The Online Photographer

Photographing from Commercial Airplanes

This week's column by Ctein

Lately I've been having considerable success making portfolio-worthy photographs on my airline flights. I may not have any artistic control over the scenery I'm presented, but despite that, I'd have to say that nearly half my flights have produced at least one photograph I'm happy to add to my portfolio. I engaged in such photography back in my film/darkroom days but I rarely achieved success. These days I consider success the norm. So, what's different?

Where you sit
One change has nothing to do with the photographic technology. I'm sitting further forward in the airplane. There is less air turbulence in front of the wing than behind; the closer you can get to the nose, the better. The reason I'm sitting further forward is that the combined forces of rampant security paranoia and rampant airline greed have made economy-class flying increasingly intolerable to me. Most of my five to eight peregrinations each year are by air rather than ground. I like to go places. Increasingly, I'm disliking getting there.

Consequently, these days, I'm weighting my flight choices more heavily by whether I can get a cheap first class upgrade or choice of premium quality seats than by flight times and arrivals. I'll also throw frequent-flier miles and credit card points at an upgrade; it usually gets me more value both financially and comfort-wise than a free coach ticket would. I'm nowhere near the income level where I can afford to pay list for business or first class, but cheap upgrades? Oh, yeah!

Paradoxically, looking to the "discount" airlines often produces better results. Living on the West Coast and mostly traveling to the Midwest, I've got some good options. Southwest Airlines often has the lowest prices to where I want to go, when you take into account that they still allow two free pieces of checked luggage. Paying an additional sum for priority boarding (and buying and checking-in early) usually means I can grab whatever seat I want.

My favoritest airline, though, is Minneapolis-based Sun Country (half my trips are to Minneapolis). They fly direct to San Francisco, unlike Southwest. Not only are their fares low, but when I do my 24-hour online check-in, they'll allow me to upgrade to first class (which is never sold out) for $120 each way. For an average of $150–$200 more than I'd pay for a coach ticket on some other airline, I fly first class. If I want to take any checked bags with me, which I often do, knock $50–$100 off of that modest premium.

That's the nontechnological angle. Mostly, my success rate is way up because of both digital photography and digital printing. Digital cameras let me find the sweet spots in the airplane windows. Photographing through two panes of acrylic/glass doesn't degrade image quality anywhere as much as you'd think, unless you're photographing through a ripply spot in one of the panes or it's really badly scraped up. In the film days, I wouldn't know if I had picked a good spot until I developed the film. More often than not I hadn't.

Now what I do is make a test photograph and chimp it like mad at high magnification. I go over the entire frame to see if there are any sour spots in it. If there are, I move the camera over a bit and try again. Usually I can find a usable spot on the window. As long as I always photograph through that spot, photographs look consistently sharp from corner to corner.

Fig. 2.

Working with a longer lens also helps. Wider fields of view pull in more oblique rays and those cause more problems when photographing through two layers of window. I stick with something in the 75-100mm-equivalent range. The illustration at the top of this post shows the full frame of a recent addition to my portfolio that I made with the Olympus 45mm (90 mm-e) lens. It makes a critically tack-sharp 17x22-inch print. Figure 2 is a 100%-scale detail.

Color-crossover
Digital printing comes into play because aerial photography means photographing through a very long column of air. There's a huge amount of atmospheric scattering, and shorter wavelengths are scattered much more strongly than longer ones. That's what produces the blue shadows in long-distance photographs: green and especially blue wavelengths from all over the scene are scattered into the shadows, veiling them. It's not just a color shift, it's color-crossover. Even when you've overall color-balanced so that the whites are neutral, the shadows will be greenish-blue.

This was a nearly-impossible problem to address in the darkroom unless you did dye transfer, in which case it was merely annoyingly difficult. In image-processing software, it's readily addressed with a curves correction. Figure 3 shows a generic curve adjustment for dealing with this. Observe how far in I pulled the black point on the blue curve, a lesser amount on the green curve, and only a little bit on the red curve. I added control points up near 192, 192 so that the whites and highlights are little altered. This is just an approximation of what you'd need to do for any particular photograph, but it shows you the general idea.

Aerial B&W infrared photography is also turning out to be a big win. That'll be next week's column.

Ctein

Ctein's column appears on TOP on Wednesdays.

©2013 by Ctein, all rights reserved

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David: "Great post. I am an airline pilot and I have taken a DSLR along on every trip I've worked since 2004. Your tips are spot on, especially the part about finding a good piece of window to shot through. Even the flight-deck's windows have their flaws. It's important to find a spot with no ripples.

