Slightly manipulated: the moon is a full-size crop pasted into a scaled-down image of the background (to keep the noise consistent). I’ve got a few others that are similar but might have a little more detail on the right. (Specs: 200mm, f/5.6, ISO400, 4 to 6 seconds.)
I finally got around to processing some of the pictures I took this past weekend. I wanted to share a few.
How does that one look? I like to think it passes as a ‘normal’ shot. What’s not evident is that it was underexposed, poorly metered, had a nasty green color cast, and had everything in perfect focus. Tweaking photos in Photoshop requires striking a delicate balance. Too little touch-up and the image doesn’t look that great, and too much and the image looks pathetically artificial.
I like to think this one is a good compromise. I used Levels as well as the Shadows & Highlights tool to bring out a lot of the detail that was lost: some areas were too dark (people), and others were too bright (the court). I bumped up saturation and contrast every so slightly (that’s an easy one to take too far), and then used my new favorite Photoshop tool, a ‘smart selector,’ which let me easily select the crowd, and nothing else. It worked remarkably well at letting me not get any of the players or the court. With that, I applied a slight Gaussian blur to the crowd, to throw them a little bit out of focus. It’s what it should have looked like anyway, had it been shot with a faster lens.
Here’s the same shot straight out of the camera. You can see that it’s not really bad, and, side-by-side, it actually look a little more “natural.” But the players are a little too pale, the crowd is a little too distracting, and so forth.
Now here’s another one I took:
At a glance, this looks like a decent photo. Your eyes should be drawn right to the player as he makes his shot (I love shooting a camera with negligible shutter lag!) (The motion blur on the ball which looks kind of cheesy to me is actually legitimate.) The players, the rim, and the backboard all look nice and sharp. But if your eyes wander the crowd, you can quickly see that my attempt at a few tiers of Gaussian blur were amateurish. Having stuff like the open doors and scaffolding in the back of the gym is distracting. Again, had I been shooting a nice 200mm f/2.0 (not yet released, much less within my budget), it would have been thrown out of focus. But I was shooting with a lens at f/5.6, leaving stuff like that remarkably in focus. I started by selecting all the background junk and applying a Gaussian blur, but to mimic real life blur gets complicated in this setup. I wanted to throw the fans near the court slightly out of focus, but let the doors and walls be further blurred. This required multiple tiers of blurring, and left some strange effects. You’ll notice a few people with bodies that are mostly in focus, but heads that are exceptionally blurry. With a little more time, I could probably improve on this, but this was one of my first attempts at working seriously to manage background blur, so I instead offer it, with its myriad flaws, as an example.
An awesome comment on Ask MetaFilter gives some incredibly well-worded advice:
The camera matters not a whit.
The lens matters quite a bit.
The flash matters most in the kit…
…if you expect your models to be well-lit.
Of course, I have a good camera and a pretty good lens, but just the on-camera flash. I’ve had some pretty good luck with it, mostly with improvised solutions (that’s almost identical to mine: similar camera, exact same gold foil) to bounce light off the ceiling / walls. It looks dorky, sure, but it works.
But you should check this out. Not only is this guy an amazing photographer, but he gives a lot of great tutorials. I think my future photo-taking is going to work on finding skillful ways to use the flash for lighting. I’m sure there’s lots more that can be done with high-end flashes and radio slaves, but I want to start by mastering the built-in flash.
Through my newfound connections, I got myself invited to a dinner with the New Hampshire Democratic Party. Me and 2,999 other New Hampshire residents. It was amazing. Although let me start with one disclaimer: it used to really get under my skin when people would take jabs at Democrats for being disorganized. But between a Youth Democrats of America conference I went to with some college colleagues and tonight, I’ve come to the following conclusion: Democrats are great in government, but terrible at organizing conferences. It took us a good 20 minutes to find a parking spot. It wasn’t that it was crowded (it was), but it was that the people telling us where to go were utterly inept! They’d tell us where to go park, and we’d arrive and have someone else tell us that they had no idea why they sent us there, since we couldn’t park there, and send us somewhere else. So we zig-zagged across the Hampshire Hills complex for quite some time.
