Everblog

Revision

2010-03-16T22:03:00.000+01:00

Some random notes about my workflow, or after "after the workflow" habits. Things like that. I thought these would be worth sharing (mainly targeted at Lightroom users of course, but applies to other photo management software just as well I think), as an inspiration, a hint... who knows, maybe it's useful for someone out there. :-)

I browse through my older photos every now and then. I review them, re-evaluate them, and rate them anew. I try to find out what I like about them, and what not.
I mark favorites in Lightroom with the "pick" flag. But I often forgot to rate those picks later. I created a smart collection that shows me all photos with the pick flag set but without rating. I can quickly rate my favorites that way.
I only rate photos that I flagged as "pick". My rating goes something like: 5 stars - absolutely worth printing; 4 stars - definitely a keeper, maybe print it, but not absolutely necessary; 3 stars - it's nice to look at so I keep it, still good enough to be shown in a web album; 2 stars - a nice personal memory that I enjoy to look at (but most likely no one else will); 1 star - personal stuff.
since I shoot raw, I often create virtual copies of older photos and start processing them from scratch. Just to find out if there's anything I missed, or to experiment... things like that.
I set filters on my library to show me only 5-star photos. I look at them critically and decide if I still consider them 5-star photos (worth printing). I do the same for the other ratings. Sometimes a photo jumps up from 3-star to 5-star after I re-processed it (with some film simulation or other creative preset, maybe)

I think it's important to stay critic on one's own work and review it. With growing experience, I tend to notice flaws that I had not seen before. I hope to learn from my own mistakes.

Feeling like a nerd?

2010-03-12T21:28:00.000+01:00

Here's something personal I wanted to share for a while. When I started using a tripod, I felt like a complete nerd. Absolutely. Hauling that thing around, especially at a somewhat "public" place, setting it up while people pass by, mounting the camera on it (with the camera pointing at "something" that passers-by will try to see)... it felt like I've got all the worlds attention on me with that huge thing in front of me. Like wearing swimming trunks AND having green colored hair - in winter!

Well, in reality, it's not that bad of course. First - people don't pay all that much attention. :-) And if they do, it's only positive. I never had someone approach me and go like "now look at that nerd with his tripod". :-P Never. If there was any conversation, it was with people who were interested in it, keen to know what I'm doing, that sort of thing (the only problem for me is to stay decent enough and not fall into photography-nerd mode; I try to reserve that for encounters with others photographers...) - most of the people would simply say "oh yes, it's nice light for making photos today". That sort of thing (to me, it sometimes feels like people appreciate the fact that someone at least tries to capture that beauty around us:-).

Pulverturm at Dusk (NIKON D70s, 6s @ ISO 200; f/11, 62 mm DX)

Oh yes, and tripods, as uncomfortable it might be to carry them around all the time, enable you to make pictures like the one above. I'm showing this particular photo again because it's one of the first good photos that I made from the tripod. It's the "Pulverturm" of Burghausen's castle (illuminated by artificial light of course), and it's taken from the path that leads around the Wöhrsee lake, which is more or less crowded with joggers and people talking a walk on evenings and weekends especially... the feelings that I described above are the ones from this very situation. :-P

Today, using a tripod feels like the most natural thing to me, no matter where (but I still don't like hauling it around and fiddling around with it, setting it up). Using the tripod somehow means being serious about photography. Not that it wouldn't be possible to make excellent and "serious" photos freehand, totally not! It's just that... for a planned approach, and maximum control over composition and framing, it's simply the best thing you can do (well, I don't know about you, but me I simply cannot freeze into a pillar of salt like Lot's wife to steady the camera... not to mention that releasing the shutter would be quite difficult of you're a pillar of salt, of course.)

Painted Skies II [Flickr]

2010-03-08T09:31:54-08:00

Alexander S. Kunz posted a photo:

February afternoon at the Chiemsee near Feldwies.
FinePix S5Pro @ ISO100, 9,0 sec at f/16 with 12-24 mm f/4 lens.
View on Black

(simulation of cross-processed Kodak Gold 200 film, polarizer)

Exploration (Part 1)

2010-02-28T18:09:00.003+01:00

For me as a landscape/nature photographer, there are two most compelling motivations in photography, and both can be filed under "exploration". One is the exploration of familiar places, the other is - guess what - the exploration of new places. :-)

In this post I only want to describe my experiences when exploring familiar places (that's why it is also entitled Part 1, yes...) - and actually, there are two approaches to that: one is the "wow, how many times have I been here, why did I never see that before?!" and the other is that "darn, I know that this is a wonderful scene, but the light today is just no good".

