Category: Digital

Velvia @ ISO 1600

Posted by Chris Klug – September 3, 2010

So the last two days I’ve been at Photoshop World in Vegas. A number of the classes have been wonderful, but none more so than Jay Maisel’s class this afternoon. Jay was, as you might expect, a bit of a rebel, in that he didn’t discuss process or software but just images. He showed a portfolio of images he’s shot over the last six months, images he says have never been seen by anyone before today. To say they were inspirational would be an understatement. In the portfolio of work he displayed he clearly demonstrated his early training as a painter studying at Yale under Josef Albers (if you don’t know who he is, look here). Over the two hours of the class, Jay paraded image after image, much akin to someone showing off their vacation pics (“the first hour is the same shit I showed in March; the second hour is new shit”). But these images were clearly art, not just snapshots. The composition, the color, the choice of image, all were wonderful. There were images captured in Paris and Rome and, of course, New York. Images of his daughter and of a project he’s putting together related to 9/11.

He would pepper the slide show with quips like ‘you gotta get out and off your ass’ and ‘always take the damn camera with you’ and ‘to hell with everything else but the gesture; if you can capture the gesture it doesn’t matter if the frame is technically imperfect.’

Then, at the very end, he took a couple questions. One of the questions had to do with his brand (‘Nikon, of course, Canon is junk’) and his walk-around lens (“70-300; with high ISO I can use slower lenses on the street and still get high enough shutter speeds.”) Then he talked a little about his workflow. That’s where the quote emerged that inspired the title of this post. He said that he always shoots in ‘Vivid’ mode and sets his sharpness to ‘Extreme.’ I realized what that implied, that he doesn’t shoot RAW! (This at a conference where at least two of the instructors I heard have stated that if you don’t shoot in RAW you’re a fool!) “Anyone who doesn’t set their sharpeness to extreme is wasting their time,” he continued. I then realized that all of the images he’d showed looked full-frame, that he might not crop.

Someone jumped up at that point: “Don’t you shoot RAW?’ they asked. “Well, yeah, I shoot RAW+JPEG but, honestly, I never look at the RAW file.” And then: “NONE OF THE IMAGES YOU’VE SEEN TODAY WENT THROUGH PHOTOSHOP” (upper case letters mine). “I don’t edit images in Photoshop, really.”

So, essentially, what Maisel is doing is shooting an old-school film-like digital-Velvia equivalent workflow (setting at “Vivid” color) at high ISO (800 or 1600). And that’s exactly what the 300+ images he showed today looked like: Vividly-colored street photography with many compressed-perspective telephoto images which isolated their subjects in dim or fading light. He’s still using a ‘light table and slide film’ aesthetic; if the image works out of the camera, it’s a keeper; otherwise, it’s “junk.”

I’m still kinda stunned at his process.

#300: Prints & Printing

Posted by Chris Klug – August 23, 2010

Canon 5D Processed in Nik Silver Efex

“If you want to be a better photographer, then you must become a better printer.” — Vincent Versace

I mentioned late the week of August 13th that I had ordered proof prints from Aspen Creek to begin the process of realizing one of my goals for the year, to begin seriously printing my images. Over the past year-and-a-half I have succeeded in getting out of my own way in terms of publishing my images to the web, mainly through this blog. This is my 300th post, a number I never thought I’d reach, so I think I can celebrate that a little bit. Yea!

As part of that celebration, I wanted to create an entry with some deep thought behind it, and I considered meshing my desire to generate and mount and display some prints with the opportunity to share some thoughts about that process, not just as it relates to me personally, but the concept of ‘hard copies’ of our images. So, that led me to really thinking about the creation of prints, the act of making an image ‘real.’ And the week began, and lo and behold the 2000-pound gorilla in the photo blog world, The Online Photographer, begins a two-part essay written by Peter Turnley, no less, about printing traditional silver gelatin black and white prints and stories about a particular well-known master of that craft. You should all go and read those articles.

That two-part essay, along with Mr. Johnson’s follow-up, kind of eclipsed any efforts I might make to editorialize on the process of creating prints (artifacts) of the photographic process. In that way, my timing vis-a-vis this subject could not be worse. I pretty much have to assume that any reader of this blog already knows of The Online Photographer and has read those brilliant, wonderful, humbling articles. If you haven’t, do so mow. Articles like that made me want to get my darkroom setup pronto (which I am almost done with now).