In typical style with these posts, I’ll probably mix political and event commentary with some comments about photographic conditions. All photos link through to the Flickr gallery, where I’ve uploaded 21 highlights from tonight.
Let’s begin with the trivial. It was held in a huge dome, newly built at the posh Hampshire Hills dome. Since I’d been there last (a couple years), they apparently built an enormous stadium capable of seating 3,000:
Media swarmed the place, since with Iowa done, we were the next big thing, second only to the news that Britney Spears was taken to the hospital…
So really, the whole nation’s–even the world’s–eyes were upon us. It’s our time to shine… or to embarrass ourselves:
We were all there to see the Democrats running for President, but they made us sit through an awful lot of other stuff. For example, who–or what–is this?
Carol Shea-Porter spoke briefly. While I think everyone in the room was to credit, I was secretly proud for having voted for her. Not only is she spot-on when it comes to the issues, but she’s an outstanding speaker.
A few photography notes… For one, if you ever find yourself in charge of lighting at an event such as this, please consider bringing a photographer in to give you some guidance. The flag had really strange lighting on it. The goal with the black backdrop and intense lighting on the podium may have been to ensure that the background was non-distracting. It’s surely better than the glossy poster behind Bill Clinton. But it threw my camera’s metering through a loop, and I ended up shooting in full-manual mode most of the night. It was so dark that I was using ISO1600 at f/3.5 (as fast as my wide lens goes) and getting exposures of 1/15 second. Terribly dark. But then I was using ISO800 and getting 1/500-second shutter speeds shooting candidates. This is good, except that the light was really harsh, and all the lights were of different color temperatures. So our beloved flag was maroon, white, beige with a hint of blue, and black, while the whitest of speakers had intensely red skin. If the speaker was properly exposed, the podium was underexposed, and the sign in front was overexposed.
John Lynch, New Hampshire’s (Democratic) governor spoke a bit, too. Here you can see another problem: my 200mm lens (effectively 320mm with the digital camera’s crop) was far too short… They need to make a 100-600mm f/1.4 lens for situations like these. (Such a lens would probably weight at least 100 pounds and cost as much as a house, but it would take great pictures!) I honestly don’t know a lot about what Lynch has been up to, but it’s the same way I felt like when Clinton was president: things seem to run smoothly. National politics is a crisis week after week. With both Deval Patrick (MA Governor) and John Lynch, I think no news is good news. (I forget whether it was Lynch or Shea-Porter that mentioned it, but 2008 marked the beginning of civil unions in New Hampshire. So it’s not all no news. I’m frankly kind of proud that what much of the country probably sees as a quaint old farming state is at the forefront of…. rights?)
John Edwards was a no-show. I’m not sure what happened. I’d imagine that he was doing something else, somewhere else, but I’m really not sure why, especially after the surprise of beating Hillary in Iowa, he’d chose to avoid a forum with 3,000 New Hampshire Democrats and cameras from every news network in the country.
So Kucinich went first. While the Caucus results show him having received 0.0% of the votes, he didn’t seem phased by trivial polls.
If you think this is an unflattering photo… You should have been there. I agreed with a lot of what he said, but it was how he said it that I think resigns him to getting 0.0% in important polls. He spoke about how it’s wrong to spy on our citizens (a reference to Bush’s wiretapping), and how we should end the war, etc. But he seemed almost as angry as Zell Miller’s legendary segment on Hardball.
It seemed a lot like a fire-and-brimstone speech, except, instead of shouting about Jesus, he was shouting about the Constitution, and, instead of waving the Bible, he was frantically waving his pocket copy of the US Constitution:
What pictures can’t convey is that he was furiously pounding on the podium and began jumping around a bit. Hopefully one of the news stations that was there will broadcast that.
It was assumed that this was his wife:
…although she appears more like a giant than a wife.
We also got to hear from Howard Dean:
He was actually a great speaker, and has a quality I love in politicians: the ability to poke fun at himself a little bit. He started talking about the need for a strong showing not just in Iowa and New Hampshire, and then began to list a few more states with early primaries. “But they tell me I’m not supposed to do lists anymore,” he said, an obtuse reference to his infamous yell. And then he made the reference much clearer by pumping his fist and acting as if he were about to reenact it, drawing laughter and applause.
