The Online Photographer

Why a 28?

[Con't. from the last post]

...So anyway, speaking of my abnormal fondness for primes over zooms and my healthy but not norm...er, average brain, I think I owe some of you an explanation. Or at least that small subset of you who might be curious. If you're not one of those, you have my permission to skip this.

You might have noticed that I've been gassing on since forever about liking 35mm lenses, yet I bought a 28mm for my latest camera.

What?

Here's the reason.

'Kay. You start out with the 24x36mm sensor and 36 million pixels. The D800 has a "DX Mode," meaning you can set the sensor manually to capture FX (full frame) or DX (APS-C), or you can set it to auto-detect and it will switch to DX mode when you mount a DX lens. In DX mode, the 28mm ƒ/1.8G is a 42mm-equivalent lens. And on the D800, even in DX mode you still have 15MP. Which is plenty for smaller prints—say on 13x19" paper. Which is all I'm planning to make.

Meaning, if I shoot with a 28mm and crop substantially, but not all the way to DX, somewhere in there is the same angle of view as a 35mm lens. Example:

Picture of Lulu from the other day...

...And the whole frame as shot.

I suspect I've cropped this one in even a little past 35mm field-of-view (FoV).

For many years, I printed 35mm "full frame," all the way out to the film edge. (That's what "full frame" used to mean, by the way.) That's why I disliked 93% finders in SLRs...those supposedly showed you the same amount of the picture as a mounted slide, but for full-frame B&W prints what it meant was that there were sometimes surprises on the negative, things you didn't see in the viewfinder when you took the shot.

That's why I liked 100% finders, or as close as I could get.

So for years I learned to frame very tightly and very precisely, to the point that I do it without thinking now.

What I'm trying to do at the moment is trying to retrain myself, to shoot looser, and leave some air around the edges, so I have room to crop later.

Which brings up the question, why not just get a 35mm lens and continue to frame tightly? Well, it's what I've been doing up till now. It's very natural to me and I'm happy with it. But here's why (I know some of you don't need this explained. I'm explaining this in a bit more detail for the benefit of those who might not know it all yet):

This is the distortion correction panel in ACR. Your chosen Editor might look different, but I suspect you have the same controls. And of course when you correct perspective distortion in software, you lose some of the picture...

As shot

With vertical transform (distortion correction) applied.

Note what's going on at the bottom of the frame; when you re-crop to a rectangle, you're going to lose a fair amount on the sides of the picture.

Hence, the need to back off, shoot looser, and leave more air. In the old days, I couldn't crop (that is, if I wanted to print full frame, to the blackline). Now, I have to crop—sometimes (when I want to use distortion correction in post). Can I re-learn to shoot differently? I don't know.

Old dogs, etc.
The problem is that when I put the 28mm on the camera, I do exactly what I've always done: frame tightly, all the way out to the edges. Only with a somewhat wider FoV.

So far, I remember to step back and leave cropping room sometimes; but old habits are hard to break, and I'd say that at best I've been able to remember to "shoot looser" about half the time. So far.

Anyway, this is just an experiment. I'm just going to try it for a while, and see how it goes. (I do that a lot, obviously. Always setting myself little "exercises.") Maybe I'll go back to a 35mm and framing tightly, I don't know.

Anyway, that's the reason "why the 28mm."

Mike

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Auntipode: "You decided to shoot with a 28mm and crop in post process rather than tightly frame in camera with a 35mm...therefore you needed your head examined? :-) "

Jonas: "Doesn't the D800 also have a 1.2x mode, 25 Mpix? That brings you to 34mm-e or so."

Mike replies: It does, but that doesn't help. The crop modes actually crop what's recorded, and what I need is the opposite—a bit of excess area in the image.

I actually have no trouble doing it—when I remember to do it. It's just remembering that's tough.

Robert Howell: "Jayzuz Mike, give yerseff a brekk. Complicated ain't nississarally butter. Do'ou have a cell phone handy? A snap shoota'? Take it down a notch or two. Hearts only last so long eh fella? The light will always be there. Sleep Data, sleep. Go to Paris."

Mike replies: You misspelled...oh, never mind.

Joe: "I've been going through the same process, also with the D800. But I don't do much perspective correction. Instead, I had begun to believe that I shoot too tight in general. I started to look at the images I was bringing home and wishing I could step back a few paces.

"Back when I started shooting digital and had all those free shutter releases to play with, I always shot wide and cropped. But over time as I tried to print larger and larger, I began to regret losing all those pixels, and I eventually got to the point where I framed everything exactly as I wanted it in the final image. I conserved pixels as if they cost money. I never cropped.

"But lately I've decided that I should begin to emulate some favorite photographers who love lots of space around their subjects, and I've been training myself to shoot much wider. And because it's with a D800, I feel much freer to do some cropping when necessary. It's both unsettling and thrilling to shoot in a way that your gut tells you is wrong.

"It's all about training your eye to do these things without thinking, to get to the point where your gut tells you it's right, and I'm starting to get there. I still hesitate to crop in post-production—some part of me is still imagining a 40-inch wide print and how much I'll regret losing those pixels. But I've started to change the way I think.

"It's quite gratifying."

Dogman (partial comment): "When I first started shooting, back in the Jurassic Age, the 35mm frame drove me nuts. Color snapshots coming back from the processor left stuff out of the edges of the picture, slide mounts cropped out part of the photo and I had to file out the negative carrier to get the edges of the frame when I printed my black and whites photos in the darkroom. I was using Nikon F cameras with 100% viewfinders. This all changed whenever I bought a Leica rangefinder and the bright lines were only a best guess of what would actually be in the final photograph. I learned to shoot much looser and crop as necessary in the darkroom. It was a bit liberating to know your composition didn't solely depend on the instant, that your framing could be contemplated and refined later on."

A Tip: Canvas Value in Photoshop

Homage to What the Duck

This is an artwork on display at the AIC. Made me smile because it reminded me of the What the Duck duck. Unfortunately I didn't note the title or artist of the piece. That's probably just as well, because I doubt the artist would be impressed with my "interpretation." Although Aaron Johnson might be.

But I'm just playing. Here's the tip I wanted to pass along: because I'm dealing with tone a lot in practicing my B&W conversions, It's important to have a neutral background for the images. Photoshop CS6's default in Preferences > Interface is a dark gray. I like that for the bars'n'boxes, because it converts the text labels to white which makes them easier for me to read. But then the "canvas" (the background, when the image is smaller than the working space) is too dark.

You've probably heard of "middle gray." That's the name for the gray tone that's supposedly halfway between black and white. It's 18% reflectance, or 50% lightness in Lab Color, or hex triplet #777777, or 128 in hexadecimal notation (confused yet? All just ways of saying "sort of a medium gray"). Middle gray is allegedly what in-camera meters assume an average scene should average to; actually it isn't—they use 12–13%, as Ctein has written about several times. In the Zone System, middle gray is Zone V (Roman numeral five) and it's what everything else is pegged to. 

But middle gray is a bit too dark for me. I prefer about a Zone VI (six). Any darker and I get "fooled" into making my picture a bit too dark, because it pops off that too-dark background even though it's slightly too dark itself. Zone VI is #999999; I prefer a tiny bit lighter, #9e9e9e (158). Of course you can set it for bright fuschia is that's what tickles your corneas.

So how do you reset the value (value = lightness or darkness) of the canvas (the background) in Photoshop? It's easy: Just pick the foreground color you want, then choose the Paint Bucket, then hit Shift-click. Viola, as the second fiddle said.

And now you can tell that I overcorrected for corner vignetting. Bet you didn't notice that in the version up at the top.

Mike

P.S. Anyone want to confirm whether it's done the same way in Lightroom? That I don't know.

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Glenn Gordon: "The sculptor is Constantin Brancusi...I believe the title of the piece is 'The Blonde Negress.'"

Mike replies: Thanks for the tip! It appears that he did many variations, and I'm guessing the "blonde" ones are the gold-colored metal ones. This one is "White Negress II."

At any rate, not a duck.

Dave Polaschek: "Note that in Photoshop you can right-click on the canvas and get a pop-up to choose the value for the canvas fill, too. Even works when right-clicking on the background in the print dialog as of CS6. And if you open multiple views on a single document (View > New Window for {document} ) you can have different canvas colors for each view (and the print dialog will track which one was frontmost when you selected File > Print...) which can be useful when you're proofing for display."

What MY Photography Costs ME (By Mike)

Duelling comments
The following two comments on Ctein's Wednesday post came in one right after the other, in the order they're presented here:

From Thor Finton:

The arguments about the need for high end computer, expensive printer, and up-to-date Photoshop are when I start to get annoyed at these conversations. 

Currently, I'm using a six- or seven-year-old iMac, an Epson Stylus 1400, Lightroom, Photomatic, GraphicConvertor and Photoline. And I'm shooting with a Pentax K-20. I do just fine. Fine as in, I'm happy with my results, and the people I share my work with are impressed. Or maybe they're just polite. My camera, computer and printer are all years old, long out of warranty, but they still work and produce very nice results.

The belief that you need to spend fifteen thousand dollars [note figure—again, neither of these commenters saw each other's comment] on hardware just to get started doing decent digital photography is ridiculous. It sounds like the sort of excuse people make to themselves for why they don't do the thing they'd like to.

Can't afford all that equipment? Buy a Canon G12. $500 new. Or for even less money, a used G-10 or something similar from Nikon. Or any other manufacturer. Take your memory card to your local chain drug store, Target, K-mart or whatever, and get 4x6 prints for twenty cents each.

Then put money aside and when you've learned a little and are ready to step it up, you'll be able to buy a modest system that will get you started.

And then this from robert harshman (about those lower case initials, I always reproduce commenter names the way they're written by the commenter):

I guess it all comes down to just how serious a photographer you are and your image volume. But I can not see any way that digital is cheaper than film when you add in the cost of computers, software and the need for multiple storage with offsite backups and ongoing upgrades to those backups. Add in the need for new lenses, and cameras every two to four years and you kick the cost up by a significant factor.

While we all may quibble about the details, it's clear to me that digital verses film is at least close in cost and not at all cheaper in any real comparison from photographers that are making images on a constant basis. When I upgraded to a D800E I had to upgrade everything that touched it. The camera cost $3,300. The upgrades for the tripod, lenses, computer stuff, software, etc. cost more than $15,000. That's a lot of film.

I always try to present a variety of views in the comments, but it's especially striking when two such opposing comments arrive in close succession—and both happen to name the same figure.

The cost of my photography
I often want to comment on Ctein's posts myself. He's good at bringing up topics that just make you want to chime in, isn't he? Occasionally I do. Mostly I don't, to speak of, because I figure that conversation's between you and him. I'm like any other commenter on Wednesdays.

But if you'll all indulge me, a few comments about what costs me money in photography:

1. Me being an idiot. This is a significant ongoing cost, and it's the most annoyingly wasteful. I buy a lot of stuff I never use. Software ("ooh, cool! I need that!); books I'm just curious about that I really want to see for myself, that I turn out not to like; technical how-to books that I never even open (HTML, XHTML, and CSS by Elizabeth Castro. Sure, Mike); useless accessories that I must have "to complete my outfit"; things I desperately need one minute that I am completely over by the time they arrive via the UPS truck. (The "what was I thinking" purchases.) I always figured it's a good thing I'm not richer, because it only means I'd waste more money.

2. Film cameras. This one's really bad. Digital has cost me big time for film cameras. Ever since digital came along, the price of film cameras has fallen, fallen, fallen, and all of a sudden I can actually have the stuff I used to lust for but could never afford ten, twenty, even thirty years ago. So I buy all kinds of things. And, of course, I never use almost any of it. I mean, did I really need a Nikkormat FT3? No. Will I ever use it? No. Is it pretty? It's so pretty. Here's what I use it for: fantasizing that I'm still a film shooter when actually I'm not*.

3. New digital cameras I don't need, replacing perfectly good, still-nearly-new digital cameras that don't need replacing, that replaced cameras that were perfectly good when they were replaced, et cetera on down the line. At least the K-M 7D broke and couldn't be fixed, making it the one digital camera I actually used until I couldn't use it any more—and I'm grateful that there's at least one.

