these editors. If you participate in online lists almost all the users will be using one or another of these products and you will easily get help when you get stuck. I have never failed to find a number of online tutorials or other help when I use Google to search for a way to do something in one of these apps.

Besides online user help Adobe itself provides a very comprehensive online support capability including forums and user groups and there are literally hundreds of published books available on each of these editors. Amazon shows 183 books for Photoshop CS4 and 202 books available for Photoshop Elements 7. Corel Photo Paint X3 by contrast has 3 books available. GIMP 2.6 has 14 books. Apple Aperture 2 has 26 books.

Elements

PSE 7 is the current version of Photoshop Elements and it will allow you to do raw file conversions and just about all basic editing on your images. PSE has a lot of wizard type interfaces to guide new users. And it comes with a pretty good photo organizer. I think this is the best choice for new users who need raw support or who want better editing capability. If you work at developing your editing skills you will eventually start wanting to do things that cannot be done in PSE and that is the time when you should start thinking about moving up to Photoshop. A good online community for PSE is found at this PSE group.

Some good introductory books:

Lightroom

Some people find Lightroom to be a middle ground between PSE and Photoshop. But it seems like every Lightroom user I have heard from also owns Photoshop and uses that for the more intense editing procedures. Lightroom is aimed at production photographers, people who need to batch process large numbers of photographs. Perhaps someone who is shooting senior portraits by the hundreds. You can easily apply the same corrections to an entire batch of shots. This is possible in PS but not as easy and I’m not sure how well it would work on large batches. LR also has a very powerful photo archiving ability, it makes it easy to find your photos whether they are on your hard drive or have been moved to an external storage device. LR has the same raw converter as Photoshop: Adobe Camera Raw. Lightroom lacks the ability to select certain parts of the image and apply effects just to the selected area. That is when LR users move over to PS. Glenn Michell has some thoughts on the two.

Online support: Yahoo Lightroom group

Some good introductory books:

Photoshop

Photoshop is simply the best editor available. Over the years many competitors have attempted to catch up with PS but they never succeed. I think the reason that they fail is this: they usually come up with a fairly good basic product. Maybe something in the PSE range plus a few more features. But to catch up with the vast capabilities of Photoshop they need a large group of programmers and time to write and debug all that code. So they need to sell copies of their first effort to finance the further development and they always seem to run out of money before that happens. Now PS is the best, but it also has a huge user community who has been using it for a decade or more. As new features are added many of those users are used to the arcane and difficult user interface and vociferously resist the least change in the way things work in PS. That means that new features are grafted on to the current user interface making it that much harder to learn. Old features never go away. John Nack has commented on this built in resistance to change from the user community.

Adobe of course has the large developer force, time and money to make sure that they stay far ahead of any competition. They have been steadily adding more power and capability to each new version. And I have yet to feel like a version upgrade is worthless from them. New versions are on a three year schedule lately. So Photoshop is difficult to learn, partly because of all the baggage it is carrying around from the past. It is also darned expensive, about $650 US for a new purchaser. Upgrades are running around $200 every two years.

Also Photoshop has a schizophrenic nature, it is both a graphics editor for graphical artists and it is a photo editor. Photographer may well never use many of the tools in PS since they are targeted at graphic artists. But it can do things that no other editor can do, and it can usually do those things in many different ways. But that will come at a cost to you.

Lynda.com has many online tutorials for PS (as well as many other applications) and they have 30 plus hours of video tutorials just on learning how to use the selection tools in PS. 30 hours for one feature. I watched them and worked thru the examples but still don’t think I understand everything about the tools. So this is why I urge people not to spend that $650 unless you are sure that you are ready to tackle this difficult editor.

A major online community for PS can be found at: listmoms

Good books for CS4

Editing webpages

There are some excellent websites that cover editing technique. Like mostsites they are specific to Photoshop but if you know your editor you can probably adapt the techniques to your editor.

Cambridge in Color which is Sean McHugh’s site is one of the best that I know of. It has a slightly technical reading level but has very good coverage of a most basic Photoshop techniques. Be sure to look at Sean’s photo galleries while you are there.

The Light’s Right the site owned by Glenn E Mitchell has a great set of tutorials that probably a bit more advanced than Cambridge. He has a 300 page ebook on sharpening for example. There are also a number of video tutorials. The essential read on this site is the ‘pop’ series of articles but you will want to read more than those. Mitch also has a blog and some excellent photo galleries.

The Luminous-Landscape is owned by Micheal Reichmann and a lot of other writers often contribute including Jeff Schewe. He has a set of video Magazines that can be downloaded (not free) that have some intensive looks at various aspects of photography. He also has the best intoduction to Printing and Color management that I have seen. It’s a 6.5 hour video which he sells on site. This is call From Camera to Print, and it is on the advanced side and probably of little value unless you have Photoshop and a serious printer.

There are many guides and tutorials on this site but they are not as well organized. You have to look for the gems. The trip is well worth the effort. Try the Understanding series.

Commercial Tutorials

Lastly let’s look at the two major commercial tutorial sites.

The first is Lynda.com. They offer a wide variety of video tutorials covering most Adobe and many other software packages. The instructors are excellent on the whole and the price is reasonable: $25/month for full access. Lynda is mostly limited to software training tho they have a few more general photography sets. You can get a free month of Lynda as a gift when you register CS4. The courses range from the basic to the advanced and can get very advanced.

KelbyTraining is Scott Kelby’s site and I have only used it when they were offering a free look when they started up. At that time I thought it was very limted and Nikon centric, but I hear that they have added many new instructors and have photographic technique as well as software training courses. Cost is $20/month. I’ll give it another whirl sometime soon. Kelby is the author of many very popular photography books and his books often live at the #1 position on Amazon.

And that wraps this post up.

So You have a New DSLR: Step 2

2009-04-12T13:40:51Z

Suwanee Morning Light

New Users Corner

Link to step one:

Step Two

Now you need to learn photographic techniques. The most important part of this is:

Taking photographs
Picking out your best of the week
Getting honest criticism

Taking photographs is the easy part. Get your camera out and shoot. You will take thousands of shots before you really learn your camera and start to feel that you are in control of the process.

Now sort thru your work for the week, and pick out one or two and certainly no more than three of the shots that you feel are your best. Here is the first rule of photography:

Only show other people your best work

Whatever you do don’t go out shoot a hundred shots, post them all on Flickr and then expect others to wade thru them, bad mixed in with the good.

You, or at least I, will always produce a lot of photos that I don’t think are very good and mixed in will be a few shots that are good. If I am having a very good day I might get 50% keepers, more often it could be 25% good to 75% not so good. Be your own worst critic. Ansel Adams sort of confesses this:

“Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop.” Ansel Adams

In others words he was happy with one good shot a month. We can have lower standards however and try for one or two a week. Edward Weston, another very famous photographer, has a very well known shot, Pepper Number 30. Thirty implies that there were at least 29 other pepper shots that he didn’t show people.

If you are new at this, do not expect to produce masterworks on your first efforts, or even your two thousandth effort. Find your best shots. Don’t look at the work of people who have been doing this for a long time and despair. You will get better as you go but you won’t get better unless you get some idea about what you need to do to improve. So put your work out for critiques even if you don’t think they are very good. After all that is when you can get the most from criticism. A good group of critics will know that you are just starting and will help you in any way that they can.

Find someone who will give you honest criticism. This isn’t your wife, your husband or your mother. All of them are more worried about insulting you than they are about giving good criticism. And of course unless you are lucky enough to have a good photographer in the family they don’t know what a good photograph is, anyway. They think that what they get from their point and shoots are good.

In today’s networked world one of the best places to find good criticism is on the net and in particular Yahoo groups. There are some very good mailing lists which run photo assignments and give excellent criticism. Honest criticism which will tell you what is technically right and wrong with your work. You must approach this with the right attitude; you want them to tell you what is technically and artistically wrong, and hopefully what they like about the image.

Let me climb up on my stump for a paragraph or two:

If you ask for critiques of your best work of the week, and you are given good advice. Do not be defensive. The advice may be good or it may be bad. Always thank the person who gave it to you and either to put it to use or ignore it. If you get into an argument and get the reputation of not taking good advice, people will cut you off. I do when I run into people like that. I add them to my blocked list and never hear from them again. Remember that you may not recognize good advice when you see it.

I also ignore people who post an unending stream of photographs, three or four a day, sometimes more. Who has time for that?

These people are spending their personal time trying to help you. They do not want to be insulted or argued with. This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t ask for further information if they haven’t been clear. You should. But do it in a pleasant way. You will occasionally find jerks who are insulting. Ignore them if possible. Find another list if you cannot. OK enough lecturing on list etiquette.

Some lists that I know of or others have suggested:

Canon: the Digital Rebels

and their photo site

The Rebels do pictures of the week and also have assignments that everyone can contribute to. This is a low conflict group and does not tolerate any sort of harsh behavior.

Nikon: the Nikon D80 group

and the Nikonians which while apparently a good group has started charging $25/year for membership. That includes gallery space. You can join for the first month free. Even at $25 a year it doesn’t seem unreasonable to me, most people on the Digital Rebel list end up joining PBase to get gallery space, and that costs $23/year.

I didn’t get any suggestions for Sony Pentax or Olympus groups but I found these:

A hat tip to Maria, she suggested the two Olympus groups above. I found nothing for Sigma. The Sony and Pentax groups are very small and that may be good or bad depending on how the group functions the Digital Rebels has 2200 members and the Nikon group has 1100 by way of contrast. If anyone knows of other good groups leave a comment and I’ll add it to the list. Without any editorial comment I’ll suggest staying away from the Canon 300D list on Yahoo.

There are a number of general groups that do critiques and are not limited to a particular camera brand. PhotoSig is well known. The people on it have a reputation of being quite sharp with the critical pen. So judge the thickness of your skin before venturing there. The Photo Critique forum is another and I have heard nothing about it, good or bad. DPReview forums have some critique sections and they also cover a lot of camera brands if you need some camera specific advice.

And by using Google you can probably find a lot of other sites. None of these lists or sites will help you if you never post and become what is known as a lurker. Introduce yourself and ask questions.

Composition

Another thing that will help you develop a good photographer’s eye is learning something about composition and the ‘rules of composition‘. Now the idea of rules really seems to bother some people. These rules or maybe principals is a better term have come down to us mainly from the painting world and have been taught to painters down thru the ages, or at least for hundreds of years. Of course the modern ‘painters’ have little use for these since they are taught that stringing toilet paper across a park is ‘art’ and thus no knowledge of composition is needed.

But I believe that these rules are derived from centuries of study on just what attracts people to a particular work and what they unconsciously look for in the work when they see it. Modern studies have been done on what people look at and they have found that you have less than one second to attract someone’s attention before they lose interest. So use your one second wisely by studying the rules of composition and getting people to spend more of their time on your images.

Once you master composition then you are free to start ignoring the ‘rules’ if you think there is a good reason to do so.

A great aggregation site for composition articles is PhotoInf. Try the Wendy Folse series for a start and just browse thru some of the other articles. This is a good site to return to once in awhile to read a different view of composition.

Books

You will probably acquire a library of photography books as you advance in your study of photography. Bryan Peterson’s books have a wide following and his Understanding Exposure is especially well known. It is well worth the $17 or so that it costs on Amazon.

Scott Kelby has popular books on Digital Photography: the Digital Photography Book volumes one and two. These are big sellers but I haven’t heard any reports by people who have read them. Kelby can be a very flippant writer and his style is not so popular with a large number of people. I find that his books are packed with information and you can skip the chapter introductions where he packs most of what he considers humor. I do have some Kelby Photoshop books and thought they were worth the money.

There are literally thousands of other books available but at this stage one or two good ones will be all that you probably need.

A Place to post your work

You will soon need a place that you can post shots so people can see them. Some forums have their own group site. The Digital Rebels, the Nikonians and PhotoSig all do. But sooner or later you will want a place of your own. One place a lot of photographers use is PBase. It costs $23 a year and comes with a lot of storage, 500MB at this time. Many people like it since it lets you control how your work appears, has easy navigation and has many photographers using it. It does come with warts tho.

Flickr is free but has awful navigation and poor presentation of your work IMO. Many people refuse to look at shots posted on Flickr. It does have very strong internal groups if you get involved with them.

Zenfolio is a newer service that is adding a lot of features. It seems to be reasonably priced at $25-40/year. SmugMug is another service that is a bit more expensive and the site navigation is disliked by some people. Lastly Wikipedia has an article listing many more sites worldwide that you can explore. One thing to be careful of is the sites terms of use, you never want to give up the rights to your work by using one of these sites. Some notorious rights thieves are Facebook and MySpace.

Summing Up

So go out:
Take many photographs
Find someone to critique them
Study Composition
Read a book or two.

Next up learning to edit your shots and using raw.

So you have a new DSLR

2009-04-04T22:47:00Z

Big Cypress

New Users Corner

It’s here

Your spiffy new DSLR has arrived and you are wondering, what next? Naturally you will charge up the battery and head out to do some shooting. But if you are new to DSLR cameras the results may be disappointing when compared to your old point and shoot.

Why is that true? Because unlike P&S cameras, DSLR cameras demand that you do a lot of the thinking that the camera did for you when you used the less powerful model. DSLRs are not just bigger and more expensive point and shoot cameras even though camera manufacturers advertise them as if that was the case.

