Pathways #2a: Michael Frye - Reading Histograms (and using them!)

In my Pathways #2 article on this blog, I spoke about getting better exposures straight out of your camera.  It makes such a huge impact on the visual appeal of a photo to have it properly exposed.  Within that article, I posted an example photo of mine to drive home my point.  This post is related to the one I mentioned above, so I called it "2a".  :-)

The two main tools to achieve better exposure are:  1) having the knowledge of how your camera's metering system works and what lighting situations will fool your camera into over or underexposing a scene, and 2) how to use your camera to correct these situations.  I touched on both points in my article. 

Related to #2 above, the main way to use your camera to understand and correct any given exposure situation is by viewing the histogram and understand what it's telling you about the exposure settings that you've chosen for any given photo that you're trying to take.

To that end, today I read this post by Michael Frye on his blog that drives home the point of getting proper exposure with even better examples than I provided in my article because he includes photos and histograms and explains what they're showing you.

It's a quick and useful read for anyone looking to get better exposures straight out of their camera.  Enjoy!

Welcome, spring! Are you almost here?!

Before the storm...

It's 55 degrees today where I live in New York.  Tomorrow it will probably be over 60!  Very nice, considering the brutal winter we've had this year.  You can go outside in a sweatshirt, the birds are singing, the sun is shining, etc.  All while we still have over two feet of snow on the ground!

I love the photo to the left.  It was taken at dusk out of my garage door after I cleaned up the snow from the start of a big storm.  The light in the sky was heavy and gray, and you could almost feel the storm coming in.  We got pounded that night with over a foot of snow.  I've seen this type of light many times this winter late in the day before overnight storms...

I didn't mind the harsh winter this year.  In my opinion, I don't have much purpose for winter without the beauty and fun of the snow, so bring it on!  :-)

My greeting in front of the garage door, blocked with 20 inches of snow!

That being said, it was a lot of work cleaning it all up!  This winter, I was typically met with a scene like this when I opened up the garage door.  A blocked door with swirling winds and blowing snow.

Of course, I learned the hard way about the new laws in the U.S. that were implemented in 2010 that increased the amount of ethanol in our gas.  Why does this matter to me?  You can't store your power equipment with gas in it during the off seasons anymore.  The new fuel turns gummy in the fuel lines and carburetor and makes the equipment run very badly.  Of course, not knowing this ahead of time, my snow blower was one of my pieces of equipment that I left the gas in over last summer and all of this snow was that much harder to clear because the machine was not running right.

Clearing the driveway after a storm of more than a foot of snow...

Eventually I got it running better, which helped me cut a path through the multiple storms that dumped over a foot of snow, like this one at left.

The kids had a lot of fun with the first few storms because there was so much snow that it was funny to try to walk and play in it.  But then we got another storm.  And another.  Soon the snow was too deep for sledding.  The sleds didn't move!

Then we got an ice storm on top of it all and that turned everything into a solid block of ice and snow.  The fun was over.

Me, at work, on one of our smaller storm cleanups...

As the winter progressed, we ran into another problem.  Many school cancellations.  In a stroke of genius (insert sarcastic sigh), our school system only planned for one snow day this year.  Huh?  I don't really understand the logic of that, but go figure....

Now the kids will have their spring vacation chipped into so that we can return days to the school calendar.

Was it me who said I wanted all this snow?!  :-)

So as we roll toward the end of February, I can say now that I've had my fill of winter.  The storms were fun, everyone got to play around a lot, and now it's time for spring.  I especially began to feel this way today with a classic day of "spring fever".  The high temperatures and the birds singing brought that on... 

The birds want their bath back...

So I end this winter photo essay with a picture of our birdbath.  It's buried up to the dish in snow and it's tipping over due to the soft ground underneath it.  In some of the past winters, it was so mild that the birds were able to splash around in the bird bath most of the winter.  Not so this year.  They land on the frozen snowcap on top of it and look around as if to say, "What the hell?  Where's the water?".

Soon, my friends...........soon.

Subscribe to me on Flickr!

Hi everyone...

As we move forward into 2011 (covered in snow!), I've started to increase my online photo posting on Flickr.  I'm trying to get some of my better photos up there to get some feedback from people.

If you're interested in receiving my new photos automatically, you can use your RSS reader to pick them up from this link:

http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=54191762@N02&lang=en-us&format=rss_200

If you're so inclined, please post your comments about any of the photos that you see there.  I would be interested to hear your feedback.

Hope to see you there!

John

Photo Carousel #10: "Boathouse Restaurant"

Here's my next Photo Carousel entry, "Boathouse Restaurant".

We spend some time almost every summer vacationing at Lake George in upstate New York.  It’s a terrific vacation place centered around the beautiful (and big!) lake with many water activities to enjoy and a nice town with a ton of restaurants and other land-based activities.

This is one of my favorite photos that I’ve taken of Lake George, and there’s not even much of the lake in it!  But it captures the spirit of the place for me and for that reason I consider it a successful photo.  I hope others enjoy it as well, even though it may not have the same emotional connection for you.  Click on the photo above to learn more about it…

From a creative perspective, there’s a lot going on in this photo to look at…which is precisely why I captured it.  It’s all “calm” stuff though, so it allows you the time to look around it to explore.

You have the overall scene itself of the restaurant and the reflections of the lights on the water.  I liked the colors there.  Their reach across the water was what initially grabbed me about this scene.  Then there’s the people eating in the upstairs alcove in the upper left.  The boats at the dock, the waitress in the red shirt all the way on the right, etc.  To me it says what it is:  A waterside restaurant, and to me they’re very relaxing.  A great way to spend an evening after a day on the lake.  Pull up to the restaurant, dock, and relax.

I took a number of shots of this scene as the sun was setting.  The most effective ones were after dusk when the lights of the restaurant impacted the scene.  For shots like this, it’s best to try to capture them while there’s a little bit of light left in the sky so it doesn’t appear as total blackness in the final image.  If I had waited just a few minutes longer, the blue sky would have turned black and that would have changed the mood of this scene in a direction that I didn’t want it to go.

I intentionally framed this with the restaurant at the top to allow the lights maximum room to spread across the water.  As I look at this I can almost hear the water lapping against the boats and the laughter of the people on the dock enjoying dinner.

What I really wanted to do was go back to shoot from this same location with a more telephoto lens on a night when the restaurant was more crowded so I could pick out scenes on the docks, in the upstairs bar, etc.  It would have been a cool vantage point to capture the hustle and bustle of the place on a busy night.  But I never got the chance to go back on this trip.  I’ll try again in the future.

LensAlign

I've seen and read about enough problems with camera and lens calibration to finally put a post up here about it.  I've had issues with it myself that finally necessitated sending my whole Canon rig (including lenses) back to Canon twice to get it fixed.  It's frustrating, no doubt about it.

Mass produced cameras and lenses at any price point are manufactured within a certain quality tolerance.  As the following two articles concisely point out, these tolerances can sometimes combine to work against you and you'll end up with slightly out of focus images.

1. The Simple Solution to Back-Focus and Front-Focus Problems
2. Are Your Pictures Out Of Focus?

I've read about many ways to microfocus adjust your camera/lenses on the internet if your camera has that function, and one of the more reputable methods is posted at this link.  The problem with this method is that depending on how you set it up, you can get widely variable and unrepeatable results.  Not good...

So what can you do about this?  As mentioned in the articles above, other than sending your whole camera rig back to your camera manufacturer (which you can't do if you use third party lenses), the main choice for repeatable consistent testing seems to be LensAlign.

Since I'm now using several third party lenses instead of Canon's, I plan to purchase the LensAlign MkII product for $80 to try it out on at least two of my lenses that I think I have some problems with.  I'll post my results here...

Rogue Flashbender and Stofen Omnibounce

Photo by Neil van Niekerk

Accessory flashes are great devices.  They open up a whole new world of lighting beyond what the pop-up flash on your DSLR can do.

Once you get into bouncing your accessory flash off of walls, ceilings, and other objects to get better flash photography results, you'll never again go back to straight ahead fired flash...which can be very harsh looking in the final photo.

The photo above by Neil van Niekerk is a perfect example of using bounced flash to fill in the existing light in a photo to get fantastic and natural looking flash results.  This shot would have been impossible with straight ahead fired flash.  It had to be bounced to achieve this even lighting on the girl with a nice balance of the background light.  Neil is a genius on flash photography.  I highly recommend his book entitled "On-Camera Flash".

If you use an accessory/external flash and you're looking to improve your results even further beyond simple bouncing to achieve the kind of results in the direction of what Neil does, then get these two cheap accessories:

1. Rogue Flashbender (see video below)
2. Stofen Omnibounce

I've been using the Omnibounce for a while with very good results.  It produces a nice, diffuse, wrap-around light on your subject.  But there are also times when I'm not looking to get the diffuse light that it creates.  I want bounced flash all going straight ahead with a better sense of control, but I don't want it harsh like straight fired flash.

Back in the day, photographers used to achieve bounced straight ahead flash by aiming their flash up and rubber-banding an index card to the flash to bounce the light forward.  It worked great to bounce the flash forward, but it wasn't very flexible.

And then along came the Rogue Flashbender.  I got one of these for Christmas and it's great.  Well worth the $25.  It attaches to your flash with velcro and it bends and flexes into any shape that you want to bounce your flash forward (or any other direction).  The animation picture to left shows the various positions it can be bent into.  You can see photos of how it's used on their web site at this link. It can also be flipped over and used as a flash flag to prevent flash light from reaching a particular area of your subject.


It's not often that you can buy an accessory for your camera that's cheap but has dramatic results.   These two simple devices work terrific and should be in the bag of every photographer who's interested in getting better flash results.

Out of the airplane window!

I've discovered Flickr lately.  Yes, I know, I'm a late-comer to it.  :-)

Under a totally crappy user interface (Yahoo, please do some work on this!) there's some great functionality if you dig around to find it.  So many great/interesting photographers out there...

While exploring some 'Groups' on Flickr and trying to find the right place to post one of my airplane photos, I ran across this link to a Group called "Airplane Wings".

One of the rules of this photo group is that the photos need to include the wing of the airplane.  Interesting!  Check it out for some very unique photos of the friendly skies.

Saving Eddy, one step at a time

This is a link to Chris Johnston's blog called "Namibian Photography".

