William Porter Photography

SONY A77: expanding dynamic range with DRO or HDR (or not)

2012-01-31T18:07:00.001-06:00

I work near my kitchen (for obvious reasons). As I look to my right from where I am sitting, I see dark shadows down around the cabinets under the counter, and I also see through the big windows to the bright outdoors full of trees, cars, other houses. This is a scene with a high dynamic range. The miraculous thing is, my eyes can see detail in the shadows and in the bright areas equally well and at the same time. Pretty amazing, really.

No camera can match that. Photographing this scene the "old-fashioned way" (say, in M mode), I would have to expose for the shadows (which will result in the windows appearing to be bright white areas with little detail beyond them) or expose for what I can see outdoors (which will mean the shadows inside will become black areas, again, with little detail). It's a dilemma. What good photographers have done for ages is learn how to make the best compromise, so that we get some detail in the highlights and some detail in the shadows, or so that we expose for the part of the scene that matters most to us and simply live with the fact that details at the other end of the light-dark scale are sacrificed.

Note that the problem I'm talking about exists only when there's a large contrast between bright and the dark areas of the scene you are photographing. This isn't always the case, in fact, it isn't often the case. Take a photo in the shade of a tree on an afternoon when the sun is hidden behind light clouds, and you'll probably be dealing with a very modest dynamic range, one that is well within the reach of your camera's sensor. And when dynamic range is a problem, one way to fix it is by balancing the light. You might for example put a flash on the camera, to throw some light into the face of your subject when you're shooting outdoors. These are solutions that don't rely on your camera at all.

Here's what my camera sees. This is what the raw file looked like when I opened it in Lightroom 3.5, with no processing other than Lightroom's very minimal default:

Raw file, unprocessed.

And, just to emphasize where the problems lie, here's is what I saw on screen when I turned on Lightroom's "show clipping" feature:

Raw file in Lightroom with "show clipping" turned on.

The red is where the scene is brighter than the camera could capture (with these settings) and the blue is where the scene is too dark for the camera (with these settings) to retain detail.

Building a better mousetrap, er, light-trap

Now, camera makers want to make life easier for us all and they have, for a long time, been trying to solve this problem in the camera, in two different and somewhat contradictory ways. First, makers of sensors like Sony have been working to expand the dynamic range of the sensors. Second, camera makers have been working to squeeze as much dynamic range into their captures as possible. Either way, the goal is to get a more accurate picture of the world, a picture that is — or at least seems to be — closer to what our eyes really see.

Sony is undoubtedly the leader in this area — both in its sensor development and in the work it has done with in-camera processing — and the current state of the art is available on Sony's new DSLT cameras, the A65 and the A77. I'm not going to talk about improving the sensor because the capabilities of any given camera's sensor are a given and you can't get a better sensor without buying a new camera. I am going to talk a little about improvements in how these cameras process images for you.

DRO

One way to improve the overall exposure is for the camera to do some quick adjustment of the lighting at the moment of capture. To do this on the Sony A65 or A77, you use the DRO (dynamic range optimization) feature. DRO tries to squeeze more contrast into a single file. Here's a picture of my kitchen with DRO set to "Auto".

DRO AUTO

Not as bad as that first picture I took without DRO enabled. In that picture, the windows were just white panels, and the cabinets were much darker.

Sensing that there was at least a five to six stop gap between the darks and the lights here, I then changed the DRO setting from Auto to "Lv5":

DRO Lv5

Not a big improvement. The shadows have been lightened a good bit — but the bright areas outside have, too. This isn't worse than the DRO AUTO shot but it's not better either.

In-camera HDR

In-camera HDR ("high dynamic range") is a different way to solve the problem. Like on-the-computer HDR, in-camera HDR starts with several different exposures of the same scene, then combines them into a single output file in which the well-exposed bright areas from one shot have been combined with the best-exposed dark areas from another, and the composite file has been adjusted to make things look natural. Sony's programmers have written programs that seem to do a very good job — sometimes — of combining the exposures. But a key factor in getting good results, is providing the processor with good source images. The new fixed-mirror (SLT) cameras from Sony are especially well suited to gathering the multiple exposures because, lacking a moving mirror, these cameras can take more shots per second than their traditional reflex (moving) mirror competitors. All of the pictures here were taken hand-held. Computer-based HDR is usually done with a tripod.

When you shoot with the HDR feature enabled, be prepared for the camera to respond differently. Instead of the single shutter noise, you'll hear several shutter noises in rapid succession. And then it takes several seconds for the camera's processor to create the resulting HDR file.

Here's a shot with HDR set to "Auto".

HDR AUTO

Sort of the opposite of DRO AUTO: The HDR AUTO has preserved detail outside well but surrendered detail in the shadows.

Once again, knowing that the dynamic range of this scene was fairly extreme, I set HDR to its max (6 EV). Here's the result:

HDR 6EV

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is not too bad. (Click the image to see it larger.) This is a pretty reasonable compromise between the brights and darks.

Raw

Now, you don't have to use either DRO or HDR. As I said above, you can take steps to reduce the dynamic range, usually by lightening the shadows. For instance, I could have used flash here, or I could have turned the kitchen lights on. You can also shoot raw and fix problems on the computer. This is what a lot of very good photographers do, and it works. The raw data file has a lot more latitude than a jpeg. To compare what I can get from the raw file with what Sony's in-camera DRO and HDR offer, I reshot the scene, saved the raw file, and processed it myself in Lightroom.

I used an adjustment brush to bring the bright areas (the windows) down 1.5 stops, and a separate brush to bring the shadow areas up 1.5 stops. I wasn't doing this for a client so I was content to do this quick and dirty. Even so, the result was pretty good:

Raw file in Lightroom after adjustment brushes have darkened the highlights and lightened the shadows.

Remember, the original of this image was the file I showed at the start of this post.

What's best: DRO, or HDR, or Raw?

So I ended up with three pretty good or at least okay results, achieved in three very different ways.

It's a tough call and I'm not sure, but I think that — in this case, at least — I like the HDR 6EV result the best.

Ah, but HDR has some serious drawbacks.

I'm tempted to say that in-camera HDR is "easy" but that's not quite true. It would be if I could use HDR AUTO, but as I showed above, this produces a result not much better than DRO AUTO. To get the best result with in-camera HDR, I have to calculate (or guess) by what amount the dynamic range of the scene exceeds the capacity of the sensor, and set the HDR level accordingly. This isn't that hard but you can end up making a couple stabs at the shot before you get it right. May still take less time than working on the raw file in Lightroom. Or it might not.

Morever, because in-camera HDR takes multiple exposures and then processes them, achieving a single HDR result in the camera takes about five or six seconds. And you simply can't use it if anything in the scene is moving quickly. Finally, the A77's processor saves the HDR file as a jpeg, by necessity. The HDR file is a composite, a processed result. There is no raw original of the HDR result.

This makes shooting raw look like the safe way to go. Just remember that, if you just shoot raw, be prepared to do the work in post to fix exposure problems caused by the sensor's inability to match the scene's dynamic range.

If you really, really want the very best result obtainable, you can use computer-based HDR. This allows you to shoot several bracketed exposures, save them as raw files, then merge them in Photoshop or an HDR program. But that's a lot more work than I went to fixing my one raw file.

If you like things easy and prefer to shoot JPEG, well, I'd leave DRO on AUTO, all the time. It will help you occasionally and do no harm the rest of the time.

And if you really want to hedge your bets, shoot RAW + JPEG with DRO AUTO enabled. You may find that the raw file is badly exposed but the jpeg is usable and you won't have to fuss with the raw file on the computer.

SONY A77 focusing options

2012-01-30T22:49:00.003-06:00

The A77's big (100%), bright electronic viewfinder (EVF) didn't just make it easy to compose this shot, the EVF and the A77's brilliant focus magnification feature made it easy to nail the focus.

Kiki on the bed. SONY A77V + SONY 16-50 f/2.8 SSM lens @ 40mm. ISO 320, 1/90s, f/4. Manual focus using focus magnification in the EVF.

This is a tricky shot. I'm pretty close to Kiki here, less than 2'. (Minimum focus distance for the lens is 12".) Depth of field is less than an inch. Autofocus is too risky. The cat's whiskers and eyebrows are a bit like the bars of a cage at the zoo and will tend to attract the autofocus sensors away from the eyes. I confirmed this by trying to manual focus with the new focus peaking enabled: the whiskers and eyebrows were highlighted red and it was hard for me to get the focus changed. In other circumstances, when I'm a little farther away from the subject, focus peaking is a wonderful feature that makes manual focusing easy and effective.

But this was a job for focus magnification. On my camera, I've assigned this function to the AF/MF button near the rear control dial, which sits beside the rear control dial, where I can hit it effortlessly with my right thumb. I was able to move the focus area over the eye on the right, focus manually, and take the shot. Helped that Kiki wasn't turning her head too much, of course.

And, with the A77, I can do all this through the electronic viewfinder, which means that the camera is up to my eye and my arms are tucked tightly against my chest so the camera is held securely. Using the similar but much more awkward Focus Check Live View function on my A580 requires use of the rear LCD, which for me means that I either need to use a tripod or hold the camera out in front of my face 6-8", which is inherently unstable.

SONY A77: Get a grip!

2012-01-27T16:29:00.001-06:00

I've been using a vertical grip on my cameras for years. Some photographers hate them. They prefer to keep the camera body light and small. I understand this feeling, but I like the vertical grip anyway, for several reasons.

I'm a portrait photographer. I take a lot of photos in portrait orientation, that is, with the camera turned "sideways". Now, I could of course just turn the camera without moving my right hand, so my right hand ends up on "top." But the grip allows me to, um, take hold of (as in "grip") the camera on what is now the side, and to hold it more comfortably and securely while I shoot. I like to shoot with the elbows of both arms firmly against the sides of my chest. Can't do that if my right hand is "up".
I'm an event photographer, shooting weddings and other events that often last for hours. The vertical grip holds an extra battery, so I can keep shooting twice as long without having to worry about running out of power.

It is important to note, in connection with #1, that the grip doesn't just let you hold the camera, it lets you shoot, as well. The grip has a shutter button, a control dial (or dials) for changing exposure settings, and other useful buttons.

Sony A77 + VG-C77AM vertical grip

The grips that I used with my Pentax cameras, when I was still shooting Pentax, had a couple other nice advantages: they could hold an extra storage card and they could store the small infrared remote. Sony's grips don't provide these extras, but they do satisfy the two main goals: a better hold on the camera, and twice the battery life.

The vertical grip (model VC-C77AM) for the Sony A77

The SONY A77 has a new grip that is, in several ways, an improvement over the grip for the A550/A580.

For starters, to use the grip on the A580, you had to remove the battery bay cover from the bottom of the camera body. There was a niche in the grip where you could store that cover piece. It was a pain to take off, a pain to store in the niche (like changing a roll of toilet paper), and a pain again to reverse the process when you took the grip off. Well, good news: The grip for the A77 makes this fuss unnecessary. There's a slot in the grip for the battery bay cover. You just open the battery bay and the cover slides nicely into that slot, without having to be removed.

On to more consequential matters.

The A77 is bigger than the A580, and the grip for the A77 is bigger than the grip for the A580. Here they are side by side (A580 on the left, A77 on the right):

This is a matter of taste, I admit. But if, like me, you feel more comfortable when you have more to hold on to, well, you'll like the feel of the A77 grip.

The A77 grip also provides more control buttons than the grip for the A580.

The A77 has two control dials, so of course the grip has two dials, also. The A77 is weather-resistant (whatever that means) and the grip is, too. And like the grip for the A580, the A77 grip has the +/- (exposure compensation) and AEL (exposure lock) buttons.

But the A77 grip adds buttons for AF/MF (allowing the photographer to fine tune exposure manually, something I do all the time), a joystick (useful for moving the focus area around on the LCD or in the electronic viewfinder, as well as for reviewing photos or working with menus), a Fn (function) button (allowing quick access to a whole range of shooting settings) and a magnification button (which I use for magnifying a key part of the subject's face while focusing manually). More buttons on the grip means I can work faster and more efficiently, without having to turn the camera right-ways up to do things that I want to do all the time.

The placement of these buttons is generally good, with one exception. On the body of the camera, the AEL and AF/MF buttons lie directly under my right thumb, and the +/- button is on the top of the camera. I can understand why Sony didn't want to put the +/- in the corresponding position on the vertical grip — that would place it on the right side of the camera in its normal orientation. But I'm not sure why they didn't put it on the front of the grip. That way, I could continue to use it with my right index finger no matter what the camera's orientation.

But I'm generally very pleased with the A77 grip and expect that I'll leave it on the camera most of the time.

Non-review of the Sony A65, with special reference to the Sony A580

2012-01-15T14:52:00.001-06:00

This is not a review of the Sony A65. There are reviews a-plenty on the Internet already. I just want to share a couple of my impressions of the camera, on a few key points and a few minor points. I used one for a couple days recently. For the most part I am comparing the Sony A65 to my older Sony A580, although I will occasionally mention a couple other cameras I’m familiar with and have been thinking about (the Sony A77 and the Nikon D7000).

Before we get started, might be useful to give a quick overview of the three big contrasts between these cameras. First, the Sony A580, released in late 2010, has an optical viewfinder, while the A65 has an electronic viewfinder (EVF). Second, the A580 has a top-quality 16MP sensor, while the A65 has a huge new 24MP sensor. Third and last, the A580 is a conventional digital single-lens reflex (DSLR) camera, while the A65 is a novelty called by Sony a digital single-lens translucent (DSLT).

For the benefit of anybody thinking about the A65’s big brother, the A77, I might add that, while the A65’s body build is very similar to the A580’s, the A77’s body is bigger, sturdier, weather-sealed and has both front and rear control dials.

A65 box, shot with A65 and kit lens.

EVF

The electronic viewfinder (EVF) is the the most distinctive feature of the Sony DSLT line that started a year ago with the A55 and A35 and continues now with the A77 and A65. EVFs aren't an innovative concept. Compact cameras have used them for a long time. What's distinctive is an EVF good enough to be used on these bigger, more serious DSLR-like cameras.

The A65’s EVF seems much larger than the A580's OVF. Generally the A65's EVF also seems much brighter. These are strong plusses for the EVF. The EVF on the A65 (and A77) is actually larger than the outstanding OVF (optical viewfinder) on the Nikon D7000. The EVF is 100%, so you see everything that’s going to end up in the image. Coming from the A580, when I raised the A65 to my eye and looked through the EVF, I admit my first thought was, Wow!

I also like the A65's Focus Magnifier feature. The A580 has Focus Check Live View, and the Nikon D7000 has something similar, but on both of these cameras it only works in Live View, on the camera's rear LCD display. The A65's Focus Magnifier on the other hand works in the finder (EVF) as well as on the rear display. For those who aren't familiar with this feature: it allows you to hit a button and magnify a part of the image that you're shooting, so you can fine tune the focus manually. I use manual focus most of the time when shooting portraits and, well, I find this feature tremendously useful.

I might add that, on both the Sony A65 and the A580, the button you press to magnify the image lies conveniently under your right thumb, while for some odd reason on the Nikon D7000 the button is on the left side of the display screen, where it's awkward to get to, since you're holding the camera with your right hand and focusing with your left. Either Nikon expects you to use your nose or they don't really expect you to use this button this way. Probably the latter, because the use of the button in live view isn't mentioned in the D7000 user manual. (The button's use is discussed only in the playback section and its placement makes sense for playback, since the review button is also on the left side of the camera.) To be fair to Nikon, the placement of the live view/OVF toggle switch is much better than the placement of the switch that does the same thing on the A580.

The A65's EVF also can display a level and some other info that I find less helpful.

And what about the EVF's image quality? This is a trickier thing to talk about. For many scenes, the EVF seems great, almost as sharp as an OVF, indeed, close enough to what you would see in an OVF that you can forget the difference. This seems to be the case when the light is decent and the dynamic range isn't a challenge. But in other scenes, the image quality of the EVF is, well, pretty bad. I had read that the EVF is challenged by high-contrast scenes, and now I see for myself that it's true. Taking a picture of my dog outside sitting on a sunlit pavement, the pavement was basically blown out in the EVF, so I couldn't make out the texture in it. This wasn't the case looking through the A580's OVF. Each camera's photo was good. But with the A65, I was quite aware that I was composing and focusing using an electronically generated image.

Sony A65 @ ISO 800. Looking through the EVF I saw even less detail outside through the door at the left than you can see here: the door was largely blown out. But the photo is as decent as the accompanying photo taken with the A580.

Sony A580. Same lens as the shot taken with the A65. By accident, this photo taken with the A580 gives an idea what I saw through the EVF of the A65: the door on the left is blown out. Looking through the A580's OVF, on the other hand, I actually could see the detail outside. The reason the photo is blown out is that the aperture for this shot (f/4.0) was a third of a stop slower than the shot taken with the A65 (f/4.5).

Panning the camera from side to side, I did notice some pixel "smearing", where the EVF doesn't seem able to keep up with the input, quite. I saw it because I had read about it and I looked for it. I don't personally consider it a big problem.

Now the truth is, the A580 has a terrible viewfinder; it's one of the cameras's few serious weak points. So the A65 shines by comparison. After buying the A580 in late 2010, I found myself using the viewfinder less and less as I learned to use Live View instead. This was partly because Live View on Sony cameras is so very good — the best, I think, on any APS-C DSLR-class cameras — but also because the A580's finder is so bad. I bet, if I shot with the A65, I would probably go back to using the EVF more.

In short, notwithstanding its occasional quirks, the EVF on the A65 is not only useful, but better than a bad OVF like the one on the A580.

But is it better than a good OVF? That's a harder question to answer. If the view you get of the scene you’re shooting were the only consideration, I wouldn’t hesitate to say that the excellent 100% OVF in the Nikon D7000 is much nicer than the Sony A65's EVF, at least in decent light. The reason the comparison is difficult is, the EVF brings with it other significant advantages in addition to letting you see what you’re shooting. Those advantages include: the focus magnification feature right in the finder; the EVF’s ability to brighten dark scenes in a way that helps you see what you’re shooting better; the level; and more. In short, the EVF has all the advantages of live view on the back of the camera, with the added advantage that you can now get that direct connection with the camera that you only get looking through the viewfinder. These are not insignificant advantages. So while a really good OVF (like the one on the D7000 or the Sony A850 and A900) shows you your scene clear and large, the really good EVF on the A65 (and A77) shows you the scene maybe not quite so clearly but even larger, and it does all those other things as well.

And for what it’s worth, I want to mention the opinion of some with more experience. I've read posts on Sony forums from a number of photographers who bought the A77, which has the same EVF as the A65. Just about every one of them said that, after a while, they got used to the EVF and wouldn't want to go back now. I am pretty sure I, too, could get used to the EVF.

Now, the EVF in the A65 and A77 is the best yet, but there is room for improvement and improvement is likely to come sooner rather than later. Rumor has it that Sony is hard at work at full-frame (larger sensor) DSLT models, perhaps to be released as early as late 2012. These will be much more expensive cameras aimed at pros and very serious and well-heeled enthusiasts. The EVF in the A65 is impressive, good enough for the camera to be worth its price. But if the EVF in the full-frame DSLTs isn't considerably better, I wonder whether anybody will pay another couple thousand dollars to buy them, no matter how good the sensor might be.