4. New digital cameras I don't even like enough to use. After Carl visited and showed me his nifty Panasonic G3, I had to buy one. So far, the only thing I've used it for is...loaning it to Carl to use as a backup to his G3 during his epic Kickstarter-funded western-states drive-in theater swing. (And he ended up not using it either, although I'm sure it was good to have a backup just in case.) You might not have the problem I have: I can justify buying a camera because I "might review it." Sure, Mike.**

5. Stuff I lose or break. I have to keep telling myself that the HP B9180 paid for itself many times over. It did. It's just that I feel guilty when I think of it, like I recycled a perfectly good printer because I just got too tired of having problems with it. The next time I buy a scanner, it will be my fourth scanner: scanners will break if I so much as think malign thoughts about them. Which I do often. And I've bought at least a dozen memory cards in my life, but if you offered me $1,000 for every one I could find in the house by tomorrow, I could probably come up with about four. Maybe five.

Film vs. digital
Look, here's the thing about photography. You do what you have to do to get the results you want. If it costs more to do that, you spend the money. If you don't have the money, you get the money—there's an arrangement called "working" in most societies where, if you do more of it, they give you more money.

I could care less about cost per frame, or hit rate, or any of the metrics by which people argue about cost. Just do what you need to do. If you need to bulk-roll your own film cartridges, do it (I did, for years). If you need a better camera or a certain lens, save up, and get it. Does it take you six months, or two years? Who cares? Do it. If you have to carry a big, heavy camera, boo hoo. If you need a smaller, more unobtrusive camera to sneak up on your subjects, then deal with less "image quality." Whatever you need to do, just do it. Don't forget that the absolute best, #1 way to save money on your photography is to give it up altogether.

And here's where I come down on film vs. digital. I like film much better. Much. I like the cameras much more; I greatly prefer the all-B&W workflow—make that "mindflow"; I like film prints better; I much prefer the process with film (darkroom work) to digital (sitting at a computer and wrestling with recalcitrant inkjet printers, most of which were invented in hell to torment us—and don't get me started about the price of ink); and I greatly appreciate being part of the history, heritage, and intellectual traditions of film photography.

But the BIG question, the bottom line, is this: which one do you take better pictures with? To hell with hit rates, or cost accounting, or convenience. I don't give a crap about convenience. You do what you have to do to get the results you want. With which one do you get the results you want?

I get better pictures with digital. It makes me a better photographer. I take pictures all the time with digital that I'm just not good enough to get with film.

The cameras are nasty, I miss B&W, I hate hate hate learning software and I could pretty much kill every digital camera designer who ever lived...how do I hate thee, digital, let me count the ways...but I like pictures, and I like getting better pictures. Digital cameras have three things that help me—high ISO capability, image stabilization, and experimentation with immediate feedback. I'm a better photographer with digital cameras than I am with film cameras. It's a lot less work, yes; it's cheaper, yes; it's easier, yes; it's less fun...etc. Don't care. It helps me be a better photographer. Do care.

That's what matters. If you want to weigh "film vs. digital," just ask yourself which one you do better work with. I have zero quarrel with either answer, and a low tolerance for film ideologues or digital ideologues. Whichever is best for your work is best for you.

Mike

*On the good side here, I haven't yet bought a 5x7 Deardorff. I swear I used to regularly go visit that camera on display at Ferrante Dege in Cambridge. It was just a bit wondrous to me at the time how anyone could want a thing so much and yet not be able to have it.

**Begone, harpy Sigma DP2 Merrill! Fie! Leave my thoughts alone, tiny temptress!

ADDENDUM: Another thing nobody's brought up yet regarding expense is how much you make from your photography. I always figured (outside of the seven years I worked as a photographer full time, of course) that whatever I spent on photography in a year, I also needed to earn from it. Some years I came up short, some years I earned more than I spent, but on balance, all during my amateur career I would guess my hobby's pretty much paid for itself.

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

My current favorite photobook:

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Mark C: "I appreciate and concur with your film vs. digital view. Except I'm not sure digital has made me a better photographer...yet. But I have the feeling (and have had since I converted to digital three years ago!) that just one more upgrade (hardware and software) is all that's required to get me over that hump."

John: "I like film too, but it is a hassle to work with. About the only justification I have is that in 40-odd years when they go through my bits and bobs, a shoebox full of 6x9 negatives of family is likely to be recognised for what it is, while a bag of thumbdrives and memory cards will head straight for the recycling bin. The idea for this came from the discovery of a stack of glass plates my mother-in-law had. Scanned, they turned out to be from her father's childhood and youth in the early 20th century."

Bruce K: "I'd swear you were referring to me in your list of five comments...."

mani: "Classic TOP post. Just one observation: I'm a digital user who discovered film three or so years ago (apart from when I borrowed my dad's OM-1 when I was a teenager), and it's definitely made me a better photographer. The thing with digital is that I never need to really visualize—really compose and vividly imagine—an image before taking a shot. I'd just take the shot. Then I'd either chimp on the spot to see if it worked out, and maybe take a couple alternate shots, or it would be an image I effectively 'chimped' on the computer screen—that is, I'd sort the keepers and trash on one screen or the other. With film I find my mind is far more concentrated and aware of what I'm photographing, because I really need to previsualize each shot for 'photographability' without the crutch of chimping or disposability."

Barry Reid: "One thing that hasn't been mentioned—if you exhibit, it levels the playing field considerably. Venue, prints, nounting, framing, private viewings...I'll have spent considerably more on that than processing or any single bit of gear in 2012, and a significant amount in 2011. All for a very limited return in sales, too."

Zvonimir MW Tosic: "How much our life costs us? Is it worthwhile investing all that we have just to die, sooner or later?

"So what if we want to spend a fortune on photography? So what if it costs 3x as much to develop film as opposed to digital? Or vice versa?  I think we are talking about excuses then, that often obscure that we have a passion of spending time with something we want to explore more. And overall, that's just a drop in the overall 'cost' of life. We earn and spend millions in a lifetime, on us, our children, the society, just to leave all that behind.

"I think Ken Tanaka reflected well; it's only a matter of 'cost' of time, not a matter of 'cost' of money. Our only and true investment in everything is time. If we have little money, we can invest little on photographic gear, but a lot on quality time in enjoying and learning photography. And perhaps the opposite is true too: sometimes we spend lots of money on gear as a compensation for lack of time to explore photography to the depth and extent we'd really want."

Lord High Executioner

By Ctein

In early July, my friend DDB (David Dyer-Bennet) and I went off to Willow River State Park in Wisconsin to do some more of the infamous stochastic photography that some readers have found so controversial (example below) and to just photograph nature and waterfalls in general.

More "frozen" water. I love this stuff.

A successful and most pleasant outing, as usual, although the day was unpleasantly warm. Consequently, there were many folks playing in the water, a custom I still find a little disquieting, since the rapids and falls on West Coast rivers are typically much more rugged and dangerous. It just seems wrong to be splashing about in white water that way. Indeed, a small number of west-coast visitors die from not realizing how vigorously many of the rivers west of the Great Divide run.

Nonetheless, it does appear to be a Midwest "thing" and when we arrived at Willow River Falls, we discovered it was lousy with bathers and sunbathers.

I use that word by choice.

I don't like people in my nature. I am at my most misanthropic when I am out in the countryside, and I am especially so when I am photographing. Strange people are variously distracting, annoying, and an outright intrusion in my photograph endeavors.

I tried working around it, treating all the brightly and scantily-clad hominids as if they were some slightly mobile variety of wildflower, working them into the compositions. For all I know, I even got good results. Here's an example:

The scene at Willow River Falls on a hot summer day, as I found it.

But honestly, this kind of work is not to my taste. Whether or not other people think it's a nice photograph doesn't really matter. I don't like it. I'm interested in the waterfall, not the human intrusions into it. Too bad I left my magic wand (or, in a pinch, the mass disintegrator ray) at home.

But wait! I've got this nice shiny new copy of Photoshop CS6 that I've been breaking in, with its new and improved content-aware tools. I wonder how hard it would be to render all those pesky hominids into, well, nonpersons?

Whaddaya know! It was much easier than I thought it would be. It took me less than 45 minutes of work mostly with the Spot Healing Brush (and just a bit of cloning) to get to this:

The scene at Willow River Falls on a hot summer day, as I wish I had found it.

For those who would like to pixel-peep and see just what a good job the new tools do, I've posted full resolution versions of the before and after pictures on my website.

Instant pristine wilderness. What's not to love?!

Okay, if you're a documentarian, this is unacceptable. And I am, of a sorts. My stated aesthetic and artistic reputation is that I try to make prints that look like the way I see things (when I can see them, anyway). At the least, that what people are seeing in the prints has a reality in front of the camera. My audience trusts that my photographs aren't the result of special effects. A photograph like this last one, below, of the forest fire smoke, is accepted to be real by folks who know me. They do not think I used a tobacco filter on the camera or gradient filter in Photoshop to get that effect. My reputation lies in rendering it beautifully, not in inventing it.

Smoke creates a lovely kind of golden Renaissance light. What makes this photo work for me (and my audience) is that it's a real thing. If it were the creation of filters (hardware or software), it would be much less interesting and appealing.

Consequently, the Willow River Falls photograph is never going to end up on my public website or as part of my portfolio. It would poison that reputation. But that doesn't mean I can't amuse myself.

Even from the documentary point of view, though, it might be acceptable. If one were interested in portraying what the waterfall looked like, with no particular space-time context, I'd see nothing wrong in using the depopulated photograph. It accurately portrays the falls themselves. Just not their relationship to those pesky people.

Ctein

Columnist Ctein depopulates reality on TOP mostly on Wednesdays.

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Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by John Holland: "So, Ctein's hero turns out to be Marvin the Martian, the fellow who wanted to disintegrate the Earth because it obstructed his view of Venus. I clicked on each picture above to open them in separate windows, then alt-tabbed between them. Mesmerizing. People...waterfall. People...waterfall. Watching them disappear was more fun than I would have expected, because for one thing, I'm not a misanthrope—at least, I don't think I am. Second, I actually like to have a human or two (but no more) in outdoor pictures to give a sense of scale, especially if the vista is immense. (But no red shirts!) However, this particular herd of hominids was too dense; your instinct to reach for the Illudium P-36 Space Modulator is entirely understandable."

Featured Comment by Jim: "There's still one small fragment of humanity surviving near the top of the waterfall, towards the right, just next to the large boulder. And there's me thinking I don't pixel-peep. Sheeesh."

Featured Comment by Andre: "With regards to Ctein's fire picture, I recently ran across some really stunning photos of tornadoes and other severe storms from a news site link—stunning, that was, until I found a post by one of the photographers showing the original capture and the amount of manipulation that had been done to get the final result. The finished photo made it look like the photographer had captured some spectacular natural light that illuminated the lower part of the storm while the clouds above were ominously dark. The base Raw file showed the exact opposite —the higher clouds were lit up while the lower reaches were dark. At that point I completely lost interest in the photograph.

"Certainly not everyone feels that photographs need to maintain some amount of documentary accuracy—at least one contributor to the Luminous Landscape site has stated that if all his photo does is capture reality then he doesn't see much point in it. But for me, I've found that I expect a fair amount of realism in a photograph. I'll happily accept dramatized-beyond-reality poses/lighting/colors in other media (paintings, drawings, etc.) but have no tolerance for them in photography. Not sure why my mind draws that hard line, but it does.

"I much prefer photographers with Ctein's philosophy—where what you see is pretty darned close to what they experienced."

Featured Comment by Clayton Jones: "I have no hesitation in using the Spot Healing Brush/Clone Tool to remove unwanted objects. I assume as much freedom to do whatever I want as I would if painting a canvas from scratch. Why should painters be the only ones allowed to create compositions the way they want? I don't invent things that don't exist, but I will modify if needed. Just yesterday I removed a small foreground tree that was ruining an otherwise nice composition. I have removed power lines and beer cans, and once I moved a bird in flight to a better location which made the composition more balanced. It's art, not documentation. I like the falls picture, by the way (without the people). Very nice."

Featured Comment by Rodger Kingston: "For me the people in the original photograph are what keep it from being just another boring nature calendar photo. Usually I find that nature itself trumps photographic representations of it. (I'm an equal opportunity nature photography bigot: more often than not I have the same feeling about Ansel Adams' images, including most of the current Adams exhibition of photographs of water at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass.)"

