What I Did on My Summer Holidays

This summer, we didn't take an exotic trip to Italy or France or Orstralia. Our youngest daughter is getting married in September, so our money is committed to paying for a very lovely wedding plus a party in Scotland the following week-end (the groom is a Scot). It should be lots of fun, but there's nothing in the cookie jar for jaunts to Europe and the like.

Green Rock and Rapids - Minden Ontario

Instead, we decided to vacation in our own backyard, lovely Haliburton Ontario. We spent an enjoyable week at the cottage and my wife and I booked courses at the local arts college, Haliburton School of the Arts, part of Sir Sanford Fleming College. Naturally, I booked a photography workshop and Trish booked a class in stained glass making.

Shangri-la, Minden Ontario

After looking around at a lot of photography workshops and experiencing a rather expensive one with Alain Briot last year, I'm very happy to say that this summer's workshop was the bargain of the century. It only cost $250 CDN and it ran for a full five days. Not only that, but it was in some of the loveliest countryside you can imagine and the instructor, Rob Stimpson, was first-rate. The workshop was a little on the large side, with 18 participants, but my fellow classmates were a pretty talented bunch and I learned a lot from seeing the world through their eyes.

Waitress, Haliburton Ontario

We spent a couple of hours in the classroom each day getting sound advice from Rob, a very seasoned and talented travel photographer. The rest of the time was spent taking photographs in Haliburton and vicinity. For those that may not know where Haliburton is, it's a small town just to the south east of Algonquin Park and is a couple of hours north of Toronto. It is a very photogenic area and has lovely lakes, great rivers with rapids and the town itself is very nice with several older buildings worthy of a photograph.

My Palace, Haliburton Ontario

Rob Stimpson offers several other workshops throughout the year and, based on my experience in Haliburton, I'd recommend his workshops to anyone. He's a very congenial companion and a very knowledgeable photographer with a talent for communicating what he knows.

Nothin' to do but Fish, Haliburton Ontario

There are two workshops in particular that I'm keen to sign up for. The first one runs in June and features moose photography in Algonquin park. Rob says that he sighted 16 moose in this year's workshop and I saw some of his stunning photographs of moose munching away with lovely backdrops of wetland scenes. At this time of year, the male moose are quite docile, but they still have the good beginnings of a rack. They don't seem to mind canoes getting up close and personal, so you can take great shots without having to tote around 800mm lenses.

Bucking the Wave, Minden Ontario

The second course that I intend to take in the next couple of years is Rob's Gales of Adventure workshop. Anyone who grew up listening to Gord Lightfoot's classic Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald (click on link to see a wonderful video of the launch and demise of the ship set to Lightfoot's music complete with underwater photography of the wreck) will instantly see why I want to take this course. Here's a brief description from Rob's site:

"November is traditionally storm season on Lake Superior. Stormy seas, fall skies and Superior's mighty shores are some of the most dramatic and powerful landscapes a photographer could dream of. Capturing them on film or digitally is a passion of artist Rob Stimpson. This workshop, timed to take perfect advantage of Superior's surely moods and spectacular scenery, will appeal to the person who knows the workings of their camera and wants to create, not just take, photographs."

Plus, you get to stay in the relative comfort of the Naturally Superior Adventures Lodge. All this for $795 CDN (based on single occupancy). What a deal!

All in all, it was a wonderful way to spend a week and I enjoyed it immensely. I also got some nice photos for my portfolio and will enjoy printing them out in the cold winter months.

Canon Lowers Resolution - A First!

Ladies and Gentlemen, we have a first! Canon has released its G11 compact camera and has returned the sensor back to 10 MP (down from nearly 15 in the G10). Could it be that the megapixel wars are over and camera manufacturers are listening to consumers who want image quality above all else? As Mike Johnston speculates in The Online Photographer, maybe Canon's move is motivated by the success of the Panasonic DMC-LX3, a 10 megapixel compact that is flying off the shelves.

I don't care what the reason is - I think this is wonderful news. I'd also welcome an updated Canon full-frame camera at around 13-15 megapixels. I've heard that the 5d mark II with 21 megapixels is difficult to use hand-held. Apparently, some camera movement blur shows up with the higher-resolution sensor - blur that would be masked by a lower-resolution sensor. My 13 megapixel 5d has plenty of resolution and works well without a tripod for most shots. I'd just like a higher resolution display and the sensor dust removal feature with a lower price point than the mark II.

Canon, are you listening?

Improving Blown-out Skies with Lightroom

I read a recent article by Mark Segal on Luminous Landscape entitled You'd Be Surprised What Those Files May Contain. In the article, he makes the good point that raw files with blown-out skies may actually contain much more information than you might think. He offers up a rather complex method involving editing two versions of the image in Photoshop. In the original image, he adjusts the tone curve to favor the sky and manages to recapture quite a bit of interest in the sky. He then adjusts the tone curve in a virtual copy of the image to favor the rest of the image. He edits both versions of the image in Photoshop and copies the good sky from one image into the other that was optimized for the rest of the photo.

While there is no doubt that this technique works, there is a tool in Lightroom that often works very well without having to do the round trip into Photoshop. It's called the gradient tool and it is very easy to use. For a good tutorial, click here.

Here is a quick example of how you can restore lost parts of the sky. The first image is exactly the way it came out of the camera, sensor dust and all:

In the second image, I've created a gradient from the top left of the image down to the roofline of the building and I've decreased the brightness of the sky. The result is a sky with lots more contrast:

There is a lot of tweaking that ought to be done - the saturation could be increased and the exposure of the sky could also be adjusted.

However, this is a quick and dirty example of a very powerful tool that often makes the round trip to Photoshop unecessary.

3D - It's coming

The big news of 2009 so far has been the advent of video as part of the DSLR offering. We've seen offerings from Nikon, Canon and now Panasonic that have videophiles all atwitter. Michael Reichmann, in particular, has been quite taken with this new development and he's quite an influential guy, not to be taken lightly.

However, I'm not a video guy and the whole video thing leaves me cold. I've never been an aspiring movie director and still photography consumes all my spare energy.

3D still photography, on the other hand, does turn my crank! I have great memories of playing with a viewmaster as a child and the awe of seeing a three dimensional image of somewhere interesting like the Grand Canyon or the canals of Venice. I think this is where I caught the travel bug.

Fuji just announced some significant 3D developments. It isn't the first 3D camera on the market by any means (just look here), but Fuji has announced a complete system that promises to transform the 3D market. Instead of requiring a binocular viewer that makes the viewing of 3D images a bit of a hassle, it looks like Fuji has developed a 3D viewer screen that doesn't require special eyewear as well as a print-making process that creates 3D prints that also don't require special eyewear.

The 3D viewer consists of an 8-inch LCD screen (600x400 resolution) with two channels. Each channel is aimed at one of your eyeballs to simulate parallax and fool your brain into thinking that it's looking at a 3D image. It has a modern GUI (very iphone-like) with a touch screen.

The camera is pretty cool. It has dual sensors and can record 3D stills and movies. It can also work as a 2D camera where you can take two conventional photos at the same time.

There isn't much available on the print making process yet - other than to say that you'll have to send your images to Fuji to have your prints made.

There is also no word on pricing yet, so stay tuned. If the price is right, I'm going to put one of these cameras and the viewer on my Christmas list and play around with this new/old medium.

POSTSCRIPT

As I was tooling around the 'net looking for 3D stuff, I came upon 3-D Review, a great blog site that seems comparable to Mike Johnston's The Online Photographer in the 2-D world.

A Few Observations on a Rainy Day

The U.S. Open golf tournament is about to start tomorrow and they're expecting a lot of rain. There will be more than 50 squeegy people waiting to get the water out of the greens in an emergency. Photo journalists have a hard enough time lugging big expensive cameras with big expensive lenses around hilly golf courses without having to cope with miserable, wet weather. Covering golf events sounds like a great job until you see a photog burdened down with two pro bodies and three huge lenses running between holes to get in position to take yet another photo of Tiger Woods. Add in some mud and a few torrential downpours and you can take that job and shove it!

Speaking of emergencies, I've been reading a lot of camera reviews lately where the reviewer says something like the following: "the Acme 300SX takes great pictures up to 400 ISO. Beyond that, the amount of noise starts to become and\ issue. The claimed maximum ISO of 64 million is good for emergencies only". What kind of emergencies? I'll be damned if I can think of any good reason for having an inflated ISO level that makes subjects look like they have the plague. Perhaps they think we'll all have the presence of mind, when being mugged in a dark alley, to pick up our camera, turn it on, select the highest ISO setting and shoot speckled photographs of our fleeing accoster. Or is there some other "emergency" that I've missed?

We have a hot new camera poised to hit the marketplace. The Olympus E-P1 adds its name to a small stack of contenders for what Mike Johnston calls the DMD or Decisive Moment Digital Camera. These are cameras that are small, preferrably pocketable, responsive and able to produce high quality images. Here are some of the contenders:

• Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX2 and LX3. I have an LX2 and find it a decent compromise. It is capable of good quality (it has a Leica zoom lens), but suffers from shutter lag and poor high ISO performance. The LX3 has a faster, wider lens that makes up somewhat for the poor low-light performance. Great for city landscapes, poor for taking photos of anything moving. As a DMD, it is more of a miss than a hit.
• Sigma DP1 and DP2. The DP1 has been available for a while and the DP2 just came out. Reviews have been mixed. Picture quality has been praised, while general responsiveness has been panned. Auto focus is poor for both cameras and build quality is low for the price (just under $900). If all you desire is DSLR quality images in a small format, then the Sigma delivers. However, it is not a DMD because of the slow auto focus and response.
• Olympus E-P1. This newest entry to the DMD sweeps has a nice-sized 4/3rds sensor and supports interchangeable lenses. There aren't any reviews out yet, but the previews suggest that auto focus is crisp in normal lighting conditions and that shutter lag is minimal. I would guess that image quality would be on a par with Olympus DSLR's (i.e. very good). Pending the availability of hands-on reviews, this sounds very much like a DMD contender!

One thing to note about these DMD wannabes is that the optical viewfinder is a thing of the past. I've often thought that digital cameras are undergoing a slow transformation a little like cars did at the beginning of the 20th century. If you recall, the first cars looked like carriages with engines mounted on them. Similarly, the first DSLR's looked like film cameras with the sensor installed where the film used to be. Now, with the micro four/thirds system, we're starting to see radical changes. The mirror and the optical viewfinder are going away in favor of using the LCD to compose photos. Fast microprocessors are automating adjustments for lens distortion and noise reduction. ISO has been elevated to the same variable status as shutter speed and aperture instead of something you set and forget. It won't be long before the camera automatically generates composite multi-exposure images to obtain more dynamic range and greater depth of field.

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.