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.
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
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.
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.
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
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.
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
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.
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.
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
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.
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.
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
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.
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.
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
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.
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.
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