On a more positive note, if you use the LED display screen instead of the finder, the good news is that the A65's articulating display is a big improvement over the A580's. The A65's screen handles so easily the A580's seems really clunky by comparison. The A65's screen can be turned around and closed against the body of the camera for protection, which might be nice. And it can be opened and turned just about every which way, so you can frame a picture while pointing the camera to your side, which might be useful for street photographers. You could even turn the display all the way around so you can compose while taking a self-portrait. The A65's display also seems sharper although I don't know why that would be. They're the same resolution.

One last positive note about the A65 and how the EVF works with live view. On the A65 (and A77) you activate the EVF simply by putting your eye up to it. No need to move a switch as with the A580 or most other cameras (like the Nikon D7000). This is amazingly useful. As you get used to working with Live View, you may find that you want to switch between finder and LCD frequently; at least I did. With the new Sony cameras, this move is effortless.

DSLT

What makes a DSLT a DSLT rather than a DSLT, is the way the mirror works. It's complicated and frankly not too important to me, so I'll let you look up the details for yourself. (As a reward you'll learn a delightful new word: "pellicle".) I'll note that on a traditional DSLR, the mirror moves, while on a Sony DSLT, it does not move. And let's leave it at that.

Now, because the mirror does not move, the DSLT lacks the satisfying mirror-slapping ker-chunk that a traditional DSLR or SLR makes when you take a picture. By comparison, the A65’s shutter sounds like a duckling sneezing. Or, if you have no experience with ducklings, it sounds like the shutter on a cheap point and shoot, and I feel slightly anxious that a client might get the wrong idea. I suppose I could get used to the A65's little noise. Taking wedding ceremony photos in church, the quieter camera might be less distracting to others.

Sensor

Sony makes the best, or at least some of the best, sensors in the world. Nikon DSLRs use Sony sensors. The sensor in the A580 got top marks from DxO and made us A580 owners very happy. The most impressive thing you can say about the sensor in the A65 is that it's almost as good as the A580's. This is an impressive feat of engineering, because larger sensors are supposed to bring with them more digital noise. Nevertheless, what you cannot say for the A65, in my opinion at least, is that its output is better than that of the A580. Because it's not.

DxO's tests seem to show that the A65 and A77 are slightly noisier than the A580. The difference seems to me to be pretty small.

A65 with kit lens (18-55) at ISO 6400. No noise reduction applied in Lightroom 3.5. On a computer screen you can see the noise in the background, but that's pretty easy to fix, and there's little or no significant noise in Kiki's cute little face. This file would make a very decent print, certainly up to 5x7 and perhaps larger.

A more significant drawback of the A65 is that its raw files are a good bit larger than the A580's. This doesn't just mean your hard disk will fill up faster. At least on my iMac, it meant that editing files in Lightroom 3 became a bit slower, because there is more data to resolve. If you use terrific lenses and if you wish to crop your photos dramatically, the extra resolution may sometimes be a plus. But the rest of the time, it's probably a minus. The extra megapixels make a negligible impact on the quality of my printed or digital output. And considering that the sony A65 is clearly aimed at enthusiasts and ordinary amateurs rather than professional photographers, well, I cannot honestly see how going to 24MP makes any sense at all. I guess it helps with marketing, at least to the unsophisticated who think more is always more. I notice with approval that Nikon seems to be resisting the temptation to add megapixels for the hell of it. The new D4 — which is probably the best DSLR in the world as of this writing — has "just" 16MP. This really should be adequate for just about any purpose outside advertising and magazine covers. On the A77, the 24MP resolution might make more sense, but I regard the 24MP resolution of the A65 as a drawback or at least a very mixed blessing.

To get the most from the A65's sensor, I suspect you will want to shoot raw (good idea anyway) and use the best lenses you can afford (also a good idea). The kit lens sold with the A65 may not be worth having. Better to get the much better new 16-50 f/2.8 lens sold with the A77.

Sony A65 + Sony/Zeiss 16-80 lens.

With all that resolution on the sensor, you will want to use the best lenses you can buy.

Not to mention...

The A65 has many strong points that don't matter to me: frame rate, video, and others. So I'm just not mentioning those. There are also a number of features in the A65 already found in the A580 that the A65 shares, like sweep panorama, DRO+, and others.

Et cetera

The A65 is a little smaller than my A580. I like the larger size, personally. In fact, I always use the A580 with the Sony grip. There is no Sony vertical grip available for the A65. This for me is almost a decisive disadvantage of the A65 and one of the several reasons that I returned the A65 and placed an order with Sony for the A77.

I gather also that the A65 cannot control take advantage of ratio control while triggering remote Sony flashes. This is a limitation the A65 shares with the A580 and it's one of my biggest dissatisfactions with the A580, indeed with Sony. If you are not a professional photographer, you may not understand what I'm talking about, let alone care about it, so if you like the A65 in other respects, don't let this put you off.

The A65 has one card slot (for either memory stick or SD card), where the A580 has two (one for memory stick, one for SD). You couldn’t configure the A580 to write to cards in both slots simultaneously, as you can on a Nikon D7000. Still, having the memory stick in the A580 in reserve, should the SD card fill up, is comforting. With the A65 I would be back to watching the frame count carefully as I work. This is a quibble that pro photographers will understand and amateurs won't worry about. But again, the A65 does not pretend to be a pro camera (no grip, one card slot, one control dial).

The exterior of the A65 is a little less cluttered with buttons than that of the A580, not because functions have been moved into the menus, but because a couple of the A580's buttons have been replaced by pushes on the control dial. A small plus for the A65. I confess I still get a bit lost with all those buttons on the top of the A580.

On the other hand, the A65's mode dial is busier than the A580's. I rather like the A580's simple mode dial with just eight options (P/A/S/M, Sweep Panorama, SCN, no-flash Auto and regular Auto). To these, the A65 adds four more: 3D, Movie, Continuous Priority AE for shooting 10 FPS, and something called Auto+. I like the A580's mode dial better but the changes aren't a big deal. Not sure why there is a movie mode as there is a movie button on the back of the A65 just as there is on the A580.

The A65 has GPS built in. Nice for personal shots perhaps but not a big deal for my work.

Conclusion

The A65 is a camera for amateurs, hobbyists, photography and technology enthusiasts who get a kick out of having the latest gadget and who have large hard drives. Yes, it can take terrific pictures, it really can, so if you really are interested in taking photos, the A65 may serve you well. But the ability to take good photos doesn't set the A65 apart from much. Almost any DSLR currently on the market can do that, including the first-generation much cheaper A35 and A55 DSLTs from Sony. And if you're attracted to the A65 because of its novelty — and I admit I was to a degree — be warned that it's also going to get old fast. The A55, Sony's first generation DSLT, is not just old news, it's old technology, because the finder in the A77/A65 is so much better. Meanwhile the Nikon D7000 and Canon 7D, both even older than the A55, hold up very well.

On a more positive note, while the photos the A65 takes aren’t any better than those taken by alternatives like the A580, A55, Nikon D7000 or D5100, etc., taking photos with the A65 is a different experience that may appeal strongly to many photographers. The EVF, notwithstanding its shortcomings, provides shooters with a new way to see what they’re shooting. It’s appealing not because (or not just because) it’s novel, but because it’s truly useful. To say that I’m still a little ambivalent about the EVF is to pay the EVF a compliment. I’ve seen a number of photographers in forums declaring they’ll never give up their OVF cameras for this new-fangled EVF thing. I am pretty sure almost none of them have ever used the A65 or A77 long enough to “get” it.

Addendum 1/21/12: good discussion of the EVF in the A77 (same as the A65) here. Balanced — but largely positive.

Bill Cunnngham New York

2011-12-17T15:25:00.005-06:00

The film is titled simply, Bill Cunningham New York. My wife and I wanted to see this when it was here in the theaters, but that was around the time I was getting quite sick and we missed it. I finally got around to seeing it this weekend, courtesy of Netflix and Roku. I might add that, quite by accident, we saw, just a few days earlier, The September Issue, about the making of, um, the September issue of Vogue in 2008 (at the same time this film was being put together). The September Issue is also an interesting film. But it is a perfect warm-up for the movie about Bill Cunningham, and if you haven't seen either, I recommend you try watching them both, in that order.

Anyway, we loved the film. I loved it. I mean, I loved it, or more accurately, the film made me love Bill Cunningham and his work.

Cunningham is, of course, a famous photographer, but that says almost nothing. I knew his name and a little about him and his work.

But, as the movie shows, he's a very special case. He's not famous for a one master photograph, or a handful of master photographs. You can't get any idea of Cunningham's work as a photographer at all without seeing dozens and dozens of his photographs. It's easy to do now. (Check out the recent piece titled "Flirty," about shoes.)

As he himself puts it, he photographs clothes, what people are wearing. Not celebrities. He doesn't go to movies, watch television, listen to the radio or read the news, so he admits, he doesn't know who the celebs are, at least not the ones outside the world of fashion. "I'm not interested in the celebrities with their free clothing," he jokes as he's being given an award by the French Ministry of Culture. He's just interested in the clothing. And it's not any one photo of his that matters, it's the collection — tens of thousands of photos, surely — and the ways that they illuminate one another. The point isn't one photo of a woman wearing purple scarves: it's two dozen photos of women wearing purple scarves.

He's sometimes called a street photographer, because so much of his work has been done on the streets of New York. But he's not a street photographer. He's a clothing photographer. He stands on the street because that's the best place to catch a lot of interesting people wearing clothes. He's like a grizzly bear looking for fish. The bear isn't interested in the river or the rapids. The bear stands where he stands because he's interested in catching fish.

Cunningham transcends technique or perhaps it would be better to say that he finesses it. He's a photographer not because he loves photography, but because he loves something else. He's not trying to say something with his camera. The camera to him is just a tool. Nothing in the film gave me the impression that he cares very much about the craft of photography. I don't mean that in a critical way at all. On the contrary, I say it with great admiration and even a bit of envy. I don't mean that he's not a good photographer; that would be worse than absurd, it would be untrue. It's just that he seems to take photos the way Mozart wrote notes, in a hurry and with the guidance of genius.

Cunningham gets around on a bike and shoots on the move, so he travels light: a simple camera, a single lens, and, when he's shooting indoors, a single flash (hot-shoe mounted or more often held in his left hand while he shoots). That's it. He started his career in "social photography" covering a "be-in" ("What's a be-in?" he asked his editor as he got the assignment.) Relating the story later, he jokes that, although the visual appeal of the hippies was all about color, his photos are all black and white because he couldn't afford color film or processing. (I can relate. I didn't start doing color myself until the 1980s.)

Personally, the man is very impressive. Aside from the fact that he doesn't live in a monastery, it's almost literally true to say that he lives like a monk. For decades he lived and slept in his tiny office above Carnegie Hall: nothing but filing cabinets for photos, and a mattress on the floor. No kitchen, no bathroom. ("Who wants a kitchen and a bathroom?") No wife or partner or children, and apparently very few close friends — just work. But he isn't lonely, as far as I could tell.

And his life is not empty. He lives to work, every day, all day. It's all he does, all he has done for decades, and it's all he wants to do. His energy is unbelievable. Watching him work wore me out. He's a good man. Nobody doesn't like him. He goes to church every week. He comments on how difficult it is to be an honest man in New York City: "like being Don Quixote."

The most famous definition of the orator in the ancient Roman world came from Cato the Elder. An orator, Cato said, is vir bonus, dicendi perítus, "A good man, skilled at speaking." It's a richer definition than it sounds like us today, perhaps because we know so little about either goodness or oratory that it's difficult for us to see what they have to do with one another. Well, Cunningham is a vir bonus, spectandi perítus, "A good man, skilled at looking." That's what he does with his camera. He looks—constantly, intensely, and with focus and interest and love. And what is he looking for, I mean, besides interesting clothing? He is shy about it, but it's clear what it is. It's beauty. And his example is inspirational. Receiving that award in Paris in 2008, he said (with a catch in his throat), "It's as true today as it ever was: He who seeks beauty, will find it."

What higher aspiration can there be? Watching him work, and learning about his religious dedication, I was reminded of the famous monastic saying, laborare est orare, "To work is to pray." For Cunningham, that seems to be the case. And if photography had saints... Well, Cunningham's still alive, so I won't canonize him just yet. Deo gratias.

White Rock Lake with a little fog

2011-12-02T18:24:00.001-06:00

I had picked my daughter Catherine and her friend up from school and we were almost home. Just before turning into our neighborhood I noticed that White Rock Lake looked uncommonly beautiful. Calm, gray, with a bit of romantic fog and beautiful reflections. I didn't have a DSLR with me but did have my Panasonic DMC-LX3. It was after 4:30pm and I knew the light was going. Raced back to the lake (two blocks), parked and ran (very cautiously) across Garland Rd, found a spot — and realized the camera didn't have a storage card! Luckily the LX3 has an internal buffer. I knew I needed to shoot raw and with the large raw files, I could only take a few photos. These are the two best.

White Rock Lake, west bank, with the Filter House.

Those are coots in the water.

White Rock Lake, east bank, looking directly at the Dallas Arboretum.

Fog can do nice things for landscape photos.

Haven't had a chance to make prints yet but hope to this weekend. These are photos that need to be viewed in print, and large.

Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX3. Exposure: ISO 125, f/2.8, 1/125th sec. Raw conversion by RPP; final postprocessing in Lightroom 3.6.

iPad notes: Facebook; Blurb

2011-10-20T12:39:00.002-05:00

Two items having to do with the iPad. One is bad news, one is good news.

The bad news is that the Facebook app for the iPad doesn't display my blog correctly. If you visit my Facebook page and click a link to a blog post, the Facebook app will display the blog post inside the app. The most noticeable problem with the display is that the app doesn't properly display this nice font that I'm using for headlines and the blog title (and which has become a part of my overall personal branding). The solution is to use the Open in Safari command to view the blog article; the command is in the upper right corner of the page that you view in the Facebook app.

The good news is that Blurb, the online service I use to create photo books (for myself and for brides) is releasing an iPad app for creating ebooks. I'm working on a book project now and this is exciting news for me! I also just realized that Blurb now has a plug-in for Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, the software that I and a large number of other photo photos use to manage, process and print my photos. Way to go, Blurb!

R.I.P. Bruce Felps

2011-10-19T14:24:00.000-05:00

I was surprised and saddened to learn today via email that Bruce Felps has died.

Bruce had a long and remarkable career in the news biz, but I knew him as the publisher, editor and star reporter for The East Dallas Times, an online publication covering my part of our wonderful city. Over the last few years, I talked to Bruce fairly often by phone or email and worked for him and with him on a number of local stories. His energy and enthusiasm and sheer love for what he was doing were amazing. It's hard to grasp that he's gone.

He wasn't supposed to be the story and he didn't ask me to take pictures of him, but in the last year, when we worked together, I did take a couple snaps of him. Reviewing them today I noticed that, in every single picture, he is the active person. Here he is (on the left) talking to councilman Sheffie Kadane during a mayoral candidates campaign event at the East Dallas Country Club. Bruce is the underdressed guy on the left. He was cutting edge in one way — self-publishing the East Dallas Times online — and in other respects, he reminded me of the old-fashioned, hard-bitten news men I knew decades ago and who seem to be a rare breed these days. He was both a cynic and a softie at the same time.

The last time I worked with him was at the start of the summer, at a gala for the East Lake Veterinary Clinic on Northwest Highway. Here he is (on the right) talking to the director of the clinic (Dr Karen Fling) and the director of the pet orphanage.

I struggled through that gala. I was sicker than I realized and a day later, I was rushed to the hospital. Here we are, a few months later. I'm doing much better, and Bruce, who seemed to me indestructible, is dead. I remember very well how much energy he had that day, not just compared to me, but compared to anybody.

He was a fine and entertaining writer and he wrote regularly for the Dallas News and other publications.

I'd been meaning to get back in touch with him recently as my health improved. Now it's too late. I wish I had gotten to know him better. I will miss him. My prayers and condolences to his family and close friends. I'm sure he's already started a newsletter to provide daily coverage of his part of Heaven.

You can read a little more about Bruce on the Caring Bridge page his family put up for him. And the Dallas News web site has a nice little piece about his life and death.

Correction: Why photos converted by RPP look darker

2011-09-24T00:36:00.001-05:00

I had the pleasure of hearing tonight from Andrey Tverdokhleb, developer of RPP, the outstanding raw converter that I wrote about here yesterday. I want to correct something I said yesterday and pass on a tip Andrey gave to me.

Why RPP's output is darker

First, the correction. I commented yesterday that many of RPP's conversions end up looking noticeably darker than conversions of the same raw file done by Lightroom. I made a guess — a bad guess — about why this might be so. I needn't have guessed. Andrey draws my attention to an FAQ about RPP where this phenomenon is briefly explained. I know I had seen this page, but the info there hadn't sunk in yet when I was writing yesterday.

The gist seems to be as follows: RPP is telling me the truth, while Lightroom (like most other raw workflow programs) is conspiring with my camera in a sort of lie or misrepresentation. I hasten to say that the camera makers and the software companies are lying to us for our own good. The cameras are calibrated to underexpose deliberately, in order to avoid blowing highlights. And the raw converters like Lightroom, knowing how the cameras behave, silently compensate by increasing the exposure value (moving the histogram to the right) so that pictures look properly exposed. RPP does not make this silent adjustment. So if your pictures look underexposed after RPP converts them, it's because they really are underexposed.

The explanation in the RPP FAQ calls to mind a recent article by Michael Reichmann at Luminous Landscape titled "Optimizing Exposure" about how digital camera makers persist in metering exposure in a wrong-headed way. That article in turn harks back to Reichmann's now classic "Expose Right" essay from 2003, one of the most important technical articles ever written for digital photographers.

I am still sorting out RPP but I am starting to think that it may make a change to the way I shoot, well, at least to the way I expose my photos. Maybe I will say more about this later when I feel more confident.

Getting the most out of RPP

The tip that Andrey gave me in tonight's email is to be aware that certain things really need to be done right in RPP, before anything further is done in Lightroom. This tip could be considered a correction, also, because I said yesterday that you can just use RPP's defaults and needn't worry about the details. Sort of true. I mean, I did it and my first clumsy efforts with RPP were very satisfactory. But I see now that, for best results, I should be paying attention in RPP to more of those settings. Apparently white balance is the most important one to get right from the moment of conversion. I gather that I should be letting RPP handle as much else as possible, so that adjustments that a derived from the raw data get the benefit of RPP's more accurate calculations.

(Posted using BlogPress from my iPad2)

Raw Photo Processor (RPP): First Impressions

2011-09-22T22:31:00.000-05:00

Andrey Tverdokhleb's Raw Photo Processor (RPP) is a Mac OS X application that in some ways seems rather retro in its concept. It's a raw processor or converter, and that's all that it is. It's not a raw workflow program like Aperture or Lightroom. You can't crop a photo in RPP. It doesn't do a darned thing with jpegs. And you can't do any digital asset management with it. How does this one-trick pony survive? By doing its one trick really, really well.

