ETTR

If you have been into photography long enough to have developed film, you will remember that one of the tricks of the trade is to subspose the film because, in the dark room, it was always easier to dogde (lighten) and retaining detail than burning (darken).

I have not been around that long, and although I did have a go at B&W processing, to be honest, I was more focus on achieving a positive image at all, forget fancies such as dogding and burning. However, one of my first books on photography, when already into digital, was a 1950s manual I got at an old bookshop. The basics could not be that different right? Well, I was wrong.

The manner in which a modern digital sensor captures light could no be more different that the way that photosentitive film did (does).

Ramon J. Freire
2013
BY-NC-ND

Permission to get a bit tecnical (just a bit) and I note of caution, this is only applicable if you are shooting RAW.

When shooting RAW (always), my good old Canon 40D, captures 14bits per channel (there are three channels, red, green and blue, irrelevant for this explanation). That means there is a potential for up to 2^14 tonal levels (16,384 exactly) and (I read) a Dinamic Range of 9-stops. One could assume each stop range would be able to enjoy its proportional share oft the tonal levels (about 1,820 each) but, unlike the more equalitarian film, that is not the way digital sensors work.

The brightest stops ‘gets’ half of the available tonal ranges (8,192), the second stop-range, half of the left over (4,096) and the process continues so that the last stop-range, the darkest, can only enjoy 32 tonal ranges. Your dark range can hardly retain any detail, no matter how much dogding, there is hardly anything there.

So.

Everytime you expose aiming to get a well distributed histogram remember that the left side (the dark side) is capturing an exponentially smaller amount of information (tonal range).

When I read an article about this (apologies I cannot atribute correctly, this is years ago) and ETTR, Exposing To The Right and my photographic results were changed forever.

Just as it says on the tin, get used to expose aiming to “fill up” with data (mind, without clipping!) the right side of your histogram, remember that way you are capturing as much information as possible, even, from the darkest areas of your scene.

No pleasure without pain……

1. You will need to get used to read the histogram on your LCD back, if you have clipping warnings activate them if you need to (I personally do not like it)

2. Your pictures will look dreadful in your LCD back (overexposed and little contrast), they will continue to look as bad on your computer screen and it will take some postprocessing to get there but the results will be incredible. Eventually you will be able to preview the good result you will obtain just looking at the back of your camera.

3. Your files will get “fatter”, remember you are capturing more information, but hey memory cost and buffering speeds today are not an issue.

I took this picture in Gerrans Bay, Cornwall, literally from the window of my car (stationary and out of the traffic!). I really wanted to ensure that I could capture as much detail of the clouds as possible, so in order to get as all possible tonal range on the brightest stop ranges I went 400ISO, ƒ5.6 and added +1/3EV for good measure, sort of crazy for a mid summer afternoon shoot at the sea, but it was exactly as much as I could push the ETTR technic. (It was a fast shot at 1/3200″). Then it was about my normal 1, 2, CVS and 4 workflow .

Have fun and remember not to frustrate yourself with the results on the LCD, that will be the biggest challenge you’ll have. You have been warned.

There are fantastic articles out there on the subject…you can start here…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exposing_to_the_right

Ramon

Missing Malibu

I have spent most of the weekend putting my photographic files in order. Not fun but a must once you start to accumulate thousands of pictures. Also it is a great opportunity to review some of the pictures from years back. (…and fantasise about being back in places like Malibu and away from the pretty miserable weather in Hampshire this weekend).

Malibu Pier
Ramon J. Freire
2010 CC BY-NC-ND

To keep the entire scene in focus I needed the aperture as narrow as possible, I settled for ƒ13, there was not much light left (it was around 8.30pm) and tripod or not the exposure had to be difficult specially because I shooting from a busy parking lot and I was testing the patience of wife and kids patiently sitting in the car.

As mentioned in “Holding on“, I do not take HDR techniques beyond being a mean to make sure I extend the range of exposure. This was a good opportunity because even after 15″ of exposure at 1ooISO, some areas of the scene were severely underexposed (under the Malibu pier building), yet when ranking it up to 30″ the foreground and the lights on the pier were clipping). I took an extra shoot at 8″ just to ensure I was not going to fall short and drove back to our hosts’ house trying to imagine the result.

The fact that the sea was so calm was of great help; trying to merge three exposures had the waves been any significant would have been messy.

Ramon

Golden waves

The sunset light just before a Winter storm has a golden tonality that is difficult to capture but as it reflected on the waves and whirlpools it gave me a unique opportunity to do just so.

At the same time the low sun provided with perfect lighting to the approaching dark clouds and a good contrasting background to the coastline against the sky.

I shot this using my Sigma 10-20 3.5f lens at 13mm and 6.3f.

I could have gone narrower on the aperture for a crisper focus across the scene but I needed a fast shutter speed (1/1200) and was pushing 400ISO already so I compromised on focus not to get any further on ISO noise or blurred waves below that speed. It work out pretty well.

