Luminous Landscape is hosting an interesting piece by Charles Cramer on Tough Selections Made Easy. Charlie explains an interesting (and, for me, already useful) technique for selectively adjusting sections of a photograph without having to carefully mask them – worth reading.
Category Archives: Technique
Pssst… I’m not the only photographer in the family
That’s right, my brother Richard Mitchell is also a serious photographer. As a matter of fact, his switch to digital is a big part of what rekindled my serious interest in photography a few years back.
While we share some photographic interests (landscape photography, for example), we also pursue some different subjects. For example, he has done significant portrait work – I have barely touched that aspect of photography, doing only a very small number of informal shots of friends and family. In addition, having a son who is a serious gymnast, he has a lot of experience photographing that sort of sport. He has posted an interesting and useful report and how-to on this topic at his blog.
(When I see some of the lenses he uses and the prices of this gear, I think I’m glad I do landscape! :-)
Fun with Panoramas
Earlier I posted a panoramic photograph of the Seattle skyline shot at night from West Seattle. While I’m on the subject, a bit more about getting this shot. I go to Seattle somewhat regularly, having a number of relatives living in the area, and I’ve come to enjoy photographing Seattle quite a bit. My son lives in downtown Seattle and knows far more about the area than I do, so I welcome his suggestions about interesting things to see and places to go.
He had mentioned that the view of the Seattle waterfront from West Seattle is stunning. I’d never been over there, though I’d seen the area from the air on approach to SeaTac. In any case, I had the idea of getting out there at night in the back of my mind during my last visit. One rainy evening I took him back to his place in the Capitol Hill area and – miracle of miracles! – the rain seemed to let up. I quickly decided to head over to West Seattle and see if I could find a place to do my photography.
Having no idea what the roads are like in West Seattle, I pretty quickly ended up in the wrong place – on a road heading across the area and away from the Seattle view. I finally just decided to take the next right turn and see where it would lead. After wandering around on a bunch of random streets I finally made it down to the waterline where there seemed to be some kind of park. I stopped, checked out my surroundings, grabbed my camera, lenses, and tripod and went to work. The rain held off just long enough for me to grab a few panorama sequences, and a couple of them turned out quite well.
Seattle Night Skyline Panorama. Seattle, Washington. January 2, 2008. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell. – all rights reserved.
When Sharpness Becomes an Unhealthy Obsession
Here is a small photo*:
It is a tiny 100% crop from a photograph made with a Canon 5D, 70-200mm f/4 lens at f/11. (I don’t recall the shutter speed, but it was on a tripod). This image includes the head and shoulders of a person standing on an overlook above the Pacific ocean. Doesn’t look too sharp, does it?
If you viewed the entire photograph from which this portion comes at this resolution it would be five feet wide.
Make a direct print of this sample image so that it has the same dimensions you see on the screen. (If your screen displays at 72 dpi, print it at 72 dpi, etc. Or, put a ruler up to the screen, measure the image, then make a print that has the same dimensions.) The print will look awful – just as bad as it looks on the screen – but keep in mind that it is a very small bit of a much (much!) larger image.
The next time you have the opportunity to view some very large photographic prints at a show or in a museum, find one that is five feet wide. Discreetly take out your little print and compare the detail in the gallery print to the detail in this little sample image.
I think you’ll find that some very large (e.g. – five feet wide) gallery prints that look quite sharp don’t show any more detail than this. Some will show considerably less. A few – perhaps shot with LF equipment – may show a bit more.
Sharpness is a good and important thing, but it can also become an unhealthy and unproductive obsession.
* For reference, a jpg of the photograph from which this sample was taken is available here.
(This is from a message I recently posted in a long-winded and hopeless forum discussion of the “sharpness” produced by various types of equipment and in prints.)