Visualization

What's Going On?
As I usually do, first I write about what's happening for a bit, then I get into the topic of the day. Or of the week, actually. Let's see...

Computer and software-related stuff
Sort of slow times here right now and I've been trying to understand why. Then I realized how much time I've been spending on the computer (those who know me will say, "yeah, what else is new?") but it's even more than usual these days.

There are days like yesterday when a sticky printer problem took up most of my day. It's fixed, but don't ask me how...I've spent lots of time trying to get Lightroom 4 working. Adobe even thanked me publicly for a detailed report I posted on their forums. I don't think they've had their "AHA!" moment yet, with the solution.

I also installed a third external hard drive (WD 2Tb "MyBook" at Costco for $129). Copying my archive over took about 18 hours but I didn't have to sit and watch it, it ran overnight. I finally have an off-site backup.

My workshop/book project is still under way. I try to spend a minimum of 3 hours per day working on it, with some measurable results but I'm not there yet. All of this stuff has taken a lot of my time and attention.

CS6 is out
If you're a NAPP member, you know that. Also if you read industry blogs. Seems like that's all everyone is talking about, but I'm not jumping on the bandwagon yet. Wait and see whether it's another Lightroom 4 fiasco.

The Nikon D800
I've seen some reviews and pictures from people I know who now have one and I'm more than envious. I'm saving my nickels, maybe for my birthday in September. But a consideration has arisen: Imagine working with 40Mp files instead of 10Mp. You may even need a new computer to handle the load, certainly bigger storage drives. Plus FX lenses...  still the performance is spectacular, particularly high ISO images.

Upcoming Events
I've got several photography shooting events coming up.

• Mid-May, there are a couple of friends coming up to shoot trilliums and whatever else here in the Highlands. Touch bases if you want to join them
• June 10th is my friend Styles' motorcycle charity ride to benefit the Vaughan Hospital, for which I'm principal photographer. If you want to shoot interesting bikes and bikers, drop me a note and I'll arrange for you to participate as well.
• June 13/14, the Algonquin Park Moose workshop with Mike Bertelsen. I'm really looking forward to that one but I need more practice with my 400mm lens!
• July. I've set aside the first 2 or 3 weeks and would really like to go somewhere. I've been thinking Newfoundland again but the gas alone would cost about $600! New Orleans? I've ALWAYS wanted to go there. Maybe I'll just do that 'around Lake Superior' trip I planned a couple of years ago. I know where to stay in Wawa!

Blogs
I read a bunch of other peoples' blogs on a regular basis. I use an RSS feed on the iPad. Lately, everyone's writing about CS6 but here and there, there are some gems and great stuff to look at. Look up +Anne McKinnell — she and her husband are RV'ing around North America and has some great stories and images. There's +Dan Bailey in Alaska with some great stuff and there's a fellow by the name of +David duChemin who travels to a lot of exotic places and whose images and tales are compelling. These people are all on Google+ — I hope I've got the hang of tagging them correctly.

OK, the topic of the week...
When I come across a scene or a subject that I want to photograph, I'm trying to discipline myself to visualize what I'm trying to make out of the image. Sure, a duck or other bird goes flying by and you just want to grab the shot and/or practice with your 400mm lens,

Majestic, or really ugly? This is a turkey vulture (Cathartes aura) and I think it's incredibly beautiful in flight, if you can ignore its ugly head! This was shot at 300mm, 1/1000 sec at f/5.6, ISO 800 and cropped. I wish I had been at 400mm because the head's not as detailed as I would have liked.

I was out for a walk down Pleasant Point Road (a dirt road around the corner from me) and spotted this old lantern that someone (my neighbour Vic, I think) had hung up as decoration on his signpost. I immediately visualized it as an HDR and took the appropriate 5 bracketed exposures.

Old Lantern. Edited with Photomatix Pro and toned with Topaz Adjust 5. I threw in some other effects with Nik plugins too. Over the top? Sure, but I think that's just what this shot needed.

