Exposure

Few things can be as confusing to a new photographer as the concept of exposure. I can assure you now that I am not the exception here. Often I find that I missed a good shot because, while my meter said it was ok to go, I did not expose that part necessary to accurately capture my vision.

When the lighting is for the most part even, exposure is generally not a problem because, well, the lighting is even. However, as those who have spent a little time behind the viewfinder know, light rarely is even in any given composition. There are areas of light and dark which run a pretty wide gamut. This is where the problem usually occurs as exposure of one extreme often causes the other to suffer.

Here is a case in point. The first flag picture below was taken with a Pentax 645 with Kodak 400VC film. For this picture I placed the center of my viewfinder over blue sky (I don't remember exactly where) and snapped the picture. The result was a nice blue sky, but the flag, as you can see, was very dark.


I metered the picture and snapped it when it said ok, but I didn't think much about what it could look like until I thought more about the settings. The camera was set at f/22 with a 1/1000 shutter speed (which also happens to be the limit for this lens/body combination). When I looked at the flag again and thought about what it would look like, I correctly predicted that the flag would be dark, but to be honest I really wouldn't know for sure until the film processed. I decided to take the picture again only this time I decided to expose the flag and recompose. The result was a much more vivid flag:


The other thing you may notice about this is the sky went from a semi-bright blue to a bluish gray color. I'm no light scientist, but I would venture to say that this is because the camera let in 4 times as much light this time around (f/22 at 1/250) and the result was a slight overexposure of the sky. When I got the film back from the lab and scanned it in, I was amazed at how much difference existed between the 2 photos when just changing the exposure base.

The reason I can bring this to you now is this marks the first time I made a concerted effort to record my settings after each photo. In the past I metered, shot, and moved on to the next thing. I find in film this can be a little self-defeating as since I couldn't check on the settings at the time of the photo, I wasn't able to make any correlations on why one photo worked and another didn't work (from a technical stance... aesthetics are another matter altogether). I could check shooting digital, but even then with the sheer number of digital pictures it becomes somewhat overwhelming comparing all the settings.

When it comes to digital versus film exposure, there is a fundamental difference. My first photography professor told me that it is better to overexpose than underexpose because an overexposure contains more "information" than an underexposure. Well, I took this information to a concert with me and found that I took a lot of overexposed shots that no amount of digital manipulation could fix. What my professor left out was that overexposure is better for film photography (unless of course you have a 15-second shutter speed at 2:00 in the afternoon). I can't really blame her for that as we were supposed to be focused 100% on film photography. When it comes to film, you should generally expose for shadows where in digital you should generally expose for highlights. From what I can see, highlights can be recovered quite well in the darkroom, but DSLR camera sensors don't handle blown highlights nearly as well as a pack of Ilford paper.

So the biggest lesson here is to record, whenever possible, the settings used to take a picture. It takes a little work in between shots, but when specific settings can be tied to a specific photo it becomes very easy to see what works and what does not. This will hopefully translate into one being able to take the best picture the very first time.

As always, comments are accepted and welcome.

PS - As for the flag picture, a little light and color balancing on the 2nd shot yielded me what I think is a beautiful flag. I call it "Phoenix Rising".

New Toys

I know it's been a while since I posted here. While I have been shooting (and my flickr profile attests to this), I really haven't been challenging myself for the past few months. I spent some time in Los Angeles near the middle of July, but most of my shots were of the snapshot variety. The one time I got to try to take some really breathtaking shots of the city was ruined due to heavy smog. Oh well, better luck next time.

I did get a new toy from the UPS man today. I had been in the market for a new point-and-shoot digital as I found the limitations on my Olympus quite... well, limiting. After careful research I decided to get the Ricoh R8 digital camera. This camera got some really great reviews in terms of features and had better than average image quality. It also has one thing that most cameras do not have - a really close macro function.