Both have one thing is common: it's necessary to "absorb" a place before the photographic opportunities will open up. And of course, sometimes both comes together quite luckily at the first instance. And sometimes, it just takes incredibly long! :-)

I don't know how many times I've been at Burghausen's citylake (called Wöhrsee, a dead branch of the Salzach river). I live in Burghausen for more than 5 years now, and I've been taking walks with the dog something like umpteen times in the area. Regarding the lake... I've had some photographic opportunities (link opens my Picasa Web Album with a search for "Wöhrsee"), but nevertheless, it just took me a lot of time to really absorb the place, find out where to go with the camera, etc. etc.

During my walks with Toni I often have the camera with me, and one late November morning I walked down the natural ramp (along the hill that goes from the new part of town down to the lake) which ends at the upper part of the lake, it was foggy and damp, and when I walked across the small bridge that leads over the Mühlbach (small creek which feeds the lake) I stopped, awe-struck by this scene (also in my "November" album):

First Attempt

Back then, I was totally confident with the photo and considered it as one of my favorites, even though I felt that somehow, something was missing (I'd never admit that without a superior picture as proof, of course). But this was the very "why did I never see that before?!" moment for me. It's just absolutely lovely how the old reed is arranged in layers. I returned to that place many times since then, always looking, waiting... in early February then, I made this photo:

Final

That's the reason why I label the old one from November "First Attempt" now (the colors are a result of applying a film simulation for Lightroom from the "Cold Storage Collection Vol. 1" - I really love playing around with these, they can be bought at Life in Digital Film and mimic all kinds of film including cross processing and whatnot).

The second example is the same scene again, and the result of playing around with the film simulation presets looked interesting and promising - this is another snapshot that I made when I had just the camera with me:

Sketch

The result is pretty unreal of course, but it was something like "ahaaaaa!" for me to see what's in there. So I went there again the next day, packed with tripod and everything, to make a long exposure (10s) that would render the water and the reflection of the reed and trees into something abstract that would go well with the false colors of the cross processing look of the preset that I chose:

Final

Using the square crop put more emphasis on the trees in the top third and how they stretch their snow-covered branches above the lake. This image is available as a fine art print from seenby.com/seenby.de and was selected as "Editor's pick", too.

I want to close with two further remarks: 1. when I was still relatively new to photography, I was always looking at others marvelous photos, sighing and thinking "darn, I live in such a boring place, I wish that we had (tall mountains, vast plains, the sea... whatever) nearby..." - and yes, I know better now! ...and 2. it's important to learn and refine the skills of recognizing photographic opportunities - we don't always have enough time (like, 5 years!:-) to really absorb a place and carve out it's beauty in a photo.

Eggenalm

2010-02-14T00:19:00.001+01:00

I always enjoy browsing through older photos that I made. This is a picture from November 2008 when we made a late-autumn hike to the Eggenalm and Fellhorn. It was a bright, but hazy afternoon, and I was using a polarizer with the Nikon 18-200VR (a lens that I sold in the meantime - which I regret) to somewhat eliminate that haze:

Eggenalm (FinePix S5Pro, 1/30s @ ISO 100; f/8, 40 mm DX)

I was using the S5pro for a couple of months back then and returned to my practice of shooting only raw, despite the infamous JPEG qualities of the camera. Going back to these photos today reassures me that this was and will be the best thing to do. I have all the detail, all the information, all the light and shadows in their purest form, as the camera's sensor saw it, in the file on my harddisk, and I'm free and open to play around with it whichever way I want. The strong and smooth black & white appearance of this new edit would have been impossible had I used only JPEG.

What I want to say is (once more:-) ...even if you're new to digital photography, and particularly to using a DSLR camera - store your raw sensor data from day #1. Set the camera to raw+JPEG in case you're feeling uncomfortable with raw processing now. You can get back to the raw data later when you're more firm with post processing and reach the limits of JPEG - and you'll be glad to have your raw data then.

Winter time, underexposure time

2010-02-07T12:01:00.001+01:00

As I browse through photos on Picasa Web, Flickr and who knows where else I can't help but notice that too many people trust their camera's automatic metering too much. This is especially problematic in winter - on overcast days it might be relatively gloomy, but nevertheless, the subject we're taking photos of are in fact brighter than average.

This leads to a lot of underexposed photos being showcased on the web - our perception is mislead by the dark and gloomy winter days, the camera's LCD can't be trusted anyway (except for the blinking highlight warning or histograms). Here's a JPEG directly out of my Fuji S5pro in Aperture priority mode:

Trees (auto) (FinePix S5Pro, 1/70s @ ISO 100; f/8, 116 mm DX)

On the dark background of the blog it might not immediately look too much underexposed - but it is (if you click on the photo you'll get a 912px wide version with a white border, just check how much the bright - foggy - sky differs from the plain white of that border). The problem is of course the camera's metering: it treats everything it "sees" as being 18% grey (which is about the same as reflecting 50% of the light) - but for a winter scene like this, it's clear that it is not 18% grey!

