Plans for the New Year

I know I got overly busy at the end of this year, and had to go on hiatus during the Christmas season. I will try to get a few ahead, so that we don't have to take a number of weeks off at the end of the year. We may also start doing some bicycle related stuff, as that was part of the original concept here. There may be a couple of those over the winter, but expect that to get going more once bicycle season returns, which around here is April to May. I need to get all the bicycles tuned up, and get riding again.

The plan is to plan articles 2 months ahead, and then writing them a month ahead, so it only takes a short while on a weekly basis to post, and if I have something like a vacation coming up, or a busy period, I can queue a few weeks up, and let the scheduler sort them out. I might consider an income mechanism, either ads on the site or a Patreon, like mechanism. This would allow me some investment, like a domain, and would allow me to put more time into it, and to write longer articles with more detail.

This past year was kind of a failure, I got going again, and then went on hiatus, because I was not prepared for what was going to happen at the end of the year. Mistakes are not the problem, it’s when you don’t learn from your mistakes, that you have a problem. What I learned was that the weeks leading up to Christmas can be extremely busy, both personally and at work, so you need a lead time, to get stuff done. In order to prevent those same issues in 2018, I have planned articles to the beginning of February at this point, and would like to get planned up to the beginning of March this week, get January 7^th in the bag, and January 14^th outlined. January 7^th will be about shooting when there is snow about. I really would also like articles to be longer, at least 400 words, a few in 2017 fell far short of that.

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In case your wondering, I actually write the text using LibreOffice, which has better spell checking, and text tools. I then do the images separately and have them ready, so I can pump the whole thing into Blogger, from a couple of files, then the only issue is to do the layout and it’s done.   

This weeks image is an old favourite from back in 2003, it's a winter shot on film, I think using the TC as it's originally from a colour negative.

Hope you had a merry Christmas, and all the best in 2018!

W

Don't put your camera away for the Winter

While most people who ride bicycles will put them away, and people swap from roller skates to ice skates, yeah I know rollerblades replaced roller skates, but roller skates does rhyme better....  Your camera doesn't need to go away with them.

There are a couple of things you do need to consider when it's cold out though.  First of all, batteries don't like cold, so you may want to keep a second camera battery in an inside pocket, even a cold battery when it's brought into a warm place, can regain some power.  If your camera and batteries are older, than you may want to replace the batteries with new ones.  I always put the date on a battery when it enters service, as I can have several batteries that look the same, and not remember which one is the oldest.

Second of all, cameras don't like wet, cold air holds less moisture than warm air, a cold surface will chill the air immediately next to it, so don't open your camera bag until it has had time to warm up.  This will keep moisture from condensing on the camera and lenses, it will condense on the outside of the bag instead.  The best cold weather camera hat I ever had, was the old Konica TC, the mechanical parts didn't seem to mind the cold, and it worked fine using Sunny 16 type exposure, even with colour negative film.  The FC-1 hated the cold, the 300D didn't seem to mind it, except when the batteries were old, they tended to go flat fairly quickly.  LCD screens are okay to about -20℃ or about  -4℉, although, you can keep a chemical hand warmer in your bag, and just take the camera out, make your shots, and back into the bag, or keep the camera inside clothing.

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The image this time, is from the great ice storm of December 2013, when most of southern Ontario was covered in ice, which led to wide scale power outages, although the storm occurred on December 20th, it was New Years before the power was on everywhere.  About a week before we moved, the new house had a total outage of maybe 10 minutes, the old one was out for over a week.  This little twig got a coating of ice. 

I hope to get another posting in, this month, will see you then.  Not sure about December yet, December can be brutally busy, I will try to get in two, but may only get in one. 

See you then,  W.

Posting less frequently.....

This is a busy time of year, with a lot of stuff happening, so I will be moving to a less frequent posting schedule. 

Voluntary blogs run into the problem of, you eventually run out of things you want to say, on a regular basis, this leads to you heading in two directions, you either move to a less frequent schedule, or you add some off topic stuff, like politics.  Since this isn't a paid site, and it doesn't currently derive income from advertising, I am moving to a less frequent schedule.  I will try to post something a couple of times a month, one at the end of the month, the other in the middle, in January when there is more time available, I may post mote.

Thanks,

W

Professional Slide shows in the old days

Last week we looked at digital slide shows, and you could have music and pre-built narration and everything.  This has been possible since at least the early 1950's, but was much more difficult.  You needed a tape player and two projectors, the slides would alternate from one projector to the other, professional grade slide projectors could be purchased that had a fade capability, as one faded out, the other faded in.   This could be based on time, or using an audio tone with a special remote.  A tone would then operate the projector, some people used separate audio tracks, one was connected to the sound system, the other to the projectors, so the tone was not audible.  Of course if you dropped the tray of slides, then you needed to start over, although smart people would number the slides, for example 1-14 would be in tray  1, slide number 14.

