PixelatedImage Blog

Monument Valley, 2011

With the advent of digital photography, and even more importantly, the internet, our ability to share and experience photographs has changed dramatically. The wet darkroom, once so necessary for creating prints we could touch and feel, is much less common than it once was, and if I were a betting man I’d wager that the majority of digital photographers out there have never printed their own work, and never had the joy of seeing their work large and framed, never felt the richness of a rag paper with their art on it. That impoverishes all of us. High tech, but low touch.

I have always printed my work, though there have been notable hiatuses in my printing, the last 2 years among them. Sometimes I’ve done it myself, to varying degrees of success, and at other times I’ve had anyone from mPix.com to professional printers do my prints. But no matter what, sharing photographs on paper is a beautiful experience. That alone is why I print, and have returned to printing as a student. But there’s more.

I think photographers, and this is something my girlfriend taught me, need to live with their work. Not just on an iPad or laptop, but printed. Large. You need to feel it. Need to live with the lines and tones and moments. Feel the colours. Doing so reveals the flaws (dust spots on the sensor, anyone?), and the weaknesses. Could those lines be stronger? Could there be more tension? Are the colours right? In short, it can return us to craft. It can focus us on more than the momentary experience of seeing a photograph on Facebook, and give the image the dignity of being created in the real world.

For me, this return to printing has pushed me back from the edge of laziness. To see, in 17×22 inch detail, the flaws in my work, has pushed me to become more diligent. Not because I want perfection, but because my art deserves better than to be treated with the flippancy that digital can encourage me towards. And because, like the rest of this past year, it slows me down. It forces me to pay attention. It opens me to renewed receptivity. And, perhaps this is the real reason, the prints are simply more beautiful in my hands and on walls than they will ever be on my screens.

I encourage you, even if you never print at home, to print your work. The artist’s life is about creating and sharing, not creating and hording. If you don’t have a printer, look into mPix.com or WHCC.com and do some test prints with them, or go to your local Costco and try them out. But print your work. Do one a month and at the year’s end you’ll have 12 beautiful prints. Do two of each and at the year’s end you’ll have 12 to keep and 12 to sign and give away as gifts. The ability to see and experience the world, and express that experience through your work, is a gift; keep it moving.

If you’ve not read it, and printing your work yourself intimidates or frustrates you, take a look at Martin Bailey’s ebook, MAKING THE PRINT. It’s $5 and worth every penny. I wish I’d had it 5 years ago.

Iceland, 2010

I spent part of today doing a second edit – nearly two years after the first one – on my Iceland 2010 images. These second edits are important to me, for two reasons. First, we miss images on our first edit, and the closer that edit happens to the moments of making the photographs, the more we get seduced by those moments, our expectations, and our disappointments. A little distance, like a few months or years, can help bring some objectivity. Or a broader perspective to our subjectivity. Either way, at least for me, it reveals images I had once passed over.

The second advantage is that while the images may not have changed in two years, our vision has, and so has our technique. Revisiting the images for a second edit can allow us to work on those images more slowly, and with an improvement in our craft that we didn’t have two years ago.

Take some time in the coming days to revisit your libraries and give your images another glance, you might be surprised what you come up with. I discovered a dozen images from Iceland and a whole B&W series that was just waiting to be discovered. These are some of them.

Cabot Trail, 2012. No Polarizer.

Cabot Trail, 2012. Singh Ray Warming Polarizer.

I put a note out on Twitter last night that I loved my Singh Ray warming polarizer so much I might never take it off my lens. I was asked some questions, so I thought I’d drop a line at the same time. Our time on the Cabot Trail in Nova Scotia was amazing, and though it made for a long day, I had lots of time to trudge around with tripod and snowshoes and take in the beauty. The shot above was one of my sketch images, but I’m showing it here because I have identical frames that differ only in my use of the polarizer. I’ve developed them the same, which is very little, and with no dodging or burning. The differences you see are entirely the result of the polarizer.

Polarizers can make skies really blue (blue skies, not grey and cloudy ones, they stay just grey and cloudy ). Most people know that, but if you only use a polarizer for that you’re missing out and you might as well just use Photoshop or Lightroom to do the same thing. What polarizers do that Lightroom and Photoshop can’t, is get rid of reflections on surfaces like water, leaves, wet streets. It’s an aesthetic affect, and as I’ve said before, the look of the photograph is everything, so anything that changes the look, is a potential tool in the visual toolbox. In the case of the image above, the loss of reflection on the water (in this case, the reflected sky) significantly darkens the water, making it a stronger ribbon of darkness (10 points if you get that Canadian reference) and allowing the rocks under the surface of the water to show more strongly, revealing underwater texture. Like any tool, it’s not a cure-all for a bad photograph, and it won’t make every photograph better, but wielded well, it’s indispensable.

A couple more days in Nova Scotia, then we begin driving towards Vancouver, about 7500 kilometers.

Morning coffee at Valley of Fire S.P. and a chance to look at the maps.

Today marks one month of traveling. We left Nevada’s Valley of Fire State Park this morning after two nights there. The Valley of Fire is spectacular and while there are weeks worth of photography to be had, we’re still on a timeline that’s somewhat inflexible. Places like this tend to be overwhelming so I focused on the thing that most struck me – the rocks. The lines and colours of the rocks were amazing, particularly at White Domes where we spent the bulk of our time and might just have camped the first night because the campgrounds were completely filled with R.O.U.S’s (RVs of Un-Necessary Size).

Because a few readers have commented, correctly, that I seem to be in my “blue period” recently, I am posting here some images from my experimental “pink period” just to show I’m no one-trick pony. (I am a one-trick pony but I can perform those tricks in multiple hues.)

All of these were shot with my iPhone with the exception of only one which was made with my Nikon D3s and a 24mm lens. When I get frustrated these days, by lines or a complete inability to frame a photograph, I take out my iPhone and play. The total lack of options is freeing and the small size allows me to play and move about without the weight of a bigger camera. And the files are great. I submit the next deadline on Photographically Speaking next week and I’ve just included a couple of these iPhone images for the book.

Next stop Utah and one night in Zion before moving on to Monument Valley en route to New Mexico.

Well, the day is upon us. The final book in the vision trilogy is out and Amazon has started shipping it – which means others are soon to follow, and places like Amazon.ca and other Amazon.co.uk should have them heading out within a month. I can’t tell you how excited I am to have this done and out there as a body of work. So excited I want to give 3 signed copies away. But you have to keep reading to find out how that’s going to happen. No cheating and going straight to the end!

Anyways, the video (click the screenshot above and it’ll take you to Vimeo) is a quick intro to the book, hopefully it’s helpful in giving you a feel for what the book is and is not. It’s not very well scripted, mostly because after an hour of out-takes I was bound and determined to get it done in one take.

I mention this briefly in the video but it deserves more than a passing mention. It’s been 14 months since Within the Frame was released and in that time so much has happened. The community that gathers around this blog has grown significantly, I’ve had a chance to meet some of you, travel or photograph with others, and become friends with many of you. Writing books that no one reads was not one of my life goals and the audience that has sprung up around the books, eBooks, and this blog has truly humbled me; I’m deeply grateful and I want you to know that. As such, this book is dedicated to you. The dedication reads:

For the amateurs – the lovers – those who do this for the love of the image and the journey of getting there. This is for everyone who loves this craft, whether you draw a paycheque from your efforts or not. For everyone who has ever created an image just to say, “Look at this!”

Vision & Voice, along with the others in the vision trilogy – Within The Frame, and VisionMongers – is available at Amazon.com HERE or from your favourite bookseller

Want one? Want it signed? Leave a comment in the comments section, make sure your name and email are there and I’ll do a draw for three copies which I will sign and mail out to you before I go to Iceland towards the end of the month.

Last night, under cover of darkness, Adobe rolled out Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3. And there was much rejoicing. It was fun to watch people quietly realize it had been released, order it and begin to play with the new features. For the first time in my life I was on the inside of a secret little club, complete with NDAs and letters from lawyers and stuff, so that meant I could finally start talking about it. Phew. I hate keeping secrets.

I’ve been living with Lr3 in its various incarnations for months now because Vision & Voice, Refining Your Vision in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, the third in the vision trilogy, is based on Lr3. So now is a good time to tell you what Vision & Voice is and is not and how it fits into your learning curve for Lr3.

First, Lr3 isn’t – on the outside – vastly different from Lr2. If you know and love Lr2, Lr3 will be an easy upgrade for you. That doesn’t mean it isn’t better. It is. It’s faster and leaner and the image quality, especially with noise, seems noticeably better to me. Most of the tools are the same, though the Post Crop Vignetting has been ratcheted up a couple notches, there’s Grain, and the new ability to remove lens distortion is going to rock people’s worlds too. Import is noticeably different as well.

So, is Vision & Voice the book you want to learn Lightroom 3?

Well, it is and it isn’t. Vision & Voice was written with Lightroom 3 in mind. The screenshots are all from Lightroom 3. But the purpose of the book was not to completely unpack the software for you. In fact I never once leave the Develop module. So Importing, doing slideshows, printing, and making fancy web galleries – you’re on your own and there are bound to be great books out there that teach you those things better than I could. Vision & Voice was written to discuss the aesthetics possible with Lightroom, to help you find a process that works for you but that begins with discovering and articulating your vision for the image and then using the best tools to get there in your workflow. I call it Vision-Driven Workflow. It’s not a system, just an adaptable process to refine your vision in Lightroom.

Will Vision & Voice work for Photoshop, ACR, or Aperture 3 users?

Well, I’ve never used Aperture 3 but like Nikon and Canon cameras have some differences but are essentially just cameras, so too I think are the leading post-processing programs. Basically it comes down to what they call the slider and how you accomplish one change or another, but if you are willing to do a little translation work in your brain, the principles I explore in the book are absolutely transferable. There’s a large-ish chapter in the middle about the specific tools in Lightroom 3 itself, but again I think you can read that with your preferred software open in front of you and get some good learnin’ in.

What about LR2? Surely you aren’t abandoning the Luddites?

Lr3 and Lr2 aren’t profoundly different in the way you do 98% of your development, and this book is all about development. Don’t sweat it. If you use Lr2 you’ll feel right at home with this book.

But I don’t need all this vision-stuff, I just wanna make my pictures look better, man.

This is where I began with this book. So many of us seem to approach our post-processing with the “just make it look better, man!” mentality. I pushed back and said, until we define what “better” means, I can’t help you and you can’t help you. You have to know what your own intent for the image is before you start heading in that direction. So I discuss that. And then we look at 20 of my own images, work through them together from beginning to end. I’ve provided 20 DNG files that you can download when you get the book and work alongside me from beginning to end.

Will we learn really fancy Dave-Hill techniques and Recipes for Awesomeness and the latest Un-Suck Filters?

No you won’t. Shame on you for asking.

When does the book come out?

It went to press last Friday. Should be in my hands by end of the month or the first few days of July. Then it’ll begin shipping from various retailers. Folks who pre-order through Peachpit’s website will get theirs first. Amazon orders will arrive after that.

What if I want to learn Lightroom 3 right now?

Well, my first stop is always the NAPP and that’s where I’ll send you. No doubt the blogosphere is about to explode with posts about new features and they’ll be great, but my go-to place for learning is Kelby and the gang. Go to the NAPP Lightroom Learning Center.

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.

One of my favourite how-to books is Vincent Versace’s excellent Welcome To Oz, A Cinematic Approach to Digital Still Photography with Photoshop. (For the book go HERE, for the DVD series, look HERE. ) It’s unlike anything else out there and was a real eye-opener for me. If you’re not familiar with it, or with Vincent Versace, I suggest you look into it.

As a follow-up to Welcome to Oz, Vincent’s just released 2 tutorial dvd sets under the title Return to Oz. One is called The Lazarus Effect, the other From Oz to Kansas 2.0. The first deals with recovering lost details, the second with black and white conversions, and while I am still waiting for the postman to bring mine, I’m introducing them to you because I know Vincent’s other work and love it. Vincent is a rare breed, and if you like my teaching I suspect you’ll like his – he talks alot about vision and expression, so these are bound to be infused with much more than just technique. Read the Afterword to Within The Frame to get a sense for the passion Vincent has for this art.

Like I said, I haven’t seen them yet, but they’re coming and I wanted to tell you about them now because by the time I get them the Introductory pricing is likely to be over. If you order before the 27th the pricing is $59.95, and each comes with a bunch of extras, including photoshop actions and Nik plug ins.

For more information on Return to Oz: The Lazarus Effect click HERE. For more information on Return to Oz: From Oz to Kansas 2.0 click HERE.

There’s a line in Paul Simon’s anthemic KODACHROME that has always rubbed me the wrong way:

If you took all the girls I knew
When I was single
And brought them all together for one night
I know they’d never match
My sweet imagination
And everything looks worse in black and white.

It’s always pained me to think Paul and I would forever disagree on this (the bit about everything looking worse in B/W, not the bit about the girls, necessarily) And then one day I heard a later version of the song and he actually changed the words to everything look better in black and white. He’d come to his senses and I could finally stop sending him all those letters and living in violation of my restraining order. I love it when harmony is restored to the universe.

On our Lumen Dei workshops we encourage people to strongly consider treating an image as monochrome when colour does not actively add to the image. Black and white has an ability to focus us away from the otherwise powerful pull of colour and towards emotion, form, and tone. It’s also been really hard to get good black and white prints in the digital medium without some kind of education. And that’s where I am going with all this. Two resources, among many, that are particularily good sources of teaching on B/W conversion.

1. Kelby Training has an excellent online course called Color to Black and White Artistry by Katrin Eismann – if books are not your thing, join Katrin Eismann as she walks you through the process of turning color images into stunning B/W images. Kelby Training is an excellent value for education – if you’re looking to keep your edge sharp, or sharpen some of the dull bits, it’s well worth the $20/month (I think that’s what I pay…)

2. Mastering Black and White Digital Photography, Michael Freeman. Long-time readers know I’m a huge fan of Freeman’s book The Photographers Eye, and his book on Black and White is just as exceptional. You can find it HERE on Amazon for less than $20.