Shooting with the best is no guarantee of quality

Lifted from the site of a well respected newspaper.

I know the equipment that is used by the photographer who shot the above photo. The stuff is the best. The image is, forgive me, very poor. I'm sure it was cropped from a larger image. I'm sure there is an explanation for the poor quality. Still, it makes a point. The very best equipment does not guarantee that the final image will be good quality.

It so happens that I shot something similar. Here is my take on this image. I took my image, not with a top of the line DSLR, but with a point and shoot. Granted, I didn't use as long a lens but if I had I would have used a tripod and the smallest aperture possible.

Whatever, I don't find the out-of-focus image professional.

Take a lesson from this. Don't feel you can not do good work because you don't have the best equipment. You can do some damn fine work if you learn to work within the limits imposed by your gear. And, you can do some damn awful work with some awfully expensive camera gear.

Happy New Year!

Blow this up and you still  have a better image than the pro.

Sometimes a picture is served with your dinner

For the recipe, please follow this link: Judy's broccoli and cheese soup.

Recently I was reading a humorous piece on what it's like to be married to a photographer. One item drew my wife's attention: one must accept the fact that a photographer, significant other rarely eats a great meal while it is still hot. They are too busy shooting pictures of the meal!

My wife read this and smiled.

The picture with today's post was quick and easy. Light was supplied by a large window in our kitchen dining nook. The attractive china and flatware were simply my wife's choice for use on Boxing Day. The red background is simply the plastic, placemat. The camera was a Canon S90 set to the automatic, available light setting.

This all went so quickly, I still enjoyed my soup steaming hot.

Note: This image would not work professionally. The reflection of the photographer in the spoon ruins this for professional use. A simple white tent of some sort to hide the photographer and supply a clean, white surface as the reflection is called for. With the help of an assistant, two dish towels can be held taut above the subject, with the camera lens poking between the towels to capture the image. The camera lens can easily be removed later in Photoshop and the harsh white of the dish towels subdued.

Better or worse? You decide.

Copyright: Robert Abell

Recently I saw the above image shot and posted to the Web by my nephew. I really like his work and I like this image but, to my eye, it had a cast: a red or deep pink cast. Look at the cement. On my monitor the cement appears quite pink.

I took the image into Photoshop and using the grey eyedropper tool in Curves, I tried to neutralize the red cast. Using the eye dropper set to sample a three by three pixel area, I clicked on various areas of the image that I believed might well be a neutral grey. When I thought I had the red just about gone, I tweaked the individual colour curves to remove any linger remnants of errant colour. What do you think? Is the picture improved or weakened?

I find that correcting the colour even makes the detail in the young woman's sari pop.

Copyright: Robert Abell

Family visits and memory photos

My nephew is a perfect example of the "be there and be ready" kind of photographer. He is not big on equipment. His camera of choice at the moment is a Canon PowerShot, G series. The quality is good. I have no complaints with the images I have seen.

The strength of his camera is not its ultimate quality but its small size. If he sees a picture, his camera is always handy.

Family visits are a great time for seeing pictures. If you haven't seen each other recently, there is that new-moment quality keeping one's eye alert.

When his niece, not yet three, figured out how to get a drink from the public drinking fountain, my nephew grabbed the picture. He captured the memory. Nice.

Later, he watched as his uncle's granddaughter, just more than two years old, did some serious wall climbing. The wall was the uncle. The picture was great. Oh, those who worry about ultimate quality would not be happy. The light was poor and the image is grainy. If you fall into that group you will not be impressed. My guess is that the naysayers are in the minority.

I love the little girl's confident expression as the little girl climbs up her grandfather's chest to a height of more than five feet.

Grandpa is holding the child by her arms and not her wrists. There is more care being taken here than one might think.

My nephew is an architect and when his uncle and the granddaughter began building a tall "castle" together, this was sure to build to a picture moment. It did.

One can quibble over the angle; It might have been an even better shot if taken from a spot a little to photographer's left. This would have put granddad completely in the picture.

But we must remember, we are capturing family moments, not perfect images for the National 'G'. In a family photo album, this image is a ten.

Note: my nephew is NOT using his camera's build-in, straight on strobe. This is good, in my opinion. I will take available light over flash almost every time. It helps to keep the feel of an unstaged moment with subjects unaware of the camera.

It was a firing offence.

When I worked as a photographer at a newspaper, we had a rule: If it couldn't have been done in the wet darkroom, we were not to do it in Photoshop. Messing too much with pictures was a firing offence.

Get it right when you're shooting it. Distracting backgrounds and off balance compositions have to be eliminated in the shooting and not in Photoshop. Get caught taking something out of the background and you might well find yourself being taken out of the newsroom.