Tonight’s hidden gem was Bill Richardson.
I’ve liked him for a long time, and he’s a very close second to Obama on my list of preferred candidates. (An Obama-Richardson ticket would be incredible! Hint hint, Obama!) While he doesn’t always photograph well (or maybe I just have bad timing), he sure knows how to give a speech. But perhaps most powerful was what he said about the need to pull out of Iraq. He talked, with evident sadness in his voice, about how he looks forward to the day when he can stop taking down the New Mexico flag to honor yet another of his residents killed in action. It was a really powerful way to put it, and the way he did it was flawless: it seemed like he opposed the war not just for political reasons, or as a soundbite, but because it truly pained him as governor to see his citizens being killed. Wow. Just wow. I really can’t do his speech justice here, but suffice it to say that I think his was the best.
And, of course, Hillary Clinton was there. I didn’t get (m)any pictures of her, because her supporters were standing and completely blocking the podium. (More on this later.) Bill and the much-forgotten Chelsea were there, too. But she began something that left me feeling uneasy: throughout the whole thing, there’d been an awesome sense of compatriotism. Some of us were there for Obama, some were there for Hillary, and some for other candidates. We were all in it together, not for our candidate, but for our future.
Hillary let loose a verbal barb clearly aimed at Obama, saying that we need strong leadership to end the war, not just hope that it will happen. This really rubbed me the wrong way–this type of bickering is exactly what has so many people fed up with politics. I also started to pick up on a sense of animosity between the Hillary fans and the Obama fans. I mentioned earlier that the Hillary fans crowded the stage and remained standing. None of us could see the stage, but with two enormous screens projecting a live feed, it wasn’t a big deal.
The Hillary camp somehow also wound up with all their tables right in front of the podium, while the Obama fans were assigned to tables in the corner. It turns out I was far from the only one to find this a little strange, as the Obama organizers decided to have us all stand and walk up to the stage when Obama came out. This ended up being an utter disaster, though.
Since our seats weren’t anywhere close, we ended up blocking an aisle. This didn’t sit well with the fire marshall, who (emphatically) cleared the aisles. We were still standing, just with a big fire-safety aisle between us, but an announcer demanded that we sit down before the event would proceed. A number of Hillary supporters were also getting testy with us. While really just a minor thing, it seems to me to show a lot of deeper problems: Obama supporters ended up coming off as brash and obnoxious, and I think Hillary fans and Obama fans came to dislike each other a little bit more. This is what we can’t have happening.
Of course, not everyone sat down as requested, leaving those of us who can follow instructions to get some pretty lousy pictures.
Obama, as usual, gave a great speech. He talked a lot about hope (which sums him up well). But he indirectly had a great comeback to Hillary’s jab, saying that, while he acknowledges that he’s a “hopemonger,” it’s time for a President with a can-do attitude, as opposed to focusing on the stale ways of Washington that we’re all so fed up with. Unlike some of the other candidates, he really didn’t use the opportunity to give a basic “You should vote for me” speech, as much as a, “The time is now” speech.
I suppose it’s neat to have him framed by his signs, but I’d hoped for better.
We’ve got a few more days to go. I’m attending a house party tomorrow (Deval Patrick’s coming), and it looks like there’s a Nashua Obama rally. Sunday’s more phonebanking, and Monday’s a Manchester rally for Obama. And then Tuesday is the day. And then it’s all over for us, with the candidates and the news getting a few days rest before scuttling on to the next primary. And an incredibly awkward period of waiting will emerge, leaving us in suspense for months before candidates are finally chosen.
I’d been seeing a lot about HDR, or High Dynamic Range, photography. In layman’s terms, the dynamic range of a camera is the range from the darkest to the lightest parts a camera can record in one shot. The problem is that the dynamic range of cameras doesn’t match real life that often.
Long ago, photographers found a halfway decent solution: graduated filters. Basically, you stick a filter in front of the lens, with part of it darker than the rest. It’s great if, say, you want to take a great picture at the beach with both foreground detail and the sky properly exposed.
With computers, though, there’s been another photo. You take a series of bracketed shots: one or two for the sky, one or two for the foreground, etc. Some people have been known to stitch together close to a dozen. Having a tripod helps tremendously here, since the images need to be pretty much exactly the same besides exposure.
