Monthly Archives: March 2008

The power of RAW

Lightroom

Two stops under does the trick.

Because very high dynamic range pictures will result in burned out highlights, notwithstanding the fine CMOS sensor in the Canon 5D, I underexposed this one two stops (spot metered on the sky) then brought the detail in the foreground back with the processing controls in Lightroom. Here’s the Before and After – a very well engineered function in Lightroom allowing all sorts of comparisons.


Lone oak. 5D, 20mm. 1/4000, f/8, ISO 250. RAW.

As the controls in Lightroom indicate, I had to add substantial noise reduction and sharpening. As the sun was directly behind the tree, regular exposure would have made the branches unrecoverable – sort of like halation in films of days past. This magnitude of correction could not possibly be done in a Jpg file. The histogram testifies to the complete absence of burned out highlights – there’s no crowding at the right end.


Adjustments made in Lightroom.

I also boosted the Tone Curve substantially in the shadows – this control is perfectly implemented in Lightroom – I used the small pointer tool, which you can see at the top left of the following screen picture,allowed me to see the tone curve in the shadow range by placing the pointer in the foreground of the picture. This helped me determine where to adjust. The dotted line shows the reference starting point.

Here’s the final result after slight straightening of the horizon – the sunlight was quite blinding and it was not easy to see much in the viewfinder!

Once stopped down the rather ‘iffy’ Canon 20mm lens is free from color fringing, so no lens corrections were needed.

Nine West 57th Street

Photographs

About arrogant cops.

It is easy to dislike policemen. They personify the old saying that “A little power is a dangerous thing”.

And while the donut and coffee vendors may rejoice at their number, the reality is that these individuals share the same demographic profile with those they seek to protect us from. Criminals.

My first encounter with an American cop, literally on my first day in New York, was on Sixth Avenue, when I asked one of the city’s finest for directions. Finest at what, they never say. Maybe it’s consumption of vast quantities of donuts, judging by the waistline of the average NYPD man in uniform?

“Move on bud”. That was this guy’s idea of giving directions. This fool probably thought he was in central casting.

And while New York’s greatest crooks go unpunished – they work on Wall Street – it’s hardly any wonder when they are being policed by a squad that has to remove its shoes and socks to count to twenty. Not the NYPD. The SEC.

So this snap brings back pleasant memories of what it’s like to be well distant from Manhattan’s fabled streets.


9 West 57th Street. 1982. Pentax ME Super, 40mm ‘Pancake’, Kodachrome 64

I carried that little Pentax and its even smaller 40mm ‘pancake’ lens – so named because it was almost dead flat on the body when in place – everywhere. It was my street camera, acquired right after I witnessed my first chain snatching in the subway. The woman’s screams still resonate in my ears. The Pentax was my “I-don’t-care-if-they-steal-it” camera while my precious Leica M3 stayed at home for the duration. Needless to add, the Pentax was never stolen. Must have been my insouciant attitude.

Nine West 57th Street has this huge numeral, a twenty foot tall, red ‘9’ on the sidewalk. God alone knows who they had to bribe to allow that, but I suspect the cops’ union was on the list.

In exchange, this arrogant policeman has parked his cruiser right next to the fire hydrant. At least the car is pointing the right way.

Yup, a true New York cop.

You think Chicago cops are more corrupt? Nah! As the great P G Wodehouse once put it “At least when you buy a Chicago cop, he stays bought”.

And California where their cars are cynically emblazoned “To Protect and to Serve”? How about early retirement from speeding tickets and crooked promotions which double the retirement check – at age 50? The French gave us our constitution. Maybe a new Reign of Terror would now be in order?

March 10, 2008 – Fact is stranger than fiction:

That Hammer of Wall Street, the Über cop himself, no less than the Governor of New York, has just ‘fessed up to being involved in a call girl ring. From Eliot Ness to Eliot Mess in one day. Then again, he would have denied all of the above in any case. You shouldn’t. At least the self-righteous schmuck ended his career at a Renaissance Hotel.

Fun with Google Earth

Photographs

Overlays add high quality pictures.

I popped over to Paris this morning, the flight taking just a few seconds, courtesy of Google Earth.

After all, if you are sightseeing, why not start with the most beautiful city on earth?

The small track ball on my Apple Mighty Mouse functions as a zoom control – neat.

Click on one of the menus on the left and an overlay is added showing links to photographs:

Click on one of the little camera logos and you get the photograph – and yes, whoever put up that awful skyscraper really should be shot:

For art museums the links provide details on the art work selected. Plus you can upload your own photographs! Some of the linked photographs are great, some plain lousy. There’s web democracy for you.

A great way of looking at pictures.

I amused myself by zipping from the home where I grew up in London to my present location – too bad they didn’t take this one when the vines were in season.

You can download Google Earth here – it’s free. And remember, no looking at the Pentagon now or Big Brother will start watching you.

Update – March 10, 2008 – you thought I was kidding?

The Pentagon just announced that they will not let Google Earth film their locations.

You can imagine the conversation in Osama’s pad.