Kirk's Take: Electronic Viewfinders

Going cold turkey on optical finders: My experiences with EVFs

By Kirk Tuck

(Please understand that this post is meant to be somewhat tongue-in-cheek. Few new tech innovations are without their faults, just as many mature viewing implementations have on their side decades and decades of familiarity.)

You can look high and low in my studio these days but the only optical finders you'll uncover are those in old film cameras or the ones in digital cameras now considered too eccentric to be sold (the Kodak SLR/n and the Kodak DCS 760C). All of my current digital cameras feature electronic viewfinders. I am now working without a safety net. Really.

It all started with that Olympus EP2 and its little friend, the VF-2 finder. A gorgeously designed camera and one that works well within its file size limitations. And a finder that set the standard for resolution and clarity upon its introduction.

But after working with several generations of mirrorless cameras such as the Olympus E-P3, both the Panasonic GH2 and G3, and most recently the Sony a77 and a57, I became completely addicted to the lure of the mini-TV screen in the eyepieces of my cameras. Here is my list of reasons why:

1. Pre-Chimping(tm). Post-shot chimping, as it is done with current, EVF-deprived cameras, is an iterative process. You can really only compose with an OVF (optical viewfinder)—you can’t see any of the other parameters that the camera will impose on your final image until you actually take the image and then review it on the back screen of your camera. How primitive! So you shoot a test frame and then you evaluate it. Then you change a few things and you shoot again to test. It's a process that, in the hands of a rank amateur, can last a long time. Pre-chimping (tm) with an EVF means that the second you bring the camera to your waiting eye you'll see the composition of your intended image and the way the white balance will handle the scene as well as any sort of digital adaptations you've made to your in-camera shooting parameters such as contrast, saturation, sharpness, or art filters. You can correct as you watch and then shoot. No post chimping required. Once you've pre-chimped(tm) I'm not sure you'll ever want to go back.
2. Have you heard about focus peaking? It's not available in your OVF. You'll need to upgrade if you want this feature. Lots of people like to use older, manual focus lenses on their brand new digital cameras and all too likely they end their experiments in sadness and misery because the focusing screens in the OVFs destined for digital work aren't at all optimized for manual focusing. And all of us over forty years of age seem to have a hell of a time achieving critical focus on our older technology cameras unless we put the camera on a tripod and engage (semi) Live View. At that point we can fine focus our fine old glass using a small portion of the image. It's not so much fun, especially if you are in an area with lots of bright light around you, bouncing off the LCD screen on the back of your camera. If you have a camera with an EVF that includes focus peaking, you'll have a nearly foolproof focusing method that works by showing you color outlines of the things you've gotten in sharp focus. With EVF cameras you can use this method while shooting stills or while shooting videos. You can do it handheld, in bright light and without cropping down to 10% of your image. Very nice.
3. How about a super quick check on an image just to make sure your subject didn't blink during your exposure? Sure, with old tech you could take the camera away from your eye, find the review button, shield the screen on the back from glancing and image degrading ambient illumination and then review, or—you could take advantage of new tech by setting a short duration image review that works in your finder while it's still at your eye. Most of the new cameras will show you a preview and you can go back to a live image with a soft touch on the shutter button. How nice. And if you need to review a shot while on the deck of a boat in tropical sunlight or in a giant field of white sand you'll be able to do it with no more effort than bringing the finder up to your eye and looking. Pity the poor OVF owner, chained to their massive Zacuto and Hoodman chimney finders, awkwardly holding their cameras up with one hand while trying to keep their finder-assisting-extra-accessory from sliding around with the other hand....

There are just a few niggling issues that still need to be perfected for EVFs; but we can't be more than half a generation away. At least when we consider the EVFs in the Sony NEX-7 and the Sony Alpha a77 and a65 cameras as current benchmarks. But I would be remiss not to mention them.

1. Since the camera is continuously taking a sensor image and running it through the processing pipeline before feeding it into the eyepiece monitor there is a statistically relevant time lag. You'll need to learn how to "lead" a fast moving subject. It takes practice but it is do-able. I've practiced on my kid when he runs competitively. I'm not perfect at tracking him yet but I wasn't perfect with an OVF-hampered camera either.
2. Since you are getting a video feed you'll have to change the way you shoot with flash. With an OVF you get the same light level through the finder with any exposure setting. If you set a high flash sync it doesn’t affect the image in the finder. With an EVF enable camera if you set a high shutter speed and medium aperture in a room with low light (as you might when working with a studio flash) you'll no longer be able to see a bright (or any) finder image with the setting most people use for the EVF, which shows what a scene will look like using the inputs and exposure controls you have set. You'll need to set the camera to "gain up" the finder image so you can see your subject and work with them. The darker the environment the more noise in the finder image you'll get. If you work a lot with flash inside you'll want to test out an EVF camera before you trade your hard won Imperial Credits for one.
3. The EVF shows you the approximate gamut of the color space you have set in the camera. This is good because you see how stuff might render in print or on the screen of your computer at home. This is now known as real time visualization (a nod to Ansel Adams's pre-visualization practice). This should be considered a positive, but most people look in the finder and see an image that looks "too contrasty" with blocked up shadows. There are one or two workarounds, depending on how you shoot and what kinds of files you like. If you're a died-in-the-wool Raw file shooter you can go into your parameters and set the contrast on your default JPEG style/setting to a lower value (less contrast). This will add detail to your shadows and highlights. If you are a JPEG shooter you can always set your color space to AdobeRGB instead of sRGB but it won't buy you quite as much correction. There are also brightness control settings for the EVFs and you might want to experiment with them as well. I'm sure we'll have a wider gamut on future screens, but as I stated before, it is an effective pre-visualization for many styles of shooting. But high contrast lighting is the EVF's Achilles heel.

After assessing the pros and cons of the different finders and weighting in my own quirks and my seeming need for novelty on a regular basis, I dumped an enviable accumulation of Canon EOS cameras, lens and flashes and bought into the Sony SLT camera system. I was drawn in by the EVF (really) and the stationary mirror (kinda) and not in the least by the fast 12fps shutter. I've used the Sony a77's now for the better part of a month and recently added their newest camera, the Sony a57. I also bought a mix of both super G lenses and cheap lenses. The two I love the most are the ultra cheap 30mm ƒ/2.8 DT Macro and the 85mm ƒ/2.8 SAM lens. They feel cheap in your hands but the quality of the imaging is superior. (All the pictures in this post were taken with the Sony a57 and the little 85mm lens.)

So, how have I fared in the post optical imaging universe? I am serious about this: When I shoot with continuous lights (like my favorite LEDs) or by modified window light, I am very, very happy. I can control my shoots while rarely taking my eye off the finder. I was shooting food for a new Austin restaurant, handheld, last Saturday, and getting a level of fluidity in my shooting that I've never experienced before. I could look at the food and turn a knob to adjust exposure while I watched the effect in psuedo real time. It's a great way to shoot food.

I'm now so used to the pre-chimping method I described above that I rarely find myself lowering the camera anymore to post-chimp. (The rear screen seems to exist now as a conduit for showing my results to my clients.) While not necessarily directly related to the EVF, I have found that with the stationary mirror and the electronic first shutter curtain, coupled with in body stabilization, I am able to perform magic tricks with blur-free slow shutter speeds. The different systems all work together to yield a final result that seems very, very sharp.

I have been shooting video for years now and I can't tell you how much more efficient a camera becomes if it can do full time phase detection autofocus while shooting video. And being able to see it in a light-protected finder is such an operational plus. When you add in focus peaking, you are getting close to the wish list for many videographers. (The only two video features I want to see in the next Sony camera are manual level controls for the audio in video and a headphone jack, à la Nikon and Canon's latest cameras.)

The one place where I know the EVF is less effective than OVF is in the use of studio flash. If you are working with powerful modeling lights it won't bother you as much, but if you are working with little 60-watt peanut modeling lights stuck in big lighting modifiers, you won't be as happy with the speckles and pixie dust that dances across the screen while you view.

I'm not suggesting that anyone abandon a system and an approach to still photography that they love and are wedded to, but the EVF is something that I think will filter down into most cameras because, as the price of sensors continues to fall, the single most expensive part of every SLR camera out will be the semi-silvered glass pentaprism and mirror assembly. As consumers demand more for less, and as OLED screens become more ubiquitous and hence less expensive, it doesn't take a telescope to see big changes coming in viewfinders.

EVFs and LEDs are a great combination. Add in a great, low noise sensor and you're in the sweet spot. I always hear that "it's not the arrow, it's the Indian." I think we're switching from the long bow to the cross bow, though. The endless march of progress.

Kirk

Kirk Tuck is a monthly contributor to the Online Photographer. He is the author of five books on photography and lighting including his most recent, LED Lighting: Professional Techniques for Digital Photographers. He makes his living photographing for corporations and advertising agencies in and around Austin, Texas. He is also a masters swimmer and spends far too much time in the pool.

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Featured Comment by Don: "Kirk, the English longbow was a vastly superior weapon to the crossbow. It's why the French were defeated at Agincourt. The English (and Welsh) archers whipped off the strings and stuck them under their caps when it rained. The French archer's crossbow strings got wet and stopped working. Crossbows take time to reload—in that time an English longbow will have fired multiple arrows. On Sundays every Englishman was required to practise archery with a longbow after church. The French so feared our bowmen they used to cut off their fingers when caught so they could no longer draw a bow. Hence the origin of the two-fingered salute—given by English archers to the French to let them know what was about to come down on their heads.

"The English/Welsh archers using the longbow completely outclassed the French with their crossbows."

Featured Comment by John Ashbourne: "Don's featured comment only refers to part of the reason for the outcome at Agincourt. Another major reason was the French emphasis on dated technology—elaborate and cumbersome armoured cavalry which bogged down in the clinging mud due to exceptionally heavy rain. there is an obvious parallel here—of which I am uncomfortably aware when I take out my 1Ds3 and 70-200mm rather than the X-Pro1—but then had circumstances been different at Agincourt the heavy cavalry would have come into their own just as in some circumstances there is nothing so good as the 'mighty Canon.'"

Featured Comment by Roger Bradbury: "The idea with the longbow was to get as many arrows into the air as possible; you are bound to hit something. Are you sure you weren't interested in the Sony's 12 fps Kirk?"

Mike replies: First of all, the topic was viewfinders yet here we find ourselves arguing about weapons technology at Agincourt—yet another demonstration of why I love this blog.

Just wanted to point out in relation to Roger's comment that in my recent book rec Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History, author S.C. Gwynne goes into considerable detail about weapons technology on the Southern Plains and how it affected the struggles between the main players. He points out that until the advent of the six-shooter—the main purpose of which was to be used on horseback, not in duels as in the movies—Comanches' bows and arrows were actually superior as weapons to the slow muzzle-loading rifles originally used by the Mexicans and the Texans, and gave them an advantage.

The various analogies to cameras seem perilous to me, albeit admittedly tempting.

Featured Comment by Rodolfo Canet: "Given the path the discussion has taken, never has the tag 'shooting techniques' been more appropriate!

How I Made the $19.95 Print

By Ctein

[Note: The example print sale ends Sunday night. —MJ]

I came upon the scene right after visiting Pier 24 in San Francisco. Happily for me, I was carrying my trusty Olympus Pen E-P1 with my favorite lens, the 45mm ƒ/1.8 (reviewed here). ISO 100, open up two thirds of a stop to compensate for the bright sky, ƒ/5.6, and Ctein's your uncle.

Once I got a good look at this photograph on my large monitor I knew it was something special. Lovely exquisite detail everywhere, delicate tracery in the clouds and tones on the bridge tower, and an amazing degree of sharpness. My, do I love that lens.

In order to eke the very last bit of quality out of that data, I super-sampled the image in Adobe Camera Raw, pulling it into Photoshop as a 16-bit, 28-MP (6144x4608 pixel) file in ProPhoto RGB color space. Why the upsampling? Because I have a (possibly superstitious) belief that ACR, having access to all the Raw camera data, will do the better job of extracting every last bit of detail from the file, and I know from experience that more pixels get me better results when I run deconvolution routines to maximize sharpness.

Wonder what you can get out of the 12-megapixel camera when everything is pushed to the max? Check out the rivets in this 100% scale detail (the full image file is 6100x4600 pixels).

