Photography Scribblings

No, I still haven’t dealt with pics from Chuck’s birthday party *am so bad* but last weekend I took the camera with me to the St. Andrew’s Celtic Festival to snap pics of the band while they performed. Man are they boring to shoot. Except for Loch Ness Monster, one picture is much the same as any other.

Luckily, Chuck and Tiffany brought out their adorable daughter, Olivia, and she is a hoot. Talk about aware of the camera. I kept hanging out near her, snapping pics of the band, trying to take “candid” shots of Olivia when she was distracted. No go. So I got a bit of distance and relied on the zoom — only I’d get about one pic and realize she was looking straight at the camera again. Dang she’s good.

Pics are up at Mishtopia. Since it’s not my place to release pics of their daughter to the world in general, the album is locked for access by friends-only so you’ll have to sign in to see them. If you know Chuck and Tiffany, you should be cleared for access. The pics are completely unaltered except for being shrunk and oriented correctly. Most are “so -so” but a bit of cropping and image clean up couldyield some good ones.

I need to go back and upload the video I took of Olivia dancing to the music, but the *.mpegs are close to 10 MB (they’re tiny little clips) and I balk at loading something that large. I need to convert it into something more compact, but I have no idea what that would be or how to go about it. That’s going to take some research. Also, each *.mpeg has an associated *.thm file that I have no idea about. More to learn, I suppose.

I’ve pretty much decided to take Chuck’s advice and use Word Press as the new CMS for this site. There’s a plug-in that appears to do exactly what I want. Stumbling blocks for now are time — and my inability to make the theme that accompanies the Semiologic plug-in yield and look the way I want it to. There’s precious little content on this site but one thing I like is the way that it looks.

I used a linkware set from Groovy Lizard and I’ve never been sorry. After a year or so, I still really like it. I wanted to emulate its look by altering the colors in the theme to match but that has, thus far, been a bust. I’ve bitten the bullet and contacted Groovy Lizard to see how much they would charge me to create themes for both the Word Press installation AND the Coppermine Photo Gallery. I want the two to feel like they’re part of the same site and right now they don’t. This blog’s theme, though very attractive, is yet another look. Not what I consider ideal. Hopefully, it won’t be too onerous a burden for the company to switch gears to themes for *.php-driven programs and I’ll be able to afford a fee.

Barring that, I’ll see about acquiring the linkware set as my own, including the right to make derivative works, and start figuring out how to create a theme for the programs. Since I’d be starting from a position of virtually complete ignorance…that would take considerably longer.

I haven’t yet spent the quality time with my new flash that I had hoped to by now, but I got a couple of things wrong. It isn’t an off-camera flash, exactly. It fits into the flash shoe above the lens barrel. So…still might have red-eye probs. Grrr. It comes with an offset attachment for use with a tripod so that must be where I got the impression it wasn’t an over-the-barrel flash. The flash unit swivels upward so that I can reflect the flash onto the subject.

The manual has a drawn picture, showing that the angle of incidence between the flash and the ceiling should be the same as the subject and the ceiling. Well, that’s nice. I could have guessed that but I’ll be honest - spatial relations are challenging for me. I don’t do it easily. Judging the angle to a point on the ceiling that is half way between me and the subject? Just ain’t going to happen accurately. Hope there’s some forgiveness in the system. Alas, it will not solve my problem at cons because the ceilings are typically high enough to string lighting trusses and sound equipment if one wanted. And they tend to be black. Not so good for bouncing light.

The Sony manual is their typical job. That is, not really helpful. *sigh* I don’t have it at hand to quote, but it’s not uncommon for it to say things like, “Test button: push to test flash” and “Select the ‘manual’ mode to adjust automatic settings.” Oh gee, thanks. Couldn’t have figured those out. Meanwhile, there’s rarely something explaining the differences in the intenstities of flash that one can choose amongst much less suggestions as to when one might want to try them.

An amusing note: whoever proofread the manual didn’t notice that the ’s’ looks similar to the ‘g’ in the chosen font, so there’s much mention of the way in which the flash integrates with the “disital camera’ — especially distracting since there is a word ‘distal’ and I used to use it all the time when I identified and described bones from archaeological sites.

I got many nice things for my birthday but the one of relevance here is a high tech flash. I am going to be so far out of my league with it…but what a cool toy! It is an off camera flash (no more red-eye!) that synchs with my camera’s operations through the flash shoe. It has its own batteries so it won’t be drawing on my camera’s rechargeable, honkin’ huge battery. I’m excited. And a bit intimidated. I can vary the light output and probably even signal Mars if I aim it properly. Fear me, friends, for I come with the Light of Blindness when next I visit and insist on photographing everything - and everyone - around me.

I feel a bit guilty for not posting here more often. Never has a webspace received so many hits for so little content. Huh. Guess the blog bots keep a more frequent schedule.

I’ve been reading portions of a book recommended by bassfingers entitled, Concert Photography and written by Jon Sievert. Of particular interest to me are the middle chapters in the book that deal with taking photographs in very low light situations.

I’m going to have to reread these chapters again before the next time I attend a con because specific recommendations are best learned by application but there seems to be quite a bit of solid advice within it. Once thing I notice in looking at the pictures reprinted in the book, though, is that I have an exaggerated sense of what I should be able to capture with my camera under those situations. I guess I’m looking to take portrait-like pics despite the surroundings. I’ll have to think about that.

I have only cursorily reviewed the other sections of the book. I’m not looking to become a music photographer and this book was written before the latest round of copyright law revisions that came into law in October 1998. What I saw of the former seemed like solid suggestions of common sense - though it often surprises at how uncommon common sense is - and the latter seemed reasonably correct.

I’m still playing with Photoshop Elements to see what I can tease out of the last round of photographs. I’ll probably get a picture or two of each participant, slap them up, and call it an expensive learning experience.

I’m still delving into the Coppermine Photo Gallery Software and support boards. For some reason, the support boards cause my copy of Mozilla to freeze and crash. Thus I rely on using IE *shudder* to read them and do not visit very often. I’m determined to figure out how to add small bits at the top of index pages, though, so I can link to related items such as con reports and other places on my site or the web related to the pics.

I have to get back to this church I went to for a performance about a month ago. Swear to gods, not making it up, but it’s a big, gold pyramid that looks like the worst goa’uld excesses. I kept looking around for the Pleasure Light.

I recently discovered that some of the photos I took have been used to make Live Journal icons — without my knowledge or permission. It’s inevitable given the nature of the web. I’m not angry or pissed off…but I am ambivalent.

I thought about this prior to posting pictures I took but chose to do so anyway. It would be disingenuous of me to get all huffy about it. This isn’t the first time this has happened and it won’t be the last. I imagine if I hung around Rachel Luttrell sites, I’d find a lot of that going on since her pics generate an astounding number of hits.

A large part of me is honored - I’m a newbie at photography and someone liked a photo I took well enough to spend time making a piece of art out of it. In fact, several someones liked the photos well enough to do that. I like that much better than finding them posted for sale at Snapfish, which did annoy me greatly.

A part of me, though, is frustrated. I’ve tried to protect the images without emblazoning my site logo across the entirety of the pic or making draconian threats or otherwise being an ass. Many people approached me…wanting copies for themselves…wanting to make a t-shirt for themselves…putting a few on their sites…and on and on. I’ve always agreed and I’ve met a lot of very nice people that way.

One of the reasons I had such a variety of photos for the 2004 New Jersey con was because lots of friends shared their pictures and agreed to my posting them. I don’t want their generosity to be punished — or for them to decide not to participate any more.

(this is a continuation of the post below, which was a continuation of the post below it)

In July of this year, I had a chance to give the camera a work out taking pics outdoors in the California sun at the San Diego Wild Animal Park. Adequate light was no longer a problem so I could play around a lot. The pictures I got back were stunning!

