PixelatedImage Blog

Hi folks. I hope you had a great weekend. Been a spectacularily sunny one here, the last glorious throes of summer, I suppose.

It’s Monday and I’m out climbing Black Tusk in Garibaldi Park here in British Columbia. (Actually it’s Sunday and I’m writing this ahead of time, absolutely pumped about a day in the mountains tomorrow). So, a round up of details for you while I’m out getting some down-time. Remember that freaky NYC heart-attack scare? This, and a personal trainer and nutritionist who’s kicking my butt, are going to make sure it doesn’t happen again. See? When y’all threatened to kick my ass if I didn’t take care of myself, I listened.

First, a huge thanks to everyone that downloaded my new eBook “10″ – The response to it, and the amazing comments, reviews, and emails, were so encouraging. I’ve got ideas for a few more but promise that they’ll be quality content, great design, and priced so no one has to sell a kidney on the black market. Anyways, thanks! If you haven’t had a chance to check it out – read the post below this one. The introductory pricing of $5 is on until October 01, then I bump it to $10 for the late-comers and procrastinators.

This Friday I will be in SEATTLE at the Blackrapid Studio. Blackrapid are the makers of the R-Strap and are hosting an evening with yours truly. Come, listen to me prattle on about vision-this and vision-that, get a book signed, introduce yourself to me, etc. But make sure you EMAIL THEM to reserve a spot – this is a private and very small gathering due to space restrictions.

Matt Brandon’s doing a photo tour to southern India this February and it looks great. I still haven’t been to the south and I’m terribly jealous of anyone doing this tour. I’ll be on assignment for World Vision at the time and desperately trying to avoid the insanity of the 2010 Olympics here in Vancouver. More information on Matt’s tour HERE.

If the heat of South India isn’t your thing and you prefer pasta to masala dosa (oh man I love masala dosa!), there is still a spot open on the April 2010 Italy Within The Frame tour with Jeffrey Chapman and I. More information HERE. It says Sold Out on the splash page, and it was, but we had someone move from week 1 to week 2 to take advantage of the Venice extension, so there’s room if you still want in.

This is my new eBook. It’s called 10. The subtitle “Ten Ways to Improve Your Craft. None of Them Involve Buying Gear.” just about says it all.

10 is my 32 page answer to everyone that’s ever written in and asked me “So, what can I do to make better photographs now? I have the basics but want to take my images up to the next level. Where do I go from here?”

10 is not a bunch of cheezy tips cranked out to make a few bucks. It’s an effort to move us collectively towards better photography without feeling the need to contribute to the growing pile of Quick Tips to Shoot Like A Pro. Anyone who’s been at this long enough knows that “shooting like a pro” (whatever that means) takes time and effort and anyone that tells you otherwise is selling snake oil.

10 is being sold as a downloadable PDF, and I’m offering it at half price as an introductory offer to my blog readers. It ain’t cheap. At a whopping $5 it’s going to deprive a few of you of your latte for the day. But I’m moving the price to $10 in the fall, so this is your chance to get in on it and my chance to say thank you for being so loyal. If you loved Within The Frame, you’ll love this one.

See? 5′ll getcha 10

In a follow up to yesterday’s post about exposure and the histogram, I thought I’d highlight a couple things.

I had a question in the comments asking whether Nikon had a similar metering mode to centre-weighted average, they do. I just don’t know the name of it. But that’s the thing – it doesn’t matter. Pick the metering mode that seems to work best for your camera, but then forget about it – what matters is the histogram, not how you get there.  Now, obviously there are exceptions. There are times for precise metering. But this is the way I do it 90% of the time, if not more.

All this really assumes you’re shooting RAW and will be going into the digital darkroom to finesse your final image. If you are shooting JPG you need to be WAY more particular about your metering because the moment you hit the button the camera throws away all kinds of information and tweaking it later will reveal the weakness of the digital negative MUCH faster. I know there are some nutty folks out there still shooting JPG, but I don’t get it. For me and my image needs, I shoot RAW.