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Many people in building such setups would, have copies made of the slides, and only the copies would be projected, as the intense light passing through the slides would cause them to fade over time, plus you protected the original slides from damage in handling.  Projectors setups needed to be perfectly registered so the images would line up.  A target slide could be placed in each projector and then they would be lined up, and re-targeting would be required for each venue as a change in the distance from projector to screen would throw off the targeting. 

All to say, it's a little like digital printing, it's easier and often faster then the old days, but it's incredible what was possible in the bad old days.

This weeks image is from last year, of a mother goose and her gosling.   If I recall correctly this was taken at the Toronto Islands.  You almost lose the gosling in the grass, but not quite.

I know, quite short this week, but that's all for now.

W

Slide shows

Back in the old days of film, producing a high end slide show was not easy, we often ended up watching the slides from Uncle Howard's Trip to Cucamonga with Aunt Helene.  Half the slides were mispositioned, because Howard dropped the tray of slides out in the driveway, and now his commentary after 7 bottles of beer is closer to a slurred verbal diarrhea,  that goes on far too long, and  how did he manage to create 85,000,000 slides and cut off part of Aunt Helene in every shot.  I think only 4 or 5 are actually in focus. 

We can do a lot better digitally these days. software like Openshot can be used to create wonderful slide shows, you can give each slide a certain amount of time, say 10 seconds, then use a professional style fade or wipe to the next image, rather than a black out.  A fade is where one image gradually replaces another and a wipe is where one seems to roll over the other.  If using wipes, don't use too many different ones, or you can make your audience "sea sick".  You can use a simple microphone to add commentary over the slides, a good way to do this, is to watch the pictures a few times, and write some notes, as to when you want to speak, and what you want to say, then script the show, if using a microphone, you want it on a stand, about 30cm away from where you're sitting.  You can also add a music track, don't use songs from the radio or a CD, as it creates copyright issues, there are places to get music for this, Youtube has an audio library of songs you can use, the ideal is to load the commentary into software like Audacity, then mix the tracks, for example you can reduce the volume of your commentary when not speaking, to remove background noise, or have the music lower below your speaking, and then higher when you're not speaking.  If using several songs, your can "balance" the volume between tracks that were recorded at different levels.  Once the audio track is completed, you can add it to the video.  You can also add titles to your show. 

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Of course this does nothing for images that are out of focus or that have the subjects head off, but nothing will fix that, better then a good edit. I may do an example slide show, and add a link here later on, but for now we need to make due with just a photo.  If I do a show it will probably be posted on Youtube with a link added here in the comments.

This little guy resting on a not quite  open rose from 2008 will need to do.  I think it was a backyard shot, as we often have flowers in the back yard and they are typically easy to obtain. 




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I think that is all for this week,

W.

A week off....

Occasionally I will be taking a week off, it is Thanksgiving here in Canada, so I will be taking the week off.  See you back here next week.  The next break will be 2 weeks at Christmas time....

Some newer stuff

Sort of a continuation of last week, we have a series of images, one or two from each year from 2011 to 2017.  Each of these images has some meaning, as I try to remember what I was working on, when I took the image.  Some of these will have pretty exact descriptions.  There will be a slightly different format this time, I made the pictures a little larger.

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This first one was taken off a small road that is near Wiarton, ON.  It can be best described by what it actually is, an honest to goodness swamp.  The water level is about 3cm below the road, the ground is about 10cm below the road.  In the spring, the road floods and the town puts out signs that the road will be underwater.  It's a gravel road, called Zion Church Road.  The flooding actually doesn't hurt it.  When it dries out, the stone dust and gravel hardens so that it's harder then concrete.  Never knew when I lived there that this is actually called the Gleason Brook Management Area. 




This next one  was taken on Flowerpot Island, although known mostly for it's rock formations that look like giant flower pots, there is a lighthouse and I found this guy near the lighthouse where there is a small cafe that had some lilac bushes near it.  This guy was just chilling on a leaf.  I did for the record take some pictures of the flower pots.  This is part of the Fathom Five National Park, which is just off The Bruce Peninsula from Tobermory,  There are a number of boats that ferry people to Flowerpot, leaving from Tobermory, some of them are cruise type boats that cover portons of Fathom Five.

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At one point in things I decided I didn't want to carry the big 300D everywhere and picked up a cheap little point and shoot, a Canon A810. I find that as a camera it is dreadfully slow.  Images were not that bad, providing it was fairly bright daylight.  Many of these little cameras have that problem, a very limited range of lens stops, mean that if light is a little lower, you end up with longer then you would like exposures.  IIRC This was taken at Lion's Head a small village north of Wiarton, that is part of the town of Northern Bruce Peninsula, which like South Bruce Peninsula was a town that was a merger of a number of smaller places.  Hard to tell but the temperature on this day was -10C, and yes that IS open water.