In fact, this camera can macro focus with only a space of 1 cm between the lens and subject. That's some of the closest macro focusing I've seen on any camera. To compare, the macro lens for my DSLR requires 12 inches from subject to leading element. The Olympus Stylus 770SW requires 8.4 inches from subject to lens in regular macro mode and 2.8 inches from subject to lens in Super Macro mode. I'm in the process of playing with it, but I do have some pictures to share with you...


I call this one "Gozer Kitty II". There is a membrane inside the posterior wall of the retinas of many mammals, which is why you get reflections when you shine a light directly in the eyes of a cow, a raccoon, or in this case, a cat. Human retinas do not have this membrane present. The cat looked at me as the flash was going off. I normally try to use as little flash as possible, even on point-and-shoot cameras, but this time I was testing the power of the built-in flash.


This was me taking a picture of my steering wheel while waiting for a train to cross. I had to macro off at this point and was amazed at the level of detail captured so close to the steering wheel without macro. It also shows that I need get a toothbrush on the inside of my car soon.


So while I was scanning some film I picked up the camera and took a picture of my Windows workstation. The screen shots are pretty clear here, better than I expected. My Olympus seems to have problems metering the LCD screens sometimes and gives mixed results. I love how the displays seem to be floating in a sea of black.


Finally here is a macro shot. I know this isn't a super sharp focus, but I think this camera holds its own very well here. The camera was only a little over 2 cm from these CD spines and was able to get a clear picture of the labels underneath the plastic. My Olympus has what's called a Super Macro mode that lets you get really close, but it has problems figuring out the subject and so the focus is sometimes hit or miss. On other macros taken earlier with this camera, it got the correct subject about 75% of the time on the first try and was almost always corrected when recomposing the image.

All in all, I think I am going to be pleased with this camera. The image quality is great and once I learn the different features of this camera, I think this will open up some creative possibilities when I find myself without my SLR or DSLR. I know that the camera is just a tool and that it's the person looking through the viewfinder (or in this case, LCD) that makes the picture, not the camera. But let's face it, sometimes if the tools aren't there, the job doesn't get done.

Making Art

I've always been of the school of thought that art is that which we use for expression of the self. The imagination is not constrained by the rules that hamstring the sciences and one can use almost any medium imaginable to express that imagination. And that expression can be on any level from the obvious to the completely abstract. In essence, art is what we make it.

Effectively expressing one's self obviates the need to master a given medium. Da Vinci could not have painted the Mona Lisa without first knowing how to effectively combine the canvas, paint, and brush to achieve the effect he wanted. Mastering the medium is all about achieving the desired effect.

Part of art instruction, aside from learning the myriad of media available, is challenging the student to find new ways to express the self. It's one thing to simply put forth the objective, but it's a different thing entirely to put forth the self in a way that challenges the artist and stirs something in the viewer. Once the artist is able to tap the imagination in terms of expression, the sky is pretty much the limit.

Consider this picture:


This sculpture is part of the Menil Collection in Houston, TX. I set to shoot this to make it look as if the branches were springing forth from the obelisk. I thought with the contrast from the backlight I would achieve that effect. A quick glance shows that I achieved that effect in the actual object, but closer inspection shows the distinction between the branches and the broken obelisk body. I submitted the printed photo for critique.

The teacher praised me for coming close to achieving what I wanted, but then told me that aside from achieving my stated effect, I really did little more than document art produced by somebody else. I was a little deflated because I was proud of the picture, but I knew he was right in his assessment. In essence I had mastered the medium as far as what I wanted to do, but I had not challenged myself into representing the subject in a different manner.

Fast forward about 4 months and I find myself trying to find something to do with my camera. I was doing up some barbecue of the slow smoked kind and decided to take some shots in my backyard. I thought my back fence would be a good subject for expressing decay since, even though it is still standing, is nearing the end of its useful life. Here is the shot I thought best represented the decay I was seeing:


After stewing over this one (and publishing it on Primordial Light) I started to think that there was something missing. I still can't quite put my finger on it, but there is something missing. I see decay, but then what? The sunlight coming through really didn't add anything to the picture.

