I am often asked about ISO. So here is a “rule of thumb” post on that subject.
Michael’s standard starting points:
Michael’s exceptions:
In each case, go lower if you can, and go as high as you need to, when you need to.
What? The Speedlighter.ca is telling you not to use flash?
Yes – but I mean Adobe Flash software.
Flash is great because it is one media-rich environment that works on every platform. But it is also bad, and increasingly not a great thing to use.
Why?
That is why my sites are simple HTML sites.
Yes, I know, I lose out on some functionality and on a lot of coolness. But “it is what it is”, as they say. My sites are clean, can be read by anyone using any device, and are, I hope, more about quickly telling the reader what’s in it for him or her than just about telling the world how great I am.
Lightroom 3.2 is out. If you are a LR3 user, get this free upgrade now! Bug fixes and new camera and lens support, as well as direct publishing to Smugmug and… to Facebook. This will make MY life easier, that is for sure!
Do you use Lightroom on a Mac? And have an iPad? And want to sort the images you see on your iPad?
Perish the thought. Unless you also want to use iPhoto in parallel to Lightroom (which makes little sense), that is difficult.
But it is possible.
And you do it as follows. If you are an advanced user, that is!
That is all.
That is all? You need to be a computer scientist for this?
Yes, it is a little involved – that’s thanks to Apple mandating that no sorting must be done unless it’s by creation time. or unless you use iPhoto so you manage your photos twice. Or give up using Lightroom, which is what Apple really wants you to do, I suspect.
But at least you now know there is a workaround. And it works like a charm.
I cleaned my sensors today. On the 1Ds Mark III and the 1D Mark IV. This took more than an hour.
So I thought this might be a good opportunity to talk about sensor dust.
Unlike a negative, which gets “replaced” for every shot, the sensor on your camera can gather dust over time. This then shows up under certain circumstances on your images.
When? When do you notice it?
To understand this, image a small piece of dust just above the sensor. If the lens has a wide open aperture, this piece of dust will not cast much of a shadow, because light from the left might cast a shadow on the right, but light from the right lightens that shadow. The wider the lens aperture, the less defined the shadow cast by the dust.
Now imagine a narrow aperture, a pinhole. Each piece if dust casts a nasty shadow. I.e. it is visible. That’s what dust spots are: shadows from dust specks.
Now think along with me. Say I want to shoot this, as I did during the Henry’s Creative Urban Photography session I taught in Oakville on Sunday.
Lion and Water
Evidently I need a long shutter speed to blur that water: in this case I selected a quarter of a second.
For which I need a small aperture. f/22 or f/32. A tiny opening in the lens.
So then, when you shoot at small apertures (large “F”-numbers), and especially in plain areas like the sky, dust shows up. Which got me here.
To clean dust, you need:
First, measure. Switch the lens to a wide angle, and switch to manual focus. Focus close, then while gently moving the camera, shoot a distant white wall, using an 8 second exposure at f/32 at 100 ISO. Adjust as needed to get white, but not blown out. Now check by zooming in and you see dust and smears.
Now clean. Make sure you have a full battery. Now use the manual sensor cleaning function on your camera to open the shutter. Then remove the lens. Carefully blow first, using the bulb blower. Now close the camera, turn it off and on, and repeat the test.
Then if it’s not yet fixed, repeat using the brush, which you first rotate for a few seconds first. You may have better results. But you will equally probably make it worse instead of better.
In that case, repeat again using a pad, after you drop 3-4 drops of liquid onto it. Again, you will make things worse before you make them better.
This is where the patience comes in: after using up three or four pads you will despair. Smears, dust: it gets worse and worse. Every time you remove one dust speck, you add two. Will you ever get it done? Is your camera toast?
And yet… after an hour you get to a point when suddenly, there’s no significant dust. That is when you stop.
So after more than an hour, I now have two as-new cameras.
Two more things:
My camera does this by itself! Yes, but it does not clean off all the dust with its ultrasonic shaker.
Is this not risky? Yes it is. Do this at your own risk. (That said, I have been cleaning sensors for a decade without any mishaps.) My advice: do this when needed, but do not obsess. If you never shoot at f/16 or beyond, don’t worry. If you do not see the dust, do not worry. But if you do – get it done.