In situations like these, I set an exposure compensation of +1 stop (even though "they" always say that it is not necessary with matrix metering yada yada yada because this "intelligent" metering technique "knows" the scene...) and the result (again, JPEG straight out of my Fuji S5pro) looks like this:

Trees (+1) (FinePix S5Pro, 1/35s @ ISO 100; f/8, 116 mm DX)

Of course, you can simply adjust exposure in post processing. But that's lame, and the most important part of a correct exposure in the digital domain is: capture as much light as possible without blowing out the highlights (hmmmm, I think I should have this as a boilerplate to insert into every other blogpost:-) because the right side of the histogram (the lights!) contains more detail!

And that of course means: the photo contains more data to work with in post processing. JPEGs with their limited bit depth will benefit from that a lot if you need to post process them (but in reality of course - here's my other boilerplate - you should shoot raw all the time).

Both of these photos where taken with the 70-300VR lens with the camera on my Giotto's 9970 monopod with Manfrotto RC234 tilt head. They are not exactly pieces of art, I just thought about this problem on my Sunday morning walk with Toni & Fuji and wanted to have illustrations. :-)

Prints, Cards, and E-Cards (aka: what's new)

2010-02-01T20:45:00.001+01:00

I've found some references to FotoMoto on the web now and thought I'd give it a try. It is a service that integrates into websites, photoblogs etc. and offers visitors additional functions for ordering prints, greeting cards or e-cards by directly tapping into the site with some - for me - black magic scripting. Or whatever. It even integrates into Lightbox and other scripts - w00t!

From January 2010

It doesn't matter where the content comes from. FotoMoto picks the photo and offers the functionality. If someone wants to buy a print or greeting card, you'll get a notification and should upload a hi-res version to the FotoMoto website. For the very first time, even I can really understand what "Web 2.0" means. :-)

The above photo was made with the AF-Nikkor 2/35mm - a very nice, small and relatively lightweight "normal" lens for DX/APS-C sensors. More on that later!

IMHO: AF-S DX Nikkor 4/12-24mm

2010-01-27T20:39:00.002+01:00

This is the first in what could eventually become a series of articles that describe my own very personal impression of working with my lenses. That's why the post has that big "IMHO" in the title. I do not provide optical facts here, but my personal opinion. A technical review of the lens can be found on PhotoZone for example.

I bought Nikon's DX wideangle zoom about 1.5 years ago, and I use it quite often. I like playing with the extreme wide angle effect. More or less recently, Nikon has replaced it by the 10-24mm DX which offers even more wide angle. The newer one is - IMHO again - a quite desirable lens, especially because it still goes to 24mm on the long end (it does not have a constant aperture of f/4 anymore, but that's really not a big issue for me). Those are the two focal length's at which I use the lens the most: 12mm and 24mm. Much more seldom it's something in between.

The original 12-24mm DX is a "gold ring" lens, indicating some extra high quality, or something. I don't know, because I can't really say that it feels so very "extra". It's rather lightweight so the build quality feels not that impressive. The "light" impression is something that I maybe associate with the zoom ring operation - it could be a little stiffer for my taste. The lack of aperture markers on the distance to focus scale is sad but true for so many modern lenses.

The newer 10-24mm DX doesn't have the gold ring anymore - and I dare say that Nikon knows why. If there's one thing that gets on my nerves very much it is chromatic abberrations (CA), and like many other DX/consumer zoom lenses from Nikon, this one has plenty of it! And by plenty I mean that the CA are visible not just in the 1:1 view, but in the downsized version of the image when I "zoom to fit" in Lightroom.

This is a 1:1 view (click on the photo please, the actually size is 900x600 pixels), and believe me, you DO see this in the on-screen version of the full image (remember, I'm using the S5pro, so a 1:1 crop of the 12mpx raw image is not really 12mpx).

CA...(FinePix S5Pro, 1/125s @ ISO 100; f/11, 12 mm DX)

Yes, this is the extreme corner of the image (upper left), but nevertheless... for an otherwise not very color-intensive photo, this is pretty bad.

Of course, CA can be fixed in post processing, and the newer Nikons will automatically fix it for the JPEGs as good as possible. But sometimes, when you have very fine details in the corners, the corrections "overlap" and turn black twigs against a white sky into blue twigs against a white sky. That's not very desirable for me. CA get on my nerves so much because fixing them in post means fiddling around in post with two sliders, and you never can make it disappear evenly everywhere.

Conclusion: I'd test the competitors (especially the Sigma 10-20mm) more thoroughly should I ever have to make the decision for or against a wideangle zoom on DX again.