I've been trying RPP out lately and I'm impressed. Here are a few observations.

How you use it

When I process a photo in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, I don't really have to deal with conversion at all. I can open and view raw files in Lightroom as soon as I've imported them into Lightroom's catalog. Lightroom's raw conversion software, Adobe Camera Raw (ACR), works more or less invisibly in the background, rendering images for display on my screen and, I presume, assisting when images are exported to another format (usually jpeg). And when I make an adjustment (say, increasing the contrast setting) Lightroom immediately updates what I see on screen. I remember when I first heard other people talking about ACR, I didn't know what it was. I was using it without being aware of it.

Using RPP adds an explicit extra step to my workflow: conversion. That's why I called RPP's concept retro. Back in the days before Lightroom and Aperture and other "raw workflow" applications came into being, you put your raw files on the computer and then you had to convert them to tiffs or jpegs before being able to work on them in Photoshop. Now, with RPP in my workflow, it's like old days once again. I have to leave Lightroom and open the raw file in RPP, convert it (usually to a tiff file), then reopen the converted file in Lightroom again to finish editing it (cropping, adjusting exposure, color, detail and sharpness, etc.). Not only does this process take a little extra time, it also creates a fairly large extra file that would not be created if I never left Lightroom.

Actually, RPP's user interface does allow me to make a number of basic adjustments prior to conversion. I can tweak exposure, color, sharpness, and even ask RPP to convert the image to mimic the look of certain types of film. But the basic point of RPP is conversion of the raw file. That's why the RPP UI is so limited. It's limited because it isn't trying to do much.

The RPP UI (in its entirety)

Here's a photo converted by RPP using the P160NP preset, which mimics the look of Kodak's Professional PORTRA 160NC (Natural Color) film.

Converted by RPP using P160NP film preset.

If, like me, you are fond of Lightroom for its intuitive user interface and dislike using Photoshop because you don't think in terms of numbers, well, then, like me, you'll find RPP's user interface a bit off-putting, especially at first. It's frankly a bit scary and unless you're a serious photo editing geek, you probably won't immediately see the purpose of the various options.

The good news is, you don't really have to do much with the user interface at all. Load the photo, click the Apply button (to apply the default conversion settings), then save the new file (as a tiff) back into the same folder where the original is stored. Synchronize that folder in your Lightroom library so the new file appears there, and finish your editing in Lightroom. Seems like a hassle, I know, and indeed, it isn't necessary. After all, you could take what Lightroom (well, Adobe Camera Raw) dishes out and be grateful for it. But in my experience with RPP so far, the small extra effort usually pays off.

I should probably add here that, although I'm using RPP with Lightroom, you can use Lightroom with any additional software you like. Considering that DxO Optics Pro is also trying to be the best raw converter available, using RPP with DxO Optics Pro probably wouldn't make any sense. But it would make perfect sense to use RPP with, say, Photoshop. It works well with Aperture, too. If you were really broke, you could use RPP with Picasa, although then you'd have to deal with Picasa's dislike for tiffs, perhaps by saving your processed RPP output as jpegs instead.

RPP's different approach to raw conversion: darker results

I don't really understand the technical details terribly well and to use RPP, I don't think you need to. I do notice a couple of things about RPP that distinguish it from the converter (ACR) that Lightroom relies upon.

The most obvious difference is that RPP's conversions seem generally darker. Here's a picture of yours truly. This is a png screenshot showing how Lightroom 3.6 displays the ARW (Sony raw) file:

Converted by Lightroom 3.6

It's not a bad conversion, really. Here's what the same raw data looks like, as interpreted by RPP. (This is a png screenshot made inside RPP.)

Even scarier than the first one, no?

What's happening here, I think, is that RPP is maximizing dynamic range and moving as much data as it can into the middle of the picture. In any case, RPP's conversions do often start out a little (sometimes more than a little) darker than the automatic conversions I see in Lightroom.(*)

RPP's different approach to conversion: detail preservation

The other thing that's clearly different is that RPP is recovering more detail, sometimes a lot more detail, from the raw files than Adobe Camera Raw is. This is a photo I took in Rocky Mountain National Park in summer 2010, with a Panasonic LX3. Here's what I made of the photo using Lightroom alone:

Moraine Park, Rocky Mountain National Park. Processed in Lightroom 3.x.

And here's the same photo, first converted by RPP, and then given a wee bit more post-processing back in Lightroom:

Processed in RPP.

The remarkable thing here is, until I ran this photo through RPP, I thought that I'd simply lost the detail in the trees in the foreground. I wasn't even too unhappy about it. It's really a photo of the clouds from a receding thunderstorm, so the trees aren't really all that important. But it was exciting nonetheless to discover that the detail in the trees actually is there in the raw file; Lightroom just hadn't found it.

By the way, if you think that the clouds in the first photo are more dramatic, that's fine. I don't disagree with you. I could however match that look in the RPP photo, mainly by increasing the saturation; indeed, I have boosted the saturation and contrast in the sky in the second photo to a degree using a graduated filter in Lightroom. What I can't do in Lightroom with ACR, is bring back detail that ACR doesn't see.

NOTE: The last two examples and the examples that follow are not screenshots, they are processed shots. You'll have to trust me that in every case I tried to make the best picture I could from the file I was working with. The point I'm making is, I got better end results starting with RPP than I did starting with an image silently converted by ACR.

When you see yourself in your daughter's eyes...

Here's another example, using a portrait of my daughter. Here's the Lightroom/ACR version:

Converted by ACR (Lightroom 3)

Now I rather like this shot. Lightroom and ACR do a pretty good job with the skin and the colors. As before, the RPP conversion started out a bit darker and a bit flatter, but this time, I did a little secondary editing in Lightroom on the tiff file created by RPP, boosting the exposure and the vibrance a little:

Converted by RPP

If you compare the enlarged versions of these two photos, you may find it hard to decide between them. I did, at first. Part of the problem here is that this is a portrait and in portraits like this, we often prefer to have soft skin, rather than show absolutely every pore. The RPP version here is not quite as soft. But I can soften skin in Lightroom, after conversion, if I need to. What I can't do is put detail back if it's lost in conversion—like this detail in the eyes. Here's a close of Catherine's right eye (left side of the photo) as converted by RPP:

Converted by RPP. Look closely....

Look closely. You can see the photographer (me) reflected in the subject's pupil. Here is what Lightroom comes up with:

Converted by Lightroom 3.6.

The pupil is simply too dark to preserve the detail of my reflection.

Do these differences matter in the real world, when you're not looking at everything at 100%? Depends on the photo and what you want to do with it. May also depend on how picky you are.

If you're just posting to the web, then maybe not. But I should mention that RPP has a couple of different conversion modes and one of them is designed specifically for converting photos for use on the web. It's quicker and makes smaller files. So far I've mostly been working with the larger conversion options. Anyway, the details do matter if you're printing, especially if you're printing large.

And for some, perhaps many, photos, Adobe Camera Raw seems to do a very nice job and RPP may not offer much in the way of improvement. I will however mention that I have not yet seen RPP produce a result that is worse than ACR.

Real world processing

Here's a portrait of Mrs Juanita Edwards at 95 years of age, sitting in the kitchen of the house she's lived in since the mid-1950s. First, the jpeg created by my Panasonic Lumix FZ35 (used in raw + jpeg mode).

JPEG produced by the camera.

It's really not bad. Most consumers would be quite happy with this result. Here's Lightroom's conversion of the raw (dng) file:

Converted by Lightroom 3.6.

I've worked a little with the raw file here to lighten the background and give the scene a lighter, airier feel that I think turns the snapshot into a real portrait. But there's a problem here. It's not really visible at this resolution on screen, but it does show up in a print — or if you zoom in. The conversion has created blotches in the face. Here's a close up of the Lightroom conversion:

Converted by Lightroom 3.

The picture here appears less noisy, say, off to the side. But in the face, the blotchiness is pretty noticeable. Here's a closeup of the conversion done by RPP:

Converted by RPP.

Seems noisier, but there's more detail. That's a common trade-off. In the print, the noise will disappear on its own, and the improved detail will make a cleaner impression. Here's the larger version from RPP:

Converted by RPP.

Notice also that RPP has the colors right. The room is not in fact as white as it appears in the Lightroom conversion.

It's not magic

Adobe's a huge company and Lightroom is a widely used, highly respected program. By contrast, RPP comes from a single (very talented) guy I had never heard of before. Is it even thinkable that RPP could do a better job than the raw converter from Adobe? Am I perhaps imagining that RPP is better, just because I want it to be, or because it's new and unfamiliar to me?

I doubt it. I've been using Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw for about five years, since the beta of version 1, and I've only been using Raw Photo Processor for a day or two, and yet I was able to coax quality out of several different types of raw file that I've never gotten from ACR. The difference appears to be real.

And it's not magic. The developer of RPP explains in the accompanying documentation that he doesn't use some of the math shortcuts that are common in the more widely used raw converters. But those shortcuts are not there because the programmers at Adobe are lazy. Adobe's approach is a reasonable compromise that achieves a remarkably high quality result, while at the same time allowing for changes to appear on screen instantly. In other words, ACR is fast. RPP, not so much. Some changes do not appear on screen automatically; you have to click the Apply button to see them. And RPP's conversion isn't instantaneous. It's not slow, either, especially if you have a modern multicore Intel Mac. But the difference is sufficient that I'm not sure that I'm going to start processing all of my images in RPP.

Still, in a couple of the photos I've run through RPP, the improvement was pretty impressive.

Try it, and if you like it, buy it

The absolute minimum compliment that must be paid to RPP is to say that it's an extraordinary piece of software coming from an individual. In my tests here (preliminary to be sure, but already fairly extensive) RPP more than holds its own against Adobe Camera Raw and the raw converter in DxO Optics Pro — two of the most highly respected pieces of software in the world of digital photography. (ACR is also used by Adobe Photoshop.)

If you're happy with what you're using now, well, you probably haven't read this far. If you have stayed with me to this point, and assuming you're on a Mac (because RPP is Mac only), I urge you to give RPP a try. If you do, be prepared to spend more than 10 minutes with it; it does take a wee bit of figuring out. The accompanying documentation however is very useful. Read it.

And if you decide, as I have, that you can find a place in your workflow for RPP, then by all means, contribute to the author. It's certainly the fair thing to do, to pay for the software you use. And talent like this deserves support. If you make a donation, you'll get a few extra features and also you'll get a plug-in for Aperture and Lightroom that allows you to send your image files (via export) over to RPP from inside Aperture and Lightroom.

(*) Addendum 9/24/11: My guess about why RPP's conversions seem darker was wrong. I give a better explanation in a follow-up post, here.

Web site renovation (again)

2011-09-20T23:04:00.001-05:00

I have been busy for the last couple of days rebuilding my web site over at Zenfolio. Zenfolio has hosted my photos for years and it does a great job at that. What I didn't realize until I attended the Zenfolio Zoom workshop in Dallas recently is that Zenfolio has added a lot of new features and it's now possible to build my entire site there.

The new site at Zenfolio

Now the site as it was over at Wordpress.com was working okay, for the most part. But I had some complaints. Wordpress is blogging site, not a photography site, and my photos never really displayed as well there as I wanted them to. Zenfolio is a photo site so I know my photos will display beautifully and I have lots of control over that, and that's the most important thing.

So I've rebuilt my main web site (http://william-porter.net) over at Zenfolio. That's where you'll see info about my portrait and wedding services (and other services), my portfolio, find contact info, and so on. And as it has been for years, it's where clients will go to review their proofs, order prints, etc.

One very serious problem with Zenfolio at the moment is that its design does not support mobile devices well. That was one of the main reasons that I went to Wordpress in the first site. As a photographer, what matters more to me: that my site displays well on iPhones or that my photos display better on real computer screens? It's a dilemma but I had to come down on the side of the best display of the photos on real computers. I am hoping that the next big upgrade from Zenfolio (which is supposed to add support for HTML5) will resolve this issue so I can eat my cake and have it to.

Back to Blogger

One thing can't transfer, at least not yet: the blog. There's a rumor that Zenfolio will be providing a blogging feature very soon. I'm plenty busy and perhaps I should just have left the blog over at Wordpress.com and waited to see what Zenfolio comes up with. But it's hard for me to imagine that Zenfolio's version 1 blogging feature is going to be as good as Wordpress, or Blogger, or Typepad or Tumblr.

So I'm moving back to Blogger, Google's blogging service, at least for the time being. It's very good. I'm not yet completely sure whether I like the Lightbox feature for photos but some people are crazy about it. Click on the picture of Cinderella's carriage to see for yourself.

Cinderella's carriage at the Dallas Arboretum

I like the fact that Blogger integrates closely with Google+, which I expect to use heavily as soon as it becomes available for Google Apps for Your Domain. (I have a personal Google+ account now but don't want to use it for my photography.)

There's a problem with the move to Blogger. As of this writing I've only imported my 2011 posts from Wordpress; my earlier posts will be imported over the next couple of days, as soon as I can deal with some technical problems. But the larger problem is that the imported posts aren't going to format very nicely here. They're readable and the photos look fine, but the text in the posts — especially the section titles — doesn't look quite right. For the moment, I'm stumped.

Look sharp, be sharp: Taking sharp photos

2011-09-12T19:27:00.000-05:00

Beginning photographers often complain that their photos aren't "sharp" and they want to know what they need to do to make their pictures sharper.

Now the first thing I want to say is, sharpness is overrated as a photographic virtue. I mean, obviously, most of us don't want to take blurry photos. But sharpness doesn't make a photo good. A great photo has an interesting subject, an artistic and pleasing (or perhaps challenging) composition, good lighting, intriguing colors and contrast, and so on. Sharpness is nice, but let's not make a fetish of it.

That said, it's not so simple as "do X and your pictures will be sharp". What we call "sharpness" in photos is an effect that can be reduced or harmed by several different factors. I'm going to limit myself to five important types of problems with sharpness:

those due to inadequacies in the lens;

those due to faulty focus;

those due to subject movement combined with a shutter speed too slow to compensate;

those due to camera movement (or camera shake);

and finally, the basic nature of digital capture.

This list is not exhaustive. I'm just trying to cover the most important factors. I'll talk about them one by one.

Lens quality

Want to take better, sharper photos? One thing you should do is make sure you're using a good lens. And when I think of "bad" lenses, I'm not thinking of the lens in your iPhone, I'm thinking of those consumer-level $280 lenses that you may have lying around. Actually there are very few truly bad lenses these days. And the price of a lens isn't an absolute guarantee of its quality. The Pentax DA 16-45 f/4 is a terrific lens and comparatively inexpensive (under $400 on 9/12/11 from Amazon). The Sony DT/SAM lenses are also much better than their price tag might suggest, in part because Sony cut corners lens on the housing (these are plastic lenses) rather than in the glass. But in general, cheap lenses don't resolve detail as well as more expensive lenses, and if you can't resolve detail well, you can't achieve serious sharpness.

But I want to add something about lenses. This isn't a simple issue, certainly not as simple as saying "Spend $1200 on a lens and you'll get sharp photos." For one thing, the lens is only one of the factors in taking sharp photos; some of the others are discussed in the following sections. But it's also the case that the difference between a $1200 and (say) a lens that costs only $600, is almost certainly not as great as the difference between a $600 lens and a $300 lens. In other words, the more you pay, the less you get in the way of improvement. (This is true of cameras as well.) Anyway, some of the weakness in a lens can be compensated for in software with a sharpening tool; see below. But sharpening on the computer produces a good result only if the original is pretty sharp to start with. So, to take sharp photos, you don't have to have a great lens. But you do have to have a good one.

Faulty focus

This is a much more complicated factor than you might think. It should be fairly obvious that a picture has to be in focus to be sharp. But what is optimal focus? How do you achieve it, or to put the question in a negative way, what might prevent you from achieving optimal focus?

Optimal focus means a satisfactory or pleasing amount of sharpness where you want it. Not everything has to be in sharp focus, in fact, it's a paradox of photography that, when parts of the photo are out of focus, the parts that are in focus are emphasized. That's why portrait photographers like the shallow depth of field achieved with large apertures, long focal lengths and/or close focusing (and if you want to spend the money, larger sensor cameras). We often like to focus tightly on the subject's eyes, but it's not a rule. Given the right subject, you just might want to focus on the nose. For example, there's nothing wrong with the focus in this photo.

Now, what are the different types of problems you can have with focus?

Autofocus doesn't work very well when what you want to focus on is behind something that can confuse the camera. This might happen if you're photographing an animal at the zoo behind a fence. In this case, you almost always have to switch to manual focus.

Autofocus also has problems when the focal point doesn't have much contrast. This might happen if you're trying to photograph a blank white wall. Try focusing on the edge of something, something with some contrast in it. This problem is exacerbated when the light is low.

Another problem with autofocus can occur when you focus and recompose, that is, when you focus on an element of the photo that isn't right in the center, and then recompose your shot. This is something many photographers do quite often; I confess I do it myself, although I am aware of the problems with this technique and I use it with caution. The problem is, if you are pretty close to the focal plane (the part of the subject you want to be in focus), then when you recompose, you may change the distance between the camera and your desired focal point enough to throw that target out of focus. You should follow this link to find out why focus-recompose sucks. I imagine that the focus or sharpness problems of a fair percentage of photos can be explained by focus-recompose.

If you have a lens that is supposed to be very good and feel that you never get good, sharp photos from it, and if you use autofocus exclusively, be aware of the possibility that your lens may be out of adjustment for autofocus, that is, it may be front-focusing (actually focusing a little in front of the place you want it to focus on) or back-focusing (the reverse of front-focusing). Google these topics for more info. These problems are not common, but they do occur. One of the advantages of manual focusing is that it isn't affected by front or back-focusing. If the lens is good, you should be able to achieve clear, sharp focus if you do it manually.

Finally, there's a host of other difficult issues that I really don't want to talk about. Don't use f/2.8 to shoot a group portrait from 8 feet away or some of the people in the shot probably aren't going to be in focus, when they should be. If your camera offers you a choice between phase-detect and contrast autofocus, look into the difference so you understand the pros and cons of each. Understand that your camera can't autofocus well in very low light — and you won't be able to focus manually in low light either, because in low light, neither you nor your camera can see very well. Shooting at higher ISO (because light is low) inevitably means some loss of detail and may make an impact on sharpness.

Anyway, the autofocus systems on cameras are not all created equal, far from it. The number and type of autofocus points in the camera make a difference. So does the lens (as a means of delivering info to the camera for the camera to autofocus on), the type of light, and other factors. Since my purpose here isn't to talk you (or myself) into buying a new camera with potentially better autofocus, let's just say that it's important to know what you can expect from your camera when you use autofocus.

If you have time for it, manual focus can be better, that is, it can sometimes achieve sharper, more precise focus. These days, I use manual focus quite a bit for portraits with adult subjects, not so often for candids of active children (not to mention sports photography, which I don't do much of any more). But it's worth remembering that we're all spoiled by the automatic features on our cameras. It's good to shoot in M mode regularly and it's good to use manual focus regularly, just to "stay in shape". Once upon time, manual focus was all there was, and photographers managed to take great photos. I increasingly use manual focus with my Sony DSLRs because of the feature that lets me fine-tune manual focus in live view.