If you feel a burning desire to buy some things for the camera then get a couple of extra batteries, Sterlingtek is a good place to find them at less than a quarter of the cost from your manufacturer. You can find them on Amazon and eBay too but won’t know who you are buying them from.

A couple of extra memory cards is a good idea. 4 GB is a good size to my way of thinking. That will usually hold a day’s casual shooting but it doesn’t hold so many shots that it would be a disaster if something happened to the card. If it gets lost or ruined in some way. NewEgg is a good source as is Amazon.

If you are using the high speed UDMA Flash cards then you will want a fast UDMA Card Reader. Otherwise a slower but cheaper USB2 Card Reader will do. I never have thought it makes much sense to use your $1000 camera to do the job a $18 card reader can do faster.

Getting a Cleaning Kit is also a good idea. I like the Giotto Rocket blower as the first line of defense against dust on your sensor.

I would wait to buy lenses or other major accessories. You of course need to decide what you need and when. But the way you look at these items may change a good deal in the next few months. You could buy something and then come to regret the purchase as you learn more.

The three steps

So to become master of your new camera and to learn good photographic technique you need a plan of action. And I have a three step plan for you:

Step one–learn how your camera works.
Step two–learn basic photographic technique.
Step three–learn post process editing for your files

By taking this process in small bites you can make noticeable progress and see that your photographic skills are improving.

Step One

Learning how your camera works can be a tedious process. The first and really vital step in this process is to do the dreaded: read the manual. Find a quiet place where you can have an hour or so alone and get the manual in your hands and the camera in your lap. Read a section of the manual and then find the things that were mentioned on your camera that you have in your lap. Try the different functions and menu items. Do this a section at a time, it may take several sessions.

Now you will not remember all this stuff. But you will recall that there was a way to do something that you are puzzled about and you will be able to find it in the manual weeks later. I carried the book in my camera bag for the first year after I got my first DSLR. And should still be carrying it since I frequently need to look up items four years later.

I have heard of people photographing the manual and saving it on a memory card so that they can pop the card into the camera and read that section on the LCD. That was a step too far for me.

I actually worked on doing a section a week for months. I’d work on recalling how to set focus points one week, and I’d do white balance the following week. Even tho I had 20 years of using SLR cameras, before I bought my first DSLR, all these complex functions were new to me.

While this is going on, visit your camera manufacturers website. They will have a lot of training material available. Usually in short video clips.

If your manual is just too confusing there are third party books on a lot of camera models. I have not read any of these but I have occasionally heard comments from people who seemed to find them useful.

And you can just get on Amazon and search for your camera model in books or videos.

Shoot, shoot and shoot some more

While all this is going on, keep on shooting. The more the better, and look at your work after you have a shooting session. Think about how you could improve your images. Remember once you have a digital camera it costs you nothing to take photos. I estimate that it took me 1500 shots or more before I thought that I had a basic grasp of camera operation.

During this step I think you are better off learning about your camera than you would be trying to learn shooting modes. However using jpeg modes on your camera teaches you nothing. What does the camera do exactly when you put it in night mode or sports mode? Most likely you won’t have any idea, and how can you learn from that?

So I suggest putting your camera in program mode, your camera may call it P mode. That is something for you to check in your manual. The camera will also probably select focus settings for you. Leave the other settings at default settings unless you have a reason to change them.

Set the file size to large jpeg and you may want to think about using the raw+jpeg file option if your camera supports that. This might be especially important if you are shooting some event that is important to you. The camera will then save two copies of each image file. One as a large jpeg and one as a raw file. Don’t worry about the raw files now, but later when you learn how to post process your images, you could go back and reprocess those shots. So just save those files for the time being. For now just use the jpeg files to email or get prints made.

The camera will probably set the metering mode to evaluative which is fine at this stage. Concentrate on learning to frame shots and understanding your camera.

OK are we ready to move on to the next step? That will be in the next post.

Buying Compact Flash Cards

2009-04-02T00:35:11Z

Big Sur Naval Station

Buying Compact Flash Cards

Just a short post.

This post will only apply to those of you who use cameras with Compact Flash (CF) cards. Almost all point and shoots have switched over to Secure Digital (SD) type cards but most DSLRs still use the higher quality CF cards. Canon and Nikon have turned to the dark side with their XTi and up Canon models (the xxxD series) and the D80 and up (Dxx series) for Nikon. They use the slower SD cards.

Over the years I have always been of the opinion that people have been wasting their money by buying cards that are too fast. Camera bodies only operate at some maximum speed and buying cards that work at higher speeds is just wasted money. Some people argue that the higher speeds are useful when downloading the cards from the card reader to the computer. But that is only true if your card reader and computer both support the higher speeds. I just let the download happen in the background while I read email or do something else so I have never been in all that much of a hurry anyway.

In the Canon 30D and Nikon D70 days camera bodies only ran at 8 MB/sec or so and almost any reasonably fast CF card was faster than that. So it made no sense whatsoever to spend 3 times as much on the the Super Ultra Fast version when the plain old fast version was fine. Camera body speeds have crept up until the 40D/D90 are in the 11-13 MB/sec range so buying 133X or 266X cards was justified. Still a lot cheaper than the top level cards which work at 40 MB/sec or faster.

Also buying premium brands never made a lot of sense either. If you go to NewEgg and check out the buyer reviews, and there are a fairly large number of reviews, and those reviews are good then so far as I can see you are safe buying the card. Now does that guarantee that your card will never fail, of course not. But I have heard of all sorts of brands failing including SanDisk and Lexar brands. I have personally bought and still have cards from Transcend, PNY, Kingston and RiData and have never had one card fail. One additional worry you have with buying SanDisk cards is the flood of counterfeit SanDisk cards on the market. They do have a very high failure rate. So only buy SanDisk cards from a major safe vendor.

However with the advent of video capable DSLR cameras manufacturers have really jumped camera write speed up. This can be seen on any of the Canon bodies with the Digic 4 processor ( 5D Mk2 and 50D) and in the Nikon D300/D700 bodies. The write speeds are now in the 30-35 MB/sec range and you are now wise to buy a top grade card. The newest Canon Ti has video capability but uses a SD card which would seem to be problematic. Of course the Nikon D90 does the same.

Ron Gailbraith has updated his database of camera and card speeds and it is well worth browsing through for information about this subject. He has a good write up on CF card technology as well as the difference in CF and SD cards. CF cards have built in electronics to speed up data transfer rates that SD cards lack.

Tom’s Hardware has a recent review of the upper end cards that show that the Transcend cards are just as fast effectively as the pricey SanDisk cards. A SanDisk Extreme III 8GB card is $105 from Amazon while the Transcend TS8GCF300 8GB 300x is a little cheaper at $82. The 266X Transcend TS8GCF266 which is rated at 40GB/sec is only $68 from NewEgg.com. Those prices are only true for the day I post this of course.

