The Quiet Picture

With the landscape looking like it does, I decided to concentrate on the birds this morning. I struck out, the birds just wouldn’t settle on the perch, nothing I can do about it. But to my great surprise, the squirrel turned up. I mean, this is me standing in full view without any camouflage, and still the squirrel came down to eat. Must’ve been really hungry! It even allowed me to change the camera orientation from horizontal to vertical and shift my position a little bit, never happened before. But then I started moving more and more, checking the limits of the squirrel’s tolerance, and it finally had enough and fled.

While I was waiting for the birds, I looked behind me to check the sun’s position. I saw that the distant hills were layered nicely in the morning light, so I turned the camera around and did some landscape photography with the 300mm lens, and wished that it would been even longer so I could’ve gotten a tight horizontal composition on the hill.

I liked the way the sky changed colour from orange to blue, so I went for a vertical stitch. When it was time to put the pictures together, I just couldn’t make the transition from orange to blue work properly (not an issue with the stitch itself, but just the way the natural gradient came out) so in the end I sampled both the blue and orange colours and used an artificial gradient instead. Since the colour is an exact match, almost the only difference between the original sky and the fake one is that the muddy transition part in the original is now clean. Would you miss the muddy transition if you didn’t know it was removed?

I wasn’t going to do anything about this nuthatch picture from yesterday, but for the lack of anything better to do (except work), I picked up the gauntlet thrown by Miika in the comments. At least it’s a nice spotlight on the bird, but the perch isn’t much to cheer at. There is this one place on the branch with different kinds of lichen and I was really hoping that some bird – any bird – would sit there but of course they wouldn’t. It seems like they sat everywhere else on this branch except the most photogenic spot!

Anyway, so there’s canvas added at the bottom. Easy enough, except the branch itself. Funny how time flies when you clone and heal those small details to hide the edits… but I think it’s ok now. Question as always is, would you know it was edited if I didn’t say so?

Been a warm autumn. Despite the cold nights we had in October, and the little bit of snow that came and went, there’s not a sign of winter yet. The days are just getting darker, that’s all. Even in the mountains it’s warmer than usual, the first cross country skiing race should go off in Bruksvallarna next weekend but I reckon the only way they’re gonna pull it off is if they had stored some snow from last year (they do that in some places you know). The only snow I saw was on top of the higher mountains and even that was melting, it was patchy and not very pretty. I walked around in some boggy areas and felt that the moss pillows were hard under my foot, so there has been some colder periods to freeze them. There was also a little bit of ice left on the small and shaded tarns. The kind of thing I’d expect in September, really.

But at least the weather was nice up there, with a little bit of sun. At home it’s just foggy and damp and the day was too dark for photographing the birds, but what else is there to shoot these days anyway? I had to go up to ISO 800 to get any decent shutter speeds, not a favourite thing to do but since the fog was providing a light background, it was possible to pull of some pictures like the squirrel closeup. Unfortunately I didn’t have a chance to flip the camera for a vertical (the squirrel would’ve been gone long before) so I just barely got the ear tufts in the frame and was happy with that. Added some canvas afterwards, no problem with that when the background is so even. And the crested is a bonus, nothing spectacular but I’m still just a little bit thrilled for getting any pictures of it at all. The crest says it all – it’s damp in the forest.

Yesterday was about as un-interesting as it gets, photographically speaking. Today would’ve been ever worse, so a visit to the zoo was just the ticket to lift up the weekend. I was hoping to get some pictures of the wolves, it’s almost three years since from my last wolf pictures and that’s just too long for my favourite animals.

Since the snow was looking rather ugly with the recent weather, I figured that I should use the 1.4 teleconverter to be able to isolate the animals from the background. When I was at the wolf enclosure, I discovered quickly that 300mm times crop sensor times TC equals too much reach – I could barely fit the animals in the frame! The first wolf pose is full frame and it’s tight. So I removed the TC and framing was easier, although that 300mm x crop sensor can still be a bit much. Especially when you meet friendly wolverines who’ll happily come right up to you to check if it’s a taste bit of meat or a camera in my hand. Since I had very little margin for composition error, I managed clip off the tips of the tail hairs of the sitting wolverine. I had to do some serious post-editing to add some pixels on the left and then try to fake the tail end. I can see it’s fake, but I’m not sure if it’s so obvious when you don’t know what was done?

At feeding time, the keeper was kind enough to put a piece of meat on a branch of the pine. I just had time to flip the camera vertically but it when it came down to it, I failed with it again – just couldn’t fit the fully stretched wolverine in the frame. This one worked because the tail is hidden, although to be honest the face suffers a little bit of motion blur. But I just can’t delete my only tree climbing wolverine picture!

