Category: Tools (Page 1 of 2)

Looks like integration is here with this blog.  I have officially switched over to the Facebook commenting engine for this blog.  I had recently adopted a captcha system that was much more difficult to crack than previous systems, but cracked now it is.  I have been receiving an increasing number of emails per day trying to get spam posts through to the blog.  Frankly, it’s becoming a hassle to have to wade through these spams every day.  I hope you all understand that this is actually a good thing as it could drive discussions on the topics I discuss in my blogs.  I know a good number of my readers find out about new entries through their own Facebook feeds, and using this system to comment will cut down on the hassle caused by posting a comment.  Really, it’s a win for everyone.  I appreciate your patience and I hope to hear from you all soon.

Hopefully it’s blue skies for this blog

PS –  If you don’t want your comments to show up on Facebook, remember to uncheck the “Post to Facebook” box below the comment box.

So as you may or may not have noticed, the site here has been evolving a little bit. If you visited the main page recently, you would have seen the category block at the bottom of the page. At the end of each post now are social network sharing icons so you can spread the word about my (lack of) wisdom when it comes to art. I’m also proud to say that some galleries are beginning to migrate here to this site. I’ve wanted to have a unified stop for my blog and my photos and I finally had the time to sit down and figure out how it works. The menu at the top has links to 3 galleries thus far – Labels, Semiotics, and Sports. Those pages will evolve over time as I add new content and I insert artist statements into those pages that need it. Enjoy the new developments, please leave feedback and share, and most of all, thank you for reading!

But for some reason I am not.  I have a busy day ahead tomorrow as I begin to build the next project for my Color Theory course.  I’ll have more details on that one later.  For now, however, let’s stick with the photography.

In my Primitive Photography course we have done 1 project so far and that was on photograms.  Basically, a photogram is a photograph where, instead of a camera being used to capture an image, an object (or objects) is placed between the light and the photographic paper.  The paper is exposed and processed with the resilt being an image (usually a silhouette of the object) on the paper.  In short, as long as a camera was not used to create the photograph, then it can be called a photogram.  My classmates came up with some really nice photograms, which put mine to shame.  I will post them as soon as I get them back to my house for scanning.

We have moved on to a project on pinhole photography.  We were given the task of constructing a pinhole camera and testing the exposure time.  I know that part of this doesn’t sound too primitive, but pinhole photography was an extension of the camera obsure, which was widely used in medieval and Rennaissance Europe as a source of entertainment and sketching.  As I already have a pinhole optic for my Lensbaby (and the instructorsaid I could use it), I spent the day prior to class shooting up a roll of film with both the pinhole and f/19 zone plate.  I spent a good amount of time trying to fill 31 frames with photos, but in the end I think I got some good ones.  The following 2 photos are my favorites from the pinhole and zone plate categories.

Click to Embiggen

This is an example of a pinhole photograph.  One of the first things one can notice about these is the (relative) sharpness is even throughout the depth of the scene.  The straws were right up against the camera, which was in the rear half of a very large classroom.  The uniform sharpness is due to the fact that the aperture for this pinhole is f/177, which pretty much eliminates depth-of-field considerations.   Of course, with such a narrow opening, the exposure times will be long, and in this case I believe it was about 4 seconds.  I really need to remember to write these things down sometimes.

Click to Embiggen

A zone plate is basically a hole containing a set of radially symmetric rings that alternate between opaque and transparent.  These rings then cause the light to diffract (scatter), rather than refract (bend) such as is done with a lens.  The zones can be spaced as to cause the diffracted light to interfere with the focus, which in photography is often the desired application of zone plate optics.  Above is an example of a photograph taken with the zone plate optic for my Lensbaby.  While there is some detail, the focus is very blurry, especially around the edges of the elements in the photograph.  Most of the lack of detail is due to the scene being backlit, but here is was necessary to highlight the fountains.  The zone plate itself is f/19, which is a much bigger hole than the pinhole.  The exposure time on this particular photo was 1/45 of a second.

