10000

Whoops. Today it happened: exposure number 10000 with my Fuji S5pro. I bought the camera in August 2008. That makes roughly 500 exposures per month (I'd be poor and starving if I'd shoot film). But I end up showing less that 10% of that to the public. Sometimes less than 5% even.

Today, I was out in the fields, following my own advice from the previous post: looking for details. After seeing photos by a fellow hobbyist on Picasa Web, I looked for my reversal ring (I tucked it away last year after a bit of playing around) and went out for some "hardcore handhold extreme macros" :-D with the reversal ring and the 35mm (and it just occurred to me that I did the exact same thing last year in March, except I was using the old 28mm and the 50mm then).

The exposure with the actual number 10000 (DSCF0001) was a fail - and I deleted it before I noticed the historic number... duh. Here's exposure number 9999 instead:

 Alpine Squill (FinePix S5Pro, 1/100s @ ISO 400; 35mm with Nikon BR2A, f/5.6)

I don't know what kind of flower that is. This is an "Alpine Squill" (Scilla bifolia, german "Blaustern" which means, very literal and fitting the appearance, "blue star") and it is really really small (about 15mm in diameter, when the buds are fully open they are six pointed stars). But what I can tell you is that the success/failure ratio when going for handheld macros with the reversal ring is something like 1:5 - or even worse...

Crouching on the ground, the distance from lens to flower is something like one or two centimeters, the only way to focus is to move the camera forward and backward. The depth of field at these distances is limited to what seems like fractions of millimeters :-D unless you stop the lens down all the way - which turns the viewfinder almost pitch black if you're not in direct sunlight, and results in exposure times that are either impossible to hand hold OR that are too long for a sharp image.

I was struggling with that all the time today: the slightest breeze will make these little flowers wiggle like mad. And of course, that breeze set in the very moment I positioned myself and was just about to release the shutter. :-P

Therefore, the photo here is not really sharp - yes, I know that! ;-) I've got others that are better (IMHO) which I will show in my Picasa Web Album. I decided to show this one because of the shutter's anniversary. Happy 10k, shutter!

Early Spring

It's early Spring in Germany, and a lot of the landscape is still brown and grey. The first spots of color are showing up here and there - Liverleaf is a violet carpet in some forests, Spring Snowflake here and there, Crocus on the meadows... it's the time where I find it more pleasing to focus on the details!

Pussy Willow Study (FinePix S5Pro, 1/80s @ ISO 100; f/2.8, 35 mm DX)

Last year in autumn I couldn't imagine that I would like or need a macro lens - and now that spring is here, I'd love to have one! :-) The above photo was made the the AF-D 35mm/f2 - with a close distance to focus of about 25cm it's quite nice for some close-up work. Being something like the "normal" lens on DX format sensors, I find it's genereally a very versatile lens. Fast and light-weight too. It's the lens that I mount when I want to "just take the camera with me".

PS: more of those Pussy Willow studies in my March web album.

White Balance? Come on!

What? An article about White Balance? Hasn't like... everything been said about it on the web already umpteen times? Well, perhaps. Nevertheless... I recently followed a (what I consider) typical discussion on the topic in a photography forum - which inspired me to this blogpost. :-)

A short note before you read on - I do not have a white balance problem. No one using raw data has a white balance problem, and I use raw data all the time (except for the 1% of my photography where I make snapshots of my friends, colleagues and their children). I adjust the white balance at home - and I don't have to rely on some automatism, or manual selection.

There, I said it: rely on some automatism. Here's the shocking truth about auto white balance: it's not perfect. Yes, it fails. And yes, that's a problem if you're shooting JPEG (because the possibilities to correct a wrong white balance for JPEGs are limited). Look at this (my dog Toni going crazy digging for mice or whatever in the forest):


WB Auto (4300K!) (NIKON D70s, 1/40s @ ISO 200; f/5.6, 105 mm DX)

Wow, that looks really bad, doesn't it? Toni's white fur has a blueish tint! But my dog ain't blue. I know that. So, everything's just too cold here. That's because the camera's auto white balance chose a color temperature of 4300K for this scene - which is even colder than the average color temperature for a bright sunny day (somewhere between 4600K and 5300K according to my experience), and this was really really not a bright sunny day - we were in the shade of the trees in the forest, late afternoon in March. The camera's auto white balance was fooled by the large amount of brown in the scene most likely. Here's the manually adjusted version:


WB Shadow (5600K) (NIKON D70s, 1/40s @ ISO 200; f/5.6, 105 mm DX)

All that I did was to set a color temperature of 5600K (which is what my Fuji S5pro uses when I set the white balance to "shade"; I have a preset for that - 5600K/-15). Hint: create your own custom presets for common white balance presets of your camera in Lightroom. I often find Lightroom's white balance presets way off, especially the tint (green/magenta shift). That's because camera's are different (there's an infrared filter in front of the sensor and it might just be more or less strong).

The question is... why do we need white balance? Because the light changes all the time throughout the day, and because our human sight has a built in auto white balance, too - most prominent example: we "recognize" a white wall as being actually white under both daylight and artificial light. The camera does not. Leave the white balance of your camera on a fixed "daylight" setting and make a photo in artificial light - it will look VERY wrong. That's not because the camera is crap, that's because the light is so much different! And our own eyes automatically adjust to it.