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After we moved back to Toronto, in the spring is the cherry blossom festival, one of the trails actually leads to a swan nesting area, there are a number of ducks and other waterfowl that nest there.  I believe that in 2014, the cherry blossoms were a little late, but the Swans and other birds were pretty much on regular schedule.  This is a mute swan, and they are not native to North America, but rather from Europe.  They have had large increases in population, and in North America are consider an invasive species.  They still take a nice image though.

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This next one is actually a film image taken with the FC-1.  I know it was the FC-1 because the TC was fully retired by this point.  Film would be Fuji Superia looks like 200, as I had a bunch of rolls in the freezer and it's a colour image.  I don't remember much about it, I think I had a few things on this roll, and I think I was just using it up at this point.  Currently if I decide to shoot some film, I need to find some, and a lab to process it, and that would be a big hassle.  I actually planned to sell the camera a couple of years ago, but it's resale value is just about zero, so I held onto it.  This is really quite sad, the camera is nearly 40 years old, and still works amazingly well, just it's not worth anything anymore.  I think on this one I used an old numbering system, because I forgot I had changed it.

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While cameras generally don't like getting wet, cloudy days give a more even light, and sometimes a natural watering adds a whole new dimension to an image.  I think it does here, especially since the leaves actually appear dry.  This is a little false though, because there is a massive cedar hedge that shelters these leaves somewhat, so they probably are dry, but the flower was further out, and got wet.   This one was easy to find, it was actually in my backyard.  Backyard flowers in large flowerpots can make great images, because you can turn the flowerpot in order to get a better image if you can't put the camera in the right place.

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I debated for a while about actually publishing this one in colour, as the light part of the wings is a bright blue, but the blue would draw the eye away from everything else.  You might not notice the dots on the wings or the veins in the wings, if all you see is bright blotch of blue.  It's an image I might just try and do in colour at another point, and see what people think. 

I intentionally didn't include this years as the year is continuing on.  This is about all for this week, and we may just revisit this butterfly to see if it really is better in monochrome or colour. 

W

Why I like Nature Photography

Much of the modern world is stressful, and that stress builds up in our bodies and in our minds, and this needs to be at times released.  For me, I find that being in nature, a good way to relieve that stress, and it is something I try to do a few times a year.  Often city dwellers, here in Toronto, don't have to go all that far to find nature, there are a number of large parks in the city, where you can find nature, often in your own neighbourhood.

This is another multi-image posting, and these are all images taken between 2003 and 2010, I will add some commentary to these, where I have it, and where I took it, if I remember....

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This is the oldest image in this series, taken with the Konica TC on Agfa Vista 200 Colour film, it was taken of a "funny" tree in G Ross Lord Park in Toronto, I would bike through to the North End of the Park sit under this tree for a while, then head back to my home that was about 4km to the south.  Not more than 200m to the East of this, is a large industrial plant, and 100m to the North is a busy Arterial road.

I have a few images of this tree, scanned on an Epson flat bed.  You may notice that some of the copyright notices are larger and some are smaller, I need to change this, as the font is a fixed size, and it should be a percentage of the image size.  So it's smaller on higher resolution images, and larger on smaller resolution images...

I don't know if this tree is still there, as it's been many years since I lived there, and it may have been cut down by now, there have been some big ice storms, and I don't think the bumps on the trunk made for a strong tree.  Some day I need to return there and see, if it's still there.

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This next image is another interesting one, it was taken using the Konica FC-1 on Ilford
FP-4  I think it was in Algonquin, as there is a similar image below that was from the same time period that was in Algonquin.  It has a bit of a dreamy effect, which is why I like it.  It's actually the first image on the roll, with a frame number of 0.  An old cataloguing system I used divided film into roll and frame numbers, then I added a different mechanism for digital, and a bunch of years ago, I moved to a single system, leaving the old roll numbers in the negative book, and referencing them in the EXIF data.  Which is how I get some of the data (like camera and film type) without needing to dig out the negatives. 

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This is an odd one, it was taken with a Point & Shoot Camera that belonged to my wife, she took thousands of images with it, in Bolivia, during a trip there, I borrowed it, to see how digital might work for me, and it did, so I bought the 300D at Christmas that year.  Again it has a dreamy, kind of feel, partly because it was in the morning of a rather damp day, and there was a lot of moisture in the air.  The day later dried up, and by evening it was very nice out.  I probably took more shots on this day, then I did the rest of the year.  My Brother-in-law was on this trip, and  we left at 5am and were at the park a little after 8, and decided to hit the trails before things got busy,  these images were taken around 9am.

