PixelatedImage Blog

At the risk of more jokes about how y’all can’t read as fast as I write, ahem, Amazon.com now has my third book for pre-sale. It has for about a week, but I was holding out on telling you. So, for the uber-impatient among you, here are the links to the book on Amazon, and on Barnes and Noble. I had planned to do three books over the course of three years, but the folks at Peachpit put RedBull in their water cooler.

Vision & Voice is the third in what I’ve been thinking of as a trilogy, three books bound together by the common theme of vision, but addressing different facets of photography. Within The Frame is about the vision-driven capture, VisionMongers is about the vision-driven career, and Vision & Voice is about the vision-driven digital darkroom. Y’all will be forgiven if you never want to hear me use the word “vision” ever again.

I began Within The Frame by stating that I believe there are three images that go into making the final photograph – the one you envision, the one you shoot, and the one your refine in post-production. The better you are at the latter two, the closer you’ll come to the first. Vision & Voice is about the role of the digital darkroom, specifically Adobe Lightroom, in refining our vision. It’s not a how-to use Lightroom book, though the exercises will help you learn Lightroom. It’s not even a “how do I make my images look better?” book, because that’s the problem with the whole thing. Any book that tells you how to “make your image look better” would first have to know what “better” means, and as only you know your intention for an image, I think it’s best we look at the tools in the digital darkroom through the metaphor of voice. You first have to know what you want to say before you can go about deciding how to say it. Then you choose the right tools, the right voice, to express those intentions.

So I’m working furiously on this now, and it’s easily the most daunting project to date. The release is due in the later spring sometime, May 24 according to Amazon. If you’re counting, that’s 3 books in one year and I’m getting tired, so I trust you’ll all be OK with me taking a breather and hiding on a beach in the Maldives or something for a while once the third book in the trilogy roles off the press in May.

Thanks for being on this ride with me. Churning out these books, having them so beautifully realized by my publishing team, and so enthusiastically received by you, this has been an unforgettable year. I have the best photographic community in the world and I don’t take it for granted – thank you! Thanks also for the response to yesterday’s post. If you’ve not read the comments, you should take some time to do so – seems there are many of us swinging back to film and reaping the creative benefits. My buddy Kevin Clark has a 4×5 camera I might steal from him and play with. It’s been a while since I’ve had this much fun stirring the paint. Much of this stuff,and the resulting images, will be going into the 2nd volume of The Inspired Eye. But don’t hold your breath, that one will come in the new year.

Reading through Vincent Versace’s book, Welcome To Oz, was both a liberating and educating experience for me. While other voices were telling me that should do things one way, Vincent’s book came along at the right time and told me I was free to do it another way. Of course, that’s not how he put it at all, but he does things in a way that felt intuitive to me, and so gave me permission to do things “my way.” That’s the long way of saying that I like what Vincent teaches and I like how he teaches it. So when I started watching his new DVDs it was a little like coming home. I haven’t watched nearly all of them because Vincent puts a lot on these things, and the stuff he teaches isn’t remedial – it’s solid stuff that takes active learning to absorb and adapt – but I wanted to point you to them before the pre-order pricing of 59.95 per title expires.

So rather than go over the whole thing, I want to point you to Vincent’s DVD’s here. The new ones are Welcome To Oz 2.0, Lesson One and Lesson Four, and you can find them HERE along with pre-order pricing. You also get a free copy of OnOne’s fantastic selective focus plug-in FocalPoint, along with some other plug-ins.

I’ll let you go to Vincent’s site to read the descriptions. What I love about what Vincent teaches is that he takes the notion of serving your vision to the logical extreme. The man is a master craftsman with a profound respect for the print and the techniques that get you there. If you’re looking for a masterclass in post-production work that touches heavily on some of the stuff I talked about in Drawing The Eye, Vincent’s the man. Like I said, it’s not remedial, and it’s not fluffy, but it’s huge bang for the buck in terms of education, and the free software takes it over the top.

