Photography 101

[footfootfoot]

Originally Posted by TheMercenary

Eyes work completely differently. Not as simplistic as a camera.

Exactly! Who ever heard any vote concluded with "The cameras have it"?

Originally Posted by TheMercenary

Eyes work completely differently. Not as simplistic as a camera.

That's why the eyes can play tricks on ya!

With a camera; well, ol' one eye don't lie.

[BigV]

I have been reading and rereading this thread, I like it. Thanks to all.

The recent trip to Hawaii produced a ton of pictures. I have been ... less than diligent in my editing. Well, that's not entirely fair. I have been diligent, but I haven't managed to kill many pictures. I'm a keeper, not a killer.

And my discovery of the joy of making mosaics has severely eroded my enthusiasm for deletion. More is better, though it does take a very long time to index the images... *yawn*.

Anyway. I have begun to exercise some new muscles in Picasa, which I love. The muscle in question is "Tagging". I have over 98,000 images in my library. That's a lot of images. Even the Hawaii trip generated about 4500 pics, now down to about 3500 (curse you continuous shooting mode and your evil sidekick, high capacity SD cards) and I have managed to tag most of them. All of them got a hawaii tag, and all of them got a photographer's initials tag. From there it got less global and more specific. Some got snorkeling, house, kid1/2/3, Tink, BigV, scenery, volcano, luau.... stuff like that.

I have a loooong way to go. I've tagged only a few hundred so far. But I think this is a very effective way to manage my library. I will be able to combine it with another feature of Picasa, "Hide picture". I can "hide" an image that I want to keep, but I don't want to keep paging past as I review my pictures. "Hide" and "unhide" are toggles, and there's a third state, "Show hidden pictures" so you can see what's been hidden without changing its hidden status. Nice.

A third aspect of Picasa I'm going to use more is Albums. They work like old skool photo albums. You select a picture, and tell Picasa it belongs to a given album. Picasa makes note of your desire, and displays that image when you view a given album. A given image can belong to more than one album.

And lastly, I will be making more use of PicasaWeb, the online sharing component of Picasa. Very very easy. It only takes a couple clicks to post an Album, for public or private exhibition.

[footfootfoot]

yeah picasa is great. links.
98,000? Buy a video camera. That's nearly 70 minutes of movie at 24 frames per second.

At one frame per second you've got 68 hours of movie there hombre.

[BigV]

temporarily changing subjects here....

After close review of many pictures, pictures I was fairly happy with, I found a new thing to be disappointed about. My composition and focus are pretty good, the exposure is ok, but sometimes, when I zoomed in on the image the noise, digital noise in the images was really noticeable. It is present throughout the image, but most easily noticed when there is a large area of one color. Black, like the night sky, is the *worst*, when it comes to noise. And noise is directly related to the sensitivity of the sensor.

I can't directly change the sensor in my camera. That would require a whole new camera basically. But I can adjust the sensitivity of the sensor--that aspect is called ISO and it is intended to behave like the different speeds of film, different ISOs of film.

The noise looks like specks when the area should be smoothly and uniformly black (or whatever color...). I'll attach a picture where the noise is a noticeable distraction from an otherwise nice picture, tomorrow.

When I went on my most recent trip, I made a conscious effort to choose settings on the camera that minimize the noise. Specifically, I shot at the lowest possible ISO setting at all times. For most of the trip, I was able to use the lowest setting on my camera, ISO 80. A few times I had to dial it up, but I moved it back down as soon as I could.

This decision had a couple of consequences. Firstly, it did reduce the noise in my pictures, yipeee! It also meant that I had to increase the aperture or decrease the shutter speed to get the same exposure. This was expected. I deliberately chose the least sensitive setting for the sensor, so to get the shot, to get the light on the sensor, I had to have more of it or take the maximum I could get for a longer time.

There is a point of diminishing returns with this plan. For one, the aperture will only open to some maximum extent. The iris can only dilate so far. And secondly, the need for a slower shutter speed means that I'm more likely to get shake-blurred photos. Not a good tradeoff.

[SteveDallas]

Check out Noise Ninja.

You're right, it's a tradeoff. I try to stay to 200 or 400 when possible. 800 isn't so bad on my camera. But things get noticeable at 1600.

[footfootfoot]

BigV, I love ya, and yer a sweetheart, but get outta here!

Ansel Adams said: "Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop." Now, as great as your images are, and as much as AA ain't everyone's cup of tea, are you telling em you're gonna go mano a mano with the A dawg? As the kids on the cellarnetz say: srsly.

Remember a chain is only as strong as it's weakest link, and argument is only as strong as it's weakest point, a portfolio of 98,000 images is the product of a very soft heart. You need more ruthlessness.

propose you upload a set of 36 consecutive photos to picassa or some such and we can have a discussion about actual images and not *your relationship* to those images.

[BigV]

Originally Posted by footfootfoot

snip--
propose you upload a set of 36 consecutive photos to picassa or some such and we can have a discussion about actual images and not *your relationship* to those images.

Your glove, sir.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Well V, your an adult, living in the land of the brave and the home of the free.
98 k or 98 million, they are yours, and you have the right to keep them, until they pry your picassa password from your cold dead hands...



... as long as you don't use them to violate the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, of others.

[footfootfoot]

Sure Bruce, it's attitudes like that which have caused the world wide shortage and subsequent price gouging of pixels...

[footfootfoot]

Originally Posted by BigV

Your glove, sir.

This one? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smell_the_Glove

[BigV]

No, this one.

[Flint]

I demand satisfacion!

[BigV]

But you *need* a spellchecker.

[BigV]

Originally Posted by footfootfoot

snip--
propose you upload a set of 36 consecutive photos to picassa or some such and we can have a discussion about actual images and not *your relationship* to those images.

this is done. check pm.