Category: Photography

Equipment, examples, history – all matters photographic

First venture into RAW

The photo above is the first one I ever produced after the fact, using the RAW data from a digital sensor. Given my current suite of software (iPhoto ’08, Photoshop CS, and Canon’s Digital Photo Professional), using RAW is a bit of a pain. iPhoto imports RAW files incorrectly (producing odd black frames), at least when you have your camera set to generate both RAW and JPEG files simultaneously. The Canon EOS utility works, when it comes to getting the .CRU (Canon’s proprietary RAW format) off the camera, but it does so slowly and imports redundant copies of the JPEG files.

All that being said, there are good reasons to put up with the bother. RAW lets you adjust the white balance and exposure far more effectively after the fact than JPEG does, and ultimately represents a far superior digital negative. For now, RAW files may be an awkward annoyance even on my excellent new Mac. In a few years, the storage space and processing power to deal with them will be ubiquitous.

In short, it seems worth shooting RAW+JPEG whenever there is a decent chance you will want to use any photo in an artistic way.

Cold, glass, and condensation

Users of cameras and eyeglasses will be familiar with the phenomenon of fogging, which occurs when one goes from a cold and dry place into a warm one. This occurs because air can hold about 7% more water per unit of volume for each ˚C of additional temperature. That means that air in warm places is naturally more laden with water than that in cold ones. When the water-laden air hits cool glass, it condenses into a fog that confounds the bespecktacled and shutterbugs.

The other night, I witnessed a special elaboration of this phenomenon unique to conditions including (a) a very cold and dry night (b) a fairly large volume of glass and (c) an instant transition to a warm and relatively humid coffee shop.

The normal fogging occurred, but it would not dissipate after several minutes of waiting. It was then that I noticed that the glass on which the fog had formed was cold enough to freeze it – leaving a thin sheet of ice of the lens. The remedy was a few minutes of huffing to melt the ice, followed by a few more waiting for evaporation.

I am a bit surprised not to have experienced this working with cameras in Finland or Estonia. Like getting mild frostbite walking home from a party, it seems to be an Ottawa experience.

The single cheapest way to improve your photography

There seem to be a lot of people out there who are succeeding at producing appealing and artistic images using low-cost photographic equipment. A case in point are the lowest cost Canon point and shoot digital cameras. They cost less than $200, brand new, and yet it is certainly possible to produce museum quality photography with them, if you have enough creativity and awareness of light.

Arguably, the worst thing that ever happened to popular photography was the emergence of the on-camera flash. It has given too many photographers the idea that light doesn’t matter. After all, they have brought along their own tiny flashbulb.

In the great majority of cases, disabling that flash is an excellent first step. The second step – alluded to in the title – is buying yourself a little tripod. Personally, I use a $10 UltraPod mini, kept constantly attached to my $180 A570 IS camera. While everyone else was making hopeless attempts to light up the roof of Notre Dame Cathedral or the Blue Mosque with their on-camera flashes, I was getting decent photos of them by bracing the tripod on walls, the floor, or furniture.

Anyone who is serious about photography with a small camera should buy one.

The virtues of digital photography

While there are certainly benefits to film, there are also many excellent reasons for which people are switching to digital. The sensors in even the low-end digital SLRs have rather good low-light performance. They are less grainy at 1600 ISO than the sensors in point and shoot cameras are at 400 or even 200 ISO. The dSLR systems also include features like depth of field preview, mirror lock-up, and bracketing for both exposure and white balance. Also very useful are dedicated controls for things like white balance, ISO, and exposure compensation. Sure, you can set all those things through menus in most good point and shoot cameras. It is a lot more pleasant to be able to do so on the fly, while still looking through the viewfinder.

As a fan of wide angle lenses, I do find the 1.6X multiplication from small sensors annoying. That being said, dSLRs these days do come with decent kit lenses that include an appropriately altered range. And, of course, there is always the enormous value of being able to take unlimited photos without marginal cost and get immediate feedback on the results of what you are doing. Being able to consult luminosity and RGB histograms half a second after taking the photo certainly beats having to wait for processing and printing.

In short, there are many virtues to digital photography: especially to those of us who are uncertain about there we will be living in the next few years. Just like one’s personal library, shipping around binders of archive-quality negatives is an expense and a pain. Ones and zeros can be zipped around the world at a much lower price, and with less risk to the originals.