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We were there for a long time, in fact we were still shooting at sunset, and the next image was taken at sunset on the same day, I think we got home after 11PM.  By sunset it was starting to cloud over again, the best sunrise and sunset photos need some clouds, and sunlight poking through the cloud deck, are pretty much the ideal.  One of the problems point and shoot cameras, is that you have to take whatever the camera gives you.  I got kinda lucky here, in that it blocked up the shadows, rather then exposing for those and burning the highlights.  I used the digital for this, because I had taken about 4 rolls of film, and had run out.  With some room left on the little digital.  It's one of the benefits of digital, a couple of cards can hold a lot of images.  If I were to have done it again with film, I would have taken about twice as much.

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This is a winter one, taken near Ashbridge's bay, in Toronto.  In early to mid winter, Lake Ontario is warmer than the shoreline, and as waves strike the shore, some water is thrown up as tiny droplets, as soon as it hits the land, which is much colder, it freezes.  This was taken with the 300D, which strangely enough didn't mind the cold as much as the FC-1, which was about 25 years old at the time.  This was taken on a very cold, windy and blustery day, even though the timestamp says it was March 3rd....  It was still solidly in winter, and probably around -10C.   

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I often tone summer images slightly sepia, and winter ones, slightly cyan, which I did in this case, the bluish tone, makes the image feel colder, where as sepia is a slight warming effect. 

This is another one from G Ross Lord park, which has a creek running through it.  Again the 300D, zoomed in as far as it can with the kit lens.  It's a fall photo, being around this time of year, it's a good imaging time, in that the temps tend to be a little cooler, not this year it's 30℃ as I type this.  Trees still are in nearly full leave, something that will not be the case in a couple of weeks.  As I said earlier, it's been a while since I have been to this park, and I would like to visit again.  This kind of image, is one I like, kinda messy, where it can be difficult to decide what the actual subject is.  It could be the trees at the front, the ones in the back, or the water in the middle.  It's actually supposed to be the water, but you could actually argue it's something else.  You can view it 47 times, and decide it's something else each time. 

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Another winter one, the date on this one is Valentines day, there had been thin ice over the top of the lake, when the wind picked up, it was tossed into this messy pile on the shore.  Again to offer a cold feeling I simulated the cyan tone, rather than the brownish sepia tone, I often use.  A  cyan tint in the film days, was commonly done using potassium ferricyanide, and was most commonly used in the production of blueprints.  These days we can do the same thing, by shifting the colour balance in a RGB black and white image.  Much less messy, and you can get the same result over and over again, where as bleaching and dyeing a print, will tend to give different results each time, without laborious notes. 



Okay, the last one for this week, I am debating about doing a similar series for next week, that will consist of some newer stuff, or possibly even older stuff, as I have some going back to the start 40 years ago.....  I suspect this is Limestone, which is fairly soft, and where water can eat away the stone in interesting patterns.  It's Lake Ontario again, but in this case over by the Humber River bridge.  What is strange is that although it appears almost a moonscape, there are massive condo's only 100m away or so, on the other side of a busy arterial road. 

Most of these were taken within a 1/2 hour subway ride, or bicycle ride from where I was living at the time.  Yes it does take a while to get to Algonquin, it's still possible to do as a day trip.  So as we began, you can look at nature very close to home.

W 

Camera Lenses

A Camera lens is a device that bends light, so that different light beams line up, preferably at the focal plane, which is where the film or sensor is located.  When this is true, it is said to be in focus, the earliest cameras had a single lens.  Since the film was so large in size, typically 4"x5", 5"x7", 8"x10", 11"x14" and 16"x20".  These numbers were not magical, they were simply standard window glass sizes, in the days of plate photography.  When sheet film came out, the same sizes were adopted.  However we are getting off track, if your negative is 8"x10" (20cm x 25cm) you can make things larger, by contact printing on 4x5" paper.

Eventually they developed  screw type lens mounts that allowed for changing lenses, and lenses of different sizes were developed.  It was quickly discovered that if you made the focal length shorter, the angle of view got wider, which meant more would fit in an image at a given distance from the camera, and depth of field increased.  News photographers would often use these benefits by fixing short lenses on their cameras.  Unfortunately there are also a disadvantage, straight lines would appear curved, and perspectives would change, an item that was close to the camera would appear much larger then normal, and an item further away would appear much smaller.  Photographers have used both of these traits to advantage. 