Of course, long exposures do have their issues.  In digital photography we all know that noise can build up to unacceptable levels during the course of a long exposure.  Film photography has its own issue known as reciprocity failure.  Basically, in black and white film the silver salts start to lose responsiveness during long exposures with low intensity light.  In color film the different colored layers will start to unevenly absorb the light coming in, resulting in low density negatives. One basically ends up with a very thin negative that may or may not have a latent image inside.  The image below is one example of reciprocity failure:

Click to Embiggen

Notice the very deep shadows, even after digital processing of the image in order to bring forth some whites in an attempt to salvage it.  In the initial scan the image was blue, so I left that color in place in order to highlight the issue.  On this particular roll I had 2 reciprocity failures, which is 2 more than I can ever remember having before.  This is obviously going to be an issue with a lot of students on this project, so we will see where this goes.

As for me, I’m starting to learn a little more about film.  I have to do a little more research because I would like to build a “button cam” before Tuesday, but we will see how time permits.  As for you all, I bid you goodnight.

It is officially 19 August 2011.  Tomorrow night I will be heading to the Texans preseason game where we will be hosting the New Orleans Saints and on 23 August I take the first academic steps my journey toward qualifying to enter the Photography/Digital Media program at the University of Houston.  I still haven’t figured out how I’m paying for this education, but I have a feeling it will work out without too much issue.  I’m taking a total of 12 hours this semester (6 at Lonestar College and 6 at UH).  The interesting part about the UH courses is that they both have 6 contact hours each week, which eats up a significant amount of time.  This could get interesting…

I was reading an editorial in Photo Techniques magazine about the Zone System developed in part by Ansel Adams.  It was an interesting editorial on the applicability of the Zone System in modern photography.  I must admit ignorance of the Zone System as I never really bothered to look into it, which I soon hope to change.  What got me thinking, however, was what the author said about Adams’s use of the Zone System.  In the 5 years that the author worked with Adams in the darkroom, he never once saw the legendary photographer make a straight print from the negative.  Adams was known to use dodging and burning to a large extent on a lot of photographs to get the finished photo that he wanted.  To help streamline that process, Adams developed the Zone System as it allowed him to set the exposure according to his visualization of the scene rather than a straight 18% gray metering.

I found that to be rather interesting, even in my ignorance of how the Zone System works.  I plan to look that up probably in the next day or 2 as I prepare for this weekend’s shooting journey.  I would purchase a book on the subject, but tuition and textbooks eat a large percentage of available cash at any given time.

Admittedly I can be a little on the lazy side when it comes to post-processing.  If an image needs extensive “tweaking” in order to be a fully realized photograph, then I really don’t want to mess with it, even if it’s an artistically nice photo.  I’m working on overcoming that self-limitation, albeit very slowly.  Tonight I got an extra burst of energy after I read that article.  I took an image that was artistically nice and would fit well in my “Marduk” series of photos.  I decided to channel my inner Ansel Adams (minus the Zone System knowledge) and see if I could tweak the image into a fully realized photograph.  I fired up Adobe Lightroom 3 and went to work.

Here is the original of the photo in question (click to embiggen):

As you can see, the exposure on this did not come out like I would have liked (a perfect candidate for Zone System, perhaps?).   I took this photo using center-weighted average metering.  This metering mode meters the light from center portion of the viewfinder and begins to feather outward, taking into account the edges but placing less weight on those readings the further it gets from the center.  The result is that the reading is based more on the light that is in the center, which in this case was the high cloud just to the right of the low cumulus cloud.  The explains why the cumulus cloud top is close to being blown out in some areas.  The high contrast of the scene also left the ground rather dark.  I liked the composition, but initially gave up on it because it was going to require some major tweaking in order to produce a nice photograph.

