Photography Workshop

Ken Stewart, creativexposure LLC

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Modules
Art & The Nature of Light Anatomy of The Camera Aperture, Time & Sensitivity Automation - Help or Hindrance? Focus on Lenses Lighting Putting It All Together Production - Before And After The Click

Art & The Nature of Light

photography (f!-t!g'r!-f")
from Greek photos (!!"!#), light, and graphos ($%&!#), writing - n. 1. The art or process of producing images of objects on photosensitive surfaces. 2. The art, practice, or occupation of taking and printing photographs. 3. A body of photographs.

Light

Light is essential to vision, photography and all the visual arts

The Photographers View

Light is what makes images possible Lights artistic properties include its color value (or hue), color purity (grayness or saturation), intensity (brightness), direction, spread (narrow beam, omnidirectional etc) diffuseness (hard or soft), duration (continuous, or in bursts), size/distance of the source relative to the subject Many of these properties are combined when we talk about different kinds of light in everyday usage - bright sunlight, cloudy daylight, open shade, uorescent light, incandescent light For example, midday sunlight is white in color, very bright, comes from almost overhead, hard yet omnidirectional, continuous, etc

Hard or Soft Light?

What kind of light are we seeing here? Hard or soft? Bright or dim? Directional? What color of light?

Hard or Soft Light?

What kind of light are we seeing here? Hard or soft? Bright or dim? Directional? What color of light?

High or Low Key?

High or Low Key?

A Physicists View of Light

Light is a form of electromagnetic radiation, comprised of photons, which have both wavelike and particle-like properties The four basic properties of light are reection, refraction, diffraction, and interference Light rays travel in straight lines, but they be transmitted through different substances (or mediums), they can be bent (or refracted) when they travel from one medium to another, they can be reected, absorbed or when they strike a surface, and they can be scattered (or diffracted) by obstacles and certain surfaces. When light of different colors (wavelengths) is refracted by different amounts (or dispersed) within a material, that material can be used to make a prism that splits white light into its components When light of one color hits some materials, it can cause the material to emit light of a different color - this is called uorescence.

More On The Physics of Light

In the vacuum of space, light travels at a maximum velocity (c) of 299,792,458 meters per second, or about 186,000 miles per second. When light travels in anything other than a vacuum, like in air or glass, its speed will always be lower than the maximum Lights speed can increase (but never above c) or decrease when it travels from one medium to another. This change of the lights phase velocity is what causes refraction The primary physical properties of light are wavelength or frequency, intensity and polarization We perceive light of different wavelengths as having different colors, and its intensity as brightness. Many humans can learn to directly perceive polarization of light, and many animals can. Humans can see light with wavelengths in the range 400-700nm; birds and insects can often see light with shorter wavelengths into the ultra-violet, and some animals, eg pit vipers, can sense light with longer wavelengths, into the infra-red

The Electromagnetic Spectrum

White Light
White is the color humans perceive when all three types of cone cells in the eye are stimulated in almost equal amounts, and with high brightness White light can be generated in many ways. The Sun, re, and electric incandescence are thermal light sources. Other light sources such as uorescent lamps and light-emitting diodes produce light by spontaneous emission

White Light & Color Temperature

Thermal light sources give off a broad spectrum of frequencies (white light) characteristic of black-body radiation; Light from the Sun comes from its 6000K/10000F surface, the chromosphere, Incandescent light comes from the 2500K tungsten lament in a light bulb. Compared to one another, midday sunlight is more bluish, and incandescent light and sunlight around sunrise and sunset (during the so-called golden hours) are more yellowish.

Fluorescent lights, LEDs and the xenon tubes in ashes produce light by spontaneous emission; uorescent light is somewhat greenish and white LEDs often give bluish light; the light from a xenon ash is a close match for sunlight.

Black-Body Radiation

This diagram provides a convenient excuse for the gratuitous use of the term black-body radiation and the ultraviolet catastrophe, which not only sounds really frickin cool, but would also make a totally rad name for a band

Tungsten vs. Daylight

Tungsten, at around 2,500K, is about the lowest color temperature we encounter on a daily basis Sunlight, at around 6,000K, is one of the highest color temperatures we encounter

White balance set for 2500K

White balance set for 6000K

White Light & Color Temperature

Thermal light sources give off a broad spectrum of frequencies (white light) characteristic of black-body radiation; Light from the Sun comes from its 6000K/10000F surface, the chromosphere, Incandescent light comes from the 2500K tungsten lament in a light bulb. Compared to one another, midday sunlight is more bluish, and incandescent light and sunlight around sunrise and sunset (during the so-called golden hours) are more yellowish.

Fluorescent lights, LEDs and the xenon tubes in ashes produce light by spontaneous emission; uorescent light is somewhat greenish and white LEDs often give bluish light; the light from a xenon ash is a close match for sunlight.

Correlated Color Temperature

The black-body radiation spectrum describes the distribution of wavelengths in the ideal theoretical case In practice, real light sources have anomalous peaks and valleys in their light spectrum due to chemical impurities, ltration effects, etc Perceptually, there is an arbitrary number of spectra that more-or-less approximate a given ideal black-body spectrum A spectrum that does not conform to the ideal is assigned a so-called correlated color temperature

The CIE 1931 x,y chromaticity space, also showing the chromaticities of black-body light sources of various temperatures (Planckian locus), and lines of constant correlated color temperature

When Blue is Hot and Red is Cold ...

Be careful not to confuse color temperature with the psychological associations of blue with cold, and red with hot Bluish color temperatures are actually much higher than reddish ones - the opposite of our everyday associations If youve ever heated something until it gets white hot, you will have seen it go through red to orange to yellow before it reaches white heat - so red is the lowest color temperature you observed Photographic lter names perpetuate this confusion - a blue lter (like a Wratten 80 or 82) is called a cooling lter and an orange lter (like a Wratten 81 or 85) is called a warming lter even though the color temperature of the light that passes through them is shifted in the opposite physical sense

Tungsten vs. Daylight

Tungsten, at around 2,500K, is about the lowest color temperature we encounter on a daily basis Sunlight, at around 6,000K, is one of the highest color temperatures we encounter

White balance set for 2500K

White balance set for 6000K

Flash - Lightning in a Bottle

Photographic ash tubes, aka strobes, ash guns or speedlights(*) produce very intense light for a very short period (~1ms or less) by creating a high-voltage electrical discharge through a clear glass tube lled with xenon (or sometimes krypton) gas The rst photographic ashes were created with magnesium powder, then later, strips of magnesium metal in a glass bulb, and then nally zirconium metal, which gave an even brighter light Light from a ash tube has a complex spectrum and a color temperature around 5600K, but for most purposes is a close analog for natural sunlight
* Irritatingly, Nikon and Canon trademarked similar words for their battery-powered ashes. Nikon calls theirs the Speedlight, Canon, the Speedlite. Because of this, many photographers use the term in a generic sense for battery-powered portable ashes.

Colored Light
Color is a sensation that results in the brain from the differing stimulus of the cone cells in the back of the eye; the color of an object is the result of the way it reects and absorbs light of different colors; without light, there is no color Different wavelengths of light stimulate receptors in the retina that are sensitive to red, green and blue light to a greater or lesser degree - those nerve impulses are perceived in the brain as the sensation of color Humans have evolved to see best under bright white light, light that contains all the visible wavelengths more or less equally

Colors of Objects
When white light hits an object, some colors of light are absorbed and some are reected and scattered. For example, a green square reects green light, and absorbs light of other colors. We see the green light reected from the ball, so we perceive the square as green A black object absorbs light of all colors equally - which is why dark clothing feels hotter on a sunny day - and an object that reects and scatters all colors of light will appear white If an object reects all colors of light without scattering them it is said to have very high specular reection - like a mirror A transparent object, like colored glass, transmits some colors of light and absorbs others. Objects we see as blue in white light will appear dark when a person (or a camera) sees them through a red lter. This is why colored lters are still useful in black & white photography

Mixing Colors
Primary colors are sets of colors that can be combined to make a useful range of colors. For human applications, three are often used. The primary colors of light are red, green and blue. They mix together in an additive process - they add light to darkness. For example, red light + green light = yellow light The primary colors of ink, paint or dye are cyan, magenta, and yellow (plus black). Their colors mix together in a subtractive process they subtract whiteness from paper. For example, magenta ink + yellow ink = red ink

The Human Eye

The back surface of the human eye is covered with a membrane called the retina, which is covered in light-sensitive cells called cone cells and rod cells Different cone cells are receptive to light of short, medium and long wavelengths, or, roughly speaking, blue, green and red light respectively. Cone cells need fairly strong light to work properly Rod cells are sensitive only to intensity of light, not color. They are responsible for our lowlight vision. Over most of the retina, rod cells far outnumber cone cells, but the fovea, the highest-resolution area right in the center of the visual eld, is populated almost entirely with cone cells

The Human Eye - The Tech Specs

The human eye has an equivalent focal length of about 22mm, and the iris opens up to a maximum of about 7mm, for a maximum relative aperture of about f/3.2 in dim light, and closes down to a minimum of 1.8mm or about f/13 in bright sunlight In addition to the iris, the eye can also vary the sensitivity of the retina - the darkadapted eye has a sensitivity equivalent to about ISO 800, the light-adapted eye has a much, much lower sensitivity - around ISO 1 Overall dynamic range of the eye is about 8 orders of magnitude, instantaneous range is about 5 orders of magnitude - still roughly 10 times better than the best man-made sensor Even though the eye/brain does not perceive all the details from every pixel of the retina at every moment, the overall equivalent spatial resolution of the eye is in the hundreds of megapixels Most people can tell the difference between a single line and a pair of lines when those lines are spaced about 0.59 arc minutes apart (about 1/100) - just sufcient to resolve the crescent of Venus, which makes an image about 5m across on the retina The human eld of vision approaches 180 in the horizontal and vertical dimensions

Human Color Vision

Color is the way the brain perceives light rays of different wavelengths Our eyes do not contain separate receptor cells for every possible color; what the eye receives is a so-called tristimulus - the relative stimulation of the three different types of cone cells in the retina with different sensitivities
Humans have three types of cone cell, but most birds have four, while pigeons may have ve. Many mammals only have two, and marine mammals have only one, while marine crustaceans calls Stomatopods have twelve! The human eye contains roughly 64% red cones, 32% green cones, and 4% blue cones

Color & Human Perception

Human eyes detect color using a trichromatic process, resulting in a tristimulus. Because the three types of cone cells overlap in their response to colors of light, it is more efcient for the visual system to process the differences between the signals
In this way, although the eye effectively sees red, green and blue, the brains visual processing seems to work in terms of red-green bias, yellow-blue bias, and brightness (the so-called opponent process) When we perceive certain colors, eg, some shades of yellow, they might be coming from a single yellow light source, or it might be the combined output of red and green light sources, and the eye cannot tell the difference. This is called metamerism.

Color By Numbers
The human eye sees color with receptors that sense short, medium and long wavelengths - roughly corresponding to blue, green and red primary colors of light respectively The words for colors - blue, green, red, yellow, purple, violet, crimson, scarlet, magenta and so on -are all subjective. For scientic precision, we need to use a numerical representation Taking the so-called Red/Green/Blue tristimulus model as our starting point, we can represent the intensities of these three primary colors as numbers, we can represent colors of light numerically - we call this scheme RGB

RGB Digital Color

The range 0 - 255 is a convenient range for computers to represent in one byte, so one common way to represent colors in digital devices (like computers, and digital cameras) is as a set of three numbers. By convention, the rst represents the amount of red, the second, green, and the third, blue. Higher numbers usually represent brighter light. In this way, (255, 0, 0) represents pure red, (0, 255, 0) represents pure green, (255, 255, 0) represents a bright yellow, (128, 128, 128) represents a mid gray, and so on. By using three sets of numbers in the range 0-255, we can theoretically represent more than 16 million separate individual colors. The eye is thought to be sensitive to 10 million or so different shades.

RGB Color Space

Because the three numbers for Red, Green and Blue are independent of one another, we can use them they like the X, Y and Z coordinates in a three-dimensional space The resulting model is known as an RGB color space Used for monitors, cameras, scanners - additive color devices

L*a*b Color Space

We can also choose to represent color using a variant of the brains opponent process. We can take the RGB values and mathematically transform them to represent them instead as lightness (L), red-green bias (a) and blue-yellow bias (b), or L*a*b L*a*b can also written Lab or LAB (and always pronounced ell-ay-bee, not like the word lab) Used for monitors, cameras, scanners additive color devices

HSV/HSL Color Space

We can use other mathematical transformations to arrive at two other closely related schemes known as HSV or HSL, standing for Hue, Saturation, and Value or Lightness It is sometimes preferable in working with art materials, digitized images, or other media, to use the HSV or HSL color model because of differences in the ways the models emulate how humans perceive color
Graphical depiction of HSV

Comparison of the HSL and HSV color spaces

HSL arranged as a double cone

CMYK Color Space

The colors of inks, paints and dyes mix in a subtractive model, and the primaries for printing are cyan, magenta and yellow, so in these cases we usually use a CMY model. In practice, just mixing cyan, magenta and yellow ink does not give a very good black, so we use a fourth number to represent the amount of black (or key) ink that is used, making the real model CMYK (since using B for black might be confused with B for Blue, we use K for key or blacK)

Lenses
A lens is an optical device that transmits and refracts light, and can be used to form an image

In the human eye, or in a camera, the lens and cornea gather and bend light rays so that they form an image on the surface of the retina In a camera, the surface is typically a viewnder screen, or photographic lm, or a digital sensor Lenses and lens systems are covered in much more detail in the Focus on Lenses module

Light Control
Many lens systems employ a diaphragm that creates a variablesize aperture or to vary the amount of light that is allowed through the lens. This also controls depth of eld In camera lenses, this is usually referred to as an aperture stop, and the usual design is an iris diaphragm In human eyes, it is called the iris. The pupil is name for the aperture or hole in the middle.

Anatomy of the Camera

Cameras
All would-be photographers already possesses at least one camera the human eye The word camera comes from Latin, from the same root as chamber as in room, and refers to a light-tight box with an opening at one end for the light-bending mechanism and a screen at the other end onto which the image is projected In the human eye, the lens and cornea work together to gather and refract light to form an image on the retina In most cameras, the cameras lens system gathers and refracts light to form an image on the lm or sensor With a pinhole camera, light diffracts around the edges of a small hole instead refracting in a lens, and the image is usually projected onto a ground-glass or translucent paper screen

Types of Camera
All cameras need a way to show the photographer the image the camera will take - eg a viewnder The mechanism used in the viewnder is one major classication of cameras View camera Rangender Twin-lens reex Single-lens reex Electronic viewnder

Types of Camera
Cameras are also classied according to the kind of sensor Film (silver halide) Digital (CCD or CMOS sensor)

... and according to what kind of image they capture Still images Moving images (video)

... and even sometimes by the purpose they are designed for Underwater High speed Astrophotography/Night vision/Infrared/ Ultraviolet/Gamma/X-Ray/T-Ray

Compact vs. SLR

Compact cameras, also known as point-and-shoots or P&S, are, as the name implies, physically quite small and almost always have a zoom lens that is not interchangeable Cheaper than most SLRs, partly due to small sensor size, which implies small lens size, which makes lens cheaper Small sensor size limits image quality Low price also means slower computer circuitry - slower to react, can be frustrating to use - missed shots, etc Almost all offer live image view on the rear LCD screen, some dont even have an optical viewnder Can still pack a lot of sophistication inside, very convenient, quite economical

Why SLRs Arent Compact

Historically, most SLRs are based on 35mm lm, and modern digital SLRs usually t in the same physical size range This is mainly to retain compatibility with lenses and other accessories for 35mm lm cameras Most digital SLRs have a sensor quite a bit smaller than a 35mm lm frame One frame of 35mm lm is 36mm x 24mm Most digital SLRs have an APS-C sized sensor about 24mm x 16mm This is the source of the so-called 1.5x/1.6x crop factor for lenses on a digital camera - some lenses, eg Canon EF-S etc are lenses made especially for APS-C digital SLRs, and cant be used on full-frame cameras A few digital SLRs exist with an APS-H size sensor with a 1.3x conversion Some full-frame digital SLRs exist, but they are expensive because its very costly to produce such a large sensor

Olympus Four-Thirds system of SLRs and lenses is based on the APS-C size sensor and the rest of the camera system is sized accordingly

Advantage: SLR
Bigger sensor = better quality = bigger lenses = higher prices Higher prices = more processor power = faster reaction time Bigger camera body = larger battery = more electrical power Physically larger lenses allow for direct manual control of zoom and focus Automation is ne so long as it can be overridden and prevented from getting in the way ...

Inside the SLR

1. Interchangeable front-mount lens (4element Tessar design) 2. Reex mirror at 45-degree angle 3. Focal plane shutter 4. Film or sensor 5. Focusing screen 6. Condenser lens 7. Optical glass pentaprism (or pentamirror) 8. Eyepiece (can have diopter correction ability)

Lenses
Almost all cameras have a lens system to gather and focus light (or other parts of the EM spectrum) onto a sensitive medium (lm or digital sensor) X-ray & gamma cameras usually work a little differently ... A pinhole cameras uses a small hole as a lens that relies upon diffraction effects rather than refraction but otherwise operates similarly One of the dening characteristics of a serious camera is having interchangeable lenses Much more information on lenses is covered in the module Focus on Lenses

Photographic Film
Image-registration media based on lightsensitive chemicals have been around since the dawn of photography Earliest media were paper sheets or glass plates coated with light-sensitive chemicals; the earliest exible plastic (camphor-plasticized nitrocellulose) lm dates from 1889 Photographic lm is available in black & white, and color versions, and comes in two different basic forms - print lm, and color reversal lm, also known as slide or transparency lm

How Film Works

Although the details differ, they all work in essentially the same way - sensitized silver halide emulsion is briey exposed to light (in the camera), then processed with chemicals that turn the latent image captured in the exposed silver halide into metallic silver. Color lm goes through a number of other steps, some of which are repeated, to remove the silver and leave behind the colored dyes that makes up the image Print lm, once it has been developed, can be used to project a negative image onto photosensitive paper - the photosensitive paper is then developed to reveal the nal image, using a process that is similar to the one used to develop the lm in the rst place

Early Digital Sensors

First digital sensors were proposed by Eugene Lally at JPL in 1961; the rst practical digital imaging array - the CCD - was invented at Bell Labs by Willard Boyle and George Smith in 1969 Early digital sensors relied upon the photoelectric effect, Einsteins 1905 description of which resulted in his receiving the Nobel prize in 1921 The photoelectric effect is part of quantum theory, and Einsteins key insight was that light arrives in packets or quanta Each individual wavelength of light has a characteristic energy (given by Plancks law, e = h/!) - the photoelectric effect turns these light quanta or photons into electrons with a specic voltage. This is how early video imaging sensors worked - color value was translated into a voltage, and intensity (or photon ux) manifested as current (or electron ux)

How Modern Digital Sensors See Color

As noted before, early digital imaging sensors exploited the photoelectric effect to directly read both average wavelength and intensity of light falling on each pixel In order to improve chip yield, improve robustness, lower cost and enhance performance, modern sensors, known as active pixel sensors, rely upon photoconductive effects to register light intensity, and per-pixel colored lters (known as the Bayer lter) to discriminate light of different wavelengths (aka colors). Each pixel has its own amplier.

