Microsoft Bing? Booooo!

Microsoft has released its new search engine Bing and, purely from a selfish point of view, I'm not impressed. I'm very anxious that anyone who searches for my name and photography can find one of my web sites (either my blog, my website, my pbase site or my flickr site).

The good news is that Google finds all of these sites (and more) on the first page. You would expect that out of a search engine. Huw Morgan is not a common name and, as far as I know, I'm the only photographer with that name.

Bing doesn't seem to get it. None of my sites is on the first page. Not one! There is an obscure reference from another blogger's site, but nothing about my sites. Nothing shows up on subsequent pages either. I seem to be invisible to Bing.

Maybe Bing does well for common search terms, but for obscure photography bloggers with unusual names, stick to Google!

White Balance and Gray Cards

One of the big attractions of capturing your images as RAW files is that you can adjust white balance afterwards so that your images don't have annoying colour casts. There are several ways of adjusting white balance using a tool such as Adobe Lightroom:

• If the image has a gray or white area in it, you can take the white point eye dropper tool and click on that area in the image. Lightroom will automatically adjust the red, green and blue levels to make that area neutral.
• If you have a handy gray card (like the WhiBal) and remember to actually photograph the gray card during your shoot, you can use the white point eye dropper tool and click on the gray card to get the appropriate white balance. This white balance can then be applied to all the other images in the shoot using Lightroom's sync feature.
• The final technique is to use Lightroom's white balance adjustment control to set the white balance to something that looks pleasing to the eye. This technique only works if you have profiled your monitor. It's no use setting a white balance on a monitor that has a colour cast to it.

I was reading Tim Grey's daily e-mail today and he makes a great point about white balance:

"in most cases you are not trying to neutralize the color temperature of the lighting under which you were photographing. Quite the contrary, in most cases you were photographing when you were for the express purpose of capturing the warm lighting that was present at the time. As a result, in most cases it is not helpful to use a gray card as the basis of a white balance compensation. Instead, I would either use an "auto" setting for White Balance in your camera, or use the setting that seems to best match the existing conditions with the understanding that in any case you may need to apply a compensation in the RAW conversion in order to produce the most accurate (or desirable) results possible."

I don't blame you if you are confused at this point. When do you use a gray card and when don't you? Here's some guidance on when you'd want to use a gray card or adjust white balance using the eye dropper tool:

• If you are taking indoor pictures of people or outdoor photos of people at sunrise or sunset and want a natural flesh tone, then you must use a gray card. Artificial light is notorious for fooling the auto white balance setting of the camera. Quite often, lights sources are mixed (e.g. flourescent combined with flash) and the camera won't know how to adjust for the resulting colour cast. Similarly, photos at sunset result in orange flesh - not a good look!
• The inverse is true - if you are taking photos of a rock band with a light show, then you'll want to preserve the colour of the lighting and may not want to adjust light balance.
• If you are taking photos of a sunset or sunrise, you might want to take a photo with a gray card so that you know what neutral lighting looks like. If you are adjusting white balance manually to taste, then it is nice to know the boundaries and neutral will be at one end of the spectrum. However, to emphasize Tim's point, neutralizing a sunrise makes the effort to get up in the morning pointless.

I hope this helps with this confusing topic.

Correct Lens Distortion

I'm a big fan of raw processing. I use Lightroom to process raw photographs from both my cameras (a Canon 5d and a Panasonic DMC-LX2) because it gives me lots of advantages:

• White balance Correction. More often than not, the camera gets the white balance wrong. Sometimes the adjustment is minor, but other times (e.g. indoors with the Panasonic), the adjustment is quite drastic.
• Recovery of blown highlights. I try to expose to the right when I shoot in order to maintain as much shadow detail as possible. Sometimes, I'll blow the highlights out slightly. Not to worry, with Lightroom I can recover these blown highlights while retaining the detail captured in the shadows.
• Adjustments (e.g. curves) done in 12+ bits to preserve smoothness of the curves.
• Production of finished photos using lossless compression - important if you are going to edit the photo again and again.

However, some camera manufacturers are packing more and more processing into the camera itself. This is due to competitive pressure as well as the continual improvement in the raw processing horspower available to camera manufacturers. Most "normal" digital cameras are capable of doing white balance adjustment, color correction, saturation adjustments, sharpening and Jpeg compression in the camera. But, now we're starting to see cameras, such as the Panasonic DMC-TZ5, correct for lens distortion.

This raises a bit of a dilemma. Should you give up the advantages of external raw processing in order to avail yourself of in-camera lens distortion?

Fortunately, help is near at hand. There are several software packages that you can download to help you correct lens distortion in your camera. DxO Pro is certainly a leading candidate, but it is not cheap! A less expensive option is PTlens from Thomas Niemann. This Photoshop plug-in has profiles for all my Canon lenses as well as for my fixed lens Panasonic DMC-LX2. Here's a review of the software on the Digital Outback Photo site.

