Flowers: Metaphors for life

There was a time when I thought of flowers, I thought of full blooms. I wanted peak action. No buds and no wilted petals. Just gorgeous flowers in their prime.

And then I experienced Sheila's art. Sheila, at the time, was painting flowers. She didn't narrow her focus to just blooms, the climax of the story. No, she captured the whole tale from bud to bloom to fading away forever.

Now, I see flowers entirely differently.

Today's image was shot with my Canon PowerShot S90 set to automatic. The jpeg was taken into Photoshop CS5 and the endpoints set; I was careful not to blow out the highend values in the yellow petals.

The foliage was already quite dark in the original image but, approaching Photoshop like an electronic darkroom, I burned down the edges even more. I do not use the burn/dodge tool. I selected the area on which I wanted to work, feathered the edge and finally darkened the selection using Curves. I stay away from the burn/dodge tool, although a fellow I worked with at the paper used it all the time.

This image has also not been given a lot of saturation. The jpeg image looked good right from the camera.

Watch for portrait moments

Fiona had had a big day: A long stroll through the neighbourhood, an action-filled visit to the park, a good dinner with her favourite vegetable — broccoli. Now, feeling a little sleepy, she plopped down on the loveseat in front of the television for a little quiet time.

This image is almost a straight jpeg from my Canon PowerShot S90. The endpoints have been set and the edges burned down but generally this picture required very little enhancement. This image hasn't even been hit with any extra saturation.

The light is good in this room. There are two windows: One behind her illuminating her hair and one off to the side giving the nice, soft portrait lighting. The white ceiling reflects nice clean light onto the subject.

If I had a DSLR I would use a lens in the 85mm to 105mm range and try and shoot with the lens as wide open as possible. Something like f/2.8 or f/4.0 would be good. The fast f/stop minimizes the depth of field, allows for a lower ISO setting and a higher shutter speed. A win, win, win proposition.

If your camera has a portrait setting, try that. You might find it softens the subject a bit much but try it; Find out whether or not you like the effect.

When composing your shot, if you have the person looking off to the side as I do, try and leave a little extra space on the side of the image where they are looking. Your picture will feel better balanced.

With my Canon PowerShot S90, I must confess, I simply picked up the camera, composed my image and shot.

Texture, and more, makes this picture

This weed, captured going to seed, is amazing: The big, gossamer-like balls are magical. You cannot go wrong taking a picture like this. The thing to remember is to get close. Fill the viewfinder with the texture that attracted your eye and excited you visually. You want people to see this weed as you did. Force them. Don't show too much. Don't give them the chance to miss the picture since you didn't.

The image works for me for lots of reasons:

• 1 - texture (The soft, gossamer like white fluff supported on spiky struts.)
• 2 - repetition of shapes and repetition of the size of those shapes
• 3 - lines of direction - They are almost classic perspective lines.
• 4 - colour (Warm toned brown works well juxtaposed the warm green background.)
• 5 - clear centre of interest (It's actually circled with lines from all over the image leading the eye to it. This is a centre of interest that cannot be missed.)
• 6 - tones (Dark tones at the bottom give the image visual support.)

Grab shots can be nice

This shot could be better but its a nice grab shot.

Personally, I like pictures of flowers immediately after a rain storm. The light is soft and puts a wonderful catchlight on each water droplet decorating the flower petals. But an open shade grab shot still makes a fine memory picture.

I've been playing with shooting RAW. I'm having mixed results. I'm not sure that more control is always a good idea. I'm not convinced my decisions are always better than the camera's. I tend to like warm images. Because of this, when I enhance a RAW image it tends to be warmer than possibly it should be.

Also, working on a RAW image encourages me to play with the image more than I normally would. And trust me, I don't require all that much encouragement. I tried to keep the highlight areas from blocking up as I worked to make the foreground lily pop from the picture. The foreground lily is cleaner and brighter than the others. I'm not sure that the effect looks natural. It may look a little forced.

Here is an image shot with a Canon SD10 point-and-shoot a couple of years ago. It was shot as a jpeg, with the endpoints set in Photoshop to maximize the contrast. It has been enhanced very little compared to today's lily picture.

Clearly, the after-the-storm lighting gives far more punch to the image and the water droplets are a fine visual addition. This image makes today's photo look flat, a bit on the lifeless side.

Give it your best shot

My Fuji Finepix HS10 is a bridge camera; It is not a full-blown DSLR. When I saw a gorgeous dog playing a fine, energetic game of catch, I knew I wanted a picture.

But wanting and taking are two different animals. With the sun setting I knew my picture of the leaping dog could itself be a dog. I knew it could be ruined by the very action I was trying to capture.

Never let reality stop you from trying. You'll never win if you never play. Always take the picture. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain.

I set my Fuji FinePix HS10 to sports shooting and used the Best Frame Capture setting. Was I lucky? Did I succeed in capturing the leaping dog in the gloomy light of sunset?

