Bluenose Copy

I've been slacking off a bit lately. After this post I still have a 1 photo debt. I did take some more landscape photos from my balcony, and some of them aren't too bad, but nothing I want to post here. One observation I made was that a most of these photos had a significant amount of colour noise. As I understand it, bit depth, gamut, ISO setting, and tone/exposure all affect colour clarity. I did notice that the highlights are less noisy (although still noticably noisy) than the lows. I thought that exposure time might have an effect on colour clarity (under the theory that a larger "sample" should result in less noise), although a few experiments didn't really verify that.

I also picked up a few library books a few weeks ago. "Natural Light: Visions of British Columbia" (by David Nunuk) was very inspiring (both to explore BC and to take great landscape photos). My favourite shot from that book is of a beach on the Juan de Fuca trail. The rising sun shines through the top of a cedar tree, creating some nice looking light patterns through the morning mist and projected onto the sand. However, the book that resulted in this week's photo is a textbook on lighting, called: "Light Science & Magic: An Introduction to Photographic Lighting" by Hunter, Biver and Fuqua. It's got all kinds of great information in it.

This week's photo attempts to copy a peice of framed art that I have hanging on my wall, using some of the advice from chapter 4 of the book. My lighting setup used a 60W desk lamp on the left, and a 60W soft white bulb on the right. Both near the photo. The photo was also placed so that the afternoon light shining through the living room window would not be directly reflected from the art. Due to the walls and various other light and dark items in my living room, I wasn't able to completely control the lighting, but I did my best. Here's the result.



Not too bad, although the right and top edges of the frame look substantially better than the left and bottom. I think this is the result of the sunlight coming through the window (which is above and to the right of the art). Due to the angle of the frame, a lot of the sunlight hitting it is directly reflected from the left and bottom edges, losing detail. I think the reason this is not happening on the top and right is because the desk lamp on the left is not powerful enough to cause this to happen.

Chester

After last week's post I went out and did some reading. I didn't answer any of my follow-up questions from last week, but I learned some interesting things about the basics of light, colour, and colour spaces (here and here), exposure and histograms (here, here, and here).

(As an aside, after reading about exposure and histograms, I was sure that the reason last week's photo was lacking was due to poor exposure. After reviewing its histogram, this seems not to be the case, and it remains a mystery as to why excatly I'm not happy with it.)

I then went out and tried to put these to practice by shooting some more photos on the Annapolis. In all of the shots I got, I was unhappy because either: 1) I couldn't capture the entire tonal range of the scene without losing detail at one end or the other or, 2) In shots where (1) wasn't a problem, I didn't get enough breadth of tones to make me happy.

So I'm going with a shot that, ironically, I took before I had gained any of this new knowledge. Some time last week, I was invited to a join a Facebook group by a friend (whom I can't seem to remember ever meeting) dedicated to her photography. She seems to like animal shots, and she seems to like close-up portrait animal shots. They all look pretty sharp, so I thought I'd try it on my cat Chester. Here he is in all of his glory.

I shot this at a 200mm focal length at f5.6. It was a bright day with the sun high in the sky, so the majority of the lighting was the reflection from our bright carpet. I didn't use any flash and I think the lights were off in the condo at the time.

I DID do the processing after having done the reading, so I was all excited about looking at how adjusting the raw image affected the histogram. The original was a little underexposed, so I brought it up 3/4 of a stop. The contrast was increased, distributing his face to cover a broader tonal range. The blacks were also brought up a bit, to get rid of the background detail and bring the focus to his face. I tried to do a bit of sharpening too, but couldn't really figure out the controls. This led me to the product help for Adobe Camera Raw, which looks like it might be able to answer some of my questions from last week.

Annapolis Bridge

Before getting to the photo, a bit of background.

The Artificial Reef Society of British Columbia (ARSBC) has been buying and sinking decommissioned naval vessels to create sea critter habitats for about 17 years. Each of these projects requires a monstrous amount of effort to remove materials from the ship which are hazardous to both divers and marine ecology. Their current project is the HMCS Annapolis (soon to be the AR Annapolis), which is currently moored somewhere near the shore of Gambier Island in Howe Sound, BC, Canada. On my second trip volunteering on the Annapolis, I snapped this photo from a ladder running past the exterior of the bridge.



This isn't my favourite photo from the Annapolis that day: there's another which I prefer which features some pipes from deep down inside the engine room which houses some twin steam turbines. However, I figured this one presents a greater learning opportunity and so I chose it instead.

My intention was to use the window glazing to provide a barrier of isolation between the viewer and the bridge interior, giving it a sort of eery, abandoned feeling. While composing the shot, I was focusing so much on the two doors inside that I completely missed the reflection of the bow, me, and the landscape. This was a pleasant surprise. Unfortunately, I also missed the window wiper (the rusty slanted bar dominating the lower left corner), which was much less pleasant to discover.

Using Adobe Camera Raw, I made a few adjustments to the raw image file before converting to an srgb jpg. The white balance temperature was raised, since the door interior paint has a slight yellow tint in reality. The tint was adjusted away from magenta and towards green, since green paint dominates the photo. To emphasize the old, abandoned feeling of the bridge, the exposure, brightness, vibrance and saturation was decreased. The blacks were also decreased to soften up the shadows, and contrast raised to emphasize the darkness of the bridge against the bright sky. Here's the final result.



After comparing the two, I'm not sure if the processed version is really all that better. In isolation, each parameter that I adjust in the raw toolkit appears to improve the look of the photo, but after comparing final result to the original, it seems as if I've come full circle and not really achieved anything.

A few follow up tasks for next week:

• Figure out, technically, the meaning of each parameter in the raw toolkit, and their general usage. (For example, what is the difference between exposure and brightness?)
  
• Investigate digital negative format (meaning and purpose)
• Of course, take another photo.