The best news is that the software can be evaluated for free and only costs $25 to license. In this day and age, that is a bargoon!

Here's an example of a photo corrected with PTLens. The photo was taken from the Top of the Rock (top of the Rockefeller Center in New York) with my Canon 5d and the 24-105 L lens at its widest (24mm). There is a lot of perspective distortion:

I edited the photo in Lightroom to correct the exposure and then exported it to Photoshop with Lightroom edits intact. While in Photoshop, I ran Noise Ninja to remove noise, then used smart sharpen to do some sharpening and ran PTLens to correct the distortion. My final adjustment was to run the Velvia Vision action to add some local contrast and more saturation.

Here's the result:

As you can see, PTLens has corrected the perspective distortion and vignetting. It has also automatically corrected for my lens' pincushion or barrel distortion at the 24mm mark.

The software is amazingly intuitive and does a splendid job of fixing lens issues.

Photoshop CS4 has a very good lens distortion filter, but I prefer PTLens because it runs as a Lightroom external editor and quite often I prefer to stay in Lightroom and edit my photos.

Windows 7

This is normally a blog about photography, but photographers in the digital age spend an inordinate amount of time on their computers, so occasionally it makes sense to talk about new software tools that make our jobs easier. I'm happy to report that Windows 7 is one of those tools. 

At the risk of insulting Microsoft, the best operating system for my PC is one that I don't notice. The less intrusive an operating system is, the better I like it. My PC is a tool that I use for my job and photography and Windows 7 is a great operating system because it fades quickly into the background and simplifies my life.

I've been running the Windows 7 release candidate now for a week. I've rolled it out from a slow single core Pentium machine that acts primarily as a printer attachment on the network to my main desktop (four Intel cores) and now my laptop (two Intel cores). Prior to that, these three machines were running Vista with mixed success. 

Vista was a disaster for the old printer machine because it needed more memory than I could install on the box. The old Pentium had the max 2 gigs of memory, but Vista thrashed around and couldn't run Photoshop or Lightroom without the disk light going non-stop, indicating that memory was swapping in and out constantly. Response time was abysmal. It took forever to boot. I managed to make the situation workable by plugging in a 4 GB flash card and using it for swap space - Vista still thrashed about, but response times were manageable.

Under Windows 7, the old machine's disk light still goes a fair bit after booting, but eventually it settles down to a nice equilibrium, indicating that the Windows 7 memory footprint is smaller than Vista. Switching from application to application is really snappy. Boot times are definitely much lower. My old computer has come back from the dead with Windows 7.

For my other machines, each with 3 GB of memory, Vista was not really a performance issue. The quad core desktop handled Vista pretty well and the laptop was a bit more sluggish than under XP, but tolerable. Windows 7 has really helped snap up the laptop and is even helps the faster desktop.

It's interesting to read the PC World article that claims that Windows 7 is not much faster than Vista. I think they totally miss the point. It is absolutely true that applications like Lightroom and Photoshop run almost exactly the same speed on my main editing machine on both operating systems. But, neither one runs well on Vista on my older, slower machine with less memory. With Windows 7, they run tolerably well. Windows 7 is much better from a speed point of view because it just seems snappier. Going back to my original premise, you don't notice an operating system that switches back and forth from one window to another without delay. And that's a good thing!

The other thing I really like about Windows 7 is the simplified user interface. The bottom task bar can now be used for all your commonly used software and it works just like (surprise!) MacOS. All your common apps are arranged across the bottom of the screen. When an application is running, it gets a little box drawn around it (as opposed to the little MacOS divot). When you hover your mouse over the running application, it gives you a little screen snapshot (or more if you have two or more instances running). This is really nice.

But, going back to the theme of this post, Windows 7 is really good because it doesn't annoy you. Applications switch back and forth quickly. It boots quickly. After you put your laptop to sleep, it wakes up quickly without a bunch of thrashing around. The interface is simple and elegant. I've experienced almost zero bugs with the release candidate version. Installation was fast and simple - you don't even have to watch over it. Once you've answered a couple of questions, it installs all by itself.

I think Microsoft has a winner on its hands here! Finally.

Frustrations of Photography

I've been doing a lot of reading lately about successful landscape photographers. The common themes include an all-absorbing love of nature as well as a willingness to do what it takes to get wonderful image. Here are some examples:

• 1st place winner of Canon's In the Parks photo contest Robert Blanchard tells Shutterbug magazine that he "positioned myself at "bird's eye" view by lying prone in the mud with my tripod legs extended out flat". The resulting image of a heron in the water is lovely.
• In the same issue, second place winner Brian Rueb risked a soaking in icy water by going to the edge of thin ice to capture a reflection of El Capitan in Yosemite.
• The December 2008 issue of Digital PhotoPro has several articles on modern masters. The thread that ties them together is the amount of hard work that they do to create their images.

