Category: Photography

Equipment, examples, history – all matters photographic

Strangers and street photography

I have never been fond of photographing strangers, and my natural reticence has been enhanced as a result of a few people who responded badly. As a consequence, my photos generally include either friends, people who aren’t prominent in the image, or nobody at all. I make a bit of an exception for situations where people are clearly making a display of themselves (in costume, for instance), but generally avoid pointing my lenses at people I don’t know, even in public.

While I recognize the sense of this approach, it does make me feel as though my photos lack something that most street photographers manage to capture: specifically, the various moments that make up city life. Should I try to be bolder and produce some images like those in the photo.net ‘Street Photography’ tutorial?

Power, oversight, and photography

As this disturbing alleged situation demonstrates, you may be ordered at some point to delete photographic or videographic evidence of an event without appropriate justification.

While there may be situations in which security concerns are justifiably paramount, there are also many situations in which those who have authority simply wish to avoid facing any accountability for their actions. Given the conflict of interest involved for those law enforcement officers on the scene, it seems prudent to retain any photographic or videographic evidence you have produced, even if you are asked by them to delete it.

After all, any impartial evidence that exists can only help in any subsequent official proceedings. The absence of such evidence is likely to strengthen the bias of impartial adjudicators towards those with authority, as opposed to those who simply happened to be witnesses.

Prior relevant posts:

[18 December 2008] Zoom has posted an update about this matter.

Deleting images in iPhoto

Whoever designed the photo deletion interface in iPhoto rather botched the job. The system in both versions of iPhoto I have used (’08 and ’04) has been confusing and very easy to use incorrectly.

When you select a photo in an album and hit delete, it gets removed from only that album, not the photo library. This is sensible enough, though there should be an easier way to delete the image from both locations. What is much odder is that when you delete a photo from the library, it doesn’t go into the Mac OS trash. Instead, it goes into a custom iPhoto trash folder.

What is really unforgivable is that if you go into the trash folder, select an image, and hit delete, it actually gets returned to its original location. There have been plenty of occasions where I have gone through the photos from an entire trip (probably hundreds of images), removing the botched and boring ones. If you then hit the wrong key while looking at the trash folder, they all jump back to their original locations, and you need to repeat the whole selection process.

It would be far more sensible for iPhoto to behave like iTunes. When you delete a photo from the library, it should ask if you also want to delete it from your hard drive. Then, there is no need for an independent trash folder. Removed images would either get taken out of the iPhoto file management system but left in their original hard drive location, or they would be put into the general Mac OS trash. It should also be possible to delete images straight from smart folders. When a photo in such a folder is selected for deletion, it should automatically be moved to the Mac OS trash.

New tripod

For several years now, I have been wondering about the fate of the Manfrotto tripod that I purchased back near the very beginning of my photographic hobby. I remember the aluminum tripod and ball head costing more than my first SLR and lens: a Pentax MX Super with a manual 50mm lens. I left the tripod in a closet when I went to Oxford and haven’t seen it since, despite a fair bit of concerted searching during a couple of the periods when I was in Vancouver.

Due to a holiday promotion, I have bitten the bullet and picked up a new Manfrotto tripod. This one – a 725B Digi – is a bit smaller and lighter than my old one, through the overall design and construction is very similar. The two biggest things it lacks, in comparison to the one I hopefully still have in some obscure Vancouver corner, are (a) the ability to position the legs at any of three stable angles (due to push-in aluminum blocks) and (b) the option to invert the centre column for use very close to the ground. The biggest advantages are the somewhat smaller overall dimensions and lesser weight. Other differences include (a) a lever rather than a screw for tightening the centre column, (b) a different design for the lever that secures the ball head, and (c) four-segment legs rather than three-segment ones. The two models are different enough that I will not be annoyed if the old unit does turn up in the course of future rummaging.

Given the reality that I will be at work during most of the daylight hours between now and the spring, having a tripod on hand makes a lot of sense. It is also nice that this model is compatible with the tripod plates from the previous stabilizer, including those affixed to the bottom of my Elan 7N and Rebel G.

Lens selection survey

Fellow photographers: if you had the following collection of SLR bodies and lenses, which piece of glass would you aspire to next?

Bodies:

  • Canon Rebel G film SLR
  • Canon Elan 7N film SLR
  • Canon Rebel XS digital SLR

In practice, I expect to be using the Rebel XS far more than the film bodies, from this point on.

Lenses:

  • Canon 50mm f/1.8
  • Canon 28-105mm f/3.5-4.5 USM II
  • Canon EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS

Ideally, it should be useful for both full-frame and 1.6x factor, APS-C sized cameras. The APS-C equivalent focal lengths for those lenses are 80mm, 44.8-168mm, and 28.8-88mm. In general, I prefer the wide-angle look to the telephoto look, though I would be interested in anything that significantly expands the potential or usefulness of the SLRs above.

First venture into RAW

The photo above is the first one I ever produced after the fact, using the RAW data from a digital sensor. Given my current suite of software (iPhoto ’08, Photoshop CS, and Canon’s Digital Photo Professional), using RAW is a bit of a pain. iPhoto imports RAW files incorrectly (producing odd black frames), at least when you have your camera set to generate both RAW and JPEG files simultaneously. The Canon EOS utility works, when it comes to getting the .CRU (Canon’s proprietary RAW format) off the camera, but it does so slowly and imports redundant copies of the JPEG files.

All that being said, there are good reasons to put up with the bother. RAW lets you adjust the white balance and exposure far more effectively after the fact than JPEG does, and ultimately represents a far superior digital negative. For now, RAW files may be an awkward annoyance even on my excellent new Mac. In a few years, the storage space and processing power to deal with them will be ubiquitous.

In short, it seems worth shooting RAW+JPEG whenever there is a decent chance you will want to use any photo in an artistic way.

Cold, glass, and condensation

Users of cameras and eyeglasses will be familiar with the phenomenon of fogging, which occurs when one goes from a cold and dry place into a warm one. This occurs because air can hold about 7% more water per unit of volume for each ˚C of additional temperature. That means that air in warm places is naturally more laden with water than that in cold ones. When the water-laden air hits cool glass, it condenses into a fog that confounds the bespecktacled and shutterbugs.

The other night, I witnessed a special elaboration of this phenomenon unique to conditions including (a) a very cold and dry night (b) a fairly large volume of glass and (c) an instant transition to a warm and relatively humid coffee shop.

The normal fogging occurred, but it would not dissipate after several minutes of waiting. It was then that I noticed that the glass on which the fog had formed was cold enough to freeze it – leaving a thin sheet of ice of the lens. The remedy was a few minutes of huffing to melt the ice, followed by a few more waiting for evaporation.

I am a bit surprised not to have experienced this working with cameras in Finland or Estonia. Like getting mild frostbite walking home from a party, it seems to be an Ottawa experience.

The single cheapest way to improve your photography

There seem to be a lot of people out there who are succeeding at producing appealing and artistic images using low-cost photographic equipment. A case in point are the lowest cost Canon point and shoot digital cameras. They cost less than $200, brand new, and yet it is certainly possible to produce museum quality photography with them, if you have enough creativity and awareness of light.

Arguably, the worst thing that ever happened to popular photography was the emergence of the on-camera flash. It has given too many photographers the idea that light doesn’t matter. After all, they have brought along their own tiny flashbulb.

In the great majority of cases, disabling that flash is an excellent first step. The second step – alluded to in the title – is buying yourself a little tripod. Personally, I use a $10 UltraPod mini, kept constantly attached to my $180 A570 IS camera. While everyone else was making hopeless attempts to light up the roof of Notre Dame Cathedral or the Blue Mosque with their on-camera flashes, I was getting decent photos of them by bracing the tripod on walls, the floor, or furniture.

Anyone who is serious about photography with a small camera should buy one.

The virtues of digital photography

While there are certainly benefits to film, there are also many excellent reasons for which people are switching to digital. The sensors in even the low-end digital SLRs have rather good low-light performance. They are less grainy at 1600 ISO than the sensors in point and shoot cameras are at 400 or even 200 ISO. The dSLR systems also include features like depth of field preview, mirror lock-up, and bracketing for both exposure and white balance. Also very useful are dedicated controls for things like white balance, ISO, and exposure compensation. Sure, you can set all those things through menus in most good point and shoot cameras. It is a lot more pleasant to be able to do so on the fly, while still looking through the viewfinder.

As a fan of wide angle lenses, I do find the 1.6X multiplication from small sensors annoying. That being said, dSLRs these days do come with decent kit lenses that include an appropriately altered range. And, of course, there is always the enormous value of being able to take unlimited photos without marginal cost and get immediate feedback on the results of what you are doing. Being able to consult luminosity and RGB histograms half a second after taking the photo certainly beats having to wait for processing and printing.

In short, there are many virtues to digital photography: especially to those of us who are uncertain about there we will be living in the next few years. Just like one’s personal library, shipping around binders of archive-quality negatives is an expense and a pain. Ones and zeros can be zipped around the world at a much lower price, and with less risk to the originals.