You have a great camera, great lens, sharp sensor and a tiny LCD.  Even if you have a large LCD on the back of your camera, it’s not as big as your computer screen.  So should you run back and forth dumping your photos after each image is made just to see if everything is really sharp?  You can zoom in on your image on the back of your camera to check the sharpness of the image.  (You did read how to do that in your manual, didn’t you?)  Almost every digital camera has this ability, but there’s a better way if you aren’t going to be moving around a lot.  Make your photos while connected to your computer.  Of course a laptop is a good choice here.  This is my basic setup (Flash on top of the camera is not necessary.)
A six foot USB cable is generally a separate purchase, since most USB cables that come with your camera are generally three foot or less.  So if you need to pull the camera off the tripod, having that longer cable will give you more flexibility.  But you have to make sure the cable can handle the data transfer.  Not all USB cables are equal.  So when you buy one, make sure you keep your receipt in case it doesn’t perform.  If you can find a shielded cable, that’s a pretty sure bet that it’ll work.  The next step will be to have some software that’ll download the images and control your camera.  If you have a Canon, the software likely came with your camera.  If not you can use several other options.  If you are using a Mac, try http://www.sofortbildapp.com/ If you have an iPhone or an iPod Touch, check out http://www.ononesoftware.com/detail.php?prodLine_id=38

In some cases, once the software is setup, you need to have it go somewhere to be displayed.  I use Adobe Lightroom for this task.  It allows the photos to automatically have certain setting applied and have your copyright meta data added.  I can quickly see  the photos and pick the keepers, and send a photo to print.  The really nice bit about using Lightroom is having a second monitor so the image can display to the client and they can see how good they look.  You can even use an HDTV as that second monitor if you want something really large.  I’m quickly becoming a proponent of tethered session for all my “in studio” photography.  It really allows you to see the photo Later this week I hope to have an interesting tethered setup and show you a more extreme use for this sort of session.

051 Photography Tip of the Week (audio)

No to Native RAW, Yes to DNG

For those of you who use a camera that saves in JPG format, this tip won’t do you much good.  But I do think you might glean a bit of useful information out of it.  So read on.  I like my steaks like I do my photo file format, RAW.  But I’m not allowed to eat much red meat anymore so I’ll just have to stick to RAW images.  Those of you who make RAW photos know the advantages of RAW.  You have an extreme amount of exposure and color control over the image after it’s on your machine.  Since memory is relatively cheap, photographing in RAW is a no-brainer.  But what RAW format should you save your file in.  Adobe created an alternate RAW format that is open (well almost) and has a lot of advantages over the native RAW format from your camera.  There are a number of photographers out there that will shoot down DNG saying that there is no reason to switch since Adobe may not be in business for as long as you need to store your files, or that you may lose image information in DNG.  All I can say is that in several hundred thousand files, I haven’t seen anything negative about the DNG format and have nothing but praise.  Below are the reasons I convert my files to DNG.

File size – The amount of space that DNGs take up are less by about 15% on average.  I know I said earlier that memory is cheap, but when you create thousands of photos a year, that space savings adds up very quickly.  But this is one of those things where you can say “prove it” and I can come up with the numbers.  So for my first photo I made an image of a plain white door.  Awe inspiring I know.  The native RAW file is 9.8MB and the DNG is 9.5MB.  Not a huge amount of savings only creeping in at a little above 3%.  But this is an image with little to no detail in it.

So now here’s an image with a little more going on.  It’s a photo of a rug.  The native RAW file is 12.2MB and the DNG is 11.1MB giving us a little more than 9% in savings.  But one could argue that there’s not a lot going on in the image and the native RAW storage mechanism could be well suited for this type of image.  So I took the size of all of the images of the day.  This came in at 534.8MB and the directory after conversion to DNG is 454.0MB giving us a little more than 15% savings.  This a reason I like the DNG format over the native RAW format.  For 1TB (1000GB) of photo files, I save 150GB of space.  One could say that 150GB of space is cheap enough to just pay for the difference.  But you have to take into consideration increased load time and if you perform a backup to a cloud server, an added 15% size could make it difficult for your photo backup to keep up.

