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!

----



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?

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.