Pictures of Food (pt1)

Photographing food is difficult.

It isn't that the food won't hold still, or that you suddenly contract palsy, or that it doesn't smile when you tell it to - though I suppose those would also cause food to be difficult to photograph, I won't be covering those situations. You're on your own.

Food is difficult to capture on (digital) film mostly because everyone knows what it should look like. Thanks to modern advertising, many times this preconceived ideal isn't even physically possible. The images of cereal with milk splashing perfectly around the flakes are often created using various types of glue. Hamburgers in photographs are front-loaded with plastic and other artificial additives that would make it the most disgusting fast food meal you've ever experienced, and likely toxic. Even fruit, something you would think would be difficult to fake, is splashed with varnish and then spritzed with alcohol in order to make sure it has that perfect sheen and crisp, fresh look we all want.

Until you are prepared to go through the effort of making these sorts of 'larger than life' adjustments, and ruining a lot of food, I'll point out some ways to share with friends and family how good your food really looks.

In this part, being part one, we'll mention the zombie-effect that flash can have on anything. You know the photographs of people, where the flash went off a bit stronger than necessary, and right in their face. This is where you see the expression 'the camera adds five pounds' come true. It's because the flash has caused artificial shadows, and obliterated the shadows we're accustomed to seeing. The sudden shift in color, too, gives skin a pallid and washed out appearance. You've effectively turned your subject into an overweight cadaver. You can also abuse food in this way, using a strong flash that often comes on a digital camera.

Here is the camera I used to demonstrate the effect. You may recall it from previous comparisons with the d60.


The handy-dandy CW330 digicam from Kodak. Please note where the flash is. It's right above the lens.

Originally, I had intended to set a digicam on a small stand, place a blind or block of some sort over the flash, and take a picture of a bowl of apples. By blocking the flash, I can reduce the glare and washout effect caused by all that sudden, direct light. Seeing the dilemma, I decided to take the shot with the full flash and just see what the result would be. After all, digicams are very smart, these days, and I had all the lights on in the kitchen. Maybe the CW330 would register that there was enough available light and wouldn't overcompensate with -

Zombie fruit.

Hm. Thankfully, the dark table and attractive decorations mean that the picture is not a complete wash. It is feasable that this is a satisfactory image for what you're wanting to do. Just a bowl of apples, a digicam, and the kitchen table.

But if you look closely, you may notice some things that you don't like in the image. The shadows cast by the apples are now directly behind them. There is no visible shadow actually inside the bowl, which makes it look flat, and gives the illusion that the apples are floating above it. The reflective glare on the apples is on the forefront, as it is on the jar in the back, making it obvious that you're flashing your fruit. Not to mention, the warm colors of the antique table, the soft cool blue of the placemats, and the hand-painted house holding the napkins are all lost to the artificial fluorescent look of a bright, direct, beam of light.

The logical next step is to block the flash. Turning off the flash altogether isn't an option, because the camera would try to compensate for the lack of bright light and may keep the shutter open longer. That would cause blur, because I was standing without support and would inevitably move slightly during that time. So, I took my index finger and placed it over the flash, above the extended lens, and took another shot from the same position. Remember, all the lights in the kitchen are on, so it shouldn't be -


Don't cover your flash. Your kitchen lights are designed to give you a nice, homey atmosphere and plenty of light to see. They do not give you the clinically bright lights of a hospital, or a photography studio, unless you do your cooking with a live studio audience and a couple oversized television cameras. Your kitchen is dark. Chalk this up to another example of how amazing your eyes are. They adjust quickly and easily to 'comfortably dim' lighting. Your digicam does not. If you are wondering why the image has a red hue, I will give you a hint - cover the bulb of a flashlight with your palm. That is effectively what I did, but with a much brighter flashlight.

So what could be the solution? The flash is too bright, and too direct, but covering it entirely means the photograph is too dark. You can't go out and purchase a professional photographer's softbox flash, or one of those giant umbrella diffusers. However, we need to accomplish the same thing. I needed to soften, and redirect my flash. Preferrably, I wanted the light to come from above so that the shadows were where they should be, and the reflections were more to the top of the apples and the jar.


Much better. The reflection is still a bit in the wrong place, and the shadows in the bowl are weak, but the colors come through more strongly in the set pieces and the whole image seems softer and more like a kitchen should feel. Progress! And not too bad for folding a napkin and holding it above my lens.

The napkin was still too thin to truly keep most of the flash from going through, so I probably should have used an envelope or thin book (a music book from the organ, perhaps) to keep the flash from shining through. However the ridged surface, slight though it is, helped diffuse the light to a more ambient direction. Being white, it was able to reflect a bit in the direction I wanted - up. Now, were we outside, this would have done nothing but shoot my flash uselessly into space. However, I have a white ceiling in my kitchen. Bouncing the flash like this recreates the effect of the umbrella diffuser in a professional studio, and can be used on any surface to give you an indirect off-light. I have seen creative photographers have a friend in a light-colored shirt stand to the side, then they tilted their camera and redirected their flash towards their friend. The flash is bright enough, and the angles were right, that it allowed a nice side-glow to their subject, aided by direct light from overhead.

When photographing food, the last thing you want is something like zombie brownies. Redirecting your flash using common household elements and a bit of forethought in terms of where you're bouncing your protons, will give you some softer, but effective, alternative lighting options.

Long Exposure Photography

Long exposure photography can lend itself to a lot of fun effects. Images of traffic zooming by, leaving neon trails from headlights and brakelights, as well as those neat images of people drawing on the wall with a laser pointer, are all made possible by forcing the camera to keep its shutter open for an extended period.

As with any style, long exposure photography requires you to know what you're doing, and have an image in your mind of what kind of photograph you are looking to create. Photography rarely allows for the free-form style of artwork that sketching or doodling can create. The medium has a tendency to be unforgiving. In the days of film, you can imagine that experimentation was difficult and expensive. Using today's technology, being the digital camera and the computer, not only do you have unlimited 'film', but you can immediately preview your work. If your computer is nearby, you can even see the full image, and then get back to shooting, in very little time. With such quick turnaround, many photographers find they are able to see what they like or dislike about a shoot, and still have time to get another shot or two of the subject before the shot is lost: either the subject has moved, left, or the sun has set.

Images like this are possible with experimenting through long exposure photography. At first glance, it may not seem interesting, and the size constraints of this page may make the details hard to see. Using a 5-second shutter speed, this sunset shot of a forest makes the day seem brighter and the light more ambient than it truly was. Another effect is that, while the tree trunks and the groundcover remain crisp and sharp, many of the leaves visible, especially those in the foreground, are blurred because of motion. The wind was blowing the leaves, moving them slightly, but obviously not affecting the trees themselves. This gives the picture a sense of motion, with a few solid, vertical lines.

By taking advantage of the long exposure, I was able to get this very dramatic shot. All I did was zoom in as the shutter was open. Woosh!

And this is what happens when you are standing on the same plank of wood that the tripod is standing on, and decide to move during a 10second shot.

While the shutter is open, it is absorbing more and more light. The evening was dim, but not dim enough for a 10-second shot of some clouds passing over. What you can see are the shadowy portions of the trees. Everything else is blown out by overexposure.