Please Look After This Bayer

Dr. Bryce Bayer's patent used twice as many green elements as red or blue to mimic the human eye's greater resolving power with green light. As land animals surrounded by greenery, vision in humans evolved the ability to extract the most information from the green/red part of the spectrum because this was most crucial for survival - apart from the sea and the sky, there isnt a whole lot of blue in nature. The eye contains roughly 64% red cones, 32% green cones, and 4% blue cones These elements are referred to as sensor elements, sensels, pixel sensors, or simply pixels; sample values sensed by them, after interpolation, become image pixels Some (Sony) sensors actually have elements that register four different colors red, green, blue and sapphire, a greenish-blue, to increase their ability to discriminate colors in the part of the visible spectrum in which human vision has the greatest sensitivity.

RAW Results
The raw output of Bayer-lter cameras is referred to as a Bayer pattern image. Since each pixel is ltered to record only one of three colors, the data from each pixel cannot fully determine color on its own. To obtain a full-color image, various demosaicing algorithms can be used to interpolate a set of complete red, green, and blue values for each point Demosaicing is usually done in the cameras processor before it records a JPEG image; some cameras can be set to record the raw sensor data without demosaicing, requiring this to be done externally later - this is the so-called RAW image data mode that some cameras offer

Dr Bayers Dirty Little Secret

A 12 megapixel camera might be advertised as giving images with 4,000 x 3,000 pixels Sure enough, the sensor has 4,000 x 3,000 (effective) sensor pixels But due to the presence of the Bayer lter, half of those sensor pixels are only sensitive to green, a quarter to red, and a quarter to blue In practice, then, the luminance (light/dark) spatial resolution of the sensor closely approximates the 12MP claim, but the chrominance (color) spatial resolution is only about a quarter - the rest is made up by interpolation This, however, mimics the human eyes conguration of rod and cone cells - the eye has many more rod cells that are only sensitive to luminance (and are well suited to night vision) than cone cells, that register color. The cone cells, however, need more light - this is why human low-light vision is largely devoid of color information.

Resolving Resolution
Two important concepts are wrapped up in the same word: resolution The word resolution is, confusingly, used to describe both pixel density and total number of pixels Same concept applies to input devices (like camera sensors and scanners) as well as output devices (like printers and screens or monitors) For cameras, the link between these two things is sensor size

Output Resolution
Most computer monitors today display between 70-100 dots per inch (or dpi) - limited by current manufacturing technology with an average of 72dpi - where each dot or pixel is made up of 3 sub-pixels - one red, one green, and one blue Most printers have an addressable resolution around 300-360 dpi When inkjet printer manufacturers talk about 4800dpi or 9600dpi, they are talking about the smallest droplets of ink that can be produced - but many ink droplets are sprayed out to make up one image pixel Commercial offset lithographic printers have used 240dpi for years as maximum worthwhile resolution Not worth exceeding this limit because the human eye cannot resolve beyond this limit

Sensor Size Silliness

Digital camera sensors come in many sizes Almost all digital SLR sensors come in one of two sizes - full-frame or APS-C Compact camera & cameraphone sensors come in a huge range of sizes A small sensor with a large number of pixels = small sensor pixels Small sensor pixels = more noise See also discussion of circle of confusion in the Focus on Lenses module for practical limit on smallest sensor pixel size

Sensor Size & Crop Factor

One frame of 35mm lm is 36mm x 24mm Most digital SLRs have an APS-C sized sensor about 24mm x 16mm This is the source of the so-called 1.5x/1.6x crop factor for lenses on a digital camera - some lenses, eg Canon EF-S etc are lenses made especially for APS-C digital SLRs, and cant be used on full-frame cameras Nikons APS-C (DX-format) sensors are actually 24mm x 16mm (1.5x) and Canons are 22.5mm x 15mm (1.6x) A few digital SLRs exist with an APS-H size sensor with a 1.3x conversion Some full-frame digital SLRs exist, but they are expensive because its very costly to produce such a large sensor

Megapixel Madness
Sensor pixel density is already approaching the ability or exceeding the optical capabilities of lenses Ultimately due to laws of physics, but also limited by defects & limitations of real-world materials & manufacturing techniques For a full-frame 35mm sensor, probably ~25MP, and for APS-C , probably~15MP Harder to say for compacts, but probably ~10MP for largest compact sensors At a certain point, adding more pixels to the sensor does not result in more usable resolution in the picture - less sharpness per pixel Smaller pixels also result in more noise due to photon counting statistics

Why Sensor Size Matters

We have become accustomed to thinking that in the world of electronics, smaller is always better Not true with digital image sensors In all but the very dimmest light, the major source of noise in all modern digital cameras is photon counting statistics (photon noise) CCD and CMOS sensors can hold about 800 to 1600 electrons per square micron (photon to electron ratio need not be 1:1 due to gain in the sensor circuitry - this is how ISO speed rating is varied in a digital camera sensor) Photon noise is proportional to the square root of the number of photons captured in each well All other things being equal, larger sensor pixels give better dynamic range, better sensitivity, lower noise, and ner tonal gradations

Film Redux
Despite all the obvious advantages of digital, photographic lm still has the lead over digital sensors in two places: The ultimate limit on resolution (although for most practical purposes this is largely irrelevant) and The ultimate limit on ability to capture dynamic lighting range (ve or more orders of magnitude for the best lm versus four or so for the best digital sensors), although this too is beginning to change, especially with techniques like HDR

Aperture, Time & Sensitivity

Getting a Suntan
There are three things to bear in mind when tanning: How strong is the sun? How long should I expose my skin? How sensitive is my skin? Getting these wrong can have painful results

Taking a Picture
There are three things to bear in mind when taking a picture: How bright is the light? How long should I expose the sensor? How sensitive is the sensor? Getting these wrong can give ugly results

Getting a Suntan - Redux

How do I control the three factors of tanning? Choose when and where to tan - strength of light varies with latitude, season, time of day, cloud cover, surroundings, and the size of the hole in the ozone layer! I go inside when Im done I can make myself less sensitive to the sun with a base tan

Getting these right can have great results I can also modify my environment, eg, by adding or substituting UV tanning lamps, or by being under a fabric cover that reduces the intensity of the UV or apply sunscreen

Taking a Picture - Redux

How do I control the three factors of exposure? Vary the size of the aperture Vary the shutter speed Vary the ISO sensitivity Getting these right can have pleasing results I can also modify the environment, eg, by adding more light with a ash, or by putting a neutral density lter in front of the lens

Exposure by the Numbers

The three main factors that we can vary in setting an exposure on a camera - aperture, time, and sensitivity - are measured in different units Aperture is measured in f numbers or f stops Typical range is f/2 to f/32

Time is measured in seconds, or fractions of a second Typical range is 30 - 1/2000

Sensitivity is measured in ISO units Typical range is 100-1600 ISO

The range of lighting conditions we encounter vary by a factor of a million or more between a very dark room, and a bright sunny day Photographers cope with this by using units that halve or double their value between steps (logarithmic scales) - especially with f numbers

f Numbers and Aperture

f numbers can be a little confusing ... The smaller the number, the larger the aperture, the more light is let in, and the shallower the depth of eld f numbers - also known as relative aperture - are the ratio of the lenss focal length to its aperture size If the focal length stays the same, and the aperture size gets smaller, the f number goes up If the focal length gets longer, and the aperture size stays the same size, the f number goes up

f Numbers in Practice
The laws of physics limit the largest possible aperture to about f/0.5 - the movie Barry Lyndon was shot with an amazing NASA-developed f/0.7 lens that allowed the director to shoot the interior scenes by candlelight Zeiss and Canon have both made and sold 50mm f/0.95 lenses Lenses with a large maximum aperture ( = small f number) tend to be very large in diameter, made from big pieces of optical glass, and are therefore expensive The iris of the human eye opens up to a maximum relative aperture of about f/3.2 in dim light, and closes down to a minimum of about f/13 in bright sunlight By convention, the typical step between f numbers is the square root of 2 roughly 1.4x. Each step between f numbers represents a doubling or halving of the amount of light. The actual gures are typically rounded up or down for convenience. f/1, f/1.4, f/2, f/2.8, f/4, f/5.6, f/8, f/11, f/16, f/22, f/32 ...

Aperture and Depth of Field

The depth of eld (DOF) is the portion of a scene that appears sharp in the image. Although a lens can precisely focus at only one distance, the decrease in sharpness is gradual on either side of the focused distance, so that within the DOF - or zone of acceptable sharpness - the image appears sharp A wide aperture (small aperture number) results in a shallow depth of eld, a small aperture gives more depth of eld
Flowers at f/32

Flowers at f/5.6

Automatic Aperture
In most cameras, the aperture of the lens remains wide open most of the time, only stopping it down to the set value right before a picture is actually being taken, and then opening it up again right after This is done to give the user a nice, bright viewnder, and to make critical focusing easier Most digital SLRs have a button that will make the aperture close down to the preset value so you can see the depth of eld you will actually get when the picture is taken (you will also see the view in the viewnder get darker) This button is usually labeled depth-of-eld preview for that reason

Shutter Speeds
Probably the easiest of the three concepts to grasp - how long does the shutter stay open to expose the lm? The way the camera displays shutter speed can be confusing - a display of 8 means eight seconds, but a display of 8 means one eighth of a second

Can be as much as 30 or longer (for night-time, astrophotography, or other special effects) Can be as little as 1/8000th of a second with a mechanical shutter special-purpose high-speed cameras with electronic shutters can expose for as little as 1/2,000,000,000th (half a billionth) of a second High shutter speeds help to freeze fast-moving action and reduce or eliminate the effects of camera shake Shutter speed steps traditionally went in steps of doubling or halving 1, 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16, 1/30, 1/60, 1/125, 1/250, 1/500 ...

How Does The Shutter Work?

Some cameras use a shutter mechanism inside the lens, very similar to the iris or aperture, called a leaf shutter Most modern cameras instead employ a mechanical shutter that consists of two curtains that move across the focal plane (where the lm or sensor is located) one after the other The rst curtain moves across the focal plane and exposes it (shutter is open) Then the second curtain moves across the focal plane and covers it up again (shutter is closed) Curtain movement is usually spring- or motor-driven

Slow Shutter Speed (<= X-Sync)

First curtain starts moving across the focal plane, exposing it Focal plane is fully exposed - shutter is fully open Second curtain moves across the focal plane and closes shutter

Fast Shutter Speed (> X-Sync)

First curtain starts moving across the focal plane Second curtain starts to move before rst curtain has completed its traversal of the focal plane Shutter is never fully open, but instead an open slit travels across the focal plane Second curtain completes its traversal and the shutter is closed

Pay No Attention to the ManSensor Behind the Curtain

In most modern cameras, the curtains travel in a vertical direction because that is the shorter dimension of the sensor (or lm in older cameras) Still, the curtains take some nite period of time to travel - lets say 1/250s This is relatively insignicant if were talking about an exposure of 1 second - but what if we want an exposure of 1/4000s? In practice, there is some shutter speed beyond which the curtain travel time exceeds the nominal period of time that the shutter is open - X-sync speed (q.v.) What happens then is that the second curtain starts to move before the rst curtain has reached the other side - the result is a slit that travels across the focal plane. Even though it may still take 1/250s for the curtain to travel all the way across the focal plane, if the second curtain follows 1/4000s behind the rst, then each and every point in the focal plane (on the sensor) will be exposed for 1/4000s

Implications of Slit Exposure

Because of this behavior, there is some maximum shutter speed at which the shutter is fully open sometimes as slow as 1/60s, but can be as fast as 1/500s (eg Nikon D70) Beyond this shutter speed, the sensor is only exposed in a slitwise fashion What if you take a picture of something moving very fast?

Sensitivity
How sensitive the lm or digital sensor is to light Measured in ISO units (same as the old ASA) - sensitive lm high ISO - is said to be fast, and insensitive lm - low ISO isslow Film for slides (transparencies) used to be available in speeds as slow as ISO 25, and the fastest photographic lm commercially available was around ISO 3200 Films effective sensitivity could be varied by processing it in different chemicals or for a different length of time (push or pull processing) Most digital cameras can vary their sensitivity from 100-1600 ISO via a dial or a menu setting Higher ISO sensitivities result in more noise in the image Again, typically vary by powers of 2 100, 200, 400, 800, 1600 ...

ISO 100 - f/16, 5

ISO 3200 - f/16, 1/6

Exposure Cheat Sheet

+dof -motion blur f22 1/4000 (4000) f16 1/2000 (2000) f11 1/1000 (1000) f8 1/500 (500) f5.6 1/250 (250) f4 1/125 (125) (60) f2.8 1/60 (30) f2 1/30 1/15 (15) f1.4 (8) f1 1/8 (4) -dof 1/4 (2) 1/2 (1) 1 (2) 2 ... ... (bulb) bulb +motion blur Source: http://glark.org/media/exposure-cheat-sheet.pdf - Used with permission -noise 100 (L1) 200 400 800 1600 3200 6400 (H1) +noise

darker EXPOSURE

FILM SPEED (ISO)

SHUTTER (SEC)

lighter

APERTURE

The Exposure Triangle

As mentioned before, between these three quantities, photographers have to adapt to an enormous range of lighting conditions We can change the amount of light recorded on the sensor by varying the aperture, the exposure time (shutter), and the sensitivity of the sensor Light --> Aperture --> Shutter --> Sensor We can arrange these three concepts at the corners of a triangle

The Exposure Triangle

Sensitivity (ISO) 100

Grain f/1 1s

Motion Blur 1/1000s Time 1600

Bokeh f/32 Aperture

00s

The Exposure Triangle

The triangle denes an exposure space How much of the triangle you can explore & still get acceptable exposures depends on how much light you have In very bright and very dim conditions, you have fewer choices for usable combinations of shutter, aperture, and sensitivity

Aperture, Time & Sensitivity

We can talk about combinations of these parameters either as Light Values (LV) or Exposure Values (EV) LV0 is dened as the lighting conditions that require an exposure of 1 second at f/1 with ISO 100 sensitivity EV0 is the exposure that results from opening the shutter for 1 second at f/1 with ISO 100 sensitivity EV and LV are open-ended scales - values in everyday use vary from 0 to 18 or so - and each step represents a doubling or halving Higher LV values represent brighter conditions Higher EV values represent less light being let into the camera, for a shorter period of time, with less and less sensitivity To nominally expose a picture under LVx conditions, set the camera to EVx

LVs for Bright Conditions

Scale is open-ended - but limited on the high end by how much light we can expect to encounter on Earth LV0 represents a very dark room LV3 might be a brightly-lit outdoor street scene at night LV7 is typical indoor lighting levels, or outdoors about 10 minutes after sunset LV10 is about what youd nd on a dull, dreary, overcast day in London, Paris or New York LV13 is what youd nd on a typical cloudy bright day LV14 is the light youd nd on a nice, side-lit scene in good afternoon light LV16 is what youd register for Caucasian skin in full sunlight LV18 would represent bright sunlight reecting off a shiny object or the sea The Sunny 16 rule of thumb says that on a bright, sunny, day (say, LV16), set the aperture to f/16, and shutter speed to (as near as you can) 1/ISO sensitivity, eg: ISO 100, f/16, shutter speed 1/125

By extension, the same rule applies at other LVs - with f stop set to (roughly) f/LV and ISO sensitivity of x, set shutter to roughly 1/x

LVs for Dim Conditions

Scale is open-ended - can go negative too LV0 represents a very dim room LV -5 represents a scene lit only by the full moon LV -15 represents a scene lit only by starlight (new moon) So-called photographic darkrooms are almost never completely dark, but somewhere around LV -15 Even though our eyes do not see colors well by moonlight, theyre still there
This moonlit scene was exposed at ISO 400 at f/4 for 480 seconds - roughly EV -7

Table of Common LVs

Useful iPhone Apps

Expositor Exposure calculator Vary LV and ISO, f/ stop or shutter to nd matching EV $1.99

Useful iPhone Apps

DOFMaster Depth of eld calculator $1.99

Useful iPhone Apps

Focalware Sun/moon rise/set/ position calculator $4.99

Automation - Help or Hindrance?

Automatic for the People

As with cars, guns and other mass-market gadgets, early examples were completely manual, utterly lacking in automation Early cameras did not even automatically time the exposure - you would use the lens cap as the shutter - which was ne when exposure times were often several minutes, even in bright sunlight, due to the comparative insensitivity of the photographic medium Exposure timing was the rst thing to be automated in any way, and then exposure calculation, followed (much later) by auto lm advance, auto-focus, and today, even rudimentary auto-composition (!) Anything automatic on a camera is best thought of as computerassisted rather than fully automatic - and therefore requires: A sentient, aesthetic being to make the nal decision, and A way to make manual adjustments and override the computers recommendation

Automatic for the People Automatic Exposure

Early light meters helped to take some of the guesswork out of calculating an exposure The rst real automation came when a light meter was coupled to the cameras exposure controls - thus was born AE, or automatic exposure Early meters were hand-held or separate from the lens - through-the-lens or TTL metering came later Most of the following discussion concentrates on measuring exposure for continuous light sources (ambient light, daylight, etc), not ash

The AE Problem
Remember our high-key and low-key images? How does an exposure meter know what key were aiming for? Answer: it doesnt. Even todays AE systems, no matter how intelligent, still assume youre shooting a picture of something that is 18% gray, meaning it reects 18% of the light that falls on it, across the spectrum 18% Gray card Result: If you try and shoot a black cat against a dark wall, the cameras AE system will try and render it as gray, and overexpose it Or, if you try and shoot a skier in light clothing against a snowy background, the AE system will still try and render it as gray, and underexpose it AE can also be thrown off by shooting contre jour (into the light), or if there is a very bright reection or light source somewhere in the scene.

