Remember I went off on some sort of Olympus OM buying binge while I was at PhotoExpo in NYC? A reaction to the same-ole-same-ole depressing state of affairs with a lot of digital camera stuff at the show. Not one of them could be considered spot on 100% prime fucntional condition. They all work to a degree but the meters are generally off or not working at all. I actually use these things. I actually like them a lot. Maybe not quite as much as my Nikon 35mm film cameras but I do like them.

Here is a shot of my niece. Up close using a 50mm f1.4 wide open. The film was a complete unknown. It was a roll that came with one of the old cameras I purchased a while ago. Hard to tell how old it was. Consumer Fuji 200 film has had packaging about the same for a long long time. It might have change a little here and there but I shoot Kodak so I am no expert on the minor variances on Fuji packaging. The film turned out to be in horrific condition. Speed and contrast were way lower than they should have been - much worse than my 10 year old Kodak Portra 400NC that I was using up a while ago. It also had a really bad layer of general fog which shows up as super grainy.

For all the film’s faults metered with a wonky meter it still delivered an image that I find attractive. Yes I am sure that it is in no way technically superior to a modern digicam but it still has a couple of things going for it. Things that are hard to come by with digital cameras. Let me count the ways…

• A very pleasing and usefule angle of view to focal length relationship for most purposes. Obviously due to the imaging area size. In this case that would be “full frame”. Neat term. This is one thing I don’t think will get fixed on digital cameras for a long time - if ever. It’s also one of the things that makes a 50mm so very wonderful on 35mm full frame. Not quire the same with a 25mm on Micro 4/3 or even 35mm on APC-C. The issue is that this angle of view vs focal length look pretty much just doesn’t look as good at the same subject distances for each and every focal length and therefore perspective throught the range that I give a crap about. Moderately wide to moderately telephoto. By the time you get to focal lengths that you cannot tell - I don’t care. They are not good for what I like to shoot. Crazy wide or crazy long.
• My old film 35mm cameras ranging from Leica to Olympus to Nikon all have something great in common. Far far smaller with a fixed large aperture prime than the equivalent DSLR. Even a non-equivalent like my D7000 is much larger.
• Simple and direct. Enought said.
• Fantabulous viewfinders. Big, very big. You can actually see what is in focus and what is not. That’s actually hard to do in the D3 because of the kind of screen it is.
• They feel good to hold and to use.
• They look great but are actually very unobtrusive. I have no issue carrying one around compared to a DSLR.

I guess these kinds of things are what I am really longing for in a compact digital camera. Nothing has delivered yet. Yes you can get some incredible performance from DSLR’s. Yes some of the compacts have some really neato features and movies. I still like the size, form factor, and most importantly the way images look on my 35mm film cameras better than I do any of my compact digicams. It has a lot to do with what I like to take pictures of and how I like to do it.

For me a 50mm lens coupled with an image capture device the size of a 35mm piece of film happens to be a combo that I find extremely rewarding. It has an almost magical ability to look wide or tele depending on how you use it. I probably wouldn’t care as much if I happened to shoot super wide at smallish apertures, nor would I care as much if I shot super-telephoto at large apertures. The basic look and basic kit might not be so far off.

Still Searching…

RB

This is the next installment on color and color management. Last time I discussed color charts and ACR camera profiles. I may have given the impression that any old profile will do. Not the case but I wanted to focus more on how you might evaluate different profiles. I hope that you took away the message that evaluating them purely by looking at your screen is not a great idea. I also wanted to convey that that startig point is not the end all be all in the color in your image files.

This time I will focus a little more on some other variables affecting color in your images. Let’s start with exposure, brightness, contrast, and ajustments to these without messing with “color stuff”. These variables can and do have a huge effect on how you perceive color as well as on the actual image files both at the time of capture as well as tweaks in post processing.

I am not going to go into a disertation on exposure and ajustments and how they might actually impact the colors that come out of your RAW processor in the sence of twisted camera profiles. If you are intrested there are plenty of more scientificly oriented discussion on that. By and large I am going to discuss things that have a major impact where those kinds of effects are secondary from my point of view.

When post processing your images when you apply any of the adjustments that affect brighness or contrast you will end up wth gigantic shifts in the color of your images. When I use the term color I am talking about the aggrigate HSL value - hue saturation and luminance, not just the hue value or the saturation value but all three. In most cases adjusting brightness and contrast will potentally affect all three without ever touching any of the controls that you would usually associate with color like “saturation”. Let’s take a look at the D7000 color chart from last time.

For the rest of the conversation this is the image that I will be using. Enought words, here is what I am talking about. A simple curves ajustment that would probably not be considered extreme by most people…

Huge color difference in a lot of different ways. I plopped color samplers on a few of the color chart chips and left the info window open if you would like to inspect the HSL values yourself. The image is a full resolution screen image if you download it or open it in a new window. To save you some time all three values - the hue, the saturation, and the brightness are impacted to varying degrees with a simple RGB curves adjustment.

The degree of impact depends where on the curve those patches sit compared to where my curve is changed. In most cases the same will be true of most brighness contrast controls that you would use. Exposure, blackpoint, brighness, contrast, levels, you name it. In camera exposure can have similar effects in both actuall values and more importantly perceived colors. Most people would think that only the “B” values would chagnge with the hue and saturation staying the same. Not the case. What changes the most - a slightly different camera color profile or a typical contrast/curves ajustment? You tell me.

I did say “most cases” right. Here is an adjustment to brightness/exposure/contrast that is by and large isolated to only the brightness part of the colors, leaving the hue the same and affecting saturation a little bit less but still affecting it.

The difference is that I set the curves layer blending mode to luminosity. I have to say it again - this is not prescriptive - I am not saying that one is better than the other. It’s to show photographers what is going on with their images if they have not looked into it before. I know that most of you do not use Photoshop CS5. I am using it here for demonstration purposes and the ability to display some things like gamut differences. This “Luminosity” blending is actually the only available option when using a curves adjustment in Aperture 3 it’s called “Luminance”.

Here is a look at a similar curves adjustment using Aperture 3. Of course the images look nothing like each other becuase we started out at a completely different place. It does something similar to Photoshop curves with a blend mode of luminosity.

If you want something similar to the “normal” blending mode in Aperture 3 - all of the rest of the exposure and enhancement adjustment block controls seem to function in “normal” blending mode. The Aperture 3 levels adjustment has the option of either “RGB” or “Luminance”. Here is a similar adjustment as above using RGB mode of levels.

Keep in mind when looking at these screenshots that you are seeing effects and not the actual colors in the file nor the colors as rendered on differing ouput mediums. What you are seeing is the colors converted through a particular algorithm/method (we’ll talk about this another day) rendered to whatever profile is associated with your screen. That profile whether it is accurate or not is in most cases going to be a smaller color space than the colors represented in your RAW file.

Just to reinforce this - let’s look at the colors that are not being represented anywhere near what the file contains based on the first image in the post.

You can compare that to the original out of gamut if you want to.

Last time I talked about color charts and camera RAW processing profiles I may have left you with the impression that they are not important or that I don’t use custom profiles. On the contrary they are pretty important and I do make use of custum ACR camera profiles extensively. I don’t blindly shoot an xrite colorchecker passport and use the bundled software to automatically generate a profile for every shot or every situation.

The fact is that I use the Adobe DNG camera profile editor with the colorchecker passport chart. The reason for this is that I do not want to use the default Adobe ACR curves that you must use with the colorchecker passport software. I don’t like them. Xrite makes some fabulous profiling tools but they are not cheap and I can get what I need using the Adobe tool. As you can see above minor tweaks that occur with most image post processing have much bigger effect than one or two point difference in hues at the RAW decode stage.