Once I had the image in Photoshop, I ran the ContrastMaster plug-in from Photo Wiz to kick up the gradation and tonal separation in the subtle, fine detail just a bit. It did a great job of restoring the delicate tracery in the clouds and the subtle variations of light on the bridge tower that I had seen in the original scene. It also kicked up the noise (just more subtle, fine detail so far as the algorithm is concerned).

And here's the moon and some support cables, again at 100% scale.

Next I ran Topaz Labs' InFocus with a one pixel de-blur radius using the blur function calculated for this particular photograph. Deconvolution algorithms like this produce a genuine increase in resolution and sharpness. I use them routinely on all my digital photographs...just a touch. They'll also sharpen up and enhance any noise or grain in the photograph. Between the two plug-ins, I had more noise in the sky than I really wanted to be seeing. Normally I have no complaints about the noise levels in this camera at low to moderate ISOs, but here I was really pushing hard.

I needed some careful noise reduction. I didn't want to lose any of the fine detail and subtle gradation in the bridge, and noise reduction algorithms always clobber a bit of that. Time to make a mask so that I could apply noise reduction, using Topaz Lab's DeNoise, to the sky alone. Making that mask required lots of fine tuning and a certain amount of pixel painting where the bridge cables were almost the same tone as the sky. There are limits to what even the best masking software can do. I had a couple of hours of fiddly work getting the mask just so. Such is life.

This is the mask I created so I could selectively apply noise reduction to the sky and not the bridge.

From that point on, it was pretty straightforward work. A few masked curves adjustment layers for dodging and burning to get local brightnesses just as I wanted them, another curves adjustment to get the overall tonal placement just so. Surprisingly, no color correction; the camera had nailed it perfectly. That almost never happens.

I printed the finished photograph out on my Epson 3880 printer as a 17x22-inch (15x20" image area) print. The printer settings were 16-bit output (I've never seen this make any difference in a print, but I figure it can't hurt), 2880 dpi with high speed off, and finest detail on.

Twenty minutes later I was looking at a very decent first print. A bit of curves tweaking to get the  print tones just so, a little more dodging and burning, a bit of pixel painting to catch a bit of cruftiness that it slipped past my masking, and there it was. A superb print of a photograph that still makes me very happy every time I look at it.

That's it for this time, folks. I'll be taking next week off, while I deal with all the orders. See you again in two weeks. Meanwhile, keep those cards and letters coming in.

Ctein

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Featured Comment by Sven W: "Hmmmm...is this exercise a measure of a Micro 4/3 camera or Ctein's excellent post-processing skills?

"Quote #1: '...I think exemplifies the very best that a Micro 4/3, 12-megapixel camera can do. It's not a hero experiment; I can go out any day and make photographs of this technical quality. I just can't see any possible way to make a much better one.'

"Quote #2: 'I had a couple of hours of fiddly work getting the mask just so. Such is life.'

"The two quotes imply Ctein spends 2+ hours post-processing a typical image. I suspect that's way more than what most people do for their 'any day' images. Truth be told, I don't have enough post processing skills to spend two hours on one image. ;-)

"I'm not making a pot-shot here...just getting my head around Ctein's level of dedication! I spend around 20 minutes fixing up my images in post and have been thinking about upgrading my camera to reduce time spent in post. Maybe I need to re-think this!

"As an aside, what level of camera would produce the (equivalent) bridge photo as a JPEG? A D7000 or a D800, for example?

"Anyway, thanks for the print offer and the write-up. You've given me some ideas to explore."

Ctein replies: As I said in response to a similar question on Wednesday, "...while I did my usual superb custom printing job (he said immodestly) this is no trickery. The processing I did to turn this into a fine print is pretty straightforward; it is about what is inherent in the medium. It's just ordinary Ctein custom printing magic, not how clever I can be at manipulating pixels. I'm not trying to win some argument by hook or by crook, here. So far as I'm concerned, I won that argument years ago. I'm only giving people an opportunity to see for themselves instead of having to take my word for it."

In other words, this is about what the camera is capable of, not what I am capable of.

As I mentioned in a the Comments, I do typically spend hours custom-printing one of my photographs, but the time for any particular photograph runs from less than an hour up to several days. That puts me a cut above most other people, but if you're trying to show what a camera is capable of, you really need a superb print. Otherwise it's like trying to show off your audio system by hooking it up to $10 speakers.

An interesting question you and others have raised: would  a camera with more pixels or a larger sensor reduce the amount of work I do printing? The answer turns out to be no. I've printed everything from six-megapixel quarter-scale sensor to 40 megapixel medium-format sensor photographs. The amount of time it takes to print a photograph to my satisfaction depends entirely on the photograph, not the format.

For example, the fastest-printed photo I alluded to previously is this one. Printed in half an hour from start to finish. From the Olympus. It just happened to be one of those 'perfect negatives' that comes along once in a blue moon and takes very little work, and you just nail it on the second print. (11x14-inch prints, in this case. My printer can't print fast enough to turn out two 17x22" prints in half an hour.)

Contrariwise, this crop from a medium format sensor took quite a few hours of work.

Can't really explain to you the whys and hows in more detail without writing several book-chapters worth of verbiage.

Featured Comment by Alan Fairley: "It sounds like you essentially applied two rounds of sharpening once you had the photo in Photoshop. Did you also apply capture sharpening in ACR? If so, how strongly? As a 4/3 and Micro 4/3 user, I am very intrigued by your workflow. Thanks!

Ctein replies: I routinely apply a modest amount of sharpening and noise reduction within Photoshop to my digital photographs. The results are so dramatically better that it is the norm for me, for any Bayer array photograph I deal with, everything from six megapixel quarter-scale sensor to 40 megapixel medium-format sensor photographs, with or without an anti-aliasing filter.

Usually I leave the Raw conversion sharpening in ACR at the default setting unless I'm dealing with a photograph with pinpoint specular highlights. Then it puts ugly rings around them. Absent that, it's on.

Once I have the photographs in Photoshop, I typically use Smart Sharpen at a radius around a quarter pixel and a percentage in the 50% range, for photographs ACR-converted at normal resolution. Tune to taste. Smart Sharpen is a deconvolution routine; it actually does improve fine detail, not merely enhance edges. I'm quite astonished at how much more detail there is in those Bayer array photos.

I also usually apply a low level of noise reduction using a third-party plug-in (there is no one best plug-in; some work better with some photographs, others with others. No rhyme nor reason to it).

Between the Smart Sharpening and noise reduction, I can produce a photograph with less noise than the original but the same sharpness and detail, the same noise as the original but better sharpness and fine detail, or something in between. Depends on how much of each tweak I use. Usually there is one combination of the two which works very well over an entire photograph.

Sometimes it works a bit better to apply sharpening before noise reduction, sometimes the other way around.

I also happen to own Topaz Labs InFocus which is a deconvolution plug-in. It's more sophisticated than Smart Sharpen but not as good at small radii, because it increments the blur circle in one-pixel steps.

In this particular photograph, since I was supersampling it, I needed to de-blur with a radius more like one-two pixels for maximum quality. I did a bunch of pixel peeping and decided I liked the plug-in better than Smart Sharpen, just by a bit.

By itself, this amount of sharpening doesn't produce killer noise. Yes, there is noise gain, but it's tolerable. What made it a killer was having applied ContrastMaster. It's a plug-in that improves local tonal separation and detail, but it's really hard to tame and it really latches onto noise.

As for the very good question of why I didn't do the masking before I did the sharpening? Well, because I didn't think of it. Normally, I don't need a mask, as I implied above. In this case I was far into the process before I figured out that there just wasn't going to be a set of compromise settings that would work for the clouds, the sky, and the bridge, all at the same time. That's when I built the mask. Had I known when I started I was going to have to go that route, it would've made a lot more sense to do it at the beginning. Given that it took me a couple of hours to create that mask, you can understand why my head didn't want to go that way. (Lazy smile.)

The And Now For Something Completely Different Print Offer

As I mentioned a week or two ago, we're having another print sale.

But this time it's completely different. All our sales are good bargains for the buyer, we feel, but all of them are designed to earn money for the photographer and for the site (i.e., me). This one, however, is not primarily about making money. Ctein has been chomping at the bit for some time to put in peoples' hands a technical demonstration print—an actual print that shows how good a digital file can look printed relatively large (17x22"). I've been referring to it as his "Bigprint Sale."

Why? Well, you've heard the various details at various times, but Ctein simply feels that the digital prints he can make are better in quality than it's possible for him to make with traditional methods, and that he can do it with smaller cameras than many think is possible. The Bigprint sale is just a way of saying, "Look. See?"

The print is also a de facto demonstration of how good a Micro 4/3 file can look printed at a reasonably large size. That's only because Ctein happens to shoot Micro 4/3 right now...but still, he does, so it is. And it's not even the latest Micro 4/3—it was shot with the original 12-megapixel Olympus E-P1 camera and the Olympus 45mm ƒ/1.8 lens.

Ctein has fanatically worked on every single detail to lower the price to as close to nothing as he can get it. Other, bigger, more industrialized operations on the web might be able to lower prices below this, but this is as affordable as it's possible for us to make it.

Unfortunately, there is one big limitation. The print will only be available to U.S. buyers. Thirty-five to 45% of TOP's audience is non-U.S., and international buyers are enthusiastic participants in all our print sales. We are loathe to discriminate against you, but the only way Ctein can do this is to absolutely streamline his workflow to the most-efficient minimum.

However, if any domestic or international reader wants to buy a small bulk order of prints and distribute them to other readers in their own country or region, Ctein will work with you on that (as he will explain in more detail on Wednesday). For my part, if anyone decides to do that, I'll help you contact fellow readers through TOP.

As a practical matter the sale will be limited to 1,000 prints. It's not in any way a limited edition; Ctein just thinks that's all the work he can handle in a timely fashion. The sale will start on Wednesday morning and run either until Sunday at 11:59 p.m. left-coast time, or until 1,000 prints have been sold, whichever comes first.

I hope this sale will enable people who have held back from participating in past sales to participate this time.

Oh, and there won't be a Ctein column published next week (he'll be busy).

Please tune in on Wednesday morning for the details, and to see the picture.

Mike

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LED Lighting for Photography: Kirk Tuck

Why LEDs? And what was I thinking?

The "classic."  A one-foot-by-one-foot panel from Litepanels. One of the few U.S. companies making LED panel products. Also, one of the very first.

By Kirk Tuck

So. I finished writing four books and I was ready to take a break. Then I ghost-wrote a marketing book for a friend and I was really ready to take a break. But my publisher was insistent. Didn't I have something I wanted to write for them? Well, I did have one thing I was keenly interested in, but I wasn't sure anyone else would really care. I pitched the people at Amherst Media on a book about LED lights, and they went for it.

Once I signed the contract the reality of what I'd done kicked in. With my previous books I could fall back on a rich library of past assignments done with flashes and various cameras. I could fall back on twenty-odd years of experience divining just how best to use the lights of the day. I could steal from the best, like Jon Falk, who really was so instrumental in turning us all on to portable lights, homemade battery packs, and off-camera lights.

But when it came to LED lights I was as naked and uninitiated as the next guy. In fact, when I pitched the book, I'd only done a handful of commercial assignments with the lights and just a couple of small, industrial videos. But I had a nagging sense that LED lighting equipment, mostly small panels, was poised to change photography. And video production. With that in mind, I spent a year experimenting and playing and learning everything I could about the lights. Then I sat down and pounded out my book.

Since every studio has an equipment cabinet full of electronic flashes in the form of monolights, pack-and-head systems, and battery-powered flashes, why would anyone care about a relatively low-output light source that needed some color correction intervention? Why indeed.

But as I looked over the photographic landscape I noticed a few things that gave me pause. Since everyone was using essentially the same kind of lighting and the same kinds of modifiers (flash, with umbrellas and softboxes and grids) everyone's work was starting to look like everyone else's work. Sure, some few photon workers had some post processing they'd throw into the mix for a bit of differentiation but the foundations of the images all cloyed together like visual and cultural mud.

And when I looked at the professionals a couple of generations younger than me I saw a group of people who could swim back and forth between video and stills with a fluid effortlessness that made me envious. These were people who could shoot both sides of the divide without missing a beat. But they were trained by people like me who were already mired in the sticky status quo of photographic tradition. We made sure they knew how to flash. What they needed now weredual-purpose lights. Lights that could do still life, portraits, product shots, and movies and videos without changing a thing. They were pushing for them. And I realized that was exactly what LED lighting was all about. It could go either way.

