Posts

Posted on

Image post-processing: preserving bokeh while enhancing detail of the subject

Adjustment points in advanced editing software, such as Nick Collection, for example, can be very effective for applying certain effects, such as enhancing contrast or structural detail, to a localized part of the image. However, sometimes the algorithm becomes confused, and the effects spill outside of the intended areas. In my experience, this often adds unwanted grain and other artefacts to the nice background blur (bokeh) created by fast lenses (low f-numbers).

Here is a simple Photoshop workflow to preserve the bokeh while applying the effects to the subject:

1. Open the image in Photoshop.
2. Create a copy of the background layer. It will become the top layer.
3. Apply the desired effects to the top layer.
4. Create a layer mask for the top layer and fill it with black colour. This will hide the layer with the applied effects.
5. Using a brush tool and white colour, paint the areas that should show the applied effects on the layer mask. This will reveal the effects in the areas that are painted white.
6. Save changes and close the file.

I used the above procedure on this image of cherry blossoms on Moss Street in Victoria, BC. I applied Nick’s “tonal contrast” and “structure” filters to the flowers that are in focus, but left the blurred-out areas untouched.

Posted on

Wedding photo shoot: pains of image processing

20130812-123057.jpg

Last Saturday, I was helping Armando as a second shooter on a wedding. It was a really fun gig, and I really enjoyed meeting the couple and the guests. Also, the wedding was at the Deep Cove Chalet in Victoria – quite possibly the best restaurant I know anywhere. The weather was also perfect for photography – slightly overcast with sunny breaks.

I heard an opinion shared by a few very influential pro photographers that shooting weddings builds experience for covering almost any kind of event. All in all, it was a great photo shoot. However, as it is typical for any event coverage, image selection and processing is a phase that can easily take at least as much time as the shoot itself.

This time, in the spirit of making the most of any situation, I am sorting through the images as I am recovering from extraction of my wisdom teeth. The painkiller drugs are a perfect excuse not to do any work that requires concentration, such as writing research papers.

20130812-123403.jpg

Posted on

Canada Day long weekend



For the first time in the last several years we are at home in Victoria for the Canada Day. We thought about going to the downtown with our daughter to see the festivities as a practice for the upcoming trip to Paris, but ended up going for a relaxing walk on the beach near Mt. Doug.

Posted on

Testing a new Canon EF 35mm f/1.4L

I took this shot of my daughter about to fall asleep in her mother’s arms in an almost dark room, handheld, no flash, ISO 2000, 1/80 sec, f1.4 (naturally!) using a Canon EF 35mm f/1.4L lens. The camera focussed a bit too close because I forgot that re-framing doesn’t work at f1.4, but it’s not really noticeable unless you zoom in to 1:1 (and you can’t do it here, can you 🙂 ) Still, pretty amazing sharpness, clarity and bokeh, in my opinion.

Posted on

Photography business: end of a hobby?

Recently, I had an opportunity to closely compare two different types of commercial photo assignments, both within the same day. On a Saturday morning, I was invited to tag along for a children’s baseball league photoshoot, and in the afternoon, I photographed a final game in the local (adult) rugby league. The first type of a gig has potential for much higher financial payoff, but the second one (rugby action) is more fun to shoot and generally requires a much more creative approach.

The children’s league photoshoot was an impressive example of super-efficient commercial photography. The photographer relied heavily on the assistants, who posed the teams and the individual children, and the actual shooting was done in a rapid-fire mode, so even the youngest kids (3-4 year old) did not have a chance to whine, which they typically do in a queue for a photo with Santa Claus at a local shopping mall, for example. The trade-off is that there was literally no time to interact with the models, and I am fairly certain that all 300 portraits will come out looking nearly identical. I did not think that it was possible, but this photoshoot made taking photos of children sitting on Santa’s lap look like a creative endeavor.

In contrast, shooting the rugby action in the afternoon had a very spontaneous feel to it. The energy of the players was contagious, and the opportunities for interesting shots were unpredictable. From the commercial standpoint, the financial payoff of the rugby game coverage was far from certain. Despite that, I was sure that even if not a single picture would sell, I would not regret shooting the game.

