Tag Archives: camera

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Photographers, Photographs: Sierra Nevada, Photographs: Yosemite

Photographer Charlotte Hamilton Gibb

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Photographer Charlotte Hamilton Gibb
Landscape photographer Charlotte Hamilton Gibb works the summer evening light along the Tuolumne River, Yosemite National Park

Photographer Charlotte Hamilton Gibb. Yosemite National Park, California. July 12, 2015. © Copyright 2015 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Landscape photographer Charlotte Hamilton Gibb works the summer evening light along the Tuolumne River, Yosemite National Park

This photograph was one result of a wonderful set of coincidences in the Yosemite high country. I had gone up to the Tuolumne Meadows area for a few days of photographing mid-July. I arrived midday, managed to get a campsite, set everything up, hung out a bit… and it was time to figure out what to photograph in the late afternoon and evening. As sometimes happens, especially on the first day of such a trip, when I’m still working my way back into “the zone,” I didn’t have a plan. So I decided to simply get in my vehicle and head back to the west along Tioga Pass Road and look for some interesting potentials in the light and the scenery. At one point I caught a glimpse of some interesting light on trees and I quickly pulled over into a clearing at the side of the road. I noticed two other cars already there and a woman getting out of one of them, and I thought “I hope I’m not annoying her.” Then I realized that she was a friend and her husband was parked one car up. Claudia and Michael and I exchanged greetings and quickly decided to join forces and head out across the meadow.

As we crossed to the other side I saw another couple, one with a serious looking tripod, who seemed to be following us. we paused at the far side of the meadow and they caught up — it was Charlotte and her husband. Now the party was becoming larger! We headed slowly downstream, talking and watching for subjects, finally arriving at a spot where the river twisted through a few turns and granite slabs lined the banks. Each of us went to work on our particular views of the spot, and I made this photograph of Charlotte, focused so intently on her photograph that she was unaware that I was photographing her.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” is available from Heyday Books and Amazon.
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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 →

Commentary, Equipment, Photographic Myths and Platitudes

Photographic Myths and Platitudes — That Sensor Noise is Awful!

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Let’s say you are looking for a new camera. You want to make a smart decision, especially since you are sinking your hard-earned money into the purchase. You sure don’t want to make a mistake and end up with deficient gear. So you do the smart thing — you do some research. You look around on the web, find some articles, and you discover that there is a lot of contradictory information. Some tell you that Product X is wonderful, while others are adamant that Product X is pathetic and that Product Y is far superior. The Product X fans point out that Product Y is deficient in other critical ways by comparison to Product X.

You have some unanswered questions.

I keep hearing that Camera X has terrible noise compared to Camera Y. In fact, I found some photographs that demonstrate how bad this noise is. Why in the world would anyone get Camera X?!

Both sides provide “evidence.” Photographers love evidence, especially evidence of a failure to achieve divine technological perfection, and double-especially when the failure is demonstrated in a brand they don’t own. They get a little testy though, when the “evidence” makes their product look weak! (For a fun detour, look up the term confirmation bias on the web. Also, this is an important time for a reminder that photography is about photographs, not about cameras.)

I want to construct a little story for you based on “evidence.” We’ll start with evidence that makes a particular product (one that I rely on) look particularly bad. But before we start, you need to promise to read the whole thing. I’ll try to make it worthwhile.

OK, I promise to read it all, and with an open mind.

Good. Here we go.

Lots of people are concerned with the related issues of dynamic range (the camera’s ability to record image data from both light and dark sources in a single photograph) and noise (non-image artifacts that are, in a rough sense, sort of like “grain” on film).

I’ll begin with an example of noise in a photograph I made using the the new and very expensive Canon EOS 5Ds R, a 50.6MP full frame DSLR that Canon released recently.

045DsRPushedAbsurdly100PercentCrop
Example #1

Man, that is awful! That 5Ds R obviously produces terrible noise. It is so bad that the photograph is unusable, at least for anything other than an article demonstrating how bad it is! And the color is pathetically bad, too!

Yes. That image looks absolutely horrible!

Astute, critical thinkers are already wondering what went wrong here. Let me explain. Continue reading Photographic Myths and Platitudes — That Sensor Noise is Awful! →

Deals and Sales

Fujifilm Deal: X-Pro-1 And Lens Bundles

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There is a special deal right now on the Fujifilm X-Pro-1 mirrorless camera if you purchase it with a couple of available lens options:

Yes, you read that correctly — the 27mm lens is essentially free with the X-Pro-1, and for $150 you can also get the outstanding 35mm f/1.4 XF R lens which is sold separately for $599! (This is the lens that is almost always on my X-E1 body.)

Fujifilm X-Pro-1 Body
Fujifilm X-Pro-1 Body

If you are interested in trying out the Fujifilm sensor system, like rangefinder-style bodies, and like to shoot with small, high quality primes, this seems like a great deal to me.

These days I use two different camera systems, depending on what kind of photography I’m doing. While my main system is based the Canon EOS 5DS R DSLR, I also use a separate system based around one of the Fujifilm X-trans mirrorless sensor cameras. I still use the original Fujifilm X-E1, even though it has now been superseded by newer models including the Fujifilm X-E2, the Fujifilm X-T1, and the less expensive Fujifilm X-T10.

The first of the interchangeable lens X-trans sensor bodies was the Fujifilm X-PRO-1. This was — and in many ways, remains — a groundbreaking camera. Continue reading Fujifilm Deal: X-Pro-1 And Lens Bundles →