A few meters further down the road, I veered off on a trail through the woods, where I saw an open area, dominated by the trees instead of the brush. The thing about forest scenes is that they don't seem to have a single subject that stands out, so that's what I was trying for with this shot:

Open Forest. It's in black and white because I found the colours distracting and they took away from the strength of the three trees. In hindsight, I should have moved a few inches to the right to separate the middle tree from the left one. Although I did shoot several bracketed exposures, HDR did nothing for this scene because it had a low contrast tonal range to begin with.

When I set up to take this shot, I thought about some of the rules I had learned. What I wanted to do was to balance the image, by taking the 3 big trees off centre and using the grove of smaller trees for counterbalance. There is a diagonal line there, but it doesn't draw the eye. I look in the gap in the big tree triangle. Right or wrong, I do like this image.

Next, I moved forward and to my left. Now I was trying to use the diagonal, to carry the eye into the scene.

Forest Glade. Again where does the eye go? In the grouping of trees at the right, not the left! Why? It's because of the light and because the diagonal draws you there. I made it black and white again, but I found the red tones of the leaves on the ground really added to the scene, so I put them back in. There's quite a bit of post-processing in this shot.

I find this image compelling. Next time I shoot it, I'll do it from lower down, to include more foreground, I think. To me, what makes this image is the light and the contrast between foreground and background, which was actually not there in the scene, which I created on the desktop! I enhanced the brightness on the forest floor behind the trees and I added the fog and the light streaming through the trees. Notice how the appearance of the light coming from upper right is created by the angle of the green branches on the trees at right!

What's my point? When I stood there contemplating how to shoot this scene, I thought, "I wish it was foggy" so the trees in the foreground would be separated visually from the background. What you see here was not what I actually saw, but rather what I VISUALIZED. Here's what I actually saw:

The original scene

The resulting toned image is what my MIND saw, when my EYES saw the original. I was fortunate in being able to enhance the picture to match what I wanted it to be.

When I wake up to a foggy morning, you can bet I'll be out there again. I'll post the picture here when I get it! But I'll be back...

— 30 —

It's all about Vision

Continuing the theme from last week, photography is all about vision. Oh sure, great hardware helps to 'render' your vision, but do you really need it?

Here's a photo of the much-photographed Empire State Building in New York City:

It is, of course, located at 34th Street and 5th Avenue in Manhattan. I was in New York visiting my brand new granddaughter (oh yeah, and my son and daughter-in-law, and my sister and her husband, but the baby was the real reason!) and I took half a day to go into Manhattan specifically to visit B&H Photo. More on that later.

I bought a little point-and-shoot camera at B&H — not state-of-the-art, just something to kick around with. It's a Nikon (of course!) Coolpix S560. I threw in the battery and an SD-card and tried it. This is probably the 4th frame I shot with it (the first three being, "oh THAT's how that works"). Wasn't the lighting great?

About an hour later, I came back and shot this picture from exactly the same spot.

I had lost the light — the sun went behind some clouds, but this was shot with my D300 and my 12-24mm lens. Both shots were at the 35mm equivalent of 36mm. I was trying for the same picture.

Which one is better? The first one, because of the lighting.

I was interested in the comparison, so I cropped both shots in tight and converted them to monochrome. Except for the obvious lighting difference, which one is better (click the image to blow it up)?

The $2500 camera/lens combination on the left is contrastier and does have an edge in pixel sharpness but the $100 point-and-shoot isn't bad! It wasn't really a fair test because they were shot under different conditions, so it will be interesting to repeat the experiment under controlled conditions some time.

Does the equipment really make a difference? Sometimes. This picture was captured using the "C" (continuous) focus mode on the D300, relying on the high speed Silent Wave Autofocus motor in the Nikkor 70-200 f/2.8 lens. I shot at high repetition rate, about 6 frames/second. Blow it up and check out the tack-sharp focus. I did basically nothing to this shot in Photoshop, other than to rotate it for better framing.

This beast is a "turkey vulture", hanging around the dump in Minden.

Ugly, but majestic in flight.

...and sometimes not. This was done with the little Coolpix (by the way it's time to start thinking about getting ready for winter!).

 

It's all in your vision. Don't be afraid to get out and shoot no matter what kind of equipment you have. There is one caveat, though: be familiar with your camera. Know how to adapt to different lighting situations. Know how to use the tools you're using so that your mind can be focused on the image you're trying to create, not the hardware.