Alleviating AE Problems
You can do one of several things: Take the picture anyway, and x it later in Photoshop Set the exposure manually Use the cameras partial metering or spot metering mode (if it has one) to get an exposure reading (AE lock) for part of the scene (you choose), then recompose to take the picture Use the cameras exposure compensation control to tell it to under or over expose the picture, relative to what the AE system is telling you

These are listed in order of least to most attractive options (generally) Exposure compensation is often set with a dial or a menu selection, and usually allows you to adjust the exposure up or down by 2 stops (EVs)

AE Metering Modes
The default for most cameras is to take readings from across the entire scene but to give more precedence to readings from the center of the scene (so-called center-weighted average) or to give preference to some other areas (evaluative metering) Other modes may include partial metering - typically a subset of the whole scene, again biased towards the center - or spot metering - taking a reading only from the very center of the scene (as seen in the viewnder) This discussion primarily applies to shooting in ambient or continuous light - ash metering is a much more complex topic

Center-weighted metering

Partial metering

Spot metering

Exposure Modes
They dont address the AE Problem as described on the previous slides, but most good cameras have at least four exposure modes: Aperture priority, Av Shutter priority, Tv Program AE, P Manual, M A stands for Aperture, T for Time, and v for variable - meaning thats the parameter you vary

What the AE Modes Do

In Av mode, you set the aperture (and sensitivity) you want, and the cameras AE system will set an appropriate shutter speed In Tv mode, you set the shutter speed and sensitivity, the camera sets the aperture In Manual mode, you set everything manually. No surprises. In Program mode, everything is set for you, but may offer a Program shift function where you can turn a dial to select different combinations of shutter & aperture that give the same EV In any mode, you may still want to override the programmed behavior as what the camera computes to be the right exposure will always be a compromise, for the average situation (which is ne if you want to take average shots of 18% gray subjects)

Even More AE Modes

Some cameras (eg Pentax K-7) also offer an Sv mode, where the S stands for Sensitivity - you set Sensitivity, it sets aperture & shutter Some cameras will also offer other modes like Sports or Action, Portrait, Macro, Theater, Landscape, or Night These modes are not fundamentally different than those above - they are usually based on Program mode, but may be biased towards selecting the fastest shutter speed possible, continuous shooting mode, the widest aperture, or the smallest aperture, while taking into account lighting conditions (white balance), focal length (zoom position) and so on. There is no magic! Your camera may also have an Automatic Exposure Bracketing mode it will take multiple exposures (usually 3) with different exposure compensation amounts - usually up to +/- 2 stops. This was useful for its intended purpose in the days of lm, when you couldnt see your results straight away - these days its useful mostly for HDR effects

Whats the Right Exposure?

Deceptively simple question, no single right answer subjective, judgment call based on aesthetic preference, composition, and intended effect The retina of the human eye has an enormously wide dynamic range of sensitivity (exposure latitude), but also uses the iris to control the amount of light Films exposure latitude is not as broad as that of the human retina, and for digital sensors, its even narrower Film exposure had the convenient property of shoulders - non-linear response - the more light fell on the lm, the less sensitive it got, making it harder and harder to expose it more

Exposure is a Compromise
The range of brightness in a scene often exceeds the range of your sensor Result: blown highlights and/or plugged lowlights (bright areas are featureless white, dark areas are featureless black) Maybe able to lift shadow areas with ll lights (eg ash) or a reector, or mitigate brightest sections by blocking some of the light - reverse ll

Finding the Right Exposure

One theory of correct exposure aims for greatest tonal range in the nal picture, not necessarily what you see in the viewnder or preview screen Assumes you will post-process the image Adjust exposure so the brightest parts of the image are almost, but not quite, blown out, then adjust in Photoshop with a curves layer if necessary - expose for highlights, process for shadows (like the Zone Systems advice for slide lm, converse of its advice for negative lm) A digital cameras histogram display (if it has one) is useful here

The Zone System

A photographic technique for determining optimal lm exposure and development, formulated by Ansel Adams and Fred Archer in 1941. His technique was to carefully study a scene, visualize the nal print, then determine the correspondence between portions of the scene and tones in the print. He would then meter, expose and develop the negative accordingly.

The Zone System scale

The basic concept is to look at a scene, determine the major elements of the scene, visualize how you want them to be rendered, and adjust the exposure & processing to place them on that zone Formalizes the process most experienced photographers probably use to some extent without even knowing it

Using the Histogram

A graphical bar-chart display of tabulated frequencies In digital photography, shows how many pixels of each brightness level are in a scene Generally turned on via menu option Can be hard to judge if a picture is properly exposed by eyeballing it on the LCD preview screen - especially in bright light Camera may help by showing blown-out highlights & plugged shadows, but the histogram gives more information May have a choice between one histogram showing overall range of brightnesses, or three showing brightness for each channel - red, green and blue

What is a Histogram?
A histogram graphically shows the distribution of different values of a variable On the x axis, discrete values or intervals are marked The y axis then shows the corresponding frequency or number of occurrences of that value or falling into that interval

Histogram Examples

Over-exposed (+2 EV)

# of pixels

Under-exposed (-2 EV)

Correctly exposed

Darkest to lightest

Can we do better?

High Dynamic Range (HDR)

HDR image made by combining the three exposures shown previously, in Photomatix PRO

HDR - Tools and History

Concepts originated in the 1850s with Gustave Le Gray, who combined different negatives to print one positive Further developed in the 1930s and 1940s by Charles Wyckoff who created special 3-layer lm to capture the 3Ss - sunshine, shadow and subject - in a single exposure and produce, among other things, Life magazines iconic images of nuclear explosions Built-in to Photoshop CS3 and up as Exposure blending As a standalone program/Photoshop plugin as Photomatix Pro, Radiance, and others Open-source tools include Qtpfsgui HDR is a powerful technique, but its easy to overdo it

When HDR Goes Bad

Another somewhat over-dramatic HDR sky

One of my early HDR experiments - oversaturated and unrealistic, nonetheless, the most popular image in my Flickr photostream :)

The Future of HDR

Subtle HDR can look completely natural, or like a painting I believe HDR is here to stay - too useful not to be - and already being built-in to some cameras, eg Ricoh CX1 that makes two successive captures at different EVs and combines them in-camera, Pentax K-7 will do it with three, and the Fuji FinePix S3 pro DSLR, which contains sensor elements of differing sensitivities

Naturalistic HDR

Painterly HDR

Flash Metering
Flash metering can be a very complex topic in its own right Essentially, most SLRs treat ash exposure as two separate exposures one for the background, one for the foreground - but this can vary by AE mode, as well as the arrangement of the scene youre photographing Background in this sense means the areas of the scene that are not lit by the ash, and foreground means the areas that are Exposing for the background is done as if there were no ash attached camera reads the light from the scene, and sets aperture and/or shutter accordingly, depending on AE mode. Caution - this can result in a long exposure when shooting in dim light (aka dragging the shutter). Exposing for the foreground is done by setting off a pre-ash and measuring how much light is reected back to the camera - this information is then used in conjunction with aperture information to set the ash output

Flash Exposure Made Easy

Set everything to P, Program or Auto, let the camera worry about it May get the results you desire or expect, or you may not ...

Flash Exposure Made Hard

Set camera to Av or M and, with the ash turned off, set an exposure that gives you the background looking the way you want it to. Then turn the ash on, and take a test shot - adjust the ash exposure to get the foreground lit the way you want Shutter priority (Tv) not really a very useful way to set exposure with ash as we shall see in a moment Things to consider: Are you shooting a fairly bright scene, and you just want to add some ll light? Or are you shooting a dim scene, and the ash will be your primary light source? Is there a well-dened background vs. foreground, or is it all foreground? Or all background? Is the foreground highly reective? How far is it from the ash to the subject (ash-to-subject distance)

Why Is Flash So Hard?

Basically, because there are often two separate exposures to consider - foreground and background Examples: Night shot, outdoors, person standing fairly close to camera in an open eld Daytime, outdoors, person standing fairly close to camera in an open eld Indoors, low ambient light, person standing 5 feet from camera, in front of a wall 20 feet behind them lit by wall-washers Indoors, brightly-lit art gallery, standing in shadow, in front of a huge painting, 20 feet away

Setting the right exposure(s) for foreground and/or background are largely a matter of artistic choice

Flash Exposure Example

Consider example 3 from before: Indoors, low ambient light, person standing 5 feet from camera, in front of a wall 20 feet behind them lit by wall-washers Lets say you want both in focus - this implies a small aperture (so less light coming into lens) - and both evenly lit Small aperture implies high sensitivity and/or long exposure for correct background exposure (long exposure combined with ash is known as dragging the shutter) Long exposure makes camera shake more likely, and can lead to blur due to subject movement

Flash Exposure Example

As long as it is slower than X-sync speed, shutter speed has no bearing on ash exposure - aperture, however, does affect ash exposure - but will also affect background exposure Small aperture will require more output from ash to illuminate foreground - may or may not be enough to light background, too More complex still if foreground person is dressed in black, and wall is white, or vice versa ... Shutter priority complicates situation even further - aperture affects depth of eld as well as foreground (ash-lit) & background (non ashlit) exposure, so best to keep it under your control In a typical setting, I leave my shutter at 1/250s to minimize camera shake and subject motion blur, vary the aperture & sensitivity to get the degree of ambient lighting & DOF I want, and rely on the ashs TTL metering and ash exposure compensation to correctly expose the foreground subject

Bright Flash, Dim Flash?