This could obviously be a major expense if you are upgrading from one of the older model cameras and have a bag full of older cards like I do. I suspect that you might do just fine with 266X cards unless you are doing video captures. Then you probably do want the max speed.

So if you have a pre-Digic 4 camera from Canon then you should be just fine using 133X cards. Even the speed demon Canon 1Ds MkIII only writes at 20 MB/sec and the 1D MkIII is 15 MB/sec. The same is true for older Nikons the D70 and so on. If you have newer models then you may need to buy at least some faster cards for video capture.

If you want maximum transfer speed from the card reader to the computer then you need to be sure that your card reader is UDMA compliant.

Lens Types

2009-03-29T19:49:59Z

Treeline at 200 mm

New Users Corner

Lens types and terms

There are a confusing number of different lens types available for DSLR cameras along with equally confusing terminology.

Zoom lenses
Ultra-zoom lenses
Prime lenses
Macro Lenses
Focal Length and aps-c
Wide Angle lenses
Ultra Wide Angle lenses
Telephoto lenses
Oddball lenses

Zoom lenses

If you come from the point and shoot camera world then you are familiar with zoom lenses. They are lenses that have a variable focal length range. The kit lens that comes with most DSLR bodies is always a zoom. Often a 18mm to 55mm.

Zooms are versatile lenses and are relative new comers on the photography scene. Twenty five years ago they were rare and expensive. Computer lens design software combined with computer controlled lens grinding equipment has made them ubiquitous. These lenses in the less expensive versions tend to be on the slow side.

Things to watch out for are: does the lens change length when it is zoomed. Lenses with internal focusing do not and are more desirable than the ones which do change length. Does the front of the lens rotate when the lens is focused or the focal length is changed? This can cause problems with certain filters since some, like polarizing filters, need a a certain position to work as you want them to do. That means you have to readjust the filter everytime you focus.

Prime Lenses

Treeline at 50mm

Before there were zooms there were primes. These are lenses with a single fixed focal length. Some people prefer to called these fixed focal length lenses rather than primes.

Prime lenses are often faster, meaning they let more light into the camera. They can be lighter weight than zooms. And they are usually considered to be optically superior in many cases. The sharpest lenses are are almost always primes. This is because the lens design is simplified for a prime lens over a zoom lens which has to physically move lens elements around in the lens barrel as the focal length is changed.

Of course with a prime lens you have to use the two footed zoom, you will need to move closer and further away from the subject with your feet instead of twisting the zoom ring.

Some extremely fast primes are made like the Canon f/1.2 lenses in 50m and 85mm. Canon has even made a 50mm f/1.0 lens. These ultrafast lenses are specialist lenses and tend not to be as sharp as normally fast versions. That f/1.0 lens is four stops faster than a kit lens at f/4 which means that if you shot at 1/25th of a second with the f/4 lens you could have shot the same scene at 1/500th of second with the f/1.0 lens or 1/250th of a second with a f/1.2 lens.

The longest telephoto lenses also are primes. Canon has made a 1200mm f/5.6 lens and the rumor is that they would still make one if someone was willing to pay for it. They do have a 800mm f/5.6 lens currently available as does Sigma. Sigma also has some very long telephoto zoom lenses.

Macro lenses

Macro lenses are one area where you cannot believe what you are told by the manufacturers. Strictly speaking a macro lens is a lens which which can focus down to 1:1. That means the image size on the camera sensor is the exact same size as the real object. Something one centimeter wide at 1:1 will create a one centimeter wide image on the camera sensor.

However manufacturers advertise some of their zoom lenses as being macro lenses. This is always a pure and simple lie. All macro true macro lenses are prime lenses, although I suppose a manufacturer could design a zoom macro, none do so. Besides focusing very closely macro lenses are very sharp as a rule. They are also commonly used as portrait lenses. Primes are commonly made at a f/2.8 aperture which means they are moderately fast lenses.

Owning a macro lens will open a whole new world to you as you can zoom in on bugs, slugs and flowers along with anything else that you fancy shooting. A macro around 100mm in focal length is often recommended as a good starting prime since it will let you get a little further away from the subject than a 50 or 60mm lens will and is lighter and cheaper than the 150mm or 180mm lenses.

Lens Focal Length

What makes a lens a wide angle or a telephoto? The 35mm camera industry has adopted the 50mm lens as the normal or standard lens. There are all sorts of mythology attached to how this came about but the truth of the matter seems to be that Oskar Barnack the designer of the Leica 35mm camera back in the 1930′s seems to have settled on the 50mm as lens on that could be produced for a good price with excellent optical properties.

The normal focal length range for a 35mm format camera extends from about 45mm to 55mm and lenses with less than those focal lengths are known as wide angle lenses. And lenses with greater than those focal lengths are known as telephoto lenses.

Complicating the situation for DSLR cameras is the fact that most DSLR bodies use some form of the aps-c sensor size rather than a full frame 35mm sensor. These are commonly called cropped frame sensors. Olympus uses another even smaller sensor called the four thirds sensor.

Effectively what this means for owners of aps-c cameras is that they need to multiply the stated focal legth of their camera lens by a crop factor to get the effective focal length. Now this doesn’t explain what the real situation is but for everyday use you can think of it that way. So for Canon cameras you would multiply by 1.6 which would mean that a 50mm lens is actually a 80mm lens. No longer a normal lens but now a short telephoto. Nikon uses a 1.5 crop factor making the 50mm lens an effective 75mm and Olympus uses 2X making a 50mm effectively a 100mm lens.

Perhaps a better way to think of the situation is this, imagine you take a photo with a 50mm lens on a full frame camera and print out a 8X12 inch print from the image. If you take a pair of scissors and cut out the center 62.5 percent of the print that would be what the Canon aps-c sensor sees and what you would get in your image file. The percentages for Nikon’s and Olympus’s would vary but the situation is the same. You can see from this where the term crop sensor comes from.

Now this as a practical matter has some consequences for you. Lenses tend to be the sharpest and have the least amount of distortion in the center of the frame. Crop sensors only use that central part of the image and thus make some marginal lenses work better than they would on full frame sensors. That is good. Since you effectively multiply the focal length that 300mm lens is now a 420mm lens. That is good. But what you win on the telephoto end you lose on the wide angle end. That 30mm wide angle is now a 48mm normal lens.

The normal lenses are considered to have about a 45 degree Field of View (FOV) which is the angle that they ‘see’. If you look at that image I placed in the prime lens section, it was taken with a Sigma 50mm f/2.8 Macro lens. Since that lens is effectively a 80mm lens is has a 25 degree or so FOV. Look at the trees in the center of the skyline, now look at the shot on the top of the post taken with a Canon 70-200mm f/4L IS set at 200mm and the same trees are much larger, the lens FOV is smaller, efectively about 7 degrees. The shot down in the ultra wide section was shot at 11mm with a Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8 lens. It has an effective FOV of 100 degrees and the trees are just visible but you get to see a much wider view of the grass flats.