What will Nikon do?

2010-01-26T20:43:00.000+01:00

Usually I do not comment on camera development... and I know that being against the megapixel race is very common at the moment... but given that a Canon EOS 5D Mk II body with 21mpx costs about the same as a Nikon D700 body with 12mpx, and that I'm not very interested in high ISO performance as a landscape photographer I wonder if Nikon will provide a tool for those of us who want more megapixels. Hmmmm.

Website Update

2010-01-23T23:25:00.004+01:00

I've recently (well, not so very recently) updated my website after reading an interesting article on one of my favorite photography blogs, The Online Photographer - the article is called "The Tenset" and Mike, the main T.O.P. editor suggests that photographers put their ten favorite pictures very prominently up front in their web presence.

With a little help from a colleague with l33t (that's an interesting read!) HTML skillz ;-) I was able to add AutoViewer to display my personal favorites selection (at the moment it's photos from 2009, and it's a nineset) in a neat presentation - it's using Flash, which should be replaced some day, yes... but it was a quick and convenient solution for me.

Organisation

2010-01-23T10:19:00.004+01:00

Sometimes, when I look at fellow photographer's harddisks (to be precise, the chaotic mess that is their photo collection on disk) I remember that it was exactly the same for me back then... and that I should write a blogpost to share my way of organizing my photos today.

But I just found out - I don't have to. It's not a big surprise that - once more - Brandon Oelling already covers all aspects of organizing a photo collection in his excellent blog. It's a four parted series of articles, for easier navigation I directly paste the links here:

Other than that, I can only add: use keywords, keywords, keywords (for the Picasa users: tags, tags, tags!). Building your own keyword "library" in Lightroom can be bothersome, but it's totally worth it because it is SO easy to browse your photo library by keywords, set up smart collections that really deserve that name, etc. etc.

If you're publishing your photos on some photo sharing service like Picasa Web Albums or flickr, you can do so many nice things with tags/keywords! Like searching for them. :-) Want to see my personal favorite abstract photos in my Picasa Web Album? You can search for combined tags like "fav,abstract" in Picasa Web - and use the result!

Quality Control (Part 3)

2010-01-13T20:18:00.001+01:00

While I'm talking about "Quality Control" I can't resist to make a statement on the big flickr groups too. It's just too obvious that the big groups are - IMHO - not much more but a collection of average snapshots nowadays. Everyone just adds their stuff and the admins of those groups apparently have a very low (if any) standard for the quality of their group's content. Maybe my expectations are too high - when I look at a group called "The Forest" (over 50k photos!) I'd expect beautiful forest photos - and not blurry snapshots of people taking a walk in the woods (of course, beauty and art are the most arguable and subjective things to define. I just share mine for the sake of giving an example).

And then these flickr group admins and members run around and add a plethora of butt-ugly invitation badges and awards to photo comments (something like "OMG! This photo screams photographer! Add it to the scream of the photographer group! Now! Or we'll all die!!!" - I cannot decide if that is pathetic, awkward, hilarious, or all of it -- because if there's one thing that my photos never do is scream, and neither do I!).

I wonder: who's happy to contribute a good photo to a giant pool of mediocrity?!

And then there's the photos on flickr that are in something like 50 group pools - indecision? Maybe. For me, it only shows so very clearly the flickr group problem: I dare say that, for every photography situation, there are at least three groups on flickr. Maybe more, but the ones with 5 items and 1 member don't count. :-P People are looking for their audience - so they add one photo to something like 10 groups that all have the same topic.

For me, it's only logic to stay away from the big groups and pick small and strictly moderated groups. Not each of my submissions might be accepted, but that keeps the quality of the group high. It's just totally not worth to spend time browsing group collections of thousands of boring photos. There are so many wonderful photos on flickr, but most big groups are degenerating into a showcase of dilletant averageness. That's a pity.

One of the few groups that I find absolutely worth checking out: Fine Art Classic Black and White Landscape. So far, none of my photos has made it into the selection. And that's not a problem (but what is a problem is that it is impossible to find out if a photo has been rejected once it was submitted...).

If anyone can recommend noteworthy flickr groups just leave a comment. :-) Thanks!

Flickr photos in the feed

2010-01-07T22:23:00.003+01:00

Those of you who read my blog with a feed reader have already noticed that the photos that I post to flickr automatically appear in the feed, too. This (IMHO) nice feature is made possible by the "Photo Splice" feature of feedburner. I hope you like it.

(I think that the current online world has far too many places one has to visit "manually" to keep up with "things", so I try to aggregate. I wish there was a way to include Picasa Web Album publishing to the feed!)

