Camera's in the shop

Currently, A1 Camera Repair in downtown Louisville has my camera in order to do a full-on cleaning of the lens, mirror, and sensor. $45 and 3-5 day turnaround. I'm sure that's fairly typical for someone to do it right (after my previous attempts at cleaning it myself, I discovered that was not what I was doing), but it seems a little steep after Peace Camera in Raleigh offered to do it for free.

Still, "free" and "have to drive 10 hours to get there" put together actually is not free in the strictest of senses.

I meant to actually show you an image of the dust and particles all over the corner of a photograph, in order to illustrate just how bad things were getting. However, since I was fighting with the lens and taking some rather particular shots in order to avoid getting any residuals, I managed not to capture any that clearly showed the problem. I confess, I was not thinking about the blog when I was taking the shots, or I would have taken a photo of some blank white wall or something. As it was, I succeeded in avoiding having dust obviously speckling the photographs I took, and failed in acquiring any examples for you.

"This was a triumph."

At any rate, some of my current experiments with the automated features of PhotoshopCS4 involve panoramas. Rather than take a really large photograph, I am able to take multiple shots of a scene and then stitch them together in post. I am learning what to do and what not to do, in order to get the results I like. Things to remember: turn off auto focus, don't use a wide-angle lens, definitely do not zoom in and out. These things together will cause the stitching to mis-match and make it very obvious that there were multiple images.

Hopefully the formatting of this post will make sense. I apologize to two groups of people for this: the ones that have me on their RSS feed readers and can't see the image, and the people on dial-up. Because I think it's a rather large image (or was when I uploaded it. I'm still not entirely sure what Blogger/Google/Picassa do to images when I upload them) and will take a while for you to load it.

Click the image to see the photograph bigger and clearer. The dusky lines crossing it at different points are the result of an artistic shutter speed in light that was getting too dark for it. It makes for an appealing vignette in individual images. When stitched together, you get this.

Addendum:
Speaking of RSS Feeds, keep up with me on Twitter for a slightly more up-to-date update on what I'm doing around town. I will sometimes announce trips to various places, and if you'd like a moment in the spotlight you may wind up as the subject of an impromptu photoshoot. I'll also be announcing next month's sale for my website. Just go to Twitter and look up tlamkinjr .

End of Summer

It's been another few months of radio silence, but a lot has changed in the meantime. While one of our party is now gainfully employed, the other has taken a career change and even moved. Though looking for new work, and limited to a laptop after burning up the work-horse desktop computer, I haven't slowed down my graphical pursuits at all. The paint on this palette hasn't dried yet. Speaking of which...

I haven't forgotten about the camera cleaning experiment. In fact, I've come back to you with some results!

Blowing on the lens yourself is always a bad idea, but I have found that many shops will suggest you try gently hitting the lens surface with a shot from the canned air they sell in many shops like Staples and even Wal-Mart. Stores specifically catering to the tech-savvy demographic will have more variety for you to choose from, and probably higher quality compressed air. Something to keep mindful of, no matter which brand you choose, is the law of thermodynamics. No, I'm not going to quote them, but just realize that this is compressed air that is suddenly being un-compressed as it comes out of the can. The can will get cold as you continue holding down the release, and there is the potential that the air will remain liquid if you spray for too long or at an odd angle. Now you may have gotten rid of the dust, but there is spots of chemical spray on your lens.

Those same shops will offer you a chamois ("shammy" for the uninitiated) cloth to brush off the larger dust particles. Be very careful to keep this cloth clean, because any dust or grit on the cloth could mean scratches on your lens the next time you brush it. Better to use a long-bristled (very SOFT) brush. This is still a potential hazard, as anything could be between the bristles just waiting to alight on the lens.

The kits - I confess, I never did trust the kits enough to try them on my camera or lenses.

This should amuse, though, to make up for it. After trying out these different methods to remove a couple of dust spots, I am now going to go with the final, fool-proof solution. I am going to look for a camera repair shop, tomorrow, that offers professional cleaning to both the mirrors and the lens.

How do you think I know the negative sides of those other methods? Yeah, woops. Learn from my mistakes!

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In other news, the photography bug has really grabbed me and I hope to make a career of it. If I cannot, I will do what I can to assist another photographer while I soak up all the knowledge and experience I can possibly garner. This new city is gorgeous and lends itself to countless possibilities for me to experiment and practice various techniques.

Feel free to see some of the pieces I've finished recently on my new gallery.

Long time no see!

No, the government hasn't bought us out in the middle of this economic crisis. Being a free service and a purely academic blog, we don't have anything that our new administration would want. No bailout money for this Palette of Pixels!

The other half of the staff has been wrapped up in new employment responsibilities, keeping her from making her debut post, so my attempt to entice her into saying something to you by going silent for months has failed miserably.

The weather has turned wonderful, and if the thunderstorms would stop bypassing my ridge, I would love to share some of the beautiful images of clouds that are possible. First, though, I'll need to explore how to properly clean a dSLR camera when pine, oak, and maple pollen finally work their way onto one of the lenses. It may be on the mirror, too, which would be even more annoying.

Unlike a regular mirror, I can't just take Windex to it. I'll need to investigate just how dangerous that Canned Air stuff might be to the delicate lenses. The propellent may be fine for cleaning the insides of electronic equipment, but that chemical may leave a residue on my lenses which would be worse than a spot of dust. I can photoshop that single blot out - but a big smear across the screen would be catastrophic. There are lens cleaning kits, too, but I'm dubious. The advertising for them always comes across as though it were written by the same people currently trying to sell you bucketloads of the new acai berries to make you lose weight like magic. Plus, the kits look really cheap like someone just repackaged a makeup kit. I will have to see, and I will let you know.

Since this is the first post in a while, I'll open the floor to any readers that may browse through the area. Do you guys have any questions, or have you discovered anything new from your respective palettes?

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?

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.

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.

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.