The Quiet Picture

I did my homework and found out that many other people have discovered exactly the same problem I have with the shutter release button, and it looks like it’s not just the 40D but other models as well. Judging by what people have written, Canon denies that this is a construction issue and sure enough when I called the support “this is the first I’ve heard of it”. So I’m on my own to get it fixed unless the Canon service centre agrees with me that this is a factory fault and the 3-year extended warranty applies.

I did some testing tonight and found out that the problem largely depends on how I press the button, it’s a little bit loose so not all clicks are created equal. Most of the time it happens when I pause halfway to focus and meter, then when the button is pressed fully it blanks out. If I don’t stop in the middle, it’s normally ok. It also seems to be possible to press down the button in different ways, so if I put pressure on one side only it’s a dud, but if I keep my finger right in the middle of the button so it’s pressed straight down, it works. (Did that make any sense?)

Anyway, since I have to pay to get this fixed, I’ve decided to keep using it as it is now, the problem is intermittent and I have a semi-decent way of avoiding it. I don’t want to send it to service and pay for the postage and examination only to have it returned with nothing done because it was working fine when they tried it. So I will wait until it is really broken, the cost to fix it will be the same anyway.

I’ve had 6 Canon cameras in a row and this is the first one with problems. I guess my luck was bound to run out.

Grrr.

I know I said that I would never go to a zoo again, but I had an opportunity to meet with other photographers so I caved in.

For every visit to Järvzoo, my only wish is to get good pictures of one species – you can never get them all anyway, so one is good. The birds are the trickiest ones and the great grey owl (Strix nebulosa) has always eluded me, I’ve never succeeded in creating a single keeper after years of trying. Until now, that is – I was fortunate enough to have the camera ready when the owl yawned, and I was amazed to see that the picture is sharp!

I like maps. They’re good for a lot of things, including a source of inspiration when I’m planning my weekend photo excursions. Even when you know (or think you know) the area you live in, a close inspection of a map can reveal something you haven’t seen before. Say for example, a murder scene. I’m not kidding, the Murder Scene Marsh (Mordplatsmyran) is marked on every map, provided the scale allows it because it’s a really small patch of bog. If you don’t believe me, take a look yourself.

I made some enquiries and found out that apparently back when someone had killed someone over some money and so the bog became known as Mordplatsmyran. I’ve driven past it many times, but never paid any attention to the place. Now that I saw the name, I just had to go and take a closer look. I found out two things. Firstly, there are a lot of dead trees in this bog which was appropiate enough for the name. Secondly, when you’re standing on the road and look to the bog and then behind it, it actually has a lot of potential – a few weeks earlier when there still was colour in the trees, and in a better light than today, it would’ve made a really nice landscape picture. And honestly, I have absolutely no recollection whatsoever that I’ve ever reacted to this place when I’ve driven past.

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The coal tits are giving me a hard time. I’m still trying to get a good keeper, this is today’s effort.

I have this recurring dream (or nightmare) that I’m looking at a photo opportunity of a lifetime and then when I press the shutter button, nothing happens. Well, unfortunately it looks like this nightmare is now becoming true – lately the shutter button is not responding as it should. Halfway it’s just fine, it focuses just as fast as it always did, but then when I press it fully to take the picture – nothing. Zip. Nada. This happens maybe 1 time out of 5 and it’s not related to the lens I use (I’ve tested with two Canon L-series lenses). No such problems when using a remote, so it’s only the camera shutter button that’s now starting to act up.

A real nuisance when I’m photographing moving subjects like the birds with the 300mm lens. Having to use the remote makes the process very un-intuitive because you have to keep your right hand on the handle anyway to move and balance the camera, and then the left hand is on the lens to steady the rig which is not very comfortable when you also have to operate the remote.

Definitely a bug, not a feature.

Let’s see… I bought my camera in September last year. They come with a 1-year warranty, right? Bummer.

I couldn’t let go of a good thing, so I drove back to Össjön to take a closer look at the old boats. The wind had picked up from yesterday and there certainly wasn’t any lack of light, so I had a perfect opportunity to try the new ND filter. Stacked with a polariser, I still maxed out at 8 sec but it was just enough for the effect so the filter proved useful – the ND8 would’ve left me short of a few secs.