You cant easily regulate the intensity of a ash tubes ash, but you can quite easily vary its duration. This is how ash tube power output is effectively regulated. The fast pulse of light from a ash tube can be used to freeze motion - a large studio ash at full power may produce light for as long as 1/400s, but a small battery ash may produce a ash as brief as 1/30-40,000s (25-33 sec) on its lowest power High-speed photography need not rely on fast shutter speeds, but rather short, intense ashes of light. This was taken 1/250s @ f/16, Canon 580 EX II ash @ 1/64 power, giving a measured ash duration of about 1/31,000s Flash output does varies throughout the duration of the ash pulse due to physical factors. There is typically a fast ramp-up to full output, then a gradual decay in light intensity, followed by an abrupt drop-off at the end of the ash. At full power, the 580s ash is 1200s. If its output were linear, then 1/64 power would be around ( 1200 64 = ) 19s in fact, its about 32s because the ash tube is still ramping up

Automatic for the People Automatic White Balance

Thermal light sources give off a broad spectrum of frequencies (white light) characteristic of black-body radiation; light from the Sun comes from its 6000K/10000F surface, the chromosphere, and incandescent light from the 2500K tungsten lament in a regular light bulb. Compared to one another, midday sunlight is more bluish, and incandescent light and sunlight around sunrise and sunset (during the so-called golden hours) are more yellowish. Fluorescent lights, LEDs and the xenon tubes in ashes produce light by spontaneous emission; compared to sunlight & incandescent light; uorescent light is somewhat greenish and white LEDs often give bluish light compared to midday sunlight, whereas the light from a xenon ash is a good match for sunlight. All digital cameras have an automatic white balance setting some are better than others ...

Which White Balance?

Most digital cameras can be adjusted for white balance or WB to take these differences into account. In the old days, you would buy tungsten-balanced or daylight-balanced lm and/or use correction or conversion lters on the lens to get the right white color Many cameras will also have an AWB for automatic white balance mode. They will take an educated guess but can get it wrong - again, theres no magic.

White balance set for 2500K

White balance set for 6000K

Flickering Fluorescents
Fluorescent lights also icker. If your shutter speed is < 1/60s, you can get weird color shifts, dark bands, etc. LEDs will also icker unless they are powered from a clean DC source.

1/30 second - I caught two complete cycles of 60Hz AC with this one - the illumination is even

1/100 second - not so lucky this time light was almost completely off while the shutter was open

1/320 second - above X-sync speed light was turning on or off as the shutter was traveling

White Balance Problems

What if I set the wrong white balance? Fixing it later is no problem in RAW; only slightly harder with JPEG What if I have a mix of light sources? Eg daylight, uorescent & tungsten? Choose the dominant light source and go with that Turn off or mitigate the most problematic source(s) - usually uorescent Close the blinds, turn off the uorescents, turn up the tungstens, gel your ash Shoot in B&W

What if Im at a rock concert, or shooting a play at a theater? Tungsten is probably your best bet

What if its a weird light source my camera doesnt know about, like HMIs? If you camera can do it, set a custom white balance using a gray card, otherwise set it to whatever looks nearest, and x it later if necessary

Automatic for the People Automatic Focus

Automatic focus is a much tougher problem than automatic exposure Early systems were often active, and would bounce infra-red or ultrasonic beams off the subject to determine their distance from the camera - easily fooled and often inaccurate Early passive systems required the photographer to focus the lens manually, and just gave a conrmation when the system judged the focus to be correct Later, camera manufacturers introduced motorized focus adjustment, and created a feedback loop between the passive AF detection circuitry and the AF motor

History of Auto-Focus
Between 1960 and 1973, Leica patented a variety of autofocus and corresponding sensor technologies, and in 1978 they displayed an SLR camera with fully operational autofocus. The rst mass-produced autofocus camera was the Konica C35 AF, a simple point and shoot model released in 1977. The Polaroid SX-70 was the rst autofocus single-lens reex camera, released in 1978. The Pentax ME-F, which used focus sensors in the camera body coupled with a motorized lens, became the rst autofocus 35!mm SLR in 1981 In 1983 Nikon released the F3AF, their rst autofocus camera, which was based on a similar concept to the ME-F The Minolta Maxxum 7000, released in 1985, was the rst SLR with an integrated autofocus system, meaning both the AF sensors and the drive motor were housed in the camera body, as well as an integrated lm advance winder - which became standard conguration for Minolta (now Sony), and Nikon Canon, however, elected to develop their EOS (Electro-Optical System) system with motorized lenses instead.

The AF Problem
The sharpest image is a matter of interpretation, and there are different denitions, and methods to determine when it has been found - eg highest contrast Which part of the image should be sharpest? Some subjects like things with close vertical stripes or low contrast or that are dimly lit often present problems for AF systems Again, there is no magic.

Alleviating the AF Problem

Most AF systems are biased towards subjects in the center of the viewnder Thats ne as long as your item of interest is in the center Most systems allow you to press the shutter half way to get AF lock on the subject in the center of the viewnder, then recompose while holding the button halfway, then press the shutter all the way to take the picture Dim lighting can also be a problem - mounting a ash on your camera may give it an AF assist beam. If you are taking a picture in deliberately dim lighting, turn the light up to get AF lock, then turn it back down to take the picture

Why Are My Pictures Blurred?

Not all blurring is focus-related If you go to see a doctor and you say you are suffering from dizziness, your doctor will say - which do you feel ... Off-balance? Vertigo? Pre-syncope? (About to pass out)

Similarly, blurriness can have a number of causes ... Images can appear soft, they can be streaky, they can just lack detail ... Two basic causes of blurriness: Movement of subject or camera Optical blur either from incorrect focus, or diffraction effects

How Do I Avoid Movement Blur?

Camera movement can be minimized with a tripod or mitigated with image stabilization Subject movement can be minimized by using a high enough shutter speed Using a ash can help to freeze subject movement, but dragging the shutter can result in combinations of blurred & sharp elements something you might exploit for artistic effect You can also choose to embrace subject movement & blur and make it part of your composition with a panning shot

How Do I Avoid Optical Blur?

Make sure your lens is clean! Use a high-quality lens tissue or cloth If youre using AF, focus on your subject in center-frame then recompose holding the shutter button halfway down Make sure youre not too close to your subject (ie not within your lenss closest focus distance) Make sure all parts of the subject that you want to be in focus are within the lenss zone of acceptable sharpness or DOF - basically, use a small enough aperture - check by stopping down the lens before releasing the shutter If you use too small an aperture, your lens will suffer from diffraction effects, which also reduce detail/resolution Most lens systems are sharpest around f/8

Background blur (or bokeh) denitely has its place in photographic composition - and the deliberate use of blurriness can create beautiful abstract shots

Can I Fix Blurriness Later?

Unlike with slightly-off exposure, which can usually be corrected in postproduction with Photoshop, you cant REALLY x a problem with incorrect focus. Focus problems actually result in a loss of information, or an increase in ambiguity in the image data - and you cannot, in general, recover lost information. Sharpening lters in Photoshop can improve the apparent detail in an image by increasing local contrast around edges, but this is not the same thing as sharper focus. Similarly, complex deconvolution software like FocusMagic can help improve the appearance of out-of-focus images, and images with motion blur due to camera movement, particularly when the error is small in magnitude, but there will always be problems that cannot be xed after the fact. FocusMagic can help recover information for forensic purposes even when the result is not aesthetically pleasing. Is there magic? No, there is no magic, despite what you might see on CSI or 24

Manual Focus
Even the best AF system in the world, under ideal conditions, wont always give you the best possible focus - particularly with tricky or moving subjects, or if youre trying to focus a telephoto lens through a shimmering summer heat haze You will have to resort to manual focus in these situations. Sometimes this is selected via a switch on the lens, other times its a menu option Sometimes you may even have to line up, compose, get an AE reading AND focus for the subject before it comes into view - such as with fastmoving cars on a track. This is called preset focusing, and can work well if your timing is good. If you have a live view feature on your camera, this can really help you get spot-on focusing with a fast (wide-aperture, shallow DOF) lens, especially when the camera is mounted on a tripod. If you can magnify the live view image, you can even get the same kind of dead-on focusing advantage that used to be afforded to a photographer with a large-format view camera and a magnifying loupe

Focus on Lenses

Focal Length
We are familiar with the idea that photographers use long lenses to bring distant objects close - like with a telescope Similarly, lenses that take in a wild eld of view tend to be short and squat The main property that varies between these two types of lens is their focal length, or magnication power The focal length of lens is, roughly, dened as the distance between the lens and the image that it forms, when it is focused on an object that is innitely far away The human eye takes in a eld of view of almost 180, and has a focal length equal to the size of the eyeball from front to back Intuitively, we can think of a long (focal-length) lens as having a narrow eld of view & high magnication, and a short (focal-length) lens as having a wide eld of view, and low magnication

All I Wanna Do is Zoom-a-Zoom-ZoomZoom and a Poom-Poom

A zoom lens is one with a variable focal length (also referred to as variable magnication) Principles rst described in the Proceedings of the Royal Society in 1834, for telescope applications Zooms are optically and mechanically more complex than primes Also heavier & more expensive with more optical compromises - but very exible

Zoom Ratios
Ratio of longest to shortest focal length for a zoom lens is called its zoom ratio E.g. - a 17-85mm zoom has a 5:1 zoom ratio The larger the zoom ratio, the more compromises are made in the design even today, the best zoom lenses can only match the performance of an equivalent prime lens up to about a 3:1 zoom ratio The highest zoom ratio available in an SLR lens today is in the 15:1 range - eg 18-270mm - although there are so-called superzoom compact digital cameras with zoom ratios as high as 26:1 where the quality demands are not as high The highest zoom ratio available today in any lens is probably the Panavision 7-2100mm - a video lens with a 300:1 zoom ratio Max aperture @ 7mm = f/1.9, @ 2100mm = f/13 Optical aberrations and distortions are not as noticeable on video as they are with stills. Also, even an HD video camera is limited to fewer than 2 megapixels, so their resolution is low relative to todays digital still cameras

