New Camera – Canon Powershot G9

Boulder Creek

Originally uploaded by mjm1138.

Got a new camera as a carry-around daily shooter, a Canon Powershot G9. Great specs for a (fairly) compact camera, with some important features for photo geeks, notably the ability to shoot raw. It feels great in the hand, very solid, and the manual features are easy to get at and reasonable to use. Yes, we’d all prefer knurled rings on the lens barrel for aperture and shutter speed setting, but let’s all repeat together: “Canon is not Leica”.

The only real quibble I have with this camera is the sensor. At 12 megapixels, it’s way too much resolution, especially for a small sensor type like this. I’d much rather have purchased this camera with an eight megapixel sensor and gotten even lower noise at higher ISO ratings. When you’re talking about the consumer space like this, the main thing that more megapixels buys you is more noise in the image, more disk space taken up on your computer, and longer transfer and processing times.

That said it’s a minor quibble, as it achieves very low noise even at reasonably high ISO, and the extreme ISO settings (800 and above) I’d go so far as to call usable in a pinch. The image above is a shot of Boulder Creek I took this morning before heading in to work. We got a nice little snowfall last night to remind us that spring is not here yet, and in fact March is the snowiest month of the year usually.

HDR – Another attempt

Sarah and I stayed Saturday night at Elwood Cabin, a Forest Service cabin on Elwood Pass in southern Colorado.  About four miles from the cabin is the ghost town of Summitville, and the site of the Summitville Mine superfund site.  Sunday morning we spent about an hour walking through the ghost town and taking pictures.  Again, I did some handheld bracketed shots, and this time I decided to try out a Linux workflow. The images were combined using qtpfsgui, which is a Linux native GUI for creating and tone-mapping HDR images.

Click the image to go to the Flickr set, which has the original images post RAW conversion (while balance set to Bibble’s “cloudy” preset).  I think the result is not half bad.   I plan on doing a few more images from this shoot. The effect is more naturalistic than my previous attempts.  Unfortunately I think the composition of the image might rob it of too much context, making it a bit uninteresting even if visually pleasing.  I also should have paid more attention to the aperture setting and tried to get the foreground in better focus.  I think there will be stronger images from this shoot once I finish going through them.

Image to image consistency is important preparing HDR images. Your source images must not only line up, they must have identical white balance settings.  You must bracket by shutter speed rather than aperture so the depth of field is consistent.  It’s helpful to shoot RAW for HDR. This way you can override your camera’s automatic white balance and contrast settings. If your camera doesn’t shoot RAW, you can always manually set white balance and contrast settings, but RAW makes it easy to make fine tuning decisions after the fact.

It seems like Linux is thinking about catching up with regards to RAW digital photography workflow. There are high quality RAW conversion apps, and qtpfsgui feels very powerful and compares quite favorably with commercial apps like Photomatix.  The Gimp (open source’s answer to Photoshop) doesn’t quite measure up, mainly since it supports only 8-bit images, but CinePaint, which is The Gimp adapted for film use, has a core that can handle even 32-bit HDR images.  The flip side is that the software is significantly more difficult to learn than commercial equivalents just as Linux demands more from its users than MacOS or Windows. I am not aware of any open-source workflow app at the level of Aperture or Lightroom, but the excellent Bibble Pro from Bibble Labs is available for Linux. The core strength of Open Source software is that as the different pieces evolve and improve, they can be combined into powerful solutions. Given the right momentum around the right projects, it’s possible we’ll be seeing professional grade workflows running on Linux with 100% free software within a couple years. Photography is by its nature a pretty geeky pursuit, so I give it very good odds.

Tags: hdr, summitville, linux, raw

Handmade HDR?

We went out for a day of shooting in September, driving the pickup south over Guanella Pass. The day was blustery and cloudy, which made for some nice shooting conditions. I attempted to shoot several pictures with the idea to combine them into HDR images, however I didn’t have a tripod on hand, so I set my camera for auto-bracketing, set for continuous shooting, and shot off three hand-held shots in quick succession. This produced photos which weren’t suitable for automated HDR creation methods, so I was left to line the photos up by hand and use the magic of layer masks to combine properly exposed areas from two photos. Here’s the result of the first attempt:

Clicking on the image will take you to my flickr account, where the picture can be viewed larger. This is from two exposures. The sky is from an underexposure and the foreground is from a metered exposure. The hills in the background are blended between the two exposures. It’s definitely got that faky HDR thing going on. There’s a bit of haloing around the border between the hills and the sky, due imperfections in the layer mask and layer alignment. It’s a kind of interesting, the border provides contrast while maintaining the atmospheric perspective, but it doesn’t feel genuine. For comparison, here’s one of the exposures by itself, processed through Aperture:

Again, you can click the image to go to my flickr account and see other sizes. A somewhat more natural photo, with the tradeoff that it does show the limitations of the camera’s dynamic range. Oh and the layer mask method: whatta pain in the butt! I’m sure it’s possible to become efficient with practice, and it feels like a very powerful method viz the control you have over what comes out of it. Maybe with a truly exceptional shot that can’t be processed any other way it’d be worth the effort.

