General photography natter — gear, thoughts, ideas, and the odd photo.
With so many of the new DSLRs now sporting HD video (my new Canon 7D included), there’s a lot of experimentation going on with video. This video of the recent Icelandic volcano shows off some of what the new cameras can do. In this one, the videographer is using a special motorized dolly system to get the moving timelapse images. Simply brilliant.
Enjoy!
Iceland, Eyjafjallajökull – May 1st and 2nd, 2010 from Sean Stiegemeier on Vimeo.
I’m home, but still catching up on the blog, Project 365, life, the universe, and everything else. There’s some retroblogging in my future. (So, just to make sure your head hurts, I’ll be blogging as though I did it in the past, but actually in the future of where I sit right now. Ouch.)
While you’re waiting, enjoy this video. Get a Kleenex. You’ll need it.
Leave Me from Daros Films on Vimeo.
Coming up in May, the National Specialty for the Bernese Mountain Dog Club of America will be held in Wisconsin. Darla will be going, and taking at least one of the Berners with her. Molly will be marching in the Parade of Veterans and the Parade of Titleholders. We’re pretty proud of our girl.
They also have a photo contest, and I’ve dropped thirteen images on them for it. Here they are. Enjoy!
A few weeks ago, I was selected to join the Photoshop CS5 Beta team. This was quite an honor, and I owe it all to my NAPP membership. Way cool opportunity!
While I can’t speak to features — NDA, ya know — the beta testers have been released to talk about the fact that Photoshop CS5 is out there, and show off some of the work we’ve done with it. Below is a before and after piece that I’ve been working on. All I can say is that Photoshop CS5 seems to really rock, and saved me a TON of time in working through the “after” image.
The kickoff event comes April 12th — can’t wait ’til then, and for the new product!
Emma loves to look out the window at the birds and squirrels. With the afternoon sun shining through the curtains, I photographed her staring at something off in the distance. I love the look of her staring off at… something. She’s a great model, and she works for dog food. 🙂
I took this image with my Canon 7D and Canon 24-105/4L lens. I brought it into Photoshop CS4E, massaged the hot spots with Nik Viveza and applied my new favorite filter, Glamour Glow, from Nik Color Efex Pro.
I was looking in my news feeds yesterday, and saw a piece by Moose Peterson, talking about the cost of wildlife photography. Specifically, he muses on the antics of photographers he’s observed on his recent trip to Yellowstone. It’s a good read, and well worth paying attention to if you photograph in the field.
The clan Wright saw the same thing when we were at Yellowstone in June of ’08. Traffic jams were common whenever there were any big mammals near the road. I know that’s not a good thing, but there’s really nothing you can do once you’re trapped in it. It’s like watching a train wreck — you’re there, and there’s nothing you can do to prevent it. And wherever the critters were, someone was bound to be putting a kid fifteen away from bison for that year’s Christmas card. That’s why I like my long lens and teleconverters — I don’t have to do that kind of thing.
I’ve gotta agree with Moose’s post. While I don’t tromp around in the “big wild” (most of the time), the principle’s the same. Stalking the critters isn’t worth the shot. And frankly, if you’re grabbing their images while they’re fleeing from your pursuit, that’s not exactly nature photography. More like unnatural photography.
I’m pretty much a rules-based kinda guy. If you’re not supposed to chase the wildlife, you don’t. Stay on the trail. Don’t pick the posies. That kind of stuff. When I hear about folks trying to operate outside the rules — whether it’s chasing their photographic vision, or just horsing around — I just have to wonder when the nature they’re exploiting will be taken away from all of us, either by fence or foible. Either way, t’aint right.
For a few months, I’ve had a real bee in my bonnet concerning the voices of photography. When I first started shooting digitally in 2002, most of what I was doing was trial and error. I didn’t have any mentors that I was learning from, so any voice of experience that I searched for either came from a web search for a specific issue I was having, or from buying a book at the local bookstores. Nothing wrong with those paths, and those paths served me well.
A few years later, several of us at the office were all shooting Canon gear, and for the last three years or so, we’ve been critiquing each others’ work, and helping each other as we’ve bumped into particular issues. One guy’s a gearhead, another is a Lightroom guy, another is a Photoshop experimenter… we all bring something different to the table, which has tremendous value. Most of us are selling our art locally, and are displaying in galleries and shows throughout our region, so we’re not exactly living in a bubble, mutually fawning over each others’ work. IDIC. In other words, if all all you hear/see/do is what just one gaggle says you should, then you end up with a real opportunity to shut out other voices.
A few months ago, I started getting the podcasts of a photographer who was offering his services to review your portfolio via his podcast. In fairness of full disclosure, I didn’t submit anything — I don’t have the cojones to do that at this stage of my game. While I’m sure there’s value in that kind of critique, I’m finding a great deal of constructive criticism with our little photo group, and that’s kept me plenty busy with my imagery.
