Turning my hand to professional photography

I have, in the main, enjoyed the time I have spent studying with the OCA.  I started with the aim of improving my photography to the point where I might be able to turn professional.  It seems that events have overtaken me and my sideline of photographing gundogs for fellow owners has taken up a life of its own!  I now have too much work to be able to devote the time I need to my studies.

As a result I have put my academic work to one side and am continuing to pursue my aim of becoming a full time professional.

My work can currently be found at www.facebook/nickandersonphoto and will soon be available on my website http://nickandersonphoto.smugmug.com/ as well on a new blog http://nickandersonphoto.wordpress.com/

Newseum – The Pullitzer Prize Gallery

I was in Washington DC a couple of days ago looking for the National Gallery and the Harry Callahan exhibition and came across the Newseum!  As soon as I spotted their exhibition of Pullitzer Prize winning photographs I knew that I would have to go in to take a look.

The Pullitzer prizes cover 21 categories and winners receives $10,000 and a medal.  The awards were first given 1917 having been established from the estate of Joseph Pullitzer, a wealthy Newspaper owner.  The categories featured were for Spot Photography (Breaking News) and Feature Photography.

The Newseum gallery features the largest collection of Pullitzer prize winning photographs ever assembled and includes video interviews with many of the photographers.

The Newseum itself has 7 levels of galleries and is a stunning glass and stone museum featuring the text of the 1st amendment, that is devoted to current and historical aspects of news and the media.

All around the front of the building are the front pages of daily papers taken from all around America, reminding us of the vast number of publications that are being produced.  They are of great interest to the passing public and always seemed to attract a line of readers taking a look at what was occurring around their country.

The Pullitzer prize gallery was a delightful mix of new, fascinating photographs and old friends that I have seen many times.  I spent much longer than I expected reading the stories behind the photos and watching interviews with the photographers.There were 158 pictures covering the years between 1942 and 2010 and I would love to mention every one but all I am able to cover are those which had a real impact on me.

During the Islamic Revolution that swept Ayatollah Khomeini to power the Revolutionary Guard dispensed their view of ‘justice’ in mock trials.  The sentences passed were quick and brutal.  This photograph was taken by an ‘Unknown’ Iranian news photographer but was released by a UPI staffer and went world wide.  It wasn’t until  2006 did Jahangir Razmi feel safe enough to reveal his name.  Observing the moment of death, particularly when seeing the image in a newspaper on your kitchen table has a shocking effect on us all.  The emotions that they generate have often been the catalyst that brings about change which is why they are often considered so important… right back to the image of the falling soldier taken by Capa in 1936 during the Spanish civil war.

Putting these two images of the flag, ‘Old Glory’ together is deliberate.  The juxtaposition is easy to see with one flag being honoured and cherished, and the other being used as a weapon in an attack of racial hatred.

I think the story of the flag being raised at Iwo Jima is fairly well known although not everyone will realise that it was the second time the task was performed and that the battle for the island continued on for another 31 days.  Thirty two years later Stanley Foreman captured the second image of the flag being used as a weapon by demonstrators in Boston protesting against plans to  bus black children to integrate white schools.  The innocent black man who just happened to be passing was a business man on his way to City Hall.

The emotions that pictures of this quality can evoke is amazing… for me it is one of the enduring merits of still photography.  Whist a motion picture comes and goes, the lasting visual impact of a single image can endure for a lifetime.  Here, both from 1973, the moment of child birth captured by Brian Lanker is contrasted by the well known photograph of ‘Nick’ Ut showing the aftermath of a US napalm attack on a Vietnamese village.  The naked girl, Phan Thi Kim Phuc, whose clothes have been burned from her body runs screaming towards the photographer… she survives and to this day she and the photographer have stayed in touch.  The battered Leica that Nick Ut used that day is also part of the exhibition.

1991 sees Greg Marinovicvh in Soweto, South Africa when he stumbles on a gun fight between supporters of the ANC.  A Zulu man is accused of being an Inkatha spy and is murdered during a brutal attack and Marinovich captures the awful event.  I find the task faced by news photographers in situations like this to be too enormous to imagine.  How to keep your wits about yourself when all rules of humanity have been suspended is a remarkable thing.

A much more introspective image taken by Paul Vathis shows Kennedy and Eisenhower deep in thought as they confer following the disastrous attempted invasion of Cuba by the USA, the Bay of Pigs.  The press photographers had been told to stop working but Vathis grabbed this image through the legs of a Secret Service man.  The image is beautifully composed despite being taken on the fly.

Watching the linesmen repair high voltage cables after a failure, Rocco Morabito sees one of them fall after being electrocuted.  His friend attempts to resuscitate him whilst he hangs from his harness.  Morabito takes a couple of frames and then dashes off to phone an ambulance.  When he returns he takes the winning shot and prays for the injured man.  The shout comes down, “He’s breathing!”

With 158 remarkable images to view I could have written so much more but all I have room for is a few of those which caught my eye and my imagination.  I left this exhibition with a mix of emotions, horror, excitement, awe and sober introspection.  I hugely admire the professional and amateur photographers who have managed to capture the moment that defines a year by winning this prestigious award… let alone those who win it twice!  The quality of the photographs, often taken in very arduous and emotional circumstances is quite remarkable and I am truly humbled.

There is so much more to see in this museum, I look forward to an opportunity to visit again.

Stalled!

I reckon to have been making fairly good progress with my current work but seem to have stalled.  Firstly I received my feedback on Assignment 1 and have been feeling a bit thoughtful about that.  Secondly I have been surprised by the deadline for the March formal assessment of my ‘The Art of Photography’ (TAoP) module that I completed at the end of last year.  I rushed to get off a paper guide on how to access my on-line work which I hope will have arrived in time.

My assignment feedback has reminded me that there is a lot of ancillary work that needs to be done as well as just shooting the photographs and I have been skimping on that.  Perhaps it was because I treated the assignment an a glorified exercise on workflow as it was the third similar task in a row… perhaps also I didn’t give it my best attention as it isn’t even formally assessed with the rest of the work in this module.  Either way I need to go back and improve the ‘mouth music’ a bit or no one will know what I was thinking when I shot it all.

I have also had some informal comments on my TAoP layouts from an assessor.  Apparently it is easy to loose marks when it is hard to locate important work, particularly relating our tutor’s feedback and to our ‘before and after’ thought processes concerning our assignments.  It was suggested that my workbook/blog isn’t the place for these comments and that they should be placed with the assignment itself… which in my case is on my assignment web site.  A bit late for that now and it will make me rethink my layout in the future.

What I have done is go back through my TAoP blog and add additional labels to assist in navigating the site which will hopefully aid the assessors which is all I can do at this stage but I wish that this sort of thing received wider circulation as it would have altered the way I set things up more than 2 years ago!

Vivian Maier

I wrote about this remarkable photographer,  the amazing story of her life and subsequent discovery in my TAoP blog here – Vivian Maier.  Her popularity has continued to grow and, like many photographers interested in street photography, I continue to look out for examples of her work.

The discoverer of her negatives, John Maloof, has published a selection of her work in a volume which is reviewed in foto8 here.  The first print was out in November and was sold out very quickly, copies going for several hundred US$.  Although still an expensive hardback I can’t wait to get a chance to look through a copy and will be keeping my eyes open for one the next time I get to New York.

Exposure explained

I have recently been a little vocal about some of the limitations of our study notes but there is no point floundering in ignorance.  I have discovered Michael Freeman’s book Perfect Exposure which amplifies and makes clear the concepts and exercises that I have been puzzling over.  I was a little disappointed that this book wasn’t listed in the Reading and Resource Appendix of our notes as a suggestion for further reading as it would appear that it is the basis for some of our notes.  Certainly, the book describes in much more detail the technical and practical aspects of exposure, noise, hightlight clipping, rolloff and scene dynamic range than the course material does.

With everything that I was previously dismissing as ‘too hard’ now explained, I realise that many of the limitations of our course notes are down to the efforts made to précis them from a much clearer and more detailed source.  The same was true of parts of The Art of Photography where I and several other students found that reading Michael Freeman’s The Photographer’s Eye gave us the understanding we needed to get past areas of the course notes that were far from clear.

I think that any conscientious student, keen to learn and fill in the gaps in their understanding would be happy to resort to extra curricular reading but not in order to make sense of core knowledge.  In this area, our course study material should be adequate… its not like we have them as a back up to a lecture or class where we can listen to and question a tutor.  They are the bedrock of our efforts to comprehend and learn and should fulfil all our needs.  In this respect they are, at the moment, lacking.

So, what of Perfect Exposure?  The book is brilliant.  Far from being too deep or technical, I am finding that it is really hitting the spot to satisfy my need for a full and clear explanation of the problems associated with digital imaging.  I would go as far as to suggest that it becomes required reading for any student of DPP.  The only drawback I have found is that having purchased it as a Kindle digital ebook I would have been better off waiting for a paper copy which has many advantages over the iPad version… quicker to access, find sections, leaf through etc.

Exercise: Your camera’s dynamic range

I have been going on about this exercise in various forums and now have to write about it.  I am going to give it my best shot but I am still not sure of the correct interpretation of the notes.

This exercise gives us a practical and empirical way to discover the dynamic range of our own cameras.

In order to do this we need a subject that itself covers the entire range of light from bright white to dark shadow.  It is suggested that we place a piece of white card into the image to get the bright end of the scale but since I was shooting a white building it that was not required.  Having shot the photograph, exposure reading were required from a few areas, in particular the lightest and darkest areas with a few in between.

