Category Archives: Photography

Posts regarding photography and related topics.

Photography, White Balance and Colour Profiling

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Hi Folks:

I wrote this out for a friend of mine and thought I should post it here as well. Back in 2010 we wrote a post on Photography and Colour Management, and this is complementary to that post.

When it comes to colour digital photography, many photographers are aware of white balance. If you’re not, this Wikipedia article on Colour Balance explains it well. The essential element is that the human eye sees subjectively (our eyes receive energy as light and our brains interpret what that energy means) whereas digital cameras see objectively. The human perspective is highly adaptable, so no matter where or when we find ourselves, if we see something white, we recognize it as white, no matter what colour it actually is. Cameras can’t do that. If you’re shooting .jpg images you select a white balance setting on the camera – daylight or incandescent or even auto – and the camera’s software shifts the information captured so that white looks, well, white. If you’re shooting RAW, the images captured have no integral white balance and one must be assigned during raw conversion.

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Focus Stacking for Landscape Photography

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Hi Folks:

We’re certainly not the first to entertain this idea, but while most people associate focus stacking with macro photography (at really high magnifications one’s depth of field (DoF) can be 0.05mm, or less) focus stacking can have value in architectural and landscape photography, even product photography as well. It’s something I’ve only recently tried so I thought I’d share some experiences.

For any image there’s one point (at most) in the frame that is in exact focus. Depth of field is the range of distances within any particular image that appear to be in focus. We’re not going to weigh you down with the details, like Circles of Confusion, Scheimpflug principle, etc. There’s more than enough information on that available on the web.

Focus stacking is a process whereby one takes a series of images with different points of focus and then uses software to choose sections of each image to create a composite image. Here’s an example:

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A Quick Lightroom Tip

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Hi Folks:

I’ve been using Lightroom since the first Beta, but never claimed to know everything. In fact I learned something new today. As I’m sure you do, I often shoot 2-3 exposures in series and then pick the best one of them once I have them in the Lr library. I’ve been opening the Library module in Grid view, selecting the 2 or 3 images, pressing C for Compare view, zooming in, determining which is best and rejecting the other(s), then pressing G to go back to Grid view, selecting the next pair, etc. I don’t often use the filmstrip at the bottom, but I happened to have it open today. What I discovered is this:

Start in Grid view and select two (or more) images for comparison. Press C to go to Compare view, and the two selected images are shown in the filmstrip below. Choose one of the images and X (reject) the other. Now, while in Compare view, click on the frame (not the image) of the next image to be compared in the filmstrip at the bottom and Lr will automatically select the image beside it for comparison. If you have more than two images to compare you can hold down the Shift or Ctrl key to select the next file(s). Compare, choose one, X the others, then press on the frame of the next image to compare in the bottom filmstrip… It’s a lot faster than going back and forth between Compare and Grid views.


 

Okay, that’s it. Now go out and make some photographs!!
 

Hugs,
M&M

P.S. There are some 85 posts on our blog now on digital photography and Lightroom. You can find them all here.

An HDR Comparison

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Hi Folks:

When you mention the term HDR, many people’s thoughts automatically jump to tonemapping and the results that can produce. That’s not what this post is about. If you don’t understand what HDR is all about or why you might want to use it in your photography, I suggest starting here: Why Use HDR? I’ll wait…

Okay, welcome back. I recently acquired a Sony A7R III and one of the features of this camera is that it has a very wide dynamic range – 12 to 14 stops are claimed. To that end, HDR capture with this camera isn’t often necessary. However, a friend of mine and I were out at Victoria’s famous Butchart Gardens last weekend and I wanted to try bracketing a few exposures just to see. Now, when it comes to the question of how many exposures to make and at what EV levels, there’s really only one answer: it depends. It depends on the scene and it also depends on the camera you’re using and what capabilities it has. For my experiment I decided to shoot 5 bracketed exposures at -4/-2/0/+2/+4 EV. Here’s an example of one of those combined images after having been pushed around a bit in Lr.

Water Dragon
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City of Angels

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Hi Folks:

On most evenings, around sunset, you’ll see groups of people gathered along the Dallas Road walkway that runs along the south shore of Victoria. Every sunrise and every sunset is unique, but sometimes the Earth just outdoes herself. This was January 24, 2019, at Holland Point.

Marcia’s image first. This is a composite of 10 cell phone images, joined up with Autopano Pro and pushed around a bit in Lightroom.

City of Angels 1

Mike recently received a new Sony A7RIII camera and has been playing with it a bit. Three images here, at different focal lengths:

City of Angels 2

57mm

City of Angels 3

24mm

City of Angels 4

12mm

Obviously, the sky and the ocean deserve most of the credit here. Okay, that’s it. Now go out and make some photographs!

Hugs,

M&M

2018: A Photography Retrospective

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Hi Folks:

As we close out 2018, many photographers choose to offer their best 10 or 12 images of the year. We did something similar with our 2019 Photo Calendars post, but we wanted to offer our favourite images from the year as well. Perhaps not coincidentally, they were both featured in our upcoming calendar.

Marcia’s first:
Dew DropsVictoria is known as the city of flowers, and Marcia loves to do flower macros. The timing on this one allowed her to capture some of the morning’s moisture as well, and if you look in the spheres you can see continuing reflections of the flowers!

And Mike’s:
Coquihalla RiverThis is a composite image of 30 images, made on the trail near the Othello Tunnels outside of Hope, BC. Fortunately it was a relatively windless day, so the images stacked together added to the sense of flow in the water without too much movement in the leaves on shore.

Creating a retrospective is a worthwhile exercise for every photographer. We went through over 12,000 images to choose the 12 for our calendar images! With digital it’s easy to shoot a thousand images a day, but how many of them are your best work?

Now go out and make some images!

Hugs,
M&M

2019 Photo Calendars

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Hi Folks:

This is the ninth year now that we’ve made our MS Word photo calendar templates available, and as with the past several years, we’ve also created a series of templates and calendar images you can use with Lightroom or other graphics software. As we’ve done before we’ve also added a full-page calendar option, below. 

I created a template in MS Word that allows people who don’t have Photoshop, Lightroom or the equivalent to make their own photo calendars, so we’ll cover that first; the Lightroom stuff is below that. I used MS Word 2016 to make the template, but saved it as both a Word 2016 file and a Word 97-2003 compatible file. Basically it’s a series of tables, one for each month, that look something like this:

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Creative Photography Work

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Hi Folks:

Originally wrote this as an e-mail to a friend but thought we should post this as well. Our friend has mentioned that she has been in a bit of a creative slump with her photography recently, so when I came across this article, I thought of her: Explore Photoshop Mix and Fix with Visual Artist Amr Elshamy.

I do pretty much all of my cell phone processing using Snapseed, but I also have Photoshop Express, Ps Fix, Ps Mix, Prisma and some other apps installed. They’re all free. Prisma does offer an annual subscription plan but if you’re not interested you can ignore that. Prisma is pretty much a one-trick pony, but the one thing you can do is to swipe left/right to vary the amount of effect from the filter you’ve chosen. For any given image most of the filters will look terrible, but there are usually one or two that look good.

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2018 Photo Calendars

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Hi Folks:

This is the eighth year now that we’ve made our MS Word photo calendar templates available, and as with the past couple of years, we’ve also created a series of templates and calendar images you can use with Lightroom or other graphics software. As we’ve done before we’ve also added a full-page calendar option, below. 

I created a template in MS Word that allows people who don’t have Photoshop, Lightroom or the equivalent to make their own photo calendars, so we’ll cover that first; the Lightroom stuff is below that. I used MS Word 2007 to make the template, but saved it as both a Word 2007 file and a Word 97-2003 compatible file. Basically it’s a series of tables, one for each month, that look something like this:

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Photo of the Month – August

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Hi Folks:

August was a pretty quiet month for us, photographically at least. However, we did have a couple of interesting images to make. Marcia’s first:

ST EVAL

ST EVAL

One day while we were down at the Inner Harbour, we spotted this yacht in port. She looks to be a converted fishing trawler, beautifully done up! We took three of Marcia’s images and combined them into one triptych.

Happy Faces

Happy Faces!!

About a week later when Mike went to the grocery store he encountered this group, all with the most beautiful, happy faces! It was too good to pass by without making an image!

Okay, that’s it. Now go out and make some photographs!!

Hugs,
M&M