I had spent much of my time over the past 3 months concentrating on concert photography and had not really done anything else. I thought back to what my Photography professor had said about the obelisk picture and realized while I was creating art, I was not challenging myself or the viewer.

I decided to offer up the challenge to myself and here are the new and improved obelisk and fence photos:




The same images taken in new directions with very different results. One person I spoke with gave me 2 different reactions after looking at the photos.

Now I challenge you to let me know what you think after seeing these pictures. In the words of my buddy Mark - "Don't be afraid to comment on the photos".

Digital Toolbox

One of the amazing things about digital is the vast array of tools that are available to the photographer for processing the shot. Indeed, the amount of hardware and software packages available is astounding. You can get a Chromira processor for a price that runs well into 5 digits, a scanner dedicated to film (thus creating digital pictures from film), full featured software such as Adobe Photoshop, or even small programs like Apple iPhoto. All these things help someone take the picture from the camera and do amazing things with the picture.

Most of my photos would not be possible without the tools in my digital toolbox. All my film photographs are scanned directly from the negatives rather than prints. I use an image editor to clean the dust from the scan (sometimes dust is inevitable and DigitalICE takes too long). Then I use Aperture to correct and exposure issues, etc. with the image. Some say this is cheating, but most things that can be done in Aperture can be done in the darkroom as well. I try as much as possible to take the picture correctly the first time, but there are times when the output can be improved upon. Even the great Ansel Adams used darkroom tricks to improve his prints. I'm sure that if he had lived to see what can be done with a computer, there would be digital tools in his arsenal.

Now that I have a little more time, I am starting to explore some more the digital tools out there. I use Aperture for much of my processing work. Up until now there weren't that many plug-ins available for Aperture. Since the release of 2.0, however, the plug-ins have started to trickle in. This evening I downloaded trial versions for 2 of the plug-ins available and decided to see what I could do. Here is an image that I played with earlier:



This is the original picture exported directly from the RAW file. For those not from Texas, this is the Texas Bluebonnet, a flower native to Texas that draws out the photographers from every hiding place in the state each spring. When I took this photo, I accidentally left my camera in ISO1600, which gave me a lot of noise. Also, the colors seemed a little washed out to me. Since my focus was on the flower and not the field around it, I cropped the picture and fired up AKVIS Noise Buster and got this result:



This is now a more noise-free photo. I left the out-of-focus flower in the picture to keep the original subject from being too centered and to let the viewer know that this was taken in a field of bluebonnets and not in a garden or a flower pot. I discovered AKVIS a while ago and have used it much since it's purchase. In fact, most of my concert photos go through AKVIS. The colors were still a little washed to me, so I imported the new noise-free image to Aperture to tweak the colors and ended up with this result:



To me now the blue in the flowers really pops out against the green of the grass. The only trouble is now the flower in the background stands out a little more. I suppose I could have cropped the photo closer to the subject, but I just didn't want a totally frame-filling subject. This picture is what would eventually end up in my flickr photostream. Some people seem to like it.

So I was reading through some groups and found that there were plug-ins available for Aperture. So I went and downloaded DFT Ozone and Tiffen Dfx. DFT Ozone allows for selective color changes while Tiffen Dfx is a filter plug-in. I took this image to see what I could do with it in both the plug-ins and this is my result:



Now I have a centered portrait of a Texas Redbonnet (doesn't exist for those non-Texans out there). DFT Ozone was used to change the color of the petals while I used Tiffen Dfx to add the vignetting. The final edit was the crop in Aperture to tighten the image. There is still a trace of the other flower, which still gives the impression that the picture was taken in a field. I wish I had saved a copy of the image between plug-ins, but before that I hadn't even planned this blog entry.

I know that I'm not even scratching the surface when it comes to digital tools available. I found an Aperture plug-in earlier that will allow one to isolate the area of the image to be edited. That one will be downloaded a little later. I know that many will say that Photoshop offers some of these things as standard, but there are drawbacks to Photoshop (cost, learning curve, etc.) that drive users to seek other solutions.