Here's one more image taken with the Coolpix. I went for a bicycle ride and couldn't have carried the big SLR with me. That's what I bought the little guy for!

I did create the clouds and sky in Photoshop. Much better than the featureless sky that was there. It was easy to do using the "Magic Wand" tool to select the bright sky then "Select Similar" and "Render Clouds" after choosing the blue and the white colours.

B&H Photo

I said I'd comment more about B&H Photo in New York. The place is overwhelming. I had only 2 hours but wish I had had the whole day to spend there. It's located at 34th St. and 9th Ave. in Manhattan and the best way to get there is by subway (take the "A" Train: I feel a song coming on!). They do have a parking lot, but I think you'd be nuts to try to drive into the city.

The store is the size of a typical department store. But it's just cameras! When I came in, I told the 'greeter' that I wanted to talk to someone about a technical issue with my D300, and I wanted to look for a point-and-shoot. He asked me what brand, and I said I didn't know, I was hoping for some advice. They have kiosks set up for each brand. One for Nikon. One for Canon. One for Sony. One for Panasonic. etc. You get the picture. At each kiosk they have EVERY CAMERA that maker has to offer on the market: set up so you can pick it up, play with it, shoot some pictures, and talk to an expert in that brand. You see why I said I needed more than two hours?

There were at least 80 cameras in the price range I wanted to spend ($200: I told you, I just wanted a little backup camera, not a fancy beast). I tried most of them. I couldn't decide — people told me to go for a Canon but I didn't like it as much as the Nikon (I'm biased, but the image looked better on the LCD. That said, it's not about what it looks like on the LCD but what it's like on the computer!). There was a Kodak camera with better features, but more than one person told me to stay away from that brand. So here I am, waffling back and forth, and completely out of time. I was supposed to meet my sister at 42nd & 5th in 5 minutes (I was late). I gave up. I decided I would order something online another day. On the way to the exit, there was a big sign: "Used Equipment". I wanted to look for a TC-17e teleconverter for my 70-200, so I stopped to ask. Nothing. "Do you happen to have any used Point-and-Shoot cameras?" Yep. The S560 came with everything, including a 2Gb SD-card and case, for $120. How could I NOT buy it?

So here's how it works: you agree to buy it. They throw it in a bin that looks like a typical blue box and put it on a conveyor belt. You go down to the central cashier, pay, then walk to the pickup counter where, as if by magic, your camera is already bagged and ready to go. What a system!

I know I'm going on and on, but it's an incredible place. If you're into photography, you HAVE TO go there, just to see it. I talked to a Nikon expert about my D300 issue: You stand in line (for a second, I was next!) for the "next available tech support person" who sits at a station behind a counter. The guy I talked to was very knowledgeable. I wanted to know about the micro focus adjustment function and he explained it to me in detail. Yes, you may need to create more than one preset for multiple focal lengths on a zoom lens, and no, it's not unusual that a given lens/camera combination might benefit by doing so. He dismounted my lens and commented on how dirty it was in the camera, told me to buy a blower brush and cleaned it for me while we were talking. He recommended a different brand of teleconverter which was less than half the price of the Nikkor TC-17e, but I think I'll stick with Nikon product.

Oh, if you want Canon advice, it's not the same guy. These people are dedicated to the brands they're assigned to and they all shoot those brands themselves. This guy had a D700 and much the same lenses I do. By the way, I played with a D3 at the Nikon kiosk. I want one! Only $5000...

PS: Check their hours of operation before you go. They're a bit unusual  since they're closed on any Jewish holiday and of course on the Sabbath. http://www.bhphoto.com/

As I said, I met my sister and brother-in-law. As we were walking past Macy's again, they had a string of "Santa Clauses in training". I handed my sister the Coolpix and she took this shot of me:

One more picture. This is what I went to New York to see:

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This is the first time that I've put anyone else's pictures on my Blog. The following two images were made by Shannon Lafferty last weekend and they are superb. She gave me permission to post them here. No words are necessary. Click to blow them up as usual.

Shannon, I adore your work.