By the same token longer lenses would have a narrower angle of view, less would fit in the image at the same distance,  straight lines would not be affected, but the perspective changes would be reversed, flattening the image.  Portrait photographers learned quickly that using a slightly longer than normal lens, was more flattering, with a 35mm camera 85mm - 100mm is about right.   In the 1960's they developed the bayonet mount, which made lenses easier and faster to change.  Unfortunately where with screw mount lenses nearly all camera's used the same 49mm mount, each bayonet could be a little different.  You could no longer use a lens made by one manufacturer, on another makes camera.  Although third party lens makers would quite often make lenses with different mounts on them, and one company Tamron made adaptall lenses which could be used with different makes of cameras, using different adapter rings. 

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In the film days I used 4 lenses, a 28mm (wide, but not wide enough that the distortion wasn't livable), a 50mm, a 135mm and a 200mm, I have a 1.5x extender for that camera so it's really 28mm, 50mm, 100mm, 135mm, 200mm, 270mm and 400mm.  For digital, I have an 18-55 and a 70-300 which are a good combination, yes I realise that 56-69mm are not covered, but that isn't really an issue.   This camera uses a smaller sensor, giving a longer lens, for the Canon APS-C the 18mm is the same as a 29mm on the film camera, 55mm is the same as 88mm, the 70mm is the same as 112mm on a 35mm and 300 is more like 480mm on the 35mm. 

This weeks image of a white lion was taken at African Lion Safari, last year, from a car with the windows closed, with the 70-300mm lens at 85mm on the Canon 300D.  It's a nice image, of a cat on the prowl, it's funny to see that a house cat uses similar methods when they are hunting. 

I think that is all for now.... 

W.

Analog versus Digital

This week we look at Analog versus digital imaging.  Each has advantages and disadvantages, but rather then simply list them, we should take a look at how they work in the real world. 

Analog imaging is a chemical process, a silver salt, is a combination of silver and one of the halides, bromine, chlorine, iodine and fluorine.  Is exposed to light, producing a latent image, this is then amplified with another chemical to develop a visible image that is then processed with either sodium thiosulfate or ammonium thiosulfate which washes away the undeveloped salts.  This produces a negative, and by exposing this on another form of the same material, we can produce a positive.  If properly processed the images can be quite well preserved, for hundreds of years.  Although the chemicals have scary names, they really are not that dangerous, and some like the developer hydroquinone are used in medicine.  Interestingly enough, the most dangerous of the chemicals is actually silver, and modern labs will use recovery mechanisms to recover and recycle the leftover silver.  Yes the silver has value, but you need to process a lot of film, to get even a small amount.

One of the problems with the process, is that if you have a unrecoverable issue, such as an out of focus exposure, you can't erase it and do over, you need to use more film, and either throw it away, or leave it in the archive.  This has nothing on the printing process, where a good day in the darkroom, results in a few good prints, and a bin full of wet rejects.

Some of us, moved to a hybrid process, where you would shoot film, scan the film into a computer, and then do your editing on the computer, some even took and sent their printing to a wet lab. This can be difficult however, in that it can take a lot to get a good scan, and you can spend more time scanning then you do processing and printing in a darkroom.  This weeks image is such, taken in 2003 with a Konica FC-1 on Fujicolor ASA 400 film, it's a pretty good rendition of a wonderful image.   Some of us are now looking at using a digital camera to copy some of the older stuff, you need a macro lens though to get a 1:1 image, and that can be more tricky then anything else.  This is because I have  books of them, in my case going back 40 years, although much of the stuff from back then, I look at now, and think of it as crap.  Which is why as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I will probably never look at.

Then there is a fully digital process, digital cameras have pretty much eliminated all of the problems except one, there is no real way to archive images, the way the old B&W negatives could be put in a box and left for a century or more.  We will find that we need to copy images over to new media as old media types are replaced with new.  Just like 8" floppies were replaced with 5 1/4" which were replaced with 3.5", we will eventually see a day, where CD's and DVD's will disappear as usable medium, and billions of photographs will  disappear with them.  Digital formats will change over time, the JPEG files will be replaced with something else.  This becomes the question, if your great grandson finds a CD full of your Jpeg files, will he know how to retrieve them? 

On that thought, enough for this week

W

A walk in the woods

Occasionally here, I will do a story, and the story may come with several images, rather then just one image, sometimes it will be a photographic study, with a whole group of images.  Today we get such a narrative.   I know there will be more then one image, but as I write the text here, I don't know how many.

So last Sunday I said to my other half, that I would like to take a walk in the woods.  She said it sounded like a good idea, and looked at a few places, here in Southern Ontario, in Canada, there are 4 systems of parks, that you can choose from.  There are Federal Parks, there are Provincial Parks, City Parks and Conservation Areas.  She suggested Heart Lake Conservation Area. It's not that far from home, and while I get my walk in the woods, she and the kid, can do a shorter walk and then use the pool at the site.  I think they walked about 1 kilometre or so, I probably did closer to 10.