I received the following question:
At the Henry’s Show, you made reference to the importance of calibrating your monitor. Would you mind discussing that one day on your blog? I’m utterly clueless about it. Thanks. Enjoy your daily emails immensely!
Welcome, and the pleasure is mine. Solet me answer your question.
What does “calibrating your monitor” do?
It ensures that the colours it displays are as accurate as possible. So that white is real white, and so on.
How does it work?
You buy a “spider”: a light sensor that you temporarily hang right in front of your screen. Like a “Huey”, or various larger spiders. The software that comes with the sensor then makes the screen flash all sorts of colours. The sensor looks at these and can tell whether, say, red is a bit brighter than green. It then adjusts the output of your screen accordingly tp correct for this, and creates a new “monitor profile”. That ensures your colour is accurate.
Why should I do it?
Ah, good question. Well, to understand this, imagine your monitor shows a bit more green than it should. When editing your images, say with Photoshop, you would decrease the green to make your images look good.
Now you send that edited image to a friend. Or you put it on a web site. The viewer look at it – and thinka it looks red (the absence of green makes it look too red)! Or if you print it, it would come out looking too red.
That is the reason you should really calibrate your monitor. It’s important!
A student wrote to ask me the following:
Sometimes it is impossible to avoid part of your picture getting over-exposed without your main subject becoming very dark. I didn’t have great improvement with a smaller aperture. What do I have to do in this case?
Good question. A sensor is more like slide film than like negatives: the dynamic range is limited. Meaning you can only show so much difference between lightest and darkest parts of your image.
So when I point at a person in front of a window, they are a silhouette. The aperture makes no difference in this case: not by itself, anyway. But if I increase the exposure (by using my spot meter, manual mode, or exposure compensation) then they can be correctly exposed, but now the sky behind them is all blown out. Uh oh!
So what can I do?
As usual, there is no single answer. I can (and often do!) the following:
An example of flash outside:
Daniel at the Alamo
Without the flash, Daniel would have been too dark (look under his chin), or else the Alamo would have been way too bright.
There is one other way that sometimes works.
I can shoot RAW and hope there is enough dynamic range to contain detail in the sky; and then adjust afterward, using HDR – High Dynamic Range.
I can do this either in Lightroom, by using “filll light”, “recovery” and other exposure adjustments, or by using specialized HDR software like Photomatix.
Photomatix HDR example from one RAW
The original image (which I took Monday in Toronto’s Distillery District) had a very bright, blown out sky, and the foreground was too dark.
But because I shot RAW, I was lucky and there was enough detail “hidden” in the file, and I was able to bring it out.
This works as follows:
This is no panacea, and HDR (High Dynamic Range) can look gimmicky and unnatural, but when this works, it can help save you from these high contrast situations.
Normally, for HDR you take multiple exposures, of course. But there is so much “extra” information in a RAW file thatyou can get away with this technique quite often.
A tip for those of you for whom this is new: about the iPhone.
I use my iPhone camera rather more than I was expecting I would.
Even though I would not want to publish the pictures I take with it, I do take pictures, and then edit them with Chase Jarvis’s Best Camera app.
Why?
Michael Willems Reference
Like many of these tools the real use only becomes apparent later, when bright people start to think of even better uses. Use your iPhone camera and tell me why and how you use it.
POSTSCRIPT: Can you geotag even when you have no data plan? Yes! You do not see a map, but that does not matter. Your iPhone knows where it is because of the built-in GPS. That needs no data plan.
So I love the iPad and use it all the time.
As a photographer, I use it to show my images. As you might imagine. Using the only viewer available: the built-in one. Apple in its typical dictatorial fashion seems to prohibit other viewers – there are none on the App store, except a few that look at your Flickr portfolio – let’s not go there.
No, to view files you must use the Apple viewer, and to transfer them, you have to use iTunes.You can tell iTunes what folder (with subfolders) to sync, from anywhere on your computer, and it does that.
So I select some images in Lightroom and write them to JPG files in that chosen sync folder. So far so easy.