I think I was lucky. Not totally successful but I think the picture still works. (Remember, I'm only shooting for the Net. A don't ask a lot of my equipment.) The best part of the night was that I got practice shooting action with my HS10. The next time I see this, hopefully earlier in the day, I'll get a great picture for sure. I promise!

If you can set your shutter speed, set a speed of at least 1/500 second. A setting of 1/1000 is even better for stopping fast action like this. You might need to up you ISO setting and accept a little noise in order to use such a fast shutter speed. Your lens will be wide open but if it is a zoom it may only open to something like f/4.5. If your lens is that slow, you may have problems unless you are will to boost your ISO as high as 6400. Good luck!

Image quality: How much quality do you need?

Had to run a little Lowbanks art before running the boring shot below.

Having worked for many years in the newspaper business, I've learned to set the bar pretty low when it comes to image quality. When pictures are translated into halftones with 100 dots to the inch, a lot of quality is lost. Also, when images are at the mercy of a backshop pressed for time and forced to cut corners to save time and money, those halftones may be of poor quality. And we have yet to consider the newsprint on which the pictures appear: yellow, thin, blotter paper.

Now, I am shooting for the Internet and my images must be reduced to 7-inches at 72 dpi and saved as jpgs in order to ensure they load quickly. I'm still kissing off quality.

Iron arches in the blocks to the right of the centre marten house are not visible.

The above shot of the beach at Lowbanks, Ontario, is 156 KB sized jpg file. If I wanted to make a large print, the enhanced file, from which the Internet file was created, is a massive 28.5 MB TIFF file. It was created from a RAW file captured by my Fuji FinePix HS10. Look at the flag in the middle of the picture and then run your eyes down the flag pole to the breakwall.

Iron arches in blocks are visible.

Do you see some small, steel arches sunk into the concrete blocks just over to the right? No? That's because detail easily seen in the large file has been lost in the small. Pictures destined for the Internet lose a lot of detail.

The image in which the iron arches are visible is a jpg cropped from the full-sized TIFF file. Unfortunately, in order to show you this cropped image I had to jpg it in order for blogger to accept it. The actual file has much more detail, even in the grass.

Recently, I read some posts on the Nothing Special photo blog. I found them inspiring. The author's writing made me think about quality in a way that I haven't thought about quality since art school.

At the newspaper, only one photographer shot RAW. One other photographer experimented with RAW but soon rejoined the jpg shooting group. Because of the image quality loss inherent in the newspaper business, most of us figured there was nothing to be gained by shooting RAW. I believe we were right.

I no longer work for a newspaper. Maybe it is time I started paying a bit more attention to quality. I am experimenting with shooting RAW. I cannot afford a different camera but that will be part of the challenge: How to squeeze the most quality from a bridge camera like a Fuji FinePix HS10 or a true point-and-shoot like my Canon S90?

Cropping in camera and other tricks

Crop in-camera for photo files that make better enlargements.

Learn to crop in-camera. Short of buying a better camera, learning to crop your pictures as you are taking them is one of the most important steps you can take in improving the quality of your images.

Simple point-and-shoot cameras do not deliver the best quality images. My Fuji FinePix HS10 is especially poor when I am forced to enlarge an image. With my Fuji, blowing up the image is a very apt description of what occurs. Always keep in mind that the Fuji is a bridge camera; It is not a full blown DSLR.

Filling the frame is often enough. Unfortunately, with my HS10 sometimes when I blow up an image I discover soft, smudging areas. This can be visually very annoying. These smeary areas are where the in-camera algorithm for controlling noise has gone a little overboard.

I have been finding that if I shoot important images as RAW files and not jpeg I can skirt some of these issues. Photoshop CS5 Extended has better noise control algorithms than my Fuji. Or I can choose not to eliminate noise at all.

I have been criticized in the past for using Photoshop. Too expensive, I've been told. Well, watch for sales, I say. I managed to buy my copy for about 70 percent off list. Stay alert and maybe you will be lucky, too.

If you click on this image of Fiona, taken with my HS10, the image will enlarge. In the original, non-jpg file, if you took a close look at the buttons on her shirt, you could see that each of her pink buttons has two holes. This image was shot RAW and enhanced in Photoshop CS5 Enhanced. I stayed completely away from noise reduction in enhancing this image.

One other lesson has emerged here. If you intend on making very big prints, save a TIFF file along with any other files you may save. JPGs have their place, and with luck will make good enlargements, but to be safe keep an enhanced TIFF file in the wings ready to send off to be printed.

For Best Quality:

• Use a DSLR to shoot your pictures. If this is not possible, it isn't for me, then make sure to:

• Fill the frame when shooting.
• Shoot RAW.
• Shoot the largest file size that your camera is capable of shooting.
• Save the enhanced image as a TIFF file.
• Stay away from JPG if you want maximum quality.

Click to enlarge. In the original, non-jpg file, one could count the button holes.