On his blog, Chris is currently documenting (with pictures and words) how he and a small group of people are trying to save a baby elephant that they found abandoned by its mother in the wild.  It's a great story of caring and perseverance.

I hope Eddy makes it!

Photo Carousel #9: "Going Home"

This is my ninth Photo Carousel entry, "Going Home".  If I do humbly say so myself, I really like this photo!  :-)

I took this out the window of a Singapore Airlines 747 on my way home from Germany to New York in March 2010.

We were flying straight into the sunset for a large part of this flight and I got some amazing photos out the window.  However, it was difficult to do it without getting reflections from the windows in the photos, especially when facing forward in my seat. 

So....I turned around to try to shoot backward and I saw this great shot.  The sky was perfect, I was able to get both engines in the photo while they were glowing in the sunset, and the ground is still visible in the dim light below.

Looking for a different vantage point from which to take photos (and some good luck with the light!) came together to make a cool photo!  

For this particular entry of Photo Carousel, I don't have a specific compositional or technical lesson that I'm communicating.  Instead, the point I want to make is a logistical one.  It's a lesson that I learned from one of my favorite photographers a long time ago, and even though it's somewhat common sensical, it really never occurred to me when taking photos.

The premise is simple:  As you're exploring a place or thing and spending time to photograph it, turn around in the opposite direction and explore further.  See if there are more photos to take of whatever you're photographing by simply changing your vantage point.

I can't even say the number of times I've done this and ended up with additional great photos that were taken in a location looking in the total opposite direction than I was originally looking.

During sunsets, at the beach, in the mountains, even at family parties.  Turn around and continue to look around.  You never know what you'll find!

Easily build your own Photoshop panel with your most often used commands

If you're like me, when you open a photo for basic editing in Photoshop, you probably use mostly the same commands every time....over and over.  Select, crop, dodge, burn, levels, curves, brush, image size, red eye fix, unsharp mask, etc.  You probably also go into the menus or use keyboard shortcuts to access these commands...every time.

Your editing life can be a lot easier.  Simply use the free Adobe Configurator tool located at this link to create your own custom panel that can sit in your Photoshop workspace, and put all of your most often used commands in the panel so you can access them with one simple click.

There's a lot of power to doing this.  First, you save time by not repeatedly going into menus (some of which are several levels deep).  Second, you can build a pseudo-workflow into the panel simply by putting the commands in the order you typically use them.  Third, any command or action can be included in these panels, saving you the time of clicking into other default Photoshop panels in the workspace.

To give you an idea of what this looks like, I put my main photo editing panel that I created to the left side of this post.  You can see that I have some commonly used tools at the top of the panel, and I also included buttons for the commands that I use most often from the menus when I edit for some purpose (i.e., web, prints, etc).

It's great.  It's free.  It's so easy to do it!  Give it a try and you'll be spending less time hunting around menus and more time getting your editing done.

Enjoy!

Pathways #2: Get better exposures straight out of your camera

Background:

The first post in my Pathways series forms the essence of what this blog is all about...discovering photography, learning about it, enjoying it, and improving your own photography.  This second post is about an easy way to get technically better looking photos straight out of your camera.  Try it, you'll like it!  :-)

You can read books, magazines, take photography classes/workshops, etc, to help you improve your photography skills.  This is all great, but the key thing to remember is that you shouldn't do these activities in a passive manner.   You have to be active.  You need to pull concepts out of these activities that resonate with you, try them, expand on them, and put them in your "photography bag of tricks" to improve your skills and realize your photographic vision. 

You also need to come up with your own ideas about how to improve.  You can't learn photography just from books, classes, magazines, and the internet.  Ask yourself what you can try that's new.  What's something that hasn't been seen before?  What's something that you haven't tried before?  Be open to new ideas and try things, and that's how you'll improve.

Today's topic:

The topic for today is one of the things that had a major impact on the technical aspect of my photography when I finally worked on it a few years ago.  I'm speaking about getting a much better handle on "proper" exposure.  I put "proper" in quotes because proper exposure for a given image is somewhat subjective.  But most people can look at a photo and inherently get a feel for whether it's underexposed, overexposed, or "just right".

This was an important topic for me because after looking at some of my older photos, I began to see how much better they could have been straight out of the camera if the exposure was a little more "right".  A little more "punchy".  Conducting some experiments in Photoshop I quickly saw that another +1/3 or +1/2 stop of exposure here, or -1/3 stop of exposure there would significantly increase the "rightness" of my photos.

Seeing the results of my experiments above, I was easily motivated to more actively examine the exposures I was choosing for my photos so that I could more accurately express a scene the way I wanted to instead of the way the camera wanted to when shooting in full Auto mode.

Before going down this path I read a few books to get some concepts down about "proper" exposure.  One of them was Jeff Wignall's book "Exposure".  Another was Michael Freeman's book "Perfect Exposure".  I used these two books to learn more about the best times to take manual control of metering and exposure (instead of letting the camera auto-expose), and how to use metering/exposure to help enhance the subject of my photos and my creative vision.

Things very quickly opened up for me...

Once the concept of taking control of exposure for technical and creative reasons was hammered into my head, I now do it much more often than not.  The two keys to being able to do this successfully are:

1. Developing a firm understanding of how your camera's metering system works and...
2. How the metering system responds to different lighting situations.