BTW, the new ND filter is B+W’s Neutral Density 1.8, which is 6 stops. If Hoya made a 6-stop ND, it would be called ND64 – the ND8 is 3 stops.

When I came back home, I saw that my bird feeder was very popular. Time to see if the birds would tolerate me out in the open, because the way I’ve set up the feeder I have no place to hide. I counted on the birds to keep feeding as long as I don’t make any noise or sudden moves, and the gamble paid off – it works! I must confess that the bird images are heavily cropped, for example this one is cropped from horizontal to vertical so I’m losing a lot of real estate, but I don’t care – I’m so bad with moving subjects that I’ll happily back down on my normal target of “making the picture in the camera”. My main concern is to get a sharp eye in the picture and today’s birds had that, so I probably just doubled up my all time critically sharp bird pictures! Anyway, cropping serves another purpose as well – I get a bigger bird in relation to the frame. Even at 4-5 metres distance, using a 300mm lens (times 1.6), it’s a very small bird. Not gonna take any frame fillers for sure, so I’ll just keep concentrating on getting that sharp eye and a catchlight!

I had big plans for the weekend, but I had to revise them already when I woke up – the cold night had turned the wet roads into icy roads, so I had no business driving around with summer tires. I waited until the sun was high enough to thaw out the worst and then got out to discover new places. I don’t know why but there are still some forest roads around Loos that I haven’t checked yet, and it’s definitely my loss because this road turned out to be one sweet photographic experience. It’s just perfect in the morning light and I didn’t have to kick myself too much for not going out as early as I had planned because the low sun wouldn’t have reached the scenery anyway (forests and hills in the way). The downside was that there was thin high cloud again so while the sun was shining, it also wasn’t. The sky cleared towards noon but the light wasn’t the same anymore.

At the Össjön lake I found these old boats, some completely broken and rotting away and others still in one piece but probably not sea-worthy (lake-worthy?) anymore, and the place was complete with a boathouse with a caved-in roof. All you needed to do was to avoid the colourful new(er) boats in the composition and it was photographic eldorado right there! It worked fine at this time of the day, but it would look even better at bit earlier in the morning.

I didn’t find any opportunity to test the new ND filter, but I was able to put the leveling base and ICE through their paces. I took a 3-image panorama with the polariser mounted on the lens and important detail in the foreground. Foreground is normally almost impossible to stitch manually unless you’ve found the nodal point of the lens, which I can’t even try because the 24-105mm lens doesn’t have a lens collar and I don’t have a specialist panorama head. ICE did another perfect job though and the result is an image that could’ve been taken with a wideangle lens, but my 38mm (24mm x 1.6) wasn’t enough for the scene so I decided to try stitching it together. A very useful experiment, and a very useful technique!

Such a productive day and it would’ve been even better if I had had the light early on. Driving along with beautiful things all around, stop and look, take some pictures, move on to the next one…

I always make an effort to photograph the full moon every time the moonrise or moonset coincides with sunset or sunrise. I’m more of a landscape photographer than moonscape ditto, so I leave the moon closeups to the astronomy buffs and try to create landscape pictures with the moon in them instead, which requires some light on the landscape. Today’s moonrise was well before sunset though so I had hedged my bets on photographing the sunset, but when I got to my location (I didn’t have much choice with that since I was coming from work), I saw that the moon didn’t actually appear too high in sky from that point along the road. So I was torn between the sun and the moon, but it became quickly obvious that the sunset wouldn’t be nearly as nice as yesterday’s red clouds (as seen through the bus window), so I hurried up to find a place for framing the moon.

