Technical | >Re-PHOTO

Hope for Linux Users

I’ve always wanted to stop using Windows. Well at least since I first installed it many years ago. At the time, back in the 1980s, Gem seemed to be a rather better system. But by the time Windows 3 came along, around 1990, Windows seemed more or less the only game except for the uber-rich fuelled by advertising who could afford to go the Mac route.

For those with computer science degrees there was of course UNIX, which became affordable in the form of Linux. Over the years I’ve installed Suse and Red Hat on quite a few computers, and my wife’s computer is now running happily on Ubuntu. Or mainly happily, but after it crashed while running an update I had to do a complete reinstall. Which worked fine, but had problems finding the parallel port printer. Not that it couldn’t find it at all, just that it seemed to insist on sending data a bit or two at a time, so it might take half an hour before a page would emerge.

There was a lot of advice on the various support forums, and I tried it, but nothing worked. Clearly too, a lot of other people were having similar problems from all the messages that were posted – and a few did find that the solutions posted worked. Most I think finally gave up and brought a USB printer instead.

Fortunately both my sons are computer science graduates, and when the elder came home he soon solved the problem, editing a few files here and there on the system – and posted his fix on a support forum too, so others may benefit. But if you don’t have a first in Comp Sci, and don’t want to devote most of your life to learning Linux there are still rather a lot of possible hurdles. We’ll probably have to call Sam in again after the next OS upgrade too.

But if you are running some flavour of Linux, you might be able to install Darktable. If you are running a Mac, it’s also possible, though looking at the instructions not entirely straightforward. If you are using Windows, you could run it in a virtual machine (likely to be slow) or should you be a true geek you might just be able to get it to run natively if you have most of your life to spare.

Why should you want to? Well it does seem as if it is almost a alternative to Lightroom for the Linux user. Here is the start of the description from the web site:

darktable is an open source photography workflow application and RAW developer. A virtual lighttable and darkroom for photographers. It manages your digital negatives in a database, lets you view them through a zoomable lighttable and enables you to develop raw images and enhance them.

And here is most of what the FAQ says about a Windows version:

What about a Windows port?

None of the developers use Windows, so a port of darktable to that operating system is very, very unlikely to happen.

That being said, many things should already work, so the actual porting should be relatively straight forward. It’s just that we won’t do it. However, there is the “win” branch which kind of cross compiles using MinGW to generate a Windows version. It’s still really buggy and might crash, kill kittens and eat your baby. You have been warned.

Like much Linux software, Darktable comes free. Of course it isn’t the only alternative, and there are a couple of review articles I quickly found that briefly compare some of them. Best Linux photo editors looks at half a dozen of them, including two I’ve tried, Gimp and Corel’s AfterShot Pro, but this review is a couple of years out of date (and the versions I tried and found a little wanting were older still – when the Corel software was called Bibble.) Top 15 Photo Editors for Linux Distributions is more recent, but also rather less informative.

AfterShotPro (now AftershotPro2) isn’t free, but commercial software, though reasonably priced, and were I seriously going the Linux route would probably be my choice. But as the writer of the ‘Top 15’ article says at the end of his roundup:

I’m quite happy with how the list turned out, and it also made realize that there is still a quite big gap in the photo editing software market when it comes to Linux. A ton of people I know, and even those that I encountered during my research – still prefer to work with Photoshop through Wine.

For the moment, rather than tangling with Wine (a Windows-like environment which allows some Windows programmes to run in Linux) I’ll continue to whine about Windows, and when necessary drown my sorrows with a glass or two of a decent red. Oh dear!

JPEG or RAW

While I was having computer problems recently I had to work in ‘Raw+Jpeg’ mode, and I chose the highest possible jpeg quality from the Nikon, ‘Fine’. And they are certainly pretty good files. But I was also having problems working with them on an uncalibrated screen and using Photoshop rather than Lightroom.

I tried to calibrate the screen visually, using one of the sites on the web that offers suitable graphics, but it wasn’t very satisfactory. I decided that my best approach was to rely mainly on Photoshop to make the judgements, keeping my own tweaks down to a minimum.

This also speeded up processing. I suppose I could have automated the process, but soon a set series of keystrokes became wired into my brain. ‘Alt+E, V, Enter’ to change from Adobe RGB to sRGB, then ‘Alt+I, A, U’ on the outdated version of Photoshop on the laptop for Auto-contrast. Next came Ctrl+M, which took me into the curves dialogue, where I used the mid-tone dropper to set the colour balance on a neutral in the image. Though it isn’t always possible to find a neutral, and sometimes it was a matter of trying a few different patches of the image until the result looked about right. And a little tweak of the curve produced a result with what looked like appropriate brightness and contrast.