"The only point where I disagree with you is the use of long lenses. Yes, long lenses help you stay clear of some of the issues associated with shooting through a window, but when I use a long lens for aerials I feel like I am not able to produce a sense of height and my pictures look flat. I advise you to pull out the wide angle and deal with the consequences. You can mitigate a lot of the flare and reflection issues by pushing your lens hood right up against the window or carry a piece of black cloth to drape around your camera.

"Your curves solution to blue shadows is quite elegant. I'm going to add it to my bag of tricks. For those who are interested, I created a video tutorial on how to edit photos taken through an airliner's window. It's kind of rambling and poorly produced but I do give away many of my secrets so it might be worth watching.

"A big part of getting good photos from an airliner is being in the right place at the right time. The same rules of lighting apply to aerial photography as landscape photography. Plan your trip so you are airborne during early morning or late afternoon. My job keeps me airborne 700 to 1,000 hours per year, so my odds of seeing something spectacular are higher than the average air traveler. Here is a gallery of some of the best aerial photos I've acquired over the years.

"For more tips about aerial photography and lots of stories, see my 'Flying the Line' series at my blog.

"Sorry for the shameless self promotion.  Sometimes I can't help myself."

Dale: "Enjoyed the column very much. Another thing to consider is using the airline website to find out what equipment is being used. Newer planes tend to mean fewer scratched windows. And as a 40 week per year flyer, I can say Southwest seems to maintain windows more often. They often seem clearer."

VK: "One of my favorite landscape subjects! And technically it is much harder than people think it is when seeing the final product, because the list of things you have to worry about is huge: sun glare, far distance haze, clouds, scratches on the window, exhaust turbulence from the engines, and that your ground speed is 3 meters per 1/60 sec. Not to mention people in the aisle seat who insist in sleeping with windows down.

"Absolutely the best airline route for such photography is British Airways Flight 118. Leaves Bangalore, India, in the early a.m., and lands in London, UK, shortly after noon, and flies over some stunning places along the way."

Eli Burakian: "Folks should check out Julieanne Kost who has a great book called Window Seat with incredible photographs from commercial flights, as well as specific and general advice."

A Cool Shot

...Just not the kind you're used to seeing here.

The 4 ball (solid purple) is touching the rail; the 11 ball (red stripe) is touching the 4. The object is to get the 3 ball (solid red) into the corner pocket. Since the two blocking balls are directly in the path of the cue ball, this would seem to be impossible. But behold:

Cool, huh?

So why am I showing you this, when I promised no more pool posts? Well, because it's also the very first video I e-v-e-r made with my NEX-6, when I've always said I have absolutely zero interest in making videos with digital cameras. Showing that a softening of position is possible for even the most recalcitrant of curmudgeons-in-training. What strange things our enthusiasms can lead us to do.

I admit my video technique needs work. (And it's still an extremely good bet that this isn't going to turn into a videography blog any time soon.)

The shot is from page 116 of Ray Martin's The 99 Critical Shots in Pool.

Mike
 

Original contents copyright 2013 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.

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

Michel: "What's next, a TOP Instagram account?!?"

Edward Taylor: "Mike, be afraid, be very afraid. I dabbled in video one day after having barely any interest for 40 years of still photography, and within six months my focus had shifted to a fifty-fifty mix. I probably spend way more time on making videos than on photography now (largely because video is much more time consuming). And if you think photography is expensive, video seems like a sport for billionaires or perhaps kings. The camera is often the least of the expense. And, Photoshop is child's play compared to After Effects. Still photography and videography are far more dissimilar than similar. For example, sound is as important as image in videography."

scott kirkpatrick: "Is that you making the shot? Or just shooting the video of making the shot? How do you plan that one?"

Mike replies: That's me doing the shot. And it's actually not hard—you just use follow (shoot high on the cue ball) and aim directly for the 11. The hard part is recognizing what will happen, what Ray Martin in the book calls "ball interplay." The trick is recognizing the counterintuitive way that the two frozen balls will react when struck. The strike whisks them out of the way, and the spin on the cue ball then carries it forward toward the 3. I have yet to miss the shot, so I think anybody could do it. But I would never have figured it out on my own.

Here is another fabulous example of ball interplay on the fly: go to this video and start playing it at about the 21-minute mark. They're playing 10-ball, so by the rules, Efren Reyes has to hit the 4 ball (solid purple) first, and sinking the 10-ball (blue stripe) wins the game.

He appears to be completely stymied; the announcer even says "I don't think there's offense here," i.e., he doesn't even have a shot. Reyes then taps the near corner pocket because by rule he must call the 10 ball. Then watch what he does.

An amazing shot, one that takes unusual mastery just to recognize as possible. (Not for nothing do they call Reyes "The Magician.")