Here is the "behind the scenes shot" of the lighting set up of a product shot. Always on means always visual.

The shot from the setup above.

After two years with the LEDs I am more comfortable shooting a portrait with a continuous light source than a flash. We've started to light stuff more like DPs on movie sets and less like 1970s portrait studios.

I've done some research and I've found that my subjects are more comfortable too. Seems that repeated flash causes the pupil to contract and expand over and over again. That causes optical fatigue and headaches. It affects both the shooter and the models. Flashes also encourage blinking because people subconsciously gird themselves against the popping onslaught of photons. (Are they waves or particles? Or waves of particles?) The continuous light allows use to become habituated. Comfortable in a way that flash never does.

Soft, directional light is important to my portrait style. So are quiet poses. Nothing the output of a few inexpensive LED panels can't handle. 

I've assembled enough LED power to put a prodigious amount of lumens through a big diffusion panel and still get exposures like ƒ/5.6 at 1/250th at ISO 400. With a good camera I can push the ISO higher and get even more action stopping exposure settings. And it seems natural.

In the course of writing the book I've come across dozens of experts who tried an LED panel or two back in the early part of the century. They came away with the permanent prejudice that the lights were all over the map color-wise, and not nearly powerful enough to use with the still cameras of the day. (I remember how bad the high ISOs were on cameras like the Kodak DCS 760.) That's all changed. And the days of being dependent on using ISO 80 to get good quality are long gone.

There are compromises. They will change. Right now only the most expensive LED panels have real CRI's (color rendering indexes) of 90 or more; 90+ is thought to be the gold standard for getting really accurate color spectra. Most of the less expensive imports advertise CRI's of 80. But most of us don't shoot under "gold standard" studio conditions anyway. We've learned to shoot well in mixed light, florescent light, and combinations of daylight and artificial light.

This outside shot, done in open shade, shows that small panels can be pushed into service as fill lights. It also shows a decent color match between the fill light and the ambient daylight.

LED panels, especially the inexpensive ones, have some rough edges. They could be brighter. And almost all of them suffer from a treatable green spike (or magenta dip) in their overall spectrum. But now they are easily correctable with appropriate magenta filtration. And when using a camera like the Nikon D3s or the Canon 5D Mark III, you'll have more than enough clean ISO to do just about any kind of photo short of filling in shadows in direct sunlight.

I think they have their place in providing a new way to shoot. I'm particularly happy with the portrait work I like to do in black and white. The tonality is different from other light sources, and the subdued magenta makes for better skin tones. I like the calmness of working with them when shooting people who are unused to a traditional "flash" studio experience.

Black and white image of Amy made with one 1000 bulb LED panel "pushed" through a six-by-six-foot diffusion scrim.

So, I wrote the book and discussed what I'd found. I tossed in 250+ samples and examples and I talked about using the lights for video as well. If you've been curious about what's out there beyond flash, this book might be for you. The video guys have pushed the "new tech" market hard. There's innovation and value pricing everywhere. It's all to our advantage. The push of efficient lights with better and better rendering characteristic means we photographers pay much less for good LED lights than ever before. It may be time to stick a toe in the water and see what it's all about.

Kirk

Kirk's new book, LED Lighting: Professional Techniques for Digital Photographers (U.K. link)

Kirk's Recommended LED Products
Fancier 500 LED Light Panel ($179.99). This is the basic 500 LED light. It's got four switches on the back to ratio power. It's bare bones. No color control or battery adapter. But it's cheap and rugged.

Fancier 160 Dimmable LED Camcorder Light ($59.99). These are my favorite cheap, battery-powered LED Panels. We use them for everything. Even put them in jack-o-lanterns for Halloween. They use AA batteries or cheap, generic Lithium batteries that are a copy of the Sony camcorder batteries. They have a stepless control for power. No color control, but a slot for supplied filters.

Litepanels 1x1' 3200K/5600K Bi-Color LED Flood (pictured at the top of the post) ($2,329.95). This is definitely the high-priced spread. This is what they use in the White House News Room. And in network TV. And in the photo studios of the still photography demigods. It's the Litepanels 1x1 LED with two set of colored bulbs, daylight and tungsten. By cross fading between the two sets you can shift color balance from 3200–5600K. These are the "gold standard" of the industry. (Kirk says, "I want four. Hello, Santa?")

Fotodiox 1000ASV Still/Video LED Light Kit ($429.95). Kirk's big favorite. Here's a light that is dimmable with a rotary knob and, with a separate knob, will cross-fade between tungsten and daylight bulbs to hit any color temperature between 2300k and 5600k. It comes with an AC power adapter and is wired and plugged to accept Sony V-type 12V batteries for location use. For the price it's pretty astounding. You'll still need to add in a bit of filtration for the green spike.

Fotodiox 312AS Still/Video LED Light Kit ($158.95). And here's a smaller, lighter unit that does the two-color cross-fade along with the stepless dimming control. Comes with two generic Sony-type camcorder batteries, a charger and a set of color filters. I'm buying one right now, today, before this post goes up, so I can be sure to get one for myself [me too. —Ed.]. A perfect size in a nice kit.

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Featured Comment by Gerry Morgan: "I've just finished reading Kirk's LED Lighting book and it's superb. The little I knew about LEDs before reading it I had gleaned from Kirk's blog. The book was a fun read and a great primer. Armed with Kirk's technical information (and safety warnings—don't stare at those LEDs), I now feel ready to get started."

Featured Comment by Rick: "...Me too! Thanks, gentlemen—I never really looked into this, as a quick search made it look like $X,XXX to get into this. But I'm now on my way.... :-) "

Featured Comment by Mike Plews: "Great piece. I'm a TV news shooter and we keep Fancier 500A fixtures in our cars for live hits. In the last year we started going from traditional live trucks to IP-based live reporting. TVU backpacks if anyone is interested. The problem with this is the loss of a full truck with its generator to run a couple of Lowel lights.

"The Fancier runs just fine off a cigarette lighter inverter or a 12v battery. The 500A also has a dimmer in addition to the individual switches. That means on night hits you can set up the camera to get the background where you want it then stand the talent in place and use the dimmer to balance it all out. You can do the same thing by feathering the lights or walking them back but when you are up against it just being able to spin a knob is very cool.

"We also put Litepanels micro instruments on top of all our cameras for run-and-gun shooting. If you want to get cute you can pull the light off and hold it at arms length to get nice off-axis light when working in the dark.

"The progress in LED lighting in the last couple of years has been amazing. You can really get a lot of light for not much dough these days. That's a good thing."

JPEGophobia

By Ctein

As most of you know, I photograph almost exclusively in Raw format (viz. my "JPEG... Seriously?" column).

So saying, I very much enjoyed Ken's column of last Friday. Mind you, I disagreed with most of his points and feel like I could construct persuasive arguments the other way. That doesn't mean I think he's wrong, though!

(It seems to be part and parcel of today's utterly toxic political climate to be certain that someone one disagrees with has to be wrong. Me, I refuse to play in that kitty litter sandbox.)

Some readers, though, took major exception to his position, with talking points that I think are...well...wrong. Ahem. So, without naming any names, I hereby register my disagreements:

I'll start with the notion that you're not a serious photographer unless you're invested in what happens post exposure. That was stated pretty explicitly, with the argument given that serious film photographers didn't stop merely with making the exposure, but were involved in what happened to the film afterwards.

Oh, really?

Most professional film photographers I knew and knew of were photographing with slide film. I was one of the rare exceptions concentrating on color negative. Easily 90+% of those professional photographers did not involve themselves in processing film in any way. They exposed their rolls, they handed them over to the lab of their choice, and didn't pay any attention until the results came back.

I guess none of them were really serious about their photographs, then. Not like me.

Then there was the argument that allowing the camera's software to dictate the look-and-feel, as it were, of the resulting photograph was an abdication of artistic responsibility, at best, and at worst would produce substantially inferior results.

Once again, we look to those slide-shooting dilettantes of yore, who had even less control over the look-and-feel of their results. They got to choose from one of a limited selection of film types. They lived with the results. Today's digital cameras give you a lot more control over what that look happens to be than any film type of old did.

Many readers took Ken's words as a universal prescription, rather than simply a description of what he did and why he did. Despite him pointing out that these choices were camera and software dependent, only a few readers, like Oleg, took this to heart. Need I describe the fallacy in logic that goes, "Well, your description of what you do and why you do it wouldn't work for me, so therefore you're wrong?" See paragraph two.

Last, there is this pernicious myth that photography is about collecting data. Many readers pointed out that JPEG processing in-camera throws away data.

They're right. So what?!

In nonscientific, colloquial usage, "data" and "information" are not the same things. (Note: we are not talking information theory here, we're talking common usage.) Data is just the mass of factoids that get collected. Information is the stuff you care about. Unless you're doing scientific record-keeping, the purpose of photography is to go after the visual information that makes your photograph meaningful and present it to maximum effect.

If data-maximizing is your photographic goal, you'll have to give up white-balancing. Much data was sacrificed to convert the sensor-native color balance of the top photograph to that of the bottom.

Here's the important thing: any time you select for, enhance, or adjust any visual information in a photograph, you throw away data. It's unavoidable. Something as simple as white-balancing your photograph, wherever it happens in the data chain, throws away data (the mathematical transform is not lossless). You really don't want to lose any data? Then you better just accept your photographs in whatever the native color balance of your camera happens to be. Not the auto-adjusted color balance, not the manually-selected color balance. The single color temperature for which your sensor's response is balanced. If the color quality of the light differs from that, in major or minor ways, too bad. You want maximum data? Leave that white point fixed.

Beyond that, maximum-data photographs are usually boring and uninteresting. It is very rare for a full-range, linear conversion of a Raw file to be particularly interesting. Those are the settings I use for making my proof sheets, because I want to see everything that's in the file before I start messing with it. Almost none of the photographs on those proof sheets look their best in that form. Flat, low-saturation, linear-contrast photographs very rarely have the best and most meaningful visual information. Sometimes the tweaks are minor adjustments of saturation and contrast, sometimes they're wholesale major changes.

The top photograph maximizes the data captured by the camera. The bottom version is much better. Many bytes gave their lives to make it possible. (Yes, this is one of the reasons why JPEG isn't for me, but
it's not about preserving data.)

As I said, you're not likely to find me focusing on JPEGs. For me the disadvantages outweigh the advantages, and I have workflows available to me that negate most of the advantages Ken's mentions. But that's just me.

He's not wrong.

Ctein

Raw shooter Ctein's lossy expositions (never the complete data) appear on TOP on Wednesdays.

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Featured Comment by fotoralf: "'Once the picture is in the box, I'm not all that interested in what happens next. Hunters, after all, aren't cooks' (Henri Cartier-Bresson). Just another notoriously unprofessional snapshooter. ;-) "

Featured Comment by Richard: "Most of the photographers I know mean 'non-destructive editing' when they talk about 'not throwing data away,' and that's why they shoot Raw. Sure if you tweak a Raw file and export it as a JPEG, you will lose data. Point is it hasn't gone forever."

Featured Comment by Kevin Purcell: "Gregory Bateson (who was a bit of a wacko) gave my favorite definition of information: 'a difference which makes a difference.'

"The full quote from Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972, pp. 457–9) is perhaps even more relevant to this topic:

A difference is a very peculiar and obscure concept. It is certainly not a thing or an event. This piece of paper is different from the wood of this lectern. There are many differences between them—of color, texture, shape, etc. But if we start to ask about the localization of those differences, we get into trouble. Obviously the difference between the paper and the wood is not in the paper; it is obviously not in the wood; it is obviously not in the space between them, and it is obviously not in the time between them. (Difference which occurs across time is what we call "change".) [...]

Kant, in the Critique of Judgment—if I understand him correctly—asserts that the most elementary aesthetic act is the selection of a fact. He argues that in a piece of chalk there are an infinite number of potential facts. [...] I suggest that Kant’s statement can be modified to say that there is an infinite number of differences around and within the piece of chalk. There are differences between the chalk and the rest of the universe, between the chalk and the sun or the moon. And within the piece of chalk, there is for every molecule an infinite number of differences between its location and the locations in which it might have been. Of this infinitude, we select a very limited number, which become information. In fact, what we mean by information—the elementary unit of information—is a difference which makes a difference.