All in all a nice visit in good company, the pictures aren’t stellar but at least I learned that I do not need to use the teleconverter in Järvzoo!

At long last, I finally thought I’d print out some pictures in poster size. It was fairly easy to select the pictures because I honestly don’t have very many pictures which I feel would look nice on a wall, I find the whole concept a little bit odd. So I went for the minimalistic flower closeups, plus a tiger (I just have to decide between this or the one presented here).

The real problem lies in the presentation. I don’t want to have a picture which completely fills the frame so I just tried to use some lines for an artsy effect. I remember a few years ago I saw a big print where the use of white space around the picture was taken to extremes, I kinda thought it was a bit funny that half the price of that print is just empty space, really… But joking aside, it was a very effective presentation. You don’t need a physical frame when you create a print like that, all you need is a backboard and a sheet of glass for protection (and hanging up).

I’m reasonably happy with the frame now, but I don’t know what to do with the text. I want to have the title of the picture and I also want to squeeze in my name somewhere in there. But I just feel that the main text and my name are conflicting… maybe it’s a font problem, I can’t find anything that would work together and I don’t think it’s a good idea to the same font for both, unless I find a nice font in small caps so I could include both the title and my name under the picture. I’m sure I used to have a suitable font but I never remember to back them up when I reinstall the computer! I have one week to sort this out before the print offer goes out, so I guess I’ll have to do some font hunting again.

I realised that I could’ve done better with yesterday’s images. The nuthatch could be cropped differently to make use of the full width of the image and get rid of some of the excess on top. And while I was processing it, I decided to add some more canvas for good measure so now there’s a bit more space in front of the bird than in the original (crop dimensions 1:2). And by the way, it’s my all-time favourite bird image – regardless of the method I used for achieving the end result!

And the picture with two birds, it was definitely too tight on the left but I couldn’t leave the ugly tree trunk in there either. But with such an even background otherwise, no problem to replace the tree trunk with more yellow. I would’ve like to expand it even more, but I noticed that the pixels started “streaking” – there was some noise from the high ISO and it doesn’t quite work with extreme canvas expansions! So I settled with a 4:3 crop instead.

And having spoken about the sunny conditions I don’t like, here’s another nuthatch to illustrate the issue. The background isn’t nearly as bad as it could be though, I deleted everything worse… That pose though, it’s classic nuthatch!

Windy today, so no fog. But overcast in the morning, so I photographed the birds, what else? Yesterday when I got some nice pictures of the more elusive birds, I started thinking that maybe I’ve exhausted the opportunities at my bird feeder. But never underestimate the birds. Instead of shooting the birds on the perch, I tried to catch them clinging to the pine bark. And then I noticed that the background in one particular spot was to die for so I carefully positioned the camera (the angle to get the background was very small) and then just waited for some birds. Any birds at all, I just wanted to use that background! When the nuthatch showed up, I couldn’t believe my luck. Granted, I had to do some serious photoshopping to get rid of an OOF blob in the foreground but this was one of those cases where I was more interested in the end result than how I achieved it. I know I recently posted a fairly similar nuthatch picture but this pose is better, it’s more of a typical nuthatch pose than in the previous effort.

Then at around noon the clouds cleared and it was bright and sunny. I just know that sunny conditions don’t work with the birds, so why I was standing there with the camera anyway I’ll never know… but I kept a watchful eye on the background so I would only use angles where it wasn’t a complete mess. But if you ever needed proof that overcast works better, just look at that nuthatch. Me happy!

A while back I was being a bit sceptical about the new Photoshop CS5. Then I found out that there’s one feature that might actually be quite interesting for me, the improved HDR processing engine. HDR in CS4 was quite bad, actually, but this new version (HDR Pro) promised an option to remove ghosts that sometimes appear in your HDR pictures when something has moved between the frames, for example tree branches in the wind. I had one such HDR that I’ve been trying to fix on and off since last September, so of course I had to test if I could finally get it done in CS5.

In short – no.

If you look at the picture, the first sample shows the ghosting that appears when the image is processed normally (samples are not downsized or processed otherwise than the HDR, just cropped from originals). I then applied ghost removal and used the medium exposed frame as the base for it. And it actually does a pretty good job, but only with some of the branches. On the right side, things look fine. In the lower left corner, it’s a total disaster.

So I loaded the same HDR but using the under-exposed frame as the base for the ghost removal. Now it looks acceptable (let’s oversee the serious CA, it’s not the point of investigation here), but instead of the ghosting, there is now some weird pixelated splotches all over the place. Look at the tree trunk, there are some black dots that are not happening in the other samples. And on the right in the brances, some green dots.