Pictures of birds where not only could you see every feather, but you could see the feathers’ barbs in many photos. Longer distance photos were wonderfully detailed; enlarged crops yielded crisply focused, detailed images. I took one picture of a gibbon and her infant from what must have been 100 yards or more; they were a tiny speck in the photo. Cropped and enlarged to 100%, a surprising amount of detail can be seen.

I was unhappy about the magenta/purple halo that the F828 produces when there’s a very strong contrast. It’s quite obvious in the strong outdoor light and an unpleasant finding in a camera of its expense.

Armed with the succes of the photography otherwise, I approached this last con feeling prepared to take the best pictures yet. I believe it’s what the Greeks called, “hubris.”

Hindsight may be 20/20 but my foresight seems to be legally blind. Having concluded that my fine focus complaints were due more to the paucity of light than, say, the wrong settings, I should have taken steps to maximize the light reaching the camera chip. I suppose that’s the difference between “knowing” and “grokking.”

Elimination of movement blur was still my #1 goal so I took an entire con’s worth of pictures with shutter speed given priority and a continuous focus that tracked the person on stage. Since Photoshop Elements could correct the lighting but not the blurring, I chose to address the latter without thought to the former. I chose a very fast shutter speed.

Alas, no setting on my camera could get a good focus given the small bit of light admitted through the ultra-fast shutter speed. Yanno… if I concluded that strong light solved my probs, perhaps limiting the light so severely wasn’t the best idea? You see where this is going, don’t you? I have the darkest pictures imaginable; many are not salvageablel. Those that are have such a huge problem with noise that they’re painful to look at. I can process the shit out of them, shrink them down to very small images, and then apply some plug-ins that really smooth out everything, including the detail. The resulting pictures look like I applied a painting effect to a better photo. *sigh*

So…what are my new goals? Hard to say. I’ve assumed all along that there is a constellation of settings that would produce crystal clear photos with vibrant colors under even the most trying settings. It was a matter of my learning enough to find that “sweet spot.” I’m working for now to understand what the camera’s limits are, what I can and can’t accomplish with Photoshop Elements, and what I’m willing to accept as “good.”

What steps am I going to take to solve them? I have a new cable remote release and I’m researching monopods to steady my part of the process. I’ve gotten a recommendation on a book that I’m making my way through to understand event photography.

I know that the real solution to my problem is light and lots of it. I’ve eyed the expensive external flashes that have their own battery packs. I know the subject’s tolerance for that kind of set-up is going to be very limited, though, and I think it would be detrimental to the other con-goers’ experiences as well. I’ve discarded that idea.

I guess I’m going to have to compromise. A little noise from an ISO 200 setting to make the most of the available light, a slightly longer exposure, and a large aperture. I’ll continue using the spot focus but I guess I’m going to have to learn to love the blurred limb. It is, after all, preferable to the nothing I have from the last con.

(this is a continuation of the ‘not quite brief history’ post below)

Flash forward a bit to February of this year. I have the F828; I’ve played with it a bit. I’ve even had it out and about on vacation in the mountains so I’ve faced the fun of photography in the snow. I’ve learned quite a bit about white balance, preventing red eye, and I was still struggling with concepts like depth of field and focal lengths.

Eliminating the flash addressed my goals #1 and 3 so I turned to goal #2: improving focus. I refined my concept from taking a picture of someone on stage to taking a picture of someone. (Semantics are often my stumbling block.) I didn’t care about the surroundings, the backs of people’s heads in front of me, or the backdrop. I cared that the person I was photographing was in focus and properly exposed.

I upped the ISO from about 100 to values of 200 and 400. I set it to “super saturate” the picture with color. I limited the focus finder to a spot focus, sampling from the center only, and then started playing with apertures. Stage lighting was almost what I would call, “normal intensity stage lighting.” I got some wild photos, especially from my first several hours. With smaller apertures, there was a cheesy movie drug trip effect of a smear moving through the frame. Opening up the aperture worked much better. By the third day, I had a smaller range of settings I cycled through. *shrug* I’m a slow learner.