As always, comments are welcome and encouraged.

The Results are in...

For those who read this (all 3 of you hehe) that may have been wondering what grade I received in my Photography II course, wonder no more... I received a B. The teacher didn't go over anything when he looked at our portfolios... he simply went through them, snapped photos of a couple of pieces, closed it up, and went on to the next person. I'm not sure what the basis was for the final grade. I know that I did miss one critique, so there may be an issue of productivity. At any rate, perhaps I'll ask him sometime down the line.

There aren't any pictures tonight. We had a get together at my house earlier today and I'm kinda tired from the cleanup. Have a good night everyone.

The Portfolio (Warning - Long Post)

This semester has been stressful to say the least. There have been a lot of demands on my time these past few months. This doesn't even count all the things going on beyond my control, such as rising prices, getting sick, and presidential elections, that affect me. In a few days it will all be over and I will be able to relax (relatively speaking) for a few months before the next semester starts.

I may take Photography II again as it will help me grow as a photographer. I know the professor will help me go in new directions. However, I won't really be learning anything new by taking the course again. I wouldn't mind taking a more advanced photography course at the University of Houston, but that costs a lot more money than the local community college. Hmmm... I'm sure there are other options.

But before I start daydreaming again, I have settled on my final portfolio. I made some changes from my last post by taking a couple of pictures out and adding in a few others. I tried to make the flow a little more logical through the pictures before taking a radical turn at the end. You can see for yourself when you view the photos. Speaking of the photos, without further adieu, here they are:

#1


#2


#3


#4


#5


#6


#7


#8


#9


#10


#11


#12


#13


#14


#15


Ok, 15 pictures are ready for the portfolio. There is no overlying theme to them, but there is definitely a flow to them. For the uninitiated, here goes:

1. Sunset at Padre Island, a suburb of Corpus Christi, TX;
2. A man walking along the seawall just off Shoreline Drive in Corpus Christi, TX;
3. Downtown Corpus Christi from the piers;
4. The courtyard at St. Mary's Catholic Church in Brenham, TX;
5. Mill Creek Church in Bellville, TX;
6. The dome at Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Galveston, TX;
7. St. Paul's Lutheran Church in Schulenburg, TX;
8. The Chapel at the Houston National Cemetery in Houston, TX;
9. The northwest corner of Downtown Houston, TX taken from the bank of Buffalo Bayou;
10. The traffic circle coming from the 1500 Louisiana building (formerly Enron II) in Downtown Houston, TX;
11. The cello player sculpture in front of the Lyric Center in Downtown Houston;
12. Waylon of the band Mushroomhead during their performance in Houston, TX on April 12, 2008;
13. Nothing of the band Mushroomhead during their performance in Houston, TX on April 12, 2008;
14. Nate Johnson of the band Since The Flood during their performance in Houston, TX on April 3, 2008;
15. Rick of the band Since The Flood during their performance in Houston, TX on April 3, 2008.

As you can see, there is a flow to the way the photographs are arranged. It took a bit of thinking to get that together. Numbers 2 and 3 were film shots taken with my Pentax 645 on Kodak Portra 160NC color film. All the rest were taken with my DSLR. All of the photos except 10, 12, and 15 are printed on archival inkjet paper using an Epson 2200 printer. Numbers 10, 12, and 15 are printed on photo paper using the chromira process.

Barring any last minute order tweaking (we are always second guessing ourselves), this is the final portfolio this semester. Let me know what you think as I need the feedback to grow.

That Time Again

We're coming up on the end of another semester. That means it's portfolio time. This time I don't need an unifying theme, but I do need 15 to 20 of my best prints. I'm going through them at this point and have decided on some to go in, but I'm going to need a few more. The cool thing is this semester we had a digital project, and I have plenty of digital photos to choose from this semester.

The cool thing is I'm seeing growth in my photography. The not so cool thing is that I'm having trouble charting my growth... i.e. I'm having trouble seeing what it is about my pictures that shows growth. Hopefully soon I can figure this out.

