A Conundrum

I'm back! (Three months after I said I might be blogging more...nice...) And I have a conundrum, a quandry, a puzzle. I got some yarn in the mail this afternoon. It's cloudy and dark outside (I miss Daylight Savings!) so I thought, it's okay, I can take pictures inside. They won't be great, but they'll be okay. The problem is, two cameras and few different WB settings later, I can't for the life of me get the colors to work.

Look at all these pictures of this lovely yarn:









The problem is, the yarn is not that color. It is sitting on a white background, which appears to be fairly white (on my computer and camera monitors), but the yarn is much greener than it appears to be in the pics. The closest I can get to the true color of the yarn is this:


(I know, it burns my eyes, too!)

That is obviously awful, and still not that close to the color of the yarn.

What gives? Does anyone have any ideas? I know it'll be best to wait for a sunny morning, but I've gotten decent results inside before. Why not this time?

Regardless of the pictures, the yarn really is a gorgeous color. I won it in a contest over at Threadpanda's blog, and I love it. I can't wait to start a Parallel Lines Scarf with it. If nothing else, I'll get good color pictures then! =)

The WB.

No, not the network. ;) WB = White Balance. I've talked about it before, and I play around with it a lot. I don't know why, but I find it really interesting. Here's a series of pics I took the other day for my knitblog. I took them in what I now know is called open shade (thanks Miz Boo!) in the morning, when it was good and bright outside. I used three different WB settings: Shade, Sun, and Auto. In that order, here they are:


Shade


Sun


Auto

The Shade is awful. Sun and Auto are much better, and pretty similar. Sun is actually probably closer to real life, on my monitor at least, but I prefer the slightly cooler colors of Auto. (This is probably because I have an affinity for cooler colors in general.) I ended up using a different pic, but still with the Auto WB setting. I've noticed before that Shade (and Cloud) generally give worse results than Auto, and even Sun. I kind of wrote that off to the fact that, on the scale of DSLRs, my camera (the D40) is the cheapest. But now I read Miz Boo's excellent post over at Ree's, and she says:

Personally, on my camera I do not care for the shade and cloudy options. I think their effects are too strong on my D80. So I almost always shoot on “A” for Automatic white balance. (Except when I’m inside, and then the incandescent and florescent options work wonders.)

Exactly! I would write the exact same thing! And she has a way fancier camera. I wonder if the same holds true for the super-duper fancy cameras like Ree's D200, or even the D300. Is it a Nikon thing? Canon users, what's your experience?

Sidenote: When I was at the airshow, I saw a woman using a D300 to take nothing but snapshots of her kids. My assumption is that she's a professional photographer, so she's got the nice equipment, and is most comfortable with it, so prefers it for snapshots, too. Because I cannot fathom spending $2000 on a camera for snapshots! That would be nice!

And on that note, I'm out. Work to do, dinner to eat, etc. (Hurricane already prepared for - check!) Ciao! =)

Aperture Study

I've been trying to sneak in a post for awhile, and Donna's comment encouraged me to up and write it already! (Go check her out; not only does she have her own wonderful site, but she's contributing to the new PW Photography. Sweet!) A while ago, Jessica asked about the blurry background in some of the flower pics I took on campus. She was absolutely correct that it was caused by the aperture settings on my camera. (Does anyone else always want to spell it aperature? I guess I just pronounce it incorrectly with a bit of a Southern flair and put that extra syllable in there.)

The aperture is basically the hole in the lens that lets light in. Normally it's closed, but it opens to a predetermined size when you take a picture. When you're using a dSLR you can control the aperture size in the Manual and Aperture-priority settings. The wider the aperture (which corresponds to a smaller f/ number), the shallower the depth of field. A shallower/smaller depth of field corresponds to a smaller in-focus area in the image. Here is a series of images I took at Avery Island to illustrate the effect a change in aperture can have:


f/25.0, the smallest aperture setting here, the largest depth of field


f/13.0


f/7.1, see how the background is getting blurry?


f/6.3


f/5.6, the largest aperture here, and thus the most shallow depth of field

In PW form, here are the first and last next to each other for comparison:


See the difference in the background, and even the leaves in the foreground?