You also need to know that when the camera shows you a histogram it’s actually showing you a histogram for a little JPG preview it’s created just for this. It dumbs the image down and then shows you what it looks like. So if you clip the highlights a little you’re probably safe bringing them back in LR or Aperture. Assuming you’re shooting RAW. So don’t be a total freak about this. You have about a stop to play with in most circumstances before those blown highlights are really, really, blown highlights.

There are circumstances wherein the blown highlights need to stay in the image. If the sun is in the photograph, your histogram will have blown highlights. The sun IS a blown highlight. Same with any specular highlights in the image. A glint of light off of silverwear or the chrome fender of a car, for example. If you try to exposue so that the histogram has no lost information on the right the whole image will be so dark you’ll have defeated the purpose of this whole thing – because the mass of your information will now be in the leftmost half, which means less actual information and a poorer digital negative.

Glad this has helped so many of you. We’ve got a funeral tomorrow so I won’t be posting. See you – most likely – back here on Thursday. Could be Friday. Let’s see how Wednesday plays out.

After Friday’s post on how I deal with white balance, I got a nice email from Ryan Marco asking me about how I go about metering. He asked a lot of good questions about how I determine where and how I meter the light in a scene. Many of you might have the same questions. And I’m about to disappoint you with my answer. I just point the thing and shoot.

First some background. When I shot film I got very good at taking readings off anything that was middle grey, or close to it, and then, using the Zone system, making adjustments from there. Those were simple times. I never used a handheld spot meter, never got too bent out of shape about things, and bracketed a stop in either direction when in doubt. It didn’t hurt that I was using mostly negative film with a broad dynamic range.

So when I tell you my approach to metering in digital leans to the side of simple, you know the background. As with white balance issues, life is just too short for neuroses on this matter. I lean towards the artist more that the geek most times anyways.

But here’s the bigger issue; it doesn’t matter. I suspect I’m going to get in trouble for this, so the caveat is that this is what works for me. But the thing is, digital capture is different than film. What matters, assuming you’re going to take the digital negative into the digital darkroom, is getting the best digital negative. The best digital negative is not the one that looks perfect on the LCD screen. It’s not the one where you nail the exposure using a spot meter. It’s the one (wait for it, this is paradigm-shifting stuff, here) that has the most digital information, even if it looks like crap on the LCD.

I cover this in Within The Frame (pg 44-46) but let me take another stab at it here.

The more digital information in that digital negative, the more able you are to create a final print with greater quality, less noise, and more awesomeness. So before I go into this, you need to remember: the image on the LCD will most likely look like crap. That’s OK. Use the LCD to preview composition and focus, and then pay attention to the histogram to determine exposure.

How do you know you have the best possible digital negative with the most digital information? The histogram. Forget studying your metering modes and learning the fancy voodoo light mojo. Learn to read your histogram, that cryptic graph of peaks and valleys on the LCD screen. You might have to consult your manual to find out how to access this. For most Canon DSLRs you just press the preview/play button and then the info button once or twice until your histogram appears.

This is the histogram from Adobe Lightroom, but the one on your LCD will look similar. The histogram above represents a scene captured with no blown highlights – notice the mountains and valleys don’t go off the right-side of the chart – and no plunged shadows – notice the data doesn’t go off the left-side either.

Now, I’m going to assume you know nothing about the histogram. It’s a graph, that’s all it is, and it’s deceptively simple. that graph represents the light values in the scene you’ve just captured at the exposure values you’ve captured it at. On the far left are shadows with no details, totally plunged shadows of darkness. On the far right are highlights with no details, total burned out whiteness. And between those two extremes are all the tonal values from black to white. The height or shapes of the peaks and valleys, for this exercise, don’t matter. Ignore them. You can do something in-camera with where the peaks and valley sit from left to right, but can’t do a thing about their height or shape. That’s the scene. Ignore it.

Why the histogram matters now gets – for a moment – a little more complicated. It’s logical that as long as you get the whole scene into the box of the histogram – neither wildly over nor under-exposed – you can tweak the rest in Lightroom and be done with it. Simple, perfect exposure, right? Wrong. You’ve created a digital negative but not a good one. Why? Because the histogram reflects some quirky math that can only be understood by wizards and occultists, and it doesn’t respond to the logic of mortals like you and I.

Remember I said the best digital negative was the one with the most information? Well the right half of the histogram is capable of storing exponentially more information in it than the left half. WAY more information. And the right quarter of the histogram, WAY more than the other three combined. How much more? Again, I’m simplifying, but if the right quarter of the histogram can hold 2000 levels of information, the quarters to the left of it can hold 1000, 500, and 250 respectively. There isn’t much information at all in the darks. That right quarter of the histogram can hold twice what the rest of the entire histogram can hold.  It’s a WAY bigger bucket, can hold more information. More information means better image quality and more flexibility in the digital darkroom before noise becomes an issue.

So what do you do with this knowledge?

Here’s how I approach exposure. First, I shoot on AV mode or Manual almost 100% of the time. I leave my metering on whatever your camera’s equivalent of centre-weighted average is. Then I take the shot. Click.

Before you look at the images/histograms: I did this in Lightroom as a simulation only and it’s meant to be an illustration, so don’t get hung up on the EXIF displayed on the histogram, it won’t change and will only confuse you. Look at the image relative to the how the information is distributed in the histogram.

I look at the histogram. Way too dark. Barely has any information in the right half, never mind the rightmost quarter. Then I use the EV+/- function on my camera, push the exposure a stop, try again. Click.

Getting better. But while the image LOOKS OK-ish on the LCD screen, the histogram is telling me otherwise. It is still, in terms of a good digital negative, underexposed. So I go back to my EV +/- and bump it another stop. Click.

Much better. Might be a little light for my taste, and where’d my clouds go? Doesn’t matter, I know they are there because none of the scene has disappeared off the edges of the graph. You’ll bring them back in Lightroom or Aperture. Look at the histogram – it’s where it should be, as far over to the right without going off the end. What matters is that now you have LOTS of digital information.

Now I have a digital negative with as much information as possible I can bring the image into the darkroom and adjust it as necessary. In this case I like the luminosity of the boat and the ocean but it was the clouds in the initial scene I loved and have lost. Should have had an ND grad filter in my pocket but didn’t. So in this case I’ll use the gradient filter in LR to darken the sky and punch the clouds – Clarity rocks for this. I’ll make a few more tweaks – including a grad filter along the bottom with Clarity set to -100 to soften foreground waves, and the brush tool with bumped exposure, brightness and clarity to pop the sails.

Here’s the final image (crappy composition and all)

So the name of the game is getting to know your histogram so you can create the best possible digital negative. And the best possible digital negative is what, class? The one with with the most information. There will be times when you have a scene with a larger range of tones than the camera can capture. In this case you have options; several of them. Decrease that range with the use of ND grads to reign in the highlights, or a flash to pop the shadows. Or you might take 3-5 bracketed exposures and bring them together in Photomatix or Photoshop. Or you can just make a choice to create an image with either plunged shadows and/or burned out highlights. (page 45 in Within The Frame has a great example of an image with a histogram that goes wildly off both ends.)

My way isn’t the only way, I’m sure of it. But it’s what works for me. I used to meter then shoot, now I shoot then meter. “Same, same, but different,” as they say in Asia. Does this help? Questions?

If this was helpful and you want more, or if my lunatic ravings didn’t convince you, I urge you to spend $9.95 and download Darwin Wiggett’s article Expose Right. You can find that article HERE on Darwin’s site. Highly recommended.

On Friday, September 4th I’ll be doing a lecture/meet-and-greet thing at the HQ of BlackRapid, the makers of the R-Strap. BlackRapid are fans and supporters of mine, which suits me fine because they make the best dang camera straps in the world and if that isn’t enough they’re just darn nice people. So here’s the details.

Friday, September 4th
7pm
Studio-R, 315 N 36th St, Seattle

Space is extremely limited – to something like 25 people – so you need to get in touch with them by email HERE to reserve and confirm your spot. See you there!

I traveled once with a photographer obsessed with white balance. He routinely accessed the deeper menus on his Nikon and played with changing the parameters on his white balance, as though he was on a quest to discover the perfect magic setting. He quizzed me about color casts and how I set my white balance, and I think it truly deflated him to discover that not only was I not in possession of Kabbalistic knowledge on white balances, but that I actually didn’t seem to care. When I told him I just set my camera to auto white balance he looked like I’d just kicked his kitten.

Like so much in the photography world we’re very good at getting sidelined by issues counterfeiting as important. Now, there’s some work that’s colour-critical, and for that it’s important to nail your white balance. Get a grey card, do a custom white balance, and do it right. But for the rest of us, it’s a matter of interpretation. And I find it amusing because the same people that want to know “if that image is photoshopped” are the same ones that are prone to making good and sure the image is perfectly colour-balanced. But it’s important to remember that for most of us it’s more critical that the colour balance of the image be an ally in what we’re trying to communicate than to be perfectly accurate. It is, to put it another way, completely subjective. It’s a matter of interpretation.

This post isn’t about white balance. It’s about remembering what matters and focusing on that. I read a pop-theology book several years ago called “Adventures in Missing The Point” and while I’ve mostly forgotten the contents, the title of the book taught me so much. It is still a constant reminder not to get sidelined from the task at hand. That task will be different for all of us, we all photograph for different reasons. What matters is that you keep the main thing the main thing. In the case of white-balance, if your work is colour-critical, then by all means freak out about your white balance either in capture or in post. You have to. But if your work is a matter of interpretation or expression, then the “right” white balance is the one that allows your photograph to best express your vision, and as such I suggest you spend less time getting it “right” and more time playing with it. The same goes for everything. Craft matters, so does technique, but for most of us they serve our vision and are an act of expression. As such, all bets are off.

The image above is essentially the same one, set to different colour temperatures. Which one’s right? Doesn’t matter. What matters is which one most closely aligns the image to how I think and feel about the Paris Metro. Want to know the top-secret way I deal with colour-balance? I set the camera to Auto White Balance. I shoot in RAW. I bring the image into Lightroom and push sliders around until it looks the way I want it to. Not very technical, you say? Life’s too short.

By the way, I love kittens, so please don’t call PETA or send nasty emails. Instead, put that rage to good use and go play with your white balance. Try setting it to something wildly irresponsible and see what happens.

In case you missed it – because it got posted over the weekend and may have got a little buried, there’s a chance to spend a week with me and Jeffrey Chapman in the Liguria region of Italy this April. One week in what I keep hearing over and over again is one of the most beautiful places on the planet, with some of the best food and wine in the world, and well, a couple photographers with a passion for this kind of stuff – what more could you ask for? More info HERE. I’ll warn you now it looks like it’s already a sold-out trip – sold out even faster than this year’s Lumen Dei – but all bets are off until actual application forms and deposits are in. And if we do sell out we’ll run a second week back-to-back with the first to accommodate as many folks as possible.

The winner of the Scott Kelby Worldwide Photowalk was announced this week on Scott’s blog HERE.

Matt Brandon, my partner in crime on Lumen Dei (which, by the way, is in just over three weeks!) has a new episode of Depth of Field now posted HERE.

Looking for some motivation and inspiration that packs a One-Two punch? My bud Zack Arias posted a great video HERE, and follow up to that video HERE. Be sure to read the comments. Inspiring stuff.

My friend Darwin Wiggett is one of those impossibly talented photographers whose work I can look at for hours. Very different from my own work, his landscape work is gorgeous and always moves me. After yesterday’s post I thought I’d go back to Darwin’s site and spend some time there – particularily looking at the way in which he uses light and time in his images. I stumbled on some things I hadn’t seen before, including a few downloadable PDFs that I want to point you towards. The first is his Paint With Time article, the second his Expose Right article. Check them out HERE. (Warning: Start playing with this stuff and you’ll be ditching your plans to buy that expensive new lens and spending more than you ever imagined possible on ND and ND grad filters. I’m just sayin’…)

Darwin is an excellent teacher and goes into technical details on a level I just never get around to. He illustrates things really well and for the paltry couple bucks he charges for the downloads, it’s money well spent. Darwin’s a kindred spirit – he talks about gear only as it pertains to technique and technique only as it pertains to vision. He’s up there with Bruce Percy at the top of my list of photographers at whose feet I’d like to spend a week learning. Fortunately, Darwin’s got some awesome workshops, books, and articles and is very open about sharing his passion and his knowledge. He’s also featured as one of my profiled photographers in VisionMongers, along with Chase Jarvis, Zack Arias, Karl Grobl, and others, so he’s in illustrious company.

All of this, and my jet-lag, pushed me down to the water’s edge yesterday morning. I sat on English Bay as I do most mornings with a muffin and coffee, and looked at the light. For the rest of the week I’m going to use my jet-lag for good and not for evil and take my little black box and tripod down to shoot the light and the land. One of the perils of vocational photography is that it’s so easy to lose the excitement, but I’ve found mine again and I can’t wait to grab my gear and my coffee, check the tide charts this morning, and go shoot. Can’t wait.

I shot these on Ko Samet last week. If you click the image it’ll go big so you can better see the info on them. If you look carefully you’ll see they were shot only 5 minutes apart. Both were tweaked only minimally in Lightroom. The reason I wanted to show you them is two-fold.

Reason One. Timing is everything.
Whether the image on the left or the right strikes you more than the other, it’s undeniable that the five minutes between captures was a vital 5 minutes. When we create an image, from the split-second difference between blinks to the 5 minute difference between sunset and dusk, is no small matter. Like every decision we make it has an aesthetic effect on the image and is really important. There’s a reason portrait photographers wait for just the right gesture – it’s the difference between a revealing image or one that presents no revelation at all. There’s a reason landscape photographers wait for just the right light. It doesn’t help make the image better, it makes the image. Period.

Reason Two. Time is everything.
The image on the left was shot at 5.0/seconds. The one on the right at 0.6 seconds. The slower shutter speed wasn’t chosen because I had no other way to create a good exposure, it was chosen for the effect it would have on the aesthetic of the image – in this case a blurring of wave details to create a feeling of calm. Again, not merely a detail, it was the reason I created the image, to re-create that feeling of calm. A faster shutter would not have done it.

I’m no expert on landscapes, these were creative assignments I gave myself to see if I could do it, to see what I could make of the light and the waves. It was an effort at intentionally working with what I had to create a mood that was present in the overall scene but not in any capture made at faster speeds. It reminds me of the ongoing debate about post-processing a little, reminds me of the “did it really look like that or did you do something in Photoshop?” questions we all get from the purists and the cynics. The answer, of course, is yes. And no. More to the point, it felt like this.

A couple weeks ago I wrote an article for the DPS site about Niches, Ruts, and Grooves. One of the ways I get out of my own ruts is intentionally jumping them with self-assigned work. Right now I’m studying the use of polarizers, variable ND filters and ND Grads, and the ways in which landscape photographers, like my friend Darwin Wiggett, use light. So many digital shooters are convinced that because skies can be darkened in Aperture, LR, or PS, filters are no longer needed, missing the point completely. Landscape shooters understand the way light and time work together in ways other photogs might not. I have no intention of being a landscape photographer, I don’t have the chops for it, but learning the discipline to learn from the discipline is proving to be incredibly helpful, inspiring, and fun. What I take back to my own area of expertise will sharpen my skillset, put me into a new groove and make me more valuable in my niche. It’ll do the same thing for you. Go shoot something you’ve not shot before, see what inspirations and lessons lie therein.

Two other things. First, I’m hoping this is fixed before this post goes live but, well, if yer reading this, it ain’t. I installed a Word Press upgrade and it’s broken a couple things, like the Recent Comments. UPDATED – The legendary Henri fixed it. Move along citizen, nothing to see here.

Second, we’re dealing with a death in the family on this side of things so there might be a gap or two in this week’s postings. Go hug the ones you love, no one sticks around forever.