"Photography is all about selection and differences: that's the photographer's task in a nutshell."

Featured Comment by David Dyer-Bennet: "Color photograpahy, of course, was not serious; collectors wouldn't buy it, museums wouldn't exhibit it, newspapers and magazines couldn't publish it.  Real photography was black and white.

"Seriously, I think the years wandering in the wilderness when most people did shoot slides and didn't do their own darkroom work damaged photography severely. It's really very limiting to just present what  you can capture directly in the camera (even more then than now, we have more controls in the camera than film choices provided then).

"You're all tired of hearing it over and over again, but it's true.  The negative is the score the print is the performance.

"The Cartier-Bresson quote implicitly acknowledges the importance of the chef, and hence of the printing process (what today we call 'post-processing').  He had the good fortune to be a good enough photographer that people would provide him with first-rate post-processing and he didn't have to worry about it, which is good. (Yeah, if you want to argue the extreme position of 'abnegation of responsibility,' then he was doing so; but he was at least doing so in the confident believe that a master chef was cooking what he had hunted.)"

Mike replies: Speaking of which, see the announcement I'm going to post next....

Myths About Megapixels (...And, Does the D800 Have Too Many?)

By Ctein

The recent announcement of the 36-megapixel Nikon D800 has brought forth a certain number of predictable reactions, a few lauding it as the Second Coming and many more dismissing the utility of more megapixels.

Most such opinions are based on mythical (or at least mistaken) beliefs about what pixel counts really mean. Let's see how many of them I can shoot down in one column.

I've written on this subject many times before, so I'm not going to present detailed arguments. I am simply going to assert facts. To keep the number of comments I have to answer to a minimum, please remember to check to see if your doubts have already been addressed in the cited columns and my comments before you take issue with my myth-busting.

-

Myth #1

The sharpness of your photographs will increase in proportion to the number of pixels.

Reality: Well, technically, the square root of the number of pixels, but that's not really the issue. Quadrupling the number of pixels (doubling the resolution of the sensor) is no more guaranteed to double the sharpness of your photographs than doubling the sharpness of the film you were using did. Image sharpness is a convolution of multiple factors. Improving sensor resolution improves image sharpness, but it won't make a proportional difference unless it is by far the fuzziest link in the chain. For more on this, see my article "Diffraction In Perspective."

-

Myth #2

Getting more megapixels is just about making bigger prints.

Reality: For a minority, yes, but it's more commonly about making sharper prints at whatever size you're choosing to print. Good printers can render more than 500 PPI of fine detail and human eyes can perceive considerably more than that. Digital cameras are only about 50% efficient in terms of resolution (e.g., a 24-megapixel camera delivers about 12 megapixels of resolvable detail), so you don't have to be printing very large to see a perceivable difference from more megapixels. See "How Sharp Is Your Printer? How Sharp Are Your Eyes?"

Whether you care about that difference, of course, depends upon your needs. But the difference is there.

-

Myth #3

More megapixels inevitably means noisier photographs and/or poorer high ISO performance.

Reality: That would be true if the camera manufacturer took exactly the same chip technology and exactly the same support electronics and simply crammed more pixels into the same size chip. That never happens! Those pixel-count changes are always accompanied by other improvements in the chips and the support circuitry. If we had reached the physical limits of image quality, those improvements wouldn't be able to compensate for the additional pixels. We haven't; we're several stops away from that. New cameras frequently have higher pixel counts, lower noise, and better ISO performance, all at the same time. See "Photography at the Speed of Light" and "Something Old and Something New."

-

Myth #4

It's pointless to add more pixels because lenses aren't good enough.

Reality: I have no idea where this one came from, because it's contradicted by decades of lens and camera test data. I'm going to cut through the morass of minutia-based arguments about pixel dimensions, filter geometries, and Airy disks and lay it out in very simple terms. A 16-megapixel 35mm-sized Bayer array sensor is going to resolve around 50 line pairs per millimeter (lp/mm). A 36-megapixel sensor will resolve around 75 lp/mm. Even mediocre 35mm lenses will hit 75 lp/mm at some aperture over some portion of their field of view. This is true of both fixed focal length and zoom lenses.

Decent (not at all exceptional) 35mm-format lenses can hit 75 lp/mm at just about all apertures and will do so over most of the field of view for at least one aperture. They'll show peak resolutions more like twice that. Really good lenses (not necessarily expensive ones) will be able to exceed 75 line pair per millimeter without even trying hard over most/all of the field of view and will have peak resolutions three or more times that.

Furthermore, until the lens resolution drops to only half that of the sensor, improving sensor resolution will produce an observable improvement in image resolution.

See the previously cited diffraction column and "Why 80 Megapixels Just Won't Be Enough..."

-

Myth #5

This is just a useless horsepower race by manufacturers; people don't need all those megapixels.

Reality: Sure, it's a horsepower race, but saying nobody needs it would be like saying nobody needed 120 format over 35mm or sheet film formats over 120 roll film. Most people don't, to be sure. Even more won't be willing to pay the premium. Count me in that group; I may still very well lay out a grand for the 24-megapixel Sony NEX-7, but there's no way I'm laying out $3K for the boat anchor Nikon D800. But that's just me (and, similarly, your priorities are just you).

Let's also remember that not everybody likes to compose uncropped, full frame. Actually, most photographers don't (although many digital photographers have been forced into it). If 50% more pixels affords them the opportunity to do some reasonable cropping without unreasonable sacrifices in sharpness, they will be happy campers.

In other words, it's not about you. It's not even about me.

•     •     •

It's likely I have missed some myths, but I'm sure I've done enough busting to enrage some of the myth-perpetuators. Can't wait to see what shows up in my e-mail inbox.

Ctein

Physicist, astronomer, photographer and fine printer Ctein has written hundreds of articles for dozens of magazines about the science and technique of photography over four decades. It's no myth that his weekly TOP column appears on Wednesdays.

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How to 'Scan' Film with a Camera—Well (Part 2)

Editor's Introduction: This week's column from Ctein, a continuation of last week's, outlines the technique needed for a procedure we don't necessarily recommend. Ctein's purpose in these columns is a) to help people who are trying this as well as b) to perhaps persuade them not to try. And, as you might understand, sometimes reading about even difficult and non-optimal technique can be interesting for its own sake. —MJ

By Ctein

Two weeks back I wrote about the gradual demise of dedicated film scanners and how that might make it increasingly difficult if not impossible to conveniently scan film photographs for digital printing in the future. Many readers expressed interest in the idea of using a good digital camera in lieu of a dedicated film scanner; a few had even tried.

Doing this really well requires knowledge and skill. If you don't care about doing it really well, and many of you don't (for good reasons, I do understand) then don't even bother. A flatbed scanner, even one a generation old, is going to do this better and a lot more conveniently. Mail-order outfits that charge circa a dollar a scan will easily beat your thrown-together rig.

Now, on to camera and lens resolution concerns.

The actual resolution of a digital camera is only about half that of the pixel count. For example, a 24-megapixel camera will produce approximately 2800 x 4200 pixels worth of resolution (assuming a 2:3 format, just for the sake of conversation). Thirty-five millimeter film is about an inch wide [film width, not frame width, ignoring perforations —Ed.], so you ought to be able to get 2400 PPI worth of "scan" resolution out of that, if you're doing everything right. Many people find that quite satisfactory. I don't, but I'm not normal people. If you pride yourself on the sharpness of your film originals and have spent good money for really good glass, you may find that you won't be either.

For larger film formats, a single camera exposure isn't likely to cut it, regardless of which camera you own. In that case, or if you own a lower pixel count camera, or if you're looking for better than merely adequate quality, you're going to be looking at stitching. Assuming you've properly addressed the alignment and illumination-uniformity issues I raised last column, this will not present a problem.

Now we come to the matter of the lens. You cannot use just any old lens for this purpose and expect to get good sharpness corner-to-corner. You need a lens that's designed to deliver flat-field coverage with uniformly high image quality at the magnification you need. If you're working copying sheet film with a less-than-full-frame digital camera, the best solution is any top of the line enlarging lens, reverse mounted. Don't know which ones are really the best? Download a copy of my book Post Exposure, which includes my list of the very best enlarging lenses ever made, so good that they're visually flawless. Search the web for a used one; with the collapse of the darkoom business, you can often find some amazing bargains.

Any of these lenses will work well down to about 1:5 magnification. Below that, things get iffy. 1:1 magnification is really the worst situation to be in; hardly any lenses perform well there unless they've been designed specifically for that magnification. Ken Werner found that of all the general purpose enlarging lenses, the Schneider Componon-S 50mm ƒ/2.8 was the best of the lot at 1:1, but it's still not great. When you're getting down in the low magnification range, you'll get better results with a lens designed for that. That would be the Rodagon D series lenses. The 120mm version is optimized for 1:2 or 1:3 magnification; the 75mm for 1:1.

This is TMAX100 film, scanned at 1200, 2400, and 4800 ppi. Observe that the film grain is still visible, although mushy even at 1200 ppi. Just because you can see grain in your scans doesn't mean they're sharp. Click on the image here to see it at 100%; the auto-resizing of TOP's blog
software masks some of the differences.

Don't imagine that you can stop your lens way down and get around its deficiencies. This is one of those cases where you really do want to be working near the optimum aperture of your lens or you'll be losing sharpness. Just because you're seeing film grain in your camera-scans doesn't mean you've got a sharp image. Film grain behaves like noise, which means it doesn't average out at low resolutions. It just gets big and mushy and lower in contrast. You can see the film grain of fine-grained film in a 1200 PPI scan; it just looks horrible, like looking at a print made with a really, really cheap enlarging lens, badly focused (see illustration above).

Well, that's everything I can think of for now. This is what you should be prepared to deal with if you want to do camera-scanning of your film and get results that are much better than you could get with an ordinary flatbed scanner. As I said at the beginning, you may not care about that or need that. That's cool; go live a happy life. But if you want really good quality scans, this is how to do it right.

Ctein

Ctein's regular disquisition on quality occurs at an approximate interval value of "Wednesday."

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Question from Marcin Wuu: "And what about dedicated macro lenses? Aren't they supposed to be excellent when it comes to sharpness, contrast and field curvature?"

Ctein replies: Depends on the lens. Some of them are really excellent—Pierce [Bill Pierce, master printer and former "Nuts and Bolts" columnist for the Digital Journalist, known universally to his friends by his surname only —Ed.] reported to me that the classic 55mm Micro-Nikkor made a damned good enlarging lens, in fact.

But many aren't. In fact "macro" is frequently invoked by lens manufacturers to mean "Anything we make that'll focus really close." Calling a lens a macro doesn't tell you any more about its quality than labeling something an "enlarging lens."

Unfortunately, while I have tested almost every credible enlarging lens ever made, I have not done the same for macros. So I can't tell you which ones in current production (if any) are really suitable and which aren't.

Featured Comment by Pierre Smith: "I must admit I have tried pushing this to the limit after my Coolscan failed. As a Macro equipment junkie I assembled a Wild camera stand for Microscopes. Leica Visoflex bellows, and 65mm Elmar. The negatives are held in a Pentax filmholder attached to a Zeiss microscope XY drive. Focusing is by a hydraulic Z drive designed for micron focusing movements. I have also used a Zeiss Luminar 65mm, and Schneider 50mm Macro and 80mm Componon lenses. Photoshop is used to stitch 4x10MP files. this resolves grain on Rollei ATP1.1 with very sharp dust particles.

"The light source is diffused to minimise scratches. I have posted some results on the Leica forum. No unsharp masking required, and it results in the smooth high resolution I prefer."

Featured Comment by Barry Wheeler: "The ASMP website of Digital Photography Best Practices has a nice page on camera scanning and links to a .pdf paper by Peter Krogh with more specific advice. I think it is a good starting point for many photographers. Here at the Library of Congress we've digitized tens of thousands of photographs, including from the original FSA negatives, using Sinar and PhaseOne and Aptus camera backs on a variety of commercial and specialized camera bodies and copy stands. While most individual photographers cannot afford our setup, they can get high quality results using Ctein's approach."

[F. Barry Wheeler is Digital Projects Coordinator at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. —Ed.]