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A walk in the woods, is a great tool for destressing, it's not always quiet, in fact a forest by a lake can be quite noisy.  Birds, insects and frogs can be quite noisy, but somehow the sounds of nature  is less noisy than a street full of traffic.     The trail we took goes from the treetop zip line, to the border of someones private property, I didn't go quite that far.  We found some small frogs, I suspect these are Northern Leopard Frogs, as you can see from the surroundings they are quite small, they could be from this years crop.  Seeing animals like frogs in a murky lake, often means it is a healthy lake.  Lakes that are completely clear and devoid of fish and aquatic reptiles, often means that the lake is dead, from pollution.  Which is a sad thing to see,
 

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When one wants images of wild life, you really need to remember 2 things, you need a big lens, and to proceed as quietly as possible.  In this case the lens is a 70-300mm Zoom, it's a little soft all the way out, but that's partly because I didn't have the opportunity to set up a camera support.  I found this little guy just chilling on a log, and took a few images, before he noticed me, and took off.  I took about 100 images on the day, maybe 5 of this particular chipmunk, then picked the one I liked the best for the posting.  One of the others may find it's way into a later post.  I think if my wife and 5 year old had been around, I wouldn't have gotten any.   I need to teach the little one, that it's okay to not be speaking, and that we can sometimes see things that we would not otherwise see, when we make noise.

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They were around, for the bumble bee though, and this was not taken with a long lens.  Sometimes Insects are tricky, especially ones that bite and sting, in that you don't want to scare them, if they feel threatened, they are more likely to sting or bite.  In this particular case though, I think this bee was too busy gathering nectar to take back to the hive.  Summer is winding down, and Bee hives need to prepare for winter.    Although honey bees and bumble bees can be very similar, bumbles appear scary hairy, and looking at this one it's most likely a bumble.  Interesting difference, with honey bees, a smaller portion of the colony winters over, with bumble bees only the queens hibernate.  Just in case you think all of the images I took, were of animal and insect life, there were some plant photos as well, like this last one.  

Looks like these plants are pretty much done for this year.  The seed pods have already burst, and spread their seed for the winter.  What I try to keep out of photos, is the fact that many parks have a single problem.  That is people, many people are dirty, they leave garbage everywhere.  I am of the opinion that the only evidence you visited a natural place should be the photographs and images that you took.  If you create garbage in the woods, take it out with you, it's not hard, and it means that other folks can visit a nice clean place.

We are actually coming into one of the best times to walk in northern woods, Fall adds the wonder of colour as the world gets ready to shut down for winter.

Thanks, all for this week

W

Exposure Part 2

Exposure Part 2 - Making it work.

This week we look at more on making exposure work on a modern camera.  While early exposure based on the type of light worked, it wasn't really accurate enough, and the first light meters were the result.  At first the meter was a set of neutral density filters, and you would pick the proper filter, which gave your exposure.  This relied on the human eye, which is different person to person.  Then we saw the first electric meters, these were based on selenium, and operated as a type of photo-voltaic cell, it would when exposed to light produce a small voltage, the higher the voltage, the more light there was.  The result was a match-needle system, the voltage would be displayed and as you set the shutter speed or aperture, it moved another needle, when the two needles were matched, you had the correct exposure.   They were terrible in low light, and needed to be quite large, and ceased to be used in the 1960's when Cadmium Sulfide (CdS) based meters were developed.

These worked in a different way, by passing a voltage through the cell, as the light was higher or lower, the resistance was higher or lower.  These meters required a battery that would provide the same voltage from fresh until it suddenly dropped dead.  Mercury batteries had this characteristic and were cheap, until they were banned in the early 1990's.  Alkaline batteries which are cheaper and less toxic, tend to start at a higher voltage and gradually drop, requiring some form of voltage regulation circuit to provide a constant voltage to the cell.  Some meters still use CdS meters are still used, although other sensors are also used.  CdS cells could be quite small, and mounted inside the camera, giving a very good reflective light meter.

Manual mode, this one is for what you think the computer is likely to get fooled, for example when there is a lot of one tone, which isn't your primary subject, or your trying to do something creative.  A photographer by the name of Ansel Adams developed the zone system, for such circumstances.

Aperture Priority mode, when you want to control the aperture, and are not as concerned about the shutter speed.   For example your trying for a certain depth of field.

Shutter Priority mode, when you want to control the shutter speed, and are not as concerned about the aperture.  For example action shots.  Sometimes you will use it to freeze motion, and other times to emphasize it.  This can be very useful.

Program mode, your not really concerned about aperture or shutter speed, and just want an image.