Having OK’d this, then came the rather riskier business of trying to guess whether I’d got things about right, and sometimes fiddling a little with Brightness and Contrast, adjustments I normally try to avoid. It was hard not to try and alter the colour balance a little, and although I knew I wasn’t seeing it correctly. But I also know that having things a little on the warm side is always more acceptable than the opposite.

Here’s one of the results:

It isn’t too bad, though it does have something of a colour cast – I obviously added a little too much yellow. Perhaps most obvious in the sunlight grass.

It was a difficult day for lighting, photographing the Green Party Photocall What Are You Afraid of Boys? in a shady corner of College Green, next to the Houses of Parliament, sunlit in the background at right. And at the left, the building has completely lost detail in the jpeg.

I’ve now been able to process the raw file, and to make it a little easier to compare I’ve adjusted it to a similar colour balance, though I would normally have left it more neutral.

Overall the image from Raw is a little less contrasty and less saturated colour, and the shadow areas are lighter, but part of the difference is also because I’ve made some use of the Lightroom local adjustment brush. That could have improved the jpeg too, but would not have restored the missing detail in the blown-out highlights.

Looking at the full-size images, there does seem to be just a little more detail in the raw file. Although I think the jpeg version of the jacket that Green Party leader Natalie Bennett is wearing actually looks better for being a little darker, I think the raw version is probably more accurate.

As I stood there taking a whole series of photographs of her, I was hoping that she would make the same expression as her portrait on the poster behind her, but she didn’t quite do so, keeping her head more upright. But I was worried by that picture of her, as it didn’t quite look like her. What it lacks is the determination that I think shows in her jaw when she talks.

I stood there taking pictures wondering whether it was digital retouching or just careful lighting and choice of view that had caused the difference and made her and Caroline Lucas look rather more like a toothpaste advert than real people. But somehow it was a look that shouted PR and advertising and didn’t at all fit with my vision of the Green Party. More like the old politics we need to get away from.
Continue reading JPEG or RAW

Slow Recovery

I’m sitting typing at my notebook, and using it to copying my files from 2007-8 from an old external hard disk onto my new Drobo 5N NAS. And rethinking how I intend to backup my work. This is a slow process, as the hard disk is only USB2, and at around 15Mb/s the 500Gb will take around 8 hours.(Later I found the speed roughly doubled if I actually plugged the Ethernet cable into the router, rather than just assuming it was connected and transferring over the wireless link.) I’ve another 9 disks to go through, some larger, though I’ll not transfer everything to the new system.

To my right, my desktop computer is still chuntering through Chkdsk on my drive G:, all 3TB of it. It’s now got on to telling me that there are around 450,000 files that need fixing and is looking at each in turn to tell me it can’t fix them. It says that it is 10% through, but I don’t believe the figures. Probably it will finish some time early next week. Meanwhile I’m doing the best I can with the notebook.

I got all ready to take pictures yesterday when I got a message telling me the event had been cancelled. There was a suggestion I might cover something else, but unfortunately by the time I read the message it seemed to late to get there. I don’t have Lightroom installed on my notebook – I decided the screen was too small and the keyboard and pad wouldn’t make it worth having. I could install it now – or put it on my smartphone as the licence allows, but instead I’ve decided to work in RAW + Fine jpeg mode until I get back onto the desktop machine. I do have an old copy of Photoshop I can use to do some adjustments.

The Drobo has advantages and disadvantages. It should protect against a hard drive failure, enabling me to replace a failing disk without losing work, and it should also allow me to increase the capacity of the system by installing disks of higher capacity. It also means that should my computer go down I will be able to easily access all my files from any other computer I attach to the network. And it is certainly convenient to have access to so much work in the one place.

Its big disadvantages seem to me to be that it is a proprietary system, and that it is also a single point of failure. So while I’m backing up my files to it, I’m also looking at keeping at least one other copy of all important files elsewhere.

I’ll store the old external hard drives carefully – and hope they remain in working order unused. And I’ll keep another attached to my main computer to store current work, replacing that as it gets full. I suspect that they will remain usuable if stored well – at least so long as we still have hardware with USB ports.
I still have boxes full of CDs and DVDs with most of my digital work (and some scans) on them, going back now in some cases around 20 years. Despite the health warnings many have given over the years, so far these have remained readable – I did always look for disks which were supposedly of good quality. I gave up writing work to these around a year ago when with 32Mp files things really got out of hand. And some of the scans and panoramas come to around 250Mb a time, which makes DVD at 4.7Gb look rather small.