My image is below:

The image has the exposure readings from my notes appended and it can be seen that from the brightest area, the white columns to the darkest area, a black window in hard shadow, there is a difference of 8 stops.  Whilst the measurements I took may seem a bit random and it might have been easier sticking to one aperture and showing the change in speed it doesn’t invalidate the readings.  I used a simple on-line calculator to input the various exposure settings and get the stop differences (rounded to the nearest whole number).

So from this example it would seem that the dynamic range of my camera is 8 stops… a little low for a high end SLR (Canon 5DII) so I must examine why.  My thoughts are that although the building is a bright white it isn’t pure white and the stone is matt which will reduce its light reflecting quality; this would probably be worth 1 stop of light value.  In addition, there weren’t any truly black areas as even a black window in shadow is going to receive reflected light from the surrounds and the shiny ground and this would be worth 1 more stop of light.  In the dark areas I had no difficult in raising the brightness to examine the detail which makes me think that I wasn’t completely at the limits of the available dynamic range.

Having a rant!

Perhaps I got out of the wrong side of my bed this morning.

This is a degree course isn’t it?  Our tutors are all well above our level of skills and academic achievement and the author of our notes is presumably more than a level or two above that?

Then why the hell don’t the notes make sense?

This really gets me down.

I previously bleated to my fellow students that I couldn’t understand the exercise ‘Sensor linear capture’ because when the notes said that the tones were squashed right on the histogram, mine where squashed left.  And when the notes said ‘brighter’ my efforts became darker!  Well I was told by my tutor and several other students that the notes were wrong in this case!  Wrong!  You bet… 180º out you mean.  I’m sorry Captain Scott, we have been going North instead of South so no wonder the Norwegians beat us to the pole!

Now I am faced with paragraphs of gobble-de-gook in the exercise ‘Your camera’s dynamic range’ and I am spending more time trying to sort it out than the whole exercise should take!

Of course I might be wrong and I might have to take it all back when someone sensible explains it all to me but in the mean time I want to shout from the roof tops, “Who wrote this, who proofed this and did anyone actually try these exercises out for real before they were palmed off on us?”

Exercise: Your tollerance for noise

The term ‘noise’ in the way we are using it here originally came from the world of radio… more specifically old fashioned High Frequency radio use.  The transmitted signal would be received but those long wavelengths were also coming from lots of other sources; car engines, refrigerators, overhead power cables, the atmosphere, thunderstorms and even outer space… indeed almost any electrical effect, natural or man made.  If these other sources were strong enough they would swamp the transmission and the strains of the BBC World Service would fade into the hiss.

The effect of image noise is similar but a better analogy is to remember our days of using wet film.  In order to shoot in low light we used fast film that had large crystals of the light sensitive silver halide in the film emulation, big enough to react quickly to the low light levels.  The disadvantage was that these fast films produced grainy, blurred negatives.  When we wind up the ISO setting of our digital cameras we get a similar effect, albeit for a different reason.

When we increase the ISO setting of our cameras we are asking the electronics to amplify the light signals received by the sensor so that we can get a viewable image.  This amplification (increase in sensitivity) has a down side.  The millions of light sensitive pixels on our sensors cannot all be made perfectly.  Some will react  to light a little more than its neighbour and some a little less.  As we amplify the output of the sensor these differences become more apparent and errors appear.  We see this as noise.

An acceptable level of noise will depend on our personal tolerance to imperfections.  As a general rule however, if the level of noise exceeds the level of detail in the image it will probably be unacceptable and visa versa.

This exercise asks us to shoot an identical image throughout the ISO range of our cameras, varying the speed to obtain the same EV (Exposure Value) but going no lower than ½ sec to avoid introducing long exposure noise.  Below are my images with areas of the ceiling, the dark doorway and the bust details magnified.  The images were shot in RAW but haven’t received any additional processing, just a basic conversion to JPG.

1/2 sec, f22, ISO 100

At ISO 100 the ceiling looks smooth, the dark areas unblemished and the detail is clear.

1/5 sec, f20, ISO 200

1/10 sec, f20, ISO 400

By ISO 400 a small amount of noise is appearing in the smooth ceiling area but not enough to affect the natural texture, indeed without the ISO 100 shot to compare it might well have gone unnoticed.  The door and bust details are generally unaffected.

1/20, f20, ISO 800

1/40, f20, ISO 1600

For a lot of cameras, ISO 1600 would be almost unusable but I am fortunate to be using the Canon 5DII and even at this level the noise isn’t too noticeable, until you examine the smooth ceiling which is now quite obviously suffering from a rash of speckles.

1/80, f20, ISO 3200

By ISO 3200 the ceiling is developing it’s own patterns caused by the noise that has appeared.  The frame of the door has also become quite speckled, however the texture and colours mixed in with the bust do a good job at disguising the effect.

