John Flinchbaugh's Weblog

Camera Gear Acquisition Mode

john — 2008-11-10T19:47:53Z

I've fallen back into a bit of light gear-acquisition mode over the past week.

After my photo class on Tuesday, we were discussing the inverse square law of light and practical application of it, and we determined that given 2 light sources of the same power, you know that you can vary the distances to the subject by familiar distances to get a predictable difference in lighting. Specifically, place one light at 5.6 feet and the other at 8 feet, and you should have a 1-stop difference.

I obviously need a second light of the same power as my first to play this out, so I hit eBay and ordered another Sunpak 422D to match my first one. I couldn't figure out which radio triggers would be compatible with the ones I have, so I decided to just order an optical slave to trigger the new flash. I may still end up buying another set of radio triggers, because it'll be fun to be able to share when playing with friends. A second cheap light isn't so bad.

I'll need an umbrella and clamp for that new flash, so I figure maybe I'll hit B&H or another camera store when I'm in New York this weekend and pick up these things.

Then I went out to the museums this weekend, and tried to shoot available light indoors with my kit 18-55mm lens. I ended up on ISO 1600 before I knew it, so I made a lot of work for myself in post processing to clean that up. I ended up with throwing away many shots.

This got me thinking about replacing my kit lens with some f/2.8 lens in the same range, but they're incredibly expensive. I decided to throw a few bids out there to buy the 28mm f/2.8 sister to my 50mm f/1.8 lens. I love my 50mm, but it's a little close when I want to get more in frame than a head shot. I think I'll find the 28mm useful.

I guess the alternative to buying faster lenses is to work harder to light with my 2 flashes (3 counting the dumb little slave), but I don't run-and-gun too much anymore, since most my lenses are manual (requiring 2 hands), and the kids keep my hands full otherwise.

In my unsuccessful spending ventures, I was going to build a backdrop, but I did not manage to find any suitable material at the local fabric store. They didn't have anything wide enough, so I came back empty handed there.

Claire will be pleased, I'm sure, to see that I'm expanding into using my gadget bag in addition to my normal camera bag. ;)

Portrait Photography Class at HACC

john — 2008-10-28T03:05:44Z

I recently attended the Portrait Photography class at HACC Lancaster Campus taught by Darryl Nicholas. It only runs 1 night for 3.5 hours. I arrived to find a whole 2-light studio strobe setup with backdrop, etc and got pretty hopeful -- I wasn't expecting much lighting discussion. Unfortunately, I found that the lights were only there for the most basic setup discussions and otherwise for making a shopping list.

The group was sort of amateur, so I guess we couldn't get as specific as I had hoped, but I still found it weird that we had all the gear setup, and the instructor didn't even crank off one frame. The largest disappointment came toward the end of the class, when a classmate asked, "The holidays are coming, and we'll not have all this studio gear with us, so what can we do?" and the instructor answered, "Well, they're called snap shots."

At this point, I had to pipe up and mention that a nice, fast prime lens (50mm f/1.8) works nicely with available low light, and that you can do some nice things with small strobes. The instructor dismissed my strobist comment/question with a story about a photo shoot needing $20,000 worth of lights and then double that when a designer tried to make a change. It didn't leave the beginner with much to start. A simple discussion of using reflectors with ambient light could have benefited the class.

In the end, I was thankful for the little bit of non-lighting discussion we had, and for about 20 minutes, I furiously scratched down lots of notes:

There are spring-loaded caps that can be purchased to fit over 2x4s to be used to create somewhat portable posts for mounting lights.
People often view images in the same direction that they read, so in western civilizations, our eyes start in lower left and proceed to middle of a photo, so subject should look to frame left. Right to left processing is sometimes less comfortable. In movies, you see the good guys ride in from the left, and the bad guys ride in from the right. Japanese car commercials often have the car enter from the right, while American car commercials bring the cars into the frame from the left.
Consider the perspective on the face: showing both ears would accent the natural asymmetry of the face, so turn the head to show only one. Don't let the nose break the cheek outline, since the nose will look larger and again accents deformities.
Consider gender roles in the society: shoot 10-15 degrees down on women to make the subject appear more feminine, and shoot up at men to show more power.
Flat or low-ratio (1:1 or 1:2) light is safe and easy, especially for children. It produces soft shadows.
When varying the lighting ratios for more interesting looks, harder shadows look better for men. Beauty dishes from above look good on women. A beauty dish would accent the ears too much on men.
Consider moods in environmental photos. The sales guy can be shown happy, but the financial officer should be somber.
To avoid red-eye from flash, ensure that the distance between the center of the lens and the flash is greater than the focal length of the lens. Which is easy, because I never have the flash mounted anywhere near the lens.
Nikon Cafe is a useful resource. I'm finding interesting lens reviews and comparisons and discussions of photography locations.

Interestingly, I found out that this class was part of a series in the computer track. It started out with basics of digital and ends with post-processing and printing. My next class is approaching quickly and it's 2 nights and lives in the Photography track, so maybe this one will be packed with more creative potential.

Manual Exposure Blending in the Gimp

john — 2008-10-07T09:00:34Z

I've been watching people post HDR images for months, and I recently stumbled upon Meet the Gimp: Episode 25 which discusses exposure blending. The hard part was defining a clean mask for blending the images.

It's not the crazy tone-mapping stuff, but this technique allows for some relatively natural looking changes.

Blending can be done by copying the layer with the most contrast (or darkness), and applying a Threshold to it, and adjusting the slider to get a clean edge. Then invert, and copy that black-and-white threshold image to be a mask for your top layer. A little hand painting and Gaussian blur finishes up the mask, and it should look pretty decent.

My sunflower image is an example of using this technique with 3 exposures pulled from one RAW image. The threshold and blur helped immensely to help define the edge between plants and sky with minimal halos.

Wall-E is another example, but I used the technique to blend different saturations for emphasis of the subject, and deemphasis of the background.

I've recently noticed a few Exposure and Blending Mask options in Gimp's Photo filters, but I've not had a chance to see what they do -- maybe it's the more automatic way to do some of this stuff.

My New Photo Workflow

john — 2008-10-07T08:56:21Z

I've been tuning my workflow a bit -- the process of pulling images from the camera, processing, editing, and getting them posted. I still do everything on Linux.

Downloading Images

To start, gthumb started out very helpful -- the first time I plugged in the Nikon D40, it popped right up and offered to pull the images for me. I had been using that for months, but eventually, the whole thumbnailing processing got too slow on particularly large downloads. I didn't need to view the thumbs first, I just need the images, so I wrote my own script to do about the same thing, only faster:

#!/bin/sh

cd ~/photos
DATE=$(date +%Y-%m-%d-%H-%M-%S)
mkdir $DATE
cd $DATE
LAST=$(gphoto2 -L | tail -1 | cut -d' ' -f1 | sed 's/#//')
gphoto2 --get-raw-data 2-$LAST --filename %f.%C
ONDISK_COUNT=$(ls | wc -l)
EXPECTED_COUNT=$(($LAST - 1))
echo $EXPECTED_COUNT $ONDISK_COUNT 
if [ "$ONDISK_COUNT" -eq "$EXPECTED_COUNT" ]; then
    gphoto2 --delete-file 2-$LAST --recurse
fi

This downloads the images to a timestamped directory, and clears the camera for me.

RAW Processing

I open the directory of images in Rawstudio, and quickly rate the images. I mostly just mark the keepers as '1' and occasionally rate higher for images I want to get processing first. I delete anything unrated (discarding 90% of my RAW images).

I make a second pass over the keepers to look for potential deletes, then I get to work processing each image in Rawstudio. I've not figured out an appropriate way to batch my images through RAW processing yet, so I do each individually. I straighten, crop, adjust contrast, exposure, and saturation. After all the images are done, I batch export the JPEGs to another directory.

Rawstudio 1.1 added the ability to automatically copy the RAW metadata to the JPEG EXIF data, so that saves me an entire script which I would often forget to run.

Final Editing

I fire up Gimp on each image, and often apply a GREYCstoration to smooth image noise and almost always apply a small-radius (0.9) unsharp mask (at about 1.10 or so).

I found this great guide to using the tunable parameters of GREYCstoration. Read this, and you'll figure out how it's affecting your image. I play mostly with the Strength, Anisotropy (amount of structure in the image), and sometimes the Noise Scale and Iterations.

I occasionally get into cloning and healing in Gimp.

Uploading

I shuffle the finished images into a few directories by trips or themes, and upload each directory to my Gallery 2 install using the (From Server) upload. Then I push 1 or 2 of the best images up to Flickr via the basic uploader on the website.

Archiving

The RAWs remaining RAWS go to the NAS for backup, and I'm usually done with my processing within a few hours of plugging in the camera.