Here is a sampling of what I'm submitting for the final. First are the digital shots:










The first photo was printed with a chromira process. This process takes the digital image and exposes it to normal photo paper. The print is then processed normally as you would a film print. The others were printed on either Moab Somerset Enhanced Velvet paper or Moab Lasal Premium Luster paper on an Epson 2200 photo printer.

And now for the film prints:




These were both taken on Fuji 160C with a Pentax 645. I was able to complete the first print successfully in the enlarger. The second print, however, had a few dust problems when I put it through. It looked as if there was some dust in the emulsion. I'm thinking with this one I may go ahead and print it on the Epson. I have a feeling that it will really pop out if I print it on the Moab Somerset Enhanced Velvet paper, which gives the photograph the feel of a watercolor painting.

As you can see I have 7 selections so far, so I'm just under halfway there. Then I need to decide on the portfolio format, mat the prints, assemble the portfolio, drink lots of caffeine, etc. Oh yeah, I have 2 other finals I need to study for as well.

Comments are welcome and encouraged.

Frustration...

... comes from many sources. On Monday it was a perfect storm when my computer containing my income tax information developed issues, I contracted a cold, and I was still a couple of prints short for my digital project in Photography II. I filed for an extension, drank a lot of fluids, sweated A LOT, and stayed up until 2 am trying to get 4 suitable prints from my Epson Stylus 925. Don't get me wrong, the 925 is a good home printer, but not good enough for a college project.

Did I mention I missed a test for my anatomy course? Yep, I sure did. I hope the professor will cut me a break and let me make it up. My computer crash demanded my attention as I was seriously freaking out about my income taxes. There is a chance that I can pass with a 'C' while receiving a 0 (zero) on the test, but to do that I'm going to have to kill the final lab exam and the final course exam. Nothing like a little pressure...

At any rate, this isn't a touchy-feely blog about my emotions, this is about my photography, so let's get to it. It took a while to go through all the photos from Saturday. As I said, the proportion of keepers to junkers was rather low. Most of the bands used the red lights while they were on stage. This was my baptism by fire that red light is a pain in the ass to shoot. I had read about it, but this was the first time it really affected my photos. I'm not quite sure as to the physics behind it, but I do know it's not very fun.

As for more keepers, here are a couple that were taken in the challenging red light:




Both photos are of the death metal band Hate Eternal. The person in the top photo is Erik Rutan, who is a living legend within the death metal community. The bottom photo is Jade Simonetto, of whom I know very little except that he is the drummer for Hate Eternal.

Ok, now you know who they are, let's talk about the photos. Mr. Rutan had a 2 different colors shining on him through his set - red and yellow. This gave him a fiery presence on the stage, but oh boy was it a pain to shoot him through that. In most of the photos the yellow highlights were blown off the histogram and there was no way to recover them. Using Aperture I was able to recover some of the highlights here, but this was 1 of only 2 of Erik Rutan I was able to keep.

In Jade's case, this one came out exactly as seen, which was really surprising. I'm guessing it had something to do with the fact that he was bathed in red light and only red light, which didn't confuse my camera sensor. I was particularly proud of this photo since I was able to get a level of detail in the drummer than is usually possible without getting on stage.

At any rate, those were a couple of keepers from the pile of 800. Before I went to the show, I did walk around downtown Houston for a little bit and took some photos. Here is some random eye candy for you:

Downtown Houston from the west bank of Buffalo Bayou.


Cupid displaying his trophy. This is part of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Bayou Bend Collection.


A back door to an Asian food distributor in the old Warehouse District of Houston. I like this one particularly for it's composition.

As always, comments are welcome and encouraged so as to foster my growth as a photographer.


* - By the way, "The Sharp Carousel" has moved. The new blog name is "Mark Alan" and is now in the "Other Cool Blogs" section to the right. If you are not familiar with Mark, he does some very creative and very cool self-portrait work. Check him out, you won't be sorry.