1/160, f20, ISO 6400

ISO 6400 is the practical maximum of my camera.  It does have specialist levels of H1  (ISO 12800) and H2 (ISO 25600) but these should be used in conjunction with the High ISO speed noise reduction C.Fn settings which would skew the findings of this exercise.  At ISO 6400 noise is apparent in most areas of the image and it gives the entire image a mottled, rough textured finish.  The overall image is still quite acceptable at a reduced size but close up it definitely suffers.

High ISO settings will always degrade an image to one degree or another, particularly in areas of smooth texture that will become artificially grainy.  However, if the situation demands a speed or aperture setting that forces the use of high settings then it is the lesser of the evils.  In some situations, the grainy quality introduced by a high ISO can help to create a period feel to an image but usually when combined with a form of monochrome to complete the illusion.

The images above had only the most basic RAW to JPG conversion but with a little effort even a high ISO image can be corrected to become quite acceptable.  Below are two magnified images taken from the set above, one is from the ISO 100 photo and one from the ISO 6400 one.

The advantage of using good RAW processing software can’t be overemphasised when dealing with high ISO images.  If you haven’t quite worked it out yet… the top one is the ISO 6400 one.

Exercise: Highlight clipping

This is a scene of high contrast and I have photographed it from the point just below which the camera indicates hightlight clipping.  From this light level I then replicated the shot through +1 to -3 EV giving me five shots.  Detail from each shot, an area of colour and an area of near white is shown below for comparison.

+1 EV

EV 0 (exposure just below the white clipping point)

EV -1

EV -2

EV -3

Looking at the magnified areas above we can note the following.

At +1 EV the white areas of stone are completely lacking in detail such that different areas of stone blend together as if they were one.  Except where shadow indicates breaks, it is impossible to tell the edges of the stone.  Clicking on the +1 EV image to expand it, lines of green fringing can be seen around the block (top left corner) and red fringing on the shadow it creates.  The colour sections shows a little desaturation as it is washed out by the overexposure.

Examining the other images the amount of detail that becomes obvious on the white increases as photos are stopped down but by the time they get to EV-3 things are getting so dark that the detail is becoming lost in the gloom. The coloured fringing is generally present throughout but by -3 EV the green has almost disappeared however the red is still present.  The colour saturation increases until the lack of exposure at -2EV and beyond makes it too dark to be obvious.

As is suggested, on this blowup I used the Recovery option in Lightroom to regain some of the detail from the +1 EV image.  Certainly, this option has done a lot to recover the information from the clipped areas; the edges are more obvious and much more texture is visible.  There were no discernible strange effects from putting the slider to maximum.

Finally, I used all of the available options in Lightroom to adjust this +1 EV image in an attempt to recover the maximum amount of information from the RAW photo.

Exercise: Sensor linear capture

One of the most appealing aspects of wet film is it’s natural response to light, in that it tends to mimic the capability of our eyes.  Not so the digital sensor.  Our eyes have the ability to compress the extremes of light and dark into a larger dynamic range than is available to the digital sensor.  This allows our eyes to cope with a wide range of light levels but to achieve the same with a digital camera we have to resort to electronic manipulation.

In the great majority of cases, our cameras process the raw digital interpretation of a scene before we are presented with it.  This ensures that the result is much more to our liking than the basic data would have appeared.  Of course it is possible to process this raw data ourselves using suitable software in such programmes such as Photoshop or Lightroom.

To examine how the raw data would be presented without processing this exercise asks us to open a picture and adjust it’s curves to simulate the raw data.

This is the original picture with it’s histogram attached.

With the curves of this picture adjusted like so…

the picture looks more like it would have done without any processing.

With the two images together I now return the dark one (left) back to resemble the normal one (right) by moving the curve up and left.

The result of this adjustment is to lift the dark areas of the image but the side effect is the noise that was previously hidden in the shadows had appeared.  Below is a comparison with the original image.

The noise is quite evident when viewed above with a section of the original image.

For all practical purposes, the processing done by the camera to create a good looking image is beyond the understanding of most photographers.  Even when converting a RAW image file to save as a TIF or JPG, the photographer is mainly tweaking a pre set series of values that have been chosen by the software designer.  However, having access to the RAW file allows us much greater artistic freedom.  Though we must endeavour to remember the limitations of the digital sensor, particularly when eyeing up a scene of high contrast and large dynamic range.  What our eye sees is not necessarily what the camera will be able to record!

Addendum:  The course notes relating to this exercise would seem to be in error.  They state that ‘for the linear image the histogram shows the tones to be squashed strongly to the right’, whereas in fact they are moved to the left as can be seen above.  In addition, the notes add that the linear image ‘has most of the levels available to represent the tones devoted to the brightest parts of the image’ whilst it can clearly be seen that the linear image has more dark tones.