I’m thinking now of going back to them, though only for storing a copy of the jpegs that I develop from Lightroom – a much more manageable proposition. An alternative would be to use USB memory sticks, given the low prices of 64Gb USB3 sticks; again people say these are not suitable for long term storage, but those I wrote when they first came out remain readable. I’ll also consider getting a Blu-Ray – perhaps external – writer which are now available at a reasonable price, and 25Gb media at around a quid a piece, but I’m less sure about them.

Of course I should be using cloud storage, but I trust that less than I do optical media. Who can say which companies will still be in business next year – or whether the promises they make will be kept? And cloud storage for all of my work would be prohibitive in cost. It does provide a valuable safeguard against theft, flood or fire etc, but perhaps I’ll ask a friend to keep a small bag of memory sticks or box of disks instead.

Computer Problems

Today I’m having computer problems. Yesterday while I was working we had a little power glitch; the light and my printer went off for a fraction of a second and then restarted; I don’t have a proper inyterruptible power supply, but the mickey-mouse protection on my fancy socket kept the computer working. People not far away had a power cut that lasted some hours, so we were fortunate. Unfortunately one of my external hard disks although it seemed to keep on working appears to have suffered some damage.

I turned on the computer it’s connected to today and went away to leave it to boot up, returning a minute of so later to find that it was running CHKSDK on my drive G:, with white figures about unreadable files flashing across the screen. Seven hours later it is still doing it, with a message telling me “10% complete”. It isn’t a good idea to interrupt CHKDSK (and I think the only way to do so is to turn off the power), so I’m working today on my notebook.

It isn’t a bad notebook, but the screen is around a third the area of my desktop, and the keyboard isn’t great for typing. But perhaps the main problem is that I can’t easily access the files stored on the desktop machine and its attached external drives.

For years I’ve been meaning to go over to network attached storage, but haven’t managed to persuade myself to pay out the cash for a decent system. Instead I’ve just added more external drives, though not all permanently connected.

I don’t know how much of the data on the disk currently being checked I will be able to recover. I think most or all of it will in any case be stored elsewhere, either on other hard disks or on CD or DVD. So I’m hoping little will be completely lost, though I anticipate it will take me quite a while to sort everything out.

Meanwhile, I’ve finally got around to ordering that NAS system I should have installed years ago, and once everything is up and running will be copying my work onto it. It will be a very long job, but should end up with things being better organised than before. It may mean rather less time for me to write here for a while.

Fluorescent Orange

One of the many reasons I wish President Obama would live up to his promises and close Guantanamo Bay is that I hate trying to photograph those bright, often fluorescent, orange jump suits which have become such a part of the protest vocabularly. Of course its a very minor reason compared to the torture and human rights abuse, but one that gives me a certain amount of personal grief rather than engaging my conscience and my empathy for the suffering of others.

Bright reds and oranges have long been a particular problem for photographers, and it was certainly something I came across in the days of film – but then almost all colours were a problem with film, at least if you had any concern for accurate reproduction. Which is something many photographers don’t suffer from, and why so many long for the days of Kodachrome or wax long if not eloquent about the warmth of Agfa, or even pine for the garish purples of Orwo. And why so many Fuji X users are excited about the new firmware that adds ‘Classic Chrome’ to the various distortions you can – if so inclined – give your colour images.

Personally I moved from chromes to negative film in the mid 1980s in the search for more natural colour, switched to Fuji when I experienced the cleaner look its colour negative films and paper gave compared to the yellow box. And realised immediately the great leap forward with Nikon’s digital files when I started using the D100, something that I think led to me soon virtually abandoning black and white (though there were other reasons too.)

But though I generally love digital colour, or at least Nikon’s version of it (and Fuji X is usually great too) there are still a few problems. Artificial light, often far removed from a continuous spectrum has its own problems, and just occasionally in natural light there are conditions where I can’t really get entirely satisfactory colour results. And there are bright oranges.

So while I expect problems at protests for the release of Shaker Aamer, a Londoner still held in Guantanamo to the shame of both US and UK governments, I didn’t expect to have to deal with the same problem when I went along to y Frack Off London’d Global Frackdown event. But I arrived to find their fracking rig workers in bright orange suits.

The files on My London Diary were processed rapidly in Lightroom before uploading them for possible publication, and I didn’t have time to think about the orange suits. I’ve done another rather quick edit (with some slightly careless burning in) which gives a rather better result to the suit, though still not entirely to my satisfaction. Apart from darkening and lightening some areas, the main change is a switch from the Adobe Standard profile I normally use to ‘Camera Portrait’ for this image made on the D800E with the 18-105mm.

For images made using the D700, I have a wider choice of profiles available in Lightroom. Changing from ‘Adobe Standard’ to ‘Camera Neutral dcpTool untwist’ with just some minor adjustments to contrast and exposure – but no burning in – gives a better result, and corrects the slight hue shift in the original oranges.