But you cannot in any way sort them. I thought that you could sort them by renaming, but no such luck. They always sort by “date taken”.
GROAN. Imagine that I have a selection of model images. And that the earliest one is NOT the one I want to see first, and when people look at the list of folders. Alas, that is what happens. Misery: that earliest image always shows as the key image for that folder, since it is the first one in it.
One way around: use iPhoto and sort in iPhoto “events”.
Which of course is not practical: managing the RAW images in Lightroom, and then having to further manage the JPG images in iPhoto? Nah, think again, Apple.
One trick, which just took me a while to work out: use the excellent EXIFTOOL command line utility to change the date EXIF tags in the file. Open a command line, run EXIFTOOL (I have written about this before: search for it on the right), and run a string like:
./exiftool -“DateTimeOriginal”=”2008:03:12 10:03:40” -“CreateDate”=”2008:03:12 10:03:40” -“DateTimeDigitized”=”2008:03:12 10:03:40” -“ModifyDate”=”2008:03:12 10:03:40” /Users/michael/Desktop/Kat-20030312-IMG_3202.jpg
Simple it isn’t. But one good thing: you do not have to type the filename. When it comes to the filename, just drag the image from your desktop into the command window, and the Mac enters the fully qualified file name, with path. And yes, that also works in Windows.
I received my iPad 3G the day it was released in Canada. Time for a quick review of this oh so important device for photographers, i thought.
In short: The iPad (or in apple-speak, just “iPad”) is a great device. Not a general purpose computer: it is limited, in part by physical limitations and in part by Apple’s need for control. But in spite of this you may well need one. In fact I think you do.
But before I explain why you need one, let’s start with the bad.
Many restrictions are clearly designed to give Apple control over what we do. Restrictions like the fact that it is completely locked down. You cannot add apps other than those okayed by Apple: Steve Jobs gives you, as he put it recently, “freedom”, namely the “freedom from pornography”. Big mistake, as it shows his true colours. Apple needs to be careful: Sony became irrelevant because of its media-ownership inspired controlfreakery, and Apple is slowly on its way to do the same.
An iPad is like a car, or a cable company PVR: you’re really just renting it and you get the feeling that tuning it to your needs would be, if it were up to Apple, a criminal offense. In fact in Canada, jail breaking may soon be exactly that.
So you need iTunes, a horrible app designed seemingly only to give Apple control, for everything. Even for simple things like deleting an image from a photo gallery, or moving one, you need iTunes.
This is inconvenient. I recently noticed I had one incorrect image in a gallery I was about to show as a slideshow on the iPad. Alas, I was 100km away from home, and to delete this one image I would have had to drive back to my iMac. This portable device is only portable if your iMac is, too. (And no, you cannot carry the laptop, because you have to sync your iPad either with your MacBook or with your iMac, not both.)
There is more such evilness. You cannot sync over Bluetooth or WiFi, thus requiring silly cables. You cannot set a default browser other than Apple’s Safari (like iCab, which is a more functional browser). You cannot just save files. The photo browser is very limited, and does not for instance support hierarchical folders. There is no file manager.
Some of the lack of functionality is not evil, but just consists of unnecessary restrictions by Apple engineers who inexplicably do not think this is necessary. Many simple settings are missing: again like your PVR or car, the device is hardly tunable, and this does get in the way.
For example,
Things like that are annoyances, but time-wasting ones. I just wasted five minutes trying to enter an address in Canada, but the device kept defaulting to the UK. Turns out you cannot just enter the country: I had to make up a city and street.
So OK, the iPad is not a general purpose computer. Then why do you need one?
Let’s look at the benefits. They are mainly obvious ones, but until you use one you don’t really see how changing they are.
Like the big bright LED backlit screen. Many other things that seem too obvious to mention but that are nevertheless huge, like:
The secret, I think, is to look at the iPad as a better mousetrap.
It is all of these:
This device is like the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy. Obvious benefits like the ones above lift this pad info an entirely new computing device category.
And of course the way it shows off photos, in spite of the limitations, is fabulous. Much better than a portfolio book.
And yes I did write this on the iPad. In bed.