Category Archives: Technique

Technique

Sharpening Basics: A Primer

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(Minor updates to this article were made in February 2019.)

Sharpening is a very important step for optimizing digital photograph files. If you let your camera save images in the common .jpg format (a compressed image format that is often used on the web) the camera is applying sharpening to the image produced by the camera sensor. If you use the raw format (a high quality format that retains the original sensor data of the exposure) you will find that the photograph looks soft until you apply sharpening during the post production phase.

Sharpening optimizes the visibility of details that are already in your photograph. It is a matter of more clearly revealing what is in the photograph than  a matter of creating detail where there was none. Most sharpening works by increasing the contrast between light and dark areas in the image — what we call sharpening as actually more about adjusting the relative brightness of adjacent portions of the photograph.

Typical sharpening

The image above is an example of a small section of a photograph.[1] It is a “100% magnification crop” of a tiny area from a much larger photograph made with a high megapixel DSLR camera. A “100% magnification crop” is an image displayed so that each pixel — or individual picture element — of the original photograph is displayed using a single pixel on the screen. (Things are a bit more complicated than that when using modern high-resolution monitors, though I’ll let that description stand for now.) 100% magnification crops let us look very closely at what is going on in photographas “at the pixel level.” In this case, the full original image from which these small examples were extracted would be equivalent to prints at a width of roughly 10-12 feet.

The right side of the example shows this tiny section of the photograph before sharpening. The left side shows the results of fairly typical sharpening. Continue reading Sharpening Basics: A Primer →

Photograph Exposed, Technique

A Photograph Exposed: Technique and Interpretation in Post

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(“A Photograph Exposed” is a series exploring some of my photographs in greater detail.)

Island and Trees, Tuolumne River
“Island and Trees, Tuolumne River” — Trees grow on a small ,rocky island in the Tuolumne River, Yosemite National Park

If you follow this website you may have seen this photograph before — it is one of two that were the subjects of an earlier article (“A Photograph Exposed: One Subject, Two Compositions“) focusing on compositional decisions I made when I photographed this Sierra Nevada subject. In this companion article I want to look at the next step — going from that original exposure to the final (at least for now!) interpretation of the subject that you see above, and the how and why of post-processing the image.

For me, post-processing is as much a part of the creative process of photography as is composing and making the exposure. In fact, many of the decisions that I make at the time of exposure anticipate what I may do during the post-processing stage. These decisions recognize that the camera does not “see” the same way that we do, and that simply trying to produce an exposure that looks the exactly like the actual scene is often both hopeless and counterproductive.

Continue reading A Photograph Exposed: Technique and Interpretation in Post →
Equipment, Technique, Tests

The Canon 5Ds R — Autofocus ‘Torture’ Test

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OK, “torture test” might be overstating things just a bit, but I’ve been meaning to check out a few things related to the capabilities of the autofocus system of my new Canon EOS 5DS R. A few years ago birds, especially winter migratory birds, became one of my photographic passions. While this camera is not really optimized for this sort of photography, I plan to use it for this purpose, as I did my 5DII.

The Landing
“The Landing” — A brown pelican joins the flock on a rock along the Pacific coast of California

Most often when I photograph birds I use the Canon EF 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS II lens. It usually provides enough reach for my purposes, it focuses accurately and quite quickly, it is sharp, and its flexibility fits my style of photography. (I often pause while photographing the birds and use the lens to photograph landscapes.)  It was my understanding that the 5Ds R added the capability to autofocus (AF) at smaller apertures down to f/8. This means that I should be able to add my Canon Extender EF 1.4x III tele-extender to get 560mm at f/8 from this lens.

A few days ago I was doing landscape/seascape photography along the Central California coast between lower Big Sur and San Francisco. On the final afternoon as we drove north we passed a small island where scores of brown pelicans had landed.

Continue reading The Canon 5Ds R — Autofocus ‘Torture’ Test →
Equipment, Technique

Landscape Photography Settings

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Earlier today I came across a question someone asked about “typical landscape photography settings.” I think their goal was to determine whether to make settings manually or automate them, what sort of initial settings might be useful, what techniques might be employed in typical situations, and so on. That covers a lot of ground, and there is a ton of room for variation depending on your goals and idea of what landscape photography is and is not.

Lenticular Clouds and Ridge
“Lenticular Clouds and Ridge” — A series of lenticular clouds build above the Sierra Nevada crest at sunset

In fact, at first the question seemed so broad and general that I wasn’t going to reply. However, rather than ignoring the question, I decided to offer a quick summary of some of the general techniques I may employ when making a landscape photograph. And since I had already written it I thought it might be useful to share it here, too.

(Of course, I have to acknowledge that this doesn’t address the most important things about landscape photography, namely how to approach the landscape, how to “see” the landscape as an esthetic subject, and how to go beyond mere technique to focus on the image itself and what it can express. That is another post. Or chapter. Or book. Or two. Or more.)

So, on to the short “answer,” or at least to my reply…

 

Everyone has their own approach to landscape photography, but most folks I know photograph landscape using manual settings and manually focusing using live view. My typical starting point includes the following:

Continue reading Landscape Photography Settings →