Quality Control (Part 2)

2010-01-04T19:59:00.008+01:00

I ordered one of my own prints at the german artist platform "mygall" to get an idea of the appearance. That was just before christmas, and when it arrived (I had it sent to the office) I got a notice from one of my colleagues that it's damaged - the glass was broken. I thought that these things can happen once in a while and inspected it.

The packaging was practically a joke. How any of their framed products can arrive at a buyer without getting damaged (at least if glass is involved) is a mystery to me. The framed print was roughly wrapped in bubble wrap, and around that was cardboard - and that was it! No filling material to stabilize the product, hinder it from moving around and damped vibration during transport. Poor!

I left it there at the office, gave them a call, claimed a replacement which the friendly person at the telephone of course granted me. That was 2 weeks ago. I haven't heard from them ever since, nor has the replacement arrived. I can understand that, it was christmas & new year, they might haven taken a time off, but nevertheless, a short message with an order confirmation and a price 0f 0,00€ would simply have made things clear for me. As it is now, I don't know if there's anything in the making, if they forgot me, or whatever.

So, today was my first regular day at the office again, and I inspected the product closer now. Let's see what the description on the website says for the framed prints:

"Unsere hochwertigen Holzrahmen machen aus mygall-Kunstdrucken stilvolle Kunstwerke. Ultraklares Premium-Acrylglas bietet bruchfesten Schutz und lässt Ihr Kunstwerk noch leuchtender erscheinen."

(translation: "our high quality wooden frames turn the mygall Fine-Art prints into classy pieces of art. Ultra clear premium acryl glass offers break-proof protection and lets your art appear even more glowing")

The reality is a bit different from that. The "high quality wooden frame" turns out to be a light-weight coated MDF (ok, I think MDF is made from wood fibres, but is that what you expect when you read "wooden frame"?). How break-proof the glass is might be arguable due to the poor packaging, but why and how this is called "ultra clear premium acryl glass" I do not understand. It's a thin, standard 2-3mm glass. The passe-partout was poorly cut and had some curves where it shouldn't. And when you take the whole product in your hands it's surprising how lightweight it actually is (without the glass, I mean - I carefully removed the cullets).

The print quality itself is OK - it's a tiny bit darker than what I see on my calibrated monitor, but it's no problem. Detail is exactly the same as I have on screen (which is to be expected with today's high resolution photo printers).

So much for that. All in all - I'm disappointed. Especially by the cheap MDF frame and the unprecisely cut passe-partout. I removed the link the MyGall from the left sidepanel of the blog for now, and I won't upload new photos.

Addendum: of course. One day after posting this, I got the replacement. The packaging was the same, but it arrived undamaged. And it's good! And it actually confuses me more, because now it is a real wooden frame indeed. The passe-partout is perfect now too - and it has a slighly different color. The first one was plain white, the new one is like a little bit of creme/beige. This goes along with the black & white print better, actually. It seems that mygall has different subcontractors that do the actual printing & framing. It bothers me that the quality is so different. If someone orderer through "my" gallery there now and would get the quality that I got first (the damaged one) I'd be unhappy. If it was of the quality of the replacement delivery, that would be ok.

Quality Control (Part 1)

2010-01-03T13:46:00.002+01:00

While I'm virtually travelling in the online photography world, it becomes more and more obvious to me that the combination of "digital photography" and "online photo sharing" has one major crux - and that's the absence of some sort of quality control.

What I'm up to (once more) is: please - show less photos, and choose those that you show wisely. I'm not saying that I don't have that problem. It usually starts like this: I come home from photo-walk-ing my dog, the memory card filled with something that I considered worth trying to make a photo of (yes, that's where the quality control starts already!), import them into Lightroom, and the memories are still fresh, the eagerness to explore the new photos, process them, share them with the world as fast as possible because these new photos are grand, majestic, the best ever made (so far;-) ...I think it sounds familiar to a lot of dedicated hobby photographers.

Just in case you didn't notice: I'm not talking about the documentary photography in which one preserves the memories of an event for friends and relatives. :-) But even there, a tighter selection with less photos would often make these albums more enjoyable. Whenever I get a Picasa Web Albums notification like "XYZ has added 127 photos to the Christmas album" I simply pass. I don't look at it. How can one evening result in over 100 successful photos? Imagine those people would shoot film - they'd all be starving while the owners of photo labs would all drive Rolls Royce cars.

Depending on the situation, light, equipment that I carry with me (sidenote: I recently re-discovered my monopod in the trunk of my car, ahem ahem - it's quite a nice supportive tool when I don't want to haul around the "big bag" with tripod and everything, but just the camera and one or two zooms) this might be something from two or three to hundreds of photos. I try to get the best exposure, so that's usually two or three shots, and with scenes with a lot of action and/or rapidly changing conditions (such as animals, or clouds moving along a mountainside) I might take a big sequence of photos of a single scene to be able to pick the best one at home (try to get 5 swans in a row and none has it's head under water).