I tried to adjust all of the processing settings to see if I could get these artefacts to disappear. But nix, it can’t be done.

This particular HDR could work with just two frames, but the ghost removal option is not available for a two frame merge. It probably wouldn’t help anyway because the un-needed overexposed frame is not used for the branches anyway.

Maybe this particular picture is just too much for HDR Pro. Let’s not forget that this is the first version of ghosting removal and first versions often just give you a taste of the tool. Just like the HDR tool in CS4 was crap and now it’s good, so there’s a reason to expect that ghosting removal will be improved in CS6!

But until then, I have to decide if I will keep this HDR or finally trash it after spending hours on trying to make it work. Currently my only option seems to be to combine the best bits from the two HDR versions with ghosting removal applied. After a while, I’ll probably decide that the picture wasn’t that good anyway!

Musings on photo editing, part 2

Part 1

My question is, is a photograph a representation of reality, or is it the photographer’s interpretation of what they think reality should be?

When the picture is edited to no longer reflect the reality, I’m not sure if I want to call them photographs anymore… seems like they’ve gone beyond a photograph, in the traditional sense of the word (read: analogue). The dictionary definition of the word “photograph” is pretty all-encompassing though, because the word means “drawing with light”. Photography is a form of art, so a photo must be a work of art, and a heavily edited photo is… not a photo? But a work of art in any case. And such, neither wrong or right. And whatever I personally feel about photo manipulation, I am not going to condemn anyone else for doing it. To each their own! My only problem is when somebody presents a photo to me as a reflection of reality, when in fact the photo is edited to longer represent reality.

The beauty, as always, is in the eye of the beholder. If you’re ready to accept a heavily manipulated picture as a photograph, then that’s what is – even if it ends up on Photoshop Disasters. But as all the pictures on the PS Disasters blog witness, a photograph does tell a big fat lie sometimes. The laws of physics are bent and the human anatomy likewise.

Maybe the issue is really about linguistics. Could we have a word for a non-edited image (where no physical elements are changed) and another word for a “photoshopped” image? Both are photographs at the moment, whether you call it an image or a picture it’s all just semantics. But I’m talking about the difference in content!

So this brings me back to the new tools in CS5, which is actually what gave me the spark for these musings in the first place. While the content-aware fill tool is very cool indeed, you can hardly call the result a representation of reality. The ease and extent of removing elements in the photo is almost scary. Don’t like the factory in the background? No probs, remove it. That’s looking at the world through a pink filter: everything you find wrong with it will be fixed.

My challenge lies in finding that rose-tinted reality in the world around me so I can portray it with my camera. The challenge is not about changing the reality to fit my ideal of it.

Same difference I guess.

Musings on photo editing, part 1

Remember when they used to say that a photo never lies?

Well, they may have been a bit too blue-eyed even in the old days of analogue. There was a lot more going in the darkroom than simple film development. But by and large, a photo didn’t lie. Those darkroom wizards aside, the majority of photographers (pros and home snappers alike) settled with reality as it was, warts and all.

Then came computers. Then came digital cameras. And now, Adobe is prepping Photoshop CS5 with some really cool new tools that takes manipulation to whole new heights and it’s not like the photo editing tools have been bad so far either.

Regular readers of this blog (yes, I mean both of you) know that I have a very conservative stance on a photo manipulation. I just simply prefer to make my images in the camera, that’s all – it’s a personal challenge, but it’s not an absolute and I’m prepared to venture out if the occasion calls. Dust spec removal, levels adjustment, saturation etc have always been part of my toolbox and I don’t consider those any more manipulation than choosing the composion, aperture and shutter speed in the camera. Manipulation to me is when you start adding or removing things in the picture – physical things like buildings, radio masts, trees etc.

It seems like I’m getting a bit more relaxed about my attitude towards editing (manipulating) my pictures, so I guess it’s just a matter of giving it time. I try to keep Lightroom as my one-stop shop for photo processing and the clone/heal heal tool has its restrictions. In any case, I’m gradually doing more retouching in my pictures, beyond Lightroom. Nothing drastic, but removing occasional stray branches or grass blades is not the moral dilemma it used to be. White lies… bending the truth a little bit?

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An un-edited version of the above picture is here. And yes, it’s a zoo animal, another thing that requires disclosure. Just take a look at what happened with the winner of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year. A stunning picture whether it’s a tame wolf or not, but if it is tame… then I would sure like to know it. The end result doesn’t count if you’re not honest about it!