June 8, 2010

Pan in the Can

The British Touring Car Championships event at Oulton Park on Sunday gave me the opportunity to try to perfect my panning technique. I’m getting better but still find this very hard to get right and my success rate is still too low for my liking.

The idea is to snap a fast-moving object (in this case a racing car) while following the car’s motion with the camera so that the car comes out sharp but the background blurs, emphasising the car’s speed. A slower shutter also produces motion blur in the wheels, which is good. The point is to produce a picture which generates excitement through visual clues to the car’s motion. If the car looks like it is parked on the road then you have failed.

The difficulty is that to get the background suitably blurry you have to keep the shutter speed relatively low, which makes it hard to get the car really sharp. This picture was taken with a shutter speed of 1/200th at a focal length of 75mm (full frame equivalent of 112.5mm) which would be ample if the car were at a standstill. With the car and camera both moving it is rather harder.

Some people seem able to go down to shutter speeds of 1/80th or even slower and still keep the car sharp. All power to them. The problem I had was that I was at a vantage point where the cars were both getting closer to the side of the track and accelerating, so that to keep focusing on the same bit of the car as it moved I had to speed up the panning motion of the camera very dramatically and at exactly the right time. It becomes a tricky hand-eye co-ordination job and I always was useless at ball sports.

If you look closely at the Formula Renault car in the picture above you will notice that the rear part of the car is reasonably sharp but the front part less so. This effect was noticeable in a lot of pictures. I wondered if this might be something to do with depth of field but I’m inclined to doubt it. I’m putting it down to the relative motion of the front of the car being greater (because it is nearer the lens) with the result that 1/200th is not enough to freeze it whereas it is enough to freeze the back of the car.

Here is another effort, this time teenager Carl Stirling in the Ginetta G40.

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April 26, 2010

Magnolia on Pieris

There I was, sitting in my lounge watching the football yesterday afternoon, when I noticed a shaft of sunlight had picked out a few of the flowers on the Magnolia tree in my front garden.  My attention had obviously wandered from the football, maybe because Chelsea’s demolition of Stoke was turning into a routine rout.

I had to use ISO 400 and my 18-250 at 250 with the aperture at the f6.3 maximum.  The lens tends to be a bit soft at those settings but the result is not too bad.  I am using Lightroom 3 Beta 2 and very impressed with the latter’s luminance noise reduction which makes a big difference with hardly any effect on image detail.

The reddish flowers in the background are Pieris Forest Flame.

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April 19, 2010

Why no DSLR with a hyperfocal distance button?

The Hyperfocal Distance sounds like a geeky photography term.  That’s because it is, but the idea is both simple and useful.

In general, when you focus on a person or object there will be other objects, both closer and further away, which are also in focus because they fall between the near and far distances which define the “depth of field”. Anything closer than the near limit of the depth of field, or beyond the far limit, will be out of focus.  The further away the object you are focusing on, the wider the depth of field.  Eventually, as you keep increasing the focusing distance, you hit the point (known as the Hyperfocal Distance) where the far limit of the depth of field just coincides with infinity.  That means everything between the near limit and infinity will be in focus.  For any given lens, focal length and aperture, this is the widest depth of field you can get, and very useful if you just want to get as much as possible, including the background, in focus.

It is so useful that there are countless websites and iPhone apps etc to help you calculate it.  Which is fine, except you have to read off the focal length of your lens  as best you can (if it is a zoom), check then enter the aperture, run the application to get the Hyperfocal Distance then focus to that distance manually, as best you can within the limits of the rather sparse focus distance scale  (if any) on your lens.  The result may be roughly right but it is fiddly and rather hit and miss.  You would do as well to focus manually with your depth of field preview button (if any) depressed until the background looks like it is just in focus.  Not very scientific but gets you somewhere near the result.

How much better, though, if DSLRs had a button which set the focus to the hyperfocal distance automatically for you, in an instant.  It would make most sense if you were in Aperture Priority mode, but it could be useful with any mode.

Hardly difficult for the manufacturers to offer this.  The camera’s electronics already have access to all the data they need.

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January 10, 2010

Adventures in colour photography: Study in black and white

Snow is an obvious subject for photography at the moment, but I don’t seem to have had much time for it. Nor, frankly, the inclination to risk life, limb and DSLR gear skeetering along icy pavements in pursuit of interesting pictures.

But sometimes you don’t have to go very far. My cat was sitting on a wall just outside my kitchen door, with the snow-covered garden behind. She didn’t have too much trouble contrasting with the snow and she threw in a mildly evil look, directly at me, as if to complain about having been left out in the cold.

