Down Day, Down Week

Posted by Philip in General

It’s amazing that something so virtual can have such a physical world impact.  Last week one of the drives in my Drobo reported as being bad.  I couldn’t replace it since the replacement drive just went in to upgrading the total capacity.  So I ejected the drive and began moving and removing files I didn’t need to take it from a 4 disk array to 3 until the warranty replacement came in.  Right as I was about to reach the threshold for the redundancy to kick in, there was a file system corruption and the Drobo was locked.  I could read the files, but could no longer add, edit or delete.  So my Drobo has been locked for 5 days while waiting for the replacement drives.  Today they came in and I’ve learned the following from this experience:

1. I have a lot of files, 162 thousand of them are just photos.
2. It takes a lot of time to copy those files from one drive to another.  12 hours just for the photos, the total time will be close to 3 days including video.
3. I’m very glad I have multiple backups of my important and not so important files.
4. I need to spend some serious time cleaning house, both virtual and physical, because when the Drobo is down, the office and the house gets seriously messy.

Sorting through all the photos I found the oldest digital photo I had, which turned out to be a picture of me right after the long flight to Switzerland, taken with an Olympus D360L by Doug Morris (no relation) on May 18, 2000.  That was over 10 years ago and I feel drained like I looked on that day.  That was a great camera for a point and shoot even though it was slow.  It had wonderful low light sensitivity, ran off “AA” batteries and could fit in a pocket if you didn’t mind a huge bulge that made people stare at you with weird contorted faces.

The Photography Tip of the Week #076

Posted by Philip in General, Photo Philosophy, Podcast

Why Watermark?

Posted by Philip in Photo Philosophy

I’ve been asked on multiple occasions and quite often several times a week, why don’t I watermark my images.  The images I put on this website are licensed with the Creative Commons, Non-Commercial, Attribution licenses.  Which basically says you can take it, use it, reuse it as long as you don’t make money with it but give me some credit as the original artist.  But some of my  photography does get a watermark and that is generally hosted on my Zenfolio site.  These are photos I want to sell as artwork to help pay for the bills and a watermark is justified, I just wish I had a little more control on how and where the watermarks are placed.

Reasons to not watermark:

1. Watermarks are annoying and distracting to the image.
2. If someone wants to “steal” the image, they can likely remove the watermark anyway.
3. Automatic watermarking is often not well placed on the image, so you have to spend time to manually watermark.
4. The image may not hold specific value and you just want to share it.

Reasons to add watermarks:

1. A watermark is a notification that the image is protected under a copyright.
2. Watermarking is part of showing your brand.  (Actually thats were the term came from, branding your property.)
3. If someone does take the image and forward it to someone else, they will see it and go to your site based on your watermark.
4. There is also a notion that adding a watermark makes you appear professional.  I don’t know if I agree with this or not.

Some people may think that those that don’t watermark are saying that they don’t care about their photography and their art.  Other may think that those who watermark are snobs and control freaks.  Both of these may be true.  But I prefer to look at it this way, when I don’t watermark I’m being generous and wanting to share what I do freely but when I do watermark I’m asking for a bit of respect and consideration.

Which camp do you fall in, do you or do not watermark and why?

Lens Correction and Manhattan Skyline

Posted by Philip in Follow-up, Photo Processing

Since I got the request to do my same lens correction test for a panorama, but with a cityscape, I asked Mark Schaffer of Knowsphotos if he had a few RAW files I could process.  He’s a far more traveled and accomplished landscape photographer.  You should check out his site, he posts images rather regularly.  The only thing is he uses a Nikon, but I won’t hold that against him.   ;-)   Just to be clear the original RAW files are his, and I processed them (including color correction) the same way I would have for any panorama.  So this is about as close to an equal comparison as the skyline pano I performed the same test on last week.

No lens correction applied before stitching.

Yes, I know I didn’t crop the image.  I just want you to see what comes out of the pano stitching.

Lens correction applied before stitching the pano

From this size you cant really see much difference.  And even putting the photos on top of each other at 100% shows that they are very close even along the edges.  Below is a small section of the pano at 100% where the images are in a difference mode so you can see the… differences.

This is using the Exclusion blend mode so you can see the differences.

As you can see there is not a lot of difference between the two images.  So one can conclude that with this lens, lens correction will not make a large difference when stitching panoramas.  I would hazard to guess that this would be true of 99% of  you panoramas, because the way the panoramas are stitched, the least distorted area of your lens is used for the bulk of the stitched image.  If you have any distortion, it’s generally along the edges of the picture, and you normally crop that out anyway.

So now you know and can spend some time at Knowsphotos to see some of Marks Landscape and Architectural photography.

The Photography Tip of the Week #075

Posted by Philip in Photo Philosophy, Photo Technique, Podcast

That’s a Sweet Brick Wall

075 Photography Tip of the Week (audio)

There are many things in life that have a sweet spot and photography is no exception.  For this tip I’m interested in the sweet spot of your lens, specifically which aperture is the sharpest all around. It’s a very simple test and only requires a few minutes with each lens you want to test.  I call this the brick wall test.  You don’t have to use a brick wall, as long as you use something that has lots of detail.  Some people will put a newspaper on the wall, but I prefer to do this outside and newspaper blows around very easily.  So here’s my setup:

1. Use a tripod about 10 feet or 3 meters away from the wall, because you want all of your images to be almost exactly the same.
2. Set ISO to 100 or 200 and shoot during a sunny day.
3. Aperture priority mode.  Shutter speed doesn’t affect your sweet spot.  You will start with either your largest or smallest aperture and photograph the exact same image on each aperture setting.
4. Autofocus.  It shouldn’t matter how the focus is set since you aren’t moving the camera, but if you must set it, just center focus will be fine.
5. Using a cable release would be nice, but not overly necessary.

Once you’ve made all your images, load them up in a program where you can look at the centers of each image at 100%.  This becomes a value judgment on your part.  Cycle through the images until you determine which one is the sharpest.  Since you have locked down most all the variables and the only variation is the aperture you should be able to determine which f-stop is the sweet spot.

Here’s the images of various apertures side by side from my test.  As you can see they could all be the same image.  There is very little difference in coloring and overall look.  You can be fairly certain that the only measurable difference now is just the aperture.

Now let’s look at a section of the images at 100%.  You can see that f8.0 is noticeably sharper than either f4.5 or f22.  I’ve scrutinized over all my aperture settings for this lens and know that f8.0 is the sharpest or the sweet spot.

With this knowledge you now know that if you want to get sharper images, you will want to get that aperture as close to your sweet spot as possible and adjust your other settings to match.