I cannot say it enough so here it goes again. You cannot judge a particular camera or profiles “quality” with a quick glance on your typical or even high quality monitor. You need to understand what you are looking at and how it relates to your chosen output medium. Hopefully by the end of this series of articles you will have a good gut feel for what is what in getting from a image file at capture to a final output that you find pleasing. That is the end goal after all. Not some acedemic exercise in color accuracy.

RB

I am not a big twitter person. Every once in a while I log in and checkout a couple of the people I follow. Mostly but not limited to photography related people and institutions. The big “news” for the last two days has been Kodak’s filing for bankruptcy. This is not really big news from my point of view. Who didn’t see this coming for a while now?

This is not the end of Kodak, in fact I am enthusiastic about Kodak and especially Kodak film. Maybe this is exactly what they needed to do to get some focus. As you know I still buy and use Kodak products almost exclusively when I shoot film. If you are a photographer you should try some. Even if you don’t shoot film on a regular basis I urge you to shoot a couple rolls a year. Not just to keep the products I love alive but also to enjoy the medium in a way that you may never have or just forgot about.

Today one of the trending twitter topics picked up by some major media outlets has been #KodakMoments. Extremely popular with thousands of tweets. I hope that a lot of the over-hyped death of Kodak stories actually bing some much needed awareness and promotion to some of their still great products.

Even if your livelyhood is made on digital. Even if you never see yourself becoming a film enthusiast, there is much to be said for casting off the shackles of computerized digi-cams and all that go with them - just for a day now and agian. Load up a really great old film camera - buy one - they are cheap. Shoot a roll of film. Have it developed, scanned, and printed. Get the prints back - experience the magic and the thrill of not seeing what you shot immediately, seeing them on paper.

I will leave you with this video I slapped together from really quick scans of film or prints for my daughter’s baby shower. Every single shot except for the two obvious cell phone pictures and a couple fuji instants near the end were shot on kodak film of one type or the other. I picked shots that were more casual snaps for the most part for the intended feel on purpose. Enjoy.

RB

I mentioned yesterday that I still like my LX5 but was thinking about the X10 as a possible successor to it as my pocket camera. This must have been a little confusing as someone asked me if I thought it was “better”. You see they were considering either the LX5 or the X10 as an upgrade to their aging P&S. Honestly I do not think it is better. Not for a moment. I think it is different - and I think it is overpriced as compared to the LX5 or the Canon S100. You may have noticed that I casually mentioned that I hoped the price would come down. It will but I don’t know if it will before it is obsoleted with the X11 or whatever comes next.

I still like my Panasonic LX5. This is strange, usually my initial excitement wears off with all of my digital cameras and I come to realize that they are not that much better than my old digital cameras. In fact I usually realize that I really like my film cameras better. Here is a brief summary of why I still like it. Will probably buy a Fuji X10 soon for a couple of reasons. Namely the viewfinder and the manual zoom combo off/on switch. I don’t really expect the images to chage much but we’ll see. I just want the hype to die down a little so it will come down to normal P&S prices.

Done, Well Not Quite

Okay so I have not posted anything remotely photo related since my new grand daughter was born. My excuse has been busy-ness, new years technology resolutions, etc. As I only spend time on this in my spare time, it could be years before I am done tweaking CSS visuals, Javascript nonsense, html, perfecting the hand-built conversion script, on and on.

The major infrastructure has been done since the last time I posted all that techno-babble. Since then I have been fooling around as just described. It’s not perfect. There are probably more than one or two glitches. To be candid I have been diddling with little stuff and keep adding it to my list. Time to just go live. The priorities will sort themselves at that point.