The coast of Northeast England is a photographer paradise as long as some sunlight is coming through, not that any weather forecaster can tell when is that going to happen. So…patience and luck, just make sure luck finds you working on it and thoroughly well protected from wind and rain.

Ramon

Volcanic orange

In 2010, we were living in leafy Richmond upon Thames, at the outskirts of London, and, unfortunately, not far away from approach path of Heathrow’s 9L runway.

No that one would actually notice the noise of the airplanes that much, after a while it was the lack of it is which felt odd and eerie.

It took an unpronounceable Icelandic volcano, Eyjafjallajökull, more that a thousand miles away, to make everyone realise how much nicer things were without the winning noise of Rolls Royce, GE or CFM engines above our heads. There was a secondary effect: all that ash that prevented aircraft from flying above us provided with sunsets one would expect to enjoy in the US’s South Western deserts.

Ramon J. Freire 2012 BY-NC-CC

I had three goals here (1) hold the exposure avoiding clippings (2) keep a crisp silhouette of the trees and the church  steeple and (3) keep the orange sky as natural as possible.

It took me a while (two sessions) to get the entire combination right.

I needed to let the Sun to go significantly below the horizon, this helped with the overexposure I suffered during session one. I am, since then, never more than two clicks away from Lightrack, a fantastic App that allows you to know the Sun’s (and Moon’s) position and times, angles, shadows, the works. Any location and any time/date.

To secured the clean silhouette I knew I had to use the metering modes of my camera, I strongly recommend you play around with them.

99% of the time we all shoot with the camera in Evaluative Metering mode with the sensors gathering information of the entire scene, perfect to balance out speed/aperture for the scene. The side effect is the camera will try to ensure no area is left under/over expose and any attempt to obtain a clean silhouette will be very frustrating.

There are three alternatives to evaluative: Partial Metering will take care of 9% of the scene; Centre Weighted which will average the centre and the rest of the scene and finally the more extreme approach, Spot Metering which covers only 3.8% of the area, literally the “spot” around your focal point. This means that none of the information away of the “spot” will not be considered for the exposure adjustment, so by aiming to the sky, I knew the speed would be so high that anything but the sky would be rendered black. The vertical cliff from the middle of the histogram,  follow but perfect a flat line towards the right confirmed I had it. Objective two achieved.

Objective three, keeping the orange natural, was always going to be a subjective matter, because to start with it did not look natural at all, so I left it as it was (except for some cleaning of dirt specks on the sensor).

By the way this is one of the picture I send to printing services when testing them, that gradient of orange does lot leave much room for poor results.

Ramon

Curves and straight lines

Allow me to divert from the blog’s theme to make a point about Tone Curves.

I wanted to find and example of the impact curves can have on an image and the only way I found to do it was by old fashion before and after shot. I took these pictures during the Farnborough Air show last July and the lines drawn by the Breitling team‘s L-39C Albatros keep with theme of curves and straight lines. These guys are amazing, check their website.

 

Although the grey skies during the Sunday show spelt disaster in the form of rain, the weather actually held pretty well and the clouds became a mix of a blessing and a curse. A blessing because managing the sky exposure, with the Sun as high as 58° over the horizon at midday, would have been a nightmare, probably pushing the upper limits of my camera shutter speed (1/8000″).

The curse was double sided….firstly, the light was pretty low and, actually, I spent the day between ISO 250 and 320 (except when speed did not allow for compromise, and I mean F/A-18E and Eurofighter Typhoon speeds) and I needed to hit 1/ 5000″ and above;

…secondly, the cloud as background, and the grey smoke left behind by the planes as they pirouetted, killed any contrast. As I shot and checked the screen all I could see the very step rolling coaster sitting in the middle histogram tell-tale sing of lack of contrast.

The histogram can be your best friend if your read it well and as long as you remember that there is not such as thing as a good/correct/bad/wrong profile. I suggest this article from Cambridge in Colour as an excellent starting point (Camera histograms: Tones and Contrast).

But getting to the point, probably the most under-utilised tool at the disposal of any digital photographer is the Tone Curve (Lightroom nomenclature). It is however the one that will provide most satisfaction once  you get the swing of it, for that my friends the only recommendation is that you practice.

Be as aggressive as you want and bring it down from there, you will see that for most of the situations a gentle adjustment will get you there and that usually a symmetric curve (concave for shadows / convex for highlights or vice versa) will do the trick.

To bring up the contrast of the smoke trails I had push it harder than usual and actually use a very asymmetric curve.

• Lowest 25% (shadows) I brought down to 8%
• the dark area (25% to 50%) peaked at 44%
• the rest: Lights (50% to 75%) and Highlights (75% to 100%) I kept almost flat at 76% and 100% respectively.

So the curve was 8, 44, 76 and 100% where an straight line would have kept 25, 50, 75 and 100%. 

Have a go at tonal curves. Well worth the small effort of practising a bit.

Ramon 

1, 2, CVS and 4

Who said business travel is no compatible with keeping up with one’s blog?