Sorry, now I am talking about pool and not videography. I'll slap myself on the wrist. [g]

'Lightning Bolt' Photo Raises Questions

Chris Hensel, a TOP reader and wedding photographer from southeastern Pennsylvania, had questions about Olivier Morin's "Lightning Bolt" photograph that we discussed the other day. How, Chris wondered, could there be two separate photos with the same lightning bolt in each? He superimposed small versions of the photos:

Olivier said that he got four photos with the lightning in the sky, all from the same camera, his fifth remote unit. I tried to do some research on the duration of lightning strikes, but didn't come up with much.

To answer the question, I turned to an old friend-I've-never-met, stormchaser and weather photography expert Jim Reed. Jim explains that although lightning strikes are of very short duration, there can be several "restrikes" along the same path, causing the lighting to flicker in the sky:

In my experience, most negative lightning strikes (the most common) last just a matter of milliseconds. Personally I have photographed cloud-to-ground lightning bolts which have featured three or four "re-strikes." In person, you see the same bolt striking several times in the very same spot. A high speed camera wasn't needed. When I edited the photos, I could see the four re-strikes on each successive frame. The re-strikes I've witnessed were between 35 and 50 milliseconds apart.

This is in accordance with my personal observation of lightning—maybe yours too? It most likely explains what Olivier Morin's camera captured in Moscow.

If you're interested in more, Jim has written tips about how to photograph lightning on Nikon's "Learn & Explore" site, where he also talks about the different colors and types of lightning. (Note that stormchasing and lightning photography is potentially very dangerous; please take Jim's precautions seriously.)

And here's Jim's website of photographs of severe and unusual weather.

Mike
(Thanks to Chris Hensel and Jim Reed)

Original contents copyright 2013 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.

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

Bert: "If the air isn't moving much, i.e. there are no strong winds to blow away the ionized channel formed by the first strike, the bolt can repeat itself for quite a long time. The interval between strikes depends mostly on the nature of the ground below—the lower the resistance, the faster your flash recycles! (Yes, the clouds and the ground form a huge capacitor, very much like the one in your flash unit.)"

Ed Hawco: "In my limited and unscientific experience, a bolt of lightning can last longer than milliseconds (or perhaps I'm just seeing re-strikes). Case in point: one night my sweetie and I were driving home after dinner during a spectacular lightning storm. We parked the car to watch the show and we each got out our cell phones. We ended up shooting the exact same bolt of lightning. Considering the kind of lag that 2006-era cell phone cameras had, this zap had to last long enough for us both to realize 'OK, there's a bolt of lightning,' then push the button, then the camera had to engage and take the shot. Doesn't seem like something you can do for an event that takes a few milliseconds. You can see the result here. You can see by the pattern that it is, indeed, the same bolt of lightning captured by both cameras. If nothing else, it demonstrates just how spectacularly bad the camera on the Motorola v710 was."

Drew Medlin: "As a lightning photographer myself, I can also confirm it is possible to have the same bolt appear in more than one photo if the lightning has a more than one return stroke, just as Mr. Reed describes."

Looking at Lenses in the Infra-Red

 

The week's column by Ctein

It's time to talk lenses for my IR-converted Olympus Pen. Unless a lens has been specifically designed to work well in the infrared, there's no way to tell how will perform based upon its visible-light performance. A lens that is good in the visible can turn out to be pretty crappy outside of its design range.

All optical properties of a lens are wavelength-dependent. The refractive index of the glass changes with wavelength (the rate at which it changes is called "dispersion"). This quality is so basic to optical glass that Newton felt compelled to develop his reflecting telescope, because he was certain the problem was unsolvable. Happily, he turned out to be wrong. By combining several different elements and lots of different glasses, you can build modern optics which exhibit good corrections for all aberrations over the entire visible spectrum.

Once you get outside the design range of the lens, things can go completely to hell. Let's take longitudinal chromatic aberration, the tendency for a lens to bring light of different wavelengths into focus at different distances. This effect is somewhere between small and negligible for a decent lens in the visible spectrum, but that red dot that you see on the barrels of so many manual focus lenses? That's the infrared focus spot, for the benefit of folks who were using infrared film. You'd focus the lens normally and then rotate the focus ring a bit to move the indicated distance from the normal marker to the red dot.

Happily, with sensor-based focusing like in my IR-Pen, this is not a problem. The same's true of lateral chromatic aberration. In the deep IR, I'm doing essentially monochromatic photography. Problems aren't limited, though, to just the two chromatic aberrations. All aberration corrections in a lens are achieved by appropriate combinations of lens elements with certain refractive indices and dispersions. The corrections are always an approximation of perfection, and designers don't worry about them outside the design range of the lens. A lens that's well corrected for spherical aberration in the visible may be very poor in the infrared.