I’m sure it would be possible to get a similar profile for the D800E, but I haven’t bothered to do so yet. For almost all pictures the ‘Adobe Standard’ is fine.

You can read about the protest and see more images from it at Global Frackdown at HSBC.

Since writing this I did a quick web search and found a link to some useful D800/D800E profiles.

Continue reading Fluorescent Orange

Better Portable Graphics

In what could be really good news for photographers, French programmer Fabrice Bellard has come up with a greatly improved new compression format for images which he has named BPG for (Better Portable Graphics.)

Making use of ‘a subset of the HEVC open video compression standard‘, it offers significant advantages over the JPEG format that has been the standard compressed graphics format for many years, in particular supporting up to 14 bits per channel and giving a greater dynamic range and better compression ratio. For equivalent quality it gives much lower file sizes, though for most of us it will be the ability to get much higher quality at around the same file sizes that will probably be of more interest.

Bellard has deliberately chose to support the same chroma formats as JPEG, to reduce losses in conversion from (and to) JPEG, and the format also supports an alpha channel and RGB, YCgCO and CMYK colour spaces. The format can also include EXIF, ICC profile and XMP.

Gizmag has a nice image gallery which compares the two formats, concluding “The BPG files seem to hold up vastly better, demonstrating a lot less color banding, blocking and step-ladder aliasing along edges, and producing pleasing images down to surprisingly small sizes.” You can also see some good examples at Imaging Resource.

The weakness of BPG which Gizmag points out is that it makes use of the HEVC open video compression standard, of which, as Bellard states, some “algorithms may be protected by patents in some countries“. The whole legal position over this and other MPEG-related technologies is unclear.

Also muddying the water is Google’s WebP format which they have made freely available under a BSD licence. Although clearly from the on line comparative examples inferior to BPG in image quality, it’s hard to compete with Google. But perhaps on seeing the advantages Google will want to run with BPG – so long as any patent problems can be surmounted.

At the moment BPG is not supported by browsers, but you can download source code, windows command line PNG or JPG to BPG encoder and BPG to PNG or PPM decoder, as well as javascript decoders for use on web sites which take pixel width and height from <img> tags to produce a canvas into which a BPG is decoded. So in theory you could start using BPG on your web site today.

Of course this is all rather experimental stuff, and few will wish to take it up. But as the number of photographers now working with RAW images shows, many photographers are aware of the deficiencies of the jpeg format, useful as it has been over the past more than 20 years. With the increasing importance of video in cameras, the use of the H.264 video codec for both video and still images might make BPG a sensible alternative for camera manufacturers. JPEG arrived just in time to make images viable on the web, but it now seems time to move on – and BPG seems the best direction to take.

Umbrella Revolution

No, I didn’t get to Hong Kong, but like so many protests around the world, it also came to London, with a little help from the National Campaign against Fees and Cuts, who organised the protest at the Chinese Embassy on 10th October.

It was the last of four stories I covered that day (and I found time to do a few urban panoramas too – which you can see with the other stories on My London Diary) and in some respects the most interesting. But it was probably well after midnight by the time I had finished uploading the earlier stories and was working on the post processing of the final event. Which is perhaps why one of the pictures I uploaded was just a little strange:

As is probably obvious, this suffers from a rather nasty case of extreme distortion, though perhaps that makes the yellow and black umbrella stand out even more.Here’s the image that I intended to post:

D700, 16mm fisheye, ISO 800, 1/80 f5.6

It still looks a little distorted, and the verticals are converging, though that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

I’d made the original picture from which both these were derived using the Nikon 16mm fisheye, chosen mainly because I was in a very crowded situation on the pavement in front of the Chinese embassy and unable to move any further back from the subject. I’d wanted both the umbrella and the messages on the poster, with the ‘No Violence to Peaceful Protests in Hong Kong’ at the left- with another umbrella and, at the right the word ‘Solidarity‘. The text on placards is very important when photographing protests (something I learnt rapidly from the first editor I took my pictures to), and something you always need to be aware of in all images, as legible text always alters the way that we see images.

I usually process the images from the 16mm using either the Fisheye-Hemi plugin, PtGui or occasionally Photoshop’s ‘Adaptive Wide Angle’ filter. The first two are rather simpler to use and more or less automatically convert from fisheye to a cylindrical perspective, straightening the verticals and reducing the curvature of objects at the edges of the frame. Fisheye-Hemi has just 3 options, depending on the type of fisheye lens you have used (circular, full frame or partial), while PtGui gives greater flexibility. Photoshop’s own filter enables you to straighten any of the lines curved by the lens, but to do a great deal of work usually involves losing a lot of the image, and I usually end up getting some very funny curves indeed and deleting the results.