Here Is What I Have Done For Readers

Please let me know how this all works for you in the real world. Maybe I will hold a contest and give something cool away for the reader that finds the biggest issue in February. Here goes:

• Tag cloud and category list are gone. They just clutter up the place. Looking at stats, nobody uses that stuff. Here is what is actually used - post tags in the actual post - the stuff at the bottom that is a pretty good indicator of related topics. So tags stay and I have built a pretty good system going foward. I will clean up the existig tags imported from the Wordcrappress incrementally.
• The old Wordpress search sucks. The new one is regular old google awesomeness. Try it - it works - it’s always there even when scrolling down a long winded post. Cool. I can actually find things on my own blog now. So can you.
• If for whatever reason you made links anywhere in the universe to old posts they all still work.
• FAST, really really really fast. For readers in the US response time should be immediate. Let me know elsewhere but I couldn’t stand using the WP admin interface on my own site. Not just because it sucks but because it was sloooooow and choked up errors frequently if there was any other traffic hitting the site. The site being broadcast via one of the most robust and fastest infrastructures in the known universe. If you are somewhere that it’s still slow - let me know and I may even cloudfront it. All setup, ready to go and tested.
• Hopefully far far better on iPads, iPhones, etc. Check it out - narrow your browser window a bit and see how the content stays and the sidbar fluff goes. Zooming should also work better and more consistently. Cannot believe it but I am seeing a significant portion of traffic from mobile now.
• Better, faster, stronger RSS feeds. Nuff said.
• A brand new store. You asked for it - you got it. Yep a shopping cart. You can buy more than one thing at a time now. Check it out - it is the ‘eBooks’ link up top. Yes yes I know the styling does not match the site - yet. I built a tiny little store for electronic product delivery for someone else and it works great. I just chucked it in. I will get around to styling it. See now that is going to be an automatic priority because it’s bothering me. Oh, it even delivers an email to you with the download links. Much easier based on the number of people that send me an email saying… where’s my eBooks.
• All the comments are still there, will all the right posts. Just where they were before. Well at least all of them since the last Worpress database/hack/comment disaster.

Starting Next Post - Photography Again

Thank you for your patience. Now back to our regularly scheduled program. I have so much built up that I want to share I don’t know where to start but here is what is comming up this month.

• Color management. Lot’s of color management from capture to output. Remember my ongoing calibration frustrations? And months later same song and dance from Datacolor, my $600 color management system still deoesn’t work. There I named names. In any case I am through with it and have evaluated and selected a new solution. The results of my endeavors should be interesting to all. I have some product reviews and practical real world advice depending on what you want to achieve coming up after messing with things six ways from sunday.
• You do I know I like my photographs on paper right? Lot’s of stuff on printing. Paper reiviews, color, printing services, printers, and special output. If you like prints you will love a lot of my agenda.
• A little film stuff. I know I am one of the few but I love the stuff so I have to talk about it.
• I do live in the real world so of course digital capture as well. Very much tied into the color management and printing topics that I just covered. Along with some of my love/hate relationships, at least the parts of them that might be relevant to all of you. I do still like my Panasonic LX5

RB

My apologies for keeping away for so so very long. I guess it’s been about two weeks, that is like centuries in internet time. I do have a very good excuse. My oldest daughter gave birth to her very first child and my very first grandchild. Yes - I am a grandfather.

The new addition to the family is a 22 3/4” 8lb 10oz baby girl named Leela Andreyevna Khlistunova. Think she might have a tough time writing that in Kindergarden? Needless to say I have been a bit busy at the hospital, visits, etc. etc.

During the course of the last week and a half I did have a chance to make a few observations while taking photos of my new granddaughter - most of them related the Nikon D7000 and TTL flash. Not all of them good. While I do strive to use available light as my preference there are times when that just will not work out and flash is just a hair less ugly.