Wide Angle lenses

Traditionally wide angle lenses ran from 40mm down to 28mm or so. With a rare and expensive 24mm occasionally seen. With the crop sensor effect this means that you need a range of 25mm to 16mm or so to give you the same effective (FOV). And on the Olympus you need 20mm to 14mm.

Wide angle lenses let you take a wider shot of the scene. You can squeeze more people in on a group photo and you can get a wider panorama view of landscapes. Kit lenses (18mm to 55mm) cover a wide angle to short telephoto range.

Ultra Wide Angle Lenses

Treeline at 11mm

Because of the crop sensor effect a lens that would be considered to be very wide angle on a full frame camera, is not so on a crop sensor body. To get the same FOV on those bodies you need a very wide angle lens, and these are called ultra wide angles. They generally range from 10 to 12mm at their widest end and go up into the 22mm range at the top. A 10mm lens on a crop sensor body give the same FOV as a 16mm on a full frame body.

The Canon system has lenses that are designated as EF-S mount and those lenses protrude into the mirror box of the camera at the back end. The smaller aps-c mirrors clear that end of the lens when the camera shutter fires, but the larger mirror on a full frame body would slam into the lens with disastrous effects. Thus those lenses are designed not to fit on full frame bodies. Lenses with the EF mount fit on all Canon bodies and most canon lenses are EF mount.

Other systems, so far as I know, don’t have this problem. But they still have lenses that are designated for aps-c use only. The lenses will physically work on full frame bodies but they are optically designed for aps-c sized sensors and will not illuminate the full sized sensor. This is called vignetting. The Tokina lens I used above only works at 15-16mm on full frame bodies for example.

These ultrawide angle lenses will produce distortion. This not because the lens is defective it is because you are squashing the very wide angle image onto a flat surface. The distortion can be dealt with in editing software like Photoshop if it bothers you. I rarely bother since I just accept it as a part of the ultra wide lens use.

You can minimize distortion by good camera technique. You need to hold the lens parallel to the ground. Tilting it up or down will increase the perceived distortion.

Fisheye lenses.

The lenses we have been talking about so far in the wide angle category are rectilinear lenses. That is they produce a image that fills the sensor from edge to edge and while they are distorted the distortion is not extreme. There is another type of wide angle lens called a Fisheye that makes no attempt to minimize distortion. They produce round image circles with a LOT of distortion. Julie K has a gallery with some of these shots that you can look at.

Peleng lenses are a cheap way into the fisheye world. I believe they only work in manual mode which probably isn’t a major problem with this type of lens. And you may need an adapter to use it on your camera. Sigma, Canon and Nikon all make higher quality fisheyes.

I’ve never felt attracted to this type of lens and have never owned one. These lenses may not produce a full circle image on aps-c sensors. And there is software called defishing software that attempts to convert the images into rectilinear form.

Telephoto Lenses

Telephoto lenses have focal lengths greater than the normal lens. The provide narrower FOV, all the way down to 2 degrees or so with a 800mm lenses on an aps-c sensor.

Short telephotos are popular as portrait lenses since they tend to have a pleasing perspective. Look at Ken Rockwells site linked above for some of his ideas on the subject.

Longer telephotos are needed for nature and critter photography. Many people think you need at least a 300mm lens for most bird photography and many people use 400mm lenses. Lens prices for prime telephotos tends to skyrocket at the 300-400mm range. A very high quality 300mm f/4L IS lenses runs around $1200 at this time. The 400mm f/5.6 is about the same but doesn’t have IS and is slower too. But the 500mm f/4L IS is $5800. So for most people a 300 or 400mm will be the absolute end of their lens buying possibilities.

Zoom telephotos exist in three types for Canon lenses. There are the cheap low quality lenses sold to new users in the 70-300mm range. These junk consumer grade lenses are slow and have really poor optical quality. I think they lead many new users to give up in frustration since they will blame their inability to duplicate high quality images on their lack of skills when a large part of the problem is the lens that they are using.

There is a perennial argument in photography circles over what is the most important factor in making excellent images. Some people claim that a highly skilled photographer can take great shots using poor equipment. That may be true, tho I have my doubts, but the truth of the matter is that most photographers are not at that level of skill. On the other hand buying expensive gear will not help you make great images if you lack the skills to use it. I know of people who have sunk ten of thousands of dollars into gear and still make mediocre photos.

So in my opinion having equipment that is suited to your skill level is important. Poor equipment matched with not so great skills is going to lead to poor photography.

Canon has an intermediate level of lenses. The Canon 70-300mm f4-5.6 IS lens is a pretty good lens with IS. It runs about $550. For slightly more you can get the very excellent Canon 70-200mm f/4L lens without IS but it is a very sharp lens with very good autofocus speed. It is a good way to get started with L glass. And there is a little known but good quality lens available if you can find a used copy. The Canon 100-300mm f/4.5-5.6 EF lens. Not the macro version which is firmly in the junk category. You can often pick up one of these gems for $250 or so from Keh.com. It is sharp and has good autofocus speed. The one defect is that the lens runs out to its longest length when allowed to hang down. A minor irritation.

Again I don’t know enough about Nikon lenses to make recommendations. They have at least two grades of lenses, the consumer grade junk and the excellent top grade. I don’t know if they have a mid grade range of lenses.

Lens Speed

Lens speed is related to the widest aperture of the lens. The lower that number the more light it allows to hit the camera sensor. And that means that you can use it in darker environments. Indoors for example without flash use.

Your kit lens will be a slow lens with an aperture range in the f/3.5-5.6 range. That makes these lenses very hard to use in low light. Happily both Canon and Nikon sell excellent low price 50mm f/1.8 lenses. The Canon runs around $85 and I think the Nikon is slightly more. These lenses are called plastic fantasticks since they have cheap plastic construction but good optics. These lenses will let you do low light photography.

Canon makes a whole series of fast prime lenses starting with the 50mm f/1.8. There is also a better quality 50mm f/1.4. There series continues with the 85mm f/1.8, 100mm f/2, 135mm f/2 and 200mm f/2.8 lenses. The prices start around $300 and get up to $600 when you get to the 200mm lens. These are not L lenses but they have very sharp optics and fast autofocus. And of course they are all ‘fast’ lenses meaning they have a wide maximum aperture. If you can break your reliance on zoom lenses these are an excellent way to expand your lens collection.

Oddball Lenses

Lens manufacturers make all sorts of odd special use lenses. Some portrait photographer like a soft look so Canon makes a 135mm soft focus lens. I’m not sure how much value it has in the era of Photoshop.