More iPhone Photos

Some images from a train trip Sarah and I took to Iowa about a week ago:

Here’s a link to the set. The phone sensor is slow to scan as you can see above, resulting in the interesting slanted effect. There are some shots I like from the Osceola Amtrak station in the set as well. The station has apparently had virtually no work done save paint since it was built, making it a bit of a throwbacck.

Note the high tank on the urinal.  The toilet was more conventional, but the plumbing still enters the stall several feet above the tank.

iPhone Photography

IMG_0058 – 2007-08-18 at 20-35-33

Originally uploaded by mjm1138.

Got an iPhone recently. It has a little 1.9 megapixel still camera built-in; very cheap. That said if you tweak the output a little bit you can get a nice Loma-like quality; albeit with a lot of chromatic abberation and other noise. This photo was taken from the Cinderella Twin drive-in movie theater in Englewood, CO. The camera interface is nicer than most cell phones (of course), so I do find myself using the camera more than with phones I’ve had in the past.

Studio Lights

As Sarah and I get more serious about shooting, we’ve been slowly investing in better gear. This week we got a studio monolight from AlienBees.

At left is an image from a shoot we did for our friend Chris’s current musical project. Clicking the image takes you to my flickr account, where there are more images from this shoot. We used photofloods with 250W bulbs and gel filters for the red light to the left, and the green wash in the background on the right. Primary light was provided by by the AlienBees B400 strobe to the right, with a reflector on the other side for fill and an old Vivitar potato masher with a slave sensor overhead for a hair light.

Here, I’m on full manual with the D70 handheld, keeping the shutter open for a little over a second and setting the aperture for proper exposure with the strobe. That’s how we end up woth the colored trails mixed with the frozen image more-or-less in color balance. It’s evolving into a style, which I like. A big danger when you start working with pro studio gear is that it’s the easiest thing in the world to create very boring, very generic “highschool senior” type portraits, and I’d rather not waste my time with a lot of that.

For a while I’ve been messing with using long exposures with flash on handheld photos for motion effects. I’ve been doing a lot with a Nikon SB-600 speedlight, and that’s a fantastic piece of equipment, but not really designed to light a studio scene. For doing larger-scale shoots we’ve used rented strobes, but the rental process is painful and the equipment frequently shows the wear-and-tear of use by many inexperienced hands.

So the AlienBees B400 is a bit of a revelation. At 400 “effective” watt-seconds, it’s the lowest-powered strobe they make (at 160 actual W/s, it may be one of the lowest-powered monolights you can buy, I’m not sure). A watt-second is a measure of power output, and like all good technical metrics, is completely meaningless as a method for comparing the light output of studio strobes, thus AlienBee’s claim of “effective” watt-seconds. The claim is that this light compares with 400W/s units from other manufacturers.

Whatever. It’s perfect for what we’re doing. One of the problems we had with renting high-end monolights was that, even at their lowest setting, they produced way too much light for the way we wanted to shoot. The B400 allows me to choose a power setting that allows me to control depth-of-field while not blowing out highlights. While I’m writing a mini-review, I’ll mention that the monolight casing is made out of Lexan, which I believe is the same stuff they make Nalgene bottles out of. This means that it should be extremely durable over time. It looks and acts like a high-quality piece of equipment. I definitely plan to continue building a full light kit with gear from AlienBees.

For these shots, we were using a 48″ silver umbrella and a 48″ silver disk reflector on the opposite side of the room. Still not the ultimate control you get with softboxes, but it’s getting much easier to produce studio output suitable for publication.

We’ve also been experimenting with shooting “tethered”. That is, I keep the D70 connected to a Powerbook via USB while I shoot. Nikon’s Camera Control Pro software can listen on the USB port and dump new images to a predefined folder as they come in. A separate utility watches this folder, and moves images from there into Aperture for display and organizing. This allows the photographer, art director and subject to see the shots at a good resolution as they’re being taken, making it easy to make adjustments while you’re still in the studio.

It’s a great way to shoot, and adds a lot of value to the interactive process of making a portrait. It’s a little frustrating with the D70, which is USB1.1 only and therefore takes several seconds to transmit a single image. Since it doesn’t buffer images to the flash memory card, this means that once the internal buffer memory in the camera gets filled (about four frames shooting RAW), you have to wait for an image to spool out before you can shoot another frame. If you have a deliberative shooting style in the studio, this is manageable. If you like to pop off hundreds of frames, this is obviously not a tenable approach (at least not without a high-speed connection and a pretty darn fast computer). For me though, it’s great. I think I’ll stick with it for studio work. Camera Control Pro also offers the capability to shoot frames via remote control from the computer both live and on schedule. This means it could be used for time-lapse photography, a possibility I’ll have to investigate if I can think of anything good to time-lapse photograph.

My Top 100 Images of 2006

As an exercise in reflection as well as a way to get some organization going in Aperture, I decided to post my 100 favorite images from 2006.

Above is a panorama of Florence I stitched together from pictures I took from Michaelangelo Square. Click the image to see the whole set. 2006 was a big year for me photographically. I was probably as productive as I’ve been since I was in school. This is in no small part owing to the decision to go digital. It’s allowed me to spend time on the parts of photography that are creative rather than sloshing around noxious chemicals in stainless steel tanks and doing batch scans.

The process of picking 100 favorites is a strange one, and I don’t think I would come up with the same 100 if I went through the process again. In some senses I had to dig a bit deep to come up with 100, but at the same time images got cut that I wanted to include.

I had the opportunity to re-rate all of my images for the year, having received Aperture as a Christmas gift from Sarah. Aperture is a truly awesome piece of software, and the only software I needed to prepare all but two of the images in the set. Unfortunately, and somewhat surprisingly, there is enough paradigm shift between the way images are organized in Aperture and the way they’re organized in iPhoto, that the migration tool to import the images from iPhoto made a bit of a hash of it, and among other things discarded all my ratings.

That said, and again, Aperture is a huge upgrade. The RAW processing seems much better than iPhoto, and it produces better looking prints on my gear with less effort than Photoshop. It’s terrific for pulling details out of shadows and highlights, even if the image is in JPG format (again, curses! We need to go back to Italy!). I had been thinking I would wait around for Adobe to release Lightroom and then decide which solution to use, but in the end I know I’m going to be happy in an Aperture workflow.

The pictures are all over the place. A fair amount of architecture, some art objects, a few cemeteries, landscapes, flowers, travel, transportation. Notably lacking is portrait and street photography. Street photography I found was easier in Florence and Venice than most other places. They’re safe places to be, and there seems to be an acceptance that at any moment there will be half a dozen tourists within a few feet of where you’re standing, snapping pictures. That said, I believe I just lack the will to get up in peoples faces and get the kind of shots that make stand-out street photography. And that’s okay. As for portrait work, I did a bit “on assignment” in ‘06, but I didn’t feel like that work really hangs with the rest of the images I’ve done, even as disjointed as the set is. Hopefully I’ll have more to show in 2007.

It’s clear to me that it’s time to start thinking about the vision thing. I don’t see a common thread in my work through the year. I spent a lot of time experimenting and learning new equipment, not as much time thinking about what I wanted to accomplish with an image I was making. As a result, I think, a lot of these images lack deeper interest, or at least fail at being evocative. Shooting in cemeteries was a gratifying way to exercise technique, and I’ll probably continue to do it, but I have to ask myself what I’m trying to say with my pictures of decaying monuments. If it’s nothing more than “look at this decaying monument”, then I need to find something else to say. Tricky…

Look at these cows

US Virgin Islands

Sarah and I made a trip to the US Virgin Islands in December. We spent a few days relaxing, snorkeling, drinking rum-based beverages and of course shooting.  Sarah recently got herself a Nikon D70s like mine, which made our shooting outings much more enjoyable for both of us.  Maybe she’ll start a photo blog too!

The image here is of a windmill from the ruins of the Annaberg sugar plantation on St. John.  Sugar production figures prominently in both the history of the West Indies and the history of the African slave trade.  I highly reccomend the book Bittersweet:  The Story of Sugar by Peter Macinnis for a fascinating account of the development of sugar as a commodity.  This plantation was divided into smaller farms when slavery was abolished on the island (some years before the American Civil War).  The sugar refining methods of the time were labor intensive enough that it was not profitable to produce sugar without slave labor, so the land would have been given over to subsistence farming by the former slaves.  Walking around the site is sobering when you consider the conditions under which the slaves were forced to work, the danger they faced during the refining process, as well as the ruggedness of the terrain from which the cane would have been harvested.  Today, most of the population of the USVI are descended from the African slaves that worked these plantations.

Somewhat less soberingly, St. John is also home to a population of some 400 wild donkeys, whose ancestors no doubt also worked these plantations, and a large population of wild chickens.  No sugar cane remains, as the vast majority of the cane that was farmed here was of a sterile variety and was grown by planting shoots cut from other plants.

I’m now doing all of my shooting in RAW format, which is a revelation.  The cost is the loss of a lot of the built-in scene mode type adjustments, but you get a lot more information and dynamic range in the file than with a jpeg.  Sarah got me a copy of Aperture for Christmas, which does a brilliant job of handling the RAW workflow, and I’m sure does a better job at RAW conversion than could be done in-camera.

On this trip I also shot a few rolls of film, which I still need to get processed.  I got a Nikon Action Touch off eBay, which is an old auto-focus point-and-shoot which is capable of going underwater (you can focus it manually underwater).  So hopefully I’ll be posting images from our various snorkeling outings soon.  The rest of the above-ground set can be viewed here.

Golden Cemetery

Monument II

Originally uploaded by mjm1138.

Today we visited the Golden Cemetery. It’s probably one of the newer ones we’ve been to, and is still well maintained. It also doesn’t convey the same sense of history that e.g. Riverside does, but in that I find it uniquely of Golden. Golden keeps not quite living up to its potential for me; the hand of industry has moved too freely (I have an earlier flickr set called “Urban Landscapes” which touches on this.

Another new lens to try out. New to me anyway. I got a Nikkor 35-70 1:3.3-4.5 ebay, since I didn’t have a macro-capable lens, and was able to get this one for a song. This is not high-end glass, but I find it enjoyable to shoot with. The other day I read about “Bokeh”, which refers to how a lens performs at rendering out-of-focus areas. I’m really liking the bokeh of this lens. It also has a pleasing flare to my eye; there’s another picture of this monument in the flickr set that features this flare.

Riverside Cemetery

Riverside Cemetery 20061105 18.jpg

Originally uploaded by mjm1138.

Got a new bit of glass for the D70s (Nikkor 70-300mm 1:4-5.6 G). It’s a cheap lens (less than $200 for a Nikkor zoom!), but surprisingly fairly well reviewed, and I figured it’d be a good travel zoom. I went out to Riverside Cemetery to take some pictures with it and get a feel.

The cemetery: Riverside is Denver’s oldest open cemetery. It was a site for relocation for an older cemetery that stood at the current site of Cheesman Park. Local history has it that the process of relocating the graves was fraught with problems and corruption, and while the markers were moved, many of the bodies remain underground at Cheesman. Many of Denver’s early swells are buried here, including old politicians and city founders.

The pictures: Sarah and I have been drawn to photographing cemeteries since we shot the Woodland Cemetery in Des Moines last December. Aside from the striking visuals usually offered by the monuments, cemeteries frequently offer beautiful manicured landscapes, and insight into local and regional history. We will definitely be returning to Riverside, as we spent less than an hour there, in less than ideal light, and barely scratched the surface of what the cemetery has to offer. This would have been a great opportunity to shoot some HDR photos, but alas, I did not convert. The light at sunset was nice, but most of the monuments face East, and so a lot of detail was lost in shadows. I’d like to try this one again in the morning.

The lens: The 70-300 is going to be useful. The long telephoto allows compression of image and background, and the narrow depth of field allows foreground images to be isolated from their surroundings in a way that’s challenging with the 18-70 kit lens that came with the D70s. Focusing is slow, and in low light, it frequently fails to focus, and at 300mm it’s hard for me to avoid shake. That’s my fault, not the lens’s. Definitely not a low-light lens for me, though. All in all, I think it was a good investment. Note that this lens is optically and mechanically identical to Nikkor’s >$300 70-300 ED lens, according to everyone I’ve heard talk about it (including the guy in the store, for what it’s worth). The differences are a cheaper plastic housing with a plastic mount, and the G lacks an aperture ring, which would be necessary to fit it to an older Nikon. Given that it’s really not all that great optically, if you don’t really need that aperture ring, it seems like a no brainer to go for the G at about half the cost of the ED.