This is one of my favorites. It is subtle, but I like the effect. The focus is on the two trees in the distance, through the leaves of the tree in the foreground. I wanted the trees in the back to really stand out, and to make the foreground fade a bit, so I put the exposure to 10 seconds. Not only do I get a soft-focus effect from the foreground being simply out of focus range, but the movement of the smaller limbs and leaves makes the focal point stand out all the more for being so clear. You can almost imagine someone peeking out from behind that – wait, did you see that?

Exposure done Wrong

It's often easy to talk about different styles of photography, or methods of taking a picture, when you're using the one-out-of-a-dozen images that turned out exactly the way you wanted.

To really show what is happening when you snap that shot, I wanted to share a couple images that did not quite 'work'.



This is from the same series of photographs as the waterfall image from last time. Like I said then, a long exposure shot requires low level light in order to keep from washing out the image. This is what happens when the sun comes out from between the clouds just as you take the photograph. The shutter stayed open for nearly a full second, soaking up sunshine and causing this blowout glare. Those places that are pure white are lost - there is nothing you can do in post production to rescue those parts of the image unless you want to start redrawing pixels and trying to create texture where there no longer is any. At that point, you may as well have started drawing the image from scratch. Much better to simply wait for more clouds, or closer to sundown.


The bee may have been holding still, but this butterfly was not. Unfortunately, rather than just take the shot and wind up with an image of a butterfly blurring away from the flower, I wound up trying to move the camera with the butterfly. I wasn't able to keep up, and my shutter speed wasn't fast enough to freeze things, so the whole image smeared into a worthless 'zoom' picture. It's a problem of having not quite decided what image I wanted before setting up the shot, and not being prepared to adjust to a suddenly moody subject. Butterflies are primadonnas. Now you know.


Another problem with choosing your subjects and lighting is that ever demonized 'red-eye' effect. It happens in people because you're literally flashing light off the back of the eyeball just as you snap the shot. Due to the red blood vessels surrounding the inside of the eye, you get that horrific crimson glare. In things that lack red blood, you get this crazy white-eye effect. It happens with frogs, fish, and certain politicians. If I could have trusted my hand to be steady enough, and the frog to hold still, I would have taken a slightly longer exposure to get a natural-light shot. As it was, it was getting dark and I had no convenient rocks on which to steady the camera.

Now, though, I've acquired a new tripod and a remote, by which I can take shots and never disturb the camera. That should allow some very interesting photos!


Of course, equipment does not guarantee that you'll get the shot you're looking for, if you haven't done your homework...

The Long and the Short of It

Preparations continue for the National Novel Writing Month. If you’re curious to watch my progress or learn more about the event, here is the link to my NaNoWriMo page.

http://www.nanowrimo.org/eng/user/404901

For this novel project (that was a pun), I plan on using photographs I’ll be taking through the month of October as inspiration and illustrations for different sections. I’ll probably do quite a bit of photomanipulation to them, adding increasingly less subtle adjustments to them in order to express the ‘fantasy’ side of the genre I’ve picked for the novel. I still have no outline, no plans, and barely a setting. That means that I will be discovering this story as I write it.

In the meantime, let me show you some neat effects that can be done with a camera before you need to take the photograph to post-production. As a segue, here is the image I’ve chosen to use as the cover to this upcoming novel.

Obviously there have been some touchups, like the text and the blur around it, and there is even a soft blur and glow to the whole image. We’ll cover how to do that at some other time. The original photograph has its own magical appeal, however, and isn’t something that can easily be done with a typical point-and-shoot camera.

Long-exposure photography is something I would like to get into more, in the future, and so I have invested in a digital remote for my d60. This will allow me to release the shutter without touching the camera, further minimizing the amount of shake that may blur or smear the image. For this waterfall, however, I was lucky enough that a steady rock and holding my breath were sufficient to keep the stones and grasses crisp and clear while the water blurred into a silk sheet.

This style of photography is used a lot for scenic waterfalls, or shots of old houses (to let the moving clouds in the background blur into obscurity), but it takes a lot of work. You have to know the spot, you have to know the time of day, and you have to be able to hold still for multiple seconds while the shutter is open. The reason that the time of day is important is because, while your shutter is open, it is absorbing more and more light. If it is a nice, sunny day, and you leave your shutter open for up to a second, then you will see nothing but glare. The image will be almost entirely white. The best times for images like this are early morning, late evening, or just before/after/during a rain shower. Obviously the rain can be dangerous to your equipment, and potentially uncomfortable, so the gloaming times of the day are perfect for photographers looking to get the long exposure image like this.

On the other hand, a dark day is very poor if you are trying to take a photograph of something in movement. To freeze the image, and reduce the amount of smearing (the opposite of what we wanted with the waterfall), you need to have a fast shutter speed. The faster the shutter speed, the less movement you will see. The best examples of this are hummingbirds and bumblebees in flight – but frozen. It looks as though they simply stopped moving in midair. For this image, I believe I may have gotten lucky and the bee actually stopped for the millisecond my shutter was open. Perhaps it was posing for me? Or just too busy eating.

A dark day would have given me a dim, greyed out image. With the shutter only open for a split part of a second, there isn’t much time for light to hit the sensor. If the day is bright, and the sun is direct, then the image will be perfectly fine, and the color will be vibrant and the details sharp. A cloud overhead will destroy the effect. A setting sun will force you to consider taking the image to post production and lightening it up, but you can never fully recover an image that is soaked in shadows.

Next week, I’ll show you some examples of how badly things can go with both a long exposure and a very short exposure. It always seems easy until you see that only one out of two dozen photographs were acceptable.

Thank goodness for an 8gb memory card.

Punctuation Practice

With the coming of the controversial movie, “Blindness”, based on the novel of the same name by José Saramago, we will turn our attention towards the part of written language that only seems to get attention when it is misused.

No, not spelling.

Punctuation.

Saramago’s novel is actually somewhat famous for being one of the few published pieces of literature that intentionally abuses punctuation. Leaving out commas is one thing, as commas and other parenthetical marks are often a matter of opinion rather than concrete law, but Saramago’s “Blindness” actually removes quotation marks, periods, and many other literary clues that make communication flow from author to reader. There are passages of dialogue that are missing the quotation marks, leaving the reader uncertain as to who is talking. There are sentences that go on for a full page or more. Paragraphs continue unabated. Perhaps these are stylistic choices made with the intention of putting the reader in a state of discomfort, or unease, or leaving them confused like the characters in the book may be. However, other authors of other books have taken this similar challenge and mastered the concept without completely ignoring proper modes of written communication. The major sticking point is the inconsistency, making it appear that Saramago simply did not know how to write, and the publishers assumed it was avante garde, and everyone just went with it.

Rather than turn to a lesson on how to properly use such punctuation as the comma, exclamation point, question mark, or quotation marks, I would instead like to play a little while in the sandbox of punctuation you may not see every day.

