When industry mavens put on their thinking caps in an attempt to gauge the
future direction of the photographic industry, they typically start by analyzing
trends in camera sales. Then they quantify the resulting data into various demographic
segments and product categories. In that regard,t...
Most “serious” photographers own at least one pocket-size digital camera so that they’re always prepared to capture an interesting scene—even if their trusty SLR is back home in the camera cabinet. That means many of us go about ourdaily...
For the past few years we’ve watched the popularity of camera phones grow exponentially, as devices on the Android and Apple iOS platforms have offered more and more features, higher resolution cameras, and the ability to download a myriad of both free and paid apps of interest to photographers and the general consumer.
Ten years ago PBS debuted a moving documentary entitled “American Photography: A
Century of Images.” The program traced photography’s profound influence upon life in
America, and I recall being particularly struck by thecamera&rsqu...
The III also sports a new Raw option, dubbed sRAW, which is 2.5 megapixels
in size and half the file size of "regular" Raw images. The advantage,
claims Canon, is that sRAW images can be processed just like any Raw image but
stored in at a smaller size. This is perfect, they say, for wedding candid photographers
who want Raw post-exposurepr...
I have always been of divided mind when it comes to printing photographic images on canvas. I have certainly seen inkjet canvas material in use at galleries and fine art fairs, where watercolorists, pastel artists etc use the material to create lower-priced copies of originals, making the art affordable yet attractive for many buyers. In fact, it’s a fairly easy bet that the great majority of the canvas coming off inkjet printers is used for just that purpose. The main use of photographic imagery on this material, in my experience, is for portraiture and wedding photography, where the image can stand on its own or gets painted over by artists for a premium touch, and price.
Sometimes we forget about all the factors that go into lighting a portrait. We might focus on the direction of that beautiful window light, the color of the fleeting sunset, the dim light in a church or that wall of light created by sun light bouncing off a building. Gaining skill in lighting means taking all four factors into consideration with each photo you take.
One of the main problem areas for many digital photographers is getting a print
that is reasonably close to what you see on screen. Assuming that you have a
calibrated display (and if you don't, stop reading this article and profile
your monitor!) the problem may lie in your printer settings. It's all
too common to find that someone having problems is actually managing the printer
settings twice - once in the print driver and once in their image editing software.
Chromatic aberration is an inherent problem in the manufacture of lenses. It is the failure of the glass to bend the light in such a way that it focuses all the colors at the same point, and it occurs because lenses have a different refractive index for different wavelengths of light. It is characterized by color fringing, or unwanted colors at the edge of objects. The colors can be red, cyan, green, magenta, blue, or yellow. You usually can’t see this fringing until you magnify the image quite a bit, but at 100 percent and higher it’s quite obvious. I’ve enlarged (#1) to 300 percent, and in (#2) you can see what I’m talking about. Chromatic aberration is quite pronounced in wide angle lenses, and it’s most obvious in the corners. The picture of this famous pool in the Gellert Hotel, Budapest, Hungary was taken with a 14mm lens. The center of the lens is largely devoid of these unwanted colors. Telephotos also have chromatic aberration, but it is usually not as bad.
The concept of color temperature is an integral part of photography, and yet many photographers are not really sure what it means. Color and temperature don’t seem to have a direct relationship with each other, but light sources are often defined in terms of their color temperature, which is allied with setting the white balance in digital photography. In addition, the measurement of color temperature is in Kelvin degrees. What does all this really mean?
There are times when you want your color to exactly match what's in the
scene, but for the most part color is a fairly subjective matter that can be
tweaked with ease in just about any image-editing program. Color has a hue--like
yellow, green or blue--as well as a vividness, which in photography is
often called its saturation. In addition, color can have a cast, which is influenced
by the prevailing lighting conditions when we make the photograph. That cast
can be influenced by the light source itself, such as photographing under direct
sun versus what we'd get when photographing under tungsten lights, and
by the position of the subject in relation to that light source, such as the
difference between photographing in the shade or open light. In addition, color
can also be influenced by the recording medium itself, be it film or digital,
and how the film is made or the digital image processor is programmed to change
the color during the recording processing.
The pixels that make up a digital image each have an "address",
a code that defines color, brightness and shades. When we make images with a
digital camera or from film with a scanner we are creating a matrix of pixels
that altogether create the illusion of a continuous tone image. These codes
are not dyes or even densities, but specific information as to how the computer
will interpret the colors and tonal values on the screen. It is only when we
make a print that we leave the "digital" world and enter the world
of dyes and pigments. Because each pixel has a code, basically a bunch of information
that is composed of bits and bytes, we can alter that code to change the "address",
or color and tonal look of every pixel. In this lesson we'll use the Replace
Color dialog box, found in most versions of Photoshop, or under other names
in other programs, to illustrate the point and give you an easy, fun way to
play with your pictures.
If you have not been photographing at twilight or night up to now, you have an exciting adventure ahead. Because cameras have the ability to accumulate light over time, nighttime photographs can seem brighter than they do to our eyes. This means that details are revealed that are hidden from view because of the limitations of the light gathering ability of our eyes, and at the same time the dazzling colors of night add a dynamic quality to the scene. Artificial lights at night are a mixture of neon, mercury vapor, fluorescent, and tungsten, and each of these produce interesting colors. Some are cool, some are yellowish or golden, and some are super saturated, and the combination is really something.
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