Philosophy of a Shooter, or where are you on the ‘Now or Later’ scale

I just finished reading Joe McNally’s book “The Hot Shoe Diaries” which was recently put out in paperback, well, more like trade paperback.  For those of you who don’t know, Joe is a big-dog. A monster photographer who shoots and has shot for just about everybody. He’s also completely obsessed with speedlites.

Now a few notes about the book before I continue.  If you’re interested in expanding your knowledge of using speedlites to their fullest extent, and like to read about how other photographers think about tackling challenging shoots, then it’s a great book to read.  If you’re a big speedlite guy already and have read everything on the wonderful Strobist website by David Hobby, then you probably know most of what Joe is going to say.  Also, it’s a little too brand crazy for me.  I know he shoots Nikon and uses Lumadyne gear, but you don’t have to talk about everything by it’s model number.   You don’t have to say “I used a Lastolite Tri-fold to fill” every time.  Honestly, just say ‘gold reflector’ please.  Seriously, the book might as well say “Paid for by Nikon” in large friendly letters on the cover.  That’s not to take away from the content, which is great, but rather a style thing.  Maybe it’s because I’m a Canon guy.

Ok, now that that is out of the way. The one major thing I took away from the book is that Joe likes to get his pictures ‘in the camera’, and he does. If he’s got to setup 47 speedlites inside and around an Air Force transport plane, well, that’s what he’s gonna do. On environmental portraits, he’ll setup 2-3 speedlites on the subject, and then another in the tree to the left with a warming filter and then a 4th zoomed in to 200mm with a cooling filter coming from the window across the street to rim light the girl. Many times he mentions that this is so he doesn’t have to sit in front of a computer all day. He’s a ‘now’ guy, he want’s to get it right at the shoot and not have to ‘fix’ it later in photoshop. Maybe it’s because he used to shoot film where you HAD to get it right in the camera. Either way, it’s certainly a valid way to go and his results are first-class, but it got me thinking that I couldn’t be more different on the now-later scale.

When I’m at a shoot, mostly what I’m trying to get is good raw material. As you can see in the before/after photos of Phil from a couple days ago, It didn’t really matter to me that Phil was a stop or two darker than the background.  Or that the background was probably a stop hotter than I would have liked. As long as I could finagle with the RAW file to export one version with the background pulled back and another with Phil pulled up and then mask the two together, then I’m fine. Mixed light temperatures, no problem. As long as there is luminance data and nothing important blown out, I can work with it.  Now that’s not to say that I wouldn’t like to have it be better right out of the camera, everyone would.  But what I am saying is that I wouldn’t take the 5 or 10 minutes of my time in the middle of the shoot to setup multiple lights with correction gels and stands and line of sight to make the TTL signals work and everything else, just to make it easier for me later after the shoot.  I worry too much about losing Phil’s attention and altering the flow of the shoot. 

Maybe it’s because I tend to take (I hope) really intimate portraits. I want my subjects to let their guard down so I can capture something special. In fact today I got an email from a reader asking how I do just that. I told him it takes time, sometimes a lot of it. It’s talking and shooting and about the energy between the two of you. It’s a dance, and it takes time to earn your partners trust. That 5 minutes, hell, even a 10 second lens change, is sometimes enough to set me back with the subject.

Plus he carries like 6 speedlights and a truck-full of diffusers and
silks and c-stands with him.  To me that’s kinda defeating the idea of
a 3″x2″x7″ battery powered speedlite. Having my assistant shoot a
speedlite though a diffuser is fancy lighting for me on location most
of the time.

It may also have to do with the fact that I don’t mind sitting in front of the computer editing. I have much more control and none of the time pressure. I can go out, spend my time at the shoot interacting with the subject and then return home with the booty in the form of 3GB or so of RAW data that I then get to play with.  Also I’m usually not handing my clients a whole slew of images.  I select what I think are the best and those get the attention.  Maybe 5 out of 200, and I may take 2 hours or more playing with that single image to mold it into what I wanted it to be. I also will try to do 3-4 different setups in the 20 minutes I’ve got with the subject. I’m not sure that would be possible with these fancy setups, unless you had 48 lights and had them all setup from the get-go.  Damn, I think he actually DOES have 48 lights.