Subject movement

The first two causes of unsharp photos — bad or mediocre lenses and focusing problems — are things that some photographers forget when thinking about sharpness, but they are of basic importance. Now, I get to the first of the factors that every knowledgeable photographer does think about in connection with unsharp photos, or at least should think about: subject movement.

In a word, it's hard to take a sharp photo of a moving subject like a rodeo cowboy riding a bull, or a child squirming in his mother's arms. In the early days of photography, it was impossible. Photographic subjects had to be still while their picture was being taken, sometimes for lengths of time that today seem impossible (30 seconds or longer). Portrait photographers used some equipment that looks pretty kinky today to hold subjects' heads still while they posed. But those old photographers often got extraordinarily sharp photos.

Today it's not impossible to get a sharp photo of a moving subject, but it can be difficult. The basic trick is to make sure that your shutter speed is fast enough to freeze the action. The photo above was taken at 1/4th of a second — way too slow for the wriggling boy. That shot probably needed at least 1/160th second. If you're photographing a school soccer game in good daylight, you might need 1/500th second for some shots. It's hard to recommend specific shutter speeds, because there are too many variables. But to freeze the movement, the shutter needs to be fast enough.

Getting the shutter speed fast enough to freeze the action only works, of course, if the subject is in focus. In the picture above, subject movement is the most obvious problem. But the truth is, the camera hadn't really finished focusing when I pressed the shutter; so even if the mother and her son had been frozen still, the picture still wouldn't have been sharp, because it would have been out of focus. If you're photographing subjects that are moving from right to left or vice versa while remaining roughly the same distance from you, it's easier to achieve focus, then you just need a fast shutter to stop the movement. If the subject is moving toward you or away from you, especially if it's relatively close, you may have trouble keeping the subject in focus. Your camera's continuous focus option should help in this situation.

Note that, at least now and then, the subject may be moving relative to the background but fairly still relative to itself. In this case you may want to pan the camera with a slower shutter speed, to get your subject into sharp focus but blur the background. I talked about this at some length a year ago, in a post titled "Horses in motion."

Now, subject movement isn't just a problem with children, animals, athletes. It can also be a problem in macro photography, where you photograph flowers or insects close up. In macro photography, because you are so close to your subject, you often have very little depth of field. And if you're shooting outdoors, and there's even the tinest whisper of a breeze, your subject may be moved around just enough to wreck focus or sharpness. You can't solve this problem by increasing the shutter speed, because the problem in this case is that the subject is moving out of the focal plane. The solution here is to wait for the breeze to go away, or get lucky.

Using flash can help you get sharper photos. Even when the available light is sufficient for a nominally good exposure, it may make sense to use flash, partly because more light may add to the clarity of the shot, but also because the flash can freeze the action even if the shutter is much slower. Say you're shooting a birthday party. You might want to "drag the shutter," that is, drop your shutter speed below the camera's flash sync speed (usually 1/160th second, or 1/180th second or 1/250th second). Dragging the shutter lets the available light help with the exposure and can give flash photos a more natural look. But the flash itself illuminates the scene brightly for about 1/1000th second, and at least if you're using the flash in TTL metering mode, the camera will be exposing for the flash rather than the available light. The very brief burst of light from the flash will freeze the action while the available light that reaches the sensor during the rest of the time the shutter remains open will simply fill in some of the shadows in the picture.

Camera movement (also known as "camera shake")

Subject movement can cause problems with sharpness, but an even more serious problem is camera movement or camera shake. You can take an unsharp photo of a building or a mountain, if you jiggle the camera. Camera shake is a major cause of unsharp photos. The effects of camera shake become more pronounced as distance from the subject increases. This is very like the problem of shooting a rifle: the farther away the target, the steadier you need to hold the rifle if you hope to hit your target.

It's important to develop good camera holding technique and equally important to learn how to squeeze the shutter without causing the camera to move. But apart from holding the camera properly, there are some things that can help you get sharp photos.

Here's a photo taken handheld at 300mm, from a distance of close to 20 feet. My Sony A550's SSS ("Super Steady Shot") image stabilization feature was turned off. You can click on the photo to view a larger version, where the photo's lack of sharpness will be more apparent.

The next photo was taken with SSS image stabilization enabled. Although I have pretty good camera-holding technique and I squeeze the shutter very smoothly, human beings are not made of stone and there is always a small degree of camera movement in any handheld shot. The image stabilization works to compensate for that slight movement and it does a pretty good job. The next photo is considerably sharper; again click the photo to view the larger version where the improvement will be easier to see.

Sony and Pentax DSLRs (and Sony DSLTs) have image stabilization built into the body, so you get the advantage of it no matter what lens you are using. Canon and Nikon DSLRs, on the other hand, do not have body-based image stabilization; instead, you can spend extra to buy image stabilized lenses. Whether it's provided in the body or the lens, image stabilization can help your images be sharper. I use Sony cameras in part because I never want to be without image stabilization.

However, image stabilization compensating for camera shake isn't as good as getting rid of camera shake, which you can do by putting the camera on a tripod. Here's a third shot, with the camera on the tripod. To minimize camera movement even further, I used an electronic remote to trip the shutter, so I didn't have to touch the camera directly.

This is easily the sharpest of the three shots.

If I could shoot with my camera on a tripod all the time, I would. By eliminating camera movement almost completely (at least if you have a good tripod and know how to use it) the tripod gives you the best chance to get a really sharp photo. But of course, most of us can't or won't carry a tripod with us everywhere, and when the use of a tripod is inconvenient, impractical or simply impossible, then image stabilization is the next best thing.

Addendum 9/14/11. I mention above two ways to fight the de-sharpening effects of camera shake, namely, the modern, high-tech feature of imagine stabilization or the classic technique of placing the camera on a tripod. There is a third semi-classic technique that deserves mention: increasing the shutter speed. I mentioned shutter speed as a way of dealing with subject movement, but it helps minimize the negative effects of camera movement as well. The classic rule of thumb is use a shutter speed that is equal to or faster than the reciprocal of the full-frame equivalent of your focal length. If the focal length is 300mm, the reciprocal is 1/300; but note that the rule of thumb requires that you adjust for your camera's sensor size or "crop factor". On a Sony APS-C sensor DSLR like the Alpha A550 that I used for the shots of the globe above, the rule would call for using a shutter of speed of at least 1/450th sec when shooting at 300mm, that is, the shutter speed should be at least as fast as focal length x 1.5. If you don't have image stabilization or a tripod, the rule is pretty useful. I took two shots, handheld, at 1/500th sec, one with my camera's image stabilization feature enabled, the other with the feature turned off. I can't see the difference. If you do have image stabilization enabled, you may be able to use a slower shutter speed than the rule of thumb calls for.

The nature of digital capture

The final consideration — the nature of digital capture — is one that I'm going to mention only briefly. The basic idea is that, because digital capture stores images as arrays of discrete pixels, there is a degree of "distortion" inevitable in digital capture and digital images can almost always benefit from some amount of sharpening after the fact. Undoubtedly the best book on this subject is Fraser and Schewe's Real World Image Sharpening, and I refer you to it, if you are serious about the subject of sharpening. Fraser and Schewe explain the why as well as the how, and in detail.

Conclusion

I simply want to reiterate that sharpening on your computer can't really fix problems caused by the previous four factors. If you shoot with a lousy lens, if you haven't focused your image well, if the subject is moving too fast for the shutter speed, and/or if the camera isn't stable at the moment you press the shutter, then there's not a lot you'll be able to do on the computer to make the image sharp. The sharpening feature in your processing software (known in Photoshop as "unsharp mask") really ought to be called "increase sharpness" rather than simply "sharpen." If the photo is a blurry mess to start with, your best bet is to delete it and take another shot.

Printing!

2011-09-08T12:14:00.000-05:00

I started college as an art major, doing prints. I'd been printing for a year or two at that time. At the same time — and for years after I left the art department — I was working in the darkroom, processing film and making "enlargements" (i.e. prints). I loved it. I loved working with the paper, seeing the results happen before my eyes.

It's been a long time since I cut a block or printed an etching or worked in the darkroom. For decades I got my photos printed like everybody else, at the local photo shop. When I started making portraits and doing weddings, I used the printing service (Mpix Pro) supported by my web service (Zenfolio). Mpix Pro does very good work, their prices are reasonable, they have a quick turnaround, they will do manual color correction for me (that's critical) and they have a ton of options with regard to papers, finishes, formats (board, canvas, etc.). In the last three years I can only remember two unhappy customers. In one case (my very first wedding, five years ago), the problem was my fault, not theirs. The other problem occurred this spring and it was a simple screw-up: Mpix sent my client the wrong prints. Zenfolio support worked with Mpix, got things sorted out, — and in the end, the client was quite satisfied. And she got her prints for free. I was embarrassed but the client was great about it.

Anyway, I've missed handling the printing part of the process myself. As much as I trust Mpix Pro, I regret the fact that, in most cases, I usually don't see what my clients getting. I let clients place the orders online and receive the prints directly. I do this because it's quicker for the client and more cost-effective. If I have the prints sent to me first, for review, well, it just slows down delivery. As I said already, I haven't had many problems with this approach. But — and here I'm being selfish, I admit — this approach means I don't get to enjoy my own photos in print as often as I would like. I get my personal photos printed. But I don't usually print client photos, except now and then to add to my portfolio.

And I've especially missed handling the printing as I've come to believe more and more strongly that, if you don't have prints, you don't have much. Even if you somehow manage to hang on to your digital photos for, say, forty years, don't count on being able to open them and view them. Heck, I'm not sure we'll be able to open and view today's digital file formats in ten years.

Ansel Adams, the great landscape photographer, was a master printer and regarded printing as the performance, while the film capture was simply the score. But not all great photographers were printers. Henri Cartier-Bresson, one of my photographic heroes, was fairly indifferent to the printing process. He said in interviews that he was interested in the process of taking the photo and not at all in the process of printing it:

Once the picture is in the box, I'm not all that interested in what happens next. Hunters, after all, aren't cooks. [Cartier-Bresson]

That is certainly a respectable point of view and I used it for years to justify my own avoidance of the printing process. But the truth is, I never really shared Cartier-Bresson's indifference to "what happens next". I avoided printing because I was afraid of it, not because it didn't matter to me. I just realized that I don't need to be afraid, and at the same time I discovered how truly interested I am in the print as the the whole point of taking photographs.

Necessity is some kind of mother

Recently, I needed some prints in a hurry. It would have been risky to upload the files to my lab, then count on them to print them and get them back to me in three days. Almost possible, but risky. And I wasn't thrilled with my local options. Of course, I've had inkjet printers for years. I just never used one of them to print photos. This last week, that changed. I decided to try printing the images myself on my consumer-grade H-P inkjet printer, using H-P premium photo paper.

I was surprised and very pleased with the results. And I found the process of printing the images (from within Adobe Lightroom's Print module) exhilarating.

Now, in all honesty, I am not sure how these would compare to the prints I get from Mpix Pro. They're probably not as good. But they are a lot better than the prints I get from any of the local consumer printing sources. My wife, who is a pretty severe critic, loved them. Colors are right and the pictures are sharp, quite lovely, in fact. And these were my first attempts. I have seen prints done by other photographers who handle their own printing. The results can be breath-taking.

Digital images vs prints

A digital image viewed on your iPhone or iPad or computer screen, no matter how lovely you may think it looks, and no matter how good your digital display, does not and cannot deliver the same experience as a well-made print of the same photo. Well-made prints display the details in photographs with greater subtlety. This has something to do with the fact that the specks of ink used to make a print are smaller than the pixels on the computer screen, but it also has to do with the fact that the print doesn't illuminate itself the way a computer display does. The print is viewed in reflected light. It's better than the light of any computer screen and it has a very different "feel" to it.

And somehow, the print seems real in a way that a digital-rendered image doesn't. A lot of the value of a print comes from the fact that it's a tangible thing. There are 97 trillion images on the Internet. Close your browser and they're gone. But a print in your hand or hanging on your wall is truly there. It takes up space and has to justify its existence in a way that a zillion images on Facebook don't.

As I said, prints make a difference to the client. Many of my clients want to have digital images so they can share them with family and friends. That's okay, I understand that. I do it myself. But I push prints on my clients, so I have confidence they'll have their photos years from now.

And prints make a difference to me as a photographer. When I shoot for prints, I shoot more carefully, with a different and more serious purpose in mind. When everything is a digital snapshot, no individual shot really matters. It's like fast food or instant grits. But when I shoot with the print in mind, well, I'm not a hunter simply out for the kill, I'm a cook shopping for an important meal, a meal designed to be remembered.

I could shoot for the print, without making the print myself. I'm sure that's what Cartier-Bresson did. After all, he wasn't using a digital camera. But being involved in the printing process more directly means I will get a reward that I would otherwise miss, if I merely sent photos out to my service. I will understand the making of the print in a practical way that will feed back into my shooting. Or so I expect. I believe that's how it was for me decades ago, when I was developing and printing my own pictures in the darkroom.

A new adventure

Anyway, this has been a bit of a revelation and I'm determined to keep at it. I have already tentatively decided that, next time I do portraits for the Dallas Arboretum, my clients will be getting their 4" x 6" prints from me and I am confident my clients will be very happy with them. Beyond that, I'm not exactly sure yet how this will fit into my interactions with clients. I can't compete with the pro lab, at least not in the range of products. I don't plan to start printing tee shirts or coffee mugs, for example. But I am confident that I can, with some effort and practice and a little investment, produce prints that exceed my clients' expectations in terms of quality and durability. And that will be worth the effort.

Serious photography on the iPad: Comparative review of Snapseed and Photoforge2

2011-08-31T12:05:00.000-05:00

Summary: Serious photo processing is possible on the iPad 2, and you have lots of apps to choose from. I tried two: Photoforge2 and Snapseed. Found Photoforge2 to be a very good app and Snapseed a great one.

Freshness warning: This post was published 8/31/11 and to my knowledge the info in it was correct on that date. But I am quite confident that things will change in the future. You shouldn't take what I say here too seriously if you read this post while it's still fresh. Don't let me do your thinking for you! But if you read it six months or a year later, by all means, skim it quickly, then go find out how the apps I mention here have improved.

The experiment
I don't generally experiment when people are paying me. I don't use new equipment at weddings, I don't (usually) try new techniques when shooting portraits. So when do I try new things? All the time. But my favorite time to learn new things and test new equipment is when I travel. Last year (summer 2010), I found out what happens when I leave my big cameras at home and take only little cameras on vacation. This summer, on my recent trip to the YMCA of the Rockies and next-door Rocky Mountain National Park, I took the big cameras but a little computer, my iPad 2. I wanted to see if I could process my photos on an iPad 2 and get them online while I was traveling. And I wanted the results to be as good.

Software options
Before leaving I investigated the various apps for processing photos on the iPad 2. There are, actually, scores of photography related apps. Many of them are niche products, others are easy to use but don't have advanced features that I wanted. In the end, I did my editing primarily in two apps: Photoforge2 and Snapseed, and these two apps will be the focus of this article.

I also purchased and briefly played with Filterstorm Pro and Photogene, which should be included if you were making a list of the top photo editing apps for the iPad. But I was put off by the user interfaces in both of these apps. I simply find Photogene's UI visually unappealing and I thought Filterstorm Pro's UI was too difficult (perhaps because it's so idiosyncratic) for me to get familiar with it quickly. Both seem quite capable and I plan to throw myself at Filterstorm Pro again in the near future. But they were not part of this experiment. I would note that both Filterstorm Pro and Photogene actually have better photo management tools than either Photoforge2 or Snapseed.

I also picked up — after I was in Colorado — an app named Flickr Studio. I wanted to upload photos to my Flickr account. The photo editing apps all have an "export to Flickr" option, but it doesn't work as well as I would like in any of them. In the end, I processed each photo, used the app's export feature to get the photo to Flickr, and then launched Flickr Studio to complete the entering or editing of metadata like photo titles and tags and the assignment of each photo to a Flickr "set" (an album). I'm not going to say more about Flickr Studio, other than to recommend it highly. If you want to manage your Flickr photo stream from an iPad, Flickr Studio is indispensable.

One more app was critical to my workflow: the iOS's own Photos app. I'll say more about this in a minute.

Review and selection: Photos
When I move a batch of photos from the camera to my computer (or my iPad), the first thing I want to do is review them, rejecting and deleting the complete failures, then picking and rating the photos that I want to edit. During this initial review and selection phase, I also add general metadata like keywords (for example, "RMNP" for Rocky Mountain National Park). This part of my workflow is very easy when I'm working on my iMac in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3.5. For example, in Lightroom, I can enter keywords for 700 photos in a few seconds.
Unfortunately, I have not yet figured out a way to do it as easily on the iPad. This sort of thing is simply not a strength of either Photoforge2 or Snapseed. I ended up entering most of the metadata (titles and captions as well as keywords) in Flickr Studio, after each image had been uploaded to Flickr. Not really satisfactory. I'm still looking for a tool that will help me here.
Reviewing photos and selecting the ones worth editing was also a challenge on the iPad, using the two apps I decided to do my editing in. Neither Snapseed and Photoforge2 has a browser tool that lets you browse your photo library and see the images at a large enough size to distinguish one from another that looks similar. So my selections had to be made in the iOS's default photo browsing app, called Photos. After finding and identifying an image in Photos, I would then open it or import it into either Photoforge2 or Snapseed for processing. Also not a very satisfactory solution but this was the best workflow I could come up with.

Snapseed: Pros
Snapseed is from Nik Software, makers of great add-ons for Photoshop and Lightroom. I do not hesitate to say that Snapseed would be my pick as absolutely the best photo editing app for the iPad, if I were picking on the user interface alone. Snapseed was clearly designed from the ground up as a touch-screen app. As a result it's brilliantly easy to use.

After you open an image for editing in Snapseed, you pick which of a dozen or so categories of tools you want to work with (selective adjustments, tuning, cropping, black and white, film emulation, grunge, frames, etc.). Snapseed can show you a nice large version of your image because it actually hides the UI for selecting a tool. To increase the "ambiance" setting, for example, you actually touch the screen inside the image and a little selection palette appears, showing options such as brightness, ambiance, contrast, and saturation. Drag your finger up or down to choose a tool. When you choose ambiance, the ambiance slider appears down below. Now you drag your finger to the left or right to move the slider. Note that you don't have to touch any particular area of the screen, that is, you don't have to place your finger directly on the slider. The app senses up-down and left-right drags on the screen anywhere. Snapseed is much easier to use than any of the other apps not because it eliminates options — it doesn't — but because it is so perfectly designed for the touchscreen platform.

Another advantage of Snapseed is that you see the entire image as you edit. In Photoforge2, if you are adjusting contrast, a contrast slider widget appears on the screen sitting on top of your photo. If you are particularly interested in the contrast in the area of the photo that the widget has landed on, you'll have to drag the widget somewhere else. Not so with Snapseed.