When I look at other's online photo albums, I quickly become bored if I see two or more very similar pictures. So I try to pick "the one". The single best exposure, the best shot. And that's not easy, of course not!

"The tall ships" (FinePix S5Pro, 1/125s @ ISO 320; f/5.6, 300 mm DX)

I have eight photos of that very fleet of swans (and of course, there was always one which had it's head under water...). And something like 50 more with different angles, numbers of birds, etc. etc. - all are photos that are very much alike, and I like many of them. But how much would the impact of that lovely golden reflection (of bare trees and bushes) with the swans be reduced if I'd choose to show 3, 4, 5, maybe even 10 photos of that series?

And that's why I try to be my own quality control. I'm not successful all the time, but I try the best I can.

Happy New Year 2010!

Picasa Web Albums - now with sharpening

2009-12-25T12:39:00.001+01:00

In a recent blogpost the Google Photos team announced that they sharpen the resized images in Picasa Web Albums now. That's great news (because the pictures sometimes looked more or less soft when they were scaled down).

However... one oddity that I notice is with the photo below - the small twigs in the background look rather over-sharpened to me (if you click on the loupe symbol on the top right above the photo and check the original upload size you can see that the original is different). Maybe I just found a weak spot because of the crop size? :-)

From December 2009

I found out that the quality that the Picasa Web servers deliver, especially when a picture must be scaled down to fit the browser window, is substantially better when you upload them at a larger size (I'm tempted to say that, if there's more data to work with, the result will be better).

A while ago I experimented with uploading my photos in only 900px or 1024px on the long side, but when I upload them at 1600px they simply look better when they must be scaled down. It is important to remember that many many people will look at the scaled down version of an image all the time - check out the new Google Labs feature "Browsersize" and test it!

On another Picasa Web related topic... the Autumn contest is over and I finished as second place (I think... the voting album is still open and people still add "Like" to it so I'm not sure:-).

All of the finalists (and some more photos from the Autumn contest) are featured on Picasa Web's "Explore" pages now. And I can't help but notice that there's some photos that would have been really worthy to enter the contest as finalists... that's the problem with taste (the taste of the Jury that made the preselection, to be precise *grin*).

And finally - I have added my contribution to the Autumn contest to my galleries at ImageKind (worldwide) and MyGall (D-A-CH), so if you're looking for a framed print, poster, laminated fine art print, greeting cards... ;-)

Seasons Greetings to all readers of my blog!

Features that I still miss in Picasa Web Albums

2009-12-21T23:35:00.001+01:00

About one year ago I wrote an - apparently not highly influental :) - article here about features that I miss in Picasa Web Albums. Let's recap that:

I want a way to directly contact an album owner without leaving a public comment and exposing my own email address to others - its possible in my Google profile, it should be possible in Picasa Web Albums, too.
I'd like to allow comments from anyone, protected with a captcha, just like in Blogger. Its a mystery to me why only people with a Picasa Web account are allowed to comment.
I want to subscribe to/track follow-up comments on comments that I left via email - again, just like in Blogger. Its just sooo bothersome to return back to an album and remember the picture where I asked a question about the photo to check if its been answered.
I want an optional visits counter/stats
I want an optional rating system, just like in Google Groups. Visitors should be allowed to give a photo a rating from 1 to 5 stars if they wish. That would result in an interesting search option, too: show only the highest rated photos - a "best of Picasa Web Albums"...

Now lets see...

Still not implemented - and I'd like to refine that: ideally, there would simply be a link to one's Google profile and/or an "About me" tab/page with a contact form.
Still not implemented
is implemented, and very nicely at that - thanks, devs!
is implemented - good one! (even though some people are complaining about the lazy update intervals)
is "kinda" implemented... we now have a "Like" button at least; it fits the philosophy from the Picasa software where you can only "star" a picture, but no further rating is possible.

My personal new wishes would be:

Make albums "virtual" and allow some way to organize them with tags - just imagine the possibilities! If you tag a photo with "close-up" and "flowers" you could have an "instant album" ready for your visitors that contains all flower macros. Or something like that.
Along with that, make ALL albums virtual so that one single photo can appear in multiple albums - just like in Picasa! It's so odd that albums in Picasa itself and the Picasa Web Albums are so different.

criticswelcome - a Picasa Web Albums experiment

2009-12-21T23:21:00.000+01:00

Following the initial idea of Allan in the international Picasa forum I've began to tag some of the photos in my Picasa Web Album with "criticswelcome" as an indicator that constructive feedback (on the technique, the composition... whatever) is welcome.