Strictly, HDR requires more than a monitor can really display, but a technique called tone mapping is often used. The basic premise is to take the “good” parts of each shot in a bracketed series and stitch them together. Photoshop CS2 and newer has an HDR utility, though I’ve been pretty unimpressed with the results. Today I started playing around with an Open Source tool called Qtpfsgui. It’s even cross-platform! It supports multiple algorithms for doing tone mapping, too.
Overall, I’m still not that happy with the results, but it’s a start. Here’s a ‘normal’ shot of the beach, taken on Cape Cod yesterday:
You’ll note that the foreground (e.g., the bench) is too dark, yet the sky is too light. It’s a good illustration of insufficient dynamic range.
Luckily, I knew in the back of my head that I wanted to try my hand at HDR photography, so I saw it as an opportunity. I set my camera to meter -2 to +2 EV, to try to cover the full range. The end product:
It displays a very common pet peeve of mine with HDR photos: it looks entirely unrealistic. Absurd, even. I think part of it’s that it’s just overdone, and that the contrast is jacked way up. I want to play around with it more and see if I can get a more natural product. So far, no luck. But, at least in a technical sense, it’s an improvement over the first image.
I’d like to see HDR come a little further, so that HDR photos don’t have the same, “Whoa!” quality that a scary old lady with way too much makeup has. I don’t think the limitations are entirely technical at this point, either.
(Okay, it works in chronological order, but I display newest on top… So just pretend my title complements Kyle’s.)
I wasn’t planning on blogging about my Christmas presents, but Kyle did and I decided to save some stuff for a new post.
I was much relieved when the former bishop of Turkey brought a Rebel XTi to replace my 10D (RIP, buddy; I loved you for the short time I knew thee). Although it’s technically a lower “class” of camera, the XTi is really an upgrade to the 10D in all ways except size and weight, so I’m quite pleased. (I “lost” ISO3200, but it was so noisy that i don’t miss it.) Not only is it a higher resolution (and a bigger LCD!), but Canon introduced an awesome new feature: an ultrasonic “duster” for the sensor that runs every time you turn the camera on or off. It’s too soon to tell, but it’s seemingly pretty effective at making sensor dust a problem of the past.
Along with it was a 50mm f/1.8 lens… I was a bit concerned at first, because it’s an effective 80mm with the FoV crop, but it’s turned out to still be an ideal length. The f/1.8 aperture affords me two great abilities: one is to take pictures in comparatively dark places without relying on flash, and the other is the ability to throw the background way out of focus, achieving “bokeh,” a fabulous effect.
I should note that, in the past few days, I re-shuffled things on my computer, re-installing Ubuntu on a clean partition and getting Compiz working. I’m hoping to use Xen to run my Windows installation, but I haven’t gotten Xen and my desktop environment to play nicely yet. I backed up my 500 GB “backup” drive, reformatted and repartitioned it (in a sane manner this time), and then moved everything back onto it in a more organized manner. I also set up an old stereo I had almost forgotten I owned. So it was practically Christmas even before today.
We also got a Wii for the family, along with Guitar Hero 3. Trying to get my parents using it, I realized just how steep the learning curve is: they’ve probably sunk a couple hours into practice and are just now finishing songs. It was the same way for me, too, just a long time ago. In a way, I kind of wonder why people bother: if you spend half an hour and get nothing but the crowd booing you, it’s really not encouraging to keep going. GH3 on the Wii is interesting–you snap a Wiimote into the back and use that, making it a wireless guitar. (Woot!) As an added bonus, the sounds when you mess up come out the controller and not the TV, which would be very helpful in multiplayer mode.
The Wiimotes now ship with this silly-looking “skin” for the controllers. I’m not sure whether it’s to protect the controllers (which practically explode if they get flung into a cinder block wall) or to protect people (who, presumably, do not like being hit in the head with game controllers), but it’s probably a good idea either way… They just look a bit goofy, is all.