Once you understand that, the door is open to taking control of your camera in any lighting situation to ensure that you get better results.  Here's the deal...

When you point your camera at a mostly bright scene, it's typically going to underexpose it.  If you point it at a mostly dark scene, it's typically going to overexpose it.  This is probably not what you want and both of these situations will make your photos less effective because in the former situation the colors will be dull, the image will feel lifeless, and it will be too dark.  It won't feel right.   In the latter situation your shadow areas will be too bright, your subject will probably be ruined, etc.  Both situations will reduce the apparent sharpness of your photos as well.

So, how do you compensate for these things and prevent them?  You have to understand your camera's metering modes, what you're aiming your camera at, and how your camera will respond.  Most importantly though, you need to have a vision in your head of what you want the outcome of the photo to be.

I'll assume for the purpose of this post that people who are interested in this topic will be shooting with advanced compact cameras or digital SLR's (DSLR) that have various metering modes, exposure compensation options, etc.

Try this experiment:

Go find a very bright scene to photograph.  Maybe something like your car on your driveway in bright sunlight.  Maybe your house on a bright sunny day.  Maybe a bright lamp in your house.  Put your camera in automatic mode and take a picture of it.  Now, open that photo in Photoshop and use the Exposure adjustment to add +1/3 stop of exposure to it.  Look better?  Most likely it does.  Reset and try adding +1/2 stop of exposure to the base picture?  Is +1/2 too much?  Maybe, maybe not.  Maybe you need even more depending on how bright the scene was.  Only you can say for sure based on what you like.....

The goal of this experiment is to demonstrate my point in the paragraph above about understanding what you're pointing your camera at and how it will respond.  With a very bright scene, your camera will likely underexpose it to try to average out the brightness.  You'll be left with a bland looking photo that doesn't look quite right.

Let's use an example photo of mine.  First is the photo straight out of my camera of a bright scene of some boats in Florida that was shot in automatic mode with evaluative metering.  Second is the same exact photo after I opened it in Photoshop and did nothing else to it except add +3/4 stop of exposure to it using the Exposure command.  You can see that the first photo is too dark, it's lifeless, and the colors are bland.  The second photo looks "right", it's punchier, and the colors are bright and accurate.

Original photo, underexposed due to the brightness of the scene

Original photo with +3/4 stop of Exposure added in Photoshop.  Much better!

Had I been thinking about it at the time, I would have realized that I was shooting a very bright scene and my camera would be tricked into underexposing it to average out the brightness.  I then simply would have taken one second to dial in +1/2 or +3/4 stop of exposure and taken the shot.  The out-of-camera picture would have been just right with this one simple adjustment.

If you understand this type of lighting situation and you know how your camera will respond to it, you can simply dial in +1/3 or +1/2 stop of exposure at the time you're taking the photo and you'll probably get better exposed photos straight out of the camera that will be more pleasing to the eye.  Don't use your camera in Auto mode when you know that you're shooting a tricky lighting situation.  Take control yourself to achieve better results.

The same exact scenario applies for very dark scenes.  Shoot one in Auto mode and then use Photoshop to put in -1/3 or -1/2 stop of exposure to see which shot you like better.  My guess is that one of the two adjusted images probably looks better than the one that came out of the camera.

Interesting, right?

By getting a better understanding of the lighting in a scene and what my cameras will do with it, I now know when I need to use exposure compensation for a particular shot.  Doing this has led to much more consistent and "likeable" photos straight out of my camera with no post-processing, and the less time that I need to spend on the computer editing photos the better.

This article does not address overexposing or underexposing for creative purposes....that's a whole separate topic.  What I'm trying to address here is simply getting better and more technically consistent photos out of your camera when you're facing tricky light.

All of the above was written with the primary thought that your camera was set to use evaluative or matrix metering, but most advanced cameras also have center-weighted, partial, and spot metering modes as well.  I'm not going to summarize what they are because it's beyond the scope of this post and your camera manual will explain them for you.  There are also these two quick articles that I found that cover the topics efficiently:

1. Digital Photography School - "Metering Modes Explained"
2. Digital Photography School - "Introduction to Metering Modes"

Understanding what these various metering modes do and when to use them, and then combining that knowledge with what I wrote above about exposure compensation, you can see that you should be able to achieve even more precise and specific results straight out of the camera for what you're trying to shoot.

Try some experiments to see how these topics come together for you.  Hopefully you'll get more effective and properly exposed images without the need for editing on the computer.

Let me know if you have any feedback on this post...Thanks for reading!

Photo Carousel #8: "Glass Blower"

"Glass Blower"

Here's a hot shot (sorry, couldn't resist!) that I took at the Corning Museum of Glass.  This is my eighth Photo Carousel entry.

If you've never been to Corning area, I can say that it's a nice family trip with many things to see and do, especially considering its close proximity to the Finger Lakes region of New York.  We live far away from that area so it's a long drive for us, but we combine the trip to Corning with the July 4th Indycar race at Watkins Glen International Speedway.  We also do some hiking in Watkins Glen Gorge and rent a boat to go out on Seneca Lake for a 1/2 day.  A nice way to spend a few days...

While at Corning, I wanted to capture the spirit of the place....which is all about making glass and the skill and concentration required to do it.  There are many ways to capture that, but I thought this shot was a perfect opportunity.