Snapseed does not support layers (which frankly strikes me as a very wise decision) but it doesn't matter much. You can still do selective adjustments of brightness, contrast and saturation using the Selective Adjustment tools, and there's a Center Focus tool as well. After playing with layers in Photoforge2 (and Filterstorm Pro) I am inclined to think that, if you really need layers, you should be working in Photoshop on a real computer. Since I do 95% of my computer-based post processing in Lightroom, which does not support layers (but does support selective adjustments) I find myself quite happy with Snapseed's options here.

Another enormous advantage of Snapseed is that it makes it easy to see the difference your edits are making. In every editing screen, your edits are applied as you make them, but before you save them by clicking the Apply button, you can touch the Compare button to see what your photo looked like when you first loaded the current set of tools. Simply not possible in Photoforge2.

I'll talk about Snapseed's filters (Grunge, Drama, Vintage Films and Frames) below. Leaving these aside, I would say that, especially if the source photo was reasonably well captured in the first place, I like Snapseed so much I wish that there were a version I could use on my computer.

Snapseed: Cons

However, I do have a number of complaints about Snapseed.

Complaint 1. Getting an image into Snapseed is a pain. You have to use a selection dialog that shows the images in your photo library as small thumbnails. Worse, they are sorted with the most recent image files — the ones you almost invariably want to see — at the bottom of the list. Since I have hundreds of images already on my iPad 2, every time I wanted to open an image, I had to scroll to the bottom of a very long list. Photoforge2 uses the same selection dialog and sorts the images the same way, but when you open this dialog, it automatically scrolls to the bottom, which is what I want. This may seem like a small thing until you start editing a lot of images.

Complaint 2. Snapseed is basically useless when it comes to metadata. You can't add a title, or a caption, or keywords or copyright info or anything else to the file while you work in Snapseed. You can add some of that info when you upload your processed image to Flickr or Facebook. Snapseed is so good that I really wish I could add and save some metadata in files as I'm working on them, so that this info will be there later when I move the files to my computer and import them into my Lightroom 3 catalog.

Complaint 3. Snapseed supports only two photo-sharing web sites: Flickr and Facebook. Your only other output options in Snapseed are email and printing. Photoforge2, by contrast, has all of these options and many more, including sharing to Picasa Web Albums, Twitter, and Tumblr, saving to Dropbox or to an ftp site.

Complaint 4. Snapseed lacks a sharpening tool. It's not always necessary, especially since I was not shooting raw on this vacation and I had already asked my camera to sharpen images slightly. Still, I wish that Snapseed had this option; Photoforge2 does (as do Filterstorm Pro and Photogene).

Complaint 5. You can't zoom your image in Snapseed. (Really not a big deal, since I most want to zoom when I'm sharpening, and I can't sharpen. Still, I'd like to have the option.)

Complaint 6. I can't add a watermark to images when I upload them.

The first two complaints having to do with file management are my biggest dissatisfactions with Snapseed; the other four are fairly minor.

Photoforge2: Pros

From the beginning of my vacation, I tried processing certain images in different apps. I quickly came to prefer Snapseed, no doubt because it was the easiest of the apps to figure out and the most pleasant to use. But after several days, I started using Photoforge2 as much as Snapseed. I think it was the lack of a sharpening tool in Snapseed that prompted me to use Photoforge2 more often, at least at first. It might also have been that it's easier to open images in Photoforge2 than in Snapseed, or that exporting to Flickr worked more reliably.

Whatever it was, once you open an image, Photoforge2 provides a fairly rich set of editing tools, to wit: auto (white balance, exposure and enhance); channel mixer; color balance; colorize; curves; levels; brightness/contrast; HSL; exposure; noise reduction; vibrance; USM (amount, radius and threshold); sharpen (simple, for people who don't understand what to do with the USM options or simply don't want to bother); shadow/highlight; and white balance. Whew!

In addition, Photoforge2 supports layers. You can create a layer, paint a mask, then use any of the editing tools catalogued in the preceding paragraph to edit the layer. I found it fairly easy to figure out Photoforge2's layers, even though I'm not very good with layers even on the computer. (I found Filterstorm Pro's layers much more difficult, indeed I haven't yet figured them out.) This is potentially a powerful feature and I do not doubt that, for some users, this will be a decisive advantage of Photoforge2 over Snapseed. I however do not care that much about layers, and if an image really requires layered editing, I'm much more likely to do it on my computer in Photoshop than on an iPad. I don't count the presence of layers as a con in Photoforge, but I do think it's somewhat superfluous, kind of like getting a windshield for your bicycle.

Photoforge2 has a generally attractive user interface and it does a pretty good job of keeping tools out of the way, at least until you need them. (I mentioned above my little complaint about the way Photoforge2 lays sliders over the image. Given its overall design, I'm afraid it has no choice about this. It has no other place to put the sliders.)

One other area where Photoforge2 has the advantage over Snapseed is that Photoforge2 allows you to view EXIF info (Snapseed doesn't) and edit metadata such as location (including GPS coordinates), copyright, title and description, etc., and and save this info in the source file.

As I said above, one thing I liked about Photoforge2 was that it let me sharpen my images; Snapseed has no sharpen tool. I found that the basic sharpening tool in Photoforge2 was, if anything, too powerful. I never moved the slider more than a wee bit; going further quickly caused the image to be sharpened too much. I was also fond of one of Photoforge2's frame options. (More about that below, in my discussion of filters.) Basic file management was easier in Photoforge2, as well. It was easier to open images in the first place; and I had fewer problems uploading to Flickr when I did so from Photoforge2 than from Snapseed (where the uploads failed sometimes and sometimes seemed to fail even though they had not).

USM in Photoforge2

Photoforge2: ConsBut of course, I have a number of complaints about Photoforge2, too.

Complaint 1. The accept (√) and reject (x) buttons sit too close to one another in the upper left corner of every screen. You have to be very careful which one you touch and if you have big fingers, as I do, you will eventually reject something you meant to accept or vice versa. In Snapseed, on the other hand, there is a "back" (reject) button on the left and an "accept" button on the right. No risk and no confusion. But this difference is just part of a broader difference between the apps. As I mentioned above, Snapseed lets you make tool adjustments (or tool selections) by dragging almost anywhere on the screen, while Photoforge2 requires greater precision. With Photoforge2, when you are moving a slider, you have to put your finger right on the slider's grab thingy. Bottom line: Snapseed is perfectly suited to the iPad's touch screen and Photoforge2 often makes me wish I had a mouse.

Complaint 2. Too many tools. Look at the list of adjustment tools I gave above. Several different tools for exposure, for contrast, for colors, for sharpening. Snapseed has a much smaller selection of tools, but they're very well chosen. And while Snapseed aims at being an ideal photo editing app for the iPad and very nearly hits a bullseye, Photoforge2 sometimes makes me think its trying to do the impossible, that is, create an iPad version of Adobe Photoshop.

Photoforge2 tool tray

Complaint 3. Compounding the confusion caused by the presence of too many options, there's the fact that the options are literally duplicated in the UI. That is, the tool selection tray shows the tools over and over again. In the screen capture immediately above, you'll see that the Frames tool is the current selection (in the center). But look to the left and right sides of the screen: there's the Frames tool again, on both the left and the right. So the same tool appears three times on the screen. Apparently the idea here is that you can just drag your finger to one direction or the other and the tool you want will eventually appear. But I think this is very bad UI design. It's not necessary for the toolset shown in the screen capture, which has only five tools, all of which could easily be shown at once. But in the adjustments screen, which has enough tools that they cannot all be shown at once, the "endless buffet" approach means I have to search for a given tool every single time, because I never learn where it's going to be. Compare this to the way the Mac OS X Dock works. If you have your Dock at the bottom of your computer's screen, the second icon on the left will always be the second icon on the left; the icon in the middle will always be in the middle; and so on.

Complaint 4. No mid-tone contrast tool like Clarity in Adobe Lightroom 3 (on my iMac) or Ambiance in Snapseed. I'm really torn here. Snapseed has Ambiance and Photoforge2 has sharpening. I would rather have both. But since I only use good lenses and I generally focus carefully, sharpening matters less to me than Ambiance. NOTE: I am sure that you can mimic the "ambiance effect" in Photoforge2 using the curves tool, or levels, or the contrast/brightness slider. But mid-tone contrast is perhaps the adjustment that I apply most commonly, to nearly every image. I'd give up three or four tools in Photoforge2 and some of that precise control, in order to make this adjustment easy to achieve.

Complaint 5. No preview when cropping. No preview at all, come to think of it. No, that's not quite right. While I want a preview tool when I'm cropping, what I want everywhere else is something like Snapseed's Compare tool that shows me what the image looked like before the current edit was applied. No can do in Photoforge2.

Complaint 6. Photoforge2's upload options are much better than Snapseed's, but it shares with Snapseed one limitation: I can't add a watermark to images when I upload them.

Aside from that last complaint (which both apps share), the problems I have with Photoforge2 bother me much more than the problems I listed in Snapseed.

Filters

In the paragraphs above, I've concentrated on what I regard as the core editing features in Snapseed and Photoforge2. While I suspect that most photographers want to do roughly similar things with their photos with the core editing suite of tools (crop and then tweak color balance, contrast, sharpness), I am aware that different photographers want very different filters, if they want filters at all. Filters are tools for special effects and are, almost by definition, designed to meet special or specialized needs. So, while there is undeniably a large subjective element in my reporting above (for example, I'm not a big fan of layers, so I don't value them as highly in Photoforge2 as another photographer might), there is even more subjectivity in my valuation of the filter options in these apps.

So I'll cut to the chase and say that I find many of Snapseed's filters quite useful, while I find almost none of Photoforge2's filters useful. Snapseed organizes its filters into five categories: Black & White, Vintage Films, Drama, Grunge and Center Focus. Photoforge2 doesn't organize them; it simply dumps them all into a tray for special effects. By my count, Photoforge2 has over two dozen effects tools, which sounds impressive until you start asking yourself how often you want to make your photo look like it was run through a blender, captured from a t.v. screen, or shot through night vision goggles. It's not so easy to count, but I am sure that Snapseed's better organized tools provide more options and — what is most important — better, more useful options. Color me uncreative if you wish, but I simply don't want to posterize or pointillize or crystallize my photos, pretty much ever, and if I did, well, I could do that in Photoshop Elements on my computer. The one filter in Photoforge2 that I did find useful — and which as far as I can tell has no counterpart in Snapseed — was the Sepia filter:

Processed in Photoforge2 using sepia filter

I admit that I don't see myself using some of Snapseed's filters, either. The vintage film filters, for example, basically take a good photo taken with a great modern digital camera and make it look like it was shot with a cheap film camera. This is very different from the features in Bibble Pro or Silkypix Pro that mimic the look of specific classic films and developing processes. Those are super geeky but I can appreciate them at least in theory. (Addendum: Nik Software's Silver Efex Pro 2 — an add-on for Photoshop, Lightroom and/or Aperture — also offers the option of processing to match classic film types.) Anyway, the Drama and Grunge and Center Focus tools in Snapseed are features that I have actually found myself using.

Here's a mediocre photo of a messy room in my house made slightly less uninteresting by being run through one of Snapseed's grunge filters:

Processed in Snapseed using "grunge" filter

This photo of my dog Ruthie uses the center focus filter:

Processed in Snapseed using center focus filter

And here is a photo I took in Rocky Mountain National Park this summer, of Sheeps Meadow as seen from the Old Fall River Road.

Processed in Snapseed

It was a nice enough photo to start with, but it was a total cliché, a photo that every tourist who's gone up the Old Fall River Road has stopped to take from the same photo-op spot that I chose. I've probably taken this photo myself before and it's not insignificant that I can't remember. Anyway, I'll remember this photo. It's nothing special, but it's different, and it is a legitimate "treatment."

These are kind of fun, and I have enjoyed playing with them. I'm not actually wild about the black and white filter options in Snapseed (I'd like to be able to play with color channels), but they are numerous, while Photoforge2 has just one black and white filter with one option (contrast).

Frames

Finally, frames. As part of this vacation experiment, I decided I wanted to put frames on my photos. And I thought, since I was taking photos in a national park, that what Snapseed calls "organic frames" would be appropriate. In this category, I'm prepared to call it a toss-up. Snapseed actually has quite a few more options than Photoforge2 does, but Photoforge2 has a couple options that I really like a lot, like the one I used in this photo of a mountain bluebird hopping around outside our cabin at the YMCA of the Rockies:

Frame added by Photoforge2

I picked this example because it works better with my blog's (current) black background, but I more often used a white frame.

I prefer Snapseed here, too, because it has more options, but I did like Photoforge well enough that I don't regard this as a terribly significant distinction between the apps. I would note that Filterstorm Pro doesn't have these "organic" frame options at all.

The bottom line

I had two goals in this project.

First, I wanted to see if it's possible to process photos on the iPad 2 in a way that is close enough to professional to make me happy. Now I don't plan to stop using Lightroom on my iMac, of course. I shot only jpegs on this vacation, while I always shoot raw for my paying customers, and until the iPad apps can handle raw files as well as jpegs, there's no chance I'll be processing photos for customers on the iPad. I would also add that the photo management features on the iPad right now are, well, awful. That will discourage me from using the iPad for processing, at least whenever I have more than a couple of photos to deal with. Nevertheless, the answer to this first question is a resounding yes, the iPad can be used for (fairly) serious photographic work. I shoot for newspapers now and then and wouldn't hesitate to use the iPad for quick processing of news photos, in fact, for that purpose it would do very nicely. It also did a good job of my vacation photos.

The other question was, if I am going to use the iPad to process photos, what are the best apps? I think any of the four apps I mentioned at the start of this article (Photoforge2, Snapseed, Filterstorm Pro and Photogene) could do the job, although as I said, I haven't yet warmed up to Filterstorm Pro or Photogene.

As for the other two, well, it's not an easy choice, but not an impossible one for me, either. I like Photoforge2 quite a bit. It is a powerful photo editing app with lots of good tools and I found it reliably stable. I'm glad that I bought it and I will undoubtedly use it in the future. But if I could own just own photo processing app for my iPad 2, it would (right now) be Snapseed. Snapseed does almost everything I want and does it in a way that seems supremely well suited to the iPad. It really is a pleasure to use.

And finally, as they say, your mileage may vary. I am pleased to see that there are not just two but four really terrific photo editing apps for the iPad. And they're cheap! My advice, at least to serious photographers, is buy 'em all to support future development. If you get to know more than one app well enough, you will undoubtedly find yourself using different apps for different purposes, as I did.

What's up with Facebook? It's getting worse

2011-08-29T08:05:00.000-05:00

In response to the threat posed by Google+, Facebook seems to have decided to get WORSE rather than better. Seems like a risky strategy to me.

I uploaded some photos today to my personal Facebook page, my "wall". (That's a term I've never understood.) The first problem is that the photos looked awful in Facebook. I uploaded them directly from within Lightroom 3.5. Perhaps it's necessary to adjust the photos to some particular resolution before uploading — but I don't have to do that with any of the other photo sharing sites I use or have used (Zenfolio, Flickr, Picasa Web Albums, etc.). I have read that Facebook is the largest photo sharing site in the world. Amazing then that it's so awful in this regard.

So I deleted the album on Facebook, and uploaded the photos instead to Picasa Web Albums. Then I went back to Facebook to create a post letting my friends know where I'd moved the photos. There used to be a button labeled something like "Add a link" that you could use to add a link to an external page. It's gone. The only way I can see to add a link is to paste the link right into the text field where I'm writing my little message. But I don't want the link to stay in the text area, so after pasting it, once Facebook recognizes the link and adds it below my text, I have to select the link that I pasted and delete it from the text area. Bizarre.

And finally, I couldn't figure out how to DELETE a post while I was editing it. I could have just closed the window without saving the post, but then I have to open a new window or tab in my browser and go to Facebook again. So instead I saved the post, thinking I would quickly delete it. But after the post appeared, I realized I couldn't see how to delete it. There used to be an "x" button that would appear whenever my pointer hovered over a post of mine, but no longer. Eventually I found the "remove this post" command — in the pop-down used to select that group to share stuff with.

I'm starting to dislike Facebook. Google+ is easier to use in every way and Picasa Web Albums is vastly superior to Facebook as a photo-sharing service.

Here's an example of the problem I see with Facebook's display of photos. This isn't a technically good photo to start with, but that just means it's about like 99% of the other photos posted on Facebook. Here is a screen capture of the photo as viewed on my iMac, in Google Chrome, as displayed on Picasa Web Albums:

And here is the same photo as viewed on Facebook:

The difference is pretty dramatic. You can click on the photos to view them larger (original size).

The A77 is coming — and a note on why I shoot Sony now

2011-08-25T08:01:00.000-05:00

Sony yesterday announced the Alpha A77 "SLT" (single-lens translucent) camera. This is the successor to the A700 as Sony's top-of-the line APS-C camera and at the same time the successor to the A55 and A33, the first SLT cameras released last year. The best discussion of the A77 available right now, as far as I can tell, is over at Luminous Landscape.

This matters to me. I shoot Sony. When I abandoned Pentax a year ago, instead of going with either of the safe choices (Nikon or Canon) I decided to go with Sony. Why? No doubt partly because I'm a contrarian. It was also partly because Nikon and Canon DSLRs don't have image stabilization built into the body, which strikes me as, well, a big disadvantage of the Nikon and Canon systems. But I chose Sony mainly because it is clear to me that digital cameras are now primarily electronic devices and Sony knows more about electronics than Nikon and Canon combined. While Nikon, Canon and Pentax are trying and to a great extent succeeding at making digital versions of their classic film cameras, Sony is busy trying to make new kinds of products. Personally, I think the NEX bodies are nutty and I've said so here; but nobody listens to me and apparently they are selling like hotcakes. As for its alpha-mount cameras, the A55 made history last year and the A77 looks like it will do the same again this year. Sony makes the best sensors around, and the sensor is the most important part of a digital SLR body. My primary body, Sony Alpha A580 (which is basically an A55 but with an optical viewfinder), gets top grades from the independent DxO Mark testing site, besting even the Nikon D300s, which costs twice as much. Not saying that Nikon or Canon don't make great cameras. They do. A large majority of the best photographers in the world prefer Canon or Nikon. I could in all honesty switch to either line this afternoon, and if I win the Texas lottery, perhaps I will pick up a few high-end bodies from both of those makers. I'm not a fan-boy for Sony. Still, Sony is really innovating, and since innovation for its own sake is meaningless (see Ricoh or Sigma), I hasten to add that Sony's innovations are, in very large part, major and valuable successes.

Sony seems to understand at a deep level just how digital photography isn't just a matter of digital capture, but rather, a fully digital workflow. Sony understands that most photos (at least by serious photographers) get processed after capture, and moreover, that photos, once processed, go on to be shared via digital media like the Web.

Anyway, I for one am excited about the imminent arrival of the A77.

*

Postscript...

