DIGITAL DARKROOM QUESTIONS

Few days ago, one of the readers of Digital Photography World wrote to me about a problem he was facing with color management. Although I gave him a few clues about where the problem could be, I could not zero in on the exact reason. That's when I realized that he, and every other digital photography enthusiast could benefit from Tim Grey's Digital Darkroom Questions, and decided to share it here.

Tim Grey is a master of Photoshop and Digital Color Science, has written many books on these topics, and currently works with Microsoft. He runs a service called Digital Darkroom Questions, or DDQ in short where people can ask questions related to image processing and digital workflow. Questions and Answer are sent to registered users in the form of emails, and any registered user can ask questions. Digital Photographers who are stuck with a problem or have some doubts in image processing or digital workflow can find this service very beneficial.

AM BACK...

I am back from my short vacation. I spent most of the time without the camera, but I did go out a bit and shot a few birds, and came back without much to write home about. Here is a magpie robin that was nice enough to pose for a few seconds. The next one is a gold mantled chloropsis just taking off, a chance shot.



Exif: Canon EOS 350D, 100-400L at 400mm, 1/250sec, f/5.6, ISO 200, +0.5EV



Exif: Canon EOS 350D, 100-400L at 400mm, 1/1000sec, f/5.6, ISO 200, +0.5EV

Those who have been reading my travel blog know that I have been footloose lately, and in most places that I go to, I don't get to be online. I am going away again for a week or so, and this time photography is going to take a back seat and I am going to spend my time just relaxing, may be giving work to camera occasionally. See you again a week later!

INCREASING THE PENETRATION OF DIGITAL CAMERAS

More and more people are buying digital cameras today. But the primary problem with digicams is that the complete activity after taking the picture is centered around a computer. This would discourage a large section of people who do not own a computer or are computer illiterate from going for a digital camera. Manufacturers seem have found a way out of this to push digicam to this segment of the market - bundle a printer with digicam which can be operated without a computer. The simple and novel solution, primarily aimed at lower end of the market seems to be working well. A report at twice.com says bundle offering has seen a good growth - from 3.1 percent of all digital cameras sold in October 2004 to 5.9 in October 2005. Of course, the bundling will be useful for only those people who would be interested in casual photography and would want to take small 4x6 prints. Nevertheless, it is a good way to increase penetration of digital photography.

PHOTOGRAPHY AND DEDICATION

A good lot of people who take up photography as a serious hobby often dream about turning pro some day. At the same time, their current occupation may not allow them to spend a lot of time on photography. As I have seen around me, people who dedicate enough time to take good images as well as to network with the right people always make it through. But the dedication and effort required tends to be so high that many people tend to turn back.

TNA Perumal is one of the most successful and acclaimed professional photographer in India. I recently heard about stories of his dedication to photography, which amazed me. Most of the days, he would walk into the wilderness or a lake nearby and spend the whole day looking for photo opportunities. And he would study his subject very well and never let go easily. I have seen one of his photographs - an owl in flight with a rat clinging to its beak and was amazed at the clarity and technical perfection of such a difficult-to-photograph situation and subject. And it did not happen easy for him - he studied the owl for 30 consecutive days with a lot of patience until he got his image!

When it comes to dedication, another person I can recall is Sudhir Shivaram(who is not a pro), a popular wildlife photographer who lives in my town, and spends a lot of time in the wilderness. I have often heard about him spending as much as 5 hours in the same place looking for that particular photograph he has in mind. He wrote once in an email -

...this is an image I had in mind to shoot and after 5 hrs of hard work, I got it.

And he writes further:

In Bird and Wildlife photography, I always believe in the 3 P's - Patience and Perseverance always Pays.

He can't be more right. And it probably applies to other areas of photography as well. Almost all acclaimed photographers echo this opinion. I remember reading so many articles by Galen Rowel where he talks about passion and commitment towards photography. At one point, in his article "Running with the camera", Rowel also expresses his unhappiness towards less committed photographers without mixing words.

DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY AND IMAGE MANAGEMENT

It has been nearly six months since I have gone digital. And when I moved from slides, one thing that I was relieved from was the pain of managing and guarding the transparencies carefully. Besides organizing them, they had to be carefully cared against dust and scratches. Now I just had to shoot and leave all the images on my computer. I knew that eventually I will have to worry about managing digital images too, but I procrastinated till I piled up a lot of them. Now the time has come when I am finding it a little difficult to rely on just using windows explorer for all my image management. I have decided to organize my images for ease of access, and my choice of software for has been Picasa, at least as of now. As of now because currently it seems to take care of most of my needs, and it comes free! And things may well change in the course of time if I discover that I need some more features, or if I just find some better software.

