baltimore inner harbor: Haziran 2012

27 Haziran 2012 Çarşamba

Photo tips for watery bloggers -- Focal length

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Focal length can be approached two ways -- how much angle of coverage the lens is able to record and how much visual distortion or compression is evident in the final image. Both are important for how they impact a photograph.

The shorter the focal length (10-30mm), the wider the angle of coverage, the more the image appears to be distorted and the greater the depth of field.

16mm focal length

The longer the focal length (70-210mm and above), the narrower the angle of coverage (and the higher the magnification), the more the image appears to be compressed and the shallower the depth of field.

500mm focal length

Focal lengths that approximate that of a human eye -- 35-70mm (depending on a variety of factors) -- deliver results we are most accustomed to seeing and relating to from our own vision.

50mm focal length

One area where focal length is very important is portraiture and a very good visual representation of how focal length affects the rendering of a portrait can be found here, here and here. One of the best tools I've found online for seeing what different focal lengths can do can be found here; it doesn't show what the effect of focal length is upon image distortion or depth of field, but it's good nonetheless.

For use aboard watery environments, I find that the shorter focal lengths work best for getting larger amounts of the scene, especially when I'm shooting subject matter aboard our own boat. However, when trying to take shots of other peoples boats out on the water itself, the longer focal lengths deliver better results.

The take away here is that you'll need a wide range of focal lengths if you want the best results, and many of the current point-and-shoot cameras have a built-in zoom lenses that can cover quite a bit of what you might want.

Photo tips for watery bloggers -- Depth of field

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Infinite focus -- 7.2mm @ f/5.0

The apparent depth of field within an image is a result of aperture and focal length.

Infinite depth of field can be created by closing the aperture of any lens down to f/5.6 or smaller, and adjusting the calculated focus range to be what the photographer wants the image to reflect. On all manual lenses and some of the newer auto-focus lenses this is easily achieved via the etched markings on the lens barrel -- a process called zone focusing or scale focusing. Naturally the zone of focus expands with the smaller apertures but this comes with degradation of the image, as lenses always deliver their best results in the mid-range of their apertures.

Infinite focus -- 24mm @ f/5.6

Infinite focus -- 7.2mm @ f/4.0

Telephoto lenses are well known for creating shallow depth of field with near focus subjects, they can deliver results that illustrate a very sharp transition from focused subject to out-of-focus background -- depending on the lens aperture, specific focal length and image chip size.

Close focus -- 210mm @ f/6.3

With the recent explosion of digital photography and sharing of images on the Internet, less familiar photographers are coming to realize that shorter focal length lenses are also capable of shallow depth of field shots, with even better results because the transitions from sharp focus can be very creamy and soft, adding a sense of dimension almost impossible to achieve with telephoto lenses.

Close focus -- 50mm @ f/0.92

Portraits can be greatly improved by using a shallow depth of field, since the technique helps to soften and hide skin imperfections without any assistance from Photoshop. Additionally, if the inside of the closest eye is used as the lens focus point, that instantly becomes the focus point of the entire photograph in its finished state.

Close focus -- 85mm @ f/1.2

The take away here is that selective depth of field control is hard to achieve without the means to do so, and it's a function that's becoming more and more difficult to find on inexpensive cameras.

Photo tips for watery bloggers -- Don't bring out your dead

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No one wants to see all your outtakes... No one.

So... You've been following along and decided to get out there and take a bunch of pix for your blog. Well? How many did you shoot? What's that you say -- five images? For the entire weekend? Phfft...

Back when I was shooting film for my own pleasure, I'd shoot five images per day and still have only one decent shot per roll of 36-frames... if I was lucky! And I shot very little back then (compared to now) because film and processing was so expensive. When I first began to see digital images get to the point that they looked good on an 8x10 print, that's when I bought my first digital camera and discovered the problem with excess digital images.

Decades ago -- when I was in the multi-image industry -- we would go out on location and shoot dozens of rolls of film and process them as soon as we got back into the studio. As I recall, the most we ever shot in one day with two photographers and several Nikon F3 bodies was roughly 30 rolls of E-6 slide film, which then took most of a day to process and another day or so to cull.

Cull? Yes, cull. Sorting the enormous number of raw images into a pile of keepers and a pile of throwaways. And we had to be ruthless about culling and do it several times. So we're talking about four to five man-days (or more) of effort to shoot, process and cull about 1,000 images.I shoot 1,100 images in just a few hours by myself now -- and I download, post-process and cull them in less than a day.

My most recent big shoot was for the Star-Spangled Sailabration post of last Sunday. We arrived in Baltimore on the prior Thursday morning and I shot photos off and on throughout the day while we were wandering in and around the Inner Harbor. When we returned home I had 1,128 shots to go through and cull (keep in mind that I bracket everything with three exposures, so that brought the total count down to 370+ image sets to wade through). By the time I was finished, I had just 58 individual images that I considered decent enough to share on the blog. And of those, maybe just five or six that I'd consider good enough for a work portfolio, and maybe just the following three for my own cream-of-the-crop portfolio (still not sure about the top image).

The point I'm trying to make is that selecting photographs to share is very subjective. And to do it right I try all sorts of tricks:

For the first pass at culling them, I look for proper exposure and sharpness. Since each shot has a bracket of three to choose from, two of them have to go. This step automatically culls two-thirds of all the images in one fell swoop.

For the second pass, I look for duplicates (or near duplicates) and keep only the better of them.

For the third pass, I look for images that tell the story I want to share.

For the fourth pass, I begin to really dig for good composition and content. During this pass I'm looking for images that'll survive the post-processing edit that's yet to come.

For the Nth pass(es), I keep going until I feel that anything less will detract from the series.

By this time I normally have just a small fraction of the images I started out with. On occasion, there won't be any left -- the entire shoot will have been a bust. The most recent bust for me was this past Father's Day; we had gone to Annapolis to visit with Cindy's parents and I was able to squeeze in a short visit to the replica of the HMS Bounty that was berthed at the City Docks as part of the Star-Spangled Sailabration (Annapolis was to be the co-host of the event when planners had expected a much higher turn-out of participating vessels). Unfortunately for me, I didn't bring my wide-angle zoom; I just brought the 50mm prime and it proved to have too narrow a field of view for proper shots of the Bounty.

Once I have the culling completed, I then turn my attention to post-processing.

Photo tips for watery bloggers -- Post-production

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Now we're into the home stretch... post-production.

Every image I have posted on this blog has had some form of post-production action applied to it. Each image is individually reviewed before uploading and may have the following actions applied: color correction, color enhancement, crop, straighten, contrast, vibrance, saturation, sharpening or white balance -- and sometimes all of these combined. I do very little in the way of traditional Photoshopping like dodging and burning, cloning or the like (I used to do so with my film scans, but not with my present digital files).

I should also note that -- unlike when I was posting images from the iPhone -- anytime I use a dedicated digital camera, I always select to have the images exported as RAW files and not as JPG output. Why? I want as much latitude in post-processing as I can get.

Lastly, I try -- as much as possible -- to crop the finished image with the lens before pushing the shutter button and not after the image has already been captured. This is to keep as much of the original quality as possible.

Here are a number of before and after shots, so you can see what has been changed: