Horsetail fern in our backyard. Stupid things, can't get rid of them.
A couple of days ago I mentioned that I left my camera on auto-bracket. Merrily snapping away, I ended up with precisely… crap.
However, one photo just barely squeaked in as decent. About 5 minutes in photoshop and it came out as you see to the right.
Details on the photo:
Seems that 640 ISO is the best that I can do with my SLR. Any faster and grain really pops in there.
Black and White view from our back yard. That's lichen on a branch.
I’m somewhat inspired to try Black and White again today. I read Trey’s review of NIK Software, and that reminded me of their Silver Efex Pro software (which he reviews on his new tutorial). I bought it last year at the NAPP expo, and loved it. The problem? I have absolutely no eye for B&W photography.
It’s not that I haven’t seen plenty, or don’t get the science behind it (although I’m a bit fuzzy). Something just doesn’t click upstairs. I think that’s going to be one of my next big pushes over the next few weeks. It’ll be tough, though – colors are finally here, and I really want to play with them.
The photo above: I was playing around with the macro setting on the sd500. It’s neat – you get a narrow depth of field. Converting to B&W has some neat parts – I like the muted background with the analog noise, but I’m not so sold on the overly bright foreground.
It’s now starting to look like last summer – raining yesterday, overcast today, hazy earlier this week. Sunday was the best weather of the week. So a cop-out photo for today:
Running the trails behind APU (click for larger view)
This is a self-pic from a jog I took at lunch on Tuesday. Notice the flat lighting – hazy already by that time. Rich colors, though.
Neat thing about the sd500 in this situation: it has a pretty wide-angle lens for such a small camera, so I could get this by merely holding the camera at arm’s length.
This is perhaps my favorite shot of the day (well, of last Sunday).
The lifegaurd station at Goose Lake.
Eastbound Northern Lights blvd.
The photo from yesterday’s post and the one to the right here are both pics that I took yesterday while out on a bike ride. This is one that I took towards the end of my trip – it’s no more than a mile from Goose Lake.
It’s supposed to range between mostly & partly cloudy for the rest of the week, so I suppose I’ll need to enjoy the memory of this for a few days.
At any rate, this is a prime example of why I like the sd500. I can shove it in a pocket & run around, stopping when I feel like it to take snapshots.
On that note, you can look forward to the rest of my posts this week being populated from my Sunday bike ride’s pics.
Playing in the water
Unless you have lived up here for a while, this may be hard to understand: we’re finally getting temperatures in the 60′s! Now, to most of the world, that’s nothing that impressive. For us, however, this is something: we’ve just wrapped up an eight-month winter (seriously, it starts in mid/late September and ends in late April/early May). Before that long, cold winter, we had one of the worst summers on record.
Normally, we get a sunny May and June (occasionaly cloudiness & maybe some rain), partially sunny July, and a partially rainy August. Then it gets nice again in September, but it’s cold – around mid September things will occasionaly start to freeze, and by October it’s pretty regular.
Last summer, however: no such luck. We had some sun in early May – when it’s still cold. From that point on, it was mostly overcast through July, and then rain and cloudy conditions from there to September. We didn’t have a summer.
Now we’re finally getting one. I just hope it stays.
Click on the image for a larger view. This was a shot I took today at Goose Lake. It’s May 3rd and already warm enough that people are getting in the lake. Just last Friday there was still ice on that lake, even now it’s cold. But refreshing
photo details: -1/3 EV, ISO 50, Sunny WB, manual mode on the sd500
You’ve seen the beach, now the other extreme: winter in Alaska. This photo was taken after work, in early January. It’s pretty unremarkable – a failure, by my standards. No detail in the moon, the sky overly noisy… But the colors are rich, and the warmth of the lights reflects (lightly) off the snow.
To pull this one off: ISO set to 400, white balance to daylight, EV still -1/3. The camera set shutter speed at 1/20. If I hadn’t been shivering, I might have worked that to my preference.
January Afternoon Moon - 4:45pm on 1/9/2009.
Building on the last five posts or so, the next few days will be examples of photographs taken by following my technique (more-or-less). I’ll describe the situation, the settings, and then display a photo for the day.
Today, I start with a picture from last November. We were on vacation in Wailea, Maui. If you know about the area, you know how nice it is. The weather was unnaturally windy, though – rough for that area. It even rained one day! And by wind, I mean “light breeze.”
So here we are, in a beautiful area, but there are clouds. Spotty clouds, mostly sunny. Going down to the beach, I have the sd500 in the waterproof case. ISO is pre-set to 50, white balance to daylight, EV to -1/3. At the beach (same area as the image posted on April 5th), I noticed a rocky area to the south, and some rocks stacked up by (assumedly) the locals.
Stack of rocks, setup by locals (I'm assuming).
EV Compensation in action
Exposure Value (EV for short) is a way of adjusting your exposure. Exposure, which is to say how bright the photo is. By default, EV compensation is set to zero: don’t make it brighter, don’t make it darker. Just take it at what the sensor thinks is the correct exposure.
Notice that I’m set at -1/3. Each full number can be considered a “stop”, and (gross oversimplification, I know) each photo will have roughly 5 stops. So, by shifting it to -1/3 (that’s 1/3 of a stop darker than normal), I’m slightly skewing the end results to be darker. Why?
The main reason it to retain detail. Sometimes, when there are extremely bright highlights, will bump it down to -2/3 or -1. A full stop darker will help keep those highlights from being blown out.
Digital photography basically works like this: if something gets too bright, it stops registering info. Or rather, the sensor keeps reading light, but it won’t go past 255 (for red, green, and blue channels) – too much light and it stops there. There I go, getting lost in the technology again. Ignore it, just accept: if too much light hits the sensor, no detail gets recorded.
Stepping down the EV will cut down the amount of light hitting the sensor. Fewer pixels hit the maximum, and more detail gets saved. The tradeoff? More noise – darker photos have less time to write valid data to the shadows, so shadows get noisier.
So, I take slightly darker photos, and massage them in Photoshop after the fact to get back to where I want.
I don’t actually use this much these days, but it’s a handy option to have, especially in difficult to gauge situations. Setting white balance is easy; it’s as easy as taking a snapshot. Using it appropriately is tougher.
the custom options for white balance
Setting white balance: go into the menu, like we did yesterday. This time, go to the far-right option (looks like a couple of triangles and a dot). Immediately, you’ll start seeing funny things going on, like in the pic to the right. That’s the custom white balance screen evaluating the balance based on… a black piece of paper. To set this as the white balance point, do what it says: press the MENU button.
So yeah, it’s easy to set white balance. but what should you use? Well, something white. Or non-tinted, at least – grey technically works pretty well, so long as it’s a dead gray. Snow works, so long as it isn’t yellow (and for us in Anchorage, so long as it isn’t break-up). Walls sometimes work – I’ve found decent results using grey construction blocks and the interior walls of my house (we painted it an almost flat white). Shoot, after a long winter in Alaska, I’m so pasty I can even use the back of my hand and get decent results.
These are all techniques that work in a pinch, but it’s better to use a real white balance card or something similar to get it right. When travelling, I usually carry a card with me. Running around town? Not at all. That’s why I rely on presets with the sd500.
What about my SLR? I usually use kelvin. That’s not an option on the sd500.