Meta data goes with the file – One of the powerful features with RAW format files is the ability to make changes to the the image without affecting the original data.  So you can change, and change settings without destroying the original data like you would with a JPG file.  The way the changes are recorded is in a set commands so each time you open the file it re-runs the commands to give you your developed image.  This string of commands is stored in a “side car” file normally with the extension of .XMP.  These files aren’t very big, but if you ever move the image file you have to move the side car file in order to keep your development settings.  With DNG the settings/commands are stored in the file and go with it if you ever move it to another directory.

These are the two big reasons I use DNG over the native RAW file format.  I hope you will take a look at DNG as your file format for all of your RAW images.  So you to can save some space and keep your development settings with your image.

Lets turn the way-back machine to March 19th 2000.  Almost 10 years ago.  I wanted to see what sort of photos I had from my trip to Switzerland and I ran across this set of 4 photos looking out over Lake Zurich.  This set has everything going against it.

1. I used a 1.3 MP point and shoot camera.
2. No RAW capture.  (Was RAW available then?)
3. I shot this hand-held.
4. It was early evening.
5. I took this after being awake for 37 hours with the last 13 hours on a plane.

So quickly stitching this together you get a very boring and noisy photo.  (I’m leaving the salvage in on purpose so you can easily see the stitch points.)

Not much to look at but it has some potential.  In most landscape photos you want the foreground and the background to be relatively equal in level.  But when I try to balance out the foreground I came up with this:

There’s nothing in the foreground detail that screams “look at me.”  The foreground is where the bulk of the noise come into play.  So it’s probably best to leave the foreground as silhouette and play up be moodiness of the sky and landscape.  So when I do this sort of adjustment in Photoshop the first thing I do is to turn the JPG into a smart object.  That way I retain all of the original detail no matter how many filters I apply.  So my 2 minute adjustment consisted of changing the levels and boosting the saturation of the blues.

Aside from the change in exposure on the right-hand side this turned out to be a fairly reasonable image.  It’s not high enough quality to put in a gallery unless I make it a bit more surreal.

I’m not often fond of this look, but in this case it uses the noise in the image to it’s advantage.  Either way, I’d opt to have the third image on my wall even it it was a smaller sized photo.

When you want some clouds in PhotoShop as a texture, why use the clouds filter?  It’s a reasonable filter for what it produces, but it doesn’t make clouds.  It makes a cloud-like blotchy pattern.  I can see a bit of a pattern in this filter.  That’s because it’s created by an algorithm.

Clouds are one of the easiest things to photograph.  You generally have all the light you need.  No two photos are ever the same because clouds are truly random.  You can always find something interesting in a cloud pattern.  I have a directory of cloud patterns.  Even the simplest patterns and most boring clouds can be tweaked very quickly.

In this case I tightened the levels and then applied a high pass filter using Vivid Light as a blend mode.

050 Photography Tip of the Week (audio)

Photoblock Challenge – Use your “worst”

I’ve made it to the 50th episode and it’s a tradition of the photography tip of the week to have a challenge every tenth episode. So if you are having photographer’s block, here is your challenge. Use your “worst” camera. Your best camera is always the one you have with you, but in this case I want you to specifically use your worst camera. So what is your worst camera? For me it’s easy, my mobile phone has a 2MP camera with very limited capabilities. But as I started working with it in preparation for this challenge, I found that it was much more capable than I originally thought. Below is a comparison of an unedited basic macro shot between my mobile phone and a DSLR.

As you can see it makes a pretty decent photo, much better than I was expecting. But it’s by no means capable of making ANY sort of photo.  As you can see the color response isn’t as dynamic as the DSLR, but with some time in Photoshop that could easily be corrected.  This challenge will allow you to discover the limitations of your own “worst” camera.  In most cases you will need lots of light.  So daylight will most likely be your best photos.

If you do take indoor or low light photos you will have slow shutter speeds to deal with, so expect some blurry photos.  If you can brace your camera this will be minimized.

However, you can get some amazing photos working within the limitations.  For me, I’ve found silhouette photos to work very well on my “worst” camera.  What is your “worst” camera most capable of producing?