Category Archives: Technique

AeriCam

Technique

A fascinating device.

Waiting at the traffic lights in San Francisco the other day, my eye was caught by this plaque so I quickly made a snap.

It turns out that AeriCam manufactures a state-of-the-art miniature helicopter which permits a movie camera or DSLR to be attached for aerial photography. It costs $12,000 ready to fly. They also manufacture a gimbal mount for an additional $2-3,000 which helps minimize vibration and the results are quite extraordinary in their smoothness and professional quality.

Results from their six bladed ‘hexacopter’ can be seen by clicking the image below.


San Francisco from the Bay Bridge. Click the image for the video.

If you can overlook the extraordinary car skills displayed by the driver, focus on the smoothness of the aerial shots. It’s not quite clear to me how one gets a video feed from the camera to the operator to permit accurate composition, but at $15,000 this device appears to be far cheaper than helicopter rental, and is available in moments to any cinematographer. The rather sparse web site refers to a ‘video transmitter’ so I assume that beams a live picture back to earth to the included ‘9″ SonyMonitor’. Bad weather? Put it back in the box and come back another day.

The recommended payload is 10lbs which will easily accommodate a big DSLR and lens. The device is GPS capable so programming locations should be easy. Order lead time is 6-8 weeks. American ingenuity at its best.

Snapseed for OS X improved

Photographs, Technique

Welcome enhancements.

Snapseed is a simple and effective application for both iOS and OSX for conferring special effects on pictures. I mostly use it to add grunge in those snaps which merit the treatment.

Now the two major issues I had with the OS X version of the application have been fixed by Nik Software. First, you can export to Snapseed directly from Lightroom and second the application will now accept TIFF files rather than just JPGs. I have tested both and can confirm the revised version does both perfectly, and when you save the file it’s stacked with the original in Lightroom.

Here’s a snap processed in Snapseed with grunge, vintage effect and frame added:

On Broadway, SF. D700, 105mm f/2.5 Nikkor-P at f/11.

Snapseed for OS X

Photographs, Technique

A great effects app comes to the desktop.

I wrote about the use of the iOS app Snapseed here and have had lots of fun with it since on my iPhone 4S. Nik Software has now released a like-featured OS X version, althjough it’s four times the price of the iOS version at $20. Go figure.

Snapseed in the Mac AppStore.

It’s 57mB (twice the size shown above) and downloads in a couple of minutes. As I catalog all my snaps in Lightroom, I went to LR3->Preferences->External Editing and added Snapseed as an export option. Thereafter it’s a simple matter to export a RAW original to a JPG in Snapseed – Snapseed does not support TIFF or PSD files, so exports to it are converted to JPG. Likewise, it can save in JPG only, albeit respecting the full size of the original – meaning 3056 x 4576 for a RAW file from my Panasonic G3.

The timing of the app’s release could hardly have been better as I had just snapped a worker at the Transbay Terminal construction site on Howard Street in San Francisco with a backdrop of massive I-beams and the original needed a little something to confer the industrial feel I wanted. An export to Snapseed saw the original thus:

Original exported into Snapseed.

A few quick tweaks in the ‘Grunge’ panel were followed by a touch of CenterFocus/Vignette/Blur, and with the addition of a Grunge Frame I had what I wanted. Saving the file seemed to place it in the Lightroom directory, judging by the filename, but I could not see it in the Lightroom Grid view, so decided to save it to the Desktop and import it thence to LR3. I suspect I’m doing something wrong and will look into it – with PS CS5, for example, a ‘Save’ places the file right next to the original in the LR3 Grid display.

Here’s the result:

At the Transbay Terminal site, SF. G3, 45-200mm @ 78mm.

The simple user interface, the quality of the many effects and the general speed and ease of use make this a bargain, even at $20, compared to $5 for the iOS version. Sure, you could do all of this in iOS, laboriously exporting and reimporting the picture, but life’s too short for that. This is no substitute for the industrial strength of Photoshop, but try doing all of the above in under one minute in that behemoth of an application. Snapseed is proof that a few carefully selected effects in a well engineered product suffice most of the time.

Here’s another before/after of an image also snapped yesterday.

The original:

The shoe. G3, kit lens @35mm.

After:

After Snapseed.

In this example I used the ‘Tune Image’, ‘Drama’ and ‘Frames’ settings. ‘Tune Image’ includes selective options, though I did not use those here. Snapseed has done a great job of enhancing drama and bringing up detail in the bricks, highlighted by the setting sun.

Update March, 2013:

Sadly Google, which acquired Snapseed along with Nik Software, has discontinued the OS X version. Quite why not keep it available, when the support and development costs are zero, beats me but doubtless Google is Doing Evil, consonant with its missing moral compass:


Recent App Store search for Snapssed for OS X.

Correcting verticals

Technique

A simple Photoshop routine.

The eye is exceptionally sensitive to parallelism and hence to leaning verticals. Hang a picture on the wall just a few minutes of arc out of level and anyone will spot the error immediately. Leaning verticals in photographs, where none are called for, are every bit as objectionable.

Correcting these is easy and better done in Photoshop than in Lightroom with its limited controls.

Click the picture for the instructional video and watch out for the phone call at the end! It seems that no matter how hard one tries to switch of all the sounds that pervade our lives, there’s always at least one sound source to be missed.

Click the picture for the video.

The video is 8 minutes long.

Background Blur

Technique

Making the subject pop.

I have referred to the need to blur backgrounds in pictures made with short focal length lenses often. As cameras get smaller, focal lengths shorten. The 35mm FFE lens in the iPhone 4S, for example, has a focal length of but 4.3mm, meaning just about everything is always sharp. At a given aperture, depth of field is solely a function of focal length, having nothing to do with sensor size.

To put this in perspective, the 50mm FFE lens on a full frame 35mm camera or DSLR become 150mm on a 4″ x 5″ sheet film monster, 80mm on a 6×6 medium format Hasselblad, 25mm on an MFT body and just 6 mm on the typical cell phone with its microscopic sensor. Compared to a 6mm, the depth of field of a 150mm lens is miniscule – everything is in focus with the former, little is with the latter. So selective focus on small cameras, absent help from software, is not going to happen ‘in camera’, yet.

If a picture is worth a thousand words an instructional video is an order of magnitude more efficient, so I have made a brief video explaining how to confer background blur using Photoshop CS5, which you can see by clicking the image below. While I start and end the process in Lightroom3, that’s not a required part of the workflow. Use whatever database you like for storage.

And remember, the only people who will know you used this technique will be those you tell in advance.

Click to view the 8 minute video.

One day this technology will be built into software in cameras. The user will be able to restrict the zone of sharpness to the main subject. Cameras already have face recognition. Selective focus is a rational extension of this thinking. Meanwhile, PS CS5 does just fine.