Another problem that can pop up is hot-spotting. If the anti-reflection coatings on the lens elements don't work terribly well in the infrared, and many of them don't, a lot more light bounces around in the barrel of the lens and makes its way through to the sensor. The result is an image-veiling glow. This is correctable in Photoshop, but it is annoying and inconvenient.

The very first lens I looked at was my Panasonic Lumix G 20mm ƒ/1.7. I'm not desperately in love with this lens, as some folks are, but it's a very good performer. I find the field of view is also a nice match for the IR "look." Unfortunately, the lens is poor in the infrared; there's substantial smearing and fuzziness towards the edges of the frame that's just barely under control at ƒ/5 (figure 1). I don't think it looks entirely acceptable until ƒ/8. Oh well, at least there's no hot-spotting.

Fig. 1. The Panasonic 20mm is a poor performer in the IR, as these center (left) and corner (right) sections at ƒ/5 at 100% show.

OK, not an auspicious start. How about my Olympus 45mm ƒ/1.8? A totally different story. This lens performs very well in the infrared, even wide open. That's most unusual. Wide-open I think I may see a bit of curvature of field, but there's not a lot, and there's almost no smearing or blurring at the corners. At ƒ/3.2, a stop and a half down, the image quality is exquisite (figure 2). The uniformity's excellent with corner quality almost indistinguishable from the center (figure 3). There's no hot spotting at any aperture.

Fig. 2. The Olympus 45mm is excellent in the IR. This is an ƒ/3.2 full frame from the camera...

Fig. 3. ...And these are 100% sections from the center (left) and corner (right).

On to the Olympus 12mm ƒ/2. Not one of my favorite lenses, but it is what it is. Is what it is good enough for infrared? Yup. It's pretty decent by ƒ/2.8 and very good at ƒ/4 and on down. Yes, there's a bit of smearing in the corners, same as in visible light, which is why it ain't one of my favorites. But it's not worse than in the visible, which makes it very good by IR standards. And, again, no hot-spotting.

How about my 85mm ƒ/1.4 Rokinon manual lens? It continues to impress. It's soft/smeary in the corners wide open and at ƒ/2–2.8. I could use it wide in a pinch, but I would rather not. It's improving as it stops down, though, and by ƒ/4 it's looking mighty good everywhere.

So, three of my four primes hold up well in the IR. What about my zooms? My 14–42mm Olympus kit zoom (first generation) is a surprise win. At the 14mm setting there's smearing in the corners wide open, but stopping down one stop cleans up most of it. At 20mm, it's definitely superior to the Panasonic 20mm ƒ/1.7. Wide open, at ƒ/4, it's close to as good as the 20mm at ƒ/8. Stopped down to ƒ/5.6 it's superior. At longer focal lengths wide open is OK but not great. Stopping down a stop makes things a lot better and is probably the optimum aperture across the board.

The Panasonic Lumix G Vario 45–200 ƒ/4–ƒ/5.6 also turned out to be OK in the IR. At 45mm, it's nowhere in the same league as the 45mm Olympus, but if it were already on the camera I'd feel comfortable using it. At 72mm, it's a bit off in the corners wide open (ƒ/4.3) but not too bad; ƒ/5.6 improves things. At 120mm and onward, the image is uniform but soft wide open; it's very decent half a stop to a stop down. There seems to be a lot of light loss wide-open with this lens, at all focal lengths—a good half stop at least—so there's not much reason to use it wide-open anyway. And, still, no pronounced hot-spotting.

So, are hot spots a thing of the past? Nope, I'm just lucky in my choice of lenses. I played with my friend DDB's Olympus 60mm ƒ/2.8 macro a bit, and while the sharpness and uniformity were acceptable (though not spectacular), the hot-spotting was severe (figure 4).

The Olympus 60mm ƒ/2.8 macro lens has a serious hot-spot problem in the IR.

And that's the state of lenses in Ctein's IR kit.

©2013 by Ctein, all rights reserved

Ctein, who is coming up on his 300th column(!), is TOP's de facto Technical Editor. His columns appear on most Wednesdays.

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My IR-Converted Olympus Pen II

(Second of an indeterminate number of parts)

Fig. 1. I've made some portfolio-worthy false-color digital IR photographs
but not many, and it's devilishly hard work. Consequently, it's
not high on my priority list

-

This week's column by Ctein

Last week I told you how I got my Olympus Pen E-P1 camera converted to 830 nm (a.k.a. "deep") infrared by Life Pixel. I didn't opt for the full-spectrum conversion, although I considered it. I have some theoretical interest in exploring ultraviolet photography, and I have done false-color infrared work (figure 1). Converting for full-spectrum, though, would've required me to buy a whole bunch of auxiliary filters. Just about every lens I own uses a different filter size. Even with step-down rings, I'd be more than doubling the cost of the endeavor, and the equipment would be a lot less convenient to work with. Life Pixel assured me that if I wanted to opt for that (re-)conversion later, they could do it (for additional money, of course).