To the Point

But, on to the print (point)! First of all, circling back, I received my prints from Aspen Creek and was appalled and depressed. Not because they didn’t do their job, on the contrary, they did a great job but rather that the creator (me) didn’t do his so much. There were so many issues with the prints, and all the issues brought with them thoughts of my days in the darkroom. I’ll list the issues in bullet form and then explain:

  • Sharpness: So, when I export images to the web, I use a Lightroom plug-in which allows me to just ‘sharpen for web content’ upon export. I don’t have to think about it much. This plug-in also has a setting for export for a print, and both settings are just general in their methodology. I experimented a bit when I exported, using Nik Sharpener Pro for one file, and when I looked at the images upon their return, I realized that I really need to understand this whole sharpening thing. I kinda got my first clue about that when I attended an online ‘webinar’ workshop with Vincent Versace where he described how you resurrect an image that is a bit soft through multiple layers of sharpening using multiple Nik tools (heh, he calls it the Lazarus Effect). This very educational session really opened my eyes to some of these issues (I remember him talking in the webinar about how, since the screen is only 72 or 90 DPI, you have to ‘over sharpen’ on the screen — “make it look a little crunchy” — so as to get the right sharpening in the print). Oy, this is a topic I know nothing about. I have never learned really anything about sharpening digital images, but it is obvious to get really great prints, you need to become an expert here. The screen as a delivery medium lets you be sloppy.
  • Focus: As I remember all too well from my darkroom days, as you enlarge an image, any defect in the focus becomes magnified. When I printed traditionally, I rarely made prints larger than 8×10. And I didn’t make 8x10s very often. I shot mainly FP4, and so to get 5×7 prints shot on FP4 to look out-of-focus in a 5×7 print, you REALLY had to screw up the focus on the day. But my proofs from Aspen were 8x10s from which I was going to choose images to print 16×20. Well, lordy, a number of those images were not going to make that cut, even though they had looked great when I exported them and showed them on the web at 92 DPI. Of course, there is an interrelationship between the Sharpness issue above and the Focus issue here, but man, I was a bit shocked. The size of images on the web makes you sloppy.
  • Color: Most of us know about color profiling your monitor and such. In fact, Aspen gives you an ICC profile for soft-proofing your color. But, of course, the feedback loop, even if you HAVE the ICC profile, is problematic, because I can use the ICC profile on my ‘profiled’ monitor, but if I am off, I won’t know until the proof comes back. In this particular area, I feel a bit at sea without using my own printer in house to close the feedback loop.
  • Crop: This, of course is a small issue compared with the others, but it is an issue nonetheless. I pre-cropped all the files and then sent them off the printer, but looking at the print in a real size at 360 ppi made me re-think the crop a bit.

Putting all of these issues together reminded me of the days when I would look at a contact sheet of images, circle a few, and then head off to the darkroom, only to emerge hours later and wonder why I would have chosen those images and how I could somehow capture the look of the small contact image when I blew it up. I was always disappointed, and this experience with Aspen made me taste that bitter pill yet again. And so thus I arrived at the tag line for this post:

Images on the Web are all Illusions, shadowy representations of the REAL image

Yes, they are. Tomorrow I’ll talk about the nature of prints and what they represent, and why I believe they are even more important as we go forward with digital photography than they ever were.

Dawn at Gehry’s Disney Hall

Posted by Chris Klug – July 29, 2010

A few days ago I had set up my tripod late in the evening and embraced the ‘one camera, one lens’ rule I was trying to live by so as to make my life easier. Concentrate on the shots, right? Not the gear, right?

So, two days later, I violate that rule by taking a film 35mm and my 5D, trying to get dawn images on both cameras. I also took a 17-40 zoom and my older 75-300 zoom. I regretted both decisions immediately. Too many choices, four combinations, complicated by one lens having a polarizer and the other not, and the film camera having Pan F (ISO 50) loaded while the 5D’s minimum ISO is 100.

Arrgh! I need to listen to my own advice. I got some nice images, but shoulda just brought the 5D and the 75-300. Wish I had my wife’s 70-200, I must admit, although the 75-300 acquitted itself nicely.