I added one stop to avoid the meter being fooled by the predominantly white tone of the image, but white balance is always an issue with images of snow. There is always a blue cast. The question is how far to go in removing it. In the Lightroom histogram, the snow element of the picture came up as three distinct curves for the red, green and blue components. The curves were similar shape and peak height, red to the left then green and blue on the right. By warming up the colour balance the curves can be made to coincide reasonably well at which point the blue cast has gone.

This is what I did with the cat picture but wonder whether I may have gone too far. The overlap of the curves was not 100% perfect and we get most of the snow coming out pure white but some areas faintly pink and others faintly blue. Maybe I should have left a mild blue cast as I don’t really think there should be any pinky bits in the snow.

Here’s another crack at it. I’ve been less aggressive with the blue cast removal and taken the exposure down a bit to bring out more detail in the snow.

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November 10, 2009

Jilting DxO

My love affair with DxO is over. It reached a passionate crescendo then came to an abrupt end. There is no going back. My hopes have been dashed and my heart broken.

Last weekend I had an opportunity to put the newly released DxO Optics Pro 6 through its paces at my son’s graduation in Oxford. No use of flash allowed in the Sheldonian Theatre, but no need to worry because I could just ramp up the ISO (even on my trusty Sony Alpha A100) to say 800 and DxO would magically make it look like ISO 100 at noon on a summer’s day.

Except it did no such thing. It dealt admirably with the noise but threw in some ugly random artifacts and produced some unnatural “watercolour” effects, particularly on fine detail of faces and hair. I had previously experimented with DxO on pictures of things, not people. It may be alright with things, but definitely not with people.

Here is a 100% crop of an example produced with Lightroom:

And the same crop with DxO:

I wondered whether it might just be teething problems with the new version, so uninstalled the DxO 6 trial and reinstalled the older DxO 5.3.5. No better, I’m afraid.

In the end I went back to Lightroom 2.2. It isn’t quite as good as DxO at banishing noise but produces a far more natural and artifact-free result. Lightroom wins hands down.

Pass me a handkerchief, someone. Sob.

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November 4, 2009

DxO Optics Pro 6 is out – expect miracles

The photography establishment diehards see the camera market as Canon and Nikon plus a rag-tag of also-rans, and the RAW converter market as Aperture, Lightroom/ACR plus a rag-tag of also-rans. Well, those brands/products do certainly dominate the market but it is all too easy to become dismissive of the alternatives and thus fail to spot the emerging gems.

One such gem is DxO Optics Pro from DxO Image Science in France. Having only recently come across it (in photoclubalpha.com) I have given it a whirl. No longer do I believe that RAW conversion is a mature, commoditised technology. DxO simply does a better job of the basic RAW conversion process than the market leaders. It doesn’t have the polished interface or breadth of features, but it produces tangibly better pictures, particularly at higher ISO ratings. Now isn’t that what really counts?

Using DxO for image processing is easier, quicker and produces better results. It’s a different way of working compared with say ACR or Lightroom. With LR you have a lot of decisions to make and a lot of sliders to fiddle with. As against that, DxO is rather more “intelligent” and does most of the work for you. It still has all the sliders but has dedicated modules for particular combinations of camera bodies and lenses with oodles of data about how they perform at various combinations of focal length, aperture, etc and uses that to set the sliders in the optimum default positions for you. Most of the time it is best just to leave the sliders alone. Job done better and with a fraction of the effort. Maybe less attractive to compulsive pixel peepers and settings fiddlers – but just dandy for people with lives to get on with.

Version 6 promises to be a significant improvement, taking the high ISO performance even further. From DxO, I will accept nothing less than miracles.

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October 9, 2009

Stand up to your horse

I noticed this picture starting to get more frequent hits on Flickr. It’s of French horse trainer and showman Jean-François Pignon, taken at the British Open showjumping at the NEC last April. The increased traffic is probably because this picture is in the top four or five images returned by Google Image Search using Jean-François Pignon as the search string.

It came out quite well given I had to resort to ISO 800 (on a Sony Alpha A100) with a shutter speed of 1/50th at a focal length of 120mm. The camera’s built-in image stabilisation just about kept it sharp, but the pony’s head was moving so it blurred slightly.

I still think the picture works quite well, helped by having a dark non-distracting background.

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September 16, 2009

DxO maybe is special

Some days ago I mentioned I would be checking out DxO Optics Pro as an alternative to Adobe Lightroom as raw converter.  This was based on a suggestion that the DxO software might do a better job at processing high ISO Sony files than other converters.

Well here is the best I could get out of Lightroom 2.2 with a particular ISO 1600 test image:

And this is the result with DxO Optics Pro 5:

Here are some 100% crops, first Lightroom:

And then DxO:

I find the DxO easier on the eye without sacrificing detail. The noise is not as prominent or obtrusive, and the overall result is a little more contrasty than I could achieve with Lightroom.