All of this said, I learned a lot in the book. It certainly makes me want to play with my speedlites more. I think some playtime is in order.  Maybe just maybe, I’d be better off if I were a little more towards the center of the scale than I am now.

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Addendum: 
Just found this Canon/Nikon TTL system comparison.  Might be handy for some people:  http://www.planetneil.com/tangents/2009/03/25/ttl-flash-canon-and-nikon/

Online Portfolios

Like most ‘artists’, I obsess over how people see my work. Designing and redesigning my website, and doing constant iterations of what images are on it and as prints in my book. It’s a stressful process that is often helped by an objective pair of eyes.  I for one have redesigned my website at least 4 times in the past couple of years. To be fair, before I was a photographer I was an art director and flash programmer, so there is an element of fun in it for me as well, but that’s not to say that I’m ever satisfied.

Years ago, in an attempt to make it easy for me to post random images, I sat down one night and started coding what became PhotoFolio. It worked well and I kept adding features and started letting people download and use it.  For a while I used it on my own site, but eventually I wanted something I bit more customized for my own use.

My current site, at billwadman.com, is based on a horizontal scroll mode.  Grab the red bar and drag is to the right to see more images. I saw another photographer’s site about a year ago and kind of fell for the way it felt. Her images were more airy and fashion than mine so it felt a little less cluttered. I’m also kind of over the ‘sections’ at the bottom. I’m thinking less images, higher overall quality. More of a paper portfolio on the web.  One image on the screen at a time.  Also, for those with higher-res screens, I want to be able to have larger images because I think my work looks better when you see into the images a bit more. 500 pixels tall doesn’t quite cut it. Of course, it also doesn’t help that most of my images are of a portrait orientation.

A few days ago I was looking at my monster talented friend Craig Ward’s new site at wordsarepictures.co.uk and liked the simplicity of the column of text and the image, and thought I’d give a similar look a shot. Initially I was thinking of doing the site in HTML, or to be more specific, HTML5 or at least a lot of js/css.  But after fiddling with a php template read from an xml file for a while I got thoroughly frustrated.  Seriously, doesn’t everything you want to do in dHTML have to be some kludgy workaround? Hey, W3C, how about an alignment attribute to ‘center’ things with?  Thanks in advance.

That led me back to Flash, and I remembered that one of the things I didn’t like with flash in the past is that my images color shifted a bit. I export them as sRGB and everything else I can do to minimize it, but I end up with some weird saturation issues, especially reds in skintones.  Remembering that the latest flash player and Actionscript 3 have some kind of support for color management, I threw myself into the task of building my idea in AS3.  Now, I’ve done a lot of Actionscripting in my day, but all AS2.  Any time I’ve dabbled in AS3 I’ve felt like I forgot how to do basic things like walk. Today was no different.  I’m sure for people with computer science degrees, a lot of the things I found frustrating and annoying and confusing and downright incomprehensible, would to them be a breath of fresh air, or at least comforting.  For me however, it was an exercise in humility.  It was all I could do to get an xml file loaded and parsed, and pull in smoothed and resized jpegs on the fly. Huge snaps to my good friend Hardin Gray for the assist.

Anyway, what I’ve come up with is a greatly simplified site, and still in a pre-beta stage.  But if you’ve got flash player 10 and want to take a look:  http://www.billwadman.com/proto

I like the big images, I like the openness. It still needs some work. For example, I’ve got to have the big image size up or down on the fly if you resize the browser. But the obvious functionality is there.

So how do you guys feel about this issue? HTML or Flash? Are thumbnails a necessity? How many images are enough? How many are too many?  Are templates like the ones in iWeb or Simpleviewer good enough?  Light or dark background?  Tough questions and I’m sure, open to many opinions. I’m not even sure where I stand on most of them.

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Oh and I almost forgot… About that Flash 10 color management stuff, I found it very hit or miss. Testing the site in flash player on my windows box produces correct colors.  Loading into a browser plug-in does not.  In either FF3 (with color management enabled) or IE7.  Flash says they’re not capable of using color profiles.  Interestingly enough, the flash plug-in says the same thing in FF and Safari on the Mac, however it ‘seemed’ as though it was rendering the colors correctly.  I’m not sure what all this means, but it somewhat defeats the purpose of me using AS3 in the first place.  Argghhhghgh.

Photography in Japan

So I’m back from Japan, now have a few hours of sleep toward the ultimate goal of not waking up in the middle of the night anymore, and would like to share a few thoughts on taking pictures while on a trip to Japan.

As you know I went with only a film camera, an old Hasselblad 500cm.  Today’s job is to start culling through all the pictures and scanning and whatnnot, but I can already make some conclusions:  
– The Hasselblad takes really pretty pictures.
– Film and processing are getting more and more expensive.
– Slide film sucks on contrasty scenes.
– and finally, if I had it to do over again, I would shoot digital. Probably the 5DII with the 24-105IS zoom and an additional wide fast prime for night stuff.

It was really fun shooting film and certainly changes the experience of taking pictures. And even though with digital there isn’t that “this piece of film was there at the location where the picture was taken” kind of like an ‘moment time capsule’.  In the end the cost of film, I probably spent almost $400 on film and processing,  as well as the inability for me to change films quickly, led to some frustration.   And yes I know I could have had multiple film backs with different films, etc, I didn’t want to deal with that kind of complexity.  Plus at over $1 a shot with medium format film, I was more hesitant to take more fun and silly pictures that might not work.  Digital would have let me be a bit more experimental.

All of that said, for those photographers planning a trip to Japan, here are a few pointers.  You really can find film over there.  120 is no problem, I even saw 11×14″ sheet film.  I should have brought some home for Timothy Greenfield-Sanders.  The big camera stores like Bic Camera and Yodobashi have large film selections which are just out against the wall for you to peruse, and even little camera places in tourist sections of town carried a more impressive range than most pro shops here in New York.  I’ll agree with the person who suggested Provia 400.  It’s beautiful, though a little too expensive for me at $8 a roll.  Yikes.

As far as processing goes, I didn’t do any until I was back in Tokyo the second week. I brought most of it to a place called Kimura Camera  on suggestion of an old post on photo.net.  I was in Shinjuku, so it was the closest place that wasn’t some huge mega store.  However they sent it out and it took a few days, though it was done faster than they promised.  Quality seemed good and the people there was super nice.  Like if they were that nice in America, they would be being sarcastic. This place also had cases of old cool stuff to oogle, some of it at reasonable prices. 

However when I picked up my last batch from them, I had a half dozen or so more rolls and not enough time to do it their way so I asked if he had any faster suggestions and he pointed me to Horiuchi Color, which is the kind of place I was looking for all along.  Pro lab, overnight turn around, better prices than people who have to send it out. Their work was great, and they only took cash (which I found interesting) but the one guy in there didn’t like me at all.  I was trying to be polite to the girl who was helping me, and maybe he was dating her and felt threatened or something, because he was cold.  A drastic 180 degree difference from everyone else we me there.

Oh and as far as film suggestions.  I think sticking with negative film over slides is a good idea. The dynamic range of chromes is a little too narrow for many settings.  If I were starting over on the trip, I’d grab a couple boxes of Portra 400VC and then a few rolls of 160 and 800 for certain settings.  

Ok, time to get to scanning and such. If anyone has any specific questions, let me know.

Japan gear

So, I’m heading for Japan on Saturday, and I figured I’d talk a bit about what I’m packing.  Photo-wise of course, I’m sure you aren’t interested in how many pairs of socks I’m bringing.

Well, this is it. One camera and it’s film.  I decided on my old Hasselblad 500cm just to make things interesting and slow me down a bit. When it’s all folded up, it’s surprising how compact they are for a medium format camera.  It’s from about 1973, and I bought it from KEH a few years ago with an 80mm lens for around $800, bargain grade and it works great.  I did replace the focusing screen with a acu-matte that I found online used.  It had a couple small scratches on it, but it cost $30 instead of the usual $120 for ones without a scratch. I think I can handle the damage.  I’ve also added an op/tech strap like I use on my Canon as well.  They’re comfortable and I like the way they just click disconnect when they get in your way.

Next is a meter, since the 500cm doesn’t have one. So I’m carrying my Sekonic 308. It’s not fancy like some of my friends have, but it does the job for what I need it for, which is mostly purposes like this and when I’m shooting film with a strobe. Actually in this case I wish I had a smaller one like the 208.  Some little old school analog one that took up a little less space, but at the moment I’d rather not spend another $100 for a marginal size decrease.  One thing I like about the lens I’ve got is that the aperture and shutter speed are linked and related based on EV which is a measure of the amount of light there is available.  So your meter reads 12EV, you left the lever and set your lens to 12 and then all of the correct combinations of aperture and shutter are available at a twist.  So maybe f/2.8 at 250th, f/4 at 125th, and f/5.6 at 60th are all options for 12EV.  Well the lens is locked to 12, so just select the combination you want. Makes it really easy, especially when your traveling and your head gets fuzzy.

And since it’s a film camera, I’ll be bringing film.  It’s all in a plastic bag so that I can ask TSA security to hand check it and not have it go through the machine.  Apparently they have to if you ask nicely and make it easy for them.  I always bring a roll or two of Ilford 3200, both because it’s handy when there’s no light, and also because it’s really fast, so you can say, “Well, there’s high-speed film in there, so it absolutely can’t go through the machine.  I plan on getting the film processed there when I can, just so I don’t have to deal with security on the way back, and I’ve heard that I can buy film there, but I’m more of a Kodak guy than Fuji, so I thought I’d bring some just in case.  So in the bag I’ve got:

Kodak E100G Chrome
I love this stuff, something about the subdued colors it’s got.  Shot some in Paris a few years ago and they were my favorite pictures. Plus looking at travel positives on a light table is so satisfying as well as making scanning easier. Some of the more observant of you might notice that there are a couple rolls of Provia in there as well, but I’ve replaced them with more E100G since I took this photo an hour ago.  I figure I prefer the Kodak, and I’m sure I can get Fuji over there.

Kodak Portra 400VC
I usually get NC, but they didn’t have any in stock so I figured I’d try the more saturated stuff.  My girlfriend Holly at Calumet assured me that it wasn’t too garish, I’ll find out for myself. Went with 400 for times when 100 chromes are just too slow.  I also threw in a roll of Portra 800 just in case.

Ilford 3200 B/W
This stuff is really fast, really contrasty, and pretty grainy, but fun for dusk and nighttime in the city.  I imagine it could be magical in Tokyo.  We’ll see.

My goal is to shoot about 1 roll a day, which would leave me with about 200 photos over the two weeks.  That’s a lot of scanning, and processing fees, but when’s the next time I’m going to be in Nara?  Exactly.

Japan – the camera dilema.

Ok, so I’m leaving for Japan in a couple weeks and have been thinking about the camera question.  I need a break from shooting tons of digital stuff, and I’ve been told by my friend Jonathan who lives over there that I can get film, so I’ve decided to bring a film camera.  Just one film camera.  Which begs the question, ‘Which film camera?’

I’ve got two options in mind, Hasselblad medium format or Leica M 35mm format.  Both are excellent cameras, surprisingly similar in weight (actually the Leica might be a little heavier). and with a bag on the leica, they’re about the same size.

I’m leaning towards the Hasselblad and shooting mostly chromes, as that’s what’s brought me the most pleasure in the past, but thought I’d get the opinions of others that have been there and done that.  Remember that I’m not shooting for sale or anything, these are just for me and I don’t mind coming back with 150 pictures total.  Maybe a roll a day or so for 2 weeks

Medium format is easier to scan, but 35mm would have more images per roll and is a little ‘faster’ to use.  Ah, decisions, decisions.

If anyone has any advice or insight, please enlighten me.  Thanks.

Ratios

Photography is full of ratios, from light sources to focal length and subject distance.  However in this case I’m referring to image ratio.  That is, the ratio of the height of the frame to the width of the frame. This used to be largely dependent on your camera choice and still is in many ways, but now with digital, all kinds of things are available to us.  That little Panasonic LX3 for example, can go to 4:3 or 3:2 or even 16:9 just be flipping a switch.

But let’s back up a bit and look at the past. Large format cameras came in all kinds of sizes from 2″x3″ to 20″x24″, though it was 8×10″ and 4×5″ that are the ones largely available today (for the time being).  Around the turn of the century, Kodak released it’s brownie camera with it’s 120mm roll of film which was the granddaddy of the medium format work.  Medium format film is shot in all kinds of ratios.  The old Hasselblad and Rollei put out square or 6×6 images.  Other manufacturers like Mamiya and Fuji started shooting rectangular images at 6×4.5 (645) and 6×7 (67) and even larger ones like 6×9 and 6×12, though those are somewhat niche.  And finally (for our purposes) was the Kodak 135 format, otherwise known at 35mm film which was taken from the motion picture world.  Though a few other cameras did so earlier, it was the original Leica which set the 3×2 ratio we observe today.

Great history lesson Bill, but what’s your point? Well, just that images taken at different ratios feel different and I wonder why that is.  Lately I’ve taken to cropping my images to 4×5 when I’m experimenting for myself.  Now, you could go and talk about golden ratio and all that, but none of the formats are right on that one.  4×5 is probably the closest, though I haven’t done the math.  It’s funny how you see differently depending on how the frame is shaped.  I take pictures with my Hasselblad that I wouldn’t with a 35mm camera.  In fact, one of the reasons I bought the 35/1.4 for my Canon was so I could crop square and get the same image as I’d get through a normal lens on the Hasselblad.

Let’s use a photo of Charlie Maxwell as an example.  Now this isn’t ideal, because I’ve already taken the shot and I didn’t intend to crop, though BusinessWeek did.  Anyway as you can see, there’s a different look to each, even though they’re the same image.

Perhaps the most annoying thing about all this is how it relates to printing.  Here in the US, we have all kinds of sizes of paper that were invented before the dawn of time, all with no relation to each other.  8.5×11″, 8.5×14″, 11×17″, 13×19″.  Basically a nightmare because none of these relate exactly to the image ratios above.  Which means that if you want to print your images with full bleed (that is, full-page all the way to the edges, with no margin) then you will end up having to crop.  11×17″ and 13×19″ are close to a 3×2 35mm frame, but no cigar.  I generally print my images smaller than and in the center of the paper, but I’ve never been a big full bleed guy.  And the use of your images in most magazines requires the same cropping, so make sure you leave some space around the edges of your pictures.

In Europe and everywhere else in the world, they use paper sizes decided upon by an ISO standard in the ratio of 1 to the square root of 2.  A much more ideal system, or at least it makes sense and sounds kind of bad ass, though it still leaves photographers wanting as you’ve still got to crop.

This is all to say that lately I’ve liked shooting 4:5 ratio on my digital camera via cropping.  I think the high-end Nikon even have a heads-up display which will give you crop lines in your viewfinder to make it easier to shoot with cropping in mind.  There are some purists who will insist that cropping is sloppy.  And while I’ll agree with them that cropping to save an otherwise crappy shot is not always cool, I think it is OK if you’re shooting with a different ratio in mind, but are stuck with the 2:3 that your camera gives.  Sometimes 2:3 is too tall for me, and I’m certainly not going to apologize for it. Plus with today’s 21MP images, we’ve got to spend the extra pixels on something!

My i7 Dream Machine

<Nerd alert> If you’re really not interested in dorky computer stuff, you can ignore this post </Nerd alert>

I’ve been looking to upgrade my Core 2 Quad machine for a while now.  It’s fast, but like anyone I’d like faster.

Below are the parts that I’ve currently got on my wishlist at NewEgg.com.  But I’d like to note that I’m assuming a few things with this:

1) That you’ve already got a monitor, keyboard, mouse, tablet, speakers, etc.  This is just for the big computer part that goes on the floor.

2) That you know what you’re doing building a computer.  It’s really not that hard if you’re up for new experiences.  Actually it’s quite fun and there is something to working on a machine that you know you built.

3) I’m going to salvage my video card and hard drives from my current machine.  I also have a copy of Vista x64 that I don’t need to buy.

So, here are the specs:
$79.99      Antec Solo Black/Silver Steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case     
$314.99    ASUS P6T WS PRO LGA 1366 Intel X58 ATX Intel Motherboard     
$294.99    Intel Core i7 920 Nehalem 2.66GHz LGA 1366 130W Quad-Core Processor
$358.00    12GB RAM = 2x CORSAIR XMS3 6GB (3 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 1600
$369.00    Intel X25-M SSDSA2MH080G1 80GB SATA Internal Solid state disk (SSD)     
$66.99    Vigor Monsoon III LT Dual 120mm Fan CPU Cooler Socket 1366 Ready     

According to Newegg, this comes to $1,483.96

As I said, I’ve already got hard drives (a 150GB Velociraptor and 4 1TB storage drives), power supply, and a video card.  But you could certainly get multiple TB of storage for the cost of that SSD.  Or get 6GB of RAM instead of 12 and spend the difference on a decent video card.  I prefer passively cooled ones without fans, but that’s because I’m a silent computer dork.  You don’t need THAT fancy of a video card even for photoshop CS4.  Anything around $100-$130 will do quite nicely.  

If you really wanted to slim it down you could get a nice 1TB drive (like the WD Black series) for $130 or so, stick with 6GB of RAM, a low-end video card and the stock cooler for about $1000.  You could also save about $100 by going with the low-end P6T motherboard, but I’m willing to pay a little more to get the higher-end workstation board which may be a little more stable.  Me, I was planning on overclocking this 2.66GHz CPU to around 3.6 or so.

Reasons why I’m hesitating pulling the trigger:

1) The economy is really bad, so it’s hard to justify spending money when the computer I have works just fine. Then again, my current machine could be sold for around $500 at least, so that would defray the cost a bit.

2) The prices of DDR3 RAM are coming down, so every couple weeks I wait, I could get more/better/faster RAM for less. Maybe even wait until I can get the 4GB DIMMS which would let me get to 24GB of RAM.  I know, silly.

3) I’d love to replace my 4 1TB storage drives with just a pair of the new WD 2TB drives that have just been announced but everyone is currently sold out of. They are rumored to be quiet and cool and surprisingly fast due to high areal density.

4) Anandtech.com is going to post a round-up of the latest SSD drives and I’d like to see if any of them can compete with the Intel for less before I leap. Up until now, almost all of the reasonable ones were haunted by a crappy JMicron controller which had horribly bad write latency.

The crazy thing is that even with the SDD and the 2TB drives, I can have my dream system for less than $2000.  That’s just insane.
If you’ve got questions, I’ve got answers.  

Noise, and why it’s not a big deal anymore.

Look at any review of the latest digital camera and you’ll see at least a page or two of 100% crops of noise at different ISO speeds, and endless comparisons with 23 other cameras.  At this point I think it’s fair to say that the engineers have successfully slayed the noise dragon. Both Canon and Nikon have full-frame cameras that are comfortable at 6400 and higher (notice I say “comfortable”, that’s actually usable and not just in special circumstances.)

One side note I’d like to make about those noise comparisons before I go on. They’re not at all real world.  Usually they’ll shoot the same scene on a tripod with the same lighting. All very scientific and objective, but most people are not sports shooters who need fast shutter speeds and so up their ISO when they’ve got decent light. Most people are like me and up the ISO when they don’t have enough light and thus high-iso noise is accentuated buy dark tones and shadow. That’s why I said 6400 is comfortable.  Ok, done with my mini-rant, now on with the show.

My old 5D was for a long time the leader in the noise race, then the Nikon 12MP cameras came out and upped the ante, then the 5DII came out with similar noise but twice the dots, etc.  The thing is, the noise we’re dealing with now is leaps and bounds better than on film at the equivalent speeds.  Last year I was walking around with my sister carrying my Leica filled with a roll of Portra 800 and when I got home and scanned it, I was very surprised how much grain there was. Here’s an example to the right, and that’s a 50% crop (here’s a link to the whole image in a post from last year).  I’d say it’s the equivalent of at least 3200 or even 6400 on my current digital.  That’s at least a two to three stop advantage.

Yes that’s 35mm, and medium format and large format are better when it comes to grain.  I’ve shot the Ilford 3200 speed film on my Hasselblad when traveling and loved it.  The grain however was definitely there.  Medium format film compared to 35mm digital, I’d give the edge to digital.  Don’t even try to talk about 4×5, what was the last time anyone shot anything over 400 speed film.  I’ll agree large format is amazing, but it couldn’t be further from 35mm digital in workflow or convenience.

You could also argue the differences between digital noise and film grain.  Sure, I’ll agree that as a general rule of thumb I’d rather have film grain.  But noise has been getting better looking, and as resolution goes up, it gets smaller relative to the pixels.  Which is something that people who compare the relative noise of the D3 with the 5DII rarely mention.

Here’s the kicker though: Lately I’ve been adding grain to my images, especially ones shot at 100-400 ISO.  That’s right, I’ll open the image up in 32bit Photoshop (yuck!) and create a layer of medium gray and run the Alien Skin Exposure plug-in to add film grain to it (I choose the 120 size grain).  Then I change the blending mode to overlay and opacity to taste. Now, you might ask, “Why in God’s name would you want to ADD fake film grain to a clean digital image!?”.  Well to answer that, I’m going to have to take you on a quick little ride down my memory lane.

I went to school for music and not visual arts and did a lot of production work where I soaked up just about everything I could get my hands on about digital audio.  I could write for days about how different aspects of the digital/analog battle in audio correlates to the digital/film battle in photography, but for the moment we’ll keep it to one facet, and that’s dither.

The process of analog to digital conversion in audio is much like a A/D converter in a camera.  Most importantly in that the louder or brighter the signal, the more information that is used to capture it.  So in audio that means that really quiet things down near the noise floor tend to flirt between being on or being off. For example, if the scale of loudness, for the sake of our conversation, goes from 1-100 (100 being clipping) then there will be some really really quiet sounds (or overtones and harmonics within other sounds) that sometimes register a 1 and sometimes register a 0.  Basically coming in and out of existence as far as the recording goes.  This shows itself as all kinds of low level distortions and some people say it’s audible, blah blah blah.

The point is that recording people decided a long time ago that if you added really quiet noise to the signal, those quiet sounds wouldn’t go from on to off, but would rather go from audible to being lost in this very quiet noise floor which sounds much like hiss on an analog tape (remember that stuff?)  The crazy thing is that listening tests showed that adding this noise, or dither, actually made the recordings sound better, even though technically, you were making them less perfect.

So, how does this effect photography.  Well I guess is does in two ways.  The 1 to 1 corresponding  effect would be to add grain to a digital images which has a lot of dark tones which have “blocked up”.  That is, that there aren’t enough numbers in the data to describe enough levels in the darkest stop of the image right next to black.  By adding grain, you’ll make the transitions between those levels less noticeable because the differences will get lost in the randomness of the noise pattern instead of being an obvious line between black and one level above black.  You might be losing ultimate image quality, but you’ll end up with a more visually appealing photograph to the viewer.

But after all that explanation, that’s not how I’ve been using the film grain lately.  Mostly I’m using it to hide my mistakes, primarily in skin.  Using the clone tool and healing brushes most of us can handle a few blemishes and wrinkles. But if the need for cloning is extensive or you’ve got to clone out a big chunk of hair from in front of someone’s face, it’s not as easy to make it look natural and blend with the skin around it in a believable way.  Film grain to the rescue. By adding the grain you’re bringing back some of the texture that too much 25% opacity cloning can smudge, as well as blend different work areas into each other.  Plus, I think that our eyes do find film grain a pleasing artifact.

Here’s a 100% example from yesterday’s image.  First is the original RAW file, second is hair removed and skin smoothed, and third is the a layer of film grain added.  Pretty cool eh?

When is ‘Done’?

All artists have the issue of when to consider their work ‘done’ and leave well enough alone. Painters, composers, architects, writers, they all have to deal with it.  And some, like sculptors, only get one chance to go too far. You can’t add marble back very easily. In some ways, photographers have it better than most because by nature our art is much more structured if you want it to be. Press the shutter and be done with it, creating the negative is their final creative decision, the Cartier-Bresson way.  Then again he was a prissy, french, rich boy.

Further down the scale are those people that used to mess in the dark room.  It being an analog process, every print is different so there are a lot of decisions to be made in that process.  Chemical and paper choices, dodging and burning, print size, etc.  Now of course, most of us play in the virtual darkroom of PhotoShop.  Anyone whose seen my work knows that I’m not immune. I’ll often spend 2 hours or more on an image.  Playing with curves and color correction, saving and walking away.  Only to come back and tweak half the stuff I did.  Refine it in an iterative process.

For me, I work on getting it the way I want and then at a certain point I switch and start looking for flaws in my work to fix by cleaning up sloppily drawn masks or tweaking curves to blend better.  The point at which I’m happy is when my pictures look like my work, but at the same time look like they couldn’t be any other way.  I know it’s ethereal and gray, but it’s the best I can put into words.  My workflow has been this way for a while now, but my standards have certainly gotten more strict.  The cleaning up stage has gotten longer and more anal.  I recently entered a competition and in the process of choosing and prepping my images, I spent hours refining post-production that I had considered “done” back when I shot them.  The older they were, the more work they needed to look finished in my mind. And we’re talking 8 months for the oldest, not 2-3 years.

So, the question is, how do you know when you’re done? When to back away and say, “I’m finished, this is the final product”?  I realize that this is a subjective question; I am looking for opinions.  Also, is it ok and/or right to go back and refine them?  Should you leave well enough alone?  Did Picasso go back and add paint to a 10 year old canvas?  And if you do go back, do you make a copy of the original and consider the new one a different version?  Interesting stuff.

File Workflow Q&A

A reader named Dwayne sent me an email this morning asking some questions about my file workflow.  I figured that other people might be interested in the answers, so I’ve turned it into a post.

Question #1 – Your using a raid 1, so do all of your working files as well as backup files live there?

Yes and no, my RAW and PSD files exist on my RAID 1 array (one of two arrays to be specific)  That way they’re always available to me.  I’m not the type of guy who shoots 10GB a day, so I can fit everything I’ve ever shot and kept on a couple 1TB drive arrays.

I also backup to external discs as well.  In the past few days I’ve started using Microsoft’s free Sync Toy utility (I’m a Windows user) to keep copies of everything on an external drive. Currently that’s a bare 1.5TB Seagate in an eSata drive dock.  I keep the bare drives in a waterproof Pelican case which I can grab if I need to leave my place in a hurry.

Question #2 – Do you at some point delete your working files and only keep the edited ones and backups on your raid?

Nope, I’ve set up my system so that I never have to ‘archive’ anything.  I like having it all available all the time.  You never know when you’re going to need to go dig something up.  There may be a time when it gets impractical, but drive sizes and file sizes seem to double at about the same rate, so I think I’ll be ok into the forseeable future.

Oh and there isn’t a difference between my ‘working’ and ‘edited’ files.  I export my RAW to PhotoShop as a 16bit – ProPhoto RGB file and then save it with all the layers as a PSD which is my final file. They’re big and unwieldy at times, but I like the quality and also keep my editing options open.  I do export my ‘finished’ image (whatever that means artistically) to a jpeg file which gets sent up into the cloud using JungleDisk as a last ditch backup in case my neighborhood gets arsoned, but I consider the psd the final file. Unless I have to flatten a copy for delivery to a client of course.

Question #3 – Do you backup your raw straight from camera files to dvd?

No, I don’t backup to DVD. The capacity just isn’t there for me and it takes too much time. Plus then you’ve got books and books of burned DVDs to deal with. 

I prefer to backup to external drives.  When I get home from a shoot I’ll copy the RAW images to my internal RAID as well as a couple external drives just in case.  If I had my laptop on site, my assistant or I will often copy them onto it’s internal drive drive and maybe an little 2.5″ external if I’m feeling anal.  On really serious shoots I’ll send these external drives home with other people (my assistant and producer usually).

If anyone has any questions or if I was unclear anywhere, let me know and I’ll do my best to clarify.