Lily studies

I decided to not take the camera with me last Saturday when I walked Toni because it was raining all the time and I didn't really feel like fiddling around with the tripod and everything in the rain.

However, when I arrived at one of our "race tracks" alongside the river Alz in the floodplain forest near Hohenwart, there were these really beautiful flowers that I hadn't seen before... so I had to return on Sunday and make some photos of them - in the rain, of course...


Turk's cap lily (FinePix S5Pro, 1/10s @ ISO 100; f/3.2, 50 mm DX)

The flowers are called Martagon or Turk's cap liky (german "Türkenbund"). A lot of small blackish bugs were all over them. The german Wikipedia article says that the scent of the flower is very sweet especially in the evening and at night - I was there in the afternoon and didn't notice anything.


Turk's cap lily (FinePix S5Pro, 1/55s @ ISO 800; f/4, 50 mm DX)

My practice of using the shadow white balance in the forest somewhat backfired on me here; there were different flowers, some were more in the shade of the forest, some not so much; the colors were quite different and I worked with the white balance, vibrance, saturation and color hues during post processing to get a more consistent look (I'm not totally satisfied with it but hey, its just a blogpost;-).


Turk's cap lily (FinePix S5Pro, 1/3s @ ISO 100; f/8, 300 mm DX)

Color management

Color management is this thing that was always somewhat scary for me. Complicated stuff with calibration, profiles, color spaces, etc. etc. - once you understand the concept its pretty logical (at most of the time...) but when I look back to the times when I was an absolute beginner in this area and read some of the guides that are available I think that they could still be easier for the novice to understand.

There are two pages that I always redirect my friends to when they ask me about an introduction to color management, its Thom Hogans "Quick & Dirty Guide to Color Management" and Jeffrey Friedls series of articles for a more in-depth look at color spaces. But are those articles really easy enough to understand for the novice?

I just want to pick up the single most important advice for all novice digital photographers and people that show 95% of their photos on the web anyway: use sRGB - don't think about using other color spaces. Its really that simple.

So thats the "what to do" part (I assume you know how to set your camera to sRGB if you're using JPEG).

And now for the "and why?!" part:

• the display: if you did not buy a "wide color gamut" display, chances are that your display won't be able to show you anything more than sRGB. If you look at the best-known brands that offer wide color gamut displays (the list of vendors you might want to check out will include Eizo, NEC and maybe Samsung) you'll notice that those are not consumer devices. They are expensive. There is no wide color gamut 22" widescreen display for 250€ - no way.
• web browsers: sRGB is the de-facto standard color space for the web. Today, this means: if the web browser is not color aware it will dismiss any profile embedded in the photo - and just use sRGB. Which means that photos using any other color space than sRGB will look more or less wrong. Whats more problematic is that only Safari (the browser from Apple) is color aware out of the box. Support for embedded color profiles can be turned on in Firefox with an extra switch, but FF is not color aware by default! The beta of Google Chrome for Mac is color managed, and IE for Mac was color managed too (IE for Windows is not). Opera? I don't know, sorry. Jao is watching the color awareness of some applications in his blog - check it out. If you're not sure if your browser supports color profiles go to this webpage and check it. Surprised?

And even if you have a wide color gamut display and your web browser is color aware - most of the visitors to your online photo albums will most likely have none of it and/or not even know about it. Conclusion: for publishing on the web, use sRGB. Just forget them folks in your photo club that tell you to use AdobeRGB/ProPhoto because it can show more color. Its irrelevant for the web!

Please note: I'm not saying that sRGB is the cure-all that everyone should use. I just say that today with the situation of web browsers and display technology, its the least common denominator, and since it is the de-facto standard for the web and in the Windows world, novices and people that publish the majority of their photos only on the web should stick confidently and comfortably to sRGB.

Green is the new color of resistance

Leaves in the Rain (FinePix S5Pro, 1/35s @ ISO 800; f/4.8, 155 mm DX)

Dedicated to the people of Iran who stand up and form opposition against the intolerable "elected" president and the regime of fear and oppression. My prayers are with you. I picked this photo that I made today to express my sympathy. Green like your colors, wet like your tears. I hope that change and peace will come for you.