As soon as I started working with the IR-converted Pen several characteristics jumped out at me. First, a Micro 4/3 type design is really ideal for IR work. There are no problems with focus shifts or corrections, because the camera is focusing based on what the sensor sees. There are many fewer issues visualizing how a photograph is going to look in the infrared, because what you see on the back screen of the camera is a black-and-white infrared photograph. It's a very natural way to work.

Fig. 2. This is a "straight" RAW conversion from my IR Olympus Pen, using my normal default ACR settings

The photographs that come out of my camera are very flat (figure 2). There are no true blacks and the only time there are pure whites is if there is a direct light source or specular reflection in the photograph or the contrast range of the original scene is really extreme. I can't say whether this is inherent in the scenes themselves, in the behavior of the sensor/filter stack in the deep IR, or purely a consequence of the fact that anti-reflection coatings on lens elements don't work especially well in the IR.

Whatever the reason, photographs are typically low in contrast with extremely poor micro-contrast and tonal separation in fine detail. My standard conversion in ACR for the IR Pen pushes the contrast slider up around +65 and has the clarity slider pegged at +100. Even that's often not enough; I may pull in the black and white clipping points in ACR or do additional local contrast enhancement in Photoshop using wide radius unsharp masking or ContrastMaster. The photographs look great after I make those adjustments (figure 3).

Fig. 3. The same photograph after I greatly boosted the contrast and clarity and pulled in the black and white clipping points in ACR

High-ISO noise was less of a problem with my converted camera. That's because the first noise to kick in offensively with the Olympus Pen is chroma noise. No chroma in these photographs! I've previously written that I considered the Pen usable up to ISO 800 for professional-quality work. After the IR conversion, it's ISO 1600.

(Important side-note: in all discussions of noise in this camera, I'm going to be talking about what it looks like after I've made the contrast adjustments needed to make the overall photograph look good. The appearance of noise is awfully sensitive to global and local contrast, so what you really care about is how it looks in a photograph with good contrast characteristics, not what comes out of the camera.)

Noise is an important consideration, aesthetically, because in the IR the sky is almost always very dark and there's more noise at the dark end of the exposure scale than the light end. Furthermore, because Raleigh scattering goes as the fourth power of wavelength (that's why the sky is blue, in case you didn't know), shadows are even darker in the infrared than they are invisible light.

Most conventional cameras show little difference in noise at the lower ISO settings, but noise steadily grows with increasing ISO in my IR Pen. The camera exhibits extremely low noise at an ISO 100 setting, but every stop above that shows a clear increase in noise (figure 4). It's very uniform and smooth; really, it looks like film grain rather than annoying digital noise, but it does increase with each increment. In subjective language, I'd describe ISO 100 as being essentially grainless, ISO 200–400 as being very fine-grained (relative to 35mm conventional black-and-white film), ISO 800 still fine-grained and ISO 1600 medium/coarse-grained. Above 1600, I don't consider the camera usable because large-scale stripe patterns appear, and the "grain" loses the totally random, uniform quality.

Fig. 4. Noise in the IR Olympus Pen at various ISOs (the RAW files were corrected using the same ACR settings as for figure 3). Pay no attention to the sharpness of the leaves—it was a windy day

Between that and wanting/needing to use lens apertures in the ƒ/3.5–ƒ/5.6 range (I'll get to that in the next installment), one can wind up a bit light-starved even on a sunny day. A sunlight exposure at ISO 100 would be something like 1/300th sec at ƒ/4, after the two-stop deep-IR-conversion loss. But, with far less light in the shadows you can readily drop 3–4 stops. If you want to stop down for more depth of field or better sharpness or use a longer lens, well... ISO 100 doesn't cut it. I'm willing to accept the two stop speed loss to get purer IR characteristics, but I can understand why many folks might prefer the conventional IR conversion.

Putting this in perspective, though, the IR Pen still produces photographs at ISO 800 that are less grainy than the brute-force IR photography I talked about last time.

The next time I come back to this subject, in two (?) weeks, I'll tell you how a whole bunch of different lenses performed in the IR. Stay tuned to this station.

©2013 by Ctein, all rights reserved

Weekly columnist Ctein's work usually appears on Wednesdays, but Mike the Ed. was traveling this week.

Original contents copyright 2013 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.

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

Oskar Ojala: "Out of curiosity, is the false color IR picture taken on Kodak EIR or something else? I tend agree with your conclusions though; in my experience false color IR usually turns into a gimmick rather than something that stands on it own and thus I've concentrated on BW IR this year. There are good examples of false color IR—I've even managed to take some shots myself that I liked—but it's a very challenging medium.