“Hey, Ahmed, this one’s blurred out. Must be military. Let’s bomb it.”

And we trust these people with our country’s defense? At least they read this blog – does that mean I should be scared? Honest, all I do is grow grapes at my place.

Lightroom defaults

Lightroom

Don’t forget to set these correctly.

One slightly frustrating thing about Lightroom’s menu structure is that preferred settings for how the application looks and behaves are all over the place. You would expect to see everything under Lightroom->Preferences, but that is far from the case. A last vestige of the truly frightful user interface enjoyed by Photoshop users for years.

I tend to prefer a really stripped down, minimalist look to the screen interface, opting for a minimum of distractions on the screen. Once you learn some of the most useful one-key short-cuts, then you will no longer need the top Apple menu or much of what clutters the side panels.

In the Develop module I right click on the left sidebar and choose to show only the Library and Folders. I have little use for Find, Collections, Keywords or Metadata Tags, so these are switched off. You cannot get rid of the Navigator selection at the top, but the very irritating flashing of the small picture preview as you go through pictures in the Grid view can be hidden by clicking on the small arrow to the left of the word ‘Navigator’. Because my photography is thematic, I do use Folders and sub-Folders named after the theme in question which, with my limited volume of pictures, works for me when trying to find something. Others will opt for keywording and dated folders. Here’s how my left panel looks in the Develop module:

The right panel is similarly stripped down – I have little use for Keywording or Metadata:

Like ‘switching’ can be accomplished in the other modules.

Much as I laud and respect the team which authored Lightroom, I do not need to be reminded of their names each time I boot the product, so I switch the display panel off by unchecking the first box under Lightroom->Preferences->General, like so:

In Lightroom->Preferences->Interface I get rid of the bizarre antique ‘Panel End Mark’ which Lightroom shows by default at the base of each panel, thus:

Now in File->Catalog Settings on the General tab, Lightroom comes with automatic file back-ups every thirty days switched on. First, 30 days makes no sense if you use the application more frequently. Your failing hard disk will not conveniently wait until your last back-up before blowing up. Second, if you are not making daily back-ups to a secure external drive, you are simply living dangerously. So I use SuperDuper! to make a daily bootable clone on an external Firewire disk and switch off this (now useless) choice, electing ‘Never’:

Still in the File->Catalog Settings menu choice in the Library (Grid) view, this time under the File Handling tab, Lightroom comes preset to discard 1:1 Previews after 30 days. Odd. It takes for ever to generate these when you import a lot of pictures and with the small increase in storage (my 40gB picture catalog creates a 6gB preview catalog) and given the vast increase in speed that 1:1 Previews add to the Develop process, you most certainly want to keep these. The third drop-down box is set to ‘Never’:

Next in File->Catalog Settings under the Metadata tab I leave the factory defaults for Metadata alone:

However, were I in the habit of frequent round trips to Photoshop and if I wanted my Lightroom edits to be automatically reflected in the Photoshop image, I would check the third box (‘Automatically write changes into XMP’) above. Otherwise, Photoshop will simply show the RAW unprocessed image in the database or the image as it was last saved. On those (rare) occasions where I do round trip to Photoshop I will do a file save (Command-S on a Mac) before round tripping, thus forcing Photoshop to show any Lightroom edits in its displayed image. If you check this box as a default, Lightroom will slow down as every change gets saved to disk. You don’t want that unless you are running on a Cray mainframe and work at Lawrence Livermore Labs. Meaning you have a super fast machine.

Finally, to get rid of the top white menu, I switch it off as explained here.

Now I have the lean and mean user interface I prefer.

A good try

Photography

But no cigar.

I have said it before.

Any self respecting photographer should have a subscription to Vanity Fair.

Sure, they confuse amateur hour politics with photography, but I don’t buy it for their perennial bashing of anything that is right of center. I can get that on the nine o’clock news, free.

No, the magazine is a great showcase for photography, never better than with their annual Hollywood Issue which comes out right before the Oscars.

This year the photo essay is an attempt to recreate the most famous scenes from Hitchcock’s movies – Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, Marnie, Rebecca, Strangers on a Train, Vertigo, To Catch a Thief, Psycho, Lifeboat, The Birds and my favorite, North by Northwest. You know the scenes.

The sets are fabulous, the evidence of hard work and attention to detail abundant. Astonishing in many ways.

Yet the whole thing is a failure and the reason is that the actors posing in the picture are – well, it’s really what they are not.

What they are not is Cary Grant, James Stewart, Kim Novak, Grace Kelly, Eve Marie Saint and so on.

That’s some sort of commentary on the lost era of glamour that was Hollywood. Just take a look at the snap of the North by Northwest recreation where the hero is being chased by the crop dusting plane. VF says they even tracked down the tailor who made the suit worn in the movie and had him make a replica. The actor has a spare tire of some 20lbs excess weight around his stomach and looks like nothing so much as an ad for a Big Mac and fries. Cary Grant must be spinning in his grave.

Nonetheless, a brave try by some fine photographers. Get the magazine. Whether you look at the commissioned photos or the advertisements, you are in for a treat. Just avoid the editorials.