Somehow I have used Fisheye-Hemi twice on the top image, not a good idea. While the edges oft he placards and the crane at right are more or less straight in the lower picture, they have become curved in the opposite sense to the original in the upper image in a kind of extreme pin-cushion distortion.

Another pair of images perhaps gives a clearer view of what Fisheye-hemi does:

D700, 16mm fisheye, ISO800, 1/60 f5

The protesters were crowded around the doorway of the Chinese embassy – much to the annoyance of the police, who like to keep protests to the opposite side of the road. I am very close to the speaker and the man at right who I could reach out and touch. In the upper images there is very clear curvature close to the edges, particularly noticeable in the pillar of the doorway at the extreme right of the image, but also in the other building in the background and in the woman at the left of the frame.

Fisheye-Hemi has more or less straightened the verticals of the architecture and made that woman look fairly normal. You can also see that the centre points of all four sides show identical subject matter – at left the word ‘Solidarity’, at top centre the top of the pillar, at right a police officer’s ear and at bottom centre the lower edge of that red jumper (I’ve cropped the lower image very marginally to remove a little distraction, which is why there is very slight less of that officer’s face.)

There is also a little part of the image missing at the corners, something you need to be aware of when taking pictures, but it isn’t really a great deal. Because you keep those four edge centres the viewfinder image remains a pretty goo way to frame the image.

D700, 16mm fisheye, ISO 2500, 1/160 f5

Here’s another image taken a few minutes later when people were applauding. I’m pretty sure my shoulders were touching those of the guy whose hands appear at the left of the image.

D700, 16-35mm at 22mm ISO 2500 1/160 f5

Here’s another picture of a different speaker taken from more or less the same position but with a different lens. It’s an ultra-wide view, with the 16-35mm at 22mm, which gives a good idea of how close I really was to the speakers – and I couldn’t move back because of the crowd.

D800E, Nikon 18-105mm DX, 62mm (93mm equiv) ISO 1000, 1/60 f7.1

Later I moved a little to the side and was able to work with a longer lens. I could even work from a distance where I could use a more normal ‘portrait’ focal length, in this case 93mm equivalent using the 18 – 105mm. By this time the light was getting low and I was needing flash to brighten up the ambient.

More pictures from the event at Solidarity with the Umbrella Revolution.
Continue reading Umbrella Revolution

Darkness and Rain

October I seemed to spend a long time struggling to make pictures in darkness and rain, particularly at several of what turned out to be a weekly fixture covering the Poor Doors protests outside the hugely expensive One Commercial Street flats in Whitechapel High St at Aldgate, just on the edge of the City of London.

It wasn’t really quite dark when I took this- and other pictures in Poor Doors Musical Protest

One solution (of sorts) to darkness is to use flash, and I’ve kind of got used to that, even if things go infuriatingly wrong at times. But using flash in rain is a problem, as all the raindrops glow in the flash, particularly those closer to the camera (as the light falls off with the square of the distance.) My flash units aren’t waterproof either, and using them in wet conditions without some kind of protection can lead to expensive repairs – and even the possibility of getting 400 volts when you least expect it.

A week later it was darker and raining rather more – Class War Poor Doors Week 12

Flash is often infuriating in any case, and there are some very good web sites about using it which suggest various creative set-ups, none of which are particularly appropriate to the kind of work that I do. For that you need quick and dirty flash, but there are a few things to bear in mind which can improve matters. I suspect I’ve mentioned all this before, but here goes with my 10 flash tips.

Use high ISO to avoid blackness around the close bits your flash can light up. Mostly at night with flash I work at ISO1600 or ISO3200.
If your flash has a diffuser built in, use it for wide-angles unless you want ‘creative’ vignetting. For longer lenses you can use it for close subjects. The little built-in white plastic bounce reflector helps too – but only at fairly short range, when you can then angle the flash head up at 45 degrees.
Work with your camera in manual mode and your flash in auto TTL mode (assuming you can – it works with my SB800s)
Usually a shutter speed of 1/30 or 1/60 will do fine. Mostly I also work with my rather slow lenses more or less wide open too. Aim to get an exposure without flash that is perhaps 2-4 stops under.
Try to underexpose with the flash too, but only by around 1 stop. If you give correct exposure you will get pictures that don’t look as if they were taken at night. If I’m working without flash I generally need to underexpose by 1-2 stops
Most night scenes – at least in cities – will contain lots of light sources which seriously muck up your camera’s metering. Best work in manual and check the results, adjust as needed, then leave alone until you move into a differently lit area.
When possible make use of the uneven light spread your flash will give by angling the flash head away from the closer parts of the subject.
Sometimes it pays to use your left hand as a flag to shade parts of the subject.
Work in RAW, as you are going to need considerable post-processing for best results.
Never let people see your flash pictures until you’ve sorted them out in post-processing!