I bracketed with hopes of putting together an HDR in Photomatix. It turned out that Photomatix is hopeless with this subject matter, for one thing it doesn’t understand the concept of “reflection” but insists on making the reflection lighter than original and that’s a big no-no, and secondly it kept overexposing the moon no matter how I tried to adjust the sliders. Photoshop to the rescue, and this is how I did it:

Out of the dark, middle and light exposures, the dark exposure had the moon and its reflection, the middle one had the sky and the light one had the foreground. I copied the middle exposure on top of the light one and then selected the moon and its reflection from the dark exposure, copied them to the base and carefully erased around the moon until it fit seamlessly to the sky (you have to make sure to get rid of all the dark sky around the moon, and careful not to erase too much which will leave you with a bright ring instead). Then I started erasing the middle layer by using a large soft brush with low opacity to reveal the lighter background below. Again, important not to overdo it or the halos around the treetops would ruin the effect, also have to watch out for the reverse where the treetops are too dark in relation to the rest of the tree. The result is darker than my original RAWs would allow (it probably looks too dark on some screens, but is reasonably ok on my LCD), but it’s miles better than the Photomatix mess. I wasted an hour with Photomatix trying to fix it, and when I finally gave up it took only 10 minutes in Photoshop. A bit of a rush job, granted, so there’s room for improvement. Anyway, whether it’s done in Photomatix or Photoshop or wherever, you need some trick up your sleeve to put together a landscape photo without an overexposed full moon. Now you know my secret!

Oh wasn’t I excited about this weekend, I had two new toys to play with and head full of ideas. Some of the ideas were not even related to the new toys, so I started off on Saturday morning by setting up my squirrel feeder and squirrel-proof bird feeder. I hope that the squirrels will like their new setup and I also hope that they can’t figure out how to get to the bird food. I don’t have high hopes though, I’m sure they’ll turn up on the bird feeder sooner or later no matter what I come up with.

So that’s how I spent the beautiful and sunny Saturday morning. In the afternoon I was ready to play with the levelling base and 6-stop ND filter, so I drove to a new place which looked promising on the map. Sure enough, it looked like a great location. Except, what happened to the light? After idly waiting around for the sunset to happen, I gave up and drove to another place to see what my options were. As if by magic, the sun appeared and I got glorious evening light. Except, the this place wasn’t half as nice as the earlier one. Nevermind, I figured that the new place will look good in the morning light as well so I set my alarm clock to wake me up.

I arrived to this new location just after 8am, I knew that the first light wouldn’t get there because there was a hill shading it, but I hadn’t counted on the scarce pine forest to be all that shady so I still didn’t have light on the tiny lake by 9am and I decided to call it quits.

The forecast said that it would be windy in the afternoon, so I would have an opportunity to try the new ND filter. I drove to my favourite place, only to find it almost flooded (at least I had had the foresight of wearing wellingtons) and just to add insult to injury, even the wind was not happening. I took a 20 sec exposure and could still see the reflections on the water – it was almost calm! At this point I was ready to write off the whole weekend but decided at the last minute to check out the creek that runs out from the lake. When I saw this fallen tree, I just knew that I had to create something out of it, how chaotic it may be. It sums up my weekend, anyway.

I’ve mentioned quite a few times that I don’t like wideangle lenses because they are a compositional nightmare for me. I do however like wide views – panoramas. A stitched panorama shows so much more than a panorama crop of a picture taken with an extreme wideangle lens.

The biggest problem with creating panoramas is to create a seamless join between the frames. The left edge of the first frame is never a 100% match of the right edge of the second frame, so if you’re creating your panorama manually, it becomes very time consuming to manipulate the pictures in order to hide the seam. I’ve tried a few panorama programs in the past but nothing worked to my satisfaction (or the program was so complicated to use that I gave up) so I’ve been doing my stitching the hard way, which is not only tedious but also very time consuming.

So I decided to take some measures to improve the situation. Firstly, I ordered the Acratech Leveling Base which will enable me to level the ballhead, because a perfectly level platform is the foundation of a good panorama (I just got the thing so hopefully I can say something about it after this weekend). And then I also wanted to give stitching software another chance, especially after I heard that Photoshop CS3 is very good at it so I felt that I was just making things too hard for myself by stitching manually. Unfortunately, PS is not an investment I can justify in any way, so I looked for specialist stitching software instead and I started with Canon PhotoStitch which came with the camera. I gave up after the first panorama – total crap. PhotoStitch is best used uninstalled. I browsed some photo forums to find out what software other photogs used, and saw someone recommend Microsoft’s ICE (Image Composite Editor) which apparently is just as good as Photoshop. And the price is right – it’s free.