I read somewhere that starting a photo business is a sure way to ruin a perfectly good hobby. I do hope that there is a balance, though. Fortunately, at this point, I do not need to take assignments where photography is traded as a pure service, an exchange of the photographer’s time for money. Recently, time has become so precious that I would definitely choose a more interesting assignment over a better paying one.

Posted on

Chinque Terre: persistent vacation

20130428-161817.jpg
Browsing through photographs from Italy taken in the summer of 2009, I realized that photos prom Chinque Terre still make me feel as if I was standing at the cliff overlooking Vernazza only yesterday. This is surprising, because usually it takes only a few days after returning home for the “vacation mode” to give way to the daily routine.

During the first couple of days after coming back from our first trip to Europe, it became obvious that my being “off-line” for a few weeks did not result in any particular disasters neither at work nor at home. On the contrary, I felt re-calibrated in terms of my personal and research interests and priorities, so I made a resolution to maintain this “vacation” mindset in daily life. Well, it didn’t work. Instead of being simpler, life became progressively busier.

There is a joke, told to me by a colleague, which describes this situation very well. To paraphrase it: I would like to be a bus driver, because there would be no loads of undriven buses waiting for me after a vacation.

In this sense, an academic job is nothing like bus driving…

However, a glimpse of that Zen post-vacation state can evidently be triggered by a visual image. In this particular case, I was looking for a picture for a photo contest on Flickr and opened a Lightroom library with thousands of photos from our 2009 trip to Czech Republic and Italy. It is always pleasant to browse through old photographs, but the ones from Chinque Terre had a particularly strong effect. These five colorful seaside towns that cling to the cliffs are strikingly beautiful, and the whole region has a romantic atmosphere, which makes it one of the most popular tourist destinations. Visually, I had no reference point for the Liguria landscapes in my prior experience – they are truly unique and seem to be frozen in time centuries ago. Seeing these images, even on a computer screen, even several years later, instantly forced my brain to disengage from the daily “treadmill mode”. This is an example of a picture that is worth a thousand words – there is a tremendous amount and depth of information, including the underlying emotional content, that can be transmitted visually.

At the moment, we are planning a trip to Côte d’Azur, often referred to as the French Riviera, later this summer. It will be our second European trip with Anna. She is 18-months-old now, so she will not remember any of it in a conventional sense, but I wonder if looking at our photographs a few years later would stir up some memories or feelings. I am packing the photo gear just in case.

20130428-174507.jpg

Posted on

Dog years: beauty of old age

20121229-211233.jpg

My 14-months-old daughter is fascinated with dogs – small and large, puppies and old ones. We met this 16-years-old west highland white terrier while walking at the Willows Beach yesterday. I was carrying a 300 mm f4 lens with a 1.4x extender and took a few shots of him. I realized what makes old dogs so photogenic – they don’t move around too fast!

20121229-210747.jpg

20121229-210830.jpg

Posted on

Total recall: better memories through image post-processing

20121222-191505.jpg

A recent BBC article argues that doctored images alter our memories and, consequently, affect our behavior in a very real way. Personally, I don’t find this surprising, but it brings up an interesting question about post-processing photos that is not aimed at creating hoaxes, but simply enhancing the visual impact or expressing the photographer’s impression (after all isn’t that what “Impressionism” is about?)

Here is an example. I took this photo of a warbler running through the undergrowth in a very dark and shady part of a park (a small forest, really). I wanted to practice shooing with a Canon EF 300mm f/2.8L IS USM lens, and this shot really pushed both the camera and the lens to the limit. There was very little available light, I had a 1.4X extender attached to the lens, which further decreased its light capacity by one f-stop, the bird was small and fast-moving, and it was quite far (about 20 m) away from me. Most importantly, this guy was dark-colored – his plumage was a near-perfect camouflage on the background of fallen leaves.

When I opened the exceedingly grainy (due to the expanded ISO range) shot on the computer, it looked really underwhelming. So I decided to try pushing the post-processing much farther than I would normally do. After boosting the color saturation of the feathers and selectively decreasing the contrast and the saturation of the background, I was able to see the details in the bird that were not visible in the original scene. I like this (arguably, “overcooked”) image better than the (higher fidelity) original. This is how I’d like to remember this little bird – full of color.