It would be great to see more people picking up this idea! You can view all photos tagged with "criticswelcome" through a community search (click on the link for a complete search in the entire Picasa Web Albums world:-).

Branches album

2009-12-16T20:00:00.004+01:00

I already announced it in my Picasa Web Album in a caption a few days ago - I've published a small album on my website which contains a collection of my favorite branches. :-)

Sometimes, these collections slowly grow over a very long time. Keywording your photos properly helps a lot to find them one day. Lightroom's Smart Collection feature is really handy for that. My smart collections are rather simple - most of the time just one or two keywords (or just the process flag "grayscale" to collect all monochrome photos). The collections that I publish on my web site are still hand-picked from the smart collections in Lightroom.

Also testing the new SimpleViewer 2.0 in Lightroom fashion (made by TTG) with this album - it has a nice "full screen" button now which makes pressing F11 (with it's shortcoming that you're "trapped" in fullscreen when there's only the Flash gallery on a page) unnecessary. Nice!

Picasa Web Albums autumn contest - the finalists

2009-12-15T19:13:00.000+01:00

The Picasa Web Albums autumn photo contest is now closed and the 12 finalists have published their photos in a collaborative album for public voting - everyone with a Google account can visit the album and click on the "Like" (german: "Mag ich") icon in the left corner below the photo to vote.

That wouldn't be so remarkable because photo contests are held all the time - but the photo that I've shown in my blog article "Time to play" here has been selected as one of twelve finalists! :-) The jury that made the pre-selection has really done a great job and selected a great variety of different autumn themed photos from the more than 1000 participants.

The album with all finalists is here. Have a look and vote for the photo(s) that you like!

I know it all

2009-12-13T20:24:00.003+01:00

Something that upsets me time and time again is the "I know it all" attitude of certain people in photography forums. The internet certainly supplied the dillettantes with additional self confidence (one could also say that their lack of decency is countered by a boasted self-esteem).

Recently, someone claimed that mirror lock up would not make much of a difference "as long as you're using a good tripod" - while the benefits of mirror lock up have been described adequatly and readily available on the internet, by Bob Atkins (beware, lots of ads...) and the late Fritz Pölking (article in german) for example.

Other people claim knowledge over all tripods because they know what a "real" tripod is (and cheap travel tripods are "fake", I assume - we'll never know...). It doesn't occur to them that the knowledge they gained might only be true for their experience and their photography (but to their great surprise, not everyone is carrying a 4kg telezoom and a full frame body with battery grip around all the time).

And then there's the hords of pixel-peeping lens evaluators that apparently spend their nights in front of the screen, gazing at 1:1 views or 100% crops, to come up with something like "oh yeah, the xyz lens is a little bit soft at 300mm". Good on you, mate!

But please don't get me wrong. It's important to know your stuff. If you know where your lenses have their peak performance, you can utilize it. If you know how your camera behaves and how it's metering will betray you in this-and-that situation, you can counteract and get the best shot. It's great if people share that knowledge - but it's one hell of an annoying disservice to assume that this what you found out equally applies to all the people in the world!

I think winter is no good for me. I should be out and make photos instead of hanging around in forums.

Upside down graduated filter in LR

2009-12-13T17:34:00.009+01:00

Graduated filters are a classic tool in photography - be it for taming a big dynamic range or adding a cheesy tint to a sunset sky. They've made their way into software as well - Picasa had a feature to simulate them for a very long time and I showed one possible usage here. Lightroom has them since version 2 (and in a much more versatile way than Picasa - you can adjust exposure, brightness, contrast, clarity, saturation, sharpness and tone the whole thing - wow! the only thing missing for me is to have a spline instead of a straight line as a border for the effect).

Graduated filters have become a tool that I regularly use - very often in the very classic way to bring down a too bright sky, which makes especially sense when you're shooting raw because you have a lot more headroom in the highlights (and again especially with the S5pro and it's remarkable dynamic range, of course;-).

However, there is one interesting "new" use of graduated filters, and that is using it upside down - adding the filter to not bring down the highlights, but lift the shadows.

About 10 days ago on my way to work I stopped at one of Burghausen's vista points opposite of the famous castle to capture this scene:

"Castle Morning" (FinePix S5Pro, 1/230s @ ISO 100; f/11, 80 mm DX, handheld)

It was particularly beautiful how the details below the main castle (which is at the left side of the frame), namely the Pulverturm (gunpowder tower) appeared as schemes in the early morning fog of that December day - but in the original photo above, not much of it is visible... and here's what it looks like after applying a graduated filter in Lightroom to bring up the shadows by 0.80EV:

"Castle" (FinePix S5Pro, 1/230s @ ISO 100; f/11, 80 mm DX, handheld)

That's much more like what I was actually seeing (and yes, I toned the sky a little bit with Split Toning in LR instead of adjusting the white balance). The details in the shadows are a bit noisy of course (more so in this web version, the original has none of those artifacts), but since this particular scene is more about these structures in the fog, to just give a little hint that they are there, and not so much about their details, it's not much of a problem.