When I listened to the podcasting photographer, my first sense was that he was pretty harsh toward the submitters’ portfolios. Now, that’s probably realistic in the big, bad real world of photography, but when he and his wife began cracking jokes at the expense of the images — to the point of using some of them as running gags while critiquing other folks’ work — well, my respect for this guy dropped off the map.
Where I come from — and this photographer is based only 150mi or so from where I was raised — you don’t poke fun of folks’ hearts when they’ve laid them bare out there for everyone to see. To quote the first Spiderman film, “With great power comes great responsibility.” There’s wisdom there. If you’re gonna lay yourself out as an expert in any field, there’s no requirement that you help another living soul. But when you ask them to come with their work in hand, there’s a certain amount of decorum expected as you deal with those invited folks’ “children.” That kind of treatment of invited folks led me to believe that this was a voice in my head I could do without.
And now to a separate topic, which I’ll tie together at the end.
For quite some time, there’s been a real bone of contention between the established wedding photographers (which I’m not) and the newly minted, freshly camera-bearing wedding photographers (which I’m also not — my doctor has enough issue with my blood pressure without adding the stress of event and portrait photography!). The new ones aren’t charging what the established ones think they should, and the old-timers are saying that’s eroding the price for the field, and therefore destroying photography as we know it. Or something like that. The new folks, of course, don’t have twenty years of experience against which they can justify higher rates, and frankly, the new folks’ work and products may not be the caliber of the old-timers… sometimes. Or it could be just as good or better, but in reality, it’s really up to the purchaser to make that call. You certainly can’t decide that based solely on the price charged. If the old-timer has a better portfolio, that should be pretty obvious, and then it’s a value proposition — is there enough difference *to me* as the consumer to justify the difference in cost?
If an old-timer has shot gazillions of weddings for the rich and famous in all the lavishness of those environments, that’s great. However, when Bobby and Bobbi Sue graduate high school or college and get married right before he ships to Afghanistan, they aren’t looking for a $2500-to-$10,000 photographer or package. Some newly minted wedding photographer may be exactly what’s needed. Frankly, with the economy what it is, it could be that you can even get an old-timer for a bargain rate.
That brings me to this weekend, and some photographic steam which has come to a head via Twitter.
I think of Twitter as a giant party room, with bazillions of conversations going on at the same time. It’s pretty easy to find a conversation that sounds interesting, featuring someone leading the conversational thread with apparent authority and confidence. At times though, I find that some of those folks that are deemed experts — by popular consensus (Twitter follower count) or self-proclaimation (oversaturated self-promotion) — in actuality have no more or less authority than anyone else out there. But at times, they act like thugs on the street, leveraging their empires against quieter, dissonant voices.
This weekend, another photographer started tweeting about his consultancy for a wedding photography house to combat another house that was way undercutting his client’s prices. Now, this guy’d been on the border with me. He’s attracted a pretty strong numerical following on Twitter, perhaps for his podcasts and website, but probably more likely for the frequent giveaways of photographic items he promotes through Twitter. I’d been getting pretty alienated by some of the views he held, but this weekend sealed the deal for me. He made comments that indicated all $500 photography is bad, and engaged in a slappy-fight in the Twitterverse with someone else on Twitter, making points steeped in lunacy, and I knew I had discovered yet another voice I could remove from my head.
I watched Superman II this weekend, and I think there’s some applicability here. In particular, I’m thinking of the scene where the villains from the Phantom Zone begin blowing hard to quell the home-spun resistance from the people in the streets of Metropolis after they believe Superman has been killed. The tie? If you’re enough of a blowhard, you really can try to quieten the masses with your apparent strength.
So, there may be too many voices in my head, but there are two fewer today than there were.
Back in August, we met Simon Biswas in Santa Fe during the Falling Star Trek trip. Later in the month, he spent an evening with us here in the Da Lou as a stop on his month-long odyssey across the country.
Over the weekend, we got news that he was traveling to Haiti with medical supplies and his gear.
I dunno how he hooked himself up on a trip like this, but my hopes and prayers are with him, that he’s able to help, and returns home safely.
After spending most of last weekend playing with various RAW converters — both for output and speed — I finally believe I found the foundational problem in my workflow. ACR was defaulting to Adobe Standard as the camera profile. There were also some other settings that needed tweaking as my defaults, but this was the root of my evil problems. I remember long ago making a change in ACR that had things coming out of it looking good, but somehow with the loading of ACR 5.6, my settings went bye-bye. Or it could’ve been the addition of images from my new 7D. No matter, it’s more or less resolved now. (Thanks Tim!) [BTW, Tim is also doing a Project 365 exercise.]
Of course, ACR can do tons to the image, and this weekend, I swallowed my ignorance, and purchased Real World Camera Raw with Adobe Photoshop CS4. I’ve plowed through the foundational chapters, not yet touching a single control. But that day is coming, and I really do feel more confident in treating ACR as another tool in the workflow, rather than a Ron Popeil “set it and forget it” gateway through which my RAW images stroll.
As I’ve delved more and more into the RAW images coming from my Canon EOS 7D, I’ve discovered that Adobe Camera RAW 5.6 just ain’t cutting it for me. The preview JPG images I briefly see in Lightroom 2.6 look much more like what I expect from my images, rather than the post-ACR images that are actually used for real work. Digital Photo Professional came with the 7D, and it sure seems to kick ACR’s backside with its RAW conversion routines. Now, there are folks out there who say that the camera manufacturer (in this case, Canon) should have the inside track on RAW conversion, and historically, I’ve just taken that as hype. Color me a believer now.
With the advent of the new year, I’ve decided to whittle away a bit of time to do some searching and comparing of various RAW converters for the Mac platform. Most of these comparisons will be done on a non-stellar image of a seagull shot last weekend at Winfield, and will be done with trial versions of the various packages on hand. I know other folks have done these kind of comparisons before, but frankly, they aren’t me, and the images aren’t mine. In other words, YMMV. Lather, rinse, repeat. 🙂
This ain’t exactly scientific, and everything I’m describing and posting is my own experiences with my Snow Leopard-based MacBook Pro running 10.6.2. The source image was shot with my 7D, my 100-400L at 400mm, handheld, IS on, f/5.6, 1/400 sec, ISO 400, and “cloudy” white balance selected. It was a grungy day, and the gull was at some distance over the river.
I’m sure there are settings I can change here and there to make some of these images better in these various packages, but that’s not the point. I’m ready, willing and able to work on my images to get them polished how I’d like, but running with default settings from these various converters is how I’d like to start. If I start out closer in the conversion process to how I expect the image to look, then that’s (potentially) less work in front of the screen, and more time left for photographing.
Where I could, I’ve tried to do my screen captures from a 100% rendering of the sample image. For each app, I did screen grabs from within the app’s UI as TIFFs using the Mac’s built-in Grab utility.
All that said, here goes.
Digital Photo Professional 3.7.3.0
DPP 3.7.1.2 shipped with my 7D, and the only thing that’s bugged me is a problem with the preferences panel causing the software to abend whenever it’s accessed. There is a solution that I found here on an Apple forum that absolutely fixes the issue. However, there is also v3.7.3.0 version of code available, and for this test, I downloaded it from Canon to see how it fared. I still don’t like that the Canon software requires a reboot of the Mac in order to function correctly (so it claims). I mean, really, reboot the machine? But the good news is the v3.7.3 does solve the preference panel problem.
As a point of reference, the image in DPP compares pretty favorably to the embedded JPGs I would see briefly in Lightroom 2.6. In other words, this is the look I was seeing on camera (again looking at the JPGs according to how I understand things to work) and briefly in LR 2.6, and this is the look I was disappointed to lose inside LR after ACR did its work.
Below is the crop of the image from DPP.
Adobe Camera RAW 5.6
This is what started the whole fuss for me. Well, actually, it was Lightroom 2.6, which uses ACR 5.6 as its underpinning for processing RAW files. However, to be fair, I wanted to pull ACR 5.6 away from LR 2.6, just to ensure that there was no hocus-pocus going on with LR 2.6.
To my eyes, there’s a significant color shift or darkening — not sure which. It’s very noticeable in the background. There also appears to be quite a bit more noise in the image, although some/all of that could be the fault of the color shift. However, the noise could be being introduced due to some kind of sharpening. If you look at the top of the gull’s head and compare it to DPP, it’s definitely sharper, but I’m afraid the cost for that may be too high.
Below is the crop of the image from ACR.
Lightroom 2.6 + Adobe Camera RAW 5.6
After finally understanding (I think) why my RAW images looked great upon import into LR 2.6 (the embedded JPG previews were being shown) and worse after a few seconds (after LR engaged ACR to properly process the RAW file), this is what I was left with. Blecch.
From what I can tell, there’s no huge difference between images in ACR 5.6 and LR 2.6+ACR 5.6, although the one through LR 2.6 may be a tad lighter.
Below is the crop of the image from LR 2.6.
Lightroom 3.0β + Adobe Camera RAW 6.0
Adobe is working on a pretty big revision to Lightroom, and currently there’s a beta version of it, along with a new Adobe Camera RAW to go along with it. For me, one of the biggest wins with LR 3.0 may be some changes to help handle large catalogs. At this point, I don’t know what that’s gonna look like, but it definitely piques my interest.
From a RAW processing perspective, there’s a little bit of difference between LR 2.6+ACR 5.6 and LR 3.0β+ACR 6.0. LR 3.0β seems to have a “different” kind of noise in the background — speckly instead of blotchy. The gull’s head appears just a tick brighter to me, as well. I probably like the speckles better than the blotches, but it’s still not as good as DPP to me.
Below is the crop of the image from LR 3.0 Beta.
Apple Aperture 2.1.4
Apple has its own rendering engine for dealing with RAW files, and it has recently been updated to deal with the 7D’s RAW files. Frankly, I like the look of this image better than through Adobe’s products. It’s still just a tick darker than the image through DPP, but would probably not have sent me on this quest had this been the result through LR 2.6+ACR 5.6.
Below is a crop from Aperture.
Preview 5.0.1
It’s my belief that both Aperture and the Snow Leopard share the same engine for converting RAW files, but I figured it made sense to include a pretty common display engine for RAW files. I can’t imagine that Preview would be part of my workflow, but until you look at it, ya never know!
To my eye, there’s not much difference between the image in Aperture and Preview. Perhaps they really are using the same engine underneath.
Below is a crop from Preview.
Silkypix 3.0.34.1
Before I’d started this quest today, I’d never heard of Silkypix. Their engine seems to still be better than Adobe’s, but there’s still a darkening as compared to DPP that I don’t care much for.
Below is a crop from Silkypix.
DxO Optics Pro 5.3.6
I’ve seen DxO advertised for a long time, and hadn’t really thought of it as a RAW converter. In my head, it was a bigtime piece of code that could take lens characteristics and deal with those in an image. From doing the installation today, I’ve learned that it can handle specific camera and lens combinations, and convert RAW files based on their profile data. Pretty cool stuff.
The installation for DxO is much more complex, allowing you to select only the bodies and lenses that you might run into. I think that’s probably a good thing, and I imagine it probably cuts down on the disk utilization.
I’ve gotta say, DxO really rocked out the image. The gull is clean, bright and crisp. It almost looks as though it applied some kind of auto-balancing to the image — it is a dark image, after all. It looks the way I would expect it to be processed eventually anyway, and that’s pretty cool.
Below is the crop from DxO Optics Pro.
Capture One 5.0.1
Capture One is another name that’s familiar to me from adverts. I’ve read about loads of folks using them for their conversion, and I wanted to give them a whirl to see what the hubbub was about.
Comparing the images from DPP and Capture One, I notice the same things in the Capture One image that I liked about the DxO-based image. However, comparing the DxO and Capture One images, the DxO image looks “hot” to me. Add to that that the detail atop the gull’s head appears clearer in the Capture One image, suddenly Capture One starts to look pretty attractive.
Below is the crop from Capture One.
RAW Developer 1.8.7
This was another tool I’d never heard of before. To my eye, it appears much like the ACR-based images. Unfortunately, that’s just not the look I’m looking for.
Below is the crop from RAW Developer.
RAW Photo Processor 4.0.1
Yet another tool I’d never bumped into before. RPP seemed to make my image quite dark compared to DPP. I couldn’t compare the sharpness too well, as I couldn’t figure out how to get to a 100% image in the UI. I’m sure there’s a way, but it wasn’t obvious to me.
Below is the crop from RPP.
Observations
To me, from the out-of-the-box experience, I see it as a three horse race: Digital Photo Professional, DxO Optics Pro, and Capture One. Comparing the three images, I really like the one from Capture One the best. It appears that Capture One is doing some sharpening, but it’s not crazy high, and appears to make the image a little nicer overall.
Both DxO and Capture One do have a little color shift to the blue, which leads me to believe that they are doing some kind of tweaking of the white balance. It’s not horrid like ACR’s though, although it appears to be of a similar nature, strictly based on the color of the background.
I’d bet that both DxO and Capture One could be tweaked a bit to get images that look like the ones from DPP. So why switch? Well, DPP is really clunky and slow. I’d like to see something fill my harddrive with TIFFs a bit quicker than DPP can manage.
However, DPP is free — well, it came with the camera, so “included” is probably the better term. DxO is running a special for $109 through Tuesday for v5.0.1 standard edition (which supports the 7D) and will include a free upgrade to v6 when it hits for the Mac later this year. Capture One 5 is $129. Frankly, I’m seduced by what DxO claims it can do with lens/camera profiling. Capture One appears to be able to do that in the Pro edition, but that’s nearly $400.
I’ve got a couple of weeks before the demo versions run out, but with the sale at DxO running, I guess I’ll spend some time tomorrow running some comparisons on batch processing. Stay tuned!
