I was going through some of the pictures I took this summer, and found a couple of wildlife shots taken at the Huntington Library and Gardens. Here, for example, is a splendid example of a bonsai tree escaping from its container.
And here is a Rainbird in its native habitat:
Finally, here’s a shot of the Japanese Garden. The bridge used to be that bright Japanese red, with black highlights; alas, it’s been allowed to return to natural wood tones.
Bop over to The Online Photographer for one of the neatest images I’ve seen in a while. The amount of work required to do it is seriously scary.
There’s been something of a resurgence in Black and White photography in recent years, due largely to the digital revolution. B&W film photographers had to rely on colored filters applied when making the exposure to bring out or suppress the particular tones that they wished to appear in the final print; this was, and is, something of a black art.Digital photographers can simply shoot the scene in color–and then mix the red, green, and blue channels as desired. The results are considerably more flexible, and the process is much more forgiving. It’s this new process that is the subject of this book.
I’ve come to realize that many photographs of the kind I like to take simply look better in black and white, and so I brought this book home. My feelings about it are mixed. On the one hand, I learned a few things from it, and have made a number of (I think) decent B&W prints as a result. On the other hand, the book has a number of flaws. It is extremely Photoshop-centric, and many of the techniques described simply can’t be done in Adobe’s entry-level package, Photoshop Elements. I don’t have the full version of Photoshop, and I really can’t justify spending the money on it at present. (It’s surprisingly expensive.) Further, although the book is full of before-and-after pictures they are poorly laid out, too small, and printed so badly that often enough I really can’t see much difference between them. I don’t know if these presentation problems are the fault of the author or of someone further down the chain; but they are a real shame, as the book would be 100% better if they were taken care of.
Pity.
One of my new favorite blogs is The Online Photographer. It’s run by well-known photographer Mike Johnston, with contributions from a fair number of other folks; if you’re interested in the art of photographer or you’re a photographer yourself, it’s one of the better sites I’ve found.
Another photography site I’ve been enjoying for the last few months is Michael Reichman’s The Luminous Landscape. This is a more traditional community-oriented site, aimed at the serious photographer, with user forums and the like, plus considerable on-line content contributed by Reichman and others (including Mike Johnston). The site’s “What’s New” page is not precisely a blog, but I find myself taking a peek there most days.
Nancy Newhall was one of the founders of Aperture, an influential photography magazine founded in 1952; an early member of the staff of the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the husband of Beaumont Newhall, the preeminent historian of photography and the Department’s first curator; an intimate friend of Ansel Adams and other noted photographers of that era; an accomplished photographer in her own right; and a disciple (I think it’s not too strong a word) of the aged and eccentric Alfred Stieglitz. She was also an accomplished writer, as this collection of her writings shows clearly. There are articles on Adams, Edward Weston, and Paul Strand, among others, and a great deal of material about Stieglitz, as well as a scattering of pieces on photography in general.
There’s lots of interesting stuff here about the development of photography as an art form during the early to mid-20th century; as such, it’s a good companion piece to her husband’s masterful History of Photography. The main problem–and a serious one for a book about photographers–is that there are very few photographs in it. Every piece begins with one picture, often one taken by Newhall herself; but the pictures she writes of are not present, which can be quite frustrating. And frankly, the emphasis on Stieglitz, while fascinating, is a little creepy.
Anyway, this is clearly not a book for general consumption; but if you’re interesting in the history of photography, it’s got some interesting material in it.
Ted the Test Lead has impressed on me that it’s very hard to take good architectural pictures with a standard camera (unless you buy a really expensive perspective-correcting lens). Here’s an example of what he’s talking about.
I took this picture from across the street. Note that the left-hand side of the building and the flag pole are both vertical in this picture, as they should be….but the rest of the building looks remarkably funny.
It’s not as pretty as the sky I saw a couple of weeks ago, when I didn’t have my camera with me….but it’ll do.
So yesterday I got a second lens for my DSLR, a Nikon 50mm F/1.8. I got this lens for a number of reasons. First, it’s a prime rather than zoom, i.e., it has only one focal length. I wanted to try living with a single focal length for a while; lots of people have recommended this as a good way to get a feel for what different focal lengths can do for you. Second, it’s much “faster”, i.e., it has a wider maximum aperture, than my other lens. Third, I’ve heard extremely good things about it; optically, it’s considered to be very good. Fourth, for a lens it’s dirt cheap, which means that I could squeak it into my budget.
So today I took it out shooting. And I happened to take this picture of some power towers on the ridge line, and I happened to take it at F/22 (minimum aperture) just to see what would happen:
And what happened, I’m afraid, was Dust Bunnies. See those black spots in the sky? The two most noticeable are on the left side. Here’s a close-up, just for smiles:
Can you see them now? What those are, is dust particles on the camera’s sensor. See, the sensor gets electro-statically charged, and that attracts dust. And since you can swap lenses, dust can get in. So you get dust on the sensor. I don’t know if this dust was there when I bought the camera, or whether it moved in afterwards; but I’ve not removed the lens all that often, so I suspect it was there to begin with. It’s just hard to see except against a bright, plain background with a small aperture, and I’ve not taken many pictures like that to date…that came out, anyway (you remember, I had this problem with my lens diaphragm….).