My first impulse was to correct the white balance.  I pretty much always stick with the “Daylight” setting on my camera.  The reason for this is that experience has shown me that using the Auto setting on white balance almost always yields incorrect results.  Correcting the incorrect values on Auto white balance shots has proven to be more difficult.  I have found that if I use a straight setting that even if the white balance is not correct, correction in post processing is much easier and yields more acceptable results.  Also, having correct white balance helps with the tonality when the image is converted to black and white, which was the next step I took.

The ground, of course, was too dark.  To fix that I used the graduated filter tool to fix the exposure of the ground.  I made the ground lighter and tweaked the contrast a little bit.  This helped to achieve a balance between ground and sky in terms of exposure, but I wasn’t quite done there.  The sky was rather light, and I needed to set the mood (after all, the Sumerian god of thunder deserves something serious!) so I turned down the blue filter, which made the sky nice and dark.  Up to this point these things I did can also be done via traditional means with the use of filters and dodging and burning.

Where I had to go digital was with the clouds in the sky.  The light meter takes things down to 18% gray.  If you meter off a pure white element, the meter takes that into account and reduces the light given off to match 18% gray.  It then figures out the exposure necessary to achieve 18% gray.  So, anything darker in the actual scene is going to be much darker in capture by the camera.  It’s that simple.  The clouds in the center were not 18% gray…  they were just a few shades darker than white.  I had to use the tone curve in order to brighten these clouds.   I pumped up the highlight slider, which lightens the highlights throughout the whole photograph.  This caused the top of the cumulus cloud to become blown out.  Since I knew the highlights in that region weren’t blown out, they could be saved my other means.

After fixing the high clouds, I went in to burn down the highlights in the cumulus cloud so we could see the detail of its fluffy little rolls.  This parallels exactly with dodging and burning in the darkroom, although I have better control in Lightroom than even in Photoshop over this process.  This was probably the longest part of the whole process…  getting the burn to just the right level and trying to stay inside the lines (flashes of being scolded for not doing it in kindergarten suddenly fill my brain) with the brush weren’t easy.

I went digital again with the final tweaks.  The sun on the grass gave it a tonal range that was quite close to the clouds in the sky, but there were some shadows in there.  I needed to tweak the color levels to get the tonal range on the ground just right.  The very last thing I did was crop the image a little to bring a little more balance to the composition.  All told, I spent about an hour on this particular image and I achieved full dynamic range.

The result is “Marduk’s Garrison” (click to embiggen):

What can I say?  The digital toolbox is awesome!

I know why I had the camera set on center-weighted average metering – I took something earlier that was a low contrast scene and in those center-weighted often gives a better reading than the multi-point metering in those situations.  I just forgot to put it back to multi-point metering.  I’m wondering, though, if a knowledge of the zone system would have helped me perhaps get the image closer to what I saw when I made the capture.  At any rate, I’m looking forward to experimenting.

Well, everyone, it is time for me to get some sleep.  You all have a wonderful weekend and GO TEXANS!

On 21 April I picked up the pinhole optic for my Lensbaby Composer.  Unfortunately, 21 April was also the middle of the end-of-semester crunch, which hasn’t left me much time to play with my new toy.  I’m happy to report at this point I have 1 more project component left for my Art History class (which will be done later today) and only 1 more exam left this semester.  Today I was going to do some serious playing with it, but got caught up in work-related duties, but I’m happy to report that I did take a few photos of the same subject while experimenting with different exposures and tilts of the optic.  Here is what I think was the best photo:

Click to Embiggen

Since the pinhole itself is literally a hole, I quickly realized that tilting the Lensbaby wasn’t really going to give me a “sweet spot.” Turning the focusing ring gave me a little bit of zoom, but no change in focus because there is no glass.  Given that the sheer curtains diffuse the light, the softening effects from the optic were seemingly intensified, for an overall softness that, to me at least, reminds me of the morning mind fog after you have opened your eyes fully from a sound sleep.  Please don’t mind the 2 spots on the photo – it looks like I may have a little dust on the sensor.   It has been a while since I’ve cleaned it.