For instance, the Irony Mark (؟). Also known as a ‘snark’ or a ‘zing’, it’s to be used to indicate that a sentence should be understood at a second level. Originally proposed by the French poet Alcanter de Brahm (aka Marcel Bernhardt), it was picked up in 1966 by Hervé Bazin for his book Plumons l’Oiseau. Bazin had a few other suggestions for additional marks, such as the doubt, certitude, acclimation, authority, indignation, and love point. Personally, I think Bazin has quietly succeeded with at least the final suggestion. After all, perhaps you have written something similar to in your own text messages or emails to friends and loved ones. How different is his proposal ( ) to our own usage (<3)?

The interrobang (‽) is a superimposition of two familiar marks, the question and exclamation, or the interrogative mark and the bang. More and more frequently, the same effect is being seen in established literature and common usage when the two marks are used simultaneously. Eg: “How could you do such a thing?!” The order in which they appear has no consistent bearing on the meaning, or emphasis, of the sentence preceding them, but many users agree that the interrogative should appear first to make certain that the question is apparent. Emphasizing the tone and urgency of a sentence is not aided by repetition of the characters, despite common and informal usage today. “What have you done?!?!?!” Despite the increasing frequency of the combination, it should be noted that the use of both-at-once predates the invention of the interrobang. Invented in 1962 by Martin K Speckter, the interrobang lived for almost a full decade, making its way onto typewriters and into dictionaries. After that, the fad ended and the two characters were again divided to be only set together in dialogue, informal writing, or chess moves.

A mark that is used, but for a sound only heard in African languages, is the click. Yes, there is a symbol for the click. Often, especially in names, an exclamation point will suffice, but this is usually only for sounds that fall immediately before a soft consonant, like an “n” or “m”. !Mbobi is a difficult name for non-native speakers to pronounce, but such names can be a source of pride for people who work in foreign lands but are unwilling to make drastic concessions to the english speakers they interact with. The actual palato-alveolar click, done with the tongue creating a pocket of air against the roof off the mouth, and then, with a velaric ingressive airstream mechanism, plosively released. The symbol for such is the ǂ, followed or preceded by a consonant indicating the dictation of the sound. I recommend a lot of practice.

Word of the day : NaNoWriMo

We’re going to learn another new, weird word, today. It isn’t latin, and it isn’t any other foreign language. The word is Nanowrimo. In the spirit of all things internet, it’s an abbreviation of a phrase.

National Novel Writing Month.

In the month of November, 1st through 30th, interested parties will devote themselves to creating a 50,000 word novel. That word count is actually pretty low, considering the size of most novels these days, and a novella is only 40,000. Novels you might have heard of, ranking in at about 50k, are Brave New World, and The Great Gatsby. 50k is not the upper limit, but the lower limit. Entrants can write as much more than that as they like, even completing two novels if they want.

The idea of the event is to encourage writing, plain and simple. In fact, a book written by the originator of the event, is titled “No Plot? No Problem!” and is designed to aid newcomers in feeling comfortable with, and understanding the concept behind, Nanowrimo.

I’m introducing you to this event to not only encourage fledgling authors out there to give it a go for themselves, but also to warn you about the upcoming deluge of words. Through the month of November, it is very likely that this blog will see few picture tutorials. I intend to write, on average, about 1,667 words a day. It is, without a doubt, a marathon, and I am inviting you to spectate. Cheer me on, laugh, or just watch to see if I can actually accomplish this feat – it’s up to you.

The rules of the contest state that you can not use pre-written material, so I won’t be able to tap into any of the stories I’m currently in the midst of. I would, however, be interested in seeing if I can pull the two facets of this blog together and ‘illustrate’ the 50k words with photography. It would help keep me motivated, possibly inspire a section, and may even keep people from avoiding this page for a full month if massive quantities of text is not their style.

Wish me luck. One month until November, and Nanowrimo.

Make them Smile

Last week we skipped the pictures to talk about a different part of the palette. Prior to that, I promised we would go over smiles.

Smiles are very important in an image. They're not always necessary, but always important. Maybe I should say that people's expressions are always important. The presence, or absence, of a smile can tell a lot about a situation. Sometimes a smile would seem horribly out of place - or even horrific. Other times, the absence of a smile makes the image look bland, or dull, just as you would feel if you were in that situation with the subjects and no smiles were to be found.

Photographers, in order to get the right smile from their subject, often have to resort to tactics used by other professions that thrive on smiles. A photographer can suddenly morph into a clown, or a comedian, or a suave politician trying to talk someone into reluctantly smiling despite themselves. Sometimes, though, this transformation is not an option. In candid images, for example, you don't want the people's attention on you. Also, in crowds, it may simply not be possible to get everyone in the frame to smile.

Nevertheless, if you're showing a portrait of people at an event, you'd like to capture a moment where they are having fun.


Here is an example of some people watching a parade. You have a few different expressions, here. The man in the foreground seems to be smiling almost reluctantly. He's having fun, almost like something has unexpectedly amused him despite the frown lines and wrinkles that may belie a somewhat dour attitude. The woman beside him has the tight-lipped smile of someone uncomfortable with the expression. Maybe she's self-conscious about her teeth, or maybe she just really hates the photographer. Behind them are more grins of people watching the parade, and even the fellow walking by seems to be chuckling to himself. The picture is full of life, and of different stories, but the sum of the parts is that people are having fun. This is a place you would want to be, and it is an even that can make anyone grin.

This is the portrait you would like to hand the event organizer, or someone possibly interested in hosting a similar event. The image could be what convinces them that a parade is just the thing they need to bring some life to their town. It is good advertising,and it tells a good story.

Like most advertising, this image is a lie. I used the same techniques we've been talking about: blur, smudge clone-stamp, and even some copy-pasting. I took more time, about 20 minutes, and worked in closer detail. It is my hope that you cannot immediately tell what artwork I did to the image. Comparing a before-and-after, though, would show what things required my attention.



Here is the original photograph of these people as they watch the parade.


A photographer, a comedian, and even a politician can convince people to smile.

Me? I can make them smile.

In Media Res - In the Middle of Things

No pictures, this week. Instead, we’re going to talk about another aspect of the palette of pixels. Words themselves paint a picture, and while some would say it takes a thousand words to make a picture, I would beg to differ. You just have to know how to use the different tools.

One tool used by the word-artist is something called “In media res”. It’s a term from Horace’s “The Poetic Arts”, and it’s part of his description of an ideal poet.

“Nor does he begin the Trojan War from the double egg,
But always he hurries to the action, and snatches the listener into the middle of things…”

(Double egg being a reference to the egg-with-two-yolks laid by Leda, Helen’s mother, after her run-in with Zeus. Yes, Greek myths are weirder than we were told in grade-school.)

The encyclopedia describes the technique like this:

In medias res, also medias in res (Latin for "into the middle of things") is a literary and artistic technique where the narrative starts in the middle of the story instead of from its beginning (ab ovo or ab initio). The characters, setting, and conflict are often introduced through a series of flashbacks or through characters relating past events to each other. Probably originating from an oral tradition, the technique is a convention of epic poetry, one of the earliest and most prominent examples in Western literature being Homer's Odyssey and Iliad. Other folk epics beginning in medias res include the Portuguese The Lusiads, the Spanish Cantar de Mio Cid, Germany's Nibelungenlied (The Song of the Nibelungs), the Indian Mahābhārata, and the Finnish Kalevala. Virgil's Aeneid began the tradition in literature of imitating Homer, continued in Torquato Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered, John Milton's Paradise Lost and Inferno from Dante's Divine Comedy.