A couple random things about aperture. As you might expect (or already know), the wider the aperture, the more light is let in. You can then use a faster shutter speed, letting you take crisper, clearer photos (although, blur can be good). Also, if you are using a zoom lens, your maximum aperture will change in relation to the focal length you're using. On my kit lens, the range of maximums is from f/5.6 when it's at 55mm to f/3.5 when it's at 18mm. The f/3.5 setting lets in more light, so it's useful in low-light situations. If you can't get the exact composition you want, you can always creatively crop. (Photo editing is your friend!)

Someday, I hope to get a macro lens and then really rock out the fun with depth of field, in photos like this:


Image by Flickr user ecstaticist, used under terms of CC License.

And with that, fun time is up. Time to get back to work! Hope y'all have a great week! =)

Cool dSLR Feature #98393878

Burst mode! Burst is a setting on dSLRs where you can hold down the button and the camera continually shoots photos until (a) you stop pushing the button, (b) the buffer fills, or (c) your memory card fills. I just experimented to see how many shots before I got to (b) or (c). I got bored sometime after 80 and quit, haha. (It did slow down for a bit around 45, but then picked back up...it was probably emptying the buffer...) It's tons of fun to shoot on burst; in fact, I almost never turn it off. I feel like the paparazzi...clickclickclickclickclick...

My camera can take about 2.5 pictures per second; fancier cameras shoot more quickly. My point-n-shoot even has a psuedo-burst setting: it will take 3 frames in a row, giving you a bit of help in the constant battle with shutter delay.

I love playing around with this feature at sporting events. Here are some images from tonight's LSU Men's Basketball game:









Neat, eh? Interested in more info? I have to bow out for now (big quantum test Friday...), but click here for lots of details! =)

e.t.a. - Apparently the pics weren't working...but they should be there now...

White Balance

I realized the other day that I've mentioned white balance (also known as color balance) a couple of times, but never explained it. Getting a proper white balance basically means balancing out the colors so that they are true to life, instead of distorted by the lighting conditions. You know how regular indoor light bulbs often give everything a yellowish tint, and fluorescent lights tend to give a bluish tint, but your eyes/brain adjust so you know what the colors really are? When you have proper white balance in a photo, you compensate for this tint. Your whites look white and all your other colors look accurate. What got me thinking about this? I was photographing a sweater I'm working on, and the first photo came out looking like this:



Ick. (This is one reason I love digital photography - when something is wrong in your photo, you know right away.) The problem was that my camera was still set to white balance for Shade conditions, from some pictures I'd been taking previously. In the D40, there are eight different white balance settings. Six of them correspond to the type of light you're shooting in:

Incandescent (most regular indoor bulbs)
Fluorescent
Sun
Flash
Clouds
Shade

The other two are Auto and Pre. Auto is what it sounds like it should be (automatically adjusts based on what it thinks the light source is), and Pre is used when you want to get a really accurate reading. Basically, you take a preliminary picture of a colored (often grey) card (like this one, for example) and the camera uses that data to get an accurate color balance in the following pictures. (I've never actually done this...never really needed to for the photos I take...)

You can certainly just leave your camera on Auto and forget about it. The software seems to be sophisticated enough that most images will turn out okay. Here's the Auto version of the purple sweater:



It's much better than the Cloud-balanced shot, but still not quite accurate. I was taking these pictures inside near a window (generally the best indoor place to take pictures of knitting, assuming it's sunny outside), and from previous attempts I knew that setting the camera to balance for Sun would probably work best:



Yep. It captures the color of the purple very well, and the white collar looks white, not blueish or cream. Just for kicks, here's what it looks like when set on Cloud:

Close, but not quite. Both on the camera's LCD screen and on my computer, the Sun-balanced shot looks the best.