The death of film

As amazing as digital single lens reflex (dSLR) cameras have become, it is a bit sad that Canon’s website now includes only one film SLR: the absurdly expensive EOS-1v. Nikon’s page has two: the $2000 F6 and the $350 FM10.

This makes me glad I went ahead and bought an Elan 7N four years ago, while digital bodies were still totally unaffordable. While it lacks the convenience of the digital options, there is still much to be said for film. A cheap roll of Velvia or T-Max can give you better performance than a $5000 digital camera, and negatives are comparatably easy to archive in a way that will endure for fifty or one hundred years. Also, changing the kind of film you use can have a big effect on the kind of photos you produce, and it is a lot easier than buying a new digital sensor with different properties.

No photographic technology ever really dies. There are still artists and enthusiasts who make Daguerreotypes, after all. Film will simply move from being the default medium to one that professionals and hobbyists explicitly select.

For now, people who are interested in getting involved in serious artistic photography should definitely consider the option of picking up a cut-price used film SLR, a bunch of rolls of good film, and some processing and scanning from a good lab. For the price of an entry-level dSLR, you could do a lot of shooting, with equipment that will not be considered any more antiquated in ten years than it is now.

Winter photography

With the transition to daylight saving time, it is now guaranteed that I will be leaving work in darkness until spring is approaching. This is a bit disheartening in itself, and it also poses a challenge in terms of producing photos of the day for this site.

The best option is probably to undertake some more purpose-driven photo shoots. Normally, my approach is just to take photos in situations that I would find myself in anyhow. This has the virtue of not requiring too much time, but it makes it harder and harder to produce quality original images the longer you live in a certain place and continue to act in certain ways. Making a conscious choice to shoot some specific subjects or places could be fun, and could produce some good images. So could experimenting with some new techniques, styles, or equipment.

I have been pondering shelling out the cash for a fancy digital SLR camera. I think I should use the possibility for some self-motivation, and insist on doing some artistic work with my old P&S before I shell out more than $500 for a new light-trapping box.

Attacking encrypted bitmaps

Just because your photos are encrypted, it doesn’t seem that you can count on them to be totally unreadable to someone without the key. The attack only seems to work against bitmap images, so those secret JPGs, PNGs, and GIFs should be safe for now. This is because most types of files contain significantly more entropy than bitmaps. That is to say, there is a lot more redundant information in a BMP file than there is in something compressed. Even in the case of the vulnerable images, the technique can only produce “the outline of a high-contrast image.”

Once again, it proves the statement that ‘you can’t hide secrets from the future with math.’ Cryptographic attacks – and the resources available to attackers – will only keep increasing over time.

Enforcing open source licenses

An American court has ruled in favour of Robert Jacobsen – a man who wrote software for model trains and released it under an open source license. Ignoring the requirement in the license that derivative work credit the original and provide the original code, a commercial company made a product using the code. Under this court decision, the violation of the open source license means that the company’s behaviour consitutes copyright infringement.

I personally see a lot of value to the ‘some rights reserved’ approach of Creative Commons and others. By not requiring payment for non-commercial usage, such licenses can avoid blocking the experimentation of hobbyists. By reserving rights over later commercial usage, they prevent the abuse of materials created for general public usage. Such licenses provide the flexibility to share, along with the assurance that others will share in return.

Seeing the legal integrity of such contracts upheld is thus especially gratifying. For information on the Creative Commons license applied to my blog posts and photographs, see this page.

Editing video using still photos

Recently, there was controversy about a doctored photograph showing four Iranian missiles launching, whereas the original apparently showed three and one on the ground. Errol Morris discussed the images on the website of the New York Times.

Photo and video editing are nothing new, but some new software seeks to make the former much easier. It combines video data with that from still photographs in order to accomplish many possible aims. For instance, it could be used to improve the resolution of a whole scene or elements within it. It could also correct for over- and under-exposed regions. Of course, it could also facilitate video manipulation. The skills and software required to edit still images are increasingly available. Combine that with this software and you could empower a slew of new video fraudsters.

It will be interesting to see what kind of countermeasures emerge from organizations concerned about data integrity. One route is forensic – identifying markers of manipulation and tools for uncovering them. Another relies on requiring technologies and techniques for those capturing and submitting video. That could involve the expectation of multiple independent photos and videos produced from different angles using different equipment, or perhaps the widespread deployment of timestamps and cryptographic hashing to strengthen data integrity.