Many modern DSLR Cameras also have "hint" modes, for example Sports or Portraits, these are similar to P mode, but will shift the values, based on the hint.  For example Sports mode, will attempt a high shutter speed to freeze action, Portraits mode will go for a higher aperture, to ensure a face is fully in focus.

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On my current regular camera, I use various modes, most commonly Av or Tv (shutter priority), there is the ability to shift the exposure by up to 3 stops,  so there is little need to use M mode anymore.  I also sometimes use the hint modes, I don't like P, but it is there....

This weeks image is from well back in the archive, it's a film image that was scanned, I don't remember from where, but I like the reflective nature of the image.  There are hundreds of these, that were scanned and never catalogued, and I am slowly getting them done. One thing I did do, was include some notes, in the exif data  and this one was originally shot on Agfa Vista 200 ASA Colour film, using the Konica FC-1 Camera.  

I think that's about all there is for this week

W.

Exposure Part 1

Exposure Part 1

Early Cameras were totally manual in nature, you had two things to set, how fast the shutter would operate, and how much light enters the lens.  Even the latest high tech DSLR that has more computing power than an IBM/360, as the ability to make these two settings.  The majority of people don't really think about this, they let the computer to all the thinking, but that can result in a poor image.

Shutter speeds are counted in seconds, fast shutters can exceed 1/2000th of a second, and many can be held open for long periods of time.   The amount of light is expressed as a fraction of the focal length of a lens.  A lens that is 100 mm long, at f/4 will have an opening that is 25mm in size, these fractions are based on a series of numbers, where each number allows double or half the amount of light, the lower the number, the larger the amount of light, these numbers are logarithmic in nature.  The typical values are 1, 1.4, 2, 2.8, 4, 5.6, 8, 11, 16, 22, 32 although it's technically possible to go smaller then f/32 it would be quite rare, rare is another word for expensive.  In the 1970's and 1980's when 400 ISO (usually expressed as ASA in those days)  film was considered very fast, the standard lens was the 50mm, and most were between f/1.4 and f/2.  Current digital zooms, are quite a bit smaller, with f/4 to f/5.6 being common, then again with ISO values of 3200 and 6400 being common, this isn't a problem.    

Early cameras were all manual, and you would use rules like Sunny 16, to determine exposure.  Then light meters came out, which would measure the light, and provide values to the photographer.  Now, fast shutter speeds can stop motion, such as in sports, the smaller the aperture, the greater the depth of field (range of distance of image that is in focus), the larger the number, the smaller the depth of field.  With the same lens, the shorter the lens, the greater the depth of field, and the longer the lens focal length, the shallower the depth-of-field.   A short lens with a small aperture can have a nearly endless depth of field.

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You can creatively make use of this.  The image below has the ice on the rock in the foreground and the much lake also in focus, it was taken on a bright winter day, with a small aperture.  in this case the exposure was f/11 with a 22mm lens and a shutter speed of 1/200, with an ISO of 100.  I know this, because the original image was taken with a digital camera, that records this.   So the rock that is only 2 metres away and the lake horizon 1km away, are both in focus.  With other items you can use a larger aperture and a longer focal length to throw a messy background out of focus.

Some photographers will intentionally use a slow shutter speed to emphasize movement, this can give a really nice effect to moving water, giving it a dreamy quality.

I try to keep these postings fairly short, as long postings can get dull and boring, More on this next week in Part 2on exposure, when I will go into the mechanics of making it work with the modern camera.

That's all for this week
W

The editing process

So you go out shooting with your favourite camera, and come home with 500 images, now what? How do you decide what you will keep, and what will you throw away.

I almost never clear an image from the memory card, even if I know it's not going to be kept, for a couple of reasons,  when you started with 24 and 36 exposure film rolls, then 100 images "per roll" on a memory card is a lot.  After they are on the computer, I reformat the card.

The first edit I do, is a technical edit, if the image is poor, out of focus or wrong focus, the lighting or composition didn't work, then I toss the image.   I don't usually have time to play around with poor images, when I have dozens or hundreds of images to deal with.  The remainder get catalogued, and honestly, may of them will never see the light of day.   Others can sit in the archive for years, and then get pulled out for processing.   Then of course, we all have our favourites, this is one of mine.  I think before I stopped the blog before, I had this one posted.

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This weeks image is actually an old favourite of mine, it was taken on the first shoot with the Canon 300D (Digital Rebel) a camera that is now heading into semi-retirement.  My brother-in-law and I, were out driving around, and we saw this place, no signs for no-trespassing were about, and we took a few shots.  It is interesting how, a building sometimes will start to come apart.  This actually was a common design in the late 1800's.  It's called a storey and a half, a later modification was the storey and three-quarters where the side walls would be extended up further to give more head height.

As with most images, this was shot in colour, then processed to black and white through my normal mechanism.