Like with the Indiana Jones series, where you meet Indy right in the middle of a small, introductory adventure, this device has been used over and over again because of its effectiveness. The audience has no time to decide if they like this or that character, or to be put to sleep by some long and boring struggle to get to the adventure. War movies rarely begin with our hero getting suited up to head off to boot camp, or in Horace’s example, being born. That’s 16 years of prologue the audience now has to get through, before the hero even thinks about joining this conflict.

This technique has its ups and downs, however, and cannot be used simply because it lends itself to a quick and easy hook. Inevitably, the storyteller must turn around and explain this background. Flashbacks work for this, but can be tricky. Dialogue is an excellent tool, where two characters discuss or explain something that has happened previously, outside the context of the story. You must always be careful, though, of telling, rather than showing, events that are important to your tale. After all, your characters will be telling the events from their own perspective. Even if they tell it exactly as it happened, a discerning audience will take this conversation with a grain of salt and may have their doubts about the veracity of your background story.

These flashbacks, whether true flashbacks, or dialogue, or some other device to show a past event, must be used with care. Each one has the threat of overtaking the real story you’re trying to tell, and it can be jarring for the audience to go back and forth. They very well may lose track of which time is ‘now’, and which has already happened. Details that you want them to remember may be lost in the time you’ve taken to explain a history lesson. Be prepared to remind your audience about important facts when you come back from these flashbacks, and emphasize what is important now, as opposed to what was the focus then.

The most important thing to remember is that ‘in media res’ is a technique to begin a story. It should not dictate anything else about your story, and once you’re past the first few paragraphs and deep into the action, your audience should be given enough information that they be able to forget that they were dumped into this tale in the middle of things.

Restoring a Portrait

It can be a lot of fun making sure your digital photographs look pristine and clear of intruding tourists. Photographs that tell a reliable story can capture a moment for a long time. Did you know that modern ink used in home printers is actually designed for archive use? Tests have shown that desktop printed documents are capable of surviving over 200 years. That’s a long time for you to be keeping pictures of Scruffy the dog, still wet from his first bath.

Some images, however, are priceless. They’re not printed on modern acid-free paper, using this state-of-the-art ink that makes us glad we’re not running our cars on anything made by Lexmark. These photographs are often of our own ancestors, the portrait surviving only because it has been behind glass for years, or was tucked into the attic for a couple generations, or sheer luck. Sometimes luck isn’t enough and time takes its toll despite our best efforts.


This is another image I found on the internet. There is an amazing amount of old photographs that have been scanned and uploaded onto the world wide web, and many of them are in similar condition to this. Age spots, mildew, water damage, creasing, wrinkles, and simply the changes in environment making the ink peel and flake off – many things can cause these minor bits of damage that grow to ruin the entire image. Soon, the portrait becomes unrecognizable and it goes from priceless to worthless. This effect is tragic, but correctable.

It used to be, before digital technology, that a skilled artisan needed to step in and take the original photograph to a laboratory. There, under a microscope or multiple magnifying glasses, the artist would carefully paint, cut, paste, and eventually repair the marred surface of the image. It was a painstaking process, not least of all because the artist was working with the original piece. If anything should happen, the photograph is gone, and is irreplaceable.

Nowadays, with scanners and other digital-capture devices (even your camera!), you can have something to work with and leave the precious original alone. To mimic the hard work performed by the artist mentioned previously, you simply need to use the methods I mentioned in the beach scene. You cannot erase the damaged sections, but you can take pixels from another section and paint over the flaw. Taking your time and envisioning what result you want will allow you to gradually restore the portrait to its prior glory. With the right training and a lot more time devoted to the project, it is even possible to improve on the original and clear up errors inherent in old photography – even adding color to a black-and-white portrait!

Here is the result of a few minutes’ work on this piece I found.


If you did not know it was originally damaged, it should be difficult to tell that anything has been done to the image. It is still very soft-focused, the colors are all the same, and lines that are supposed to be continuous do follow from one point to another without apparent disruption.

Just for comparison sake, here are the two images side-by-side.


Now if only we could make her smile…

We can. We’ll do that next week.

Editing digicam images (continued)

The art of editing a digicam picture requires the proper tools, a bit of patience, and some clue what you’d like to see as the final product. These things actually help with any digital photograph, but most professional photographers want to get as perfect a picture as possible with the original snap of the shutter. For us regular folks, we’re more likely to have a digicam and all the troubles that come with it.

With a dSLR, you start with a massive image, lots of detail, and a resolution high enough that real artwork can be done down to the size of a pixel. Wrinkles vanish, hairlines are filled in, blemishes fade away, and pounds can melt into a trim waistline. While possible with what a digicam offers, the artwork is much more difficult and often impossible to fully hide.

Instead of such detailed artwork, we’re going to look at a couple of things that can be quickly and easily done with a digicam’s output. Since I no longer live near a beach, I’m going to have to borrow this image I found on the internet of Trinidad. A quick google search of “beach” landed me this beautiful shot. While I don’t know for certain what camera was used, the compressed jpeg image is the equivalent of a digicam’s shot.

The tool I’ll use is paint.net (found here), I have a little bit of patience, and what I’d like to see for my final product is a beach with those swimmers out in the water. The young lady on the cell phone is not important to me, so she has to go. Since I can not pluck her out of the image and expect to see the beach that is in front of her, we have to use a bit of digital magic. With a two dimensional image like this, it’s important to remember that, as far as we’re concerned here, there IS no beach directly in front of her. The sand stops at her hip, and starts again on the other side of her hand. Erasing her is worthless, because we’d be left with a vacant area. How, then, would we remove her from the image? To be technically accurate, we cannot. However, we can cover her up.

Sand is wonderful for this, because the very nature of its randomness suits it to be picked up and moved around from one place to another without being obvious. We see the chaotic texture and just accept it without paying too much attention to duplicated ripples. However, the human eye is designed to see patterns, so if you are not careful, it will suddenly become very obvious that something has been done to your image. Water, too, has enough randomness that you can copy its texture across a field and keep it believable.

The key is to make it believable. Not perfect. Ideally, you simply want your viewer to not pay attention to that area, thinking there is nothing important there. If you make it too obvious that artwork has been done, then it will become such a distraction that it may have been better to have left well enough alone. If you are able to mask your work well enough, the illusion will be sufficient for your viewer to simply accept what you are showing them as a straightforward image, revealing only the story you want to tell.

To cover this woman up, I’m going to use the most basic tool available. I’m going to select a square of sand, copy it, then paste it over her. Then I’ll select more sand from a different area, and past that over an edge. I continued doing this, attempting to capture textures (like the streaks of wet sand) that will flow from one block to another and create the illusion of continuity. I’ll take a bit of water, include the sliver of a wave, and do the same for the portion of the woman that is protruding out into the ocean. I’m taking big lumps of pixels and covering her up, just like you would with paint.

And this is the result. The woman is gone, hidden behind big squares of sand and water. Except it is very obvious that there are big squares of sand and water, now. It’s probably worse than when we started, because instead of my viewers simply dismissing the woman as a distracting but unimportant part of the image, they are now focused on that spot and wondering what is wrong with the image. Or their eyes.