There are lenses that produce intentionally distorted images, LensBaby. They make no sense to me but someone is buying them.

There are lenses with swing and tilt adjustments for architectural and product shooters. The Canon TS-E series. These lenses are so important to some photographers that they have switched camera systems so they can use them. Nikon finally came out with one in 2008.

And I’m sure you can find other oddball lenses if you look hard enough.

Summing Up

Well so much for my 1000 word goal, this post is almost 3000 words. A lot of the opinions above are my opinions and there are people who will not agree with them. They can get their own blog I guess, heh. Next up in the New User Corner will be a post on what new users should do next once they have that DSLR in their hands.

I’m planning a post of CF card speed in between tho.

Buying lenses

2009-03-22T13:32:49Z

Killdeer

The New User Corner

Buying a lens

Buying a lens is a serious project, or at least it should be. Camera bodies come and they go after a few years. But a good lens will outlast many bodies. There are plenty of photographers who are still using lenses on their new DSLR that they may have bought back in the 1990′s or even earlier for a film SLR. Thus you should buy the best lens that you can fit into your budget. Waiting until you save money to get a better lens is often better than buying a cheaper low quality lens now.

However there is an active market for used lenses so you can probably sell a less worthy lens for a good fraction of what you originally paid for it. I unwisely bought a Canon 55-200mm lens when I bought my first DSLR ( a Canon 350D and that lens is not the current version with IS). I think I paid a bit over $200 for it and was able to sell it a couple years later for $155 on eBay. So you can correct early lens buying mistakes without a lot of pain.

What do I look at when buying a new lens?

Focal Length
Lens optical quality
Maximum aperture
Autofocus speed
Build quality
Other factors like weight, IS, and noise. And always price.

Focal length

What usually prompts me to start thinking about buying a new lens is when I notice a gap in my lens collection. Or if I feel that one of my current lenses has some blemish on its desirability in my eyes. My last lens purchase was to replace a current lens which I felt had too much flare and ugly hard to edit out flare at that. But I would think that focal length or focal length range in the case of a zoom, would be the most common reason that people decide that they need a new lens.

I have heard from some people who think that they must have a lens that covers every possible millimeter of range from the ultrawide to the long telephoto. I don’t really think that’s true. Right now I have an ultrawide 11-16mm Tokina and the next lens up in my collection is a 50mm prime. I don’t feel any burning desire to cover that gap from 16mm to 50mm. That is what feet are for. You can walk nearer or farther away from a subject and cover the gap without the expense of adding another lens to carry around with you, which will make your camera bag that much heavier too.

Just a note I am going to cover the various lens focal ranges in another post.

Once you have decided on a focal length range it is time to start searching the review sites. Some of the ones I use frequently are:

Fred Miranda’s reviews are all user reviews and as such you have to read them in bulk and not accept any one review as being too important. I always assume that someone who is angry about some product is more likely to get online and write a nasty review than someone who is satisfied is likely to get online and write a favorable review. But that being said, if I see a high number of nasty comments I tend to take them seriously. Fred Miranda seems to have an undeserved bad reputation among Nikon users.

Photodo and Photozone reviews are more technical and are based on actual objective testing. So they will give you an idea of the quality of the lens. Digital Picture is oriented towards the Canon equipment line and has spotty coverage. There are a number of other test sites and using google with the lenses model designation will find more reviews. I also check out the manufacturer’s sites:

I guess a word or two about lens manufacturers is called for here. You first source for lenses is your camera manufacturer. Canon, Nikon, Sony, Pentax, Olympus and others. But third party manufacturers have cracked the camera manufacturer’s codes and produce good lenses. I feel that with the highest grades of lenses from Canon and Nikon those companies are still producing the best lenses. That would be the Canon L grade lenses and the equivalent Nikons. I do not know enough about the other camera manufacturers to comment on their lens quality.

Many of the lens manufacturers provide MTF diagrams on their lenses and look at those can help you judge the lens quality. This is a semi-technical undertaking and the charts were produced by the lens manufacturers so have to be taken with that in mind. The not so technical among us may prefer to skip MTF charts.

Below the top grade lines of lenses the third party companies are in the race with Canon and Nikon producing some very good glass and just like Canon and Nikon producing some junk grade lenses too. You absolutely need to carefully research the lenses you are thinking about buying. No matter who makes them. They all make bad glass and you don’t want to be stuck with one of those.

The third party companies do have a certain reputation. Sigma has been historically fairly safe to buy from but recently they have been getting a lot of complaints about the quality control of their telephotos. One lens rental company has stopped carrying Sigma glass because of the high level of complaints. This situation may have already turned itself around. Tamron has had a reputation of having poor quality control in the past but may be getting better. Tokina has had the reputation of producing ‘built like a tank’ quality lenses but with less than stellar image quality. They still make well built glass but have produced a number of excellent high quality lenses recently. They have the smallest number of models in their inventory however.

Those comments are just based on my subjective observations and may or may not be true at any particular time. You should form your own opinions. And they are not meant to discourage you from buying from third party manufacturers. I own lenses from Canon, Sigma and Tokina and very much like the ones I have. Tamron just never floated to the top when I was done making my evaluations but they do seem to make some nice consumer grade zooms. I just haven’t been interested in those lens ranges.

All of the companies do have a reputation of taking lenses back and recalibrating them or replacing them fairly promptly. But this should make you want to buy from a vendor with the highest reputation so you’ll have someone else to complain to, if you have a problem.

You can also seek advice from Yahoo groups if you are a member of a list there or from local camera clubs if you are lucky enough to have one near you. The least useful source of information is a camera store or big box store. The salesmen get higher bonuses for selling certain products and are thus likely to push those on unwary buyers. You may be lucky and have a camera salesmen, that you know, who is highly ethical.

Magazines also publish reviews but these have to be read carefully. The magazines live by selling advert space and they are not going to enrage a big advertiser by writing an overtly bad review. But if you read the reviews with this in mind they often drop lots of hints. Phrases like the ‘best that can be expected of a lens in this class‘. Faint praise in other words means it is a piece of junk, stay away from it.

Lens optical quality.

Lens quality and cost are somewhat related. You can expect that a better quality lens will cost more since higher quality and more expensive materials are used to make it. Exotic glasses and difficult to grind lens curves are also more likely to be used. Take a look at this video to see what goes into making a $6400 lens. There are several other videos in the set.

The same review sites above will also give you an idea of the lens quality. Lens contrast is also an important part of the optical quality. Some very expensive lenses have the reputation of producing low contrast images. Lenses can also add slight color casts. Some have a reputation of producing ‘warm’ images for example.

Maximum aperture.