In these situations, where I’m juggling so many location variables (light changing minute by minute, people walking by, tripod needing to be manipulated, etc.) the variety of choices on the camera itself only complicates things. It was so much easier with the Mamiya 645 because all I did was take a shadow reading, take a highlight reading, place tones, change the shutter speed, focus, stop down, flip the mirror up, expose a frame, flip the mirror down, open the aperture, move the tripod, etc. So, the only thing I let the 5D do for me was focus, and then only some of the time.

More from LA

Posted by Chris Klug – July 29, 2010

Hand-held at night

Yesterday I went back to the Hall with my Mamiya and tripod (the image above was just from a drive-by later on with the 5D). I followed my own advice this time and took one lens and one camera. I exposed a couple rolls of Pan F and took lots of notes.

This experience was much better vis-a-vis talking to people on the street than Sunday. I met a few people on the street (more than one commenting on my film camera and giving me some ‘atta boy’s” for still shooting film). The overall vibe I got from them was that they were extremely proud to live or work (or both) in the same neighborhood at this building, knew what I meant to the identity of downtown LA, and were even more proud that people such as myself would come to LA and drag my tripod onto the street and shoot away.

One gent told me about a garden around the back of the building which I intend to visit during the day today. I had missed it because I just didn’t go up a flight of stairs I had passed as I walked along the street.

One last note about SIGGRAPH. In a lecture yesterday about software models for rendering light, one gent from SONY Imageworks commented “People as me all the time where I obtained my expertise in the area of light and recording/simulating the effects of light. There’s really only one ultimate source, and I refer to it all the time: Ansel Adams’ ‘The Negative.’ If you haven’t read it, you really should, and it should be required reading.”

More later today, hopefully.

SIGGRAPH

Posted by Chris Klug – July 26, 2010

Nik Silver Efex

I’m in Los Angeles to attend SIGGRAPH. Today I sat in on two photography lectures. One was given by Nik Software, and I got to play with Viveza II, which is an astounding piece of software. It was the first time I’ve been trained on their suite of tools, here are ways to use their tools that I hadn’t considered. We spent most of the day in Viveza II and Color Efex, and never even touched Silver Efex, my favorite. Among the things I learned in that lecture was:

  • Eliminate Noise first, even before you RAW sharpen, because if you sharpen first all you are doing is sharpening the noise
  • Using their tools as extensions of Photoshop (instead of just plug-ins for Lightroom) multiplicatively increases their power, because you can then leverage the power of Photoshop Smart Objects and Brushes. That alone is a game-changer.

I also got to use the software on a Wacom 21-inch Cintique, which is a seductive piece of hardware. Unfortunately, a $3200 piece of hardware. Beautiful way to work.

Lee Peterson

Then I went to a lecture by Lee Peterson, an expert on lens design and sensor design who works as a consultant to Phase One and Hasselblad. This was an amazing lecture. Among many things, I learned.

  1. Every sensor has ‘prime’ ISOs, ISOs at which the noise is minimized. These primes are mathematically related to each other, such as 160, 320, 640, or 100, 200, 400 (etc). EVERY SENSOR IS DIFFERENT, and you need to test to find out what your sensor’s primes are. He said he had lunch today with representatives from Getty and Corbis, and they both told him that unless the images you submit to them have been captured with your sensor’s primes, they will reject the image out-of-hand. He taught us how to test, and I’ll relate that in another post.
  2. Sensors act as mirrors (while film does not). This means that light will hit the sensor and bounce back around in the lens, reducing contrast and resolution. He showed us images where this was evident. Thus, lenses needed to be re-designed to minimize this problem, which is why a modern wide-angle lens is longer than it used to be at the same f-stop. Which is why Leica builds in software adjustments for every old-design lens in its M9.
  3. If you have a DX crop camera, you should use lenses designed for that crop. Don’t swap DX and FX lenses back and forth. Your resolution will suffer.
  4. JPEGs generated in-camera have embedded in the file a line of data containing the white balance, f-stop, etc. Every camera does this. If you don’t want the data (which is a horizontal line of pixels containing no image data, by the way), shoot RAW instead.
  5. Sensors are notorious for being slightly inaccurate exposure wise (!!!). The sensor in the Nikon 300s can run as much as a stop and a third over exposed. You need to test and see where your meter/sensor is and build-in EV to compensate. Don’t assume your sensor is accurate.
  6. Sensors have color shifts, which can be identified and corrected for. Some bias towards red, some towards blue, etc.
  7. The amplifier for the sensor is in one corner of the frame. If the amplifier is running hot, the frame can ‘bloom’ in that corner. Again, he showed us examples.
  8. Every frame captured by every digital camera has noise. The question is how much.
  9. Foveon sensors were designed backwards, in that the red layer is at the rear of the sensors but older lenses were designed expecting the red layer to be at the front, so you can’t use older lenses on Foveon sensors because you’ll loose vibrancy in the reds.

