OP Editor's Blog

Scott Kelby has a lot more energy than I do. He must—otherwise I can’t imagine how he has time for all of the things he does. Blogging and shooting and writing and filming what appears to be 25 hours a day, Mr. Kelby has turned himself into a digital photography guru. One of his outlets for sharing his knowledge is D-Town TV, which takes a “fresh approach to teaching camera tips and photographic techniques.” D-Town used to be Nikon-centric, but Mr. Kelby recently pointed out on his blog that this season the web show will be less about “which button does what” and more about working with digital SLRs of all varieties—including Nikon and Canon. So if you’re a Canon shooter who previously avoided D-Town because it didn’t seem pertinent, or if you’re a Nikon guy who didn’t know about the show, now’s your chance to check it out for yourself. Knowing the great advice that Mr. Kelby often shares, it’s bound to be a very worthwhile watch.

kelbytv.com

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I’ve heard lots of great photographers talk about color fringing in their digital image files, but alas I’ve never noticed it myself. Until now. I was recently wandering through the city park one winter day when a woman pointed me to a tall tree just a few hundred yards away, in the top of which were perched two beautiful bald eagles. I was armed only with a APS-C sensor and a 200mm-equivalent zoom—not ideal for wildlife, especially bald eagles  that would have preferred a 600mm image stabilized extreme telephoto. When I got the pictures into the computer, I quickly zoomed in and cropped to create a composition in which the eagles practically filled the frame. Horror of horrors what did I see? Bright purple fringes at the high contrast edges of the objects in the frame. I did a bit of research and found out there’s some misinformation out there along with the real facts about fringe, and it can be difficult to discern the difference. So here I’ll try to briefly set the record straight.

There are two primary causes of color fringe. There’s chromatic aberration, which comes from lower-quality lenses or extreme zooms used at their extremes. Different colors of light are focused at slightly different distances, and if a lens isn’t optically optimized to compensate, fringe can appear.

The other cause is bichrominance. It’s the “purple fringe” that people still debate the exact cause of, but conventional wisdom seems to be it happens more on small sensors with densely packed pixels. It would appear that microlenses don’t focus all light evenly, and sometimes stray magenta (i.e. purple) light can be misallocated into adjacent pixels. The problem is most evident in edges of extreme contrast—say a dark tree branch backlit by bright sky. That is, in fact, where I saw it. (In fairness, the fringe I found was fairly minimal. In some cases it’s extreme and hugely distracting.)

To prevent color fringe, you can use lenses coated to minimize aberrations. You can also limit yourself to prime lenses or smaller zoom ranges, as they’re less prone to chromatic aberration since they’re not so “extreme” in their capabilities. Of course, that’s a sacrifice too.
Another helpful prevention is to avoid shooting wide open (like f/2) or stopped down (like f/32). Somewhere in the middle is bound to be the sharpest aperture anyway, and you’re going to lessen the possibility of color fringe there too. Some photographers even suggest using a UV filter on the lens to minimize ultraviolet (magenta/purple) light—thereby minimizing the opportunity to have excess purple light to create fringe.

When color fringe occurs—and it will—you’ve got a lot of options to repair it. Perhaps the easiest approach is to adjust noise reduction sliders in the RAW conversion. Lightroom, Aperture and Camera RAW all offer intuitive tools to minimize fringe. But even if you don’t shoot RAW, you can always process images in third-party programs like Noise Ninja which has a lens correction tool designed for precisely this purpose.

Photoshop also has a Lens Correction filter which works in much the same way. Or you can use simple hue/saturation sliders to reduce the appropriate channel’s saturation and lightness—in the case of purple fringe, work on the magenta channel. If other portions of the image contain purple tones you’d like to retain, though, you’ll have to selectively adjust the fringe alone by selecting a large area, the sky for instance, expanding that selection to include the fringe, and then removing the original selection to retain only the edges.
The takeaway from all of this is that fringe is bound to happen. When it does it may be barely noticeable or it could ruin the shot. But now you know what causes it, how you can work to prevent it and some simple approaches for eliminating it in post production.

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I’m a sucker for time-lapse videos. I’m also pretty susceptible to oohs and ahhs induced by creative use of tilt/shift perspective control lenses. Photographers have lately begun to combine tilt/shift creativity with their cameras’ video capabilities or time-lapses edited into video. That’s exactly the greatness John Nack recently linked to via his Adobe blog. It’s a cool urban landscape “video panorama” that incorporates moving through the scene to expand our conception of a panorama. It incorporates tilt/shift perspective control to create a strange—but very interesting—morphing effect as well. Each individual frame is on its own nothing special. But thanks to London photographer/videographer Theo Tagholm’s abundant creativity, the end result is awesome and inspiring. I’d love to see a traditional landscape photographer incorporate this sort of thing into an expedition through some iconic American wilderness. Get to it!

blogs.adobe.com

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I don’t use my light meter nearly enough these days. The problem is, using the LCD screen on the camera for image previews and histogram data does much of the work of a meter—especially when shooting with ambient light or in situations that don’t seem terribly tricky. The one situation in which I still do crave a light meter, however, is when I want to be able to spot test particular areas of a scene to determine lighting ratios and luminance values in zones from shadows to highlights. That’s how Ansel Adams worked, after all; if it was good enough for him it’s surely fine for me. But who wants to carry a big bulky spot meter for only occasional use? Well now you don’t have to.

The PocketSpot Meter from Metered Light is a brand new product from the boutique two-person company (really, it’s a couple of photo enthusiast engineers who identified a niche and created what seems to be an ideal solution) that has long produced timers and darkroom accessories. They claim this little guy to be the smallest spot meter in the world. That size is a benefit, especially compared to old-school spot meters which more closely resembled huge handguns than compact photographic accessories.

The PocketSpot is a small 1-degree spot meter that actually fits easily in your pocket—perfect for photographers who may not use a spot reading for every exposure but who would at least like to have the option. And now they don’t have to sacrifice precious kit space to be able to do it.

At $400 the PocketSpot is far from inexpensive, but it’ well made too. So well made that lots of folks want them; that high demand means you may have to have some patience before you get your own. But good things are sure to come to those who wait. meteredlight.blogspot.com

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Theroxor design blog has published a guide to Photoshop guides. It’s a list of online Photoshop tutorials for beginners—or so it claims. I think it’s a great place to learn all sorts of great Photoshop techniques, but maybe not on your first day with the software. If you have minimal editing experience, you might want to practice a little bit before diving into these tutorials head first. This guide is really a great place to learn how to do more than the most basic processes, making the most of the powerful program tool by tool and technique by technique. Topics include everything from layer masking to selection tools to color palettes, so it’s kind of like a one-stop resource you can go back to again and again.

theroxor

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It’s not that I think I know it all, but I do know a thing or two about photography and the digital workflow. That’s why it’s always a pleasant surprise when I come upon something so important, so simple, so powerful, and so previously unknown to me. That’s exactly the experience I had recently when I was reading the ASMP’s Strictly Business Blog and Peter Krogh linked to his work at the DPBestFlow web site in which he explains the process of a “validated transfer” when copying digital files from one disk to another. Utilizing a validated transfer serves several functions, most notably minimizing the opportunity to introduce corruption into image files and alerting you to potential problems with hard disks that could be prone to failure and data loss. I like that the validated transfer is a fairly simple and straightforward procedure; see for yourself by watching a video of the validated transfer in action at the dpBestflow web site.

asmp.org: strictly business/2010

dpbestflow.org

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The Epson International Pano Awards is the printer company's worldwide recognition of panoramic photography. The Pano Awards aims to showcase the work of panoramic photographers worldwide, with more than $13,000 awarded in cash and prizes. Best of all, anyone can enter. There are two sections—one for amateurs and one for pros or pro-caliber amateurs—with two categories in each, Nature and The Built Environment. To enter by April 30th, check out the details and submit online at theepanoawards.

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Rob Galbraith always points out great photo galleries online, and lately he’s been highlighting Olympic coverage from around the globe. With links to galleries on sites such as the Sacramento Bee, the Denver Post, the Toronto star, Germany’s Stern and many more, Rob has compiled a definitive look at the Olympic games through the eyes of the world’s photojournalists. My favorite portfolio is the panoramic work of Finnish photographer Kari Kuukka. While you can’t read much about Kuukka’s work (unless you read Finnish, that is) the photographs provide not only an immersive view of the Vancouver venues, but a behind the scenes glimpse of what covering the games was like for the multitude of photographers, videographers and journalists involved.

robgalbraith.com

docimages.fi: vancouver/panoramas

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Resolve, the Livebooks photo blog, has gone live with its IMPACT project—an interesting take on the online art gallery designed to promote the use of a blog as an exhibition space. It’s a pretty simple concept and an interesting approach that works well. Functioning much like an old school web ring, each gallery lives on a photographer’s own web site. What’s best about it, though, isn’t the way it’s set up—it’s the opportunity to view the work of world class travel, sports, landscape and wildlife photographers such as OP regular and master photographer Art Wolfe. I particularly enjoyed Rachel Wolfe’s portfolio of photographs from Jamaica, the island from which I’m writing this update, and Daniel Beltra’s beautiful yet ominous work on tropical deforestation.

blog.livebooks.com

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Are you longing to bring out the computer geek in your outdoor photography adventures? If so, Steve Berardi at Photo Naturalist has put together a list of five great computer geek tools for photographers. These include weather web sites offering tracking data for precipitation and pattern prediction, sun and moon-phase web sites that will detail where and when the sun will rise and set and what to expect from the moon for an evening or early a.m. landscape shot. It’s a great list. I’d also add to it a program that I think is super cool, The Photographer’s Ephemeris. This freeware program offers extensive information and even graphical topographic mapping of the sun and moon’s position in the landscape—even detailing the length of shadows cast at a certain place and time. It’s a neat way, as are the other five tools on Mr. Berardi’s list, to wield the power of the computer to help take great pictures—as opposed to just bringing it into the workflow after the exposure is made.

photonaturalist.net

stephentrainor.com

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