Plus a Change: Zoom and Aperture

Remember our denition of f number? If the focal length increases but the iris remains the same size, the resulting f number will get bigger and the relative aperture gets smaller E.g. - a 17-85mm zoom might open up to f/4 @ 17mm focal length, but only up to f/5.6 at the 85mm focal length Most zoom lenses have this issue although zoom lenses do exist with constant (relative) aperture eg Canon has a 70-200mm zoom with a constant f/2.8 maximum relative aperture

Plus a Change: Zoom and Focus

Before the days of AF, it was important for a zoom lens to maintain the same focal distance when the focal length was varied - such lenses were said to be parfocal and were more complex and more expensive than non-parfocal zoom lenses (strictly speaking, a nonparfocal zoom lens is called a varifocal lens) Advice used to be given to zoom in all the way to focus, then zoom out to frame the shot & take the picture This advice only applied to parfocal lenses and is actually counterproductive for non-parfocal lenses Since AF makes (re)establishing focus so easy at any focal length, parfocal behavior is no longer necessary Cameras equipped with live view often allow magnication of the live image - this can help the photographer manually establish focus, along the same principle as the old zoom in and focus advice

Focal Lengths - Short to Long

10mm

20mm

40mm

80mm

150mm

300mm

Field of View
Lenses of different focal lengths take in more or less of a given scene A normal or standard lens generates images that generally look "natural" to a human observer under normal viewing conditions Lenses with focal lengths shorter than a standard lens are referred to as wide-angle, and focal lengths longer than this are referred to as telephoto In practice, a standard lens has a focal length approximately equal to the diagonal measurement of the sensor - for 35mm lm, about 43mm, for most digital SLRs, about 30mm

Different Perspectives
Wide angle lenses give a perspective that tends to exaggerate foreground details, and take in a broad swath of background. Close-up portraits taken with a wideangle lens tend to distort features and give results that are unattering Moderate telephoto lenses with focal lengths in the 80 - 135mm range (for a 35mm camera) are considered classic portrait lenses because they give a pleasing perspective - they also require the photographer to stand well back from the subject, well out of their personal space Telephoto lenses tend to compress distance and because they only take in a small slice of the background, can make the background seem closer than it is. Wide-angle lenses by comparison emphasize the distance between foreground and background The longest (non-military) telephoto lens is the Zeiss Apo Sonnar T* 4/1700, a 1700mm f/4 lens custom-built at a cost of $200,000. It comes with a 2x telephoto extender, resulting in a 3400mm f/8 lens. The front element of the lens is 17 across. It ts on a Hasselblad 6x6 medium format camera, and weighs 564lb.

Primes and Zooms

Prime lenses - Fixed focal length + Best image quality - Change view = Change lenses + Large maximum aperture + Lower cost - maybe + Light weight, simple ! Highest-quality image Zoom lenses + Variable focal length - Good image quality + Vary your view with a twist - Small, often variable maximum aperture - More expensive - maybe - Heavy and complex ! Convenience & exibility

Cin Lenses vs. Still Lenses

Recently, several manufacturers (eg Zeiss) have announced adapters so you can mount certain cin (or PL) lenses on still cameras This is primarily intended for use with DSLRs in video mode Whats the big deal? Still-camera lenses generally have three properties that make them unsuitable for cin usage: Not parfocal - this means that focal distance changes as you vary the zoom Ramping - this means that aperture changes as you vary the zoom Breathing - this means that focal length changes as you adjust focal distance

In addition, cin lenses are generally of very, very high quality optical design & manufacture to minimize are and vignetting, and to maximize contrast and acuity. They may also have externalized and/or remote zoom & focus controls Even (eg) Canons L-series lenses are considered entry-level in the cin world

Optical vs. Digital Zoom

Digital zoom is really just cropping and enlarging pixels & reduces image quality Optical zoom gives better image quality

Optical

Digital

Apertures - Light Control

Many lens systems employ a diaphragm that creates a variablesize aperture or to vary the amount of light that is allowed through the lens. This also controls depth of eld In camera lenses, this is usually referred to as an aperture stop, and the usual design is an iris diaphragm In human eyes, it is called the iris. The pupil is name for the aperture or hole in the middle.

Image Stabilization (IS)

Also known as Vibration Reduction (VR), Anti-Shake (AS), Optical Stabilization (OS) etc Reduces blurriness in photos by reducing the effect of camera shake - NOT movement of the subject Good systems give 3-4 stops of vibration reduction - eg you can use a shutter speed 8 or 16 times slower than the (1/focal length) that is recommended to avoid camera shake Some IS systems have a pan mode where they will ignore lateral movement - IS can also go a little haywire when the camera is very steady, eg on a tripod and should be turned off in these circumstances if necessary

ISO 100, f/5.6, 1/5 s, 85mm focal length

IS off IS on

Optical vs. Digital IS

As with zoom, analog/optical is better than digital Digital IS results in lower resolution pictures, just as digital zoom does Analog/optical systems compensate for camera movement with counter movements (movement is detected by gyroscopes or MEMS accelerometer) moving lens/prism system inside the lens barrel optimized for each lens moving sensor (eg Sony !-Series) - buy it once, makes any lens vibration resistant on that body, within limits

f Numbers, Aperture & Focus

f numbers can be a little confusing ... The smaller the number, the larger the aperture, the more light is let in, and the shallower the depth of eld f numbers are a ratio of focal length to aperture size - so when the focal length stays the same, and the aperture gets smaller, the f number goes up

f Numbers in Practice
The laws of physics limit the largest possible aperture to about f/0.5 - Stanley Kubricks Barry Lyndon was shot with an amazing NASA-developed f/0.7 lens that allowed the director to shoot the interior scenes by candlelight Lenses with a large maximum aperture ( = small f number) tend to be very large in diameter, and therefore expensive The iris of the human eye opens up to a maximum relative aperture of about f/3.2 in dim light, and closes down to a minimum of about f/13 in bright sunlight By convention, the typical step between f numbers is the square root of 2 - roughly 1.4x. Each step between f numbers represents a doubling or halving of the amount of light. The actual gures are typically rounded up or down for convenience. f/1, f/1.4, f/2, f/2.8, f/4, f/5.6, f/8, f/11, f/16, f/22, f/32 ...

Aperture & Depth of Field

The depth of eld (DOF) is the portion of a scene that appears sharp in the image. Although a lens can precisely focus at only one distance, the decrease in sharpness is gradual on either side of the focused distance, so that within the DOF - or zone of acceptable sharpness - the image appears sharp A wide aperture (small aperture number) results in a shallow depth of eld, a small aperture gives more depth of eld
Flowers at f/32

Flowers at f/5.6

Aperture & Depth of Field

Effect of aperture on blur and DOF. The points in focus!(2) project points onto the image plane!(5), but points at different distances!(1 and 3) project blurred images, or circles of confusion. Decreasing the aperture size!(4) reduces the size of the blur circles for points not in the focused plane, so that the blurring is imperceptible, and all points are within the DOF.

The Hocus-Pocus of Focus

Focus is subtle, and not an absolute concept - only things that are acceptably sharp Acceptable sharpness depends upon the resolving power of the human eye and the display medium Example: image that looks sharp in small preview on the LCD but when you blow it up on the computer monitor it looks soft

Focus is related to the circle of confusion - an optical spot caused by a cone of light rays from a lens not coming to a perfect focus when imaging a point source (the smallest imaginable point of light - in practice, think of a distant star) When the circle of confusion is smaller than the resolving power of the eye, sensor pixel, or lm grain, an image will appear to be in focus Conversely, when sensor pixel size is smaller than the smallest circle of confusion a lens system can produce, then smaller pixels will not result in more usable resolution - megapixel madness

Ball of Confusion
The depth of eld (or zone of acceptable sharpness) is the region where the size of the circle of confusion is less than the resolution of the human eye (or of the display medium). Circles with a diameter less than the circle of confusion will appear to be in focus

Depth of Field and Distance

For a given lens, depth of eld varies with focal length, aperture, and focal distance Shallow depth of eld Long focal length (telephoto) Wide aperture (small f/number) Close focus (focused on near subjects)

Deep depth of eld Short focal length (wide-angle lens) Small aperture (large f/number) Far focus (focused on distant subjects)

See http://dofmaster.com for example calculations

Hyperfocal Distance
Two closely related denitions giving almost identical results: 1. The closest distance at which a lens can be focused while keeping objects at innity acceptably sharp; that is, the focus distance with the maximum depth of eld. When the lens is focused at this distance, all objects at distances from half of the hyperfocal distance out to innity will be acceptably sharp. 2. The distance beyond which all objects are acceptably sharp, for a lens focused at innity. Varies with focal length, f number (aperture) and the size of the circle of confusion See http://dofmaster.com for example calculations

Diffraction-Limited Optics
Up to a certain point, using a smaller aperture will result in a bigger DOF = more sharpness in the image Beyond a certain point though, diffraction effects will limit image resolution With a very small aperture, the image is formed only through the center portion of the lens glass, magnifying the effect of defects in the material & manufacturing A lens image-forming powers can be limited by many factors, but the ultimate physical limit is due to diffraction Thus, good lenses are said to be diffraction-limited meaning their performance is limited only by the laws of physics

Lens Hoods
Helps to shield your lens from stray, off-axis light rays Can help to reduce are and increase image contrast - allegedly .. May have greatest value in helping to physically protect the front surface of your lens Tend to be expensive for what they are, may help improve image quality, and can denitely help to physically protect the lens

