OF NEATIMAGE AND GRAINS

Wednesday, June 29, 2005

A few days ago, I was trying bird photography in the western ghat region and I was faced with the problem of low light. It was raining incessantly for the last few days and I was lucky to have some short dry spells. But it was still overcast and there was no sight of sun. And I had ventured into the thick jungles where direct sunlight can hardly enter. But I had a chance to see many not-so-common endemic birds and did not want to miss a chance of photographing them. So I decided to compromise on ISO and pushed it all the way up to 1600. I did manage to get decent shutter speeds and hence some pictures with out shake, but the resulting pictures were predictably not very impressive. There was lot of noise and grains in the output. But not willing to trash all the pictures, I decided to salvage them. I had heard many people recommending neatimage but had never tried it. I went ahead and downloaded a demo version. The results that came out were pretty impressive. If you profile the noise characteristics of your device properly and ensure that the setups are proper, you can virtually eliminate all the noise from the images. You can see some of the results here. I will post some of my outputs soon.

But the demo version was considerably limited, in the sense that it does not save tiff files. After some thinking, I decided to go ahead and buy the home edition. For USD30, I feel it is a very useful investment. But that keeps me wondering, why don’t the camera manufacturers install something like this in the camera itself? It saves lot of trouble for people who need to work on action photography or will have to shoot at low lights.

BACK, LOOKING ARUOND THE WEB ABOUT PAST WEEK

Sunday, June 26, 2005

I was browsing today through dp weblogs to see what all did I miss while I was away on vacation. It was a pleasant surprise to see some good improvements in weblogsinc's digital photography weblog. They have come out of being a weblog that simply reproduces digital photography news to something that has some useful content for regular visitors. There are quite a few interesting posts in the last week. They are also posting a photograph of the day with all exif and post processing info. Worth having a look.

Monday, June 20, 2005

I am away for a week, spending some time relaxing and sipping coffee at home, and sometime witnessing the beauty and furore of the monsoons of the western ghats of India, taking photographs. Posts will be intermittent or absent in this period. In the meanwhile, savour this picture that I managed to capture last weekend. Have a great week ahead!

SHARPENING PICTURES IN PHOTOSHOP

Friday, June 17, 2005

After spending some time to understand unsharp mask in photoshop and spending even more time to apply it on my images and gain fluency on it, I jotted down a short write-up using Unsharp Mask for digital images. Do take a look.

MICROSOFT ACRYLIC

Thursday, June 16, 2005

Suddenly there was a big noise about Microsoft announcing a competition to Adobe Photoshop in the form of Microsoft Acrylic. As the excitement and expectations are slowly coming down, slashdot has taken it up for discussion.

OF DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY AND CAMERA SHAKE

Monday, June 13, 2005

Last weekend, I was out with the camera in the periphery of the town and I got a chance to try my hands on car-birding. Car birding is when you go photographing the birds while sitting in your car. It is quite popular since birds are less averse to people in cars than walkers.

And we did find many birds close to the car. Most of the times, we stopped briefly, took a few photographs and continued. While we got down from the car if we were spending long time in a place, we would just keep the engine on, shoot for a brief period and continue quickly. We spotted and photographed a good number of birds. While reviewing on the camera lcd over a cup of coffee at the end of the session, I could see quite a few impressive pictures that would be hard to come by without the car.

But the computer had a different story to tell. When I went home and downloaded the picture, most of the pictures seemed to be in a sad state. Most of the pictures shot from the car were fuzzy and not sharp. And it becomes all the more apparent when you view full size digital images. I could not blame the low shutter speed, since there was enough light and I was shooting at higher ISO. I was pretty surprised to see that even a picture taken at a shutter speed of 1/1250 second had considerable amount of camera shake!

After much contemplation, I am considering keeping the engine on as one factor that should have contributed to this. There were no perceivable vibrations and hence I had not bothered to turn off the engine. I find it unlikely that shake from the hand should matter at such high shutter speeds so this is the only explanation I could think of. I intend to confim this in future car-birding trips.

I am now contemplating on moving to tripod sooner than I thought. I usually shoot handheld and I used to feel comfortable at it when I was shooting film. Aside, that’s another reason to think about going for an IS lens as soon as I can afford one. Below is one of the pictures I had taken. This was shot at 1/320 seconds and I normally used get decent output at such shutter speeds.

I loved the composition of red whiskered bulbul below. Taken at a shutter speed of 1/320 seconds from the car with the engine on, alas has come out soft and fuzzy.

Digital Camera Memories

Friday, June 10, 2005

When I bought my digicam, I had spent all my time and effort researching the camera but never bothered to find out what memory to buy. Only when I was talking to the seller at the shop, I suddenly realized that I had forgotten about memories. Since I was buying the camera at that point, I did not want to wait for some more days to buy a memory card. So I had to settle for whatever the shop owner recommended.

A few days back, I noticed that I am burning my 1 gig card quickly in the field and I would definitely do with some more memory. Before deciding to buy one, I browsed around to learn about compact flash memory cards, different types, vendors and the best choices available in the market.

Here is a summary of what I understand.

* CF cards are the most common memories and type I is seem to better than type II. Microdrives are less expensive than CF cards but CF cards are more durable.
* Your camera may not be fast enough to write at the speeds offered by CF cards. Even if you buy 80x card paying lot of money, camera may not be writing faster than 40x
* SanDisk Ultra II cards seem to be a decent buy. Lexar is popular, but Canon has reported some issues with Lexar cards.

Some of the links I have gone through are here.

* Bob Atkins' excellent review on CF cards. Worth a read. He also describes his experiences with different card makers and what is the best buy.
* Steve's Digicams on Flash Cards and storage devices. Provides the basics and understanding of different types of memory avaialbe for digital cameras.
* DP Review's comparison of digital memories. A bit outdated.

OpenRAW debate on slashdot

Wednesday, June 08, 2005

Slashdot has a discussion on OpenRAW format. It is filled with the usual crib about manufacturers trying to use proprietary raw formats that could make writing third party conversion softwares difficult. Some time back, there was a big issue about Nikon trying to encrypt some exif data on D2X. It was eventually decoded by Dave Coffin and probably many others but the event gave a big push to Open RAW proponents.

The OpenRAW group is attempting to standardize raw format so that all camera manufacturers can use a universal format. This will ensure that RAW data is more freely available to everyone and promotes third party software makers to write raw conversion softwares. This could eventually lead to better conversion softwares than what the manufacturers provide.

If you would like to support OpenRAW format, consider writing a letter to manufacturers and cast your vote for the open format. See an open letter and email addresses of camera manufacturers at luminous landscape. The page also has an article describing the problem in detail.

Faster AF with Canon EOS 350D

Tuesday, June 07, 2005

Last week, I realized that my 350D is giving me faster auto focus on my EF lenses compared to my older film camera(EOS 300). It is quite likely that 350D's AF motor drive is much better. It has come to great use for me in bird photography, especially when shooting birds in motion. My flight shots have improved leaps and bounds compared to what I used to get on film. Here is a Grey Heron shot in flight last weekend.

MORE LEARNINGS: While resizing this picture for posting it on the web, I saw the image was becoming very soft and loosing considerable quality once resized. I wondered on it for a bit and decided to apply USM(unsharp mask, the filter used for sharpening the picture) after resizing. And lo! I have the same old quality of the bigger picture. That is a useful lesson learnt - to use USM after resizing the pictures if needed.

Stock Photography of Different Kind

When browsing through photography websites sometime back, I clicked on an ad from shutterstock and discovered their website. They have an interesting model for selling pictures. It seems especially attractive to non-professional digital photographers who want to make some money out of what they shoot.

The business model goes like this - the buyers get it cheap, the seller sells cheap. Low prices could transform into many downloads. The seller and the stock agency make money in volumes. A buyer looking for photographs gets to download photos for as little as less than a dollar irrespective of how he is going to use it. The photographers can upload as many (digital) pictures as possible which adhere to some (not so tough) quality norms. Although some screening of quality is done, most of the pictures will be out up for sale; so you don’t have to have a big collection of really good stuff. The site claims to have more than 200,000 pictures and adding a few thousands every week.

I went through some of the photographer's forums on the websites and saw that they do claim to make decent money out of it. An observation seemed to be that more photos you upload to their site, more hits you are likely get from buyers and if your photos are decent enough, you can end up with decent money.

Though I am personally not inclined to it, sounds like a good starting for photographers who are still starting up and would like to make some money out of their expensive hobby.

GLUED TO THE COMPUTER?

Monday, June 06, 2005

From the time I started using digital camera, I have been spending a lot of time in front of the computer. In earlier days, I used my comp only for leisurely activities like browsing, sending emails, updating my weblogs, etc. These days I spend most of my free time understanding the intricacies of digital photography or trying to post process the pictures I have taken. I just thought I would sit down and account the time I am spending on the desk.

I typically shoot around 100 to 150 pictures in a week(actually a small number). Of these, I end up selecting an average of 5 to 15 pictures(a big number for total number of pictures) as good pictures, process them and save them. Sometimes I send it out for feedback to mailing lists or post them on my weblog. If I take around 15 minutes to process one image, I still end up spending 4 hours a week for bringing out the images. Add an additional 3 hours in a week for browsing, emailing and other things I used to do before, and I spend around 7 hours in a week with the comp. That is like an hour a day, which I think is not bad at all. And as I gain experience with post processing the image, I think I should be able to cut down the time spent on that too.

Firmware Upgrade For 350D

Thursday, June 02, 2005

Canon has posted a firmware upgrade to fix some issues.

Has any one tried FW upgrade for Canon cameras? How safe is it to do it yourself? Do email me if you have any information.

The upgrade is supposed to address following problems:

# Fixes the phenomenon of extreme underexposure when using some lenses.
# Fixes the phenomenon of auto power off function failure when auto power off is set more than 2 minutes.
# Fixes the phenomenon of incorrect white balance when using an external flash.

UPDATE: Sudhir tells me he has done an upgrade for his 10D successfully, and if you follow instructions precisely, it should not be any problem. I am planning to go ahead and do it. But I don't have a CF card reader with me which I am buying soon. So may be it will be done sometime nextweek.

Windows to Support RAW file Decoding

Microsoft has plans to support raw formats of all major manufacturers in the next version of windows(read press release at dpreview via PhotographyBLOG).

I think it is a good idea and should provide lot of convenience for people who prefer to shoot raw. It might mean that the basic raw processing tasks could be integrated to windows explorer. That way, viewing, converting and managing raw files would become much easier and you are saved the trouble of installing new softwares every time you buy a new camera.

I hope MS provides enough flexibility to plug-in and integrate third party raw processing softwares to integrate seamlessly to windows. That would help people who prefer not to use manufacturer's raw conversion software.