While we’re on that subject, OnOne software just announced Plug In Suite 5 which won’t ship until next month but that can – like Vincent’s DVDs – be got on discount if you pre-order. More information is HERE on the OnOne site. I have only recently started using this suite and am loving the possibilities it brings to my work. Even the frames, which I didn’t think I’d have much use for, are truly fantastic, and FocalPoint rocks. Photographers with consumer clients will get tons of bang-for-buck out of Plug In Suite 5, which you can demo or purchase on the OnOne site HERE

Last Friday I posted a short slideshow of images shot in Lamayuru, Ladakh. Thanks to all for the kind words left in comments and sent in emails. There were a number of requests for a how-to, so I’ll do my best to be helpful. Truth is there isn’t much to tell in terms of technique. I pointed the camera and let it do it’s thing while I worried about not getting trod on by a horse, donkey or yak. In situations like this the meter on my 5D does remarkably well. But remember, HOW I meter is not as relevant as what the histogram looks like. I shoot first, meter later. Sort of. HERE’s an article on that.

I shoot in AV, chose an aperture (f/16 in the case of the image above, ISO 100, 1/100sec- (see, the “Sunny 16 Rule” really works!), then check the histogram and try to balance the dark shadows and the bright backlit sun. But here’s the thing – perfect exposures are not what these images are about. These images are about mood, so I wasn’t afraid to blow the exposure, plunge the shadows, or even get way too much lens flare. I grabbed my 5D instead of my newer 5D MkII because it’s my kick-about camera; with the 17-40 lens on it I honestly don’t care what happens to it, so I take more risks, and don’t mind burying it in the dust and chaff of harvest. If you study my work you know I tend towards simple, clean compositions. This was an intentional departure, having already shot some harvest scenes that were front-lit, perfectly exposed, and boring & lifeless (see below).

I post-processed these (the slideshow images not the image above) in Lightroom with very few tweaks. In some cases I made the blacks darker. In most cases I added vignette, pushed the clarity slider way to the right, and added some fill light. In other cases still I pulled back the saturation and bumped the vibrance. I don’t have a formula, just the desire to retain or finesse the dusty, luminous feeling of a warm autumn day in the gold of the barley fields. That’s the key, and it’s what forms the spine of the book I am working on now to compliment Within The Frame.

Within The Frame was primarily about capturing your vision within the camera. The next book, the one after VisionMongers, is about capturing your vision in the digital darkroom of Adobe Lightroom. Most books out there answer the question, “how can I make my photograph look better.” Instead, this next book ask the question, “How can I make this image express my vision?” It begins with being conscious of your vision, the feeling you want to express in your image. Sure, adding contrast might be the answer. Or it might not. Begin with your vision for the image, and play in the darkroom until you’ve brought the digital negative into alignment with that. Forget the recipes and shortcuts, and instead learn what each setting does to the aesthetic of the image. Just the same as you do in camera.

I hope this is helpful in some way. I know it’s vague. Between you and I, I think the reason these images work is because I took the risk of getting in there, shooting against the light and pushing my face (and camera) around in the dust and dirt. As my portfolio fills up with safer images, I find myself drawn more and more to the need to express myself with less perfection and more mood. Perfection is over-rated and seldom touches the heart.

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.

A late start this morning. I usually write my blog posts the day before and yesterday was Sharon’s’s first evening home for over a week so we sat on the couch, had a bottle of wine and watched HOUSE MD re-runs on dvd. Nice way to spend an evening, sorry you weren’t invited.

Yesterday’s post on Faith and Art stirred some insightful discussion, some of it far more profound than the actual post on which it was based I encourage you to read it if you haven’t. One of the things that came up was a further clarification. I thought I’d been very clear that this was not only a discussion of faith in the religious sense, that what I was getting at was broader and applied to all of us, theistic, athieistic, or whatever lies in the middle; that our core values and beliefs about life, ourselves, the world in which we live all form the deepest parts of us, the most unique parts of us, and when we draw from that well to create our art we have the potential to create art that is more uniquely personal than when we stay on the surface of things.

Ok, so a few detaily-linky items today.

First, I got my HyperMac yesterday. The one I ordered is a 100 watt-hour external battery for my MacBook and it’s sweet. Small, not much heavier than a normal MacBook battery, and it’s reputed to give another 13 hours of working time, as well as being able to recharge USB devices like the iPhone. And it came with a car charger so I can charge the thing while driving. I wish I’d had this in Ethiopia. Had plenty of car time, it was AC power when we got into town that I didn’t have. Check it out HERE.

Ever work in Lightroom on your laptop and find you just aren’t sure which angle to put your screen at to get the right tonal values in your image? My buddy Gavin Gough has a simple, elegant solution and if you go to his blog you can download a gradient that you can set as your identity plate and you’ll never have to fiddle with the screen again. Check it out HERE.

I’ve been using Blackrapid R-straps for just over a year now and love them just as much as I ever did. The weak point has always been the snap connector and they’ve finally got new ones – small lockable carabiner clips that seem beefy and well-made. I’ve just replaced my old ones and while I never had a problem I know others did and this oughta make many of you feel a little more comfortable about these brilliant straps. When I visited Blackrapid in their Seattle digs last year we had a long talk about a 2-camera system, and that rig is now out. I’ve got one and will be taking it to Ladakh in September and will review it then. For now visit Matt Brandon’s blog to see his write-up on both the new clips and the new harness. Check that out HERE.

Hope you all had a great weekend. I’m gearing up for Ethiopia this week, I leave Friday morning. That means I’m up to my ears in creative briefs, gear, and a mountain of little detaily things that always seems to predicate these trips. But you’ll be pleased to know I’ve got posts lined up for the week and there will be a new desktop wallpaper on the 30th. July 1st is Canada Day so to celebrate I’ll be announcing the winner of the signed 20×30 canvas I announced HERE.

On the subject of backups, I trust, for the sake of your sanity, you’re being diligent. Most of us back up our image files religiously. Are you also backing up your database files for Lightroom or Aperture?

You absolutely need to be sure your Lightroom Catalog files are backed up. Lose them to a corruption or hard drive failure and you lose a heartbreaking amount of work. Lightroom allows you to specify where these backups can be made and when. Problem is, none of the options offered include one to backup when shutting Lightroom down, which is when I would want to do it – after I’ve imported, made changes, etc. All their built-in options are for backups when Lightroom is launched and I think that’s really lame.

So because I embrace my paranoia I finally did something about this. My main machine has several internal drives. One is my main drive, and another is the backup of that main drive. The rest are drives for RAW files and until recently they also held my Lightroom Catalog files and got backed up in a pretty haphazard way.

So here’s what I did. I moved them all – I have 6 right now – to a folder marked LIGHTROOM CATALOGS on my main drive. My main drive gets backed up by Super Duper to my internal backup drive automatically every weekeday at 9:30pm. So now I have automated back up that is never more than 1 days old, unless it all goes down on Sunday night, then it’s 2 days old.

Now all you have to do is re-open your catalogs, go to Lightroom > Catalog Settings > and under Backup Catalog chose Never. Should you have a problem you’ve got recent backups sitting on your back up drive and Lightroom won’t keep asking you about it.

A good Monday morning to ya. I got some great feedback on my Global Workflow article. Articles like this always bring up a bunch of “yeah, but how do you…?” questions. A couple of them were about organizing and file naming in Lightroom, so I’ll walk you through some ideas I had about this.

First, you need to understand that Adobe Lightroom is more than a put files here and fix images there, kind of program. One of the genius things about Lightroom is that it operates on a database. So frankly, if you wanted to put 10,000 images all into one bigg-ass folder called My Photographs, Lightroom would handle it just fine. So this isn’t about how you structure your folder or buckets or drives. It’s about the tools within Lightroom to keep you organized. Second, you need to understand that I’m naturally pretty organized, my brain just knows where things are – most of the time. This arrogance will no doubt come back to bite me as I age, but for now it means I don’t have a huge organization system I can teach you, just a bunch of tools I can show you. So in the spirit of The Big Q:

The Big Q: How do you keep organized in Lightroom?

1. File Structures. Ok, I said this wasn’t about this. But it’s just way easier for me to navigate to my folder: Round The World > Havana than it is to search in other ways. It’s how I work. So I keep my stuff in folders that are usually a simple description of a place or project and that one is inside a folder delineated by year. So the structure would be 2009 > Round The World > Havana.

2. File Naming. When I import images I generally convert the RAW files to DNG and re-name the file. Did you know you can change the file-naming templates in LR? I have mine set to YYYYMMDD_Text_Seq but you can set to whatever you like. In the import dialogue in the File Naming section click the Template field and go to Edit. Now just add the fields you want in there. I like custom text because if my file name is 20090108_Havana_0001 I can always just use the search function in LR and find all images with Havana in the name. Easy. Also makes it easier to find if I’m searching for images in Bridge, which I do occassionally.

3. Keywording. I’m getting better at this as my forays into the world of stock begin to make more sense to me. But generally I’m lousy at it and only paint with the broadest of strokes. So I use Keywords like Travel, Cuba, Havana – mostly so I can keyword an entire folder of images at once. Still, the more disciplined at this you are, the easier it’ll be to find the right images using LR’s search functions.

4. Color Labels. I use colour labels on my files to indicate use. Some are personal (yellow), some are for clients (red), some are for stock (purple) and some are use-pending (blue). So if I know it’s a shot of Havana that’s in my stock library I use the filters, search for Havana with keywords (Havana) and ask LR to filter out only the red labels.

5. Ratings. I rate my best work with 5 stars. Makes it easy to toggle the filters on and off – want to see my 5 star images from Havana, no problem. Navigate to the Havana folder and toggle the filters to show only the 5 stars. Or search for images keyworded Havana and rated with 5 stars. Or….

6. Use Collections and Smart Collections. Collections are easy. Create a new one called Havana 5 Stars, then drag in all the Havana 5 Star images. Done. Now it’s there anytime you want to see those. But Smart Collections go one better because, well, they’re smart. You can create a collection that is dynamic. Let’s say I do a trip to Havana every couple months for a long-term project. I create a Smart Collection called Havana Best, and when I do so it allows me to specify the filters. So I create one that automatically puts ALL images with keyword Havana, rating 5 star, and colour-label Red into the Smart Collection. Each time I come back from Havana and import, keyword, and rate/label my images it automaticall updates the collection. Brilliant.

This isn’t a full-on tutorial, I realize. Might even leave you with more questions. Some of you are already clicking the comments button, “yeah, but how do I…?” Tell you what, FIRST open LR and play with it for 10 minutes, see if you can figure it out. I’m betting you can, and you’ll retain it better. LR is incredibly intuitive when it comes to this stuff. But if questions remain or just dying to tell me I spelled something wrong, let me know

Got a tip I completely overlooked? Comments, as always, are open. On a completely unrelated issue – my book, Within The Frame, comes out 5 weeks from today.

I know there are many of you that don’t get Photoshop User Magazine. I also know you know that I think you should be a member of NAPP and getting this magazine as part of your membership. But I’ll save the sermon for another time. The kind folks at Photoshop User Magazine have graciously allowed me to post the PDF version of my latest article, a gift of love to all you non-NAPP folk out there who want to read the article but don’t subscribe. Click HERE for a downloadable PDF version of my article GLOBAL WORKFLOW, an excerpt from the April/May 2009 edition of Photoshop User.

A quick 5-minute video to run you through my personal back-up system. Click the screen capture above to see the medium-sized Vimeo version.  If you’d like to download a tiny version for the iPod or iPhone, click HERE.

Well, nearly made it through a whole video without the cats interrupting. Not that I mind when they do but soon y’all are going to get your expectations up and start coming here just for the cats and that’s when they’ll go on strike. Keep an eye out at the end, the cats start doing a scene from Fight Club. They’ve been rehearsing.

Here’s an oversimplified cheatsheet.

When it all comes down to it what matters is not whether I use DVDs or not (I don’t) but whether the system you have works for you well enough that you’ll use it. If your computer blows up or is stolen tomorrow does it leave you high and dry? With the cost of harddrive space these days, there’s no reason not to have some kind of back-up plan, even if it’s not as paranoid as my own.

Got a plan? Share it with us. (And yes, I know I got the date wrong. I recorded this on March 23, a Monday. Sigh…)