While I could go back in and, taking much smaller squares of sand and try to break up the obvious lines, that would be far too much work. Also, any viewer looking close enough would still see the regularity of lines and differences in shade and the effect would be the same.

Let’s start over with a different tool. This one does the same thing that I had been doing, picking up pixels and copying them into another area, but it uses a softer approach more likely to blend and fade into the surrounding textures. This is the tool I’d use in Photoshop as well, but paint.NET is free! While not quite as particular or adjustable as the Photoshop tool, this one will do perfectly fine for our digicam-based masterpiece. This tool is called the Clone Stamp.

I’m going to open the original image up again, and I’m going to select the Clone Stamp tool. Bumping my brush size up to a whopping 8, I’ll then ‘anchor’ the tool over beside her in the sand. Hold the control key and click some sand beside her leg to ‘stamp’ the tool, or anchor it, and then release the control key and begin painting over her legs to ‘paste’ the pixels. You’ll see the small circle of your anchor moving in relation to where you are painting, showing you what pixels you are picking up and copying. Just like painting, you’ll have to pick up more ‘paint’ every once in a while to make sure you’re not making your work too obvious. You’ll have to select a new patch of sand and copy it across, making sure to carry the textures over as believably as possible. A lot of control-click, then paint a few pixels, and then select more pixels, and paint with them.

The portion of her that protrudes into the water (mostly her head) requires even closer detail. You’ll have to zoom in rather close in order to make sure your lines match. You want to make sure to especially capture that section where sand meets water and continue that line from one side of her head to the other.

At this point you may be noticing that the colors are very different from one side of her to the other. The left is a bit brighter than the right. Trying to bring them together makes the difference even more obvious. While paint.NET does not have a ‘smudge’ or ‘blend’ tool as other programs might, it still allows you to use these effects up in the ‘effects’ toolbar. Select a small area where the colors are very different, but the texture is the same. For instance, the area in the water between the two waves. The water is the same blue (if lighter/darker), but the waves are an obvious white that you want to remain crisp. When you have the proper area selected, choose a blur effect. I used the ‘motion blur’ effect in order to sweep the light and dark water together. Zoomed in this close, it looks messy, but when you zoom out, the effect is minimal enough that the viewer’s eye will likely be fooled into thinking the water fades from light to dark in an even way.

This picture is a result of these steps. Looking at that area, you can still see the places I cloned, and possibly a few places where I blurred two areas together. To get a better effect will require more time, especially zoomed in very closely to see the details you want to make less obvious.


This image was taken with the digicam I previously used for the comparison of pink roses. This is an older image, taken during a summer that allowed for more vibrant roses. You can see that the digicam has no trouble focusing on the big, vibrant blooms, and leaving the house and fence to blur into the background. However, it does not give the narrow depth of field that we saw from the D60. To mimic that effect, we’ll use one of the tools we used for the beach image above. We are going to blur some of the pixels to make them look more out of focus. There are two ways to do this.

One way is to select the roses in the foreground (don’t forget the leaves that are at the same distance), copy them into a new layer, and then blur the entire image behind them. Select the roses using the Magic Wand tool (set at 40% tolerance) and use the ctrl-key to select additional patches of pixels. Use your Undo option if you accidentally select more than the subject you want to keep in focus. The other way, the one I chose, is to select the roses (again using the Magic Wand tool), and then reverse our selection (Edit-Reverse Selection) and copy everything except the roses into a new layer. Putting that layer on top of the roses, I deselected it, and used Gaussian Blur set to 10. This allows a little bit of overlap for the blurred pixels to cover the edges of the roses. Doing it the other way would cause a rather sharp edge that makes it look like the roses were cut outs from a different image and out of place in this scene.

This is the result. It isn’t exactly what a dSLR would give you, but it is closer. Just like with the beach image, more effort and more time spent perfecting the edges and making sure the selections were exact would allow for an even more effective illusion of a narrow focus. Nevertheless, 10 minutes and knowing what you are aiming for, and you have the soft, dreamy look with a specific subject that is still crisp but now stands out more from its background.

Somehow, crisp roses look a lot better than they sound.

D60 vs C330 Sensors

I’ve threatened a few times that there was more to tell about the differences between a dSLR and a digicam. There is a lot of information out there, with a lot of websites doing their reviews and trying to help the most people make the most informed decision when preparing to buy a new camera. Those websites get incredibly vague, mostly because there are so many dSLRs, so many digicams, and so many differences among them.

We’re going to focus on two cameras.

Our dSLR is the Nikon D60. The digicam is the Kodak Easyshare C330.

To use a bit of a photography metaphor, we’re going to zoom in a bit closer and focus on the sensors used in these two machines. This is the element that truly differentiates the end product.

The D60 uses a sensor that has, effectively, 10.2 million pixels. That’s what you see on the side of the camera as “10.2 MP” or megapixels. This is the number that most people look at when buying a camera, and is the number most advertisers push as hard as they can. This is the resolution, or how large your images can be printed. You may have seen digicams sporting pretty high number megapixels, too.

Our digicam, the C330, only has 4 megapixels. But you saw the images on the previous post – they are not poor images at all. On a website, or in a newspaper, or even printed up to a 5x7 size, you may be hard-pressed to see the difference in most digicams and dSLRs.

10.2 million pixels, and 4 million pixels – there’s a big difference there. The gap is even wider than these numbers show, however. You see, the D60 has a sensor that is 23.6 by 15.8 mm. That doesn’t mean much until you realize that the C330 has a sensor that is 5.76 x 4.29 mm.

I’m not great at math, so I understand if you’re looking at these numbers and wondering what my point is. Let’s reduce the number of numbers. The C330 has 24.7 mm. The D60 has 372.88. That’s a big difference in size. Here is an image comparison of different sensors from wikipedia so you can get a visual. Compare the 370 mm2 to the 25mm2, both on the right side of the image.

It may seem logical that the larger sensor would mean that the D60 can fit more pixels on the surface, but remember that many digicams are moving upwards of 8mp or higher as well. They are still using the 25mm2 sensor. The D60 not only fits more pixels onto the sensor, but the pixels are able to be larger, which allows them to accept more light, thereby getting a clearer picture with less noise even in darker situations. This higher level of detail means that many things are possible with the D60 that the C330 cannot do, due to risking far worse signal-to-noise ratios that would make the picture worthless. The higher megapixel counts in the digicams actually exacerbate this problem by walking that fine line of signal-to-noise, which means the flash and other light-adjusting parameters must be automatically adjusted to give as much light to those pixels as possible. In daylight, or with bright indoor lights, these 8+ megapixel digicams perform exceptionally well. Beyond that, the results are grainy and can look very soft-focus.

Further Reading:
CBS News
Wikipedia
Luminous Landscape
NY Institute of Photography

Next week - more about editing your images.

Post Production

Being a Palette of Pixels, the art form goes far beyond the initial capture. I like to think of that original snapshot, portrait, photograph, as being a raw, frozen instant. It is the real world, caught and framed in such a way as to give your viewers a narrow and focused image or thought. On some level, it is telling a story.

That's why I love the art form.