On a gear note, I am starting to think about purchasing a Wacom tablet for editing -- a basic tablet is relatively cheap, and could make some work a lot easier. It's been a while since I've purchased anything.

Photography July and Beyond

john — 2008-08-15T03:57:41Z

While preparing for last night's No Fear Photography meeting, I realized that I've had a pretty exciting month of photography!

As Independence Day approached, I realized I didn't care a thing for trying to take some fireworks photos, but we still stumbled upon some, and I happened to get a fireworks photo or 2 that I actually liked.
I got away with taking all my gear on the beach vacation -- flashes, umbrella, lenses, foam and poster board reflectors, everything! The monopod bungeed to a chair or railing makes a great lightweight light stand.
I crudded up my sensor pretty badly on vacation, and ended up learning: 1) small apertures show dust really well, 2) to clone out lots of dust spots in post-processing, and 3) how to clean the sensor with a blower, swab, and Eclipse fluid.
I managed to shoot a few strobist-style shots of the family on vacation -- they played while I setup, then I shot for 10 minutes or so. Then we abruptly tossed all the gear in the van and ran off, because someone needed to hit the bathroom.
I passed off my D40 and 50mm f/1.8 crammed into a too-small bag as a point-and-shoot, so I got it into the Kill Hannah show at Chameleon.
Upon acquiring a super-cheap Sigma 70-300DG lens which only focuses manually on my D40 and a few other accessories, I've acknowledged that I have all the gear I need for now, and that opinion has stuck for nearly a month now. 300mm fits my needs nicely, and I seldom wish I had "just a little more".
I've actually started shedding gear -- Stacey's borrowing my Nikkor 55-200VR lens which was effectively replaced with the 70-300. If she doesn't buy it, maybe someone else will.
I'm having lots of fun shooting close-up shots with the Sigma lens.
After about a month of shooting almost exclusively with the 70-300, I went back to my kit 18-55mm lens a bit to shoot some wide-angle -- I'm particularly enjoying wide landscapes and a bit of distortion in portraits.
My manual-everything 50mm f/1.8 remains my go-to lens for parties, low-light, and street photography.
I was looking at the Fall non-credit photography courses at HACC and trying to choose 1 of 2 possible classes. Today, I just registered for both, instead of trying to choose: Portrait Photography and Perfect Pictures.

Gimp Tips from Meet the Gimp

john — 2008-07-10T12:09:32Z

I've been sitting on a little email note to myself since October! It's just my hot tips I collected from the early episodes of Meet the Gimp. Finally, I'm going to put them here, so I can find them again, and I can delete that email.

Keys:

'x' swaps background/foreground colors
[ ] scale the current brush

Faking some simple adjustment layers:

multiply a compensation color layer to remove a color cast
screen a color layer add a color cast
multiply a gray layer to darken
overlay a layer and paint black on the layer to burn
soft light a layer and paint white to dodge.

Shenk's Ferry Wildflower Preserve Photowalk

john — 2008-04-29T22:30:43Z

I took 388 photos on the combined photowalk 2 Sundays ago (20 April 2008), but managed to pare the offerings down to 38 images. I processed all the images in RawStudio 1.0 and Gimp 2.4.

I met up with Virginia and Al from the No Fear Photography group and hung out with them for the trip. I cycled through all my lenses as I did on previous trips -- 18-55mm, 55-200mm, and my 50mm prime.

When we got to the tunnel at the end of the trail, all 3 of us broke out our strobes and started playing. Al had a shiny new SB-26 and a set of radio triggers. We served as his voice activated light stands for a bit, and I played with my new SunPak 422D on its hot shoe cable. I think I captured some worthwhile images, but I'm most happy with my strobe photos -- I was able to produce some interesting shadows and darken down the mood of some of the photos.

Lititz Photowalk

john — 2008-04-09T12:56:31Z

On Sunday afternoon, I went photowalking with a small group of No Fear Photography members.

I filled the camera bag with lenses and had no room for the camera in there, and surprisingly, I used all the lenses I had with me. I started out with my rather basic 55-200 VR, and I shot with that for a while. Then I switched to my 50mm f/1.8 Series E for a while and started shooting closer going down the street.

I switched to Stacey's 70-300mm at Linden Hall, but I didn't keep it on for long -- I just couldn't get far enough away from what I was trying to shoot (architecture). Within a short time, I switched to the kit 18-55, and finished up with some wider shots. I forgot to try any flash shots (light was relatively nice for afternoon), and for once, I didn't go home wanting another new lens. If anything, I may have talked myself out of a 300mm lens for another couple weeks.