My daughter got selected to be a in a glass breaking demonstration, and for her participation in the demo she won a small glass bud vase.  They mentioned when they gave her the prize that the man who made it would be doing a glass blowing demonstration just across the hall so we went over to see him.  I saw the opportunity for this shot developing so I quickly got ready for it.

From the creative perspective, I composed this shot to place the three major interest points (his face, his hand, the flame) in strategic locations to keep the viewer's eye bouncing around between them. I also wanted to create the black free space in the upper left to give the photo some room to breathe. There was no need to have anything in that part of the frame because it only would have distracted from the main elements.

I think this photo is successful and interesting because of it's simplicity. There are the three main elements within the frame that are closely tied together, and that's it.  The slow shutter allowed the flame to blur a bit to give the photo some dynamic quality. I spot metered off the glove.

My goal was to leave no question what this photo is about....intense heat, concentration, and the skill required for glass blowing.

People, coffee, commonality, a tree, and New York City

Happy New Year!

I hope everyone who reads this blog from around the world enjoyed their New Years celebrations last night and that you're resting/recovering nicely today.  My first nap next to the fire on this tiring day is about to begin as soon as I hit 'submit' on this post to get it out there!  :-)

To date this blog has been visited by people in 74 different countries, and I think that's pretty cool.  I've received some nice email from people who have connected with it one way or another, and I hope it becomes even more widely read in 2011.  If you like it, forward the link to your friends!

As is true with most of the posts on this blog, this one is tied to photography (albeit loosely for this particular post today).

Every year, my wife and I take the kids down to New York City to do some exploring around the area of Rockefeller Center.  We see the giant Christmas tree, the windows of Macy's, Lord & Taylor, and Sachs 5th Avenue which are all decorated with Christmas scenes, St. Patrick's Cathedral, and just generally enjoy the good holiday spirit in the air.  This year, we also went to see the show Wintuk, which was very good and I would recommend.

The colorful set of "Wintuk"

I was shooting with my Canon S95 just trying to grab some nice scenes and some things occurred to me during the act of taking pictures that I thought were interesting to share here...

Taking a trip down to the city at this time of year isn't necessarily about just seeing the sights, having a nice dinner, snapping some photos, and going home.  On a deeper level it's about participating in an event with many thousands of other people and enjoying the common feelings that we all share around the holidays. 

The "Believe" sign on the side of Macy's on 34th Street

As we were walking around and I was in the process of taking photos and disappearing into my "world of photography" where I concentrate on what I'm doing, I began listening to people talking.  Not what they were saying, but how they were saying it.  The excited tones of their voices, the enjoyment, the laughter.  Adults, kids, teenagers, grandparents.  Everyone laughing, smiling, enjoying the moments, and tolerating the large crowds as we all hopped over slush puddles and snow piles from the recent blizzard in this area. 

The thing that really struck me were all of the different languages.  I don't know what they all were, but I heard some Spanish, French, Arabic, German, Japanese, and many more.  A very international crowd and a nice thing to see.  People from all over the world coming together in the area of a few small city blocks to celebrate the holidays....and all gathered around the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree.  Smiling at it, taking pictures in front of it, pointing at it, and watching the ice skaters on the ice rink underneath it.

The tree, the 30 Rock building, and some holiday flags

I stopped taking photos just to watch the people for a while and I got a nice feeling inside.  This, I thought, is exactly what the holidays are about.  Pure joy.  The commonality that we all share no matter where we're from of enjoying the holidays with our family and friends, reliving old memories, making new memories, etc.

We went inside to grab a coffee for me and Jan and some hot chocolate for the kids.  As I was standing on this huge line to get the drinks, I continued to watch people come together over a simple thing.....coffee.  Sitting, chatting, laughing, and everyone was looking at their photos of the day.  Every year that we make this trip, I look around and notice more and more cameras.  Small ones, big ones, smart phones, etc.  Whatever the size or type, everyone was taking and enjoying their photos.  Photography bringing people together, as it always has...

This is why photography is important in my life.  I honestly don't think I would have noticed many of these things unless I had been looking around for photo opportunities.  Actively looking around for possible photos, finding them, and taking them helps to open my eyes to what's going on around me and enjoy things more.  I see things in a different light, even if I'm not actually taking photos at that instant.  

As I was standing there I saw a sign that said "I lost a friend once.  Yesterday I found her again over coffee".  A nice sentiment about just sitting down to relax for a bit and talking with a friend or family member to reconnect.  Happy New Year!

Out of the mouth of babes

Although my kids are not babies anymore, every once in a while they say or do something that reminds me of that old expression "Out of the mouth of babes....", referring to the innocent way in which kids think and it goes straight from their brain to their mouth.  :-)

My daughter asked me a funny question the other day.  She said, "Daddy, if we have our home alarm turned on at night time, how will Santa get in the house to deliver our presents"?  I laughed so hard when she asked that, because from a child's point of view it's a very logical question!

Then she exclaimed, "I know!!!!  We'll use the motion sensors on our alarm to catch Santa!".  She may have been onto something there (parents know what I mean), so I told her that we would leave it off on Christmas Eve so we don't have any problems.  :-)

Along those lines, I was cleaning up the house today getting it ready for Christmas and I noticed a note that she hung on her stocking.  She was telling Santa, "Thank you for all of my presents.  Put the smallest present in here." with an arrow pointing to a small stocking that she pinned to her larger stocking.  I thought that was very cute, and it fits right in the mood of the holidays as the kids get so excited for Christmas morning to open their presents and enjoy the excitement of Christmas day.