I loaded up my panorama frames and waited for ICE to do its thing. I was amazed – I couldn’t tell where the seams were, even when I knew where they were! I have now been throwing panoramas at it for two nights in a row (I had lots of unstitched images in my catalogue), everything from 2 to 13 frames, and it seems to deliver perfect results most of the time. There are two things which seem to be an issue sometimes, one of them makes sense but the other one is a bit of a mystery.

Firstly, although all the detail in the image is seamlessly joined, ICE doesn’t always seem to be able to compensate for uneven light from one frame to another. By this I mean that if one side of the frame is slightly darker than the other (it is so slight that you don’t even know about it until you start stitching), then in stitching you will notice this when the lightness of the picture changes at the seam. ICE allows you to export the panorama in e.g. Photoshop format with layers, so for critical work, you can use adjustment layers to fix the issue. You can see an example of this problem in the panorama below – there’s a sharp change in levels a little bit right from the middle, and then about 2/5 from the right there’s a wide strip with some lighter levels. It’s good enough for me because I won’t use this image for anything other than keeping in my catalogue (and using it as an example here), but if were to e.g. print it then I would take some time in an editor to sort out the levels.

Secondly, sometimes ICE leaves out a frame in the stitch for no apparent reason at all. Initially I thought it’s doing it because there wasn’t enough overlap between the frames, but then it happened again when there was definitely enough overlap. I re-loaded the frames but it did the same thing again. The really strange thing is that ICE knew exactly what size of slice was missing in the panorama, so it left a gap which was a perfect fit to fill in Photoshop without moving any of the layers done by ICE. Weird. This happened e.g. with the above panorama.

Other than these bugs, it really doesn’t get any easier. Launch the software, select the pictures, read some news while you wait (it doesn’t take very long anyway), select the crop and how you want to save it and that’s it. I never thought I’d say this but… well done Microsoft!

The only problem I have now is what will I do when I go over to Macs next year like I’m planning to? I somehow doubt that Microsoft will make a Mac-compatible ICE!

This is a follow-up to my previous post about using slow shutter speeds. I wanted to elaborate on the water theme a little bit so here goes.

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The shutter speed to use with moving water is one of the more interesting issues in landscape photography. Some prefer a fast shutter to freeze the water, and others prefer a long shutter speed to smooth out the water. And some people prefer something in between, and then of course “it depends”.

I’ve liked the smooth water effect so much that I succeeded in taking my favourite waterfall picture already in 2004 using good old film. This is a detail of the Anderssjöåfallet waterfall in Härjedalen and believe it or not but I have not photographed the falls since then – maybe it’s because I know that I can’t improve on this one and every time I look at the falls, I just see this slide in my head. It is a fairly abstract picture, one that is stripped out of everything but the very basics (even the colour is gone, although this is not B&W), making it a very simple capture which to me is a perfect example a quiet picture. Now imagine this same image, but with a fast shutter speed which captures every drop of water. Would you still say that it is “quiet”?

I posted the Anderssjöåfallet picture on Fotosidan a few years ago and someone commented that the water was unnatural. Absolutely correct, I admit it’s 100% unnatural and I didn’t argue with them and I never will, but it got me thinking – where is it written that nature photography should be “natural”? We only have our own photographic visions, and there’s no right or wrong with them. Every vision is equally valid, every shutter speed used with moving water is equally good, the only thing different is your own taste and I respect that. Smoothing out water is just one way of manipulating the subject, but the manipulation really starts already when you choose your composition and focal length. So when is photography ever really natural? It’s all just a photographer’s vision and you choose the means which fulfill your vision. It’s all good!

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I browsed through my waterfall pictures but the pair of images above was the only one where I could actually show a comparison between slow and fast shutter speeds. Pictures are taken in June 2006 at the Sveån creek which falls into Ljusnan at Ramundberget.