How does auto white balance work? Well, ask Google. It doesn't make sense to explain it - because even if you know how it works, it doesn't help you to make better photos. Really. :-)

What does help however is what I would call "white balance awareness". Let's look (back) at (the days of) film: analogue film is made for a specific color temperature (mostly daylight, something like 5000-5500K; and there are special films for artificial light sources like tungsten and such). You need filters to balance the color (it's really just colored glass in front of the lens to warmify or cool down the colors).

So, film photographers needed to be aware of light situations that would falsify the colours and counteract - and that's what digital photographers should do, too. If you're shooting JPEG, you need more white balance awareness, that's all. If it's a bright sunny day, set your white balance to "sunny" instead of auto. And if you're in the shade of a forest, why leave the camera in auto white balance mode and not set it manually to "shade" instead? And this has another benefit: a more consistent look of the photos.

Now, why would I worry about the white balance at all if I'm using only raw data anyway? One reason is the camera preview image (it should be somewhat accurate, hu? remember that it is always the JPEG, rendered with the camera's settings!), the other is faster post processing: importing photos into Lightroom when the camera's white balance was manually set to "shade" (in situations where it is useful) saves me the time to manually adjust it. I might only need to tweak a few of the photos instead of most of them (of course, it's a piece of cake to simply apply a white balance preset to a set of photos, but still...).

And a final personal note: I think that "always neutral" colors (a common goal for digital photography as it seems) is not really worth achieving (of course, if you're working in a studio under controlled conditions, you'll absolutely want to use a grey card to assure accurate colors and such). After all, the light does change throughout the day. It's warmer in the mornings and evenings, and coldest in bright midday sun. If you're standing in the shade of fresh green foliage in a forest in spring, everything will have a slight green tint. It's just like that. It's natural that colors are somewhat off, depending on the situation. I think that pictures actually appear more natural when we embrace and work with that "flaw" of nature and light.

Revision

Some random notes about my workflow, or after "after the workflow" habits. Things like that. I thought these would be worth sharing (mainly targeted at Lightroom users of course, but applies to other photo management software just as well I think), as an inspiration, a hint... who knows, maybe it's useful for someone out there. :-)

• I browse through my older photos every now and then. I review them, re-evaluate them, and rate them anew. I try to find out what I like about them, and what not.
• I mark favorites in Lightroom with the "pick" flag. But I often forgot to rate those picks later. I created a smart collection that shows me all photos with the pick flag set but without rating. I can quickly rate my favorites that way.
• I only rate photos that I flagged as "pick". My rating goes something like: 5 stars - absolutely worth printing; 4 stars - definitely a keeper, maybe print it, but not absolutely necessary; 3 stars - it's nice to look at so I keep it, still good enough to be shown in a web album; 2 stars - a nice personal memory that I enjoy to look at (but most likely no one else will); 1 star - personal stuff.
• since I shoot raw, I often create virtual copies of older photos and start processing them from scratch. Just to find out if there's anything I missed, or to experiment... things like that.
• I set filters on my library to show me only 5-star photos. I look at them critically and decide if I still consider them 5-star photos (worth printing). I do the same for the other ratings. Sometimes a photo jumps up from 3-star to 5-star after I re-processed it (with some film simulation or other creative preset, maybe)

I think it's important to stay critic on one's own work and review it. With growing experience, I tend to notice flaws that I had not seen before. I hope to learn from my own mistakes.

Feeling like a nerd?

Here's something personal I wanted to share for a while. When I started using a tripod, I felt like a complete nerd. Absolutely. Hauling that thing around, especially at a somewhat "public" place, setting it up while people pass by, mounting the camera on it (with the camera pointing at "something" that passers-by will try to see)... it felt like I've got all the worlds attention on me with that huge thing in front of me. Like wearing swimming trunks AND having green colored hair - in winter!

Well, in reality, it's not that bad of course. First - people don't pay all that much attention. :-) And if they do, it's only positive. I never had someone approach me and go like "now look at that nerd with his tripod". :-P Never. If there was any conversation, it was with people who were interested in it, keen to know what I'm doing, that sort of thing (the only problem for me is to stay decent enough and not fall into photography-nerd mode; I try to reserve that for encounters with others photographers...) - most of the people would simply say "oh yes, it's nice light for making photos today". That sort of thing (to me, it sometimes feels like people appreciate the fact that someone at least tries to capture that beauty around us:-).


Pulverturm at Dusk (NIKON D70s, 6s @ ISO 200; f/11, 62 mm DX)

Oh yes, and tripods, as uncomfortable it might be to carry them around all the time, enable you to make pictures like the one above. I'm showing this particular photo again because it's one of the first good photos that I made from the tripod. It's the "Pulverturm" of Burghausen's castle (illuminated by artificial light of course), and it's taken from the path that leads around the Wöhrsee lake, which is more or less crowded with joggers and people talking a walk on evenings and weekends especially... the feelings that I described above are the ones from this very situation. :-P

Today, using a tripod feels like the most natural thing to me, no matter where (but I still don't like hauling it around and fiddling around with it, setting it up). Using the tripod somehow means being serious about photography. Not that it wouldn't be possible to make excellent and "serious" photos freehand, totally not! It's just that... for a planned approach, and maximum control over composition and framing, it's simply the best thing you can do (well, I don't know about you, but me I simply cannot freeze into a pillar of salt like Lot's wife to steady the camera... not to mention that releasing the shutter would be quite difficult of you're a pillar of salt, of course.)