Until recently, I’ve been a PC user. I didn’t have much interest in using a Mac, although I dearly loooove my iPhone and iPod. I also have a high appreciation for Apple’s minimalist design and aesthetics. Macs do look very cool.
Yet I didn’t feel the need or desire for a Mac. PCs run fast. It’s a stable platform with a wide choice of programs. On top of that, there were some things which put me off the Mac. The thing I found most annoying was the fanboyism of the Mac enthusiasts. Any problem you’d encounter on a PC, you’d get a gloating chorus of, ”just use a Mac.” Equally aggravating was the assertion that Macs are sooo intuitive. You know what? If Macs were so intuitive you wouldn’t have to explain their operation to me, would you?
Initially I was a little under-whelmed with the Mac experience, but then a few things fell into place for me in terms of software and hardware options … and then I switched my main computer that I work on (ie the laptop), over to the MacBook Pro. Suddenly it all made sense!
All of this will be old news to Mac lovers. When I was gushing about my new setup to a friend of mine last week, she just laughed, “Where have you been all this time?”.
The things that fell into place for me had a big impact on my post-production workflow and efficiency, and I’d like to share some of my observations and new experience …
When you resize an image with repetitive patterns, you stand the chance that the pattern itself will form another pattern. This is called moiré. When I resized this image for web display, I had to take care to make sure the blue window shutters didn’t generate a moiré pattern.
Here is the full image resized for web. The image here is 600 pixels wide.
Click on the photo to see the image as a 900 pixel wide image.
By going from the original 12 megapizel image (4288 pixels wide), directly down to 600 pixels in a single adjustment ..
.. I get an image where the detail looks like this:
You can see the moiré pattern there in the blue window blinds as a diagonal shaded pattern. You run the risk of this happening if you do a massive jump in resizing in one go.
But by doing the resizing as 10% reduction steps, you can most often avoid that. Here is how it looks when resized as a sequence of resizing steps:
Instead of changing the pixel dimension from 4288 pixels right down to 600 pixels wide, instead do it as approximately 10% jumps in size. You would now change from 4288 pixels (as an example), 3900 pixels wide. And from there you would change to 3500 pixels, all the way down to the size you want your image to be. The diagonal moiré pattern has now been nearly completely eliminated.
Sharpening an image (as you have to when you resize an image for web use), also enhances the pattern. Therefore, with this image, I removed the sharpening for the window shutters to further reduce the effect.
Of course, doing this kind of step-by-step resizing, is best done as an action. You can create your own, or use one of the many available on the internet. The best actions also provide some sharpening as an intermediate step for best results.
A little bit about the post-processing of the image …
The classic shot – a beautiful bride lit by soft window light.
That’s a yes on the beautiful bride – but it’s a solid no on the window light.
What you see there is on-camera flash. (Which most likely won’t be a surprise to regular readers of the Tangents blog.)
This image is from a wedding this past weekend, and it makes a great example of how light, choice of lens, composition, angle and technique come together to make an image work. With a bit of post-processing added finally for that vintage feel.
Let’s look at the light first .. how I used on-camera bounce flash for my lighting here.
My favourite image of the week is this one from a sequence taken during the romantic portrait session after a wedding. The wedding took place in Florida, earlier on in November. (It’s my favourite image of this week since I am only now catching up on a backlog of work.) As a wedding photographer in New Jersey, it is quite a treat to do a destination wedding – someplace a little more exotic than the Garden State.
Not only was it a destination wedding in Florida, (timed with a flash photography workshop), but this also happened to be the first time that I photographed a same-sex wedding. And I felt particularly honoured to have so much faith placed in me with a special event like this.
The reason why this image is my favourite is that it shows a wonderful couple together in a spontaneous moment. It is very much *them*, and I am sure their friends and family will instantly recognize this image as capturing the essence of who they are, and how they are.
This is where a lens like the 70-200mm f2.8 is essential .. it allows breathing space between you and your subjects. The light is all available light. No flash necessary with the soft early evening light.
But I did a little bit of work on the image in Photoshop, so let’s see how I got there ..
What do you do with an image that is under-exposed but there is a certain moment that you love?
Well, perhaps you get lucky that when you convert it to B&W and crank up the exposure and embrace the noise / digital grain … and all this adds to the mood and in this case even poignancy of the moment.
Here is the original unedited image of the bride dancing with her dad …
Because of the positive comments I’ve had to the recent addition of video clips that show a glimpse of how I work, I thought I’d show the progression of an idea. Not just how the actual image was made, but how the idea progressed.
The photo above of Sarah and Mark at Coney Island, is from the day-long photo session where we went to different locations in New York. Where this image above started, was in a previous sequence ..
One thing I always loved (actually awed) from your photos in the blogs are how effectively you use flash (among various other ways) to balance the bright backgrounds with the subjects to catch the details and colors in both. However the images above seems to been blowing out the details from the sky. I am sure you would have had a reason for doing so. But would you mind sharing it to your readers?
I thought I would rather answer the question here. But taking it a step back …
Two images from quite a while back – a photo session on New Year’s Eve in Manhattan. We stopped at various places in Manhattan, including the steps of St Patrick’s on 5th Avenue where I took these photos.
On this shoot I used a number of Canon zooms, and the Sigma 14mm for some ultra-wide shot. All the images where I used the Sigma lens, clearly stood out. Not for sharpness or distortion .. but for a colour cast. (The Sigma is actually a terrific lens, especially for the price.) The images with the Sigma lens are much warmer than the Canon lenses. Neither wrong nor right … just different. Different to the extent that it took effort to correct the WB differently for the images taken with the Sigma lens, than the images where I used the other (Canon) lenses.
For those two examples: left: Canon 16-35mm f2.8 // right: Sigma 14mm f2.8
Each lens was on a Canon 1D mk2N body, with both cameras set to Cloudy WB.
And no, the light didn’t change between the two images, and no, it’s not a camera issue either. Even changing the WB as Kelvin settings using DPP, had the same effect – the Sigma lens was clearly warmer than the Canon lenses.
So the point of this post is that this kind of difference in the colour characteristics might between lenses, might be a consideration when you consider an off-brand lens. Fortunately I didn’t use the 14mm lens often, so this wasn’t a real problem for me. But I can see how it would be a real pain to spend extra time to constantly correct WB for a specific lens, in any shoot, for such a change in colour. (Assuming of course that there is much less change in the colour characteristics within a brand.)
I’m sure that there is the likelihood that these kind of colour differences exist for different lenses within the same brand. But I also suspect it will be less noticeable than this, and less of an issue. Personally I’ve never particularly noticed this problem before when using all-Nikon or all-Canon lenses.
This might then be a valid consideration – to consistently only use lenses only within a certain brand, for a more efficient workflow.
Someone recently emailed me to ask me what lighting I used for this portrait of the groomsmen. I did explain this in the Flickr group, but wanted to expand on a key point again.
When lighting groups like this, I don’t try to get all Rembrandt on the group. Instead, I have a preference for even light. A simpler approach where everyone’s face is equally well lit, with no cross shadows .. all of which makes for a faster workflow. You also have less risk of the chance of a weird shadow spoiling something.
In this instance, the light was from two Q-flashes that I was bouncing into the ceiling and wall behind me. I wanted a flood of even light. The Q-flashes were the older T2 models which I use purely as manual off-camera flash.
There is a slight problem though .. light falls off to the background, which caused the groomsmen in the back to not be as well exposed as the guys in the foreground. This was worsened by there being a slight overhang where I was standing – and this blocked the light that should’ve reached further up the staircase.
But in the image above, the groomsmen in the back are well exposed .. but I had a little help in post-production.
The title is pure nonsense. I live 20 miles outside of New York. That’s it. The complete description of the distance. Actually, I live 21.19 miles from B&H in Manhattan, which is like magnetic north for many of us photographers. We always feel drawn towards the toy-store. Now that 21.19 miles of course could mean either 30 minutes or 3 hours of driving, depending on traffic through the Lincoln tunnel. But I digress.
I could have described my distance from my house to New York as 20 miles, or disregarding traffic, as 18 minutes at 65mph. But it is nonsensical to describe my distance from New York as 20 miles at 65 mph. The 65mph becomes a superfluous bit of data when stated like that.
So why the strange title for this posting? Because as a digital photographer I see the same kind of nonsense perpetrated on a daily basis when image size is described in terms of absolute pixel dimensions (600 x 400 pixels) and a specific dpi such as 72dpi or 300 dpi also demanded.
It is unnecessary, or worse, confusing.