I’m thinking I’m going to have a lot of fun with this optic if I can get an opportunity to play with it some more.  New toys can be so much fun!

Red is just one of those wavelengths that frustrates the hell out of me sometimes.  When I was shooting a lot of concerts I would have problems with blown highlights because heavy metal performers love red lights.  There was a really good photo I got of Erik Rutan from the death metal band Hate Eternal that eventually ended up as a black and white photo because I could not get the red light on his skin properly adjusted.  The problem, however,  isn’t just limited to the digital image on the screen, it also manifests when I’m trying to print certain red wavelengths on my Epson 2880.  When I shot the April 2008 performance of Mushroomhead in Houston, I got a really good photo of one the vocalists (click here to see the photo).  I was ready to use it as an image for a class project.  Unfortunately, it cost me a lot of money in terms of paper, ink, and time only to realize that I could not get the red to print digitally without the blown highlights.  I ended up getting it printed through a third part using the digital chromogenic process (digitally exposing an image on color photographic paper then developing the paper as you would normally) – the professor had given his blessing on using that method when he assigned the project.  The photographic paper properly rendered the colors and I was able to use the image.

Fast foward to 2011 – I haven’t thought about it much since then as I haven’t had any photos to be printed that were flooded with red light.  Yesterday I took some photos of a monolithic scultpure for someone.  As part of the composition we placed a red orchid-type flower next to the piece and while the owner was cleaning off another plant I took some artsy type shots of the flower and scultpure.  Here is the photo that I ended up with:

Click to Embiggen

As part of post processing I increased the luminosity of the red in the flowers in order to really get a good contrast against the white marble of the sculpture.  I was pretty proud of the digital result and decided that this particular photo needed to end up in my print collection (also for sale if anyone is interested).  So I fired up Photoshop, made the adjustments to Brightness (my printer tends to print a little darker than it appears on screen) and went to the print dialog.  Unfortunately, a large area of reds in the flower were out of gamut for the printer and paper profiles.  “Dammit!” I thought, “Not this again!” I printed a low quality test and the reds were blown out, as in the subtle tonal changes were gone.

So, I consulted Photoshop help and figured out how to view gamut warnings in real time when working with the images.  As an added bonus it could reproduce the gamuts of the various paper ICC profiles I have installed.  Since I primarily use luster paper (it’s a nice middle ground between glossy, which I don’t like, and matte, which often looks washed out) I was able to get a good idea of its limitations.  I attempted to replace the colors.  While I was able to save the subtle tonal changes, the resulting colors were not really true to what I wanted:

Click to Embiggen

As you can see, the reds are now a pinkish color.  It doesn’t look bad, but it’s not the true color of the flower.  For this particular photo I wanted to stay as true to the actual colors as possible.  What to do?  What to do?

I looked at the other paper types I have and tried those profiles.  I found that with the matte finish papers I have (Velvet and Somerset) I got more of the colors in gamut, but still had a large area outside the gamut.   Then I realized that last week a couple of sheets of Ilford Galerie Smooth Pearl inkjet paper came into my possession.  I installed that profile and viewed the gamut warning.  I was amazed to find that this paper had a larger gamut than the Legion papers that I had been using.  There was still an area of reds that were out of gamut, but the area was much smaller than before.  I opened the color replacement dialog and then found the in-gamut replacement color very closely matched my original processing:

Click to Embiggen

I lost a little bit of the tonal changes, but in the final print the changes were still extremely subtle.  I score this as a win.  The print itself turned out great, although it is a little more glossy than I normally use, I can see this paper finding its way into my printer when the need arises.

What did I learn from this?  There are A LOT of different papers out there (which I already knew) but the differences in color gamut between the brands seems to be more than I initially thought.  Unfortunately, the quality papers are not cheap – my Legion MOAB Lasal Luster (11 x 17) costs US$70 for 50 sheets and that’s in the mid-range price for that size paper.  There is also the issue of ink costs (US$15 per cartridge for the Epson R2880 – these don’t hold much ink at all), time, and waste.  Clearly, experimentation is going to cost a lot of money and that’s something I will only be able to do over a long time.  If I could afford a digital chromogenic setup then I would be all set, but that’s quite the capital investment there.  The upside of this is I gained a bit of understanding of the printing process, a bit more understanding of color, and learned a few more tricks in Photoshop.  I also found that printmaking is not something simple…  there is a lot more to learn about this.  What am I getting myself into?

Well, that’s all for now.  I hope everyone is having a good Easter and I will see you all again soon.

Other than the drone of existence and working the past few days, I’ve pretty much kept my mind a blank slate.  I’ve pretty much been taking everything in, processing it superficially, and then moving on with the next course.  Today I decided to snap out of that rut and start thinking again.  Let’s see how this goes.

My next project is due at the end of the month.  That was part of the reason I shut my mind off…  I was hoping I could come up with something for it after re-engaging my mind.  So far there’s been no luck.  Just to let you know, the project is to be a juxtaposition of photographs (one of the things that Photoshop was built to do).  I did have one idea, but quickly dismissed it as it didn’t fulfill the requirements.  Oh well, work will continue.

Speaking of Photoshop, I did find out that Adobe makes a version of Photoshop Express for the iPhone/iPad.  I downloaded it and tried it out on my iPhone.  Although the editing options are rather limited (this is a phone camera we’re talking about here), it did produce some nice results.  This little program will be great for those photos that were compositionally good, but got caught up in the limitations of a phone camera sensor’s capabilities.  Besides, who says you can’t take great photos with a phone?

The first picture of Ozzy is the one taken straight from my phone.  I used the HDR function on my phone to take the picture (which actually takes 2 pictures and reprocesses it to get the tones correct) as the flash just didn’t look very good.  It’s not a bad shot, but it is a little underexposed and the colors are a little washed out.  The second picture was processed using Adobe Photoshop Express.  I increased the exposure value first.  This did introduce a little noise into the photo (which canbe seen in the highlight areas) but I can live with that.  I then turned up  the saturation as messing with the exposure tends to wash out colors in the process.  This actually helped the overall color balance of the photo, since it was taken in a room with yellow incandescent bulbs.  I realize the brick is now a little washed out, but the main point of focus – my beagle resting on my leg – is now looking better.  I suppose the software could do with a white balance feature, but this is a phone app, after all.

This set of photos was taken later in the day.  I was really struck by the harsh coldness of this room, which is surprising given the color of the floor.  The building’s designer seemed to go to great lengths to emphasize form over function, but instead got the reverse.  I used the app to straighten the photo (I made the floor line parallel with the top edge) and then turned up the saturation to bring out the color swirls in the tile.  The result, of course, now closely resembles something you would see in a Saw sequel, which is the impression I got when I first entered the room but was not able to fully capture with the camera.

Overall this is a nifty little app to have on your phone (or iPad 2 if you were lucky enough to get one already).  I am still playing with it a little, but you can convert to black and white, add different color tones, and add a limited selection of effects.  I don’t know if there’s an Android version (my Nook doesn’t support 3rd party apps at this point) but I’m quite sure one exists.

WIth that, I must continue my journey toward finding a genesis for my next project.  Have a good night, everyone!