Which Cameras Do the Best Skin Tones?

Is there any cloud-mind consensus out there as to which DSLRs do skin tones the best? Any portrait or wedding pros care to speak up about this?

Just askin'.

Mike

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Featured Comment by MarkB: "Photoshop (speaking as a pro fashion retoucher for 20 years)."

Featured Comment by Robert Meier: "I get the best skin tones with my Nikon F6 and the 85mm ƒ/1.4 Nikon and Plus-X."

Mike replies: Got a big freezer? Sadly, Kodak Plus-X was just discontinued.

Featured Comment by CK Dexter Haven: "95% of the 'top end' of fashion photographers shoot Canon. I'm just sayin'. My feeling is it's more about the bokeh than the skin tones, though. If the skin tones thing is different between manufacturers, significantly so, it's all worked out in the profiles and subsequent Photoshop manipulations."

Featured Comment by Rusty: "Consensus? you have got to be kidding."

Featured Comment by Ben Mathis: "I'm a raw enthusiast, always saying you can get whatever you want in post, but the Fuji X100 raw files absolutely have more pleasing skin tone than my Canon 5D. Even in the raw. And while I can improve both, I can never make the 5D's look as good as the X100's."

Featured Comment by Tom K.: "If you took all the photo forums in the world and poured them into a bucket and stirred it around about this issue the answer is clear. Canon 1Ds Mark 2 + Canon 85 ƒ/1.2L II."

Featured Comment by Wijnand Wustrow: "I am a wedding photographer and I agree with Ken Rockwell X100%."

Weese in Wisconsin, Part Deux

I got to have breakfast with my friend Carl Weese this morning, which was great. He's on another of his photography odysseys, the maiden long voyage in his new Chevy HHR—his old truck finally gave up the ghost after a moon trip. (He thought a shock had gone out, but the mechanic told him, "the shock's fine—there's just no frame left for it to attach to." Time for a new truck.) He's photographing for his drive-in theater project, and stopped by Waukesha between a morning shoot at the Highway 18 Theater in Jefferson and the Keno Family Drive-In in Kenosha.

Carl and I only see each other occasionally, but keep in touch by email. It was really nice to get a chance to see him.

He had the 8x10 and the 7x17 loaded in the HHR—and a Panasonic G3, first time I've seen one. Neat little camera. He uses it in an unusual way—he's long been used to documenting his shooting locations by digicam, but now, with the G3, he does it using the video function—it allows him to speak his notes into the video file instead of having to write them down.

Carl wrote on his Working Pictures blog the other day about the way he packs the truck. "Decades ago, commercial work as a location specialist taught me to have absolutely rigid rules about packing," he wrote—"where everything goes in each case, where each case goes in a vehicle—in order to keep track of all the equipment." The idea is to be able to get a quick visual read on each case, so if something's not there it's immediately apparent. Same deal for the way the equipment is packed inside each case. Everything in its place, so if something's not there it jumps out at you.

Nice tripod, too, huh? A big Ries. Carl's 6'6" or thereabouts, for scale.

Curses, blown highlights
Oh, and, apropos of nothing, the above picture illustrates nicely the bane of my digital existence:

—the histogram is just for the selected bit. Illustrated another way:

This is the same bit with the exposure slider thrown all the way to the left. Curses! Blown highlights! The snapshooter's curse in digital. Drives me crazy. Even when it doesn't happen, I'm still worrying about it.

If I ever see Elvis getting into a flying saucer, I'll get the shot all right—but it'll have blown highlights. I'm just sayin'.

Mike

UPDATE: Following Ricardo's suggestion (in the comments), I downloaded RPP and have been playing with the image in it. First of all, I am not claiming to have even risen to the level of basic competence in this somewhat complex raw converter and its more-than-somewhat opaque UI, and I certainly am not claiming that I have used the available tools even properly, much less optimally; but here's the best I could do at first blush, following the instructions in the operating manual:

I appear to have plastered the side of Carl's noggin with some sort of scabrous liquid material akin to paint. Sorry, dude. I gather this is because RPP's conditions for highlight recovery—that at least one channel be blown and at least one channel not be blown—are not met by my file.

Let's face it, I should have just taken a reading off Carl's shirt. I mean, the guy's a black-and-white large-format photographer—he had the courtesy to wear a near-neutral gray shirt. The least I could have done was make proper use of it.  :-)

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Featured Comment by tal: "Quick fix: set a 10% opacity brush on multiply mode, point sample skin tone, select highlights and apply some density to the clipped area. Then, you can add some texture with a 20–50% opacity stamping. It works fine for small prints. :-) Blown digital highlights, what a pain in the argh!"

Ctein RetouchPRO Redux

I got the following press release from RetouchPRO LIVE:

Our first RetouchPRO LIVE show with Ctein was so well-received that I couldn't wait to bring him back to show us more of his photo restoration techniques.

On our next all-new live show, Ctein will be performing these 2 photo restorations from start-to-finish. Both demonstrate very common yet hard-to-solve problems. The first involves the "silvered" tarnish that shows up on some old images. The other is an image that has been ripped into pieces.

Watch Ctein's full-sized desktop live via your web browser as he restores these images from start-to-finish. He'll answer your questions about his technique as he works, and more general questions at the end (if there's time).

Saturday, July 9, 4pm CDT (see link below for other time zones)

Click this link for details and ticket sales.

Just passing this along. As you know, Ctein is the author of Digital Restoration from Start to Finish as well as being TOP's resident weekly columnist. His restoration work involves many Photoshop/Lightroom skills that are of general interest and usefulness. I only caught 40 minutes or so of the live show last time, but I liked what I saw and I've heard from lots of people who found it enjoyable.

Please help spread the word!

Mike

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Retouch Redux

Ctein's RetouchPRO tutorial on scanning and restoration is being rebroadcast tomorrow, Wednesday, June 1, at 6:00 a.m. or 2:00 p.m. CDT. The original broadcast was interactive and that's not, of course, quite an accurate term for the rebroadcast, but you'll hear the interviewer and the original audience asking questions. It's approximately two and a half hours long.

Click this link for details and ticket sales. If you're inside the U.S. you can rent the show at any time. Rental costs more than the rebroadcast, but adds pause, rewind, and multiple viewing options over the 3-day rental period.

Mike

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Restoring Photos Seminar

If photo restoration interests you and you've got a couple of hours and ten bucks to spare this coming Saturday, you might want to visit RetouchPRO.

Our very own Ctein will be presenting a live-over-the-web 2-hour seminar on photo restoration. You'll get to watch Ctein as he restores damaged color photographs. He'll answer your questions about his technique as he works, and more general questions at the end.

(This event is organized and run by RetouchPRO, not TOP or Ctein; if you've got questions about it, please review the information on their website and direct your questions to them.)

Mike

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Why My Gigabyte Film Scans Might Not Be Good Enough

By Ctein

Last week, in some comments to Mike's "Touch Once" post, I mentioned that I was on my fourth round scanning some of my film and that re-scanning my film seems to be something I have to do about every five years despite my best efforts to make scans so good that I could never imagine needing better ones. (Apparently, my wildest imaginings have a tangible expiration date.) This, of course, raised questions about how good a film scan really needed to be, and so here we are.

I'm close to wrapping up the task of scanning all the undigitized negatives of the photographs in my dye transfer portfolio. After several weeks of work, I've got a folder of image files that's about 100 GB in size. That's what happens when almost all your work is medium format negative and you're scanning it at 16 bits per channel color depth at a pixel pitch of 4800 PPI. My average file size tops three quarters of a gigabyte. Shouldn't this be enough for anybody?

Well, I really hope so. I don't look forward to repeating any of this five years from now; I truly can't imagine why I would have to. The problem is that I'm pretty sure these aren't the best of all possible scans. That leaves the door open to the possibility that at some time in the future I will come up with some unimagined need that demands even better scans. Be afraid, be very afraid.

The problem lies in the resolution. Forty-eight hundred PPI crisply images film grain, but it doesn't actually resolve it. What's the distinction? Point your digital camera at the night sky and open the shutter for a few seconds. You'll photograph stars, but the stars themselves are thousands of times smaller than an individual pixel in your camera. The stellar image expands to fill a pixel with some average level of brightness, but it's not resolved.

1200 PPI scan (click on these images to see them larger; the auto-resizing of the blog software obscures the sharpness of the images a bit). You can image film grain at remarkably low scan resolutions, as these comparison photos of TMAX 100 film scans show. An image of film grain, though, is not the same as resolved film grain.

2400 PPI scan

4800 PPI scan

Film grain is extremely small, even in coarse-grained films. Forty-eight hundred PPI scans don't resolve it. What you get are little square pixel-sized blobs in place of the original grain that mimic the pattern of the grain.

So what? Well, there are some subtle kinds of image degradation that occur when you don't sharply resolve grain. Good darkroom printers are familiar with the effects that occur when a print is just a bit out of focus or made with a less than a top-notch enlarging lens. Edge acutance gets subtly altered. More visibly, tonality and gradation in the extreme highlights and shadows gets distorted or muddied, because those tiny individual film grains (or spaces between grains) have a disproportionate effect on tonal rendition at the extremes.

The situation is not quite the same for film scanners, but it's close enough that there are issues to worry about. The losses are small; I think they may never matter to me. But there's that demonstrated lack of future imagination.

How much scan resolution would it take to satisfactorily resolve the film grain? I don't really know. The late Bruce Fraser and I discussed this on occasion, and we guessed the scans would have to resolve in the 10,000–15,000 PPI range, but neither of us ran any tests. I'd be looking at 5–10 GB scan files, and that would give pause even to Lloyd Chambers' uber-Mac.

There are other practical issues. Scan pitch is not the same as scan resolution, It's only the upper limit on the resolution. The real resolution is somewhat less, due to losses in the optical train. (A cautionary note there for any readers who want to report on their ultra-high-resolution scans. Do you know what resolution you're really getting?) I'm fortunate. I've tested my Minolta Dimage Multi Pro scanner, and it resolves 4200 PPI in the center of the field and 3800 PPI at the edges. 80–90% of theoretical resolution at a scanner's upper limit is very good performance.

Thing is, if I had a scanner that delivered 10,000–15,000 pixels per inch, I have to come up with new measurement tools to find out what was actually resolved. Nothing in my experimental arsenal is good enough. For all I know, there aren't even any film scanners of any type out there that can resolve 10,000 PPI, manufacturers claims notwithstanding.

If the gods choose to smile on me, I'll never have to answer these questions. All I can know for sure is that there is information in the original negative that I'm not capturing in the scans, and all I can do is hope that I never need to care.

Ctein

Ctein's regular weekly column appears on TOP on Wednesdays.

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From Film Holder to Memory Card

By Charles Cramer

In 1973, I visited Yosemite for the first time and was smitten. I was in college studying classical piano (I was in it for the big bucks), and soon realized I wanted out of those tiny practice rooms. I read about Ansel Adams, and was inspired, since he started out as a pianist. So, on my next visit to Yosemite, I brought along my new (used) 4x5 camera, the nifty Super Speed Graphic press camera, and began making some remarkably bad negatives and prints. But, after 31 years of practice, I got better! I did eventually upgrade to a Linhof Master V field camera (similar to this one —Ed.), and was perfectly and utterly content with that beautiful camera.

That is, until some of my friends starting using digital DSLRs....

For the past 10–15 years I have been very intrigued with moving water, especially with longish shutter speeds. But this subject matter requires a huge amount of luck, since you don’t really know what the water will look like at different shutter speeds—unless you use a digital camera. On a trip to the Yosemite backcountry in 2002, several of us were photographing the same patch of moving water, and my friend with the digital camera yelled out "fifteenth of a second" as the most effective shutter speed. Seeing my transparencies ten days later—he was right. And he could make tens or hundreds of exposures, without worrying about film and processing costs.

On the next year's trip, I encountered an incredible water display. The base of Yosemite's Waterwheel fall was in shade, with the sun slowly rising behind it. And intermittent jets of water would shoot out far enough to be backlit by the sun. I pulled out my 220 roll film adapter for the 4x5 and started exposing. But this was really tricky, for three reasons.

1. The backlit jets were impossible to accurately meter.
2. I didn’t know what shutter speed would best show this effect.
3. It was hard to time the shutter release with the jets. As the sun rose, the backlighting became even more amazing.