Every once in a while, parents (including me) get a little hung up on the fact that kids don't listen all the time (sometimes not at all!).  Maybe they don't do their chores when they need to, they don't want to do their homework, they argue about going to bed "too early", etc.  It can be frustrating to deal with these same topics every day, and we wonder why they can't just figure out that these things need to be done, and there's no way out of doing them.... 

When I sometimes get frustrated by these little things in life, it's the moments like the discussion I had above with my daughter and finding this little note to Santa that reset my brain and my disposition and remind me that they're only kids and we need to let them be kids.  The chores and other things in life can sometimes wait for another day and we need to just let things be and enjoy the moments...

Have a great holiday season and a Happy New Year!  Enjoy the moments...

Inspiration! "Within The Frame" by David duChemin

I have a lot of photography books.  I enjoy reading the thoughts and techniques of the photographers whose work I like.  Not only do I learn many things, but I also get a chance to live vicariously through them and see some of the places and sights that I probably won't have time (or money) to see in my lifetime.

Some of the books are great and I refer to them often to re-read key sections until they sink into my brain and I can make the concepts my own and put them to work for me in my own photography.  Others are not so good, and get placed on an upper shelf and are rarely touched again.

I'm reading an excellent book right now called "Within The Frame" by David duChemin.  If you're looking for a last minute holiday gift to tuck under the tree for your favorite photographer, then this is the book to get.

This is not a technical book about photography or technique, per se'.  It's about the journey to finding your own photographic vision and achieving the kind of photography that you most enjoy.

Surely, this is a lofty goal for any book.  Finding your photographic vision is an intensely personal journey that every enthusiastic photographer takes.  How can a book help with this?

Stay with me for a few minutes on this topic..... 

I'll tell you where many books of this nature fail.  They use too many words.  It's as simple as that.  I've read books that, although they're good, are written by an author that takes forty sentences to complete one key thought.  So what happens?  Your brain gets totally lost in all the written words on the page and the concept that you're reading about floats right by without sinking in.

This is not the case with "Within The Frame".  David duChemin writes with a down to earth style and states his key thoughts very succinctly.  This makes the book easy to digest.  He then uses supporting text and images to drive home his points. I use the word "supporting" intentionally.  There's plenty to read in the book, but the key thoughts in each section of the book can be lifted out quite easily.  Those points make you think about how you can apply the book to your photography, and that is precisely what a book of this type should achieve.  It should make you think, not try to ram ideas down your throat.

David speaks early on in this book about some key thoughts:

1. Passionate photography (duChemin says his goal for his image making is "Passionate stories told passionately").
2. Chasing your vision and telling your stories as clearly and passionately as possible with compelling photography.
3. Shooting what moves you.
4. Making the viewer of your photos care.

Having read this book, I totally understand where he's coming from.  My brain is flooding with ideas about how to implement David's key messages in my photography.  It's a completely successful book.  Well worth reading...

"Image of the Year"? Huh?

I always try to avoid being unnecessarily overly critical of the photography of other people.  Everyone has their vision and who am I to criticize someones art, right?  If they ask me for my opinion I certainly provide it without hesitation, and I've had many great and interesting discussions this way and I've learned a lot about myself and my photography along the way.

What I'm being critical of here is American Photo magazine.  They recently published their list of "2010 Images of the Year".  The image at this link of the blue house was actually selected as an 'Image of the Year'.

Seriously? 

For the life of me, I can't find one single redeeming quality in this photo.  Thinking that I might be off base and with my curiosity of other people's opinions now piqued, I've showed this photo to many people and they all said the exact same thing, "What's it supposed to be?  It's a terrible picture".

I don't know why this annoys me so much, but a blog is about expressing your opinions, so I guess I'm just doing that here.  I read American Photo magazine and they always strive to publish high quality content and photos.  With so much great photography out there and the thousands of photos that must have been considered in this competition, I guess it just irks me that a photo of the side of the house with a satellite dish and some telephone wires is lauded as an 'Image of the Year'.  I can't imagine people sitting around a table saying "That's a great shot....It's an image of the year"!

Come on American Photo.  Please filter this stuff out and keep your content at the high quality level that it has been in the past...

Photo Carousel #7: "Milkweed In Cold Sunset"

Here's a nice shot taken at the Mohonk Preserve in New York when I was coming to the end of a great day of hiking with my daughter.  This is my seventh Photo Carousel entry.

I'm getting more comfortable executing these types of classic shots.  I used to struggle to find nice compositions like this with the right lighting elements, etc, but all of my practice is starting to pay off nicely because I'm "seeing" these scenes more easily these days.

As we came to the end of our hike, the sun was setting fast and we were almost back to the car. The temperature was dropping quickly through the mid 40's and into the 30's in what seemed like just a few minutes.  When we rounded the last turn in our trail and came to this open field, the sun was just finishing cutting across it with a great golden color.  The photographer's classic "golden light"...