We did have one dry week, but then it rained again – another Wet night at Poor Doors

Nikon also have some kind of random fault generator, that will result in the occasional image being hopelessly over-exposed. It might help to make sure flash and hotshoe contacts are clean and that you have pushed the flash right on and locked it in position. But you will still get the odd random white-out (or at least I do) and the occasional random non-flash image with burnt out highlights. Its just to keep you on your toes.

Of course there are some faults for which only the photographer is to blame. Like taking a second picture before the flash has had time to recycle, which I manage frequently. Or forgetting that any exposure compensation for flash set on the camera adds on to that set on an external flash unit…

And while flash actually built into the camera may sometimes be a good idea, it’s largely a marketing point. Of the five lenses that I normally use on the Nikons it actually only works sensibly with one of them (and the one I uses least) the 20mm f2.8; with all the other lenses except the fisheye get a large shadow in the lower part of the frame from the lens. For the 16mm fisheye it’s also generally useless as it only illuminates a central oval in the frame.

I always thought that, as the SB800 manual says the flash diffuser is needed to provide proper illumination for 14mm and 17mm lenses, this meant that there was no way the flash would give a wide enough coverage with the 16mm fisheye. So I’d never tried it before these occasions. To my surprise it actually works quite well, and is slightly better still if you also use the bounce card. Used out of doors, recycling times will be around the maximum – and NiMH rechargeable batteries the only sensible choice. When I remember, adding the optional 5th battery really helps, bringing the recharge time down to under 3 seconds, almost as fast as the best external power supplies.

Having fitted an external flash into the hot-shoe, it becomes possible to only slightly raise the built-in flash. Just a little, so it is difficult to notice, but it is still enough to mess up flash exposures completely. So much so that I keep it permanently taped down, only for emergency use.

Uncorrected Fisheye and flash

But flash and rain is still a problem. As an alternative to flash I have a couple of cheap LED light sources, the more powerful with 9 rows of 16 LEDs, a total of 144 LEDs. It makes quite a good torch for looking underneath furniture, but as a light source for taking pictures it is far too weedy. There are more expensive units around, but I’ve yet to try them, though I have at times ‘borrowed’ the light from the larger units wielded by professional videographers.

But in the end I’ve often found myself trying to work just with available light, and wishing that I had lenses for the Nikons like some of those I used to use, particularly the 35mm f1.4 Summilux. Neither the 16-35mm f4 nor the 18-105mm f3.5-f5.6 is much of a lens in low light, and most of the time I find myself using the 16mm f2.8 fisheye, or, if I’ve remembered to put it in my camera bag, the 20mm f2.8. I’ve had most success with the 16mm (not least because I’ve almost always got it with me) but I’d still like a really fast wide lens for use on dirty nights. The only real choice I can see is the Nikon 20mm f1.8G AF-S but its a little on the expensive side.

Druids and Viewpoint

Twice a year I get an invitation from The Druid Order through the post inviting me to their Equinox celebrations, and although I’ve now seen them a number of times both at Tower Hill in Spring and on Primrose Hill in Autumn, I still like to go. Its an interesting spectacle to watch and still presents a challenge to photograph, even more of a challenge to try and produce different photographs of. I’m not sure I succeeded in that second aspect this time.

D700, 16-35mm at 16mm, f9 1/320 ISO 640

Primrose Hill is certainly the more spectacular of the two locations, with the green grass a better surface and the distant view of London. Tower Hill has its historical associations, but the Tower is a little distant and the closer buildings uninspiring. In some past years they used to process some distance through city streets which had some visual possibilities, lessened now as they emerge from the church hall next door.

I also have my suspicions that the ancient druid rites may well have been very different to these rather dry and solemn occasions. Probably a much more bloody and drunken orgy than these carefully scripted routines following the book. But the ceremonies doubtless satisfy those who take part in them and surely encapsulate some truths about the relationship between us and the planet we live on that are essential to the future of the species. We have to respect the earth, not desecrate it, and to be aware of our relationships with nature.

D700, 16-35mm at 16mm, f9 1/320 ISO 640

This is one of the very few occasions on which I screw anything into the tripod socket on any of my cameras. I hate tripods. I’ve never found one that really suited me – either too heavy to carry any distance or too flimsy and short to be of much use. If I could afford an assistant to carry the tripod (and much more usefully in London, the umbrella) I might think differently, but probably not. Tripods get in the way and slow you down. I’d rather lose the imperceptible scintilla of sharpness in the odd image than use one. Most of my images are at least sharp enough.