FEATURES TO LOOK FOR

To begin with, here are the features that I was looking for in my image manager software. It is a very small set provided by most of the software available as of now and I guess they would suffice for me for a long time to come.

1. It must recognize raw files along with other most common image formats. It makes no sense if I need another set of software for organizing raw images.
2. Labeling or categorizing images. For example: landscapes, birds, New York City, etc,..
3. Add title and descriptions to the images.
4. Add exif data to the images. It makes life easy if I can add some image information to the image instead of storing them somewhere else.
5. A search feature, based on labels, file names and descriptions
6. Facility to rate the images.
7. An interface for creating backup CDs

The above are the features that I would find useful. There could be other additional features that would be nice to have.

1. Creating calendars, screensavers or wallpapers
2. Slideshows, thumbnails, image album, contact sheet generation and other fancy means of displaying images.

Note the absence of a feature for editing or fixing the images. I would usually not want to use image management software for this except for may be some rare occasions when I would need some quick fix and am not worried about the quality.

ORGANIZING FOLDERS

So far, though I did not have an image management software, I still had to ensure an easy way of accessing images. I maintained a folder structure which helped me access my images without much difficulty. I am going to continue using the same folder structure, since I have found it very useful so far. Picasa will now help me in managing keywords and make quick searches, and hence making accessing the images much easier. Here is my folder structure.



I have made a separate partition on my hard drive for storing digital images. Here is the description of each of the folders shown in the image:

digital images: This is the root folder for storing all the images
place1, place2, ..: For each place I visit, I make a separate folder where images from that place go to.
2005_10_01, 2005_11_11,..: All the RAW image go to the folder named after the date. Under the folder for places, I make another folder named after a date. So if I visit the same place on two different dates, I will have two different folders for each date. That way, it is easy to get to the date when the image was taken and I can easily zero in on the image I was looking for. Note that the date folder only stores RAW images(occasionally jpgs) straight from the camera.
processed: This is where all the processed images for that date go to.
web: When I decide to post a processed image on the web, I simply make another folder called web. Here, I store optimized small sized images that I post on the web.

The structure makes it easy for me to find images based on a place or date, and also based on the type such as raw images, processed images or images for posting and emailing.

USING A SOFTWARE

So far these folders had worked great for me. But there are some disadvantages. If I am looking for images of the same kind, it is not easy to find them. For example, if I am looking for all the images of lakes I have photographed in different locations, I have to keep browsing through each location, which is a pain. This is where labeling and searching(and hence an image management software) comes in. Once again, if I am looking for only the best images, I can search based on ratings, which saves me the pain of going through all the mediocre images.

Another area where software can help is in backing up images and burning CDs. Ideally, I would prefer to let the software automatically find a diff between previous archive and current archive based on a set of rules and burn the backups on the click of a button, but unlikely I can find something with such a feature yet. So I could just use the software for selecting images to burn. My ideal frequency for backing up images is once a month, but I usually miss that.

WHAT TO KEEP AND WHAT NOT TO KEEP

It is easy to get tempted to keep all the images. But you will soon be overwhelmed by the number of images you have, and of course run out of space too. Especially so if you shoot raw. My policy is to discard anything but good pictures without any hesitation. Even with that, it is easy to run out of space. I used to save processed images as TIFF files earlier. Now I have settled for jpegs. This makes things much easier for me. It is faster to process, takes less of computer's RAM and requires less disk space. I was in a dilemma about backing up - whether to burn only raw images or the processed ones too. The answer was easier - I can't discard the effort spent on processing an image, so it has to be backed up too.

DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY BASICS

John Engler runs a weblog at inluminent.com which has plenty of content on digital photography. He is currently running a series which he calls "Digital Photography 101". He covers the very basics of photography in the series and not necessarily related to digital alone. His last post in the series is about understanding what an aperture is. There are other articles that has content for people who want to start with SLR photography, such as "What is an SLR?", "What is ISO" etc. This is a series that could be useful for people who are just starting with photography, but he has much more that that on his weblog.