I can’t sleep anyway so I worked on the project some more.  I found there were issues with the black and white version of the photo I was using.  The issues came from adjustments I had made to the color filters in the black and white.  The reason I made the adjustments was to lighten some of the darker tones in the photo.  Well, this led to a few problems with skin tone (especially when both coaches and Tarvaris Jackson and Joe Webb looked like they had nasty skin rashes).  I went back in, removed the adjustments to the tones, and found that the darker tones actually help the picture.  Well, without further ado, here it is:

Click to enlarge

I’ve always referred to the Vikings former Head Coach as Papa Smurf (every time I saw him his beard reminded me of Papa Smurf), so I decided to turn the coaches and players into Smurfs (albeit very large and very human looking Smurfs).  I went with the garish colors on the clothing because these are colors one normally does not associate with the NFL.  I did have the field painted purple, but there were some mistakes I made in the coloring process that show up when the layer is visible.  Unfortunately I’m going to have to start that part all over again, but that should be no bother.

At this point I would estimate I’m about 3/4 of the way done in the coloring aspect.  Then I’ll do the touchups on the bleed areas and some outlines to give it maybe a comic book feel (perhaps “The Smurfs Play in the Superbowl”).

For those geeky/nerdy types – the original TIFF file I started with came in at 79MB (the picture was taken with an 18 megapixel DSLR camera).  Now, with the layers added, the PSD file comes in at 349MB.  The size of the JPG alone is 6MB.

Well, that’s it for now.  I need to try to get some sleep.  Goodnight, everyone.

The Silvershotz annual ‘Folios’ issue just recently hit the newsstands.  Aside from being one of my favorite magazines to look at the world of art photography, the ‘Folios’ issue is one I look forward to each year as it contains work by emerging artists and those who are not strictly photographers but have an artistic talent for photography.  The 2009 issue contained a lot of great work, some of which really inspired me.  The 2010 issue seems a little disappointing by comparison.  More than a few of the pictures I see in this year’s issue seem to have a snapshot feel and some are so out there that I’m left wondering if the quality of submissions this year was just at a low.  That’s not to say that the whole issue is bad because there is some excellent work to be found in the pages (some of which I may discuss soon).  Perhaps I’m becoming more discriminating?  That’s a matter of internal debate at this point.

Since we’re on the subject, there exist a few photography magazines which I read on a regular basis.  I read Silvershotz, Photographic Technique, Color, and another I can’t quite recall (it’s a technique-oriented magazine).   Silvershotz and Color focus on art photography (although Silvershotz does include some informational articles and sometimes a product review).  Photographic Technique focuses on some of intermediate and advanced techniques used to process photographs, both digitally and in the darkroom.  It also includes a product review, which is focused the processing side of photography.  The last magazine is strictly about shooting technique, and it has given me more than a few pointers on what to look for when setting up my shots.  Most other popular photography magazines seem to deal more with gear, which is not where I believe one focus their energy when engaged in photography.  And seriously, do we really need to read articles about the latest bags from Lowepro or the new CF cards from Sandisk?  Every once in a while they will mix a camera review in there as well.  That’s not to say those magazines don’t have their place – if I’m looking to add a new piece of gear, I will sometimes consult one to get their thoughts, but that’s about it.

Thankfully most of my discussions with other photographers about gear have mostly been based in the need for input, feedback, or information.  I have had a couple of gear discussions in the past where the other photographer has bragged about all the higher-end stuff he or she uses (as they looked with disdain upon my little entry-level DSLR).  Those discussions tend to grate on my nerves and, if I can’t steer the discussion to something more substantive, leave me looking for the nearest exit.

On the gear front, I did pick up my backdrop rack the other day.  I’m pretty excited about it.  While I meander my way through a small health issue and a pending dental procedure, I can try to do some larger scale still life shots in my living room.  I do have a small “Studio in a Box” contraption that I got on the cheap (I used it to to take the photos of my cameras for my final project) but its small dimensions don’t make for much flexibility in object selection.  I could barely get my Pentax 645 in the frame without showing the sides of the lightbox.

Now you have the meandering thoughts swirling in my head for today.  I must take my leave as in about 8 hours I need to cancel an appointment in order to find a more cost-effective way to get something done I need done.  So, to all of you, my faithful and not-so-faithful readers, I bid you goodnight.