We might actually be on the way to altering reality for the purpose of creating better memories (think “Total Recall”). Although, this altered memories will probably be mostly hazy, color-shifted and full of lens flares from all the Instagram filters…

Posted on

A baby and a telephoto lens: a sandboxing challenge

In computer security, the term “sandbox” refers to separating running programs. In contrast, here I am talking about keeping up with a 14-months-old baby playing in an actual physical sandbox, while trying to photograph her with a telephoto lens.

Last week, while my wife was immersed in a marathon exam marking session, my daughter and I went for a walk in the Mount Douglas Park. I took the camera with a Canon EF 300mm f/2.8L IS USM lens, so I could practice shooting with it. In terms of physical bulk, this lens is not much larger than a Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS USM lens, which I am used to, but the fixed focal length and the relatively more shallow depth of field give it a noticeably different feel. I really like the beautiful bokeh produced when shooting with a wide-open aperture. One neat feature of the 300mm lens is its ability to focus as close as 1.5 m, which makes it quite useful for macro shots. I played with it a little bit and took some photos of a family of mushrooms, while the little one was sleeping in her stroller. She woke up just as we reached the playground.

To take appealing pictures of children, one should generally try bringing the camera down to the same level with them whenever possible. The playground at the Mount Dog park is perfect for this, as it has a sloping lawn on one side. I could simply walk down the lawn and become effectively closer to the level of the sandbox, without having to lay down on wet grass.

But here is the sandboxing challenge. As of about two weeks ago, my daughter became exceedingly mobile, as she somehow decided that crawling is not cool anymore and discovered her ability to run very fast by tilting her body in the general direction of travel and allowing her legs to try to keep her from falling. Normally, my wife and I can catch up with her quite easily to keep her from crashing into various objects, eating things that should not be eaten, and destroying flowers and houseplants. This time, however, there were two issues: a) it was just me looking after her, and b) the fixed 300 mm focal length forced me to stay at least 10 meters away from her while taking pictures. My daughter was delighted at her apparent independence and ran around the playground. I was glad when she decided to sit down and play with the sand. Just as I thought that my little photo session was going on brilliantly, she decided to check what this sand substance tasted like and put an entire handful of it in her mouth. It all happened in less than a second, while I was left to passively observe it from the opposite end of the sandbox, through my long telephoto lens.

Fortunately, she didn’t find the sand particularly tasty and spit out most of it right a way. I spent the next fifteen minutes or so getting the rest of the sand out of her little mouth. Letting her chew on a wet tissue did the trick. Such are the challenges of photographing children….

Posted on

Shooting sports: high adrenaline and higher ISO

I had a chance to get involved in some sports photography last couple of weekends. I was helping Armando Tura, who shoots regularly for the University of Victoria VIKES. We started with field hockey and rugby, trying out Canon EF 300mm f/4L IS USM and a rather monstrous 300mm f/2.8L IS USM lenses as well as a 5D Mark III body, all of which Armando was kind enough to lend me, along with about 10 years worth of his own experience. It was quite exciting to feel the adrenaline-charged atmosphere of the game and, as a photographer, to operate in a drastically different regime from my usual travel- and portrait-style of shooting (equipment-wise, I typically use a 5D Mark II with a 70-200mm f/2.8L IS USM lens).

It was at a basketball game the following weekend where I was really pushed out of my comfort zone. The ISO range that I had to push my camera to was mind-boggling to me. Note: a 5D Mark II at the auto ISO setting (“A”) only goes to 3200. One can dial in 6400 manually, or go to “H1”, which is in the expanded range and corresponds to ISO 12800 (sic). If you’ve been shooting mainly portraits and landscapes before, the grain would look horrible to you (as it did to me). It can be somewhat corrected in post-processing (I am using Lightroom 4) though. Most importantly, you’d have to embrace the fact that, in sports photography, “grain is good”.

After the basketball, which was by far the most challenging action I ever shot (with a possible exception of a horse race at dusk at the Palio di Siena), a swimming competition was relatively easy. The action is considerably slower, and the paths of the athletes are more predictable. Photographing swimming events has it’s own challenges, though. Mainly, the vantage points at the side of the pool are limited, and the flashes cannot be used, because they interfere with the metering equipment used by the event officials. A final note: keep your camera warm and in the bag before entering the pool area, otherwise the high humidity will cause the lens to fog up.

See more photos from these events here.