Going through the pictures, I was disappointed. The fine focus was still unacceptable, the increased ISO introduced me to the concept of “noise,” many of the pictures had a blurred arm or leg, and I had a huge number of reject photos. The first con I’d rejected maybe 20% of the pictures. With all the experimenting I did, I was lucky on some to be able to keep 20%. How discouraging.

On the bright side, the colors were so much more vibrant. What a world of difference good lighting and setting the saturation levels made. Also, I spent precious little time “fixing the photos.” The colors, contrast, and saturation were all good. The things I didn’t like, the blurring, couldn’t be fixed so those pics were consigned to the dustbin.

My new goals were:

1. Fine focus: I really want to be able to see the details of someone’s expression.
2. Freeze action: I’m not fond of the blurred limb look and I wanted to eliminate that. If it meant a little more time at the computer pumping up the saturation and contrast, so be it.

My first foray into photography was in July 2004 at that year’s Gatecon. Joe and I took off with both a traditional 35mm point and shoot Olympus Stylus and a 5 megapixel Sony Cyber-Shot. We took pictures under just about every conceivable situation: outdoors (sunny and overcast), indoors, in a dark room from far away, and through the window of a bus, moving and otherwise.

Unbeknownst to me, the film camera had developed a tiny crack in the case because those pictures came back with a light bleed on one edge. The digital camera pics were ok but we were so far away that the people on stage looked tiny. And dim. And grainy. And, since we were using the camera’s admittedly wimpy “maximum zoom” the images were blurry. (To be fair, I’d just started taking medication for hypothyroidism that had me zippy and my smaller muscles a bit tremble-y.)

Thus began my quest for Better Pictures at these events. It was clear that our cameras were not adequate and the seating we could get at Gatecon, even after having waited in line for 3 or more hours, was too far away. My goal after Gatecon was:

1. Get a camera with a decent zoom.
2. Get a better seat. (Their competition, Creation Con, offers assigned seats.)

I had an unlooked for chance not a month later when I was visiting Judy-Lynne in New York to have a second chance at the photos. I took pictures with the aforementioned 5 megapixal Sony and a new-to-me 8 megapixel Sony DSC-F828 from a seat at the New Jersey Creation Con. It was a tricky venue with the absolute worst lighting I’ve ever seen. Think a dim restaurant — and no stage lighting. It was hard to see the guests even when I was sitting there. I didn’t know anything about using the more powerful Sony, so the pictures I took were on auto-everything.

I got home and had…black rectangles. 3.5 megabyte black rectangles. Lots and lots of them. Using Photoshop Elements, I spent an unholy number of hours teasing images out of those rectangles. Sadly, although the flash did nothing to illuminate the actor it was enough to produce red-eye. I spent a lot more hours just painting out red eye.

Never again, I vowed all Scarlett O’Hara-like.

I made some friends who knew about photography and we talked a little about the problems I encountered. I listed things to work on for future photo ops:

1. No red-eye: I never again wanted to spend hours honing the sensitivity of the selection wand, separating out the red bits, desaturating, and then painting the eye color in several shades of varying opacity.
2. Fine focus: At 100%, the pictures were grainy, grainy, grainy. Other people’s photos from other events have this crisp sharpness that I want, too. I could see fine detail, a chair seat’s stitching, but the person’s face lacked the same detail.
3. Faster pictures. The flash on the camera ate up resources, the most crucial of those being time. Set on “auto,” the camera will not take a picture if the flash is re-charging. I missed some excellent shots because it fired a second after I pressed the button.
4. Stop action. Minimize action blur whenever possible. I was pretty certain that most of the blur in my pics was due to my own movement, but every once in a while a great pic would be unusable because the person on stage moved.

All in all, though, I was pleased with the performance of the F828. Under very difficult conditions, it still got an image and I was one of the very few people present who had anything to show for it. I’m guessing most cameras without professional-grade flashes got even less. Everything I read pointed to the abysmal lighting as the culprit; as proof the pictures I took at the breakfast turned out much more in line with my expectations. The lighting at that event was the least eye-strain-inducing of the weekend.