My daughter (8 years old) is just learning to take photographs and I showed her how to get behind these milkweed to let the sun shine through them to make a nice effect. Her response was "Cool, that looks much better.  Thanks Dad!".  She went to take some photos of some other plants nearby that she liked and I stuck with these to try to get my shot....

From the creative and technical perspective, a number of things came together nicely here that I wanted to mention as a learning experience...

I composed the shot that I wanted with the two primary large fluffy weeds positioned near two intersecting "Rule of Thirds" lines.  Not right on them because I wanted to keep certain things out of the frame, but close enough.  Dividing up the frame in my mind in various ways and placing elements where I want them was the single biggest thing that I did years ago to improve my photography.

Interestingly, I originally framed this shot to cut out the two smaller weeds in the bottom left corner, but then I realized that their shapes echoed the two larger ones and I thought that was cool so I put them back in.

With the composition and the light in place, I was ready to shoot but something was still missing.  Warmth.  This scene needed some warmth.  I decided to wait for the setting sun to enter the top of the frame.  I knew that the small aperture I was using on my Canon S95 would get me some nice streaks of golden light across the frame. Patience paid off, and it worked perfectly!  I fired off a few quick shots at various zooms on this same scene just as the sun came into the frame and this is the one that I liked the best.

The scene is -2/3 stop underexposed to make the colors a little more rich.  A straight metering of the overall scene would have overexposed it due to the mostly darker field I was shooting, so I dialed in some negative exposure compensation.  Any time you want to make the colors in a scene like this a little more rich, just dial in -1/3 or -2/3 exposure compensation if the scene can take it without ruining the mood.

About one minute later the golden light completely ended as the sun ducked behind the hill. We were left out in the cold gray light of the rapidly approaching darkness to finish our walk to the car. 

We completed the day with a nice post-hike dinner in the town of New Paltz, NY at the Gilded Otter Brewery.  Another great day out with my family, during which I was able to snag some nice photos...

I feel like Charlie Brown!

In the classic cartoon "A Charlie Brown Christmas" that airs on TV every holiday season, we find the main character Charlie Brown fighting his way through the over-commercialization of Christmas to find the real root of the holiday season.  Thankfully he does, and the story ends on a pleasant note that expresses the true meaning of the holidays...

I feel a little bit like Charlie Brown these days.

This is the first year that the commercialization of Christmas has completely pounded me over the head until I can't take it anymore.  Black Friday, Cyber Monday, twenty-five emails a day with announcements of new sales, exchanging Christmas shopping hint lists, Christmas decorations in the stores in the first week of September!  Argggggh!  I've had enough!!!  I want a simpler, less complicated, less shopping-oriented Christmas.

The kids having fun with a glowing string of lights...

This is the reason why my wife and I are going to continue to intentionally try to turn the holidays back in time at our house this year and in the future.  We like to get back to what the spirit of Christmas is truly about...family, memories, and the simple joys of the season.

We've always had a few nice Christmas traditions that we carry on in our house.  Some of them include things like:

1. Decorating the house a few items per day for the first week of December to surprise the kids with a new treat every day when they come home from school.  They run around the house looking for what's new.  :-)
2. Putting out photos from our past Christmas holidays to enjoy the memories and swap funny stories. 
3. Visiting New York City to see the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree, the decorated store windows, and a dinner at Ted's Montana Grill.  
4. Hiking into the woods to put some Christmas decorations on "our" same pine tree every year to see if they survive the winter (we then go back in the spring to take them off).  
5. Making some of our own Christmas decorations.
6. Baking Christmas cookies.
7. Turning out all the lights to watch The Grinch, Rudolph, and The Polar Express (which, if you haven't seen it, is a fantastic Christmas movie that should be in everyone's collection).

I hope you have (and keep!) your Christmas traditions too.  Every family has them, but sometimes they get pushed aside in the hustle and bustle of the shopping season and this is what I'm trying to reverse.  I don't want the holidays to rush by in a fury of sales and then be over before I have a chance to enjoy them. 

So, in the spirit of getting back to more easy-going holidays, here are some thoughts for the future that I plan to do:

1. Find a traditional Christmas event in a town near my house and go to it (tree lighting ceremony in the town square, etc).  They're out there, but sometimes they're not easy to find around where I live.  I like what many other countries in other parts of the world do in this regard.   In Germany (for example), many of the towns of significant size that have a Marktplatz (town square) have a traditional Christmas market to ring in the season with crafts, foods, wines, hot drinks, singing, a giant town tree, etc.  This link to some photos of the German Christmas Markets shows exactly what I'm talking about.
2. I will not exchange Christmas lists with anyone.  If I know them well enough (and vise versa), I should be able to buy them a gift without being told what it is, where to get it, and how much to pay.
3. I will log into every online store where I shop and change my account to use an alternate email address.  This way my primary email account won't get pounded with emails at the holidays, which forces me to sort through all of this shopping junk to find the real emails that I want to read.  I can then go check my "Christmas email account" when I want to, not when the stores want me to.  This will go a long way in improving my psyche because I can just "turn off" the constant sales stuff.
4. I will not shop in any store that puts out Christmas decorations in September!!!
5. I will share these thoughts with anyone who will listen to me in the hope that the spirit catches on!

I hope that everyone reading this post enjoys their holiday season and finds some peace in these fast paced times...Enjoy your family, enjoy your memories, and skip that sale at the store so you can sit by the fire and relax a little bit longer.  Happy holidays!