The Auto is good enough on my camera that I usually leave it on Auto for snapshots, or when I'm going to be in multiple different light conditions in a short time period. However, if I know my lighting will be consistent for awhile, like when taking knitting photos or taking pictures at an indoor sporting event, I'll set the white balance to match the lighting. It only takes a few clicks, and it's usually worth it. My old point-and-shoot has white balance settings as well, although by the time I learned what it was, I already had my dSLR, so I haven't played around with it much. Point is, if you have a digital, you can probably adjust the white balance. Try it out. Let me know how it goes. =)

To learn more about white balance, you can check out:
Ken Rockwell
Cambridge in Colour
Wikipedia

A related topic is monitor calibration. I know pretty much nothing about this, as I cannot afford a monitor calibration system. Based on the tests at that site, I think mine's okay, and I'm not too concerned since I just take pictures for fun. =)

Shutter Speed, and Bubbles!

Note: I've created a photography glossary in the sidebar with links to definitions of terms I use often, like exposure, depth of field, aperture, etc. I feel silly linking to the same things over and over again, so if you see a term you're unfamiliar with that isn't linked, check out the sidebar! =)

So, a few posts ago I talked about aperture and how it affects depth of field in addition to exposure. (In my mind, the exposure effect is intuitive; the depth of field one is not.) Today, a similar discussion on shutter speed...

Again, in my mind the effect of shutter speed on exposure is intuitive: the faster the shutter speed, the less time there is for light to enter the lens, the darker the picture. A slower shutter speed would then lead to brighter, more exposed pictures. The non-intuitive effect of the shutter speed is its effect on capturing motion.

This is more intuitive than depth of field...follow along with me...warning: science and math!

A basic formula of the physics of moving things (aka kinematics) is that:

speed = distance / time

We can rewrite this as:

distance = time * speed

For the purpose of most of the things we take pictures of, the speed is relatively constant, so we don't have to worry too much about that term. What we can control is time, via shutter speed. A faster shutter speed corresponds to a shorter amount of time. This corresponds to a smaller term on the right-hand-side of the second equation, and thus, since the right- and left-hand-sides must be equal, the left-hand-side must be correspondingly smaller. But the left-hand-side is distance, and so in our shorter time span, our moving object moves a shorter distance. So we have

fast shutter speed -> shorter time -> less distance

The same reasoning works for slow shutter speeds:

slow shutter speed -> longer time -> more disance

The distance the object moves is the effect we see in photos. Fast shutter speeds "freeze" moving objects, while slow shutter speeds lead to blurrier motion. Either of these effects can be exploited to get the photo you want, using the shutter-priority or full manual modes.

I was taking some photos tonight for my knitting blog (for a post on blocking and its magical effects) and decided to play around with my shutter speed as I was taking pictures of the "fill the sink with water" step. Check this out:



Bubbles!!! (Reminds me of this guy!) The shutter speed is 1/320, with my maximum aperture of f/3.5. (For an explanation of the numbers of shutter speed, click here.) I had to turn a flash on (it's dark outside and I was too impatient to wait until daytime to take pictures...). Since I was shooting in full manual, I could adjust the flash level, a dSLR feature that I love. Normally I adjust it down, but for some reason I decided to play with adjusting it up. (This picture was shot with the flash at +1.0.) Since I had the flash on and up, I could use a pretty fast shutter speed, and still get a bright image. Want a closer look?



Here's another fun one, same camera settings as above:



I like how the motion of the water is frozen into the wave forms. (I'm taking grad quantum 1 right now...I can't get away from wave forms...)

As a counterexample, here's a photo taken with a much slower shutter speed (more time!):



See how the water is just a blurry stream? Unfortunately, I can't tell you the exposure for that one, although it was around 1/50. (In addition to playing with flash levels, I was playing with shooting in RAW. Well, it turns out that Picasa, my editing program, can't pick up the EXIF data for RAW files, so I lost the record of all the settings. I've never had any problems with JPEGs, so I will just return to that and keep my data.)