I also got some great books… I’ve started several, and am having a hard time deciding whether I should keep up status quo (reading a chapter or two from one and then coming back and picking up another book and continuing that), or read them sequentially. Current must-reads on my nightstand* include my (signed!) copy of The First Campaign by Garrett Graff, an expert on blogging and politics; Tim Ferriss’ The Four-Hour Workweek (pre-review: the little bit I’ve read is fascinating, but between the book and his website, I can’t help but pick up on a bit of ego?); “Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria,” an interesting (or so it looks; I haven’t gotten far in yet) look at race relations in America by Spelman College President Beverly Daniel Tatum; and Naked Economics, a thin paperback “Undressing the Dismal Science” by Charles Wheelan: it looks like the type of book I wish I’d had when I was taking Economics.
I also received a nice vacuum. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t be too excited about a vacuum cleaner. Think of the, “Oh, it’s more clothes?!” you felt as a child. I think that’s how most people would feel upon receiving a vacuum cleaner. Especially college-aged guys. But you should see the floors in my dorm room… The vacuum was among my favorite gifts this year. Our floor at school gets vacuumed about once a month. It needs to be vacuumed about thrice a week. So it’s going to be a huge improvement.
* Full disclosure: I don’t actually have a nightstand, but I didn’t think it was too egregious of a lie to not say that the books are actually split between my desk and the side of my bed. But in case anyone wants to try to accuse me, there it is: I don’t have a nightstand.
Andrew’s biased me. I’m a Canon fan. I own a Canon body, and now, two Canon-mount lenses. And this brings in switching costs: the lenses would be useless to me if I had a Canon. And, while I think it’s mostly irrational, I’ve come to love everything about Canon cameras and see any difference as a flaw in Nikons.
But I’m still excited about the Nikon D3. And it turns out that I’m far from the only one. The D3 has a ton of people anticipating its release. And even at 5 grand, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re sold out at first. I don’t have that much to spend on a camera, but if I were a serious photographer, I’d have pre-ordered mine already. Why?
Something tells me that the folks at Canon are scrambling to develop a sensor this good.. I hope they are. Because I hate those stupid circular viewfinders on Nikon cameras.
Aside: I really hope the folks at Canon are also scrambling to develop a camera that ditches the shutter… I’m still at a loss to explain why it’s even in a digital camera.
Aside: Maybe they can steal my ideas and include a useful integrated WiFi chip… Or a built-in intervalometer. That’d be trivial to implement?
Tonight Oprah and Obama spoke at the Verizon Center. I went, both as a fan (of Obama, not Oprah) and to try to get some great shots.
I’ve heard Obama speak before. He’s really good. I went in tonight with Obama being my likely pick, but with Edwards still having some chance, and with the idea that Richardson would rock, too, but that he doesn’t stand a chance right now. I came out convinced that, without a doubt, Obama’s my guy.
Oprah also turned out to be an amazing speaker. I generally don’t have anything positive to say about TV celebrities, but she turned out to be great. She spoke about how, when she’s not on TV, she’ll often say, “Somebody should do something about that…” to all the things wrong in America right now. So, for the first time in her career, she stepped up and endorsed a political candidate, the one she thinks will “do something about that” to all our contemporary problems.
Michelle Obama spoke, too. Granted, she’s biased, but she had nothing but good things to say about her husband. She spoke about how when she first met him, they were both lawyers. While she was focused on wanting to be the next millionaire with her law degree, Obama received his degree and then went into destitute, rural areas to help.
And of course, Obama spoke. While he called himself the third-best of the three when it comes to speaking, his speech didn’t disappoint. Hearing him talk almost gives me goosebumps. I’m so focused on all that’s wrong with America: millions don’t have health care (as soon as I graduate from college, I’ll join the ranks of the uninsured), we keep botching things like Katrina, maybe because all of our National Guard / military is tied up with Iraq’s civil war. Our economy heads further south and shows no signs of stopping…
But when he talks, I suddenly have a vision of what America should be: veterans coming back from Iraq receiving a hero’s welcome and receiving veteran’s benefits, restored relations with the world community, health care for everyone*, the end of a pointless war, and the end of the clash between blue states and red states–a United States, if you will.
So why is my post entitled Misery? Because my camera died.
Here’s Cameron, a 10-year-old student, reading a letter to Obama, imploring him to provide more aid to the autistic:
He received (much-deserved!) hearty applause.