Topaz Labs - InFocus (Refine Detail, Restore Clarity)

Here is a link to a new tool from Topaz Labs called "InFocus".

Topaz has a good reputation for its Photoshop plug-ins, so I thought I would post this here and you can try InFocus for yourself using their free trial offer to see if it lives up to its hype.

As the Topaz web site explains, fixing blurry photos is an extremely difficult computational process.  There are so many factors that contribute to the possible causes for a blurry image that no one company has come up with a solution other than merely sharpening edges in the photo and hoping for the best results.  From what I've tried of these tools, they haven't been worth the money.  A blurry photo has always remained a blurry photo....

With this new plug-in, Topaz claims to be the first company to tackle the difficulties around fixing blurry images.  If this plug-in truly works, it could be a lifesaver for an image that was otherwise ruined or heavily compromised due to accidental blur regardless of the source of the blur.

I'm a bit skeptical, so I'll try it for myself to test it out.  But if it works, it could be a great tool to have in your photo processing arsenal for when a problem image comes up that you want to rescue.

Color management - A marriage between your monitor and your printer

And 'huey PRO' is the priest!  :-)

If you do a lot of high quality photo printing at home, you're well aware that printer ink costs a small fortune.  Over the life of a printer, the cost of printer ink adds up to many times what you spent on the printer in the first place.  To replace all eight ink cartridges in my Canon Pro 9000 Mark II printer costs me $85 each time!  Yes, $85 each time!

So logic would follow that you want to get your photos out of your printer with the correct colors the first time so that you don't waste money re-printing photos that you've had to correct to get them to look right when printed.

Unfortunately, this is not as easy as it sounds.  I talk to people constantly who say to me, "My printer stinks....It never prints my pictures with the same colors as what I have on my screen".  Some of these people are using printers that cost $300 or more.  Trust me, the printers don't stink.

My answer to them is that 8 or 9 times out of 10, it's because the person is editing their photos on a computer monitor that isn't properly calibrated, or isn't calibrated at all.  They are then sending photos with dubious colors in them to a printer and expecting that their printed pictures come out "right".

The response I hear back is:  "I took my monitor out of the box from the factory, why isn't it calibrated properly from the factory"?  The answer is:  It just isn't.....and there are a variety of reasons why.

On top of not being calibrated properly from the factory, your perception of the colors on your monitor changes as the lighting changes is in your room throughout the day.  Sun pouring in the windows at one time, compact fluorescent or tungsten bulbs at night, etc.  Lighting is very dynamic.

So how does a person level the playing field when there's all this to consider to get proper colors?

Answer:  Calibrate your monitor so that you're displaying and editing colors based on a standard and accurate color calibration, and adjust the monitor throughout the day for changing light.

Sound hard?  It's not.  It's actually easy!  Simply purchase and install the huey PRO device from Pantone and away you go.  It really is that easy.  Go to the link above to see what Huey can do for you.

Once you install the software and plug in the device, it will step you through the process of calibrating your monitor.  It takes about five minutes.  Once done, the custom calibration is loaded automatically every time you boot up your computer.

What's even better is that you can set Huey to automatically monitor the light in your room and adjust the monitor settings based on what it's seeing throughout the day so that you're seeing accurate colors all the time.  Perfect!

After doing this with the initial version of Huey that came out years ago, my prints out of my printer are much closer to what I see on the screen because my monitor is displaying standardized colors and my printer is printing standardized colors.  No more was I saying, "Damn...it's still not right" and going back for another round of corrections and printing.  The prints I make after using Huey are very accurate.

Using Huey should get you much closer to your goals of accurate printing and I think you'll be pleased by using this device.  However, on top of using Huey to achieve proper monitor calibration there are other things that you can do to ensure even better color matching between your monitor and your printer.  You could inadvertently be doing some things wrong that you're not even aware of... 

Some of things to watch out for that could be causing color match problems from monitor to printer include the following:

1. Make sure you're specifying the proper kind of paper that you're printing to in the printer dialog box for your printer.
   
2. Make sure that you're having either Photoshop OR the printer managing color when you print, not both.  If you use them both to simultaneously manage color when printing then your colors will be far out of whack.  You have to explicitly turn one on and one off and then they should stay that way as your defaults.
   
3. Make sure you're editing and printing in the same color space.
   
4. Make sure that your printer head isn't clogged (it will be very obvious if it is).
   
5. If possible, get a printer profile for the paper that you're printing to, and use it.  These can often be found on the paper manufacturer's web site.

My hints above are just the tip of the iceberg.  Sophisticated color management is the topic of many books and web sites, and I don't intend to echo those writings here.  Simply Google "printer color management" and you'll see many of the issues that people face and their solutions.

My point with this post is that there's a simple way to get much more accurate prints the first time without struggling, and that's to use huey PRO to calibrate your monitor.  If you have further issues after that then a little digging within Photoshop help, Google, and/or your printer manufacturer's web site should get you the rest of the way there.

I should note that there are significantly more sophisticated monitor calibration devices out there other than huey PRO, but they also cost a lot more.  My thought is that huey PRO is probably all that most advanced amateur photographers really need to get their color management and printing on track.

Enjoy making better prints!