ANOTHER IMAGE FROM KERALA

This is a little cormorant, which gave me enough time to get a couple of shots. I think I could have improved the image a little more by spending some more time. The bird could have been placed a little more to the right. I could have zoomed out to include more of the surroundings and less of the bird to improve the image. And more depth of field may or may not have helped, since it was a picturesque lake with some lilies and lotus a little behind in the frame. There are both possibilities - it could gel well in the frame or could only distract the viewer away from the subject.



Exif: Canon EOS 350D, 100-400L at 400mm, 1/60sec, f/5.6, ISO 400, handheld.

IMAGE STORAGE DEVICES FOR DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY

I currently have 2 compact flash(CF) cards with me totaling to 3GBs. I normally shoot raw images and both cards together can store around 375 images. Come January, I will be going on a trip around the Indian Himalayas lasting more than a month, and I was getting worried about the storage capacity. I was toying with the idea of burning CDs often and deleting the images from the CF card, which would work fine because I can find lot of internet centers where I am going, where I can manage to download images and burn them to CD. But I wanted a better solution that could help me store my images without bothering to go searching for such a place. That’s when I did some searching around on the internet and figured out that there are many options of storage devices which can offer 20 to 40GB storage without burning a deep hole in the pocket. I am still figuring out what is the best option, but am relying on the compilation of storage devices and reviews from Steve's Digicam for making a decision. If you are looking for some storage devices, it is an excellent place to search for options that suit you.

THE ULTIMATE GUIDE FOR CANON EOS SYSTEMS AND LENSES

When it comes to learning about Canon lenses and EOS cameras, whether you love to understand every little things in detail or just looking for a solution to a problem or dilemma that you have, NK Guy's detailed FAQ on photonotes website probably has something useful for you. Especially comprehensive is his chapter on Canon lenses, which has plenty of information. You might find here - answer to many questions that you would want answered. The coverage of lens section includes information on the kind of lenses available, features, choosing a lens, technical information and much more. This is one website I have used quite often to get answers to many of my questions, and is definitely worth a read. But don’t stop at the lens section but browse the entire FAQ series, which has details on cameras, lens, flash, filter and other general topics. There is also a sub section on digital photography.

THE EARLY MORNING LANDSCAPE

I am just back from a good 4 day trip to Kerala. It was primarily a bird watching trip and I did not spend much time photographing. Never the less, we passed through some beautiful landscapes and I managed a few images. Here is an image of the early morning foggy landscape.



Exif: Canon EOS 350D, Canon 100-400L, 1/60sec, f/13, ISO 100

Post processing: Processed using Canon DPP, levels adjusted and saturation increased.

AWAY ON A BIRDING TRIP

I am off for a 5 day birding and photography trip to the moist deciduous forests of Wayanad, Kerala. While I hope to return with some good images, this blog will not see any updates for next 5-6 days. See you again next week!

IS YOUR CAMERA RUINING YOUR HOLIDAY?

There are times I have wondered if people with photography as an important hobby give too much importance to it. Sometime we give so much importance to it when we are out, that we forget to enjoy or dwell in our surroundings. I have often realized this happening to myself, and hence I consciously leave my camera behind in a few trips. Hasn't it happened to you that you spent more time photographing a beautiful mountain than sit quietly and enjoy its beauty? Haven't you ever been to a beach side and spent more time with your camera than in the water? I think many people go through this problem. I was recently reading a Steven Alter's book - Sacred Waters, which made me think of this again. He writes about some one he encounters in the Himalayas:

..His eyes were wide with alarm and at first I thought there had been some sort of accident. Waving his hands anxiously, he blurted out, "Have you got any camera batteries? Mine have gone dead and I did not bring any spares."

Startled by the intensity of his gestures I shook my head.

"Damn it! Trip of a lifetime," he said in a flustered disappointment. "Now it's completely ruined."

Alter goes on to comment on the incident:

…the assumption that the success of his journey depended on the photographs he might have taken was altogether ridiculous. If he had been less concerned about his camera, he probably would have discovered that his own eyes gave him a much greater appreciation of the mountains and a more vivid set of memories... …I made a conscious decision to leave it behind. ...worrying about shutter speeds, f-stops, and depth of focus, the inner beauty of the scene is often lost

I find it difficult to fall in line with him, but have to admit that he has a point!

WHAT IS THE BEST RAW CONVERSION SOFTWARE?

This is a question posed in photography on the net forum. Most people seem to prefer Raw Shooter Premium(RSP) from Pixmantec. The other name that you get to hear is Capture One from Phase one. Some people prefer Adobe Camera Raw more for the ease of using single software than anything else. No one seems to have much regard for Canon's Digital Photo Professional, which is not very surprising. And Capture One being an expensive software, not everyone would be able to use it even if it is better than others. So I guess RSP would come as the winner. The thread is still open, so keep watching for more opinions.

DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHER'S CHECKLIST: BEFORE YOU TAKE THE CAMERA OUT

It would have happened to many of us. You are out somewhere to take some photographs and you realize a little too late that you did not charge the batteries previous night. Or you come back home after a good photography session only to realize that your camera ISO was set to 800 yesterday evening and it stayed that way even in ample daylight. Such problems are a plenty, and it usually happens to everyone of us. After goofing up with such things many times, I now always check the camera and reset everything before I take off. Here is a set of things that one needs to look at.

1. Charge the batteries early enough. This is the most difficult thing to remember because you have to do it a little ahead of packing the camera. Most other things can be checked at the time of packing. Set a reminder or alarm whenever you remember about it so that you can charge them at the right time.
2. Make sure you are carrying all your CF cards. I usually leave a CF card stuck to the card reader and it is a quite likely that I might miss taking that with me. Sometimes my camera will not have any card loaded, which actually turns out good for me because I get to notice that easily and immediately remember to pack all the cards.
3. Check that the exposure compensation is set to zero.
4. Set the shooting mode to continuous(or your favorite mode). Not everyone might want to do this. But this is crucial for me because it is necessary while photographing birds. If the mode is set to single or timer, I might end up missing a shot.
5. Set the ISO to 100. It is always good to keep it at the lowest. You can consciously change to higher ISO if there is less light, but the reverse is less likely to happen.
6. Check the AF mode and ensure that it is set to your favorite mode.
7. Set the metering mode to your most favorite mode. You might have changed it from evaluative to center weighed yesterday and forgot about it. This is less likely to happen with people who always stick to one metering mode.
8. If you have the habit of changing white balance, reset it. This one should not matter much for people who shoot raw.
9. Try to recollect any temporary changes you have made in camera settings that you might want to revert back. This could be about the picture size and quality, parameter settings color profile, any of the custom functions you have modified. Reset them if needed.

RICH COLORS IN THE WILDERNESS

I was out in the wilderness to do some photography this weekend and was hoping to get those rich colors that I have been writing about in the last few posts. Light was rewarding during most of the two days and we had great time walking in the wilderness and photographing. The forest and the grass filled plateaus above the forest line offered excellent colors as if they were just made for photography. Weather was great too. Here is an image of the forest loaded with all its greenery, enhanced by the wetness left over by previous day's rain and a mild fog.

THE PROBLEM WITH EVENING LIGHT AND WHITE BALANCE

It is common understanding that the best time for photography is when the sun is near the horizon - morning or evening. It pretty much worked fine for me until a few days ago when I came home with some bird images taken in the warm evening light. The trouble is - the white balance of the image had gone completely out of place and the true color of the image was not seen. I did try to do some salvaging by resetting the white balance in the RAW image and more. But it still did not gain the true colors. I guess even if someone would be able to get the perfect colors, it is likely to be hard work. This particular image hardly has any neutral shades which makes it even hard to fix the image by fixing the neutrals. Here is an example of image - of a rose ringed parakeet taken that day. The real color of the bird is in the next image which was taken at a different place and time(early in the morning).


The rose ringed parakeet taken in evening light


Original colors of Rose Ringed Parakeet

DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY AND POLLUTION

So there is news going around that digital photography is helping to reduce pollution(See news, and a mention in dpguru.com). This is basically due to the fact that there are many chemicals involved in processing the film or as part of the film, which will no longer be needed in digital photography.

While this may be a valid argument, it is still difficult to say that going digital helps improve the environment to some extent. The factor that I see here is that a digital camera eventually ends up as a e-waste which is not biodegradable and needs to be disposed with care. Yes, film cameras also end up as waste, but then comes the question of how often do you decide to throw away a camera. It is most likely that people will have to upgrade their digital cameras frequently just like they upgrade computers, which means that older cameras get junk status very quickly. Take for example, you would have bought a Canon EOS 300D only 2 years back, but today you would definitely feeling that it is an old camera and would be thinking of upgrading. Film camera bodies last much longer that way. In addition to generating e-waste, a digital camera includes far many components that are likely to have a not-so-environment-friendly manufacturing process.

Despite all this, it is still possible that digital cameras are better than film cameras, but it is a fact that is best asserted only with a more involving research.