D800E, 18-105 at 25mm (37mm equiv) f14 1/800 ISO 800

I had to use one when I photographed the multiple image panoramas for the ‘Secret Gardens of St John’s Wood’ as it was essential to get the lens nodal point in virtually the same place for all of the exposures. Though I messed up the only ones I screwed the camera in place for, and generally worked just by resting my hand supporting the lens at the correct place on the tripod plate. I used one – a solid Manfrotto – for some of my film panoramics too, particularly with the expensive Widelux which had no viewfinder or spirit level, but soon abandoned it with relief once I was working with the cheap Horizon that came with both.

But for this occasion, what I took to Primrose Hill was a monopod. It’s relatively light but still won’t fit into my camera bag, which is a pain. I put it across the top of the contents and close the cover and it stays there until I open the bag to get something out and forget it’s there, and then it isn’t any more. Fortunately I’ve yet to drop it anywhere completely unretrievable.

Also in my camera bag is a long cable release, an electronic thing that fits into the fancy socket on the front left of the camera. I did experiment with a cable-less release, with a little box in the hotshoe plugged into the same socket and another with an aerial in my hand, but it seemed more fuss for this job.

The monopod screws into the tripod socket on the base of the camera, or rather it should, but I have a strap that screws in there, with its socket that I always forget and screw the monopod into instead. What I should do is unscrew the strap – and then use the quick release built into the strap to remove it from the camera – before screwing in the monopod.

In use it makes no difference, but when you come to remove the monopod, it comes off the camera with the strap, leaving the camera hanging from the other end of the strap only, and it takes a mole wrench to separate the monopod from the other end of the strap. Unless your assistant carries a mole wrench (if you have either) your only recourse is to screw the monopod back in and keep working with one attached to you camera. Which I did.

D800E 16mm fisheye, f16 1/1000 ISO 800

The purpose of this is to photograph the circle from a high viewpoint, particularly with the fisheye 16mm lens. But holding the camera high above your head you can’t see through the viewfinder. Live view puts the image on the rear screen, but it’s almost invisible from below with the sky reflected in the glass. The Nikons have a ‘virtual horizon’ feature which is a little more visible and I sometimes try to use, looking for a green line. But it still isn’t easy to see

It really is a problem trying to keep the camera level – and necessary unless you want a curved horizon. What I mean to take with me but always forget is a plumb line which ought to solve that problem. Until I do so I will just have to rely on guess work and taking quite a few exposures in the hope that some will be ok.

It isn’t too easy either to keep the camera pointing in exactly the correct direction, working very close to the circle even with the very wide angle of the fisheye.

Of course there are high-tech solutions to the problem. With the Fuji cameras I have an app that lets me control the camera and see the viewfinder image on my phone, which I might try another time. But I think I would need a cradle of some sort to fix the phone onto the monopod or to grow a third hand (or that assistant again.) Perhaps better still would be a drone, though I’m unsure how well that would go down with the druids, especially were I to fly over the druids, and it adds another level of complexity. It would probably need to be used at a greater height, and I think the kind of view I’m getting from monopod level is probably the most interesting.

D800E 16mm fisheye, f16 1/1000 ISO 800

But perhaps I’ve already done enough on these druid ceremonies, and if I wanted to take the work further should look at it in some very different way. Though that – like the drone – is probably something I’ll leave to others.

D800E 18-105 at 42mm (63mm equiv) f13 1/640 ISO800

There are more pictures on My London Diary, in Druids on Primrose Hill and as usual the images, apart from the one on the ‘month’ page with the text are posted there in more or less the order in which they were taken, and are my attempt as usual to try and tell the story mainly through images, though some words of explanation are necessary to go with them. There are a few captions, but there just aren’t enough hours in the day for me to do this as well as I would like. As you may appreciate it is now less than a month to the winter solstice and I’m only now on this blog writing about the equinox.

I’ve included exposure details, though they don’t have a great deal of meaning. All were probably taken on P setting and with -0.3 stops exposure compensation. All on pattern metering, with probably all on autofocus. Generally the camera does it at least as well as I could, though I occasionally make changes when time allows.
Continue reading Druids and Viewpoint

Good/Bad Light

I’ve written at times about my own rather coarse flash techniques using high ISO, and it was interesting to come across an article by a photographer working in a very different area, Kristian Dowling, on PetaPixel a few weeks ago. Obviously the ideas and solutions that Dowling presents in What Photographers are NOT Considering When Using High ISO work well for him – as you can see from the example images – but I’m not sure they are suitable solutions in my own practice, where situations tend to be fairly fast-moving and often rather crowded with both protesters and other photographers.