"A picture is worth a thousand words," they say. But sometimes there's a lot of extraneous words involved that don't contribute to your story. Just like with a written tale, you could leave it as the raw original, but it is often better to look back over what you've captured and start trimming down the excess. Get rid of any distracting elements that don't add to what you're trying to say. You have to know what is important, and what is telling some side story that isn't vital. Also, perfect your language. Make it fit exactly what you're trying to do. Word choice, sentence structure, even punctuation is of utmost importance. After you're done, no one will see how much work you put into making your story succinct, fluid, and streamlined. That's the idea, though. Your brush strokes can be invisible, so long as the story is what you want to tell.

I suppose it counts as a metaphor when I move back and forth between the imagery of a novel and a photograph. Nevertheless, the end result is the same. A good photograph does not have to be a finished product.



Ah, summer break on the beach. Friends hanging out with the other tourists, a bright blue sky and a big golden sun directly overhead. Thoughts of school are far away, and you hop out of the water for a second so your friend can snap a photo before you go in for lunch at the hotel. A perfect shot to remember the moment!

The photograph is 'complete'. Everything's in frame. You've got Scooter, there, and Jessica, names I made up JUST NOW, and they look happy and content. They're looking out of a portrait at their future selves. Their future selves are looking at the portrait going "Aw, we were so young." Or something. And then they send it off to mom, and mom goes "Aw, they're so cute!" And they send it off to their friends in Canada, and they go "Aw, it looks so warm!" And they set the photograph in a cute little frame on their coffee table, and the neighbors come over and see it. And their neighbors go "Aw, who are those people back there?"

Imagine the sound of a record player scratching and the cozy music abruptly ending.

"What? What people? Oh. Um. Other tourists, I guess."

"And how come the ocean looks tilted?"

"Well, we were on the sand, so I guess the camera wasn't straight."

"And why's your hair in your face?"

"Well I just got out of the water."

"Scooter was sucking it in a bit, wasn't he? Look at the -"

"IT IS JUST A PICTURE, STOP IT."

Why should it be just a picture? Trim down your story so only the elements you intend to share are carried across. Don't distract with excess details. Those tourists have their own story. The awesome waves and the way the water felt, you can tell that story without this portrait. Scooter really needed to relax, but he was nervous and you guys had just met. He wanted to look good!

Brush up the sand, smooth out the hair, tilt the image, lose some of those shadows, and offer Scooter the tummy tuck he was trying to do himself...




Now your story is coming through a bit clearer.

Digicam vs dSLR (The Rose and Bowl)

The last post was a lot of technical talk about mirrors, lenses, and the differences between how you build the two types of cameras. Sorry if it got to be a bit much, but there's a reason I don't build these contraptions. That stuff is complicated even to me, and I've seen mechanical diagrams.

Today's comparison won't have much of anything to do with the lenses or mirrors involved in the cameras, nor where the viewfinder is located on the body of the camera. The subject is a small cluster if pink roses, taken from about 3 or 4 feet away, using all the default "Auto" settings on both a Kodak Easyshare 4.1 Megapixel digicam, and a Nikon D60 10.2 Megapixel dSLR. We're going to ignore the technical stuff like lens size, exposure rating, flash speed, and all that. Maybe next week we'll revisit these images and poke at all the numbers!

First off, let's introduce our contenders.

This image was taken with the digicam. It's got nice, warm colors, good clarity, and a broad depth of field.

It required me to just turn the camera on, let the motor whir and the lens extend from the body, and I shot the image while looking at the LCD view screen on the back. No squinting and peering through a tiny peep hole, and no settings to worry about. Point, shoot, and you can tell exactly what I'm looking at. The roses are pink, the leaves are green, and even the bird bath is looking kind of spiffy (if a bit dry...)


This next image has been reduced down to the exact same pixel width. It's not as tall, though, because the dimensions of the sensors are different. I'll talk about sensors another time. Think of this camera as "wide screen" like movies at the theater, different from the ones on television. I was standing in exactly the same spot as for the previous image, and of the same rose cluster.

This image is slightly cooler (that means it has more blue to it), but it's still pleasing to the eye. The roses are still pink, and the leaves are still green. Even the birdbath still looks rustic and quaint, and the makers would be pleased to know that the soft plastic looks very much like a copper basin. But if you look at that empty bird bath, you may notice a key difference between the two images. It's a difference that makes the roses in the second image 'pop' out of the background and become more noticeable.



Look at this mess! What a horribly blurry image! You can barely tell what this is, and you probably only guessed that it's the top of the bird bath because you've been looking at the above pictures. This is ridiculous, and would never pass as a standalone picture. The gaps in the side are smeared together in a single, smooth blur, and you can forget telling any detail about the tree in the background. You can't even tell if there is water in the bird bath, or if that's just a smeared reflection of the surface itself. It is so out of focus, you have to wonder what the photographer was looking at.


Well that's a little better. After all, now we can see the holes along the side of the basin, you can be relatively sure that the bowl is empty, and there's even evidence of texture and variations in color in those places where the sunlight hasn't blown out all detail. You could believe that the photographer was pretty interested in this part of the image, and he wanted you to pay some attention to it.

Except that's all wrong. This is supposed to be the background. You want this sort of detail faded out and unimportant, so it doesn't distract from your main subject. If you have too much detail in the background, then you start losing that direction, and it starts to become confusing for your viewers when they try and find what it is they are supposed to be focusing on.

Let's zoom in on the aspect that we do want to focus on.


This is from the dSLR. This is sized to 100%, meaning that the rest of the image would be huge if it tried to fit on your screen. Go ahead and look at that image up there at the top of the page and imagine those little pink roses in the center were this large, and you have it.

Look at the way the detail is sharp and crisp on the roses - and then notice the fact that everything in the background is just gone. There's no chance you can tell what's back there, only that it is mottled green. That's good! That means your viewers are only seeing those flowers and going "Wow, that drought is tough on them!" Well, hopefully they're saying "Wow!" about the pretty pink flowers, too. But they do look kind of rough...


And here we have the image from the digicam, also 100%, so you can go ahead and compare the full image from way above and see how large this image would be. It would also make for a pretty huge picture if you blew it up full-size. Not quite as large as the SLR, but it's not a bad camera at all. But see how you can see the background? You can tell there's a fence, there's some leaves, probably that there's some grassless dirt further on. It's a very busy background.

You'll also notice there's some 'noise' in this image at this size. There are places where the fact that the image was digital becomes very noticeable. Looking close, you'll see places where colors seem to blend into square patches. These are called 'artifacts' and they are the bane of any person who has to work with digital imagery. It's similar, in ways, to the graininess of old film photography, but as you can see, it doesn't have the classic appeal of a grainy .35 mm shot. The places where the digicam become 'blurry' tend more towards the 'smeared' look a lot more than the way the SLR creates a consistent 'soft focus' effect.

The digicam proves once again why and how it is excellent for family shots, quick photos with the kids, and a snapshot of the family garden to email to family far away. But if you want something more than that, with a bit more personality and a lot more potential for art, well...

