The Quiet Picture

It has been snowing all day. I’m not complaining – well, other than maybe I’m wishing it would snow a little bit more. Those big flakes that are easy to catch on camera.

I ventured out to a lake again, but this time a lake that I’m familiar with so no wet feet. I was betting on the outflowing creek to be still open, and so it was. My only problem was the shutter speed, I really would’ve needed an ND filter but it was hard enough dealing with the polariser when snowflakes took every opportunity to create drops of water either on the lens or the filter. The camera was protected but the front of the lens has to stay open, for obvious reasons… so I settled with a couple of seconds.

Such a lovely day!

A day of snowfall and I was really looking forward to a long walk to enjoy it. I got down to a lake I rarely visit and initially followed it by walking through forest on my way to a potential photo spot. No photo ops were appearing though, so I decided to walk on the shore instead. This is where I made two mistakes: 1) I assumed that there wouldn’t be any water in the marshland surrounding the lake and 2) even if there was water, it would be shallow and thus frozen solid by now. I had forgotten the warm weather we had on Thursday and yesterday… I wasn’t two steps out of the forest when I sank right through the ice down to my knees. I got up quickly, but I already felt the water trickle down my boots and decided to cut my long walk short. Thankfully I was wearing functional clothing so I didn’t freeze while walking home in wet socks and wet pants… those waterproof boots are not worth much when you get water over the shafts!

LR/Enfuse is a HDR plug-in for Lightroom for merging your HDR pictures without leaving LR. You just select the images and tell Enfuse to merge them and import the result back to LR. Couldn’t be simpler! I wish I’d known about this plug-in a few months ago when I was doing comparative tests with HDR software. This little snippet of programming can do the job much better than Photomatix, so I’ve re-done many of the Photomatix HDR’s that I wasn’t happy with and LR/Enfuse came up with a winner every time.

LR/Enfuse doesn’t have as many settings as Photomatix does and the HDRs lack much of the “pop” that Photomatix creates so at first look it may seem like Enfuse isn’t that good. However, what really matters is how the dynamic range is handled and this is where Enfuse shines and you create that pop yourself, it’s no different than any post-processing you with your images. I’ll much rather have a perfect “raw HDR” that needs post-processing than a half-baked HDR with generous contrast and saturation. LR/Enfuse even succeeded with the reflection images that Photomatix completely messed up.

The first image above is Njupeskär, a 4-image HDR. Compare it to the Photomatix HDR, where the sky looks like it belongs to a different image. The second image comprises of 3 exposures, where the Photomatix HDR left a nasty grad filter effect in the birch. Both of these new HDRs are done with the default settings in LR/Enfuse and required post-processing in LR, but nothing extravagant – saturation and curves for the most, and a grad filter in the second image to add some more drama in the clouds.

The trial version has a size limit which I think is way to small (500 pixels) for any reliable evaluation, for example, it’s impossible to say how the alignment works. So after some hesitation I paid to get the full version and now that I know how well it works, I only wish I could get my money back from HDRsoft so I could give them to Timothy Armes instead. If you’re a Lightroom user and looking for HDR software, I can warmly recommend LR/Enfuse!

Rane’s gallery update reminded me that I should update mine. The reason I re-built my galleries was to make them easier to manage so I would update them more frequently… but it appears that it hasn’t helped much. Nevermind.

It’s been snowing nicely the past days and SMHI just confirmed that winter has indeed arrived. Seems like it’s arrived in the rest of Europe as well, read in the news that snowfall is causing havoc in traffic in many countries. Me, I’m just happy to be still be able to drive in the forest roads. The car is scraping the snow but it’s not a problem as long as it’s soft and fluffy like it is now. Have to enjoy it while it lasts because most of the forests roads won’t get plowed so they’ll be unpassable when we get more snow.

When I arrived at my first location, I got a lucky break and it started snowing again. Proof that I’m out of practice with snowfall photography – I started setting up the tripod when I remembered that the only way to catch the flakes is to use a fast shutter speed… so I walked up and down the shore, happily snapping away and grateful that I was at the right place at the right time. Intense snowfall like this normally doesn’t last long and it’s difficult to plan for it.

My second location was a creek that I had seen from the road earlier in the autumn when I drove past (without stopping). It seemed to have a lot of potential so I was expecting a smorgasbord of photo ops but reality turned out to be anything but – the ops were few and far between and not really very good and I had to work very had to get to them. The creek was lined with trees and even when I did find a somewhat open view, there was always some stray branch blocking a critical element in the composition. Sometimes the forest was so dense that I had to walk back to the road until I found a new opening and could access the creek again, all the while being careful about where I put my foot because these forests are treacherous in the best of conditions, let alone when all the rocks and crevices are covered with snow. I’d be lying though if I said I didn’t enjoy it – even with the snow falling off the trees on my head and neck and my mittens getting soaking wet. The thing is that somehow I haven’t been quite as happy as I expected to be for the snow, I was starting to think that maybe I don’t like winter anymore as much as I used to. Well, after today’s experience, there are no such worries. Snow makes everything beautiful – snow is beautiful! More, please!