Closer & Closer

A large part of photographing small things at high magnication involves getting closer to the subject, so this type of photography is often known as close-up Macro or close-up mode on compact cameras may unlock/unlimit some part of the lens system to allow it to focus closer at the expense of distance focusing - not magic Close-up focus with a DSLR can be achieved in one of two ways: With lenses - including adapters, screw-in lters or dedicated macro lenses, reversing rings for primes, that all optically augment or replace an existing lens Without lenses - eg bellows or extension tubes that physically move the lens assembly further from the lm plane

With a zoom, greatest magnication is typically found at the long end of the zoom range, even though it also increases minimum focus distance - so even though you cant get as physically close to the subject, the lens greater magnication more than makes up for it

A Closer Look at Macro

Historically, macro refers to a camera system with the ability to reproduce an object at 1:1 (the magnication ratio) or greater on the lm/sensor Lens specications often include a maximum magnication ratio - everyday lenses typically around 0.1x or 1:10 - ie image on sensor is 1/10 size of real object Specically-designed macro lenses often give at least 1:1 magnication; when combined with bellows or extension tubes, magnications of 10:1 or higher may be achieved At the extreme, starts to overlap with microphotography - photography with a microscope

Small Subjects, Big Challenges

At macro scales, DOF becomes extremely shallow, demanding very small apertures, and consequently lots of light, ie bright sunlight or ash - which also helps to minimize the effect of vibrations through very short exposure times Camera-mounted ash is often blocked by body of the the lens itself - hence the invention of the macro ring ash Can only stop a lens down so far before diffraction effects dominate and quality suffers Even at smallest aperture, DOF may become so shallow that only part of the subject is in focus - may alleviate with focus stacking software eg CombineZP or Helicon Focus

300mm lens & +8 diopter close-up lens = 5:1 macro

Why Are Camera Lenses Complex When Eyeglasses Arent?

We are used to simple lens systems from the examples of our eyes, magnifying glasses and corrective eyeglasses - yet camera lenses seem to have a lot more glass in them and a much more complex construction with multiple elements Simple lenses meant to be used directly with the eye, like eyeglasses and magniers, actually often introduce signicant optical distortions, but we learn to ignore them. Used in a camera, they would give unacceptable results

Lenses Have It Tough

While they may appear to have a simple job, camera lenses actually have contradictory requirements For one thing, they have to bend visible light of all colors and form a sharp image with all of it. However, light of different colors (wavelengths) will bend by different amounts producing images at different distances from the lens They have to produce an image that is in sharp focus and evenly illuminated across the entire scene (no vignetting) They also have to gather enough light to make them usable, yet remain sufciently small as to be lightweight and affordable to manufacture (awless, large, wide lenses cost a lot more to make than smaller lenses)

Short-Long Lenses
A 600mm lens may appear to have to be nearly two feet long to accomodate its focal length, but it would be too heavy and unwieldy at this size so a special lens group called a telephoto group is employed (this is where long lenses get their name, even though not all long focal length aka telephoto lenses actually contain a telephoto group) Special kinds of glass and sophisticated optical design can make some telephoto lenses available that are much shorter than their nominal focal length - but at a price (eg Canon DO lenses) Most lenses sold today are zooms - they cover a range of focal lengths, and have to do so well at all focal lengths. This may involve having several groups of lenses move in tandem inside the lens as the zoom ratio changes, adding complexity, cost and weight to the nished product. To keep costs down, again, manufacturers employ compromises

Distortions and Lies

Despite the use of the most sophisticated design and manufacturing processes, real-world camera lenses are imperfect Some of the things a lens can do wrong include: Vignetting Chromatic aberrations Spherical aberrations Geometric distortion (barrel, pincushion, etc) Poor resolution Flare/coma
Chromatic Aberrations Vignetting Back- or front- focus (plane of focus is not at, or is partially in front of or partially behind the lm or sensor)

Not provide consistent performance at all apertures

With a zoom, these effects all may be better or worse at different focal lengths; in addition, a zoom may not stay focused as its focal length varies (it is non-parfocal) - see also ramping and breathing Luckily, many of these things,can be xed in software, either in Photoshop, or, in the case of chromatic aberration, within the camera itself (eg Nikon D700, D80, D90)

Wide-Angle Distortion
Be careful when shooting a tall building with a wide-angle lens; converging verticals can make a building look odd Traditionally, these types of architectural shots were made with a bellows or rising-front camera to keep the verticals vertical; today, we buy a tiltshift lens or use Photoshop

The Lloyds Insurance building, London, not quite the way Richard Rogers intended

Telephoto Trickery
Telephoto lenses tend to give the illusion of compressing distance, and can make two things that are in line with the photographer appears to be closer to each other than they really are This makes it easier to produce forced perspective images - often used in the movie industry to make small models appear life-sized, especially when appearing along with full-scale items or actors
Careful, that things hot

Filters
Filters are typically made of glass and come in a threaded holder that screws into the threads at the front end of the lens Different lenses often have front elements of different diameters Close-up (macro) lens attachments are sometimes misleadingly included in this category, especially when they have a lter-like mounting arrangement Alternative systems exist, like Cokin - cost-effective square lters, lter holder, cheap adapter rings

Most common lter type is the 1A or UV lter, appears almost completely clear to the naked eye but in fact, is ever-so-slightly straw colored; reduces UV, may help to cut through atmospheric haze In practice, most useful as clear lens cap to protect the front element of your lens

More On Filters
Historically, lters were very important in lm photography to: correct color casts & white balance create in camera special effects in color photography such as starburst, soft focus, graduated tones, etc enhance contrast in b&w photography lter out all visible light, allowing only infra-red through

With digital, all but the last of these things can be done digitally in camera, or in post-production Other than the UV lter (clear lens cap) the most important lters for digital are the polarizing lter, and the neutral density lter. Joseph S. Wisniewski of photos-of-the-year.com believes there are 4 additional lters whose effects cannot be easily replicated in Photoshop - 80A, neodymium enhancing lter, soft focus and graduated ND

A Polarizing Issue
As mentioned in the module on the physics of light, light rays can have the property of being polarized - many people can actually perceive polarized light via a phenomenon known as Haidingers Brush Light rays can be plane polarized (eg horizontal or vertical) or circularly polarized (clockwise or counter-clockwise) For technical reasons, need to use a circularly polarizing lter (PL-CIR) with digital cameras otherwise it may interfere with the operation of AF & AE systems Effects of polarizing lter will be familiar to anyone who has worn polarized sunglasses - put on a pair, look at a blue sky, and tilt your head side to side Tends to increase color saturation (intensity) and cut down on reections from glass, surface of still water, etc Saturation can be enhanced in post-production (Photoshop) but antireective effect cannot

Polarizer In Action
Notice the deep, saturated blue color of the sky

Dense, But Neutral

Neutral density or ND lters serve a particular purpose - to reduce the amount of light reaching the sensor without affecting color balance, polarization, aperture, or depth of eld Useful if you want to use a slow shutter speed, eg to blur motion, or a wide aperture for shallow DOF on a bright day without over-exposing the image

ND Filter in Action

Lighting

Light and the Photographer

Light is the sine qua non of photography - without light, there is no photography In many ways, the most convenient light for photography is available light Available light is whatever light is present on the scene we wish to photograph, rather than lighting the photographer brought along Can be natural (eg sunlight, moonlight, lightning, etc) or articial (re, light bulbs, uorescent tubes) While available light is very convenient in some ways, it can be problematic in others - may not be enough of it (or too much!), may be very harsh (like bright sun), may not be coming from the right direction, may have an odd mix of color temperatures

Working with Available Light

In most cases, we have to work with what were given You can vary aperture, shutter speed & sensitivity to cope with whats available You can modify what the camera sees as white light either with lters or with the cameras white balance control You may be able to modify the lighting conditions to some extent with a shade to block light or a reector to bounce it, and you may be able to change your position to vary the effective direction of the light If forced to shoot in direct sunlight, for example, you may be able to move your subject into open shade, or even provide them with shade from eg a large umbrella Dark areas on a subjects face can be lightened with a reector to bounce some of the available light back into the shadows

Reectors
Typically available in white, silver or gold (gold will warm the color of the light a little) Generally fold down small for convenience Lightweight, exible - many can also double as a shade Make your own with foamcore & aluminum foil (not the shiny side)
Subject

Window Reector Camera

Window to the right of the camera, reector to the left

Daylight - Good and Bad

Sunlight is typically bright, and freely available during daylight hours Color of sunlight can vary during the day and with conditions In the early morning and late evening, sunlight takes on a golden quality due to atmospheric ltering and scattering Daylight diffused through cloud cover tends to take on a cooler, more bluish hue than direct sunlight Similarly, in open shade, much of the light you see is reected from the surroundings, or else comes from the sky - again, tends to be more bluish Bright, mid-day sun can be very harsh, highly directional, and coming from nearly directly overhead resulting in ugly, deep shadows Crepuscular light (around sunrise & sunset) comes from a lower, more attering angle, is not so bright and harsh, and takes on a golden quality - the so-called golden hours - but often more like 20 minutes!

Go Into The Light

One piece of received wisdom I often heard was - you should always have the sun behind you, dont shoot into the light Ignore it! Not right for every shot - no rule is really right for every shot - but shooting into the light, or contre-jour, can give dramatic results with the right scene Experiment with exposure settings do you want any foreground elements to be in their own shadow, silhouetted against the light, or well lit? What exposure are you going to meter for?
Subject lit with ash, high, camera-right

Moonlight
Basically a very dim form of sunlight - just reected from the neutrally-colored moon Still gives good color rendition, even if you cant see it with the naked eye Typically requires exposures of several minutