Photo Club Photos

I'm doing a photo club on Jekyll Island, and today's assignment was to shoot photos of architecture at the historic district. If and when other club members send me their photos, I'll post them here,

Mahlon's Photos

 I wanted to show the architectural detail here, and I composed for the palms above and reflected in the window. But I missed getting the view centered so that both sides were balanced, ruining the symmetry.

This is an example of cropping for effect. I also did a bit of lens distortion correction to keep the roof line straight.

This is a vertical panorama, I took 3 photos from top to bottom, and Photoshop assembled them for me. Each image needs to overlap the next by about 1/4, so your final image resolution is about 2-1/2 times that of a single image, or about 24 Megapixels in this case.

 This is the original image




 The image below was adjusted using Photoshop's perspective transform to straighten the chimneys. Because the resulting image is skewed into a trapezoid, the resulting image needed to be cropped closer. The colors are more saturated, as well.

T

Rather than get the entire turret, I went for a small part of it using my zoom. Then I focused on the brickwork by increasing the contrast  and black levels, making shadows go black.

 I couldn't resist getting a shot with the croquet players in front of the hotel. Color was saturated a bit to compensate for the haze, and the horizon was straightened.

 I liked the repeating pattern on this Sans Souci porch, but the dynamic range was to wide for a single shot, so I too 3 shots which were 2 fstops apart, and combined them with an HDR program. This allowed the detail in the siding behing the left chair and the detail in the column on the left to both be present.

This lamp was outside Sans Souci. I tried it with he building as a backdrop,  but took advantage of the flat sky to make it stand out by itself. A little extra sharpening and clarity heightened the texture in the glass

This lamp pole has wonderful patina, and is providing housing for a couple bugs living in their cocoons under the edges. I used a wide aperture here and got very close to allow the background to blur, further enhancing the details in the pole.

I asked permission of the croquet players to take some photos, and placed my camera on the ground behind the blue ball for this shot. To try to keep everything in focus, I closed the aperture to f16, requiring a 1/2 second shutter speed. But since I had the camera on the ground, I didn't need a tripod. Having a wicket in the scene would have added more to the story in this picture.








Nancy's Photos

Sam's Photos

Allan's Photos

Charlotte's Photos

Restoring an old panorama

While showing some of my posters and books at Friendship Day, a home owner here saked if I could restore an old photo that they had in a frame in the house. They wanted it done for an open house the following week, as it showed the view that was there when the house was built early in the last century. I said that I would be interested and they delivered it to me.

The two images captured by the camera

As you can see from the original copy I made of it, it was a set of 4 black and white photos which had been trimmed to match as well as possible at the edges. Brightness between the images was way off, there was some skew in each image that made the match relatively poor (though the image was interesting because of this, I thought) and there was no correction for lens distortion across the scene.
I set up my Nikon D80 with a 50 mm lens on a tripod with 2 strobes arranged at 45 degrees. I placed the original on a table under glass to keep it flat. The width of the image would require coverage of 2 shots. I probably would have been better of to place the image on the floor, since had to work around the tripod legs. A nearby window provided ambient light, but the strobes would flood the scene so that managing the ambient would not be a problem. I made a number of test exposures to balance the flash and find the best exposure. I captured the copy in two sections to be stitched together with Photoshop.
Once I had the raw images, I imported them into Lightroom and then loaded them up into Photoshop, retaining them as 16 bit color images. Using Photoshop's panorama function with manual adjustment, I arranged the two pieces as best as possible ignoring the brightness issues for the moment. I then created layers of the 4 original pieces and rotated them and moved them to find a better fit for the pieces than was possible with the original prints, by reducing the transparency of the top layer and using free transform to align the elements. This was particularly needed with the house in the right hand side, as the original match was fairly poor.

Partially processed in Photoshop.

Once I was satisfied with the new arrangement of the image parts, I uses the rubber cloning stamp to remove the joint artifacts between the images. I then used the brush tool with a low flow value to better balance the brightness between the segments. I left the bright segment of the house on the left for later adjustment in Lightroom. I saved the image once with the layers intact, then again as a flattened image to work with in Lightroom.
Once back in Lightroom, I applied a gradient darkening mask to adjust the brightness around the house on the left. I did some spotting. Then I noticed that there were two fence posts below the house on the left, which needed to be fixed. I copied the image back into Photoshop and removed the extraneous fencing.
Once this was done, I loaded them back into Lightroom and applied one of the black and white templates in Lightroom to convert the color image to black and white. Out of some twenty converstion templates, I found that one with higher contrast provided a better result.
The original frame was 6X18. I printed  the image on 11X17 matte paper to come as close as possible to the original style. However, this was too short for the frame, so I printed it again on 13X19 glossy and trimmed it to fit the frame.
I could have worked this a lot more in Photoshop to remove even more artifacts, however, I chose to leave some of the original defects in the final image to retain some of the antique quality. I did not attempt to remove the resulting lens distortion, as warping the images to achieve this would have skewed the images and likely resulted in more loss of image area after matching and cropping.
The resulting image removed the joint artifacts, had better light balance and contrast than the original. A close inspection revealed a person walking up the road on the right, something that the customer had not noticed. They were pleased with the result.

The final image

I enjoyed this challenge, and would like to see more work like this.

Study, study

Now that we're back in Maine, we have high speed internet again. Time to catch up on a bunch of things that were out of reach with the slow wifi on Jekyll Island.

Yesterday I got into the great Adobe TV videos about Lightroom, hosted by Julieanne Kost. I got through about 4 of them, on topics like whether to use one or multiple catalogs in Lightroom. Julieanne agreed with my decision to use one, though my total photo count is approaching 50,000. Another topic was when to use virtual copies or snapshots. Again, my approach was verified, though I have never used snapshots and there are times when I might find them useful. Of course, there was a stringer included to illustrate how useful snapshots can be if you take your images from Lightroom to Photoshop CS5, which I'm not going to be able to afford for some time. Another video was how to use the second monitor window in survey mode to view and align images for diptychs and triptychs, which I have rare occasion to use. The last video was about all the keyboard shortcuts in the Develop module, the sheer number of which put me to sleep for the night.

Today I looked into my copy of Visual Poetry by Chris Orwig, a great all around inspirational book for all kinds of photographers, as he had referenced several sites online that I couldn't access on Jekyll. The first reference I found was to watch "Annie Liebovitz, Life Through a Lens" which Chris said I could find on Netflix. Sure enough, it's there, but only as a DVD, but Netflix suggested that I watch "The Modernism of Julias Schulman" which was available online, and I took in about an hour of it. Schulman was the major photographer of the modern architecture movement that flourished in Los Angeles, Palm Springs, and Wisconsin. There was a small bit about photography, but more about the architects and his relationships with them. Searching further in Netflix, I found a couple Nat Geo shows about their photographers, and all of this inspired me to work on a portfolio from my Antelope Canyon images to consider showing to galleries here. I was further inspired to ask for some pointers from a neighbor who is a museum curator, and she gave me some tips on what's next. Which is, printing and matting photos, and making inquiries of the galleries. Tomorrow.

Visual Poetry is still open on my desk, and there will be more websites to explore in the future.

Sensor cleaning

The original image

The heart of a digital camera is its sensor. With an SLR, changing lenses opens the body of the camera to the surrounding environment, and dust can enter. Then, when taking a picture, the mirror flaps up and down and some of that dust can fly behind the mirror onto the sensor. When this happens, every frame you take will have a blotch on it. It might be black, or it might be a bit fuzzy. When you start noticing spots in the same place on all your images, it's time to clean your sensor.

I've owned my Nikon D80 SLR for about 4 years. I bought it in Northampton, MA, on a stop we made there in 2008. I used it through all our travels up to and back from Alaska. The amount of dust and the number of lens changes left some serious dirt on my sensor, and I took it to a camera shop in Phoenix when we camped nearby to get it professionally cleaned. The guy in the shop said that it was one of the worst he had seen.

Now, about 2 years later, I'm seeing some slight blurry spots appearing on the sensor. This perhaps due to the salt air and dusty roads on Jekyll Island, where we've spent the winter. This time, getting a cleaning will be more difficult. We have no stops planned near a city where there might be a camera shop capable of doing this. I may have to ship the camera body to a place that can do it.

Two round blotches in the upper right sky

I have explored doing the cleaning myself. This must be handled delicately, as any damage to the sensor will destroy the camera. And there can be no residue left on the sensor when the job is done. Adorama and other vendors sell a bunch of different cleaning kits for doing this job, with prices from $20-$50. I'm thinking that having one of these in my bag is not such a bad idea, since traveling can make getting it done difficult.

Why shoot raw?

The award winning image

One of the ribbon winning images that I entered into this year's competition on Jekyll Island was taken several years ago with a point and shoot camera. As I prepared the image for printing, I wished that I had captured the image as raw. Here's why.

Serious photographers have already figured this out, so if you're serious, stop reading this and go take some pictures. One or two of you might just be coming up to speed, so this is addressed to you.

Most cameras produce JPEG compressed images, which have been processed, white balance adjusted, color balanced and sharpened to provide what should be the average pleasing result, and they do a pretty darn good job. Some cameras, notably SLRs and some point-and-shoots can deliver raw images as well.

Inside the camera, the data is collected from the sensor, and that data from the sensor is what we call raw. The key element in a more expensive camera is often the quality of the sensor. Good sensors deliver more data per pixel in a raw image than can be stored in a JPEG compressed image. Yet the best sensors cannot compete with the visual capabilities of the human eye.

The original JPEG image

So the first, hopefully obvious point is that the raw image is not processed and balanced to some average. You get to do that yourself on the computer when you load the image into Photoshop, Lightroom, iPhoto or Aperture, or perhaps some software that came with your camera.

Well, if you're like me, when you start doing this you ask, "OK, now what? I've got all these controls, and I have no idea in which direction to go!" Yep, it can be overwhelming, and the names on all those sliders don't necessarily mean much to the uninitiated.

But control s the whole point. Because when the processor in the camera does the work for you, you have lost most of the ability to control. And very often, it is the nuance in the image that can make the difference. In fact, many times we want to exaggerate the nuance. For some people, exaggerating the nuance is a key element of their photographic style.

So by using raw images, you are able to make fine adjustments of the image, getting away from the "good average" spin that the camera processor would put on the image.

Finally, because there is more data in the raw image than a JPEG compressed image, it is possible to reveal parts of the image that the processor in the camera ignores. One example of this is the number of bits in the digital data. We generally think that 8 bits each of red, blue and green is sufficient to produce an image. They eye can discriminate at least 9 and perhaps more bits in adjacent patches, and our vision system can sense perhaps 16 bits in a scene.

So if you're deciding whether to shoot raw or not, first decide whether the JPEG images that you get are sufficient for your needs. In most cases they are. But if you find something lacking, then capturing more data and sorting through it may well be a worthwhile effort.

What was it in that prize winning image that I discovered that made me wish it was raw? It was the detail in the dark, shadowy parts of the image, especially in the rafters in the roof. By using raw processing in Lightroom on this JPEG image, I was able to reveal some of that detail that was otherwise invisible. That detail balanced the composition, and the judges thought so, too. But the depth of control, and the amount of detail was necessarily limited by what I had available in the JPEG image. If I had a raw image to work with, this might have been a second place image instead of a third place image.

Renewing the photo blog

It seems that despite my efforts to be a photographer, I keep returning to writing to satisfy some unfulfilled urge in my soul. Taking good photographs is exciting for me (taking great ones is more earth shattering...) and I'll continue to work at that. But then, I want to share the work with... whoever. Thus I'll start contributing to this blog again.

During the past 4 months while we have been living on Jekyll Island, I've had the urge to provoke some income with photos. This challenged me to create opportunities. Along the way, I learned a lot.

The campground residents tend to be thrifty, and they live significant parts of the year in homes that have zero wall space. These facts suggest that the hard sell wouldn't work, nor would lavishly framed wall art. I would have to find ways to expose my attractive photos and look for small, inexpensive offerings.

I first tried posting images on the Jekyll Island Facebook wall. That may have got a few people familiar with my name, and done some good for Jekyll, but there was no sales associated with that effort.

My next effort was to consider postcards for sale in the campground office. As I evaluated this, I realized that I could not realistically compete with the commercially printed postcards that were offered.

The next opportunity that I created was to put some of my images on 13"X19" posters which I could print in my motor home. I selected a few good prints, added "Jekyll Island Georgia" on the bottom, and posted some in the windshield of my motor home. These were nearly invisible, so I got permission to post in the community room. This was very soft sell... I didn't even mention that they were for sale anywhere at first. Later I added an 8-1/2X11 sale sheet with contact information. This produced a couple sales, but these got much more play when I presented them at the craft/art sale during the February Pancake Breakfast.

The Pancake Breakfast craft/art sale is the only opportunity for the rest of the Island to come see what we're up to. To fill the table at the craft sale, I also generated some note cards, in packages of four, and a few matted prints.

The next event was the Art Festival at the Jekyll Art Center. This juried competition was free to enter (for members)and framed prints could be sold. I scrambled off to Michael's and bought a few frames that I thought looked good, and selected some prints to frame. For the first time, the Festival created 5 photo categories, as well as beginner, intermediate and advanced classes, with a limit of 6 photos. I consulted with another artist, Nancy Hoffman, for her input on photo selections, and entered 3 landscapes, 2 people, and one "alternative" photo, collected 2 second place ribbons, a third, and an honorable mention for the alternative. In addition, my second and third place landscape photos were sold, one during the Festival and one before.

Another way to get known was to offer photography classes in the campground. This was primarily on Picasa, but the first session was about taking better photos.

Yet another effort was to ask friends to pose for me on Driftwood Beach. I had been helping them with their computer problems, so it was a fair exchange. It took a while to find the right combination of weather and tides, but I got some great shots on the beach. This generated two additional requests for portrait sessions, all taking place on three consecutive days.

A friend of mine in St. Mary's, GA, is retiring from the Navy in July. We met through photography, as he hired me to help with Christmas Party portrait photo sales. He thought that he wanted to be a professional photographer full time after his Navy PR job, so he bought some more equipment, rented some space and set up a studio. He lined up some weddings. A few days ago, I got a call from him, saying that he caved to the money and decided to take a non-photo job in New York. He is selling his studio.

I've heard it said that it takes 4 years to develop a photography business. I'd say that I'm now in about 5 years. I keep studying and reading, improving my quality and skills, and now I'm discovering marketing. I might make it before I die.