I landed at Heathrow quite late on Friday night in the middle of a major snow storm and half way into Sunday I am already sitting,a I type this, on a Eurostar train to Brussels, usually a great place to catch up with the pending emails but, being Sunday and having spent 3 hours sitting on a taxiway at Heathrow on Friday waiting for a gate to dock the air-plane to, I have done the all the catch up already and I thought it will probably be the last chance to blog for a few days….mind you I would had prefer to spend the weekend at home with wife and kids.

I promised something about Clarity, Vibrancy and Saturation so here we go.

First, I use Lightroom 3.0 for 99% of any postproduction (1% would be Photomatix). I had a try at Photoshop a long time ago and found it well beyond my needs, specially since, as self imposed editorial policy, I do not edit any picture by deleting or adding beyond cleaning some dirt spot on the sensor or the odd smear on the lens or filter.

Over the years I have developed my personal workflow in Ligthtoom, (1) cropping, (2) curves, (3) CVS (not the pharmacy for the US readers but Clarity, Vibrancy and Saturation) and (4) sharpening.

This does not mean I always apply changes at all for stages nor that I do not use WB, colour adjustments, etc. but in most of the cases I manage well with the 1, 2, 3 and 4 approach.

Autumn is lends itself to colour management, the same way Winter is contrast season, Summer is Light and Spring is the perfect mix of all.

This scene, again at Hamsterley Forest, Co Durham, had a perfect mix of reds, greens and yellows and everything in between but once out of the sensor and into my screen it had clearly lost humf, probably because the over exposure over 2.5″.

Many times I find a generous S at the curve tool fixes somehow the lack of intensity in colours but here some extra help was required and adding +10 Clarity (basically works mid tones’ contrast) and +16 Vibrance did the trick.

It is pretty easy to go well over the top with these sliders so I always open up the Before/After screen (key Y) to keep an eye on it. Also, I keep away from Saturation which is it “incompatible” with Vibrance and, even by itself, too harsh. When more (or less) saturation is needed I use the colour section and apply whichever adjustment for the individual colour I want, but this is rare.

Here two good articles from the fantastic site Digital Photography School about the CVS slides.

Ramon

Clarity

Vibrance vs Saturation

Holding on

I am not the greatest fan of the excessive usage of HDR techniques. Some photographers do manage to do a great job with it (see links below of examples) but when the effect becomes the objective itself, specially if emphasis is on the tonal enhancement, I think the whole thing becomes too distracting.

I use my HDR software (Photomatix 3.0) when, from a single shot I can not capture the entire range of exposure I try to obtain. I use this picture below as an example.

The idea was to capture the leaves holding to this rock both above and below the water and, at the same time, the strength of the current. That is what caught my eye when crossing this creek and what I wanted to photograph.

To capture the effect of water flowing, I tested the speed around 2.5″ (85mm, ƒ6.3, ISO 100), which was good enough, but sent the exposure of the leaves about the water sky-high, clipping many of the details. When narrowing the aperture to ƒ10 I started to lose some of the underwater detail, so after a bit of fiddling with the menu controls on the camera I had to go fully manual (I usually live on (A)perture).

With the speed at 2.5″ I shot three exposures at ƒ10, ƒ6.3 and ƒ5.6 (for the extra light under water).

Obviously, when bracketing for later development in Photomatix there is no certainty until one hits the computer back home, but since one can still adjust the EV on Camera Raw there is not much risk (as long as the exposure is the issue).

And added bonus from using a multiple exposure is the water flow effect was amplified in some areas and mellowed on other which helped with the intended high contrast result I wanted.

This series of pictures took my tripod (Manfrotto 190XProB+joystick head 222) to its limit, and held my breath in a couple of occasion.  But it was worth it.

My next post will be about the shot I tool with this tripod set up and the adjustment of presence values (Clarity, Vibrancy and Saturation)

A couple of good places to see some HDR work, I leave up to you to like and dislike. I like the gentle approach, respecting the original tones of the picture.

http://www.flickr.com/groups/hdr/

http://www.hdrsoft.com/gallery/index.php

Some specific examples I enjoy:

john Adams: 
http://photomatix-gallery.s3.amazonaws.com/adams/normal/The%20Edge%20Of%20Georgia.jpg

Dieter Bethke: 
http://photomatix-gallery.s3.amazonaws.com/dieter/normal/db_001.jpg

Stephane Bureau: 
http://photomatix-gallery.s3.amazonaws.com/bureau/normal/Grands%20Charmoz%20Mountains.jpg

Alex Lindeijer: 
http://photomatix-gallery.s3.amazonaws.com/alexl/normal/lindeijer_2008-01-19_006.JPG

Wojciech Toman: 
http://photomatix-gallery.s3.amazonaws.com/wojtek/small/IcyRiver.jpg

Paul Timpa: 
http://photomatix-gallery.s3.amazonaws.com/paul/normal/06_BW_Bridge.jpg