May leftovers

Three photos from a walk to the Innspitz (link is german only, sorry) near Haiming, confluence of the rivers Salzach and Inn. The "Swans in the rain" photo is also from that area.


Old reed and new green (FinePix S5Pro, 1/10s @ ISO 100; f/11, 95 mm DX)

A lot of old foliage floating on the river (this is the Salzach). The long exposure time blurred it a little bit. I like that effect.


A small track through the floodplain forest (FinePix S5Pro, 1/70s @ ISO 400; f/5.6, 92 mm DX)

Handheld for a change, thus the ISO400. I like the distribution of sharp and unsharp areas in that photo. Its seldom possible to achieve this with a slow lens like the 70-300VR.


Great crested grebe (FinePix S5Pro, 1/55s @ ISO 400; f/8, 300 mm DX)

Colors: I set the white balance to "shade" most often recently, especially when I'm taking walks in and around the forest. In sunlight the colors might be a bit too warm (in the analogue days people used a warming filter for that:-) and its easy to adjust it thanks to using raw - but it gives me a consistent look when I first import the photos into LR.

S5pro F2 preset for Lightroom ("Velvia" mode)

UPDATE: the download link was broken. Duh! Its fixed now. Sorry to everyone who tried to D/L and it didn't work. :-/

One of the most interesting things for many Fuji S5pro users is the film simulation modes for the JPEG engine of the camera (many users claim that they don't need raw with the S5pro because of the excellent JPEG engine - I'm not one of them, on the contrary: I listened to that sermon and wasted two months of time and photos trying to get JPEGs out of cam that would satisfy me as much as my manually developed raw data).

There is one particularly charming preset that is simply called "F2" in the camera, but it is often called the "Velvia" preset because of the very saturated and vivid colors it produces. However, one of its biggest shortcomings is that it does NOT seem to utilize the 400% dynamic range of the camera (I don't know whose twisted brain is responsible for that).

For me, one of THE key features of the S5pro is the enhanced dynamic range, so I'm using raw anyway. And I wanted the look of the F2 mode. I used a lot of "RAW+JPEG" storing in the camera last autumn and created a preset for Lightroom (right-click and "save as..." to download) that mimicks the color appearance of the F2 mode (and nothing else, just the colors!).

This is what a "developed" photo looks like with LR's color adjustments being flat:


A beautiful day (FinePix S5Pro, 1/20s @ ISO 100 - f/11, 70 mm DX)

After using my "F2 sim" preset for a while, I often found that the green hue shift is just too extreme for my personal usage. I checked and double checked with the F2 JPEGs out of cam, but its really correct, the S5pro's F2 mode really creates these extreme colors - just like Velvia film... :-)

Since I live in an area where the vegetation is very green in spring and summer I created a preset where that green is a little less wild (the "F2 mild" preset in the zip archive). Here's what it looks like:


A beautiful day (FinePix S5Pro, 1/20s @ ISO 100 - f/11, 70 mm DX)

This might not be very spectacular in this scene, here its just the pinch of extra color that I like about the F2 mode very much. For other scenes (especially in autumn) the result will be far more shocking (and too extreme for some without doubt, but since this is a "Velvia" simulation, thats just what it is).

When used with a polarizer, the overall saturation boost of the presets (both +24) might be too much sometimes. Again, it largely depends on the scene, and you'll find that you have to adjust the saturation occasionally.

Honk if you like these presets!

Music for the moment: Vidna Obmana - "The River of Appearance"

Illumination

Made a walk in the forest with Toni in the afternoon and mounted the camera backpack "just in case" (you know, be there...). After so many photos with the telezoom I wanted to practice some wide angle usage again (or else I'll forget everything;-).


"Illumination"(FinePix S5Pro, 1.3s @ ISO100, f/8, 12mm DX)

I played with the backlight through the leaves. Bracketing is a really good helper here! I set the camera to take 3 frames for each exposure: normal, +1 and -1 EV. Its much easier to just make 3 photos in situations like these (that are a real challenge, exposure-wise) and just pick the best one at home instead of peeping at the tiny display, blinking highlight warning and the (tiny S5pro) histograms. One more benefit of digital photography - extra attempts don't cost extra.