I'm not averse to hard work. In fact, one of my nicer tree images was taken in a swamp during black fly season where I was in danger of being eaten alive before getting the shot.

Sometimes, however, despite hard work, things just don't work out. I'd been planning to do a shot of a lovely barn that I know of just as the full moon rises behind it. I'd planned the shot by going onto the Internet and finding the day that a nearly full moon rises in the early evening just prior to sunset. The choices were May 6th and May 7th. 

Yesterday, I headed home early from work, grabbed my camera and headed north to the barn. In the traffic, it was about a 2 hour drive. When I left work, the sun was out, but there were clouds on the horizon. As I drove north, the clouds steadily gained on me and by 6 o'clock, the sky was completely covered. I headed home with my tail between my legs.

I'll just have to go back to the drawing board and pick the next full moon evening.

New York

I was in New York last week for a fantastic couple of days. I'd been invited to sing in the chorus of Scotland the Brave, a terrific musical show put on by Sean O'Boyle and Andrew McKinnon featuring pipers, drummers, dancers with full orchestra and chorus. We sang in Avery Fisher Hall in the Lincoln Centre - quite a thrill!

While I was in New York, I took some time to photograph the city. I'd purchased a very good book called The 50 Greatest Photo Opportunities in New York City by Amadou Diallo. 50 photo ops was a bit ambitious for two days in the Big Apple, so I decided to focus on a couple of photogenic sites: the little red lighthouse under the great gray bridge (made famous by this children's book) and 5Pointz, a factory in Long Island City, owned by artist Meres One, that's world-famous for its graffiti. 

Here's my take on the lighthouse:

And here's my favourite artwork from 5pointz:

I was also very lucky to catch a heron in flight early in the morning in Central Park:

All in all, I had a very good time travelling around the city taking snaps. I've been travelling to New York for many years (starting in the 70's) and I've experienced the city at its worst, with vandalism and graffiti everywhere and neighbourhoods too scary to walk in. I saw some photos being sold in a park last week that illustrated the subway system in the 80's with cars sprayed with paint inside and out and homeless people everywhere. I'm happy to report that this is all in the past and the subway system in New York ranks right up there as the cleanest and safest in the world. It was a pleasure to ride the Metro all over the city and very economical. For $7.50, you can ride the system all day and I was able to travel up as far as west 180th street and as far east as Long Island City quickly and easily.

Equipment versus Ability

Many people have written about whether it's the camera equipment that matters or the photographer. Here are two articles on the subject: Your Camera Doesn't Matter by Ken Rockwell and Your Camera Does Matter by Michael Reichmann. I'm somewhat conflicted on the subject. Clearly, having a camera is important. You can't take pictures without one. But, how good does the camera really have to be and how technically proficient does the photographer have to be? These are very different questions.

What got me thinking about this was an article by Mark Dubovoy on the Alpa medium format camera. Embedded in the article is a picture of Full Moon Dome in Zion National Park. Mark's quote on this photo (not apparent in the jpeg) is "the quality of the file is simply stunning" While the quality of the file might be simply stunning, I find that the quality of this particular composition is simply boring. I don't want to dump on Mark - he is capable of outstanding work. I'm just making the point that a preoccupation with image quality can cause an artist to lose focus on the artistic side of photography. What's important is not the resolving power of the lens, but the image that it captures.

For example, Galen Rowell used a 35mm camera exclusively. He did this because he often hiked miles to get a photograph and didn't want to be encumbered with a large camera or even a tripod. Yet, he took stunning images that can be blown up into very large prints. 

I'm always amazed at the number of magazine articles and web posts that are devoted to camera announcements and reviews and how little press is devoted to the artistic side of photography. My contention is that you quickly run into the law of diminishing returns once you've acquired a camera of good quality. These days, good quality probably means a Canon Rebel or a Nikon D70. Anything else is probably overkill and will give you a hernia or slipped disk.

Technical proficiency is also a focus of many workshops, tutorials and classes. I find that a bit of a red herring as well. Photographers tend to come at their passion from one of two ends. On one side, we have artists who gravitate to photography because they love the medium. On the other side, you have technologists who start with the love of the gizmos and then gravitate to the artistic side once they realize that money can't buy you good images (unless you buy someone else's). My intuition would be that artists learn only enough technology to get the job done and then stop because they are passionate about the art and want to spend all their time creating images. Technologists are at a disadvantage because they are insatiably curious about the technology and spend too much time fiddling with new cameras and software and not enough time practising the craft of producing good images. I know because I'm a geek and love all that stuff. 

The moral of the story? Find a good camera system that works for you and stop reading equipment reviews. Spend all your time taking photos and printing them out. Nurture your talent, find your voice.