When I started to photograph the night sky, I read that I should use a wideangle lens, high ISO, big aperture and bulb setting with remote. Unless of course I wanted to photograph the rings of Saturn or the Andromeda galaxy, in which case I needed a telescope, but I’m not an astronomer so I stick to the basics. It all sounds simple enough but it seems like there are as many settings to use as there are people giving advice. So in the end, the best way to learn is to not listen to the advice and make your own mistakes and it seems like every time I point my camera at the stars, it’s a new mistake (and a lesson)!

My interest in astronomy is pretty much limited to the stars visible with naked eye. I’ve never felt the need to invest in a telescope, but I frequently study star maps and try to learn the names of the constellations and stars. So when I photograph the night sky, I normally want to have a recognisable constellation in it. Star trail pictures can be really cool and I’ve done some of those, but in the end I found that I’m much happier with small dots of light instead of streaks and I want to top off the picture with a silhouette of something (trees are best).

So what I’ve learned is that you have to keep the exposure at max 15 sec in order for the stars to appear as dots. There’s ever so little streaking even then, but it’s only visible in the full scale original. And if you want real star trails, then you need a minimum of 15 minutes or otherwise those streaks will have an appearance of camera shake because they are too short to come across as genuine trails. That’s my star 15 rule – you know, sunny 16, moon 11 and now star 15!

Once you’ve decided which effect you want, there are other decisions to be made. Let’s say that I want to photograph the stars as dots and I’ve set the camera to 15 seconds. Now I have to decide how many stars I want to record (or how dark I want the sky to be). A wide open aperture is almost a must, so the only thing left to adjust is the ISO speed. ISO 200 is a starting point, it will give you the bright stars but you’ll probably end up going higher to get some of the fainter stars as well and more definition in the foreground (=better silhouette). You’ll want at least a little bit of moonlight to lighten up the sky, otherwise the sky will be just as black as your foreground which makes the foreground a moot point.

But let’s say that I want the star trail effect. ISO 100 is doable and you can stop down, anything to get a longer exposure. However, there’s a risk that the trails will be very faint with these settings because there just simply isn’t enough light hitting the sensor. With a long enough exposure you can bring out detail in the foreground, but those trails are stubbornly faint even for the brightest stars. I’m guessing it’s because the brightness of a star is kind of an absolute? The star will keep moving along during the exposure so it will not “collect” light the same way the foreground and sky does, thus you end up with faint streaks and only for the bright stars while the foreground and sky look correctly exposed. Just compare the long exposure on the left to the first picture which is much darker overall, but the stars are much brighter in comparison to the trails.

So for the star trails, the solution is to photograph on a dark night with maybe a moon crescent to lighten the sky ever so little. Then you can bump up the ISO and stop down without a risk of your foreground and sky becoming unnaturally light, all the while gaining enough sensitivity in the sensor to catch decent trails for even the faintest stars.

What did I say about learning by mistake? The next opportunity is in early December when the first quarter moon is up in the sky in the evening. Just no clouds and no wind…

The linguist in me just loves articles like this. Be sure to read the comments to the previous article as well, I got many a good laugh reading the discussion going back and forth in defence of the English spelling. And don’t miss the reference to Finnish – although the thing about not having any spelling tests in Finland is not true (unless they’ve changed the education system since the 70’s and 80’s when I went to school).

My pet peeve with the apostrophe is that many people use the acute accent instead of the real apostrophe (Nit-picking? Oh absolutely, guilty as charged!). It makes a big difference – just compare it´s and it’s. In my eyes that extra space around the acute accent is a disruption to the natural flow of the language, it feels like a hiccup. In the English and Swedish and many other Western keyboard layouts, the apostrophe is even easier to reach than the accent. So why reach for the accent at all when the real thing is much closer?

P.S. In my defence, I’ve spent 6 years of my life studying languages at university and even a small mistake in spelling was a make or break deal. You have no idea how many times I proof-read these blog entries before I post them…! The word you’re looking for is “pilkunviilaus”.

P.P.S. No I don’t grade anyone else’s spellings. I was a student, not a teacher!