The larger (which actually means the smaller the number is) maximum aperture of the lens is also tied to its price. Faster glass costs more and the lens will be heavier. The Canon 70-200mm f/4L lens costs about $600 while the f/2.8L faster version costs $1200. One extra stop doubles the cost of that lens. It also changes the weight from 1.56 pounds to 2.8 pounds.

Better lenses also have a fixed aperture, those lenses above are always f/4 or f/2.8 no matter what their zoom position is. Cheaper lenses will have variable apertures which generally get slower as the lens is zoomed out. Consumer grade telephotos will often start at f/4 at their low end and as you zoom the lens out they will change aperture up to f/5.6. This makes them more difficult to use in low light situations.

Another linked feature is that better lenses usually have non-rotating elements which means that a filter used on the lens will not rotate when you focus the lens. Cheaper lenses will sometime have rotating elements which means that filter will move and you will have to reset it every time you focus. That is important if you use polarizing or special effect filters.

Autofocus speed.

Autofocus speed is how fast a lens focuses. If you are trying to track a flying bird or a running child you want fast autofocus speed. Again better grade lenses often but not always have faster autofocus speed. Some very expensive lenses are notoriously slow to focus and if that is important to you, then check it out carefully. Macro lenses are one class of lenses which often are not quick to focus but most people feel that is less important in that type of lens.

Build Quality.

Like other features this generally tracks price. Some manufacturers have a better reputation, at least in their better grade of lenses. Canon, Nikon and Tokina make sturdy lenses. But it can vary from model to model so check out the one you are interested in. Sometimes you just accept a cheap build quality to get a good optical lens and a low price. The Canon and Nikon 50mm f/1.8 lenses are examples of this. Plastic construction, good optics, and very low prices make these good buys.

Other factors.

There are a lot of other factors that may influence your decision. Is the lens really noisy, some are. Noisy in this case means loud. Does it have IS (if your camera uses lens based IS). I don’t think IS is all that important in shorter lenses but once you get to 200mm and beyond it gets to be very important. The weight of a lens can be an issue. That Canon 70-200 mm f/2.8 IS version weighs 3.5 pounds. Add that to the Canon 5D mk2 body which weighs 2 pounds and you are holding the equivalent of a 5 pound bag of potatoes up to your eye and hanging it from your neck all day.

How the lens focus and zoom rings work can be an issue. Some lenses un-spool and run out to their longest focal length when they hang down. That can be irritating.

And of course price can be very important. No matter how much that Canon 600mm f/4L seems to be exactly what you need, that $6400 price may keep you (and me) from getting one.

Summing up.

So buying a lens can be a long process. But it is one I usually enjoy. It gives me an excuse to search all of those sites. I usually start out with a general idea what I’m looking for, a ultrawide zoom or a long telephoto for example and narrow the list down to 3 or 4 possibilities. Then I use the review sites to focus in on one or two models. I usually ask on a Canon list or two to get thoughts from people I know.

All this takes months for me. I often make a decision but have to start saving up to get what I want. But it is all worth the effort if you get a great lens that you will still be using 10 years from now.

Stacking for Star Trails

2009-03-20T01:51:11Z

Lake Eaton star trails

How to make star trails

There are a couple of different ways to photograph the night sky with stars. If you shoot a reasonably short exposure then you get stars that are pin points. The exposures have to be fairly short because of the earth’s rotation. More than 30 seconds or so will start to draw the stars out into ‘trails’. You can get a longer exposure but you will have to mount the camera on some sort of drive that will rotate the camera in sync with the sky’s movement. You can make a mount to do this called the barn door mount out of a couple of boards, a hinge and a screw.

Google “barn door star photo”

and you will find many references and instructions for making one of these.

You can make stunning photos with that technique. Look at this one by John Moran

But our subject for this post is making star trails not avoiding them. To make the shot above I took 6 shots, each with 180 second exposures. And combine them using a technique called stacking.

A comment about that shot. I do not claim it is one of my best shots but it is the only successful star trail shot I have so far, so there it is. The red in the sky was from the urban lights from the City of Ocala about 15 or 20 miles away. The red comes from all the forest fires in the area, from the smoke not the flames which were 7 miles behind me. That area across the lake did catch on fire the next afternoon however, causing us to beat a quick retreat before they closed the highway out. Click on the shot for a larger version.

I could have made a single 18 minute exposure rather than 6–3 minute exposures. But the bane of night shooting is sensor noise and the longer the sensor is run the hotter it gets. By dividing the shot up into shorter intervals you can reduce the heating problem.

Now this shot was taken to the north but not quite far enough, the pole star is just off frame to the right. But getting a shot due north will give you concentric trails like this by Harold Davis. You can tell he has had a lot more practice than I have. Unless you live down near Key West or Brownville Texas in the US you won’t get the same effect by shooting south since the southern axis is below the horizon.

The stuttered dotted effect of the shot above was because I let a minute of so go by in between shots to demonstrate the effect of stacking. If you shoot them closer together you will get a continuous trail.

How I did the Stacking

I have Photoshop CS4 extended which includes stacking modes. Standard CS4 does not, CS3 extended does. The version Adobe sells as the educational/academic version is the extended version. So that being said I suspect that most of you will not be able to follow this method, but there are other ways. So I:

Shot the images and loaded them into Adobe Bridge.
In Bridge I compiled them into a stack by selecting them all and right clicking and selecting group as stack.
You can then open tools–>photoshop–>open in photoshop layers
Or you can download Russell Brown’s scripts which will add a Dr Brown’s Services menu item under tools and one of those services is Dr Brown’s Stack-o-matic. He seems to be having a problem with the scripts but they will show up on this page. He has CS3 and CS4 versions. He has a lot of good Photoshop material on that page too and the scripts do more than stacking. Select maximum mode from his script.
Anyway, without Dr Brown’s help, go into CS4(or 3) and select all the layers then go to Edit->Auto blend layers. You may need to auto align the layers first but do not unless you have to do so.
Then Layers–>smart objects–> convert to smart objects
Finally the Stack Modes menu item will be visible on the layers menu, select maximum mode there. There are a lot of modes and you can play with them.
If you have a lot of layers in the stack be prepared for long waits as photoshop does the work.

You don’t have PS Extended.

In that case load the shots into layers in Photoshop as above then try to combine them using blend modes and opacity. Screen or lighten mode are likely to work the best and the opacities should probably be 30 percent or so. But you will have to experiment yourself or hit Google.

Other Stacking Software

There are a lot of non-photoshop ways of doing the stacking:

Image Stacker (look at Max Lyon’s excellent panoramas when you are there)
DeepSky Stacker
Registax
CombineZ

You are on you’re own with these since I haven’t used them. If you have a favorite let me know and I’ll add it to the list. I don’t know of any other photo editing software that does stacking but some may do so.

I’m probably going to step away from night shots for awhile and do some posts for new camera users.