Argh

Concert photography marks one of my more frustrating endeavors. Sometimes I get it right on and other times (more often) I fail miserably with some shots. I changed tactics with a show I did a couple of weeks ago and set my camera to burst mode.

Before I used to always take my shot in one-shot mode and then wait for my next opportunity. Needless to say with AI Servo mode that it was really easy to lose a shot if the lens was focused on something other than the performer such as the microphone stand or the neck of the guitar. I found in the Since The Flood show that using burst mode would yield me at least one good picture in a given series of shutter actuations since the AI servo focus is constantly adjusting.
That leads me to the frustration of last night. The show was at Warehouse Live in the old warehouse district of downtown Houston, TX. It's a nice venue and it's the first time I've had a chance to shoot there. I did get some good shots, but here my big issue was lighting. Some of my shots that would have really kicked butt were the worst in terms of lighting. I took a little over 800 pictures last night, but the proportion of good to bad was really low in relation to the Since The Flood show.

I'm still in the process of going through the images. Hopefully soon I'll have some of them up on my Flickr page. Here is an example of one where my skill with the use of existing lighting resulted in a bad picture:


This is Nothing, vocalist for the band Mushroomhead. This dead-on shot resulted in a level of noise that was completely unacceptable. The problem for me was that he posed for me to take this shot and the moment was gone as he had a show to perform. I tried to lower the noise level in AKVIS Noise Buster and got this result:


The noise level dropped significantly, but this was the best I could do with the noise and still keep the detail of the shot. The blown highlights and color aberrations also would need extensive Photoshop work to make this a serviceable photograph. Needless to say, I was a little disappointed. But the best part is I got a great shot of Nothing earlier in the evening:


At any rate, I do need to get some more of these shots processed. As always, comments are welcome and encouraged so I can grow as a photographer.

Sunshine

A couple of days after my last post we finally got some sunshine here in Southeast Texas. It was welcomed mainly because I could now start work on some good pictures. Overcast skies are good for really even lighting, but the resulting pictures can look so boring.

I also tried some new film this time as well. I have been shooting Kodak Portra 160NC and VC. The NC stands for neutral color and the VC stands for vivid color. To be honest I really can't see a different because both films seem to be a little flat and contrasty. I suppose I should expect the contrastiness due to the fact that it's ISO160. I shot 2 rolls of Fuji 160C color film (220-size) and I must say I like those a little more than I like the Kodak Portra offerings. After doing a print of one I was rather impressed. I should look into the Superia line of films.

I read about Kodak Ultracolor film, but I cannot find that in medium format anywhere, online or in a brick-and-mortar establishment. Well, I bit the bullet and ordered some 35mm rolls of Kodak Ultracolor 100 and 400. I also ordered some paper that will hopefully add some more saturation to the photos I've already taken... we'll see.

As to the offering of photos for this entry... let's examine them, shall we?




These 2 photos are among my favorites taken from the Fuji rolls. I love the composition on the upper picture (taken at Hermann Park in Houston, TX). The lower photo is just beautiful to me. In both photos (indeed on most of the roll) the colors are very vibrant, more so than on the Kodak Portra NC and VC films. The shots are a little contrasty, but to me it works in both pictures as it helps preserve the detail.


This was taken also on the Fuji film, but this one helps illustrate a little better about my last post. The whole picture seems more dynamic when sunshine is a factor. I need to learn to use it better to my advantage as I learned that sunlight can easily washout any color you come across (more examples later as I don't have access to the machine that contains them at this point).




For those who think I may have forgotten how to use my DSLR, you're mistaken. These were taken in Galveston, TX over the weekend. We have a digital project coming up in my photography class and the picture of the cathedral dome is going toward that project. The seagull was just an opportunity that presented itself on East Beach.

As always, comments are welcome and encouraged. For those of you who haven't noticed, check out "The Sharp Carousel" listed under "Other Cool Blogs." I have seen some of Mark's work both online and off. He has much creativity and skill in him.