That said, outright lies in photographs were quite another matter. The chain that owned the paper for which I worked saw nothing wrong with using models in news photos; The paper I worked for saw this as a travesty.

Which brings me to today. I am now shooting with a Fuji HS10. It's slow. The shutter lag can be a killer. It can be awfully hard to get the composition just so. Today's image had too little water at the bottom and was a little shy on the left, too.

I took the image and, using content aware in Photoshop, I added extra water on the bottom and left. The picture looks better but is it still an honest picture? Doing what I did is sorta creative but does that allow this to slip by under the umbrella defence of art? It is hard to take too much credit for the craft, that credit goes to the software writers at Adobe.

I know if I still worked at the paper, I would leave unbalanced swans alone. Is this still a good rule? My gut feeling is this question risks stirring up a lot of unbalanced critical comments.

It was a firing offence: Part Two

Newspaper photographers are not supposed to manipulate images. They are allowed to adjust the tonal range, make blacks black and whites white, but this is not seen as manipulating the image. This is just making a good quality print.

But the day could have been flat and the dull-toned image might be accurate. Still, it was O.K. to change contrast. In the wet darkroom it was as easy as changing the paper grade.

Please check out the following link to the well known Pulitzer Prize winning photo by John Filo showing a kneeling, young woman screaming over the body of a fallen student, one of four killed when National Guardsmen fired in to a crowd of demonstrators.

Note the missing fence post above the young woman in the image taken from Life magazine. It is stuff like this that my old editors were trying to prevent. But today, with the ease that Photoshop can alter an image, almost seamlessly, adding water to a picture, water that is in fact there but cropped out by the camera, can get oneself into the deepest of job-threatening, doo-doo.

Newspapers and news magazines like National Geographic don't need to be defending their images. The National G. knows first hand how yielding to the temptation of improving an image in Photoshop can lead to red-faced embarrassment than can't be as easily Photoshopped away.

The National G. once was caught moving the pyramids and another time was accused of adding water to an image in order to use a horizontal image in a vertical format on the magazine cover.

The technology has made the modifying of images very easy and very tempting. If you work at a newspaper, the Devil uses Photoshop. Take care.

Memory Colours

Took two shots, then wind blew away the yellow leaf.

When I worked at a daily paper, one of my responsibilities was preparing colour separations for publication. I learned that sky blue, grass or foliage green and some other colours such as tomato red are memory colours. Oddly enough, memory colours vary from culture to culture. For instance, I was taught that North Americans like their memory colours, especially sky blue and foliage green, more vibrant, more saturated than Europeans.

I don't know whether or not this is completely true but I do know that brightly coloured pictures in the paper were received better than dull ones — even though the dull ones might have more accurate. When I think of fall, I think of incredible colours. Impossible colours. Like the colours in today's photo.

This image was shot RAW and punched up before being converted to a jpeg. Then it was taken into Photoshop and posterized before being saved. (Image -> Adjustments -> Posterize...) When doing stuff like this to images, always keep a copy of the untouched original. The bold look you like this year, may simply look cheesy next year.

Point-and-shoot zooms have changed photography forever

When I got into photography my camera had a fixed lens. Then, in the '60s I discovered the single lens reflex camera and ordered a Pentax Spotmatic from Asia Photo Supply in Hong Kong. I can still recall the excitement when a large, wooden crate arrived with my new gear. I had a 28mm lens, a 135mm lens and a 300mm lens.

But because it took a crate to carry all that stuff, I often didn't have all that stuff with me. Often, I was back shooting with one lens.

Today, almost every point-and-shoot has a zoom lens and many have lenses capable of emulating my entire camera kit from the '60s. The pictures today were taken with an older Canon S90 but they could have been shot with any one of dozens of little cameras.

For the dandelion picking picture, I set the lens to wide angle. For the shot of Fiona enjoying a high-flying ride on a swing, I set the lens to its longest setting. For the picking dandelions shot, I wanted to see some context. I wanted to see the little girl surrounded by grass with the suburban neighbourhood in the distant background.

For the swing shot, I wanted to try and show the flying, mane of red hair and the child's reaction to being pushed hard, fast and high. The long lens setting allowed me to fill the frame.

What is important here is to capture the moment just after she has reached the highest point and is beginning her return. Stopping action with point-and-shoots can be difficult. If you nail the shot at the instant the little girl is changing direction, you will have a tack sharp picture but the flying hair won't be flying. But, if you wait too long to shoot , she will very difficult to frame properly. Set your zoom to a long lens setting, I used 105mm, and be sure to shoot lots.