Anyway, so what to do? It’s possible to remove these with the Clone Tool in Photoshop Elements…ugh. I can send the camera in to be cleaned; I gather that it’s not uncommon for new cameras to have dirty sensors, and that Nikon will clean it once for free; after that it’s $40. Plus shipping. Plus two weeks travel time. Ugh. My sources indicate that this will be a recurring problem; it’s something I’m simply going to have to deal with.
There are ways to clean the sensor yourself, and I’ve been looking into those. The best articles I’ve seen have been at The Luminous Landscape, a photography site run by landscape photographer Michael Reichmann. He discusses a couple of methods that I’m going to have to look into, given that my house is a dust magnet.
I’m used to looking at the pictures I take one at a time, rather than side-by-side. Whilst at soccer practice this evening, I took a bunch of photos of the sunset and of things lit by the sunset. Later I looked at them several times–one at a time–and as usual had trouble deciding which I liked best. Some were, as usual, clearly not so good; but also as usual, some were close enough that I just wasn’t sure. After a while, though, I managed to weed most of them out.
Then I went into LightZone to edit one of them. By default, LightZone shows you a set of large thumbnails of the photos in the directory. Suddenly I could see all of them side-by-side. And I was amazed at how a few of the twelve pictures I’d kept simply jumped out at me. They were clearly better than the others.
I’m going to have spend more time looking my virtual contact sheets on a virtual light table.
(Oh, here’s the picture I wanted to fix up.)
A couple of weeks ago, Jane and I went down to the Getty Center in Los Angeles. If you’re not familiar with the Getty, it’s a sort of an art museum, sort of a public gardens, and sort of an interesting pile of architecture. Among (many) other things, the Getty has a massive collection of photographs; and though I didn’t really hope to see any of them (the art galleries proper are rather small) I figured the museum bookstore would have a neat photography section. Also, I hoped to take some nifty pictures of the grounds with my new camera. We didn’t have as much time as I’d have liked, but I did get some good shots…or so I thought until I got home.
One of the differences between the Nikon D80 and my old camera is that there’s no live LCD–you have to look through the viewfinder. (“Have to”! “Get to” would be more accurate.) The LCD is used for menus, which I don’t use all that much while I’m out shooting, and for reviewing the pictures you’ve taken. Reviewing them is neat, but extremely limited. You can tell if a shot is egregiously awful…but a shot that looks good on the LCD, that is exposed properly and well-composed, might still look awful when you see it full-size on your computer screen. Consequently, I don’t tend to look at the D80’s LCD all that often, or I’d have noticed the problem quicker.
Not to put too fine a point to it, I had a horrible problem with over-exposure–not by a little, but by an awful lot. Most of the shots were simply unusable; some were exposed properly; and some few were over-exposed, but in an interesting way. Here’s an example:
What you’re seeing are a couple of giant “bouquet” shapes made of steel rebar with bougainvillea planted inside so that it spills out the top. I was trying to get the colorful tops along with part of one the Getty buildings and some sky; instead I got what you see. But why was I having so many exposure problems? I’d been experimenting with manual exposure and different ways of metering, so I assumed it was my fault, made a note that I’d have to be more careful in the future, and moved on.
The next Friday I went to my son’s soccer game, and took a bunch of pictures using semi-auto exposures (shutter priority or aperture priority), and again, many of them came out slightly or horribly over-exposed. I was nonplussed: in semi-auto mode, the camera sets the exposure; it surely ought to be able to do a better job. I got on-line at photo.net, and with my friend Ted the Test Lead, to ask about what I was seeing. Both Ted and the gang in the on-line forum eventually nailed it: it wasn’t just me, there was a problem with the camera or lens–and the evidence pointed to a sticky lens diaphragm.
When you take a picture, you need a certain amount of light to expose it properly. This gives you a choice: you can let a lot of light through a large hole for a short time, or a little light through a small hole for a longer time. The size of the hole is called the aperture; the length of time is the shutter speed. The mechanism that controls the aperture is the lens diaphragm; and the consensus was that sometimes the diaphragm wasn’t closing to a smaller size when it was supposed to, that it was getting stuck part way.
That seemed to explain what I’d been seeing; so I went out that afternoon, and started taking some test pictures. What I found surprised me. The pictures I took with a wide-open aperture were fine; the pictures I took with a smaller aperture were over-exposed. The smaller the aperture, the worse the over-exposure. It began to look like the lens wasn’t stopping down the aperture at all! Quickly conjectured, quickly tested. The D80 has a depth-of-field preview button, which stops down the aperture to the current setting (the aperture is usually wide-open except when you’re actually taking a picture). I stopped it down to F/22 (which is very small), and pressed the DOF preview. No change. Nothing. Suddenly, it all became clear–the only pictures I’d taken that worked over the previous week were those taken with the aperture at or near wide-open.
The folks at Samys Camera were very good about it, and swapped the lens for one that works properly; the salesguy said he’d never seen such a thing (with that lens, anyway), and he looked honestly shocked.
So, problem solved!
Well, maybe. I now have a lens that’s working the way it’s supposed to, and that’s a very good thing. It turns out, though, that the D80’s “matrix metering” system does tend to over-expose by about 2/3 of a stop in some circumstances. The conjecture is that it’s a marketing thing, with the intent of making high-contrast scenes look more “punchy”; the less expensive consumer-oriented D50 does the same, but the more expensive D200 (their low-end pro DSLR) does not. I’ll need to get used to that…or perhaps I’ll just experiment with spot and center-weighted metering.
Man, have I got a lot to learn!
The View from the Foothills 