"For a while I've used converted Sony NEXes for IR, before that a Nikon and have also converted a prosumer Canon as an experiment. All except the Canon were multispectral versions. The Canon, with a deep enough filter to render an entirely monochromatic image, worked very well actually. While my IR pictures tend to have flatness, it hasn't been as extreme as your example, although the settings might differ. Specifically, blacks aren't nearly black enough for me. There could be many reasons for that.

"One thing I have found is that there are huge differences in lenses for IR and especially most wide angle lenses tend to work lousy, with too many aberrations ruining everything but the center. Contrast also varies a lot. My lens selection has been a long process."

Tim: "Perfect timing with these posts, I recently (last Thursday) acquired a second hand full spectrum E-PL1. I've only used it for a weekend, but I think I'm going to have a lot of fun with it. The full spectrum images converted to black and white at first glance are really appealing to me. I wanted to let you know that I'm really enjoying these posts."

My IR-Converted Olympus Pen

(First of an indeterminate number of parts)

This week's column by Ctein

As I mentioned in last week's column, I've done some good art in the past with digital IR. All of that's been done with "brute force" configurations. That is to say, I used a conventional IR-blocking-filtered digital camera with a visible-light blocking filter over the lens and made my photographs with the minuscule amount of infrared light that would leak past the blocking filter.

The advantage of such an arrangement is that one can use one's existing camera. The disadvantage is that those IR-blocking filters are extremely effective. On my old Fuji cameras, vis figure 4 last week, it was still possible to make infrared photographs. But, that photograph had an exposure of 1/5 second at ƒ/2.8 with the camera set to ISO 100, and the only reason it was even that short was I was photographing almost directly into the sun. Three-fold longer exposure times are more common, even in direct sunlight.

On my two Olympus cameras, this brute force method won't even work; the IR-blocking filters are simply too good. I gave up infrared photography for the time being when I got my Olympus Pen three years ago.

A while back, TOP reader Dave Polaschek lent me his hard-converted DSLR, where the IR-blocking filter had been removed and replaced with a visible-light-blocking filter. Unsurprisingly, the results were immensely better. I could work at hand-holdable shutter speeds and apertures even under less-than-direct-sunlight conditions, and the photographs had much nicer tonality and less noise.

I found myself not using Dave's camera very much, though. It was a different make and format than my Olympus, which meant there was no common hardware. It was also quite bulky compared to the kit I was using. Too much trouble to haul along. Since 99% (conservatively) of my work is still traditional color photography, Dave's camera languished on the shelf. Eventually I returned it to him.

I started thinking about getting my old Olympus Pen converted to IR, since it was not getting any use at all since my OM-D purchase. The body is so small and light that adding it to my kit wouldn't present an annoying burden, and I wouldn't have to buy lenses for it. I did some casual looking into the companies that had IR-photography products, but there was such a wide range of prices and services available, spanning more than an order of magnitude, that I put it aside as something that was going to require far more energy and time to research that I felt like putting in. I did bookmark that Life Pixel had an off-the-shelf Olympus conversion at the exceedingly reasonable price of $275, but that's as far as it went. I didn't know anything about the company, and if you attempt to research this subject online by looking at user threads in various forums, you'll find a most notable set of partisan flame wars. It's almost as if you were to ask the question, "Gee, I want to be a computer user. I hear those things are cool. So, should I get a Mac or Windows machine?" hoping to get something approaching a dispassionately informative answer.

Then a friend, Josh More, who does truly exquisite animal photography, asked me if I had an opinion on which company he should go with for a camera conversion. Well, having none, and rather liking the camera David loaned me (and besides it was of the same brand as Josh's camera) I asked Dave who had done his conversion. And, what do you know, it turned out to be Life Pixel. David been pleased with his dealings with them, and I had been pleased with his camera, so that settled the matter.

I'm not saying they are the only people who offer good service and reasonable prices; I am sure there are others. But me, I need only one. I'm not even saying they're better than anybody else. Don't know, don't care. In this case, better is the enemy of good. I will say they treated me just fine, and I don't think they thought I was anyone special (the "world-famous Ctein" only exists in some alternate reality [yes, but it's a cool alternate reality —Ed.]). I had a modest number of hand-holding questions for them that their website didn't answer (although it answers quite a few) and I received prompt and useful answers.

After too much procrastination (I was dealing with a rather large print sale; you might've heard) I sent off my camera to them with payment. I opted for the "deep IR" (830 nm cutoff) over the "standard IR" (720 nm cutoff) conversion. They cost the same, and I figured since I was most interested in pure IR, I would go for the purest experience. Deep IR conversion loses an additional stop of camera sensitivity over the regular conversion—two stops instead of one. In other words, a camera setting of ISO 100 becomes an effective setting of ISO 25 (assuming you think ISO applies to IR, but we won't go there). Still, for a great deal of work ISO 25 is plenty, so I decided that would be more than sufficient. Turns out it's not quite so "plenty" as I thought, which I'll get to in future columns, but it's still pretty great.