More experienced photographers than myself can do even cooler things with shutter speeds:

Slow shutter speed:


(Image used under terms of CC License. Photo by Flickr user www.ericcastro.biz)

Fast shutter speed:


(Image used under terms of CC License. Photo by Flickr user chomp_on_that)

Neat, eh? =)

Monkshood...

...is another interesting flower. They line the stream beds in the French Henry area and bloom during the second half of the summer. I like the shape of the bloom, and how it's separated from the leaves; I think it lends a dramatic flair to the flower. Does the shape of the bloom remind you of something? Like a monk, wearing his hood? (Also, they're poisonous, so don't eat them, mkay?)

As for photography, do you notice how the flower is normally lit/colored, but the background is very dark? You can see the same thing in this shot, of Mountain Bluebells:



Obviously y'all are smart enough to know that the reason for the lighting differences is flash. It illuminated the flowers, but not the relatively empty background. Now, some people are very anti-flash. I don't love it, but I don't hate it either. I generally try to shoot without it, but will turn it on when necessary. I actually really like the effect in the first photo, because I think it draws attention to the flower. I don't like it as much in the second photo, but it was too dark to get a clear shot without a flash. (Obviously I just need a better lens with a wider aperture, so I don't have to use a flash if I don't want to...or a tripod...or both...)

So yeah...flowers are pretty, and flash isn't evil. =)

(Please forgive the lack of real content in this post, and the sporadic updates lately. Midterms stole all my time...)

Wild Roses, and Depth of Field

I took a ton of flower pictures this summer, because I love flowers, and because there were so many. Northeast New Mexico has been in a drought for a long time, at least as long as I can remember. This past year, however, was really wet, and some of the old-timers think this is going to keep up for at least the next few years. *crosses fingers* That would be excellent, if true. Enough water means so many good things for the region, including great flowers! We had more wildflowers this summer than I've seen in ten years of going to Philmont, and luckily I had my sweet new camera to capture them.

Over the course of this blog, you'll probably see most of the good ones (or you can go check them out on Flickr...see the sidebar badge), but for now, here are two pictures of the same flower, a wild rose, and a mini-photography lesson.

Disclaimer: I know very very little about photography. But I am capable of reading (thank goodness) and am teaching myself, little by little. To learn more, click here and here.

Ok. Back to the photos:

Do you see the difference? In the top photo, the petals are in focus. In the bottom one, the stamens are. I like the bottom one better, because...well, I don't really know why, I just do. This is one of the things I really like about my D40, is that I have control over where to focus. I also have control over depth of field.

Now, up until about three days ago, I didn't really understand depth of field or aperture settings or how they are connected. I always got shutter speed, because that makes sense to me. (The faster the speed, the less light comes in, the darker the pictures. And vice versa.) I shot on S a lot, and let the camera control aperture. I had a vague idea that aperture had to do with how wide the lens opened to let in light, but didn't really understand how that made a difference. I decided that I should probably learn. I found these two great articles (one and two) and they made a ton of sense. I also liked the Wikipedia article on aperture because it explains the math. (Yay math!)

Which got me thinking about the flower pics. I reckoned that the aperture must have been set very wide (which corresponds to a low number...) to get such a shallow depth of field that I could have either the petals or the stamens in focus, but not both. So I zipped over to Flickr and checked out the Exif data (for some reason I prefer to look at it on Flickr instead of on my computer...don't ask me why...), and sure enough, the aperture for both was f/5.3, which is close to the max for my lens at that zoom level. This means the lens opened really wide to let in a lot of light, and, as I suspected, made the depth of field very shallow. Cool!

I hope you enjoyed this mini-lesson, and that it made sense. Please feel free to comment and let me know other cool things about aperture, depth of field, wild roses, etc. (Also, please let me know (kindly!) if I have said anything incorrect.) Ooh, and if you know how to blog multiple Flickr photos into one post (I can only figure out how to get one photo in the post using 'blog this'), please please let me know!

Thanks y'all! Have a great week! =)