With all those variables, I ended up exposing ten rolls of 220 film—that's 200 exposures (did I mention this was on film?) The exposure you see here was around 1/4th of a second, allowing the backlit water to create streaks, like exploding fireworks. I quickly realized how much easier (and cheaper) this would have been using a digital camera.

But it wasn't until 2006 that a digital camera had enough resolution to compete with 4x5—the Phase One P45 39-megapixel back. My friend Bill Atkinson had earlier switched from using film with his Hasselblad to an earlier Phase One back, and he was interested in this new back, too. At the dealer we staged a shoot-out: the P45 on a Hasselblad, against me with my Linhof armed only with Fuji Velvia. When the smoke cleared, it was all over—except I still had to get my film processed and scanned.

The comparison can be found at the Luminous Landscape website, with a follow-up post five months later at Outbackphoto.com. The P45 was so impressive that I wanted one—but the price ($30K) was outrageous. Since the back came with a three-year guarantee, I computed what I spent the previous year on 4x5 film, processing, and scanning, and multiplied by three—and I was at 80% of the cost of the back. Thus, sheer logic compelled me to buy it! Five years later, I am still very happy to have switched to the dark side, er, the digital realm for capture. (Note to my large format friends: O.K., I sold out—but I get to use zoom lenses!!!)

On the first photo trip I did with this new back, I experienced an almost supernatural event that proved to me that my switch to digital was the right choice! Bill Atkinson and I were photographing the Northern California Redwoods late one drizzly day, and were confronted with this scene:

The overcast provided a beautifully soft, glowing backlight. After doing many digital exposures, I told Bill that I just had to capture this gorgeous light with my 4x5—to make sure I got it. As I walked the few feet to the car—it started to hail! Hail to the extent that the road was now covered with white. My beautiful scene and light was suddenly gone! I took this as a divine intervention—assuring me I didn’t need to use my 4x5 anymore. Bill will testify that I am not making this up (although he thinks it was just a little hailstorm...). I haven't used my 4x5 since.

Here is an image that would not have happened with my film camera. It was getting very late in the day in Acadia, Maine, and I saw this little pool with leaves.

What I didn’t realize was that the pollen foam was slowly rotating. When I saw this slight blur in the LCD screen from a one second exposure, I stopped down to get much more blur. The image here was a four second exposure. Being able to see what is actually happening with differing exposure times, and even changing the composition based on what you then see is a huge advantage.

Two years ago I went to Hawaii, and started playing with slight time-exposures of receding waves. I found about a half-second gave the best combination of smoothness and detail. Even when I did not move the camera, each exposure of the waves created an entirely different composition. It was like the waves were auditioning for me ("How's this one...or this one?") I kept this up at dawn and dusk for the next three or four days, and ended up with around 1800 exposures! Great fun—until you have to edit these down. With that many exposures to work with, I have no excuse if I don’t find at least one good one!

My large format friends always ask me if I miss swings and tilts. To get the same angle of view as my favorite 4x5 lens of 200mm, I now use an 80mm. This decrease in focal length provides about 2 1/2 times more depth-of-field. Also, in a really challenging situation, I can always "focus bracket"—changing the focus point. Since changing the focus even slightly alters the effective focal length of the lens, the two exposures don't register. But, starting with Photoshop CS3, you can now "Auto align" the two exposures and then just paint in the sharpest parts of each exposure.

There is one situation, though, where I want to be able to tilt for focus. In the canyons of southern Utah, colored reflections in the water can be incredible. The water (in shade) reflects colorful things in sun, like red rocks, green or yellow trees (depending on the season), and of course, the brilliant blue sky. With these little creeks, you need a fairly fast shutter speed to capture the color from each respective little ripple. But you also need to get both close and far parts in sharp focus—so the solution is to use tilts so that the plane of focus is parallel with the water. One of my friends wasn't using his Mamiya RZ67—and he had the tilt adaptor and lenses to go with it. So I bought it, along with a Phase One adaptor plate to use my digital back with this camera. If I think I'll be encountering this type of water reflections, I'll take this camera along. Here is an exposure from Harris Wash, near the Escalante that uses this technique. The exposure here was 1/50th of a second.

One of the reasons for my switching to digital capture was the thought that being able to make many more exposures would lead to more "keepers." I'm certainly getting better water images, my camera backpack now weighs about 10 lbs less, and I'm having lots of fun. But, it still seems just as hard to get a really good image. This quote from painter/photographer Charles Sheeler comes to mind: "Isn't it amazing how photography has advanced without improving?" I’m waiting for the camera manufacturers to add a little red light in the viewfinder that comes on when I'm making "ART"!

Charlie

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Editor's note: As always, you can click on each of the images to see somewhat larger versions. With Charlie's pictures even more than most, you should also be aware that a little online JPEG is but a faint echo of the vibrant and rich real prints. It's difficult to bear in mind when you're "seeing the image" as published here that you're not really seeing the image, but that's the case.

How to Make a Good Proof Sheet

By Ctein

Some of the feedback I got to my last column led me to realize that a lot of readers don't know what constitutes a good proof sheet. To put it succinctly: A good proof sheet doesn't make your photographs look good; it shows you what's in your photographs, conveying as much information as possible about the content of your negative or digital file.

Now that we're into the digital age, not everybody uses proof sheets. Many photographers prefer to work with their photographs entirely on-screen. For a variety of reasons, I still find proof sheets extremely valuable. Every photographer's preference is entirely personal and idiosyncratic. If your choice is to work on-screen, that's fine with me—I'm not going to belabor my choice or debate the two approaches. If you're curious to know the way I do it, however, this column might interest you.

Proof sheet photographs are a lot like RAW digital files. They tend to be flat, dull, and lower than you would like in contrast and saturation. Show an untrained viewer your proof sheets and they will be unimpressed with your photography. There will always be a few exceptions; occasionally a photograph will be so striking that it stands out no matter how it's reproduced. I have a few of those in my portfolio. But by and large the vast majority of your portfolio-quality work won't fall into that category. A photograph that looks striking in a proof sheet will likely prove to be a winner—but most of your winners won't look striking in proof sheets.

Darkroom proof sheets are usually, but not always, contact prints from the original film. Hence they are often referred to as "contact sheets." I prefer to say "proof sheets" because this isn't always the case. For example, a lot of workers, myself included, learned the trick of putting three strips of 35mm film in a 4x5 film carrier and enlarging by a factor of two to print nine 35mm frames on a single 8x10 sheet of paper. It makes studying the details and visualizing the final crop a lot easier. Also, the tonal placement is closer to what you'll expect to see in a final (enlarged) print.

For normally-exposed negatives, the usual procedure to making a proof sheet is to choose a paper grade substantially lower than the one you would normally print those negatives on. In color work, that simply means finding the lowest contrast paper you can that's on the market; there aren't a lot of choices. In black and white work, it means dropping at least a full paper grade below whatever is normal for you. The exposure should render middle grades approximately correctly, but blacks should not look solid black; there should be a clearly visible difference in print density between the unexposed edges of the filmstrips and the entirely clear area between strips. If your negatives are unusually dense, you won't be able to maintain that difference and there will probably be some blocking up in the shadows, but it still will be a lot less than you would get in a normal-contrast print.

Here's a tip that will speed up your printing if you're making contact proof sheets. Set up your enlarger as if you were making a typical enlarged print from one of your negatives, say an 8 x 10 from 35mm film. Set the lens aperture to some plausible value for your printing. The exposure time you end up using for a decent contact sheet, combined with the way the individual frames look on the sheet, will give you a pretty good idea of what your starting exposure settings should be for making enlargements. Write the proof sheet exposure information on the margins or back of the sheet for later reference.

Fig. 1

If you're proofing digital files, enlargement is entirely virtual. I settled on 15 frames/sheet. It puts the same number of photographs on a proof sheet that I got from contact printing my 645 negatives, which is big enough for me to see what's really in the photograph. I still use the Contact Sheet II automation in Photoshop, because it's what I know  and it works for me. Figure 1 shows my control panel settings. (Most image processing software will give you some way to generate a proof sheet, but I don't use these other ways, so please don't pepper me with questions about how to set them up correctly.)

You'll notice in the control panel that I set the effective size smaller than a full page. I did that so that it left room on an 8.5 by 11 sheet for me to punch the edge of the page for a three ring binder and room at the top for me to add title and date information about the "roll."  I have a simple little action in Photoshop that takes the proof sheet, expands the margins accordingly, and lets me type information into a text layer at the top of the page.

Since I work 99% in RAW format, all my photographs get massaged by Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) before Photoshop merges them into the proof sheet. The default settings for ACR are not ideal for reviewing photographs. They produce a pleasing image, but it's too contrasty and it doesn't show the full range of information in the RAW file. Kind of like the difference between looking at a camera JPEG and a camera RAW file, although not that extreme: The JPEG looks attractive, but the RAW file shows you what's there. Figure 2 shows the settings I saved as my default settings in ACR. The two important differences are that I've added 20 points of highlight restoration, which is enough to  avoid excessive clipping in the highlights without significantly compressing the midtones, and I've moved the black level slider all the way down to zero. Also check the Tone Curve Point tab in ACR to make sure that the "Linear" curve is selected.

Fig. 2

That's pretty much it. Not rocket science. Not even really bottle-rocket science.

Making decent proof sheets doesn't have to be a burden. I'm happy to say that although I am years, even decades, behind making enlarged prints of all of my very best photographs, my proof sheet files are 100% up to date.

Ctein

Ctein's regular weekly column, which was delayed for one day this week, will appear once more on Thursday (next week), and then will be switching to a new time slot—Wednesdays on TOP.

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DxO News

DxOMark.com has added a number of new cameras to its DxOMark Sensor database. Newly added are: the Canon PowerShot G11 (ranking 78th, with a score of 46.6); Canon S90 (79th, 46.5) (the close rankings confirming the belief that these two cameras use the same sensor); Canon EOS 7D (31st, 64.9); Sony A500 (34th,. 64.4) and Sony A550 (27th, 65.8); Pentax K-7 (52nd, 61); Nikon D300s (19th, 69.8), and Nikon D3000 (47th, 62.5).

Somewhat surprisingly, nothing has yet knocked the Nikon D90 (15th, 72.6) off its pedestal as the top-ranked APS-C sensor digital camera (all the cameras above it are either full-frame or medium format). 

In other news, a few days ago DxO announced DxO Optics Pro v6.1 for Windows, which adds RAW support for the Canon 7D and G11 and the Nikon D3000. For this new release, several bugs were fixed and some improvements were made to the user interface based on customer feedback and suggestions. Fifty-six new DxO Optics Modules are now available to DxO Optics Pro users, covering the Canon 7D, XTi, XSi, and T1i; Nikon D3, D300, D300s, D40x, and D3000; Olympus E-30, E-420, E-510, and E-620; and Sony A300, A850, and A900.

DxO Optics Pro 6 for Mac is expected in "early 2010." In the meantime, there's an intermediate release, v5.3.6, which is compatible with Snow Leopard.

Here's the DxO Image Science website.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Mark Probst: "I wouldn't take the DxOMark rankings too seriously. The DxOMark score is a composite of three sub-scores, only one of which (Low-Light ISO) is in any way indicative of performance at higher sensitivities.

"As an example, I mostly shoot black and white, rarely below ISO 400, but quite often up to 3200. Given that, I don't really care about the DxO dynamic range number, because it gives the dynamic range at whichever sensitivity it is maximized at, which is usually the lowest one. The Panasonic LX-3, for example, has a dynamic range number of 10.8, while the Canon 5D has 11.1. That would suggest that in terms of dynamic range their performance is comparable. The graphs however show that at ISO 400 the LX-3 is down to 8, while the 5D has barely fallen below 11, and the difference grows even more at higher ISOs.

"The third sub-score, Color Depth, is also mostly irrelevant to me, because I shoot black and white, but even if I shot color, it would only be meaningful if I shot at low sensitivities.

"So, don't look at the DxOMark score. If you must compare cameras via DxO, know what you need and look at the graphs! And don't forget to switch from 'Screen' to 'Print' mode!"

Mike replies: It's true—single-index scores, as I've ranted in the past, are of—ahem—limited usefulness. It's always better to dig deeper in the data and analyze according to your specific personal needs.