There’s our beloved John Lynch addressing the crowd. We were near the back of the Verizon Center, so we didn’t have the best angle, but I knew from past experience that Senator Obama was very cognizant of the fact that the crowd wasn’t just directly in front of him, so he would turn around and make sure all the crowd got his attention. So I was excited. Obama would surely come around to the other side of the podium at some point, and I’d get some great shots. The lighting was good enough that I was getting 1/100 and better shutter speeds at ISO800 (on a slow f/5.6 lens); the only thing I could have wished for was a faster lens to throw the background out of focus a bit more. But I was golden. A lot of people say photography’s all about light. To me, it’s all about angles. And we’ve all seen head-on shots of politicians. They’re boring. I had a good perch.
So, you might ask, where are all the shots of Oprah, or Michelle and Barack Obama?
Err 99. Canon’s catch-all error message.
For a lot of people, it’s a bad connection between the camera and the contacts on the lens. For others, it’s a CF card error. But I tried it all in vain. I “reseated” the lens. No luck. I tried taking a shot with no lens. No luck. I tried shooting without a CF card. (That wouldn’t do me much good, but it’d tell me if the CF card was the problem.) Still Err 99. I tried reseating the battery, which apparently sometimes resolves the error. No luck. I even took the battery out and removed the little CMOS battery. No luck.
All indications are that it’s the worst possible fate: a shutter problem. There do look to be some small scratches on the shutter, although I wasn’t about to stick my hand in and try. (Because then it’s guaranteed to become a shutter problem…) The shutter isn’t really user-serviceable. Taking the camera apart is very involved. You have to send it back to Canon, for what’s apparently a $200 repair.
Is this a sign that I should get the Rebel XTi I’ve been eying? Or just a sign that I should give up photography?
The worst part, though, wasn’t sitting there knowing that my pride and joy of a camera had just become little more than a paperweight. It was knowing that I was missing some great shots. Initially, I kept just powering it back off and on trying to get some good shots. As Obama walked out, there was a huge sign blocking a lot of people from seeing him as he walked out. So he ducked down and waved underneath the sign. I had a nice, clear shot, and was at 1/100. I clicked the shutter. If all I had gone well, I’d have held it down and gotten three off in rapid succession, ensuring that at least one came out well. But all didn’t go well. Err 99. I got nothing.
A bit later on, he was speaking, and I noticed that Michelle Obama had her arm across Oprah’s back as they sat there. 200mm was just enough length to just about fill the frame with the two of them and Barack at the podium to the left. Err 99.
I spent a long while trying to see if I could resuscitate it, but eventually gave up.
* Before you fault this for the cost, consider that we’re spending many, many billions more than any nation in the world. As President Clinton remarked last month, if we were to put all the other country’s health care systems up on a board, throw a dart and pick whatever it hit, we’d save billions. And yet, despite paying billions more than we should be, we can’t even cover everyone!
How does that happen? Note that this isn’t some carefully-sculpted masterpiece. This is how it came out of the freezer after I filled it with (filtered) water an hour ago.
The other day my camera was in its “AF Hunt” mode, where it couldn’t seem to lock on focus. It’d focus past where it should be, and then turn around and focus back the other way, and just keep going. When you use the flash, it’s worse, because it’ll do a strobe flash to try to aid in focus, but it doesn’t help at all.
After a couple times of doing this, I finally got it focused, and just slid the switch on the lens from “AF” to “M,” disengaging automatic focus. It’d hold the focus that way, so it wouldn’t have to focus every time. (I was stationary, photographing something stationary, so there was no need to refocus every time.)
And then I put the camera down and bumped the lens, so the focus was off. So I just turned the focusing ring. And for the rest of the night, I left the camera in manual focus mode. I’ve found that I can do it just as quickly as the camera can focus the lens, and that’s when it works right: I don’t spin the focus back and forth ten times in a vain attempt to focus something.
Leaving it in manual focus also speeds up the shot: you press the shutter and it takes the picture instantly. There’s no waiting as it focuses.
So almost accidentally, I’ve become a fan of manual focus. Sometimes I’m lazy and want the camera to do it for me, but more often than not, I’m finding that I’d just as soon do it myself.