Here are a couple of things off the top of my head that I will be discussing at length in upcoming posts:

• With all the vunder-computing, color-matrix-metering, hoop-de-do bullcrap it’s unbelievable that the Nikon TTL flash control consistently and hopelessly underexposes scenes with a lot of white in the frame. I kinda remember this is kinda what the whole automated, evaluative thing was for in the first place. Wasn’t it? Well after extensive in the field testing I’ll give some my guidelines for the D7000 depending on how you have the 300,000 parameters set. Hmmmm 300,000 parameters and compensation vs incident flash meter? Yes we will have to discuss that again.
• Despite all of the things I have read from all of the on-line “experts” as well as Nikon that there is not really a difference between “TTL” and “TTL-BL” exposure in circumstances were ambient light does not contribute to the main subject’s exposure, that is complete and utter hogwash. At least it is with my particular D7000 and both my SB800’s. Maybe mine are somehow different - yeah right.
• Digital skin tones continue to be horrible. At least they are “out of the can” on most JPEG settings and definitely on all the default RAW conversions in both Lightroom, ACR, and Aperture. I have mentioned this just a couple of times in the past right? Well I guess now that I am shooting people with the D7000 and digital vs film only for the first time in a while I will have to discuss some options for dealing with that in Aperture and if anyone cares ACR as well.
• My current favored lighting gear is WAY too big and cumbersome for use in my daughter’s small apartment. I just ordered some gear that should alleviate that - cheap simple gear. I share some of that as well as how I am using it as well. Why do I need lighting gear? Because sometimes the light is just crappy and there just isn’t a decent bounce surface to be found. I spent less than a hundred bucks and should be able to get the results I am after. My order should get here any day now.

More Later

RB

I have been a tad hard on digital imaging lately. I wanted to put that into context. The context is that I am a photographer and image maker first and foremost. For better or for worse we photographers are married to our tools and the people that make them. The reason I have been a little down on digital lately is because I am a heavy user of digital. I don’t sit away in my little corner of the universe isolated from all things digital - obviously. Not only am I a heavy user of digital capture devices and digital imaging processing software. I am a customer. Yes I have spent huge sums of money on digital imaging gear and post processing software and all that goes with it.

I consider it a right and a duty to point out the flaws and shortcomings of products I invest my money and more importantly my time and my images into. It is in that spirt that I cast dispersions on software and image capture devices that I use. The reason I choose film as a medium to compare it with is that happens to be the only other photographic medium out there with it’s own set of qualities, processes and procedures that are quickly being forgotten. Not all of those qualities, processes, and procedures are bad - a lot of them were very very good. I want my cake and I want to eat it to. I still use film where I feel it is appropriate. I use digital as well and want to see it become as refined as some of the things I have experienced with film.

You see I don’t want just more of the same with digital. I don’t want a continual improvement in ONLY the speed and “convenience” features. There are still terrible shortcomings that we all pretend are not there or become distracted from due to the next new thing that we didn’t want in the first place. Man the way highlights are rendered blow - they look like absolute shit - I guess I will have to either underexpose for the highlights and make it sorta look okay - or use fill flash - or do that goofy HDR crap until it gets more like film - I can live with it but it really sucks. Hey man look at the new camera - it shoots like 12 frames a second at like 25 bazillion pixels - I guess I can live with crappy ass highlight rendition for a bit longer…. On and on and on more of the same.

I have also been hard on Apple Aperture 3 for more than a month - no love. Understand that I am also one of it’s biggest proponents. Just because I think ACR has come into it’s own in the last year or two doesn’t have me shouting Lightroom from the rooftops (I know Lightroom very very well - most of my images are cataloged   in both via referenced images). In the spirit of Thanksgiving - here in the US I am going to write only positive posts regarding digital and specifically Aperture 3 over the next week or so. Starting with Aperture 3 RAW processing that I have taken more than a few pot shots at over the last month. I will also chuck in some quick and dirty tutorials on the finer points of Aperture 3 adjustments along the way…

Happy Thanksgiving.