Now wait... why didn't I use the Fill Light feature instead? Because of the sharp transition of the dark tree silhouettes at the edge of the rim in front of the morning sky. Using Fill Light, I would have lifted up the brightness of these tree silhouettes too, which introduces sometimes more, sometimes less visible halo-like artifacts that reduce clarity and sharpness. In this scene, a rather unwanted effect.

PS: once more, for this scene with the shadows being lifted just so much that the detail becomes somewhat visible, a properly calibrated display is an absolutely must. If you're serious about your post processing - calibrate!

Have a break

2009-12-11T21:59:00.008+01:00

There is an old lesson from my days of composing music that I should have transported into the realms of photography, and especially post processing, and that is: have a break. Take it easy. Put things to the side, and do something else.

When making music, it happened to me all too often that at a certain point, I was getting into a real rush, and everything just seemed to work and everything just seemed to be perfect and super and cool and whatnot. It was not a big problem when composing for me, because I seldom, if ever, finished a track in one evening and published it right away. I always saved my work, turned off the computer, went to bed, shopping, whatever...

And guess what - when I came back and continued working on the music, suddenly things weren't that superduper cool anymore; instead, I found a lot of flaws that I didn't notice before... and the same goes for post-processing photos.

This is version 2 of a photo that I made last Saturday in the late afternoon at the Huckinger See (one of my favorite locations, no doubt) in Austria as the sun was setting and the fog moved in very quietly and calm:

"Disappearing in the Mist (v2) (FinePix S5Pro, 10s @ ISO 100; f/8, 12 mm DX)

However... when I first saw the scene at home on the screen I thought "oh yes, that's gorgeous" (because I slowly arrived at this almost very last photo of that session of course and saw how things developed, on screen, in the previous shots that I already processed) - and this is what I initially published to my Picasa Web Album a couple of days ago:

"Disappearing in the Mist (v1) (FinePix S5Pro, 10s @ ISO 100; f/8, 12 mm DX)

The longer I looked at it, the more obvious it became that this amount of blue just can't possibly have been there. It was already pretty dark and colours were somewhat muted; I couldn't really tell how much blue there might have been. But in that first version... gee, it's simply way too much!

In version 2, I adjusted the white balance and reduced the vibrance and also decreased the blue saturation. It looks much more natural to me now. Lightroom should have a timer for me that would pop up a requester "take a break!" after using it for one hour, or something. :-)

Call of Light

2009-12-05T17:42:00.005+01:00

Call of Light (FinePix S5Pro, 1/60s @ ISO 100; f/8, 60 mm DX)

According to the latest version of the Picasa Web Albums API, image sizes larger than 800px are embeddable - this post is just for testing that with a 912px sized "large" version of a photo (instead of the 800px I've been using so far).

It's not testable with Lightbox in the preview so I have to actually publish this. And yes, it works! :-) That's great news.

Album updates

2009-12-04T22:47:00.003+01:00

Soft Glow (FinePix S5Pro, 1/60s @ ISO 100; f/8, 170 mm DX)

I updated the "Forest" album on my website recently. I removed some of the older photos that do not fit the theme that I have in mind anymore; I wanted to keep the picture count somewhere around 20 (the above photo is one of the most recent additions).

Oh, and I also updated the website itself (a while ago). :-) It has one single selected photo on the home page (where the direct links to the galleries used to be) and the galleries are on an extra page now.

The single "home" photo is something like a "pick for the moment", I just couldn't make up my mind often enough and make a choice to pursue the plan of posting one single photo as a "best of the month" photo here on the weblog. :-P

Next up: updating my galleries at ImageKind and MyGall...

Picasa Web Albums - direct links

2009-11-30T20:36:00.002+01:00

For a very long time, it was not possible to easily get a "direct link" to a Picasa Web Album photo. At least the english version of the Picasa Web Albums offers a much easier way now with the "Image only (no link)" checkbox in the "Link to this photo" tools:

Make sure to set your web album to "English (United States)" in the Settings page (textlink in the upper right corner) or else you won't see the checkbox!

In addition to that: while you can edit the size parameter in the generated URL manually (the .../s800/... part for 800px)~~, my experience is that a direct-link to images larger than 800px does not work reliably. Obviously an unmentioned restriction (since the "large" size refers to 800px as a maximum).~~ - It seems that this is working just fine now, see my other post.