People always ask what I do photographically, and I still always describe my photos as "chasing the kids". Now I'm chasing the kids in a shallower depth of field.

I shot about 330 exposures, and I'm now wading through them all preparing to start processing. I'm trying to get everything processed in time to share them at the meeting on Wednesday.

People didn't share (chimp each others' shots) so much while we were walking, but I've started seeing some nice work showing up on the Flickr group. I hope to get mine up there soon.

Update (9 April 2008): The keepers are up in the gallery now.

Debating the Bleeding Edge in Camera Gear

john — 2008-03-31T13:55:48Z

I'm listening to DPS 86, and they're debating buying current or waiting for the latest camera bodies.

I used to do this with my computer gear, but I've gotten over it by dropping back a year or 2 from the bleeding edge. Prices are better, and in the case of computers, Linux support is more complete once something's been on the market for a while.

Camera's make it even easier, because your just looking at the body -- it's only a fraction of the cost, and it can be eBay-ed later. I get to keep my investment in lenses no matter what body I have. That's why I was completely comfortable buying the D40 -- it gives me all the basic controls I need, and the rest is up to me.

Nikon D40

john — 2008-03-18T08:51:29Z

I've had a new Nikon D40 for nearly 2 weeks now, and I think it's working nicely for me. The noise at ISO 400 on my PowerShot S2 was just getting to be too much of a hassle for me, and the opportunity to drop some cash came around, so I went for it.

Stacey and Doug were a great help while I shopped. They're both Nikon shooters, so I knew I could borrow equipment and draw on their vast experience. Dinger also has a nasty case of NAS paired with an odd DIY flair.

The extra couple hundred dollars that a D40x would have cost didn't seem worthwhile just for some extra pixels, so I just went with a D40 with the kit 18-55mm lens. I added a Nikon 55-200mm VR lens to try to get nearer to the telephoto capabilities I had with the PowerShot S2.

After a quick read through the manual (I don't seem like the type, though, do I?), I could pick up and find everything on the camera pretty quickly. The camera doesn't have quite as many buttons and dials as the higher-end Nikons, but I can still change my basic settings pretty quickly -- the dials default is shutter speed, then I need to hold a button for aperture, and I mapped the Fn key to change ISO, so I'm in business. I found the built-in flash configuration to switch it to manual 1/32 power, so I'm in business with my slave strobes.

The minimum ISO of 200 means I'll definitely need my ND4 filter to get some longer exposures, but that's fine. 3200 ISO (HI1) is pretty noisy, but not terribly disappointing. 1600 is surprisingly clean. Indoors I try to stick around 1600, but I'll gladly kick up to 3200 if needed. I can clean up the noise in post production.

I've had to introduce UFRaw to my workflow to get images down to 8-bit for Gimp. I really like having the extra range and flexibility -- I can make some dramatic changes in RAW without losing detail, but it took me a little while to learn what I was doing, and some things (base curve) still sort of allude me. I'm still sort of slow at processing, but I think the results are much better. I'll figure out batch processing soon, I figure. I would get done much quicker if I wasn't consistently holding the camera 1-3 degrees off of level -- I'll have to work on that.

I got to try the camera for travel for the first time on Sunday at Baltimore's St. Patrick's Day Parade. I can barely fit the camera and its lenses in my old bag, so it wasn't too difficult. It's a little cumbersome to have the 55-200mm lens hanging from my neck and chase the kids, but it's possible.

I was feeling some pain having to switch between lenses to shoot the passing parade from the curb, but I quickly settled into my 18-55, and I was really glad I had it. I used the 55-200 later to shoot the kids running and playing. The photos have a surprisingly noticeable "telephoto" feel, though.

I've been able to get much shallower depths of field with this new gear -- that makes me happy, since it was really hard to do with the PowerShot S2. I find myself actually having to work the other way, and closing down the aperature to get a bit of depth back. It's nice to have that control now.

My kit's pretty complete right now, but I hope to get a hold of some old strobes my Mom doesn't use, and her old camera bag. That'll give me a little room to grow. I also have an old full-manual 50mm f/1.8 lens on loan from Dinger which I'd love to have for indoor party photography and maybe portraiture, though I think an 85mm prime would be more comfortable for portraits.

I can't really think of anything more that I'd need the camera itself to do, so I'll probably use this thing for a pretty long time. Pair this thing with a couple more lenses, strobes, and some radio triggers, and I'll keep myself busy for quite some time.