Like Dowling I have experimented with using LED lights, though not the Westcott Ice Light mentioned in the feature, and have not been too impressed with the results, though I’ve often piggy-backed on the video lights of others at events (though at other times they have been an annoyance.) At $500 the Ice-light seems a little on the expensive side (and there are ‘Accessories Galore’ to add to the expense), but perhaps it does do a better job than the £15 ‘160 LED Video Light Lamp Panel’ you can find on E-Bay. This seems to claim a similar light output, but is perhaps a more suitable rectangular shape than the long, thin, Ice Light sabre. But the cheap units I’ve tried have been a little disappointing in terms of light output for photographic use, though good for other purposes. More powerful units are available for around £100, but I’ve yet to try these.

Similarly while fashion work may make the Phottix Odin wireless TTL flash triggers seem a snip at $329 or $399 for the twin pack with second receiver, for those who work for the poverty fees now paid by newspapers and magazines (or more often 50% or less of them) may find the Yongnuo RF 603-II which offers a manual Wireless Flash Trigger and 2 Transceivers for around £20 of more interest (or if you want iTTl the Yongnuo YN-622N is around £60). At these kinds of price I’m tempted to try one out myself.

But I think what is important is to understand the difference between good and bad light, and there are things in the article by Dowling that I find confusing, either because they are confused or because I got to bed to late last night. Here’s how I think about lighting.

Quantity & fall-off

Light intensity is perhaps the most obvious feature. And for most artificial light sources we need to think in terms of the inverse square law – twice as far away means a quarter of the intensity etc. (Theoretically only for point sources but even with large soft boxes or bounce the light falls off, just not quite so dramatically.)

Spread

The angle from the light source over which you get relatively even light distribution. Can be increased by diffusers over the light source

Size

The size of the light source viewed from the subject (where the sun is a small light source but the light from a small flash tube bounced off a large white wall is large.) This mainly effects the hardness/softness of the shadows. Despite what many photographers seem to think, putting a diffuser in front of a flash hardly effects this unless the diffuser is considerably larger than the flash reflector, at least where there are no large reflectors around – it does work in rooms with low white ceilings. But using it outdoors simply cuts down the range of the flash and increases recycle time.

Colour

Pretty obvious, but mainly important in avoiding mixing light of different colour temperature. Filters come in handy at times, though I seldom bother to filter my flash, there are times when it would help to do so. The LED panels usually come with both a simple diffuser and an amber one to use with tungsten lighting, but little outdoor lighting is 3200K.

Direction & Position

The horizontal angle between the light, the subject and the camera, and the angling of the light down (usually) on the subject

Main Light and Ambient/Fill

Although we can have very complex lighting situations, it is useful to think in terms of the main light – which gives the subject its ‘volume’, the ambient which illuminates the whole of the scene and the fill, light used to soften lighting contrast by putting light into the shadow areas.

In Practice

The main light is always better away from the camera, whereas fill is best from close to the lens. So flash on camera is great for fill, but rather lacking as a main light. With camera systems like Nikon, flash in bright sun for fill is simple, and handled very well by the TTL BL mode with a flash in the hot shoe. With some lenses you can alternatively use the built-in flash on some bodies, but physically large lenses such as the 16-35 cast an ugly shadow in the frame.

At night, working in fairly brightly lit areas, you can still use flash for fill, (though not in P mode) by working at high ISO, setting up the camera with appropriate underexposure to give some feeling of night, and then adding a touch of flash to illuminate close subjects. Often I’ll combine the flash – of short duration – with relatively slow shutter speeds such as 1/15s to retain information in relatively dimly lit areas of the background.

When the light falls so low as to make flash the only possible main light source, again I usually like to use as high an ISO as practicable so as to pick up what little I can from ambient in the background. Here it would be good to have the light source off camera, but it isn’t always practical to do so. Probably the easiest method for my sort of work would be a long flash cable enabling me to hold the flash in my left hand, arm outstretched and above head height, but I think a wireless flash trigger would give more control and get in the way rather less, so I’m considering that option.

Even with flash on camera, there are things you can do to make life easier and your pictures better, at least with units like the SB800 I like, where the head will swivel both left and right and up and down. If you are able to have close foreground on only one side of the frame (often the case) you can get some help from the flash fall-off by angling the head away from the closer parts of the subject. Just occasionally I see the chance to bounce the flash from a suitable white wall or even a white coat or other white object rather than use direct flash, almost always an advantage.

And then of course there is post-processing, burning in closer parts of the subject and brightening the more distant. And just occasionally a little burning in parts of the face can help add the volume that the flash wiped out. Getty might not approve, but it is getting back towards how I saw the subject – without the distortions introduced by the flash.