I'm not saying I'm rushing to order the A77 myself. There were some issues with the A55 SLT and flash use, and since flash use is critically important for me, I'm going to have to confirm that those issues have been resolved. I'm not sure I need 24MP, although I don't see that as a huge problem. More important, there is, at the moment anyway, some doubt about whether the A77's image quality will be as good as the image quality of the A580. More megapixels does not mean better image quality, certainly not automatically. See for example this comparison of the new A35 with the A580; the A35 apparently has a sensor identical to or similar to the one in the A55, which is (as I understand it) the same as the one in the A580. But the A35 rates lower in every category than the A580, presumably because of the SLT design. Have to wait a month or two until the tech-heads have had a chance to work with production models of the A77 and we can see the results. I would also like to hear more about whether a full-frame SLT (A99?) is coming. Some rumors suggest that it is. If that is the case, I might skip the A77 and jump to the A99. Anyway, no decisions have to be made this week!

Traveling light, revisited one year later

2011-08-24T08:49:00.000-05:00

I usually take a couple vacation trips each year with my wife and daughters and of course I take photos on those trips. For years I took my best cameras (my digital SLRs) with me, on the theory that the best cameras would give me the best pictures. And then last year, I decided to question that theory. When we traveled to Yellowstone in summer 2010, I left my DSLRs at home and instead took a couple of fixed-lens cameras with me, the Panasonic LX3 (for wide and normal shots) and the Panasonic FZ35 "superzoom" (for shooting wildlife). The results were generally pretty satisfying and I blogged about the experiment when I got back ("Traveling Light: The Post-Mortem").

It's now August 2011, a year later. When we started planning our recent trip to Rocky Mountain National Park, I thought I'd "travel light" again, either with the same two cameras I used last year or perhaps with the new Sony Cybershot HX100V, which is similar to the Panasonic FZ35 but, well, a little newer and better. But I changed my mind and took two DSLRs instead (the Sony A550 and Sony A580). To go with the bodies, I took two zoom lenses. One (Carl Zeiss DT 16-80 f/3.5-4.5) was a wide-to-moderate telephoto like the LX3. The other (Tamron AF 70-300mm f/4.0-5.6 SP Di USD XLD) was a normal telephoto range of 70-300 or 105-450 in traditional full-frame terms; this replaced the Panasonic FZ35 although the FZ35 goes both wider and farther and so is more versatile. I wasn't expecting to do much hiking this year, so weight and size weren't really issues.

So, did it matter? Were my pictures better because I took bigger and "better" cameras?

On the whole, probably not. Most of the time, I was able to shoot outdoors in good to pretty good light, and under those circumstances, at least for the purposes of family vacation photography, I am pretty confident that the fixed lens cameras would have done fine. For example, here's a shot taken this year with the Sony A550 and Tamron 70-300 USD:

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="640" caption="Shot with Sony A550 and Tamron 70-300 USD lens"][/caption]

The shot above of the marmot might be better than the following shot of a couple of otters, but the superior clarity of the more recent shot is not, I think, due to the equipment, but to the lighting.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="562" caption="Taken with Panasonic FZ35"][/caption]

Let me say again that I'm thinking strictly in terms of personal photography. In other words, I'm not worrying about whether I can make a stunning 8x10" print for a paying customer. I don't like to stay that my standards are lower when I'm shooting for myself, but I guess I would admit that my purposes are a bit different and of course I'm able to tolerate failure when I'm shooting for myself. Most of my personal photos end up on the Web or in a memory book that I create at Snapfish or Blurb.

Which brings me to the real point. While the compact cameras can do really very well when the light is good, they fail pretty completely when the light stinks, as it did here:

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="640" caption="Beaver eating dinner. Taken at ISO 3200."][/caption]

That photo would simply have been impossible with the FZ35 or the LX3. It was taken at almost 8pm. The sun was going down and I was in a very shady wooded area. To get the picture at all I had to kick the camera's sensitivity (ISO) up to 3200. The photo you see has not had any noise reduction applied, partly because noise reduction reduces detail and partly because, in this case, noise reduction wasn't terribly necessary. Had I taken this shot with either the FZ35 or the LX3, well, it might have looked like this:

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="640" caption="Beaver at ISO 3200 as it might have looked if shot with compact camera"][/caption]

The grain or pseudo-noise here was added in Lightroom 3. To be honest, I think the photo would have been even noisier if I'd taken it with the FZ35.

So, boys and girls, what have we learned?

First, as I have said many times before and for years: Compact (fixed-lens) cameras can take great pictures and they keep getting better every year. By contrast, DSLRS are more expensive than fixed-lens cameras. They're heavier. Changing lenses introduces the risk of dust on the sensor which can ruin photographs. Focus with DSLRs can require greater care because depth of field is smaller. And lens quality can be an issue with a DSLR. The best lenses are much better than the lenses on fixed lens cameras; but you can also buy consumer-grade lenses for DSLRs that are worse than the Leica lenses on the Panasonic LX3 and FZ35. In short, for many people, compact cameras make a lot of sense.

But second, DSLRs have their advantages, too. One advantage is that, because DSLRs have larger sensors than compact cameras, other things being equal, DSLRs wil perform significantly better in low light. This is why no pro shoots weddings with a compact camera.

World's largest stop-motion animated short, shot with camera phone

2011-08-10T18:51:00.000-05:00

I have long been a fan of Nick Park and Aardman Studios in London. They're famous particularly but not exclusively for the Wallace & Gromit movies. Now Aardman has gained a little more notoriety by doing shooting the world's "largest" animated short using, well, it's certainly not the world's smallest camera but it might be the smallest camera ever used for stop-motion animation: a Nokia N8 cell phone. You can see the short here:

http://vimeo.com/26877221

Unless you really are a connoisseur of animation, that might not knock your socks off, because you may simply not understand what you're seeing, so be sure to watch the (much longer) companion piece which explains how the movie was made.

http://vimeo.com/27019750

Great stuff, creative people having fun.

Now, my comment. It's great public relations for Nokia and I grant that it's a technical tour de force — I mean, shooting a movie like this on a cell phone. But it doesn't prove as much as you might think. The movie isn't better because it was shot on a cell phone. The movie is simply good enough. Shooting it on a Sony A580 (one of the cameras I use, not terribly expensive, but a massively better picture-taking tool than the Nokia N8) or one of the newer high-end Nikon or Canon full-frame cameras with video, wouldn't have changed the video at all, because the Nokia N8 was good enough, and that's all that's needed. Anything else is overkill.

But they didn't shoot it on a cell phone the way, um, you would shoot a movie (or rather, a series of still photos) on a cell phone. In other words, don't try this at home, folks: these people are professionals. What did the professionals do that you wouldn't or couldn't do? Perhaps the main thing is that they've stabilized everything, so they get clear, sharp pictures. The cameras are mounted in a special box that is held aloft by a cherry-picker. The cameras are therefore stable, as if they'd been placed on a tripod. Alas, you can't normally put your cell phone on a tripod. And since this is stop-motion animation, the scenes that are being photographed are static. Nothing is moving. I'll skip over the irrelevant stuff — like the fact that they had a huge amount of computer equipment helping them, or the fact that the people who were doing this are immensely talented artists. That all matters to the end product. But what mattered to their getting technically satisfactory pictures in the first place from a cell phone was that the camera was stable and the subject was static.

(The fact that the cameras were quite a distance from the focal plane might have mattered, too, at least a little, but these cameras already have a great deal of depth of field. Still, I would have been more impressed with the Nokia N8's contribution here if the set were being photographed from a distance of 3 ft rather than 30 ft.)

Is there a lesson here? Sure. If you want to get decent photos on your cell phone, (a) make sure you hold the camera absolutely steady and (b) shoot subjects that are static. I would add that, to achieve goals (a) and (b), you have to go about your picture taking with some care or deliberation. You can't just lift your cell phone, snap a photo, and expect a prize-winner. You have to set your shots up carefully, as the animators did here. In particular, your cell phone doesn't have a fast shutter, so don't try to use it to shoot your daughter's soccer game, at least, not to shoot your daughter scoring a goal.

Stable camera and still subject. Actually, it works not just with cell phone cameras but with any camera, no matter how sophisticated. And it's worked for 150 years or more.

The "golden hour" (with the Sony HX100V)

2011-08-03T19:18:00.000-05:00

One of my clients at the Dallas Arboretum on Fathers Day asked me about "the golden hour." He'd heard the phrase but wasn't sure what it meant. It's the first hour after dawn or the last hour before sunset, when the sun is low in the sky and its light tends to be particularly, well, "golden."

About 7:30 this evening I decided to run over to the spillway at White Rock Lake. I thought it would be a great time to take some test shots with the Sony HX100V because I knew that there'd be birds in the spillway and that the light would be favorable — that is, the sun would be behind me as I looked east towards the spillway (and the lake behind it). I was hoping for the light to give me that golden glow. Here's a panoramic view of what I saw, taken with the HX100V's sweep panorama feature:

You can catch a bit of the yellow light off to the right of the island of trees in the middle.

Now, do you see the great white egret right in the middle of the photo? Look carefully. He's just a speck of white in that shot, with a couple brown specks (ducks) around him. Here he is, after I zoomed in using the HX100V's rather extraordinary zoom lens:

It ain't gonna make the cover of National Geographic or Audubon, but it's okay for a snapshot. Heck, I may even order a print of it.

And that's what the golden hour is all about.

Restoring a very old photo (with a free moral)

2011-06-30T04:49:00.000-05:00

Wow, this is impressive.

http://topdogimaging.net/blog/restoring-a-photograph-from-the-1870s

The commentary by Bob Rosinsky of Top Dog Photography is detailed and quite interesting. I don't do this sort of thing. Well, when my brother-in-law and I worked on a movie almost seven years ago for my mother-in-law's ninetieth anniversary, we had a lot of old photos to go through and I cleaned up a few of them, but that was child's play compared to what Rosinsky did with this nineteenth-century photo.

I wonder if this sort of thing will be possible for photos taken today, say, 150 years from now. I doubt it. The tintype that Rosinsky worked on didn't require either hardware or software format conversion, at least no conversion was necessary for the photo simply to be viewed. It could be viewed with the "naked eye." Digital photos, not so much. Rosinsky's client brought him a 150-year old tintype and he was instantly able to see the image and quickly assess the amount of work that the restoration would require. If 150 years from now, one of your great-great-grandchildren finds a box of CDs in the attic and takes them to a photo restoration service, the expert is likely to look at the disc and ask what it is. Forget about 150 years. That might happen in 15 years. Moral: Make prints!

(Hat tip: TOP, as so often....)

What "post-processing" means to me (and you, if you're my client)

2011-06-21T19:17:00.000-05:00

I usually put photos online for clients with only minimal processing. If you are a client reviewing your online gallery, what you should look for, as you decide which photo to order a print of, is the smile, the pose, the background — the look of the photo in a general way. And don't be troubled if the photo looks a bit flat. It usually does. When I shoot, I do only "raw capture," that is, I don't ask my camera to generate nice output, I take the raw data that the camera's sensor captures and then I go to work on it myself. And while I admit that sometimes I do process photos so they will look as good as possible online, most of the time — especially when I'm working on photos for clients — I'm working to produce a master file that will result in the best possible print.

Before and after

This photo of my daughter Catherine at the Dallas Arboretum is as close to an "original" as I get, but it has already been processed by Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3.4 as part of the raw-to-jpeg conversion process.

Now, I go to work and five or ten minutes later, I end up with this:

And now the photo is ready to send off to the lab (Mpix Pro) for printing.

Huh?

Don't see what's changed? Look more carefully. Okay, this isn't magic, so I'll tell you:

Horizontal alignment has been adjusted and the photo has been cropped slightly.

White balance (color tonality) has been corrected—well, modified. The original white balance wasn't technically wrong, but in the final photo, Catherine's skin is a little pinker and more pleasant looking.

Increased overall contrast (using Lightroom's tonality curve), set black point (makes blacks really black), and enhanced "clarity" (mid-range contrast). These steps make the photo start to "pop."

Removed a small blemish on Catherine's right cheek (left side of photo) and also a small mole just below her lip.

Minor noise reduction (the photo was shot at ISO 800 but wasn't too noisy to start with) and modest "capture sharpening". These effects are almost impossible to see on a computer screen but will make a difference to the print.

Added "vignetting", that is, darkened the outside edges of the photo to highlight the subject's face in the middle. As a complement to the vignetting, slightly desaturated (weakened the color) in the background and also added an almost imperceptible extra blur to the background, as well.

I don't do this with a preset or a template. I do it one photo at a time, one tweak at a time. If you want to see the changes as they are applied, click the link below for a slideshow that will show you the process in eight stages, including two final and more dramatic changes (black and white treatments). Be sure to read the captions that appear onscreen and use the navigational tools to jump back and forth to compare the changes. Some of them are fairly subtle.

http://photos.william-porter.net/p130088644/slideshow

Trust me: It makes a difference to your print

And if you still don't see all the changes, well, don't feel bad. It really is hard to see some of these differences on a computer screen. Even if you have a large, high-resolution, calibrated monitor, I'm generally not displaying large, high-res copies of photos. But trust me, these changes really do make a difference to the final print. That's why I don't usually make these changes until clients place their orders.

There is of course a great deal more than can be done with a photo — you can move the subject's eyes farther apart, remove the subject's former boyfriend from the photo, convert the photo so it looks like a crayon drawing, give the photo a "grunge" effect, merge several layers to create an HDR effect, etc. But that isn't post-processing, that's manipulation. I very seldom manipulate my photos in that way.

War on Photography

2011-06-20T13:16:00.000-05:00

A few years ago, I spent the morning on the campus of UT Southwestern Medical School here in Dallas, photographing snowy egrets in the rookery there. I drove into a public parking garage (well, it is "public" in the sense that you don't have to pay to drive in and no one challenges you when you do), and went up to the top floor, which overlooks the rookery. Within minutes, a campus police car rolled on to the top floor, the officer got out and challenged me. I had business cards with me, which seemed to mollify him, and he was actually fairly pleasant about it. My having a big camera with a big lens was proof enough that I'm photographer, but that wasn't the issue: I think the business card somehow proved that I'm not a terrorist. Anyway, he explained that the campus is very concerned about security and he advised me not to turn ninety degrees to my left and take photos of the hospital, implying that if I did, he'd be back and perhaps not in such a good mood. I stuck to photographing the birds.

Since then, I've read more and more about photographers being challenged while photographing in public places. I find these reports depressing. I'm actually a solid law-and-order guy and I certainly favor doing things that actually work to thwart terrorism. I don't think my right to (say) take photos of a nuclear power plant overrides the government's responsibility to protect the plant and local citizens. And my default position is always to support the police. But it's also clear to me that the police are not well informed on this subject. They are, after all, not generally constitutional scholars and seem to be pretty busy with other matters. And since everybody remains a bit touchy about the possibility of another 9/11 attack, well, the police are over-zealous.

Anyway, here's an excellent legal article by Morgan Lee Manning discussing these matters very thoroughly: "Less than Picture Perfect: The Legal Relationship between Photographers' Rights and Law Enforcement." I recommend it to photographers and lawyers—and especially to policemen. It's a pretty typical law review article, long and pretty dry in parts. But law reviews are built like sandwiches, except that the meat is on the outside. You can read the first five pages and the last five pages or so and pick up the gist pretty clearly. If you have the time and inclination to dig into the middle of the article, there's a lot of interesting stuff there, too.

We're hoping to make a trip to Washington DC in the next year or two. I really really don't want to get blown up by terrorists. But I would also like the police to feel confident that I, as a photographer, don't pose a threat to national security when I point my 200mm lens towards the Capitol Building. Could be that I'm just a guy with a camera who loves his country.

Hat tip: Glenn Reynolds.

City critters

2011-06-20T10:53:00.000-05:00

It was a slow, slow weekend at the Arboretum. I'm not just commenting on the fact that I was not busy, I'm observing that the Arboretum itself seemed to be empty most of the weekend. On Saturday, the majority of folks walking around were accompanied by pro photographers. On Sunday, well, there were fewer photographers and a few more guests, but the place still seemed pretty dead. Surprising for a holiday weekend, or perhaps not. After all, it was over 100º each afternoon. I think people just decided they'd rather go bowling or see a movie. Can't blame 'em.

Anyway, the lack of crowds seems to have emboldened the wildlife. Now I know we have a lot of critters in the area. At the Arboretum or in the area of White Rock Lake, I've seen coyotes, raccoons, and opossums. (I'm just mentioning non-domestic mammals. Too many interesting birds around here to get started.) Arboretum grounds manager J. Glore tells me that he has seen a bobcat at the Arboretum. But most of these animals are shy — and nocturnal. The first time my wife and I saw a coyote, it was crossing Mockingbird Lane at about 5am; we were on our way to the airport for an early flight somewhere. You can see possums and raccoons pretty frequently, but mostly in the evening towards (or after) sundown.

So it was a bit of a surprise yesterday to see a raccoon just tippy-toe across the empty Paseo (the Arboretum's main drag) and jump into the gardens behind my "field studio," in the middle of the afternoon.

Catherine urged me not to get close. But I looked into is eyes and he looked into mine and I just sensed that he wasn't a bloodthirsty killer. Apparently he sensed the same thing about me, although the constantly flashing of my camera may have momentarily confused him.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="640" caption="I stepped a little closer and he didn't run away"][/caption]

We'd been throwing our drink bottles away in a nearby garbage can all weekend, and it didn't take me long to guess where he was headed.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="359" caption="Lunch time!"][/caption]

He jumped up, climbed into the trash can, looked around to see what I was doing, and then dropped down into the can, like Santa Claus sliding down a chimney. Then, after a minute or so thrashing around in the trash, he jumped back out and went on his way.

I felt like offering the guy some ice water but I didn't have a bowl.

Not a bobcat, but a bit of excitement for a slow, hot afternoon in the City.

Father's Day Weekend at the Arboretum

2011-06-14T17:09:00.000-05:00

I'm pleased to announce that the Dallas Arboretum has asked me back this weekend to take family portraits again, for Father's Day. I've worked Mother's Day weekend for the last many years but this will be my first Father's Day. I will be working 11-3 both days: Saturday, 6/17/11, and Sunday, 6/18/11. If you are thinking of coming by, my advice would be, come by earlier in the day rather than later, as it's going to be absurdly hot by 3pm both days.

Early color photos

2011-06-07T05:30:00.000-05:00

Although color "photographs" were being made from fairly early in the history of photography—starting in the mid-nineteenth century and continuing into the twentieth—color photography didn't really become practical until 1935/1936 when Kodak and Agfa began to produce "modern" color film. Here's a link to some interesting color photos taken mostly in the early 1940s in the western USA:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1388179/Rare-Library-Congress-colour-photographs-Great-Depression.html

Why is wedding photography so expensive?

2011-05-29T10:26:00.000-05:00

Really terrific article by my virtual friend Booray Perry, an outstanding photographer working over in Florida, speaking to the question, "Why is wedding photography so expensive?". If you are a bride looking to hire a photographer, I urge you to jump over to Booray's blog and read it.

Couple points I would like to add to what Booray says.

Why is portrait photography so expensive?

First, most of what he says applies not just to wedding photographers, but to nearly all photographers who are working for money and trying to do a good job for their clients. I do more portrait photography than weddings, but the economics aren't that different. Let's say I charge $150 for a one-hour portrait session, which at the present time is fairly average for my fees. Here's what I do to earn that $150....

Well, I started to itemize what was involved but it's too depressing to show you the details. Let me summarize it this way. That one-hour portrait session probably involves at least five or six hours of work from me. That includes contact and planning before the shoot, the shoot itself (which almost never in fact lasts just one hour), and several hours afterwards processing and uploading photos. I bring thousands of dollars of equipment to that one-hour session. Afterwards I use thousands of dollars of computer equipment and software to process your files. And then there is the cost of books, training sessions, PPA and other dues, etc.

How does anybody make money in this biz?

Which raises an obvious question: How does anybody do it? Is pro photography a minimum-wage job these days?

It is for some folks. As Booray points out in his article, anybody these days can by a DSLR, toss up a web site, and solicit clients. An awful lot of photographers out there claiming to be serious, really aren't. Turnover in the market is extraordinary. Lots of young photographers set up a web site, do a few gigs, realize they can't hope to make money at it (or realize they're not good enough, or it's too stressful, or that doing it for money takes the fun out of photography) and they leave. Those of us who've been doing it for years—especially those of us who, for whatever reason, are not working at the high-dollar end of the market—have to compete against these folks.

I'm not sure how others do it. Me, I make it work in a number of ways. I will mention only three important points.

First, as an expert computer user, I am able to work with greater efficiency than a lot of less experienced and less tech-savvy photographers. Here, I get help from the other ways that I make money—as a software developer and as a computer journalist.

Second, I make very little money from taking the photos and hope instead to make money from prints. Now preparing image files for printing takes extra time, but I'm good at it. And I believe in prints. My own view is, if you don't buy a good print, you don't really have the photo. A photo on Facebook is like a drugstore snapshot on your refrigerator: a very temporary pleasure.

And third, I have a somewhat different view about professional equipment from my friend Booray. This is a controversial topic that I've been wanting to write about for a while, but since I take the controversial or contrarian view, I want my essay on the subject to be as strong as I can make it and I just haven't found the time to write it up. Short version: I use the least expensive high-end equipment available. Right now I'm shooting with Sony bodies and Sony (and Zeiss) lenses. I sacrifice a little in body build in order to stay current with the parts of camera technology that matter most, in particular, the sensor. My main camera presently (a Sony Alpha A580) lacks some features and conveniences found in more expensive camera bodies. For example, the A580 doesn't have a weather-sealed body. But the sensor in the A580 is terrific and allows me to compete head to head with the image quality other photographers get from more expensive cameras. (If you are a camera geek, you can see some of the info that matters to me here on the top site for camera performance metrics, DxOMark.com.) I also have insisted for years on using cameras that have image stabilization built into the body. I started with Pentax five years ago, and now I've switched to Sony. Both Pentax and Sony bodies are image stabilized. Now Canon and Nikon shooters can buy image stabilized lenses, but they cost much more and you have to keep paying for image stabilization over and over again. Image stabilization means that I can shoot effectively with slower shutter speeds, thus doing better in lower light, than I could without image stabilization. NOTE: This is in no way to knock Nikon or Canon! This is just my approach.

You don't always get what you pay for—but it's a pretty safe bet

It's an indication of Booray's integrity that he acknowledges briefly in his post that, while there's often a good reason why the expensive photographers are expensive, it's also possible—if you're lucky—to get a bargain. Some people are cheap because they aren't very good, don't spend the time required to do a good job, don't have the equipment to do a good job, don't get the training, etc. But there are good photographers who are inexpensive for other reasons that Booray mentions (building portfolios, etc.). Almost everybody started out charging less than they were worth. I would add, with some regret, that, just as in absolutely every other field out there—law, medicine, plumbing—there are expensive vendors who, well, are better at marketing themselves than they are at providing the service they're hired to provide.

So you have to be careful. The best way to know what your you are going to get from photographer X is by checking out X's portfolio to see what he or she provided to his clients in the past. Challenges vary from shoot to shoot, and even the greatest photographers in the world have bad days. But as a rule, if you've seen a fair sampling of a potential photographer's work from the past, you should be fairly confident that you'll get results of similar quality from that photographer. And if that photographer seems a tad expensive compared to some others, well, keep in mind the points that Booray makes. You're paying for a lot more than you are aware of.

FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) about Arboretum portraits

2011-05-11T05:37:00.000-05:00

Now that the links have gone out, the questions are coming in. Here are the answers to some of the questions I'm receiving. The Q&A here might change a little as more questions come in.

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Q. What exactly did I pay for at the Arboretum?

A. The $15 (or, less often, $30) you gave me at the Arboretum paid for the taking of the photo and for one 4"x6" print (or two, if you paid $30). I call this your complimentary print, because I am a photographer, not a printer, and the 4"x6" print you get from me is done locally and is basically just a memento of your visit to the Arboretum. You will get that print in the mail directly from me. So your $15 paid not only for the taking of the photo, but also for the print, the envelope, the postage, and a legally required percentage to the City of Dallas.

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Q. How do I let you know which picture I'd like you to use for the complimentary print?

Email me, please, and just say something like "I would like a print of photo #3" or whichever one you like. The photos in each gallery are in a fixed order and I don't mess with that order after I upload them so referring to the photo by number should suffice. If you want to give me more detail ("the one where I'm holding my daughter upside down"), that's sometimes helpful but not usually necessary.

To be honest, this is the first year I'm letting you pick the photo for the 4"x6" print and it may not turn out to be a good idea. In the past, I've picked the complimentary photo for you, and it's clear now, that was a more efficient way to get these inexpensive prints out quickly. And I will pick your print for you this year, if I don't hear from you fairly soon after I send you the link.

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Q. What if we want more prints of our favorite photo, or a print at a larger size, or prints of other photos in our gallery?

A. Additional print orders can be placed right there online. Above each photo, there is a "Buy" button. Hold your pointer over that button and you'll be able to order that photo, or save it for ordering later. You will then complete the ordering process entirely online, providing the online service with your credit card number, delivery address, etc.

Print orders placed online are printed and shipped by Mpix, one of the country's best photo labs. Every print is manually color-corrected by Mpix, and your print will be made with top-quality ink on top-quality paper. I order all of my own prints from them and they're excellent.

I receive notice of all orders placed online, so that I can review them. This allows me to upload a high resolution copy of your photo file (for the best print quality) and if necessary to make any tweaks to the photo beforehand (like sharpening, making it a little lighter or darker, etc.). I do NOT receive any info whatsoever about your credit card. Orders placed online are handled by two third-party services (my online hosting service, Zenfolio, and the pro lab in California, Mpix).

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Q. The photo I like online seems a little dark, or isn't cropped quite right, or looks a little too green, etc. What's up with that?

A. There are at least two potential answers here.

First, most of the photos in your gallery online have received little or no post-processing. Before I send you a print, I will always make some final adjustments, at least small ones, to your photo that will make it look better. The most common "problem" (which isn't really a problem at all, in the end) with the photos as displayed online is that the midtones (including faces) seem a little dark. Your prints will usually be a little brighter than the photos displayed online.

But second, please keep in mind that there is a huge variance in the quality of computer displays. I work on a large, carefully calibrated display that shows colors properly, renders images in a crisp fashion, and generally makes things look good. Your old computer monitor at work (or on your smart phone, or your laptop) might simply not be a very good screen for viewing photos.

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How soon will we receive our complimentary print in the mail?

A. Because I decided to give everybody a choice this year, I expect that the entire turn-around process now will take into next week. Within about 48 hours of sending you your email, I'll start placing orders for prints here in town. I then have to pick up the prints, stuff and address the envelopes, and drop 'em off at the post office.

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How long will the photos stay online, in other words, how long do we have to place orders for better-quality prints?

A. Until the end of June.

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Q. I'd like to link to my photos. Can I do that?

Sure. There's a "Share" button right on the page above each photo. However, be aware that the links created by the share button won't be permanent. I don't promise to keep these galleries online forever. If you really like a photo, the best thing to do is contact me. I'll explain how you can become a friend of "William Porter Photography" at Facebook, and I'll be happy to upload and tag your photo there, so all your friends can see it, too. There's no charge for this. Friends are priceless.

Self-portrait with whiskers

2011-05-05T13:46:00.000-05:00

I'm starting to get my equipment ready for this weekend's portrait sessions at the Dallas Arboretum. Running the Sony DT 35 f/1.8 SAM lens through its paces quickly, I took a couple of shots of myself, not in a mirror but just holding the camera at arm's length and trying to aim it accurately. Yes, it took a little luck to focus on my eyeball.

If I'd known the lens was this sharp, I'd have shaved first. I'm going to be using this lens a lot.

When bad things happen to good cameras, or, Why experienced photographers carry backups

2011-05-02T12:02:00.000-05:00

Experienced photographers know: equipment breaks. That's why experienced photographers carry backups. I mention it because I ran into a problem last weekend. Would have been a big problem—well, it would have been a disaster—were it not for my having not one, but two backups with me.

I started the morning shooting with a Pentax K10D and planned to use it as much as possible. For a while it was working fine. Here's a boring but otherwise satisfactory shot taken shortly after I got on board with my host, Corinthian Sailing Club former commodore Michael Mittman:[caption id="attachment_761" align="aligncenter" width="590" caption="Michael Mittman"][/caption]

But once we got out on the water, something happened. I don't chimp every photo but eventually I did review a couple photos and I found this:

[caption id="attachment_759" align="aligncenter" width="590" caption="One of the many things that can go wrong with a camera!"][/caption]

This, I'd seen before. A couple years ago, at the State Fair of Texas, this problem appeared for the first time. At shutter speeds over 1/1500th of a second or so, the shutter curtain no longer moved out of the way fast enough, causing a part of the photo to be blacked out. By the time this problem appeared, a Pentax K20D had replaced the K10D as my primary camera and I didn't feel like spending the money to get the K10D fixed. So long as the shutter speed was under 1/1000th sec—which in my photography is almost always the case—everything was fine, so I continued to use the K10D as a second body now and then.

Now, I'm not sure what was causing the camera to use a very fast shutter last weekend. It was a very overcast day. And I haven't used the K10D much in the last 10 months or so; so perhaps some problem arose with its metering. But I didn't have time to think the problem through while I was out in the middle of the lake, and I didn't need to, because I was able to switch immediately to the other cameras I'd thrown into my bag the night before: the Panasonic LX3 with its terrific Leica wide-to-normal zoom lens, and the Panasonic FZ35, which its remarkably good superzoom capability. I wouldn't take either of the Panasonic compact cameras to a portrait shoot (too little control depth of field due to the small sensor) or a wedding (poor low light performance) but for this assignment for the East Dallas Times, I thought they'd be fine and they were.

The moral is simple. Don't go out without a backup unless you can afford to come home without photos.

The Royal Wedding

2011-05-01T13:09:00.000-05:00

We recorded the royal wedding on a couple different channels and I did end up watching some of it yesterday, with my finger on the fast forward button most of the time. Just a few thoughts.

First, although the Brits do a big ceremony very well, I had a lot of esthetic complaints about the program. They have this venue, these musicians, and a universe of musical choices—and they came up with that program? Unbelievable. If you're going to sing "Ubi caritas et amor," for heaven's sake, sing the great setting by Duruflé! The fanfares sounded like they were taken from some old Hollywood movie.

I also thought the sermon was a missed opportunity. I always listen to the sermons at the weddings I shoot. I've heard some great sermons about marriage—some that really deserved to be heard by the whole world. This wasn't one of them.

Picture Credit: Photograph by Hugo Burnand

On a more positive note, for starters, they are certainly going to have a great wedding album.

I like the young couple. She was a very beautiful bride and he a most handsome groom. I don't know much about Catherine personally but from the little I know about William, I rather like him. Good strong name, for starters. I admire the work that he does piloting a rescue helicopter—dangerous, real work. Come to think of it, I like her name too. Our youngest daughter is named Catherine, and our oldest daughter's middle name is Elizabeth.

But in the end, they're just another couple getting married. Obviously they have some terrific advantages. I don't think they're going to worry much about paying their bills. But look at the marriage of Diana and Charles and you should see that there is no couple in the world whose marriage lacks for challenges.

"Still, the institution endures, even when a particular marriage falls apart. Our failure to attain it doesn’t change the ideal." That's a comment by Jennifer Marshall at the National Review online, and I agree. A royal wedding is, in the end, just another wedding. I pray that God blesses them and guards their love. I get the impression that they really do love one another and that's a good start. Now I hope the rest of the world can leave them alone at least from time to time.

Leukemia Cup Regatta

2011-04-30T10:33:00.000-05:00

East Dallas News editor Bruce Felps asked me to take a few photos at this morning's Leukemia Cup Regatta, so I did. The regatta this weekend is hosted by the Corinthian Sailing Club of White Rock Lake, in partnership with the North Texas/Oklahoma chapter of the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.

I had one technical problem after another with cameras, but that's why you bring backups. At least I managed to stay in the boat—something I confess I was a tad worried about. It was a thrill to be in the middle of a regatta.

I am grateful to skipper Mike Mittman for having me aboard.

I had the honor of meeting (and boating with) Devon Kerr, who is one of the Honor Heroes for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society this year.

Few more photos here. The article at the East Dallas Times is supposed to run next Tuesday.

Addendum Tuesday, May 3, 2011: The article is now online, here.

Photography and the iPad 2

2011-04-26T06:12:00.000-05:00

Excellent overview of the iPad and photography over at dpreview.com:

http://forums.dpreview.com/reviews/appleipad2/

Most of what the authors say could apply to the iPad 1 as well as 2.

At the moment the iPad seems most useful as convenient way of showing photos to clients (or friends or family). My big iMac's display is even better, but obviously I can't lug my iMac out to a coffee shop for a meeting with a client, while an iPad is even more portable than a laptop computer.

I have not heard anything official about this but it seems likely that Apple will eventually (sooner rather than later?) release Aperture for the iPad. And that may be a game changer. I have Aperture 3 on my iMac but I use Lightroom 3 for 99% of my work because, well, the user interface in Aperture is simply too disorganized for me. Lightroom makes much more sense to me and I find it much easier to use. However, I'd be willing to bet that, if Apple rewrites Aperture for the iPad, they will have to fix some of the UI problems, and the result might be an iPad app that is capable of editing photos in a fairly serious way. Anyway, I'm hoping this happens and looking forward to it. In the meantime, I'll use the iPad mainly for viewing photos.

Mothers Day photos at the Arboretum

2011-04-26T04:22:00.000-05:00

Mothers Day will soon be here, and once again I will be back at the gloriously beautiful Dallas Arboretum taking photos all weekend. And this year they've asked me to add a third day—Hispanic Mothers Day on May 10. If you want to come by, here are the times:

More info can be found on the Arboretum's web site.

Meet the mayoral candidates

2011-04-20T10:06:00.000-05:00

We've got a mayoral election coming up here in Dallas (March 14). The candidates were invited to attend a luncheon at the Lakewood Country Club sponsored by the Greater East Dallas Chamber of Commerce, and East Dallas Times editor Bruce Felps asked me to take a few photos. So I did. You can read about it on the East Dallas Times' Wordpress web site, here.

I got there a few minutes early and hung around for about 90 minutes, taking photos as the candidates arrived, schmoozed with the guests, and afterwards as the luncheon got underway. But I didn't stay for their individual presentations or for the Q&A, so I still haven't made up my mind who to vote for. Edward Okpa seemed very genuine to me, and I might vote for him based on that and what I heard of his life story. But my impression is that Okpa is a real long shot and I like for my vote to have a chance to make its small difference, so I'm still looking at the other three guys, too. Need to make my mind up soon!

It's a pleasure to work with East Dallas Times editor Bruce Felps. If you live in East Dallas, you should consider subscribing to the EDT. It's cheap, the news comes right to your inbox, and you have the satisfaction of knowing you're supporting the best kind of journalism there is—local journalism.

Flash Bus Tour comes to Dallas

2011-03-25T09:33:00.000-05:00

Sorry if you tried to reach me yesterday and I wasn't my usual pretty responsive self. I spent the whole day attending the Flash Bus Tour seminar at the Hilton Anatole Hotel in Dallas.

There are lots of working photographers who do terrific things with flash. But there are a few guys who stand out not just for their work but for their teaching. If you're a working photographer, you probably know these names: David Hobby, a.k.a. The Strobist; Joe McNally, the renowned photographer for SI, National Geographic, Life and other mags and also the author of some great books, including The Hot Shoe Diaries; and I would add as a third, Neil van Niekerk, photographer, author and blogger. Hobby and McNally teamed up this spring to run the Flash Bus Tour, a series of one-day seminars on flash use, focused at intermediate and advanced photographers. It was terrific.

The seminar was great because both Hobby and McNally are enthusiastic, energetic and effective speakers, but also because they complemented one another so very well.

Hobby is a terrific photographer but he's also a terrific teacher. I scribbled notes all during his morning presentation, in which he laid out very useful principles about lighting. He urges photographers to use their flashes in full manual and build the lighting for a scene in an orderly manner described by the acronym AFKA ("Aussies Find Kangaroos Attractive" was the mnemonic he offered us): first ambient, then fill (bit of a surprise there), then key, then accent. He then showed us a number of his finished photographs and explained them. If you've been reading Strobist.com for years, much of what Hobby said will be familiar, but he said it really well, and to be honest, I've always found the info at Strobist to be a bit disorganized. So getting it all in one morning was great. You can see some of Hobby's work on a website that is an ongoing project, hoco360.com (a not-quite-blog about Howard County, Maryland, here Hobby lives).

McNally is not as organized and logical a teacher as Hobby, but he's a truly remarkable photographer. And I was very pleased that, instead of talking, McNally actually took camera and lights and models and went to work there on the stage. While we watched from the room, he set up lights, made decisions, changed his mind, all the while explaining what he was thinking and doing. And McNally approaches things differently from Hobby. While Hobby favors manual control of the flashes, McNally is a big believer in TTL, especially since this works so well with the Nikon flash system. My own process has always been pretty much the same as Hobby's, but I was impressed at how easily McNally was able to control three groups of lights from the single commander/controller flash mounted in his camera's hot shoe. Lights still have to be positioned by hand, of course, but once the lights are in place, the photographer can adjust lighting ratios without having to touch the lights. I liked that. The Sony flash system (what I use now) also supports this kind of control and for the first time, I find myself really wanting to give it a try.

All in all, it was a day very well spent.

Groundbreaking at the Arboretum

2011-03-09T03:23:00.000-06:00

Bruce Felps, editor of the East Dallas Times, asked me to take a camera over to the Arboretum yesterday to cover the groundbreaking for the Nancy Rutchik Red Maple Rill. I took the pics and passed them to Bruce with a few simple notes about the event. He wrote the article and you can read it (and see a few of my photos) here:

http://eastdallastimes.com/2011/03/09/turning-shovels-on-new-arboretum-garden/

Note that the East Dallas Times is a wonderful and active news resource. If, like me, you live on the east side of town, you should consider ticking the box there to support this venture in independent local journalism.