Since their estimated delivery date was after I'd be leaving for Minneapolis, I asked them if there'd be any problem contacting me on completion to see if I wanted it shipped to a different address. Nope, no problem.

Two days before I was due to fly out, and nearly a week earlier than they had estimated, they were done with my conversion and sent me an e-mail asking where I'd like the camera sent. I fired one back saying that since I would be leaving town in two days, was there any chance they could get the package shipped out that same day via UPS for overnight delivery?

Before I was done telling Paula that she might need to keep an eye out for delivery in the morning, I got a phone call from Life Pixel. Yes, they could get the package out the same day, and the reason they were calling me is so that I could make the payment for the faster shipping with no unnecessary delays. Great! That meant I didn't have to have the camera shipped to Minneapolis and I could check it out before I left.

UPS screwed up and the package didn't arrive the next day but the day following, the day I was going to leave. That still gave me time to run some quickie tests to make sure the camera performed OK, and it did. And, pleasant surprise, it came back with a custom white balance programmed in, so the photographs come up on the back screen and in ACR looking almost perfectly neutral with no futzing about on my part. I've got Mike's beloved black-and-white camera (not counting the IR business) [this alternate reality is no fair —Ed.].

The full frame from an "ISO 100" infrared photograph from my converted Olympus Pen

A 100% section from the center of that frame. Nice detail and low noise.

While waiting to board at the airport, I sent a short e-mail off to Life Pixel letting them know that UPS screwed up and asked them to check into whether I'm due for some kind of a refund on shipping. No problem, they said, and they went and smacked UPS around a bit and the next morning there was an e-mail saying it's done and they've credited me back with all my shipping charges.

And that's how I got my camera: flawless conversion, ready to use out-of-the-box, finished a week before I expect, and an appropriate amount of handholding the whole way through the process. Complaints? None.

Next week I'll start to tell you what it's like working with this camera and the image characteristics of the photographs it produces. Then, probably, tea, and after that, probably, some reports on lens performance with this camera (Yeah, I rearranged my upcoming writing schedule since I spelled it out a week ago. Anyone truly surprised?)

©2013 by Ctein, all rights reserved

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Harold Merklinger: "A cameras once criticized for its high IR sensitivity but seldom seen recommended for IR photography is indeed the Leica M8. Hand-held IR images are quite possible with typical exposures such as 1/60 sec at ƒ/5.6 with ISO set to 320.  The filter offering the best hand-held opportunities is the B&W 092. The bright foliage effect is present with this filter, although skies may not be as dark as with stronger filters. The on-screen review image is quite purple, flarey, and may seem to indicate a hot-spot problem, and yet the final image will be fine.

"A near-unique feature of the M8 is that it meters correctly in the IR spectrum! I have learned to trust the meter and not the screen. Of course the appropriate focus off-set for each lens needs to be known. ISO settings higher than 320 are certainly possible, but I find that definition suffers. Better results are obtained at ISO 160 although this often entails shutter speeds of 1/15 sec and a tripod becomes a near necessity. (The M9 will offer even better definition, but requires 30 to 60 times the exposure—depending upon the filter used.)

"Some cameras—like the Nikon D800—are almost entirely unsuitable for IR photography unless modified. In my brief tests with a D800, 100 to 300 times the exposure was required (compared to the M8) and the bright foliage effect was weak to non-existent. This implies that the net effect of the IR passing filter and the IR blocking filter is essentially a neutral density visible light filter. And even live-view metering was way off. (I never use the in-camera JPEG files from the M8; I only use the DNG files.)"

Ctein replies: That is indeed a remarkable amount of IR leakage in the M8. But what a great way to turn a bug into a feature. And you get to use your Leica lenses, yet!

Your D800 performed a lot like my Olympus Pen, pre-conversion.

PSDs and Permanence

This week's column by Ctein

One of the complaints I've seen raised about Adobe's new subscription-based license for Photoshop is that if you fail to keep up your subscription, years of your work will become unavailable to you. Which brings to my mind two questions:

1) Are you completely out of your friggin' mind?

2) If not, what unmitigated fool ever managed to convince you that Photoshop Document (.PSD, hereinafter rendered without the "dot") files were an appropriate way to be archiving your work?!

PSD's should not be considered an appropriate format for archiving. Especially not layered PSDs. Especially, especially not layered PSDs that include active elements like un-rendered type or smart filters or objects. No way, no how.