You'll have to break through that brick wall.

digicam vs dSLR

The dSLR actually debuted in 1986, in the form of a prototype analog electronic still SLR camera from Nikon. Kodak took the concept a step further, and in 1991, released the first commercially viable dSRL built from a modified Nikon body, rebuilt drive unit, and a storage unit that was connected by a cable to the rest of the body. It had 1.3 megapixels and cost …$30,000.

Since then, the race has been on for companies and design teams to both streamline and bulk up these ‘next generation cameras’. For people that are less familiar with photography, this concept of a $30,000 camera seems a little ridiculous. Time to look at the guts of these things and show the difference between a digital point-and-shoot camera (digicam) and a full-sized digital Single Lens Reflex camera (dSLR).

For a digicam, the viewfinder is just this extra lens on top of the camera. It’s good for framing or composing an image, but it can be as much as an inch away from the lens – and the lens is what will be taking the picture. The best way to make absolutely sure that you are seeing what picture will be taken, is to use the LCD screen on the back of the digicam. This screen takes its reading directly from the lens itself, so there is no offset. When you snap the picture, you can be looking at either the screen, or through the viewfinder, and the camera will take the shot, exposing the ‘film’ (actually a sensor, in the case of digital cameras), and storing the image all without interrupting your sight.

For a SLR, well. It’s a long process for the light to get to that sensor.

The light passes through the lens assembly, is reflected into the pentaprism by the reflex mirror (which must be at an exact 45 degree angle), and is projected on the matte focusing screen. A condensing lens, and internal reflections in the roof pentaprism, projects the image through the eyepiece to the photographer's eye. When an image is photographed, the mirror swings upwards (suddenly making the viewfinder useless for a split second), the focal-plane shutter opens, and the image is projected and captured on the sensor, after which actions, the shutter closes, the mirror returns to a critical 45 degree angle (making the viewfinder functional again), and the diaphragm reopens and the built-in drive mechanism retensions the shutter for the next exposure.

Whew.

Did you catch the key differences? Through a series of mirrors and lenses, you are looking into the viewfinder, but out the lens. When you press the button, mirrors and lenses realign for a split second to allow the sensor to see what you were looking at, and then switch back again.

This key difference is how photographers make certain they have the right view of their subjects’ eyes. A tiny variation, where the person may be looking too high, or past the photographer, may not seem a big deal – but the human eye would recognize it in the resulting image, and can make for some amusing looking people with crossed eyes. The SLR format also allows for extremely close-up imagery, called macro photography, that would be much more difficult with a camera that required you to use a viewfinder a full inch away from the lens. You’re going to miss that ladybug by a mile if you think you’re looking right at it, but the lens is pointing beside it at the leaf.

A bit of a joke, there.

The camera shoots, leaves, and you missed it.

…Okay, that was a stretch. Promise I’ll work on it.

File Size - Resolution - Image Quality

Like the other tips, this may be one that earns a “Duh” from those that know the concept, but it’s actually rather confusing for people who are new to the scene.

File size. Image quality. Resolution.

Different cameras focus (haha) different aspects of this idea, but it comes down to the same thing. How many pictures can you fit on the memory space allotted? You may be using the grandest memory card in the world, or the internal memory that came with the camera. Either way, it’s a finite amount of space, and the quality of each image you capture will determine how many more like it you can fit into that space.

The higher the resolution, the larger the file size will be. 800x600 right on up to some crazy numbers. I can’t keep up with what point-and-shoots are capable of, and some seem to be overreaching their grasp. Ever hear that phrase? It’s the idea that your fingers can reach the object, but you can’t reach far enough to actually grab it. That’s what happens when a point-and-shoot camera starts throwing out big number megapixels and high resolutions at you. You will then start to see a divergence of file size, image size, and actual image quality. Your best bet is to always take a few shots, and then see how they look in whatever medium you’re going to be using them. Email, webpages, printing – all three will require different levels of file size, image quality, and resolution.

To get the most pictures onto your camera at one time, you want to set the resolution, file size, or image quality way down. On a typical memory card, purchased for dirt cheap at walmart, this will probably net you 300 images or more. That is a lot of point-and-shooting. 24 exposures for a roll of film, or a disposable camera, versus 300+ images on your digital? Suddenly you should be more concerned about your battery life than whether you have room for more pictures. But the end result is that these images are going to find a limited range of uses. Printing them will be limited to wallet sized, or perhaps larger if you’re going to be alright with pixilation, fuzziness, and maybe some digital ‘artifacts’ on the image (those are the big blocky squares that look like varying degrees of focus). On the other hand, webpages and email work much better with small file sizes – whatever the size the image appears on the screen, if it is only 24kilobytes, then a 24.4bp modem will download it in one second. Most people these days seem to be on a broadband internet of one sort or another, so it’s easy for people to go nuts with file size. But why kill the load-time on a webpage or clog up someone’s email when 24-50kb is plenty for them to see the image on their little monitor? They’re not going to be framing it. They’re not going to be viewing it from across the room. Despite what our parents told us about sitting too close to the television, most of us now spend over 8 hours a day sitting within 2 feet of these screens. 2-3 inches tall is more than enough for those images.

Bumping up the resolution or image quality will also cause the file size to soar. Only do this if you intend on editing the image or printing it for display. And by ‘display’, please recognize that an 8x10 portrait may be your best of best option from a point-and-shoot camera. There’s a reason that 30x40 over-the-sofa family portraits are taken by a professional photographer’s camera. He paid the money to make sure that camera has a clear shot of that sparkle in gramma’s eye, even when gramma’s eye is printed larger than life. Of course, he’s going to make sure you pay for that, too.

That’s why you’re putting the sparkle in gramma’s eye with a wallet-sized picture of her grandkids from your point-and-shoot, isn’t it?

Steadying your Point-and-Shoot

The D60 came in and it is looking quite pretty. Functionality is good, and the results have been … satisfactory. More on that when I run out of other things.

Last time, I talked about how to trick a point-and-shoot camera into focusing on the right element in view. This time I’m going to give you a few pointers on how to get the best clarity from that shot.

When a picture is not well focused, there are a few reasons why this might be the case. It could be that the camera itself was focused on the wrong thing; ie: that leaf in the foreground as opposed to your real subject further on. It could also be that the subject was in motion, smearing the image across a clear background. It may even be that the image was too dark, and the camera kept the shutter open too long in an attempt to get enough light. Finally, YOU might have moved.

We’ve already covered a few ways you can trick a camera out of doing the first hiccup. The second is not something that is easily controlled. If we are talking about a car going by, then the solution is to somehow move your camera with the vehicle so that it is the background that blurs but the car stays crisp. But if you’re taking pictures of a group of children and they are not, as children never seem to, holding completely still, then you will get smear-blur. There’s no single element for you to move your camera with in order to clarify it, and you’d never be able to keep up with the randomness anyway.

The second, third, and fourth hiccup are actually the same problem. The shutter is open for a set length of time, letting the sensor ‘see’ the image, and then the shutter closes again when enough light has passed through. Sometimes there is plenty of light, but the shutter is simply too slow to completely avoid smear-blur. From the time it opens to the time it closes, your subject has moved, even when the shutter is moving as fast as it can. In dark settings, the automatic camera will keep the shutter open longer in order to keep you from having a flat, black image, maybe with a spot of light from a street lamp or something. You are more likely to get a blur during dark times than any other, because the camera is attempting to adjust for this no matter what is moving. When the camera itself moves during the time where the shutter is open, EVERYTHING will smear. Unless you are moving the camera WITH your subject, I mean. But that technique is difficult and it takes a lot of practice to freeze a moving element by moving your camera exactly as it does.

There is not much you can do about your point-and-shoot camera’s shutter speed. You could slow it down, for artsy trick shots (or things in the dark that you know will suddenly get bright, like fireworks). The best you can do is select the automated settings designed for specific situations, like the fireworks setting, sports (for the fastest shutter speed), and various portrait or landscape options.

Since you can’t do very much with the shutter, and you can’t control the movement of your subject, the last thing you can do is reduce the amount of moving that your camera does.

The obvious solution is a tripod. Tripods can be expensive and, really, a point-and-shoot camera looks silly on a 4+ foot set of legs. Many of them have the attachment placement, or a bracket to put the tripod’s grips, but it still looks ridiculous. Smaller tripods are available, around the six inch height, but these are almost always designed specifically for the self-portrait types of shots. If you had a brace that was convenient to set the camera on, you wouldn’t need a tripod.

Which brings us to the next solution: a brace. A park bench, a tree, a wall, a lamp post. Anything that will not move can become a steadying support. Place the side or bottom of the camera directly against the object and then frame your picture. Don’t make the mistake of setting a corner of the camera against the object, or taking up an awkward and uncomfortable pose when using it, or you’ll be back to the same problem. You’ll be wobbling and tottering, even just a little, while thinking you were braced. What you want to do is reduce the amount that your muscles are supporting the camera – muscles are designed as a compensation mechanism. If you were to stand up straight, completely still, you could feel your muscles at the front and back of your ankles working to keep you steady, alternating pulls to compensate for slight motion and winds gravity and whatever else is trying to get you into a prone position. Your bones do not have this problem, so if there is nothing else available for a brace, use your own skeleton. That is to say, if worst comes to worst, sit on your butt and set the camera on your bent knee. Your foot and your butt are working as two legs of a tripod, and your musculature isn’t involved in any way (except to keep your skeleton together, I guess). Instant tripod – sort of. Bi-pod? There IS such a thing as a monopod…

Let’s create a monopod for those people uninterested in sitting on cold, wet grass. Or gravel. Or in the middle of a forest, or at a sporting event. There are plenty of reasons you may not want to put your skeleton to use. Rather than go out and purchase a 4 foot monopod, we’ll instead make use of that screw-hole for another item. A screw. Attach a long thread, maybe of yarn or some other string that will not stretch, to the neck of a screw that will fit into that aperture. Make sure the string is long enough to tie, and then have enough length left over to have about half a foot on the ground. Then screw it into the tripod receptacle and let the string hang from your camera to the ground. Now step on the dangling end of the string. Remember how we mentioned your musculature was a compensation mechanism? Well we are going to force it to compensate for a force that will not move, hopefully keeping your muscles as still as possible. Pull upwards on the camera until there is no slack in the string (keep your foot solid), and now compose your picture with a steady camera, held aloft by your arms which are fighting a consistent pressure of a string pulling down. Instant poor-man’s portable monopod!

As always, do your best to make sure there is plenty of light so the camera is not having to compensate with a slower shutter speed. Don’t rely entirely on the flash, as even at it’s best, flash imagery can look garish. There is no better way to add 5 pounds to a person, while still making them look like a cadaver, than to have a straight-on flash be your only light source.

But at least that picture won’t have any motion blur.

Photography Tricks

There is a wall, when it comes to photography. It’s when your equipment can not perform what you’re trying to ask of it.

Some will say, even with a non-pro soccer ball, Beckham would beat out the average player on the field. However, even Beckham may admit he’s not having much fun on the field if the ball is flat. A child could make do, maybe have some fun, but no one can really accomplish much with it.

So my first step into dSLR is the Nikon D60 and a couple of lenses that came in a kit – hopefully that will get me over the wall, and I can start to expand my knowledge of the craft.

In the meantime, remember that other soccer ball? Can’t do much with it, but it can be a little fun. You have to learn some tricks, too, to get it to do what you want. You have to get creative.

Point-and-shoot cameras have evolved to take a lot of the effort out of photography. They have been given auto focus, light sensors, internal image compression, automatic flash, and more. These tools make it easy for anyone to pick up a camera, point it at the subject, and capture the moment with ease. The picture comes out clear enough and bright enough to email back home to mom.

But sometimes the autofocus will latch onto something you aren’t interested in. Sometimes the light sensor gets confused by shadows. Sometimes the flash is a bit too much. And sometimes that image compression winds up just crushing your image. That’s when you have to start learning some tricks.

Until the new camera comes in, I’ll share some of the tricks I’ve learned from using a 4.1mp Kodak Easyshare digital camera.


First of all, defeating the autofocus.

I’ve enjoyed taking shots of various forested areas nearby. It allows me to discover and share the treasures that are hidden out amongst the trees. In an old town that saw a boom and bust over 50 years ago, there are a lot of treasures tucked down in the shadows. Point-and-shoot cameras, though, were designed for a clear shot of the family or house, and will automatically try to focus on the most obvious element in view. Often, this means your camera is struggling to focus on the tree branch or twig that is dangling down in front of you. You may not even see it, because your attention is on the decrepit house in the woods. But when you get home, load all your images, and inspect your hard day’s work, you’re definitely going to see that twig. In high relief. Maybe there’s a blur in the background that was a house – maybe not even that.

To combat this autofocus feature, you have to know what it’s doing and play along. Depressing the shutter release button half way causes the camera to focus and take a light reading. If you’re lucky enough to be on a shaded road, you can turn to the side and point your camera down the lane to approximately the distance between yourself and the subject you’re actually going to shoot. Let’s say the house is 20 yards into the woods. Let the camera focus on the road about 20 yards away. Keeping the shutter release halfway down, turn back to the house and snap the picture. Voila, the camera should ignore the limb, twig, leaf, or anything else that may be in the way. After all, it’s already focused in and set to take the picture.

Pro-tip. Remember that, while autofocusing, it is also taking a light reading. If your road is well-lit, and the house in the woods is shaded, your camera will be trying to adjust for the bright road and you will lose the house in darkness. You may try shielding the light sensor on your camera with your hand to reduce the amount of light hitting it, but suddenly you’re changing this trick from “Not an exact science” to “A shot in the dark.”

And those pictures rarely come out right.

Definitions

Main Entry: pal·ette
Pronunciation: \ˈpa-lət\
Function: noun
Etymology: French, from Middle French, diminutive of pale spade, from Latin pala; probably akin to Latin pangere to fix — more at pact
Date: 1622
1: a thin oval or rectangular board or tablet that a painter holds and mixes pigments on
2 a: the set of colors put on the palette b (1): a particular range, quality, or use of color (2): a comparable range, quality, or use of available elements (a rich palette of tones and timbres) (a palette of flavors)



Main Entry: pix·el
Pronunciation: \ˈpik-səl, -ˌsel\
Function: noun
Etymology: pix + element
Date: 1969
1 : any of the small discrete elements that together constitute an image (as on a television or computer screen)