Great lecture.

Can You Guess where I was today?

Posted by Chris Klug – July 25, 2010

Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles

I’ve wanted to capture this location since I first heard about it. I’m staying at a hotel for five days and I’m going to try to get as many views of this astounding structure as I can over the time.

This image was captured with my 5D and processed in Color Efex. But the majority of the work was done first by adjusting the white balance. There are many astounding things about the building as you walk around it. The surface is curved, of course, so the light plays all sorts of tricks. The image above was captured on the shade side as the sun was setting.

This processing yields a truer tone. The shade side of the building looked much like this.

My trip today was really a scouting trip. I took the 5D and a film camera, and I shot a roll of HP5 as well as a roll of Pan F. My plan is to go back at dawn at least one day, and perhaps at night another day. I have my Mamiya with me, and I’m really going to try and get some good b&w images on film. No color film this trip, all b&w.

When you have a polarizing filter on the camera, and you rotate it, the shadows and reflections run up and down the side of the building. It’s pretty astounding.

The building had many photographers around the outside. One guy had a tripod. I had heard that if you have a tripod and you’re on the property, they will ask you to move across the street. This guy . . .

Was shooting with a tripod, I saw him from across the street. I crossed to say ‘hi’ and swap stories, tips, whatever, figuring he was here for the same reasons (his camera was pointed right at the building). When I approached and said hello he just grunted, continued collapsing his tripod (he had started before I saw me) and crossed back over to the side of the street I had come from. I just was a little shocked, as most photographers I’ve met are nice and friendly people, and I wanted to know about whether he had gotten into any trouble with the tripod on the property. I guess I’ll never know.

I counted at least five Canon L 70-200 zooms on various cameras as I wandered around the building. It really would be an ideal focal length if you are on the same side of the street as the building itself. A couple other photogs (not this guy) came up and asked me if I’d gotten any decent images, we chatted about the contrast ratio of the highlight reflections, most were surprised I was shooting film as well as digital, etc.

Then I came around the side of the building and there had been a wedding inside and the bride and groom were coming out of the building and posing for some shots by their car.

I thought it was odd that they were posing with the driver of the car. Not for all the shots, but for a bunch.

Two of the 70-200 L’s are in this shot, along with some small point-and shoot.

The building is seductive to shoot as you walk around it. Every few feet the composition changes, the reflections change, and the angle of the sun changes, and so you could walk around the building all day long and never see the same light and composition twice.

I honestly don’t think I’ve seen anything quite like it. Walking around Sedona has the same effect, but here, because a different composition presents itself every few feet, it’s quite compelling. In places like Sedona, while everywhere you look beauty presents itself, the scale of the place is such that after a few moments, you sort of have to get in the car and move on. Not here.

Compositions like this and lighting conditions like this make this structure exciting and challenging all at the same time. This is the angle the gent with the tripod was shooting just before I wandered by.

Oops! Wrong Settings!

Posted by Chris Klug – July 7, 2010

Umm, one thing too many to think about

As my wife can certainly tell you, I have trouble thinking of more than one thing at a time. The image above exemplifies that problem in spades.

First of all, when I unpacked the car and walked into Muir Woods, I carried with me TWO cameras, one film (the Mamiya 645) and one digital (the 5D). My plan was to move from setup to setup, get the images on the 5D, remove it from the tripod, mount the 645, get some images, move on, rinse and repeat.