There is no guarantee that previous versions of Photoshop can open your current work product correctly. Equally, there is no guarantee that future versions will be able to open it correctly, or at least in exactly the same form it is now. Filter algorithms change. Type rendering changes. Just to give two examples. These complex structures you're building right now? They're intermediate work product, highly dependent upon the platform you're interpreting them with. It is nice and convenient when they endure; God knows, I take advantage of that. But they are not an archival format. There is no guarantee you will be able to read them in the future in the same way.

It's not just about a subscription-based license. What happens when Adobe goes out of business? It will. Very few companies and product lines of any sort make it to the age of 50. Only a minuscule number will make it to 100. None of them are immortal. Some of you reading this will be around and still making photographs when Adobe disappears.

Personally, I'm hoping it doesn't happen in my lifetime, and not 'cause I'm hoping for short life. But it will happen.

If you're treating these fragile and temporal constructs as your long-term archives, you're just asking for trouble.

There's an easy way out of this. So easy, in fact, that no one can be excused for not implementing it. It doesn't take terribly long or very much money, even for a very large base of PSD files. Which means that even if you don't do it now, like you should, you can do it when the time comes that you no longer feel able or willing to support a Photoshop subscription.

Here's the scheme:

Grab yourself a spare coupla-terabyte hard drive. Don't have one at hand? Go spend $100. Seriously, this is your "life's work" you're talking about; if it ain't worth that much to you, you've got nothing to whine about. Besides, you know you'll just need the new space in the next year, anyway. Admit it. Nature abhors an empty hard drive

Go through your existing inventory of work and copy anything with a .PSD extension to that drive. Specific details depend on exactly what directory structures and naming conventions you use for your work. You can figure it out; it is definitely not rocket science. If this takes you more than a day, no matter how large and complex your inventory is, I'll be amazed. Most of your time will be spent waiting for hundreds of gigabytes of data to get copied over.

Open up one of the files in Photoshop and create an action that does the following—first it flattens the file and second it saves it as an uncompressed TIFF. Yes, uncompressed. Less fragile, nearly universally readable and it will be for the rest of our mortal lifetimes, barring the complete collapse of technological civilization. (In which case, honestly, the disposition of your photographs is not going to be your biggest concern.)

Now tell Photoshop to batch-process all the files on your new hard drive using that action, and let 'er rip.

Come back an indeterminate amount of time later, and now you have rendered, universally (almost) readable versions of your work in its most current final state. Archive those, according to your taste.

That's it.

Oh, not quite. All of you complaining about being forced onto the upgrade treadmill so that you can read the RAW files from your newest camera? Adobe still distributes its free DNG Converter, which is kept as current as Adobe can, so you don't need the latest and greatest Lightroom or Photoshop to be able to access the files from your latest and greatest camera.

Now I'm done.

©2013 by Ctein, all rights reserved

Original contents copyright 2013 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.

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Jack: "According to John Nack, Adobe will be offering a way to use files once you've stopped paying the monthly tax. I'll believe it when I see it."

Mitch: "One copy on one hard drive isn't enough for archiving. Hard drives always eventually fail, so you should archive to at least two drives. Ideally, a) buy the drives at different times from different manufactures so the drives and components within aren't from any of the same production runs. This will reduce the likelihood of both drives failing around the same time; b) store the drives in different places, preferably in different geographic areas. If a major natural disaster or fire destroys your home, having a second drive at a friend or family member's home in another city/state means you're much less likely to lose work."

Ed Hawco: "Well, that seems very sensible. It doesn't fully apply to me, as I don't use Photoshop. I do everything in Lightroom, where I do all my adjustments on 'virtual copies,' which are essentially another locked-into-Adobe format. (In fact, they're not even a format proper; they're just descriptions of adjustments that are applied to previews and export files).

"My big worry is that I'll reach a point where I just cannot live with Adobe anymore (I'm not far from that now). The solution is obvious: Export all of those virtual copies (or at least the important ones) to TIFF.

"I think your idea makes some people uncomfortable (wrongly) because of its apparent finality. For those of us who do this more casually than professionally, we don't necessarily want to fully 'commit' our edits. We like to think we can always go back and tweak a bit more for the next print or export. We're not always convinced we got it right, so we don't want to commit.

"It's a completely bogus worry, of course. Just because you commit to a TIFF doesn't mean you can't still tweak the virtual copy/PSD, at least until such time as the plug is pulled on the format. But we're talking about fear of commitment, not practical methods.

"After reading this I'm going to make it a project to go through my Lightroom library and commit all of the images I've tweaked as virtual copies. The nice thing about Lightroom is that I can make those committed copies part of the library, grouped with the 'originals' so it will be easy to keep track of them.

"Thanks for the kick in the pants!"

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.

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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.

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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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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!"