I'll admit that this week is a little short, but I ended up writing this on Saturday afternoon, with a sore back that seems ready to give out.  I'll try for something more interesting next week

W

My workflow for digital images

My workflow for digital images.

I shoot everything in RAW mode, this is because JPEG, the normal output for most digital cameras, is a lossy format, it loses some of the image data that the algorithm, deems unimportant. If you normally, simply take your memory card to Walmart, and feed it into their machine for a bunch of prints, or your post everything on Facebook or Instagram, this is fine. If you like to do post processing of your images, then it’s not fine.  The reason for this is that it throws away a little more of the image each time, so after a few edits there is nothing really left.  Back in the days when disk space cost $1/MB and a 56K modem was considered blindingly fast; the need for high compression was worth the cost of lower quality.  Today when $100 buys a 2TB drive, and 10Mbit/second is considered slow, we don't need as high compression.  

I consider the RAW file, as the undeveloped film, I use RAW conversion software (UFRAW), as a standard developer which leaves me with a PNG file; essentially a transparency or slide, rather than a negative. I go through, and any that are obviously unable to be salvaged, get sent to the trash folder. Some that are iffy, I will go back to the original RAW file, and load it into the conversion software, and play with it, to see if I can get a better result. If the result is not usable, then it also gets moved to trash.

The rest are fed through a custom program that issues them catalogue numbers, and moves them to the archive. It’s still a work in progress and will eventually get rewritten to become more efficient and to work better, but currently it works well enough.  I want to eventually get it to do the raw conversion, as one thread then show the image in a second thread, so I can either accept or reject it, and then catalogue it, again in a third thread.  

When I am considering images for use, I go back through the archive and see if I can find what I want, these are then fed through another bit of custom software, that does a bunch of things, like re-sizing, conversion to black and white, toning, adding the copyright notice, etc. If something doesn’t work, I fix it, will it ever be ready for public consumption, probably not. The end of the process is a Jpeg file, either suitable for printing or for posting.

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If you think you need a fancy new Mac for this, you don’t, I use a 10 year old PC that runs Fedora Linux on it, I can load images into Gimp which will allow intermediate processing, but often use my own software so that I can get the same result each time.

This weeks image, Catalog Number E4700329, I like the angle on this one, it's unusual and the petals have a translucent effect on the front, because the sun was above and slightly to the right of the flower.  The background is actually leaves that are dark green, they turn black when converted to black and white.

I think that is all for this week, see you next.

W

We're Back

After abandoning this blog some 4 or 5 years ago, I have decided to resurrect it, as a place to learn about digital black and white photography.  I shoot mostly nature, so expect to see a lot of plant and animal life here.

I expect to post at least one photograph from my collection, each week, these will be set to publish at 3am on Sunday mornings, which lets me write it on Monday and then play with it during the week, before it automatically posts on Sunday morning.

Expect that posts will be partly commentary, and partly a teaching experience, and that there will be something of each.  Although I expect a photograph to be posted, some posts will be about an unrelated aspect of photography and digital imaging.  If your looking for use of certain tools, there are probably 65,536 different other sites that deal with that very issue.

One note, the caption on Photographs will be the catalogue number of the image, if you find an image you are interested in, then let me know, and I will inform you of prices.

This week we tackle the question, why do I prefer to work in Black and White.   I have been shooting black and white, since the late 1970's....

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Take a look at this image, it's of a flower; Specifically a Hibiscus flower, these are tropical flowers that are not native to my area, I did take it in my garden though, so it's not a photo I had to travel a vast distance to obtain.  While many people look at such flowers with the idea of them being colourful, that is often all we see.  A splash of colour against a green background. We usually don't get to see the textures, and the play of light from the delicate petals of the flower.

When we look at such an image stripped of colour, we do see these things.  So how is this done?


In the old days we chose a film like Plus-X or FP4, for a reasonable film speed, and low grain, took our pictures and then processed our film in a fine grain developer.   Then we got out the enlarger, and produced a print, and you would sometimes need to do a fair amount, to get a print that you liked, getting the exposure right and the tone the way you wanted it.  Sometimes you would use different paper some papers are colder, some are warmer.  You then might tone a print to get what you wanted.

Then I moved to a hybrid process, making a colour negative, and scanning that into the computer, and then doing some processing, to get a good colour digital image.  You would save this image, and continue working on it, to get a good black and white image, using computer software.

The next move was to a digital camera, it eliminates the film processing and scanning, and you're starting with a good digital image,  I shoot in raw mode, then automatically convert to a PNG file.   I have automated a lot of the process in my case, and can get a pretty good image, as the above one attests.  I can sometimes shoot over 150 images of different things, in a single day, so I want to be able to process the majority of those quickly, or at least without needing to sit and watch the process.

Until next week

W.