Category Archives: Technique

Street Snaps 2009-2010

eBooks, Photographs

My new FREE book.

Online publishing being the thing of the future, I have created a new book in PDF format which you can download free by clicking the picture below.

All but the first were taken on the Panasonic G1 with its kit lens; the exception was made on the Canon 5D. All snaps were taken during the past year in San Francisco.

You can view these in a browser of your choice on your desktop or laptop or, better still, save (File->Save as…) the downloaded PDF file and drop it on iTunes to sync with your iPad or, even better, if you use GoodReader ($0.99) on your iPad get the free GoodReaderUSB utility, plug your iPad in and drag and drop the PDF onto your iPad where you can then view it in GoodReader. (To mitigate image theft I have disabled right-clicking on this site).

This PDF was created using the slideshow PDF export capability of Lightroom 2/3. The PDF file was then opened in Preview and the cover and colophon pages, created in iWork Pages and saved as single page PDFs, were dropped in. The whole thing was then saved again as a PDF and uploaded to my server. Lightroom 3 does allow you to add Intro and Ending pages but I didn’t notice that until it was too late!

The file is 14mB and should download fast – 45 seconds here. It is optimized for viewing on the iPad. You can also download the book by clicking on ‘my books’ in the right hand column, under the ‘links’ tab.

Enjoy!

Update July 21, 2010: Now expanded from 44 to 100 photographs.

HDR for street snappers

Technique

If it moves, forget it.

I gushed on about High Dynamic Range photography ages ago here, meaning that the curative aspects of time have done their thing and forced me to reconsider.

You see, unless you have one of those blitzoid megabuck Nikons which take a bazillion snaps in the blink of an eye, HDR is useless if your subject moves. And this is not just the case with the street snapper’s target. A wavering leaf or a flying bird – if the images differ in subject matter, forget HDR. They cannot be merged without ghastly ghosting effects.

And as I’m a street snapper at heart, traditional HDR techniques do not work. Heck, it’s tough enough getting one good snap, let alone the three or more dictated by HDR. So, somewhat unconsciously, I have found that I am using the localized adjustment tools in Lightroom 2 a lot more. When I have a subject with challenging dynamic range, I will underexpose by a stop or two to tame the highlights and then bring back the shadows with a spot of localized exposure adjustment.

Here’s an example of what I am talking about. The underexposed original saw me bringing back the detail in the vendor’s face while leaving the reflective sculpture alone:

Chrome vendor, Maiden Lane, San Francisco. G1, kit lens.

So yes, this is still HDR, albeit with a street snapper’s twist.

HP DJ90 with Snow Leopard

Printing

Phew!

Long time readers will know that I use a Hewlett Packard DesignJet 90 to make large prints using my iMac. I suggested it made little sense to rush into the OS 10.6 upgrade (Snow Leopard) until many of the incompatibility issues were resolved. Indeed, Snow Leopard has already had one upgrade to address security issues since I wrote that piece.

Well, some good news. HP has released new printer drivers for the DJ 30/90/130 series (respectively 13″, 18″ and 24″ wide) as stated in this Apple Support document. This is great news for those of us using what may be one of the best ink dye printers made. While recently discontinued, I confess prints made with it today look every bit as good as they ever did! My only grumbles have been the occasional blocked printer head, easily replaced. Click ‘Printing‘ on the right for more about this outstanding piece of hardware for serious sized printing.

Update 1/2016:

There is one more benefit to keeping a Snow Leopard boot drive handy. SL was the last version of OS X to include Rosetta, the emulation software which allows Intel Macs to run PPC (IBM G3/4/5 CPU) apps. This is important if you want to run the HP online System Maintenance Utility which is coded to work with PPC CPUs only. And you really want to be able to run that utility as it is the only definitive way of identifying printhead issue, allowing you to hone in on the faulty head – see Page 3-10 in that linked PDF. See here for details.


Snow Leopard – the last great OS from Apple before the tinkerers took over.

You can still buy Snow Leopard from Apple for $20. This is not altruism or nostalgia on Apple’s part. Rather, SL (10.6) was the first version of OS X (from 10.6.4) to permit access to the AppStore wherefrom all subsequent OS X upgrades are made over the air, Apple no longer shipping OS X on DVDs. So without SL you cannot access the AppStore.

I actually use an old PPC iMac G4 to access HP’s utility but you can do just as well using SL for less trouble.

An excellent Lightroom book

Technique

Evening writes good English.

It’s now coming on for two years since I made the painful switch from Aperture to Lightroom and scarcely a day passes when I do not rejoice in that decision.

From the resource intensive Aperture (sells more ‘newer, faster’ Macs, I suppose), illogical and buggy application to one that is logical, has yet to lock-up on me and is blisteringly fast on my middle-of-the road iMac, Lightroom (I’m on version 2.4) is a joy to use. I visit some of the Lightroom blogs now and then and find I am always picking up new tips, no thanks to the lack of a proper instruction book from Adobe, as none is bundled with the software.

Indeed, to my own surprise, I actually find that after 50 years of processing pictures, I’m beginning to enjoy what is ordinarily a drudge. Anyway, a while back I decided to get a good book on the product as it was increasingly irritating to find out more or or less by accident about features that really helped the processing step along.

In selecting my book of choice, the first dictate was that it had to be written by a photographer who can actually take good pictures. Why on earth would you want to learn any skill from an academic, clueless in real life application of his expertise? That dictate promptly excluded most of the many books out there – some of these people really have no right to be preaching about Lightroom when they cannot take a well composed, decent photograph.

The second driver was that the author has outstanding communication skills.

Having watched some of his instructional videos on the web the book to choose was easy – Martin Evening’s The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Book: The Complete Guide for Photographers. (Disclosure: The link is to Amazon – I get no ‘click through’ payment if you click on it. I have no position in AMZN at the time of writing.)

My main reason for buying a good reference manual, dictated by the poor quality of the materials included with the software and the generally poor Help files within LR – was that I wanted to be absolutely sure how best to integrate two catalogs of pictures. I wanted to add the one from my laptop to the master on my desktop computer. While I have daily back-ups of everything, I would rather get this right first thing than scramble to recover from mistakes by resorting to the back-up.

Evening’s book not only walked me through this in accurate detail, I found that it added value in many other areas where the apparently simple user interface of LR hides many special functions, often invoked through the use of the Alt key on the keyboard. Areas where I find real value was added include:

  • Importing and creation of import profiles specific to a camera or lens
  • Using filters to find images
  • White balance corrections
  • Sharpening – a whole chapter, much of it addressing magic simply invisible to the normal user
  • Custom profile printing

The book, at 600 pages, seems long, until you realize that much of that is the result of copious illustrations which make it much easier to follow along. I still think of it more as a dictionary – something you look up to learn from – than a tutorial, but I find I keep it at hand when processing and frequently dip in to learn a new trick or two.

It’s published by Adobe Press (I only learned this after buying it – it was most certainly not a reason for purchase) which simply begs the question why it isn’t included with the software in the first place.

Quibbles? On p. 582 Evening states “The graphics card does not play such a vital role in Lightroom’s overall performance.” This contrasts with my experience which shows that screen rendering of previously generated previews when flicking between images is considerably faster with the new nVidia 7600 GPU (256 mB RAM) in my iMac 24″, compared with that using the nVidia 7300 GPU (128 mB) it replaced. But I have no objective measurements to bear this out and it may just be the placebo effect at work as I try to justify all the time I have had to waste in repairing my faulty Apple computer.

Overall, it’s a fine manual by a real, working photographer who has had the benefit of a proper education in the use of the English language. Highly recommended.

Meet my new view camera

Photographs, Technique

A Panasonic G1? Are you crazy?

I have absolutely no reservations about cropping and manipulating an original picture if it results in a better result.

Never does this apply more than in architectural photography.

The other day, making my way through the horrors of the UCSF-Mission campus in south east San Francisco, I was struck yet again by how ugly much modern architecture is. Given the incredible cost of land, bribes to officials and unions, the cost of design and materials, how much more would it take to make something beautiful rather than just another precast, soulless box? And this is on a campus of higher learning, for goodness sake, where you are meant to encourage open communication, sharing and ample leisurely exchange to help brains grow. How do you do that surrounded by architecture seemingly inspired by concrete makers and designed by structural engineers?

Gazing at the horrors around me I was reminded how Prince Charles has been pilloried over the years for his stance on keeping British architecture beautiful. Whereas he was written off as a privileged nutter with nothing better to do but gripe about buildings and talk to his daffodils, we now increasingly see him as a voice of wisdom in an ugly urban world and a pioneer of the green movement. UCSF-Mission needs him.

Back to the topic at hand, architectural photography. When I know I cannot but have leaning verticals, I make a point of leaving plenty of space around the subject as it will be needed when correcting these at the processing stage, if correction is needed.


Before and after. G1, 41mm, 1/250, f/8, ISO 100

Here the G1’s kit lens was almost fully extended to bridge a building lot in front. I knew that what I wanted was a borderless image of the multi-colored glass (a movement originated by Cesar Pelli in New York, if I am not mistaken). The lamp standard lower right was simply icing on the cake. Here’s an example of the use of modern materials in a lovely, refreshing manner, providing visual interest and harmony in an otherwise uninspiring box shape. And some of the windows actually open! Nice work.

Once the RAW original was in Lightroom 2, I exported it to PS CS2, set up a background layer and used the Edit->Transform->Perspective function with the Grid turned on (Command-Apostrophe) to aid in aligning the verticals. This corrects leaning verticals but shortens the image, squashing it vertically, so to return the correct aspect ratio to the windows I switched to Edit->Transform->Distort and simply stretched the picture vertically until the windows looked right. Finally, before saving (PS integrates with LR so the ‘Save’ creates a second stacked image in LR – nice) I go to Layer->Flatten to keep the file size small – no need for the bloat of layers in the LR catalog of images. I use a lossless TIFF format to save the PS-processed image.

So there you have the G1 as a compact view camera! Here’s the final image. It will make for a nice 30″ square print.