Something to think about.

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September 6, 2009

Sony’s excuse for not including video in the new A500/A550/A850 DSLRs

Writers from the Spanish photography website quesabesde.com had a play with the new A500 and A550 at the Berlin IFA 2009 tradeshow and there is a very nice write-up on the site (in Spanish).

While there they collared the representative from Sony and asked the question that everyone has been asking.  How is it that, when the likes of Canon and Nikon are bringing out new video-capable DSLRs every other week, Sony for all its pedigree in consumer video can contrive to bring out stunning new cameras that pack in every conceivable feature bar video?

This is an excerpt from quesabesde’s article and my translation below.

“Sin ánimo de resultar cansinos con este tema, una vez repasada la apabullante lista de prestaciones y novedades de la nueva pareja Alpha no dejamos pasar la ocasión de preguntar a uno de los representantes de Sony por la ausencia de la función de grabación de vídeo en el cuadro de especificaciones de los nuevos modelos. La respuesta no nos sorprende demasiado. Sony es una compañía de vídeo -nos explican- y cuando dé este paso será para ofrecer una prestación sin limitaciones en el enfoque, los controles manuales y demás parámetros. Esperemos que la espera -valga la redundancia- no se prolongue demasiado. En todo caso, nos preguntamos si esa promesa de futuro no afectará al presente de estas réflex.”

“At the risk of becoming tiresome on the subject, after reviewing the mind-boggling list of features and innovations on the two new Alphas we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to ask one of the Sony reps about the absence of video recording functionality. The answer didn’t come as much of a surprise.  Sony is a video company, they told us, and when they take that step it will be to offer a feature set without limitations on focusing, manual control and other parameters.  We hope that the wait, and we think it’s worth restating this, will not be too long.  In any event, we have to ask ourselves whether that promise for the future might not have an impact on these new DSLRs right now.”

So there you are.  You can have it when it’s perfect.  They have standards to live up to and can’t quite get there yet with a DSLR. It’s a technology thing.

Well, it certainly doesn’t make sense as a marketing strategy thing.  Sony have a very long way to go to get anywhere close to the scale of dominance that Canon and Nikon now enjoy.  Getting established Canon/Nikon shooters to switch to Sony is going to be a very hard sell. Even where Sony models match or beat the spec for a lower price, those diehards will already have made a huge investment in proprietary glass, and in any case Sony’s lens range is still fairly sparse.

Sony have quite clearly realised this and are trying to build up DSLR market share by turning their attention to photographers just making the step up to DSLRs from digital compact (point and shoot) cameras.  They are hoping to attract anyone who loves their point and shoot but wants better image quality and interchangeable lenses without necessarily having to become a photo geek.  So they produce DSLRs which do not take former compact camera owners too far out of their comfort zone.

The problem for Sony is that these same people have got rather used to getting video out of their point and shoot cameras.  The lack of video on the Sony DSLRs will be a showstopper for a large proportion of them.

The other possibility is that internal politics at Sony may be holding things up.  But that is pure conjecture on my part.  At senior executive level, Sony should be able to work out that they would be better off incorporating video now, even if it’s not 100% as they would want it, because they would sell a damn sight more units now and that would pay dividends quite quickly in terms of establishing long-term market share.

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September 2, 2009

DxO Special

As someone who has built their worfkflow around Adobe Lightroom, it never occurred to me that there might be any serious mileage, image quality wise, in looking at other RAW conversion software. Lightroom has established itself as one of the two professional tools of choice, along with Apple Aperture. RAW conversion seems pretty commoditised. The choice seems to be around whether you’re a Mac or a PC, and minor usability considerations. No-one has been claiming that one produces better image quality than the other, or indeed than any of the many lesser known RAW conversion options.

Maybe that’s not quite true. I have come across the suggestion for example that Aperture beats Lightroom for RAW conversion of Sony A900 images.

Going much further with the notion that Lightroom (which shares its RAW conversion engine with Adobe Camera Raw) does a rotten job with Sony DSLR images is this recent post by Photoclub Alpha’s David Kilpatrick.

David is speculating that the loose tie up between Sony and French camera software company DxO labs may go further than first thought. In any event, he points out that the DxO Optics Pro RAW conversion program seems to do a far better job on high ISO Sony images than Lightroom/ACR or indeed anything else. Now this may not be just a Sony thing. Perhaps the science of RAW conversion has not been fully tamed after all, and DxO have come up with a superior conversion engine full stop.

I will in any event be trying out the DxO software. I can think of a number of noisy images which might benefit from better RAW conversion. It must be better to get the best possible conversion first, rather than rely entirely on Noise Ninja or similar in a subsequent step.

So I will give it a try and post my findings. Should be fun.

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