This day was even worse than yesterday – just as foggy, but now we got rain as well. Lovely. So it was another long walk with the G10 and this time I experimented with the ISO values. And again I agree with what everyone says, the IQ is usable up to ISO 200 and anything above that should only be used in desperation. This image is taken with ISO 200, it was originally full colour but trust me, the difference to this b&w version was minimal; the days don’t get much more gray than today. So although I’m not a fan of b&w, I’m kinda happy with this one (and it will work better when I can properly process the RAW in LR… please Adobe, please!). Just had to crop all around to tighten up the composition and then to 2:3 dimensions. It may seem that I’m really attached to the 2:3 format but the thing is that my brain is so programmed for it that I have trouble seeing my compositions in 4:5. It will be useful to learn it though, just in case I ever want to move up to medium format!

My first day day out with the new Canon PowerShot G10! And what a lousy day it was. By that I mean the weather – I wasn’t missing the 40D in any case so having the new camera to test meant that at least I got something done and not just sit inside all day watching an Indiana Jones marathon (I got the 4-DVD box yesterday!).

The G10 is pretty much what I expected – I had seen enough test pictures before I got this camera to know what to expect, and my own pictures confirmed the impression so I got the camera I wanted. I tried a variety of techniques, handheld with IS, timer and a tripod, bracketing for an HDR, and also tested the lens adapter so I could mount a polariser filter and just to make it more fun, used the 3-stop built-in ND also.

So if IQ is not an issue, then I have to talk about the controls. It felt like I had to fiddle with the buttons and dials a lot more than I do with my 40D. Logically thinking, there isn’t anything more involved in taking the picture than with the dSLR so it must be quite simply that I’m not used to the controls yet. I know the 40D buttons with my eyes closed so hopefully I will learn to know the G10 equally well as I keep using it.

Which only leaves the software. The latest Lightroom version was released just before the G10 so I’m stuck with Canon’s Digital Photo Professional, which I hate with passion. Ok yes it’s probably because I’m not used to using the software… but seriously, even if I was familiar with it, I’d still hate it. Please Adobe, release a patch for LR – yesterday wouldn’t be too soon!

You’re not gonna believe this but… I just got myself a compact camera, Canon PowerShot G10 to be exact.

I have wanted a small portable camera for a long time now. The 40D is no lightweight, neither is the 24-105mm zoom lens. Put these together and you’re dealing with a big and heavy camera. There are also a lot of times a big camera is not practical to have and then there’s also my high threshold for taking a picture in the first place, I mean that every time I pick up the 40D I want to take a serious picture. For example, the hike we did in September. Sure I have some nice pictures from it, but I completely failed to capture feeling of the hike itself. What I mean is that there is a time and place for snapshots and the 40D is no snapshot camera to me, but the G10 however, you just dig it out from your pocket, switch on and snap. No threshold to get over!

I mentioned the Panasonic G1 a while back. I was hoping that it would be small enough to be that portable camera I wanted, but now I’ve seen it compared to other dSLRs and it’s actually not dramatically smaller. Not to forget that I would then be investing in a second system with lenses and accessories and all, so I decided against it.

So G10 it is. It’s been receiving rave reviews and it seems to be a professional photographer’s #1 choice in compact cameras.

Pros

• Nice zoom range 28-140mm (the 28mm wideangle actually beats the 38mm I get on my 40D+24-105mm zoom). Sure I’d like to have more at the long end, but 140mm works. Especially when I have 14.7MP to crop from.
• RAW
• Nice functions like live histogram and built-in 3-stop ND filter
• Conversion lens adapter with a 58mm filter thread so I can use my existing filters with a step-up ring (which I already happened to have)
• Other must-have features like bracketing and manual mode

Cons

• It’s a compact camera, what can I say. 14.7MP on a small sensor, that’s just insane. With today’s technology they should be able to create a kick-ass 5MP compact but unfortunately Joe Public can only appreciate the pixel count and not picture quality.

Also-rans

• Panasonic LX3. Panasonic had the good sense of jumping off the megapixel-wagon and created a nice 10MP camera instead. Unfortunately, it only barely beats the G10 in picture quality but what really put me off was the zoom range. Sure, 24mm wideangle is unique but 60mm at the long end…? It would never work for me.
• Nikon P6000. Just simply not as good as the G10.

First impressions

It’s heavy. I mean, I had read the specs so I knew how much it weighs, but it’s still much heavier than I thought. However, it’s easy to see where the weight comes from – the camera is solidly built and it feels like a real camera and not just some toy. Even the tripod socket is metal, and you don’t often get that with compacts. Secondly, there are a lot of buttons and controls, my 40D seems very simple in comparison. I might even have to read the manual!

The battery is still being charged but I will have to wait until the weekend to try it out in any case, so watch this space!