I played with the various exposures of the above scene and found that utilizing the overexposure works really well here (whereas I normally try to avoid it and bring up the shadows instead). It does so in the color versions too (which I'll show later in a Picasa Web Album maybe), but switching to black & white increased the impact quite a lot. The moment I switched to b/w in Lightroom I knew I have an instant personal favorite and "best of June" candidate. :-)

Music for the moment: Anthony Rother - "Magic Diner".

Vignetting - why?

I just found this excellent series of photos from The Big Picture: "Children in Pakistan". I don't feel like I'd ever want to make such photos myself, really really not - but I love them, nevertheless (its something like the street photography of Bruce Gilden: amazing results, but the way he approaches people... woah, I think I'd smack him on the nose just out of a reflex).

But there's one thing that really ticks me off: the artificial vignetting that was applied so obviously and out of measure to quite some of the photos. Its simply way too much.

Don't get me wrong, I do it too, its a nice effect to draw the attention of the viewer to the centre point of interest in the photo - but I always try to apply it with so much subtlety that its not really obvious (at least I hope so:-). But its not so with some of the photos shown in the series above. I dare say that not even the cheapo lens of my very first own (film) compact camera had such a bad vignetting, and it was REALLY bad!

Why do people do that? Its ugly, and ony of the things thats always discussed in photography forums is how poorly some older lenses from the analogue domain work with digital sensors because of the problem of the "light buckets" and the microlenses.

So, lens vendors are doing a terrific engineering job to deliver extremely excellent lenses for the digital domain that have no or just very little light dropoff in the corners (Nikon's AF-S 24-70/2.8 Nikkor comes to mind - very bulky and expensive, but what a lens!), and what do people do? Add artificial vignetting, and so much that everyone knows its been done in post processing. Thats just too weird for me.

Moon and Clouds

We'll soon have the longest day of the year, and its close to full moon at the moment too. All the hassle of moving into a new apartment has one advantage: a view of the evening sky with front lighting. :-)


Moon and Clouds @ 7:41pm

Best of May: Branch and Reflections

Branch and Reflections

I didn't get much chance to make a lot of photos in May because of moving, so it was fairly easy to pick my personal favorite for this month - its the photo from one of my (numerous:-) visits to the Huckinger See which I showed in my Picasa Web Album before.

Birches on Water

Another photo that I made yesterday when I visited the Frillensee. Looks like I have an "impressionistic" period which forms around reflections on the water at the moment. :-) When I saw it on screen I had to think of Bob Ross, maybe because of the fine detailed lines of the white birches in the clouds of green.


Birches on Water

So, cheers to a wonderful artist. I still enjoy watching the occasional rerun of "The joy of painting" on TV now and then, its a perfect chill out session. Only the good die young.

Bragging :-)

I can't resist. An extremely example of overexposure, from yesterdays visit to the Frillensee (originally I just wanted to find out how long an exposure I can get to get movement of water rendered really smooth), and how much can be recovered with the Fuji S5 pro.

Imagine on the right has a -4.00 exposure correction in Adobe Lightroom. You just can't do that with JPEG. Or with a normal sensor. :)

Flies, Frillensee

After a rainy and cloudy morning the weather became quite sunny and warm yesterday afternoon, blue sky with beautiful layers of clouds, so I spontaneously decided to make the 1 hour drive to Inzell and walk up to the Frillensee again.

I made a couple of photos that I will publish in a web album later (of course), here's a really funny set of the myriads of flies that are all around there at the moment (well, in the open and sunny spots). First is a good example of how funny long time exposures can be:


Flies I (1/8th of a second)

(I didn't pay close enough attention to the background, so you can make out some of the machinery in the background. There's a lot of work to do to clean up the chaos that the avalanche caused.)

Even 1/50th of a second is not enough to catch the quick movement of the flies (I do have one photo with 1/320s exposure but its boring because the flies are just dots then:-)...


Flies III (1/50th of a second)

And here's an update to my older blog post "Nature Gives, Nature takes away" of what things look like in the area, now that the snow and ice are gone:


Devastation

I haven't made a lot of photos in may so it should be fairly easy to pick my personal favorite for the "Best of May" photo. I hope to post it soon. What I want to do is to add special custom wallpaper crops for common aspect ratios for my best of collection. I've yet to find a way to automate the export process more. :-)