I have a few more photos of the event, starting here.

F/8 and be there...

2011-03-01T17:16:00.000-06:00

This is cool, very cool:

http://9-eyes.com/

I understand it's a Tumblr blog devoted to interesting photos taken by Google's street view camera. The photos aren't works of art but some of them really are interesting. And the collection makes a point. There's interesting stuff to photograph just about everywhere.

There's an old saying in photography: "F/8 and be there." Or "F/11..." Whatever. F/8 (and f/11) are aperture settings that provide for good depth of field, making precise focus less important; the idea here is, "Be ready to shoot without hesitation" But the important part of the saying is "be there." To take a photo, you have to be there.

And where is "there"? Very often, it isn't "here." Often "there" is a destination I have to travel to — the Grand Canyon, or Yellowstone National Park, or Rome. But it doesn't have to be far away. There can be here, or close to here. That's why I carry a camera with me almost every where I go. Of course, I tend to go to the same fairly boring places over and over. The 9-eyes site reminds me I need to get out of my neighborhood more.

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By the way, for my review of Tumblr, go here. I liked it.

White Rose

2011-02-21T17:24:00.000-06:00

Brides (usually) wear white gowns with (usually) subtle textures. Capturing those textures is hard. Having a couple dozen white roses here (what I gave my daughter for Valentine's Day) I decided to do a little flash practice.

To bring out the texture of the rose, I knew I needed the light to be directional. The rose is lit by two flash units fired by radio triggers. The main flash was about 45º off the camera's axis to the right — and fairly close. Because the light was bounced off a wall right behind me, it was fairly soft. The secondary flash was bounced into a ceiling corner about 90º to the right and three times as far away.

The shot was taken hand-held at 1/160th sec. Little tricky, that, given the shallow depth of field here, but the Steady Shot feature of the Sony Alpha A580 helps.

Although I live across the street from the Dallas Arboretum and shoot there quite frequently, flowers are not my favorite subjects, in fact, I find flowers rather challenging. I'm reasonably pleased with this little shot because I got the lighting right and got the effect I wanted: you can see the subtle veins (if that's what they're called) in the petals of the flower.

Modest post-processing in Lightroom 3. I initially tried to process this in Aperture 3, but Aperture crashed on me (as it has done a number of times) and I switched. I may have more to say about Aperture in a future post.

Visual Acoustics: A film about Julius Shulman

2011-02-19T07:03:00.000-06:00

This morning my wife and I watched the film Visual Acoustics, a documentary about the career of Julius Shulman.

http://www.juliusshulmanfilm.com/

Shulman is arguably (probably?) the greatest architectural photographer of all time, and he was a very great photographer indeed. He was also tremendously important, because what most of us know about beautiful or important architecture outside our own home towns comes from photos. The movie reckons that, for every one person who sees a great piece of architecture in person, eighty thousand know it through a photo.

The film is an absolute delight from start to finish and I recommend it highly. The central character is Shulman himself, still very active in his mid-nineties!

I want to mention a few details about the film that make it particularly interesting to photographers. Many films about photographers show the photos but say almost nothing about the technical issues involved in their making. This film isn't a lecture on technique, of course, but there is a lot of interesting info here about how the photos were made, and also about what makes Shulman's photos distinctive. There's more to it than the fact that his work dealt mostly with modernist architecture.

I was also struck by a comment Shulman makes in the film, that the camera is the least important element in photography. He says that, when he teaches, he doesn't even let cameras be brought into the classroom until he has laid a lot of groundwork. I have said the same thing myself, as have many other photographers. Indeed I have been writing sketches for the last couple years that I hope to turn into a book about photography without cameras. I was glad to hear a great photographer like Shulman say this, not least because architectural photography does present a number of special technical challenges and he didn't shoot with a 35mm SLR!

Finally, a comment on the question of whether Shulman is The Greatest Architectural Photographer, or not. Most successful, certainly. He practically created the field. But I can't forget about Eugene Atget. Perhaps Atget wasn't an architectural photographer at all. He was a cityscape photographer, with a wonderful subject: old Paris.

I passed the CPP exam!

2011-01-31T10:19:00.000-06:00

Hallelujah! I just learned that I passed the CPP (certified professional photographer) exam. Took it a couple of weeks ago at ImageFest USA in San Antonio.

Please understand this does not mean that I am now certified. I am not. This is just half of the process. Now I have to submit my portfolio for review, and from what I have heard, the portfolio review is at least as tough as the exam.

Still, I am mighty relieved to have successfully completed this part of the challenge. I had hoped to take the exam last October and did start studying a little at that time, but I decided to accept a late wedding gig instead and my studying fell by the wayside. Before taking the test recently I had basically zero time to study. I walked out of the test in San Antonio feeling "cautiously optimistic", but, well, you never know. So—I'm happy, relieved and, yes, a wee bit proud of myself.

On to the portfolio!

Pseudo-tethered shooting with an Eye-Fi card, an iPad and ShutterSnitch

2011-01-25T09:24:00.000-06:00

No boundaries

Originally uploaded by William Porter

This photo is one I took as a test of a wireless "tethered" shooting set-up I have going here. The ingredients are: my DSLR (in this case a Sony A550) with an Eye-Fi wireless SD card inside; and an iPad running the PhotoSnitch app.

http://2ndnature.thebrew.dk/shuttersnitch/

Once it's launched on the iPad, PhotoSnitch communicates with the Eye-Fi card and vice versa, so that I take a photo, and a few seconds later, the photo appears on the iPad's screen (inside PhotoSnitch) where I can review it on the iPad's nice and relatively large screen rather than using the high-res but tiny screen on the camera.

I had a wee bit of trouble setting PhotoSnitch up initially. If you have previously configured your Eye-Fi card to send photos to your computer, you have to mount the card on the computer first, open the Eye-Fi Center software and basically follow the instructions to break that link. Only then do you put the card into the camera, launch PhotoSnitch on the iPad, and finish up the connection from there. It was this part that I had a little trouble with, but somehow—to be honest, I'm not sure how—it worked itself out and now it works terrifically.

For studio portraits, this can be really nice. It lets the client-subject see the photo right away. Whether it's so useful for the photographer, I'm not sure. I do not generally "chimp" my photos, at least not excessively. I can usually wait to get the photos on to the computer for review.

NOTE that ShutterSnitch and Eye-Fi require a Wi-Fi network. The camera isn't talking directly to the iPad; they are both talking over the network. Too bad the Eye-Fi card doesn't support Bluetooth. Anyway, I understand that you can buy a small portable router that would let you create a not very "Wi" Wi-fi network anywhere. Sweet.

A final point. This isn't "tethered" shooting, at least not in the traditional sense. It's called "tethered" shooting because in the past, you connected the camera to the computer via a cable (the "tether"). I suspect cable would be faster, but it comes with the risk that you'll trip over the cord and pull your computer on to the floor.

Blogging from my iPad

2011-01-24T05:32:00.000-06:00

One of the big reasons I have decided to move my entire web site to Wordpress, is to make my site more accessible from mobile devices—for my clients but also for me. Well, I have now installed the Wordpress app on my iPad and this is my first post using that app. So far, so good.

Jeff Bridges and True Grit

2011-01-21T09:28:00.000-06:00

Well, this is cool. Actor Jeff Bridges is also a photographer, and a pretty good one; this much I knew. He likes to use a very special panoramic camera called a Widelux. I don't use a Widelux but I do very much like panoramas, so I feel a small kinship with the guy. In addition, I am a huge fan of the movies of the Coen Brothers, and I loved True Grit, in which Bridges plays a starring role. With me so far?

So I was tickled today when I launched the App Store on my iPad and discovered that there's a True Grit app, and it's free. Even better than free, it's rather cool.
[caption id="attachment_564" align="aligncenter" width="480" caption="Cover of Jeff Bridges True Grit album for the iPad"][/caption]

What I want to know is, how was this done? I guess I could try writing Mr Bridges and asking but I expect some clever programmer associated with the Coen Brothers's marketing staff is responsible for it. Anyway, it's pretty neat. If you have an iPad, check it out. If you like photography, well, some of the photos are rather nice. And of course, if you love movies, see True Grit.
[caption id="attachment_566" align="aligncenter" width="480" caption="Jeff Bridges's photo of the Bear Man from True Grit"][/caption]

Postscript (day later): We went and saw True Grit again yesterday. I enjoyed it even more than I did the first time. I wondered originally, before I saw it for the first time, why the Coen Brothers bothered to remake a film that was tied so famously to John Wayne. Seems pretty audacious. Well, it was audacious, but the Coen Brothers did it because they knew they could make a better film. A much, much better film. Is it the best film of 2010? Could be....

Tip: Viewing your photos online

2011-01-21T07:37:00.000-06:00

Like it or not, it's a fact that most photos are now viewed on computer screens or on cell phones. I admit, I think it's really cool that I can take a photo with my cell phone here in Dallas, and two minutes later, my daughters in San Antonio and Lubbock can view it on their cell phones. And a lot of photos—including some of mine—aren't so special that it makes a big difference whether they are viewed online.

But there's a down side to digital delivery, as well, and the higher quality the photograph, the greater the likelihood that digital viewing will diminish your experience. Viewing good photos on your computer screen (or, heaven forbid! on your cell phone) is like listening to Mozart through bad speakers. You may think that a person's face looks orange when it shouldn't. Or you might not see detail where you think you should.

Sometimes, the problem you see might actually belong to the photo. But quite often, there's nothing wrong with the photo. The problem is with your display. You should be aware that viewing photos on your computer screen is less than ideal, and depending on your computer's display, it may be a lot less than ideal.

For starters, it is often the case that you are viewing an image at a resolution considerably lower than the resolution at which the photo was originally taken. Proofs uploaded by professional photographers to their web sites are often downsized to decrease upload times.

But it's also possible that your computer screen may have one or more of the these problems:

It may not display colors correctly.

It may be darker (or, less often, brighter) than it should be.

It almost certainly shows fine contrast and detail less well than a high-quality print.

The color, contrast and other properties of your computer display may be adversely affected by the light in the room.

Seeing high-quality photos well on a computer screen requires, first, a high-quality display, and second, careful calibration of your display (usually with the help of a calibrating device). For much more info, go here, and/or here.

You should also be aware that, just as a photo printed with a matte finish doesn't look like a photo with a glossy finish, it's even more true that a photo viewed on a computer screen—even a very high-quality screen that is well calibrated—will never look the same as it does in a well-made print.

Note that prints can display a number of problems, too, especially problems with color. High-quality professional print labs offer color correction as part of the normal service when they make prints. Your local drugstore probably does not. If a print comes back from the drugstore and Aunt Lucy's face is green, well, it's possible she wasn't feeling well that day, or perhaps the white balance setting in the camera was wrong and she looks green on your computer screen, too; but if neither of those is the case, then the fault probably lies with your printing service.

A professionally made, high-quality, color corrected print almost always provides the best viewing experience of a good photo. After that, it's possible that the next best option is to view a high-res version of the photo on a high-quality, properly calibrated computer display. A bad print (say, made at your drugstore) may be marginally better than viewing the photo on a badly calibrated computer display, although it's easier to say what's best than to say what's worst.

Tip: What to wear for an informal portrait

2011-01-21T07:29:00.000-06:00

I photograph a lot of different types of portraits, and what you should wear for yours to a large degree depends on what kind of portrait it is. Obviously, if it's a bridal portrait whose purpose is to show off your gorgeous wedding gown, you will wear your wedding gown—and you will probably want to visit the hair dresser in the morning before our shoot. Graduates usually (although not always) will wear their gowns and First Communicants will wear their white dresses (girls) or suits (boys). If it's a portrait of you for work or at work, then wear what you wear to work—whether it's a suit, or a uniform, or blue jeans and your welding mask.

The following tips are mainly for folks who are having a more informal portrait done, such as an engagement portrait or a family portrait.

Be comfortable

We photographers often start by telling clients to wear something they are comfortable in, both physically comfortable (i.e. don't wear pants that are too tight) and personally, mentally comfortable (i.e. if you haven't worn a suit since your grandfather died five years ago, don't wear a suit for your portrait). Wear something that is you, but do be aware that the camera can be unforgiving and while casual is okay, careless probably is not . "Dressy casual" sums it up nicely most of the time. For engagement portraits, consider wearing what you might wear on a casual date. We live in a very casual age, and blue jeans, khakis or chinos are fine. Wear comfortable shoes. Women, be aware that I may or may not get your feet into personal portraits, and for engagement portraits, we may walk around a bit. If you plan to wear heels, be sure to bring some flats to walk in as well.

Avoid flashy clothes, patterns, and very strong primary colors

This is standard advice you'll find everywhere. Avoid wearing clothing—shirts, hats, sweaters, pants—that draws attention to itself and distracts from your face. Stripes (like rugby jerseys) and shirts with striking patterns (Hawaiian shirts) are generally no-nos. And strong colors (yellow, green and especially solid red) can also be difficult to deal with photographically, unless you know we're going to do a black and white portrait. It's an old photographer's guideline that darker or subdued colors are slimming and also easier to deal with than bright colors or whites, but don't feel bound by it. If you have a white linen dress that you love, by all means, wear it.

Cover up

Avoid "short": short sleeves, and especially short pants and short skirts. Bare skin can be distracting.

Makeup and grooming

Hair and makeup are difficult subjects. Give your hair some thought and at least bring a hair brush with you. Men, ask your women about your hair. A haircut a week before your portrait is often a good idea. As for makeup, if dramatic makeup is your style, that's fine with me. But I suggest to most women that they try to tone down their makeup for their portrait. Less is more. Don't worry terribly about tiny blemishes: I can remove them after the shoot. (You may want to apply a little makeup over a blemish simply so you feel more comfortable and less self-conscious during the shoot.)

Groups: Dress alike, but not too alike

Couples posing for an engagement portrait and families posing together should make an effort to dress so that everybody harmonizes with everybody else—but I generally don't suggest wearing a uniform. If the woman is going to wear a nice dress, the man clean up, too. But this is a difficult issue and hardly a rule. If you have identical twins, for example, and want to dress them identically, that's perfectly fine.

There are no rules

In spite of the very traditional tips above, I want you to know that I know that there are really no hard and fast rules. If the woman feels comfortable in a sleek DKNY number with gorgeous pumps and loop earrings, and the man feels comfortable in jeans, tee shirt and tennis shoes, that's cool with me. These days, heaven knows, anything goes. However, it would be a good idea for the man to bring a blazer and perhaps a pair of leather shoes in a paper bag, just in case.

Choices are good

Final note: It's good to have choices. If you dress in layers, we can easily take something off if it looks better. So men, bring a blazer, just in case we want it. If you would really like to have choices, bring a change of clothing.

And remember to bring your sense of humor and have a good time!

*

By the way: the tips above are pretty standard. You will find more advice of the same type by searching on the Web for "what to wear for a portrait" or "how to dress for an engagement portrait".

Imagination trumps everything

2011-01-19T17:28:00.000-06:00

I went out on a little photo-reconnaissance lately in near East Dallas and my daughter Catherine came along with me. I had the Sony A580; she, the Panasonic Lumix LX3. I've long wanted to stop and take a photo of a beautiful, whimsical sculpture right near the edge of downtown (near Woodall Rogers and Swiss) and so we stopped and took some shots. I was doing my little technical thing, thinking about the ways that the afternoon sun was hitting the metal sculpture and how to handle specular reflections, thinking about how to minimize distracting backgrounds, and so on. After a few exploratory shots, I got this:

I'm not unhappy with it. Actually I rather like it.

But i like my daughter's photo even better.

As I write this late at night, Catherine has not seen her photos yet. She went to bed a while ago and I just finished processing the photos from the shoot. But she told me at the time that she had tried to take a photo that made it look as if the statue was striding across downtown. She succeeded. And it's a nice photo. I simply looked at the statue until I saw an angle that caught my eye. Catherine on the other hand imagined the photo she wanted, and then took it. Imagination trumps everything.

Old house

2011-01-19T16:18:00.000-06:00

Old house

Originally uploaded by William Porter

Perfection is unattainable but we strive for it anyway. I actually took my time and tried hard to center this photo dead on. And I failed. You might not notice it if you just glance at the photo and move on, which is what most people do. But if you look, you'll see that there is slightly more space between the column and the front door on the left side of the door than on the right; and slightly more space between the inner column and the window on the right than on the left. Blast.

Perspectival distortion (in this case, the keystone effect) was corrected in Lightroom 3. DxO Optics Pro is even better than Lightroom for this kind of thing but I was able to do well enough in Lightroom. The correction didn't introduce those slight variances that I talked about above. Those were simply a mistake at the moment of capture.

I really wanted to stand about six feet closer, but that would have put me into the middle of traffic.

Vindication: Desktop vs Laptop

2011-01-05T05:57:00.000-06:00

For several years (roughly 2007-2009 and into 2010), I used an excellent Dell laptop (Latitude D820) as my primary computer for editing photos. It had a high-res (1600x1050), non-glossy screen, and I kept the screen calibrated. Sometimes I'd attach a second monitor, but often I would not. As I have several other computers, I generally tested color and detail by viewing on other computers, and then (the acid test) by printing. It worked okay, but I knew that it had many limitations. And so I resolved that, when it was time to replace the laptop, I was going to a desktop machine.

The time came in the late summer when my laptop started showing its age. I very nearly purchased a desktop running Windows 7 and I'm sure that would have been fine. But because I write regularly for Macworld, it made more sense for me to buy a new computer running the Mac OS. So I bought an iMac. I've been happy with my purchase, and I'm even happier with it now that I also have an iPad.

Today I ran across an article by guest-blogger Ctein over at The Online Photographer that lays out precisely the thought process that I myself went through and comes to precisely the same conclusion. I didn't need any reassurance but it's nice to have anyway.

Three Masters from the '30s: You missed it

2011-01-02T14:00:00.000-06:00

We made it to Fort Worth's marvelous Amon Carter Museum just in time. Today was the last day of the American Moderns exhibit, featuring photos from the 1930s by three masters: Berenice Abbott, Margaret Bourke-White and Walker Evans. My wife and daughter came, too, and we all enjoyed the exhibit very much.

Of the three I knew Evans the best already, having some books about him and also having read Now Let Us Praise Famous Men, his great collaborative project with writer James Agee. There's something a bit, I dunno, hard about Evans that accounts for my never quite feeling as comfortable with him as I do with Kertesz or Cartier-Bresson. Still he was a very great photographer and it was a major treat to see real, full-size prints of his photos rather than reproductions in a book.

I have never made an effort to acquire a general acquaintance with either Abbott or Bourke-White. I knew Abbott more through her important work on Eugene Atget; I have her book on Atget. I was pleased to see so many famous photos in the exhibit by the two women, like this photo of the Flatiron Building in New York by Abbott (1938):

If you live anywhere near north Texas and love photography, you should be familiar with the Amon Carter Museum. They have had one great exhibit of photographers after another recently, including the mind-bending exhibit of Curtis's photos of American Indians last year. The museum is free, as in completely free. They gave my wife and daughter iPods containing exhibit notes. For free.