Well, almost immediately I realized that was one too many cameras to be juggling, and one too many formats to think about. When I was talking to Dave Beckerman about shooting both film and digital, he kinda laughed and mused how he wondered how I could keep both thought processes clear in my head. ‘Cause, as I mentioned in the Great Experiment, you really have to approach the two mediums with a different thought process.

When I have one camera in my hands, I don’t have too much trouble thinking ‘different,’ but switching one after the other was causing short circuits.

Then, a few setups into the walk, I realized I hadn’t even thought about shooting HDR images, which really was one of the driving forces behind me coming back to Muir. Doh!

So I packed everything up, went back to the car, put the Mamiya in the trunk, and went back in with just the 5D mounted. All the Muir images I’ve posted so far were captured after I only had one thing to worry about.

Ok, well, not just ONE thing. I had to think about how to shoot the HDR images. Which I basically screwed up some of. Here’s how.

I would get to a spot, and see something I liked. Set up the tripod and choose the f-stop to get what I wanted to get in focus. I would zoom the zoom (I’ve always used the Canon L 17-40, which has always been good enough for me). I’ve got the f-stop, I’ve got the frame. I’ve got the mirror-lock up set. I have the MF switch on, so I don’t auto-focus every shot. I’ve got ISO 100 set, so almost no noise (here’s where it begins to go wrong, btw).

I use the camera meter to set the exposure, and I have the auto-bracket to do two-stops. Ready, set, expose!

Well, um, it’s dark in those woods, and there happened to be a breeze that day. Take a look at the image above, and you can see what I wasn’t seeing on the day.

When I would chimp, I was always checking the histogram of the base exposure. BUT I WASN’T LOOKING at things like whether the freakin’ frond was fuzzy or not. My shutter speeds, when the breeze would kick up, WERE TOO SLOW. And I didn’t see it, didn’t think of it, didn’t look for it, nothin.

A half-dozen shots were ruined (like the one above) because I didn’t think to check that. Crap.

Now, the other thing I blew (but not too often) was this. When I first started to shoot HDR, I did the bracketing by hand. In the forest, that day, I just always went with two stops. Why? ‘Cause it was one less thing to think about. What resulted was that sometimes two stops off the base exposure wasn’t enough to not blow the highlights of sunlight. I KNEW to watch for this, but I didn’t always.

What I should have done was S-L-O-W   D-O-W-N and taken out my spot meter, metered the highlight, metered the darkest shadow, and done the simple math to figure out what the bracket SHOULD be, what the base exposure to get the highlight without blowing it should be, what the shutter speed should be so that the frond is always frozen, adjust the ISO to make sure that happened, etc.

Really frustrated with myself.

Fallen Log

Posted by Chris Klug – July 4, 2010

Dappled Light

Posted by Chris Klug – July 3, 2010

HDR + Nik Silver Efex

I know there is a dreamlike quality to many of these images from Muir.

Metering and Digital

Posted by Chris Klug – July 3, 2010

There’s nothing particularly remarkable about this image, but there is a little story as well as a question.

As I was walking along a path in Muir, I saw this catch the light. I had the 5D mounted on the tripod, and for some crazy reason, I didn’t just put the tripod down, undo the camera, take the image, and put the camera back on the tripod. Instead I lifted the whole shebang in my left hand, supported the camera and tripod in that hand, and used my right to focus and shoot. Now, it took me three tries to get the image for a couple reasons. First, holding the assembly in one hand didn’t really give me the steadiest way to get the picture (I’m saying I don’t know why I did it this way, remember?) So the first two attempts were out of focus. But the second thing was the exposure. There is so little actual area of the lit plant that the camera, of course, kept overexposing it. But this image is very sharp (there is a spider web in the upper area between two of the branches, and the strands of the web are tack sharp). I don’t know how I managed that, and I have this image of what I must’ve looked like lifting up the tripod, exposing the frame, lowering the tripod to chimp, etc. I get into a very weird place when I’m shooting some times.

But the second issue is this: unless you know your EVs cold, how would you ever get this exposure correct on film? The only way I got it was to shoot, chimp, look for flashing highlights, adjust, shoot, chimp, etc. But without the ability to preview, you have to just look and make an educated guess and bracket.

BTW, it’s ISO 100, 1/125th, f/4.0. It’s even more amazing to me that at 1/125th I got the sharpness I did.