Quick Post Processing example

2009-03-15T20:23:09Z

Lake Eaton at Night-from the camera

A quick look at editing

Let’s take a quick look at editing. I say quick because I haven’t figured out a way to squeeze this into a reasonable length post if I go into great detail and add screen captures to show the steps in Photoshop. If there is any interest in that I’ll give it a try.

Look at the image above, it was taken at Lake Eaton in the Ocala National Forest this last Friday. I took my son there on a scout camp-out. The light on the horizon is the urban area to the west. You can see some stars in the sky but it is basically black. As is the foreground. The whole image is dull and low contrast.

After ten minutes in CS4 we get this below:

After some work in CS4

This is still no great image and it does look a lot better in larger sizes. But now we can see that there are a lot of stars. The sky is midnight blue. The lake water now pops out in a reflection of the orange sky and clouds. There was a large forest fire to the east of this area and that was imparting the smoky orange tones. There is now a boat visible in the right foreground. Let me note that this shot was a 3 minute exposure but the histogram was mostly to the left since I actually shot 6 of these images and intend to stack them. But that is for another post.

How did I get from the first image to the second image?

Edits

In ACR5

Increased fill light to +67
Added contrast and just a little more exposure
Added clarity and vibrance
Decreased the color temperature to 3050
Use 5 adjustment brushes
Reduced noise

In CS4

added a layer copy
used noise ninja on the whole layer

Starting with the ACR (Adobe Camera Raw 5) work. The histogram was pushed to the left (Histogram 1 below), so I pushed the fill light slider far to the right from almost zero to +67. That moved the histogram a little to the right (Histogram 2) and brightened the stars and foreground. This revealed the boat.

Histogram 1

Histogram 2

The only reason I can do this is that this shot was captured as a raw file. That gives you 1.5 to 2 stops of leeway at both ends of the histogram. You can recover both shadow detail, as I did above or recover blown highlights on the right side of the histogram. In a jpeg file this is not possible.

I then add just a little more exposure and some contrast which makes the stars pop out a bit more. I reduced the color temp from 3150 to 3050 to make the sky more blue but this makes everything else bluer too.

Why dod I pick the various adjustments? It is just from my experience working in ACR. I make adjustment until I like the effect. You can always go back on these adjustments if you think you went too far.

All of this can be done in CS3 and ACR4. But in CS4, Adobe added adjustment brushes to ACR5 and you can use these brushes to add local changes in exposure, contrast, clarity and several other adjustments to the image by brushing them in. I used this feature five times to brush in more contrast and less exposure to the sky. More orange and adjusted the exposure on the lake with another brush. And used a third brush to do similar adjustments to the skyline and clouds just over the trees. A last couple of adjustment brushes dimmed the foreground weeds and lightened the boat.

All of this added a lot of noise so I used the noise reduction feature in ACR to reduce this. And then moved to CS4.

All I did in CS4 was do a single run with Noise Ninja to reduce the noise further. And I added a copyright watermark.

Why work in ACR?

Everything I did in ACR could be done a different way in CS4 or CS3 (and probably earlier versions of Photoshop). The adjustment brushes could be duplicated by selecting the area and creating a mask. You could then use dodge/burn, curves and saturation to recreate the effects. But by working in ACR you are working in the raw linear data and changes are easily reversible and do not introduce as much image damage.

You could also duplicate this in other editing software. The ability to use layers and masks would make that easier.

So I wanted to give people a brief look at what I do in editing. I probably could have picked a better sample image to work on. I have no hesitation to do any sort of editing that I think improves the image.I never claim that my work is a representation of the scene as it naturally appeared. The sky was black, the only star really visible was Venus and the boat was dimly visible to my eyes. But it is a representation of my ‘artistic’ vision of what I want to create.

Urban Night Shooting

2009-03-14T21:32:03Z

Color balanced lighting

Urban and Industrial Night Photography

Shooting in Urban and Industrial sites poses it’s own set of problems.

Safety issues
Color Balance
Access

Safety

The safety issues were discussed in the first post of this series for urban areas. If you are shooting in industrial areas, like the one above or abandoned sites, then those have their own sets of problems. Industrial areas will have high temperatures, steam, electrical dangers, fall hazards, moving equipment and traffic problems. You should never be in these areas unless you are familiar with the dangers, have permission to be there or are escorted.

Shooting at abandoned sites is popular but the dangers there can be real. These sites are not maintained and there can be uncovered pits, fall hazards and the possibility of a wall collapsing and falling on you. There can be enraged security guards and maybe guard dogs to deal with too. You don’t want to end your shooting adventure in a hospital or jail. I would be sure to have someone along with you for backup in case there is a problem.

You can also run into urban outdoorsmen living on these sites who may not welcome the intrusion.

Equipment and Exposures

The equipment you’ll need for this type of shooting is less than for dark environment shots.

Tripod
Remote release
Flashlight with gels
Lens Cloth

The equipment is discussed in this post

Exposure durations will most of the time be less than dark areas with the possible exception of abandoned sites. They can be very dark. Just take a guess and watch your histogram. Adjust exposures up or down based on the histogram peak. Too far to the left, add shutter time and if too far to the right then reduce shutter time. ISO should be low, 100 or 200 and try a mid range f/stop like 5.6 or 6.3 to start.

Color Balance Problems

Take a look at the shot above. This site shows at least 5 different types of industrial lighting. Starting at the tower on the left I see blue, orange, green, yellow and white lights. Probably several different types of sodium lights, HID and mercury lamps are present.

I just don’t worry too much about color balance unless it is obnoxious. There is no way you could ever correct that shot above. But I actually like the effect in that shot.

But sometimes, if one light type predominates on the scene, you can tweak the color temperature or use curves to correct the color in post processing. And sometimes with yellow or orange lighting you will want to do some correction. I don’t try to guess the color temperature and set it on the camera either. I just use automatic white balance and shoot in raw. I do my adjustments in Photoshop and ACR.

Light Painting

This type of shooting is natural for light painting, you can put a gel over the lens of your flashlight and add light and color to the scene. The traditional way to get gels is to get a sample kit from one of the manufacturers like Rosco. However the manufacturers are not giving out the sample kits like the once did. You can try to request one but it might take some creative form-filling-out skills to succeed.

You can buy gels from B&H and others but you’ll end up with a huge sheet which will be a 100 year supply of that one color. So there is no great solution. Too bad these people don’t sell the sample kits. It would be worth $20 to get a sample kit.

–update– I have a comment that say that B&H does sell the Rosco sample kits for less than $10. I just spent 10 minutes trying to find the sample kit but could not; but Rosco has thousands of different items on sale at B&H so I may have used the wrong search terms.

Finally

Like other night shoots these images will also require a lot of post production. But you can produce wonderful images. So get out and give it a try.