RB

There have been quite a few people that have been participating in the beta version of my D7000 Picture Control Presets for Aperture 3. More than I expected with all the caveats that I put out there. A few of them have written me with comments and critique - I plan on incorporating that critique into updates if possible and if it does not conflict with other peoples results…

What is surprising is that a bunch of people that shoot other Nikon cameras have asked me if the work with those models - like the D3, the D700, etc. The short answer is maybe. The long answer is that most Nikons that have “Picture Control” share similar characteristics in terms of their Aperture 3 RAW process so in general the D7000 presets provide  something more in the neighborhood of Nikon NX2 picture control settings than the default Aperture 3 processing. Having said that I have been working on and off with a Nikon D3s shooter to get a little more precise as to what is different. The presets are definitely not as close as the D7000 but do get it closer. If there is interest I may also offer a D3s version of the presets. Please let me know.

One last note on Aperture 3 presets and actually presets in general. As you may have guessed I don’t rely on Aperture 3 for all of my post processing. Not even close. I shoot and have shot with many many cameras ranging from Hasselblad H2’s to Sigma’s to Nikons. In many cases I use Aperture 3 only for it’s work-flow and organizational capabilities. The UI is extremely fluid compared to other solutions but I rarely use it for the final image produced in terms of post processing. Is it good enough? Yes maybe in a lot of cases. Especially for delivering a ton of images. Is it good enough or comprehensive enough for delivering the ONE image - ummmmm. Not so much.

What this results in is me working with a bunch of RAW processors - Capture One in some cases, NX2 obviously, Hasselblad Phocus (although since Hasselblads new found openness with Adobe in October - ACR6 is actually BETTER for H4D files than Phocus), and of course the ubiquitous Adobe Camera RAW in various versions and flavors. ACR has gotten so much better over the years that in a lot of cases it meets or exceeds some manufacturer’s RAW processing software - as I just mentioned the latest development.

What does this have to do with presets? Well I have a bunch of presets that I use that some of you might be interested in. I shoot film - I love the way film looks. What kind of presets might you guess I have spent considerable effort on? Presets that mimic the look of some of my favorite film.  Portra, Ektar, Kodachrome, Astia, etc. The way I have gone about this is not the way you may think. Most of my preset effort has been in the form of ACR DNG camera profiles with some add-ons on top of that. I have been playing with these ever since the beta of DNG camera profile became available…

I have also sort of mimicked these DNG profiles in Aperture as much as possible - which is not the same but good enough for a visual impression. Here is the question - are any of you interested in the DNG profiles for film simulation? How about the not quite as good Aperture 3 presets that correspond to those? The DNG profiles are camera specific so they will only work for Nikon and any other cameras that I develop them for. The Aperture 3 presets are not really that specific. Let me know if you are interested in these - I don’t want to go through the considerable effort of packaging them in a friendly form if I am the only one that likes the way film renders color.

[poll id=”31”]

RB

Look at the state of that…

What we have here is a Photoflex light disk - I am sure along the way you have all seen these. They fold down to about 1/4 the full size. I went to use this particular one this morning and this is what I found. My vague recollection is that I used it about 3 months ago and nothing really bad happened to it while I was shooting. there may have been a tiny bit of light mist that day. It definitely was cloudy. I was shooting indoors that day and the exposure to the elements consisted of a trip from my trunk and back. I can tell you that none of my other gear suffered and it definitely was not soaking wet when I put it back with all my other crap.

I have had this particular disk along with 2 60” disks for about 8 years. Up until this they were all pretty decent and not even dirty. The sparkly sides of all of them is beginning to flake off where they get creased as they are folded but that’s it. I never really thought about it before but these are definitely NOT the way to go if you do any kind of shooting or transportation that risks the slightest bit of moisture due to the steel frame that seems to disintegrate with any tiny bit of dampness.

I used to use California Sunbounce reflectors but about 5 of them got mislaid somewhere along the way. They are CRAZY expensive but I have shot with them in the rain, by the ocean, in the surf and can tell you personally they are 100 times more durable and have some other nice handling features as well. I guess I will have to save my pennies to replace them.

One other thing that you cannot see in the images - it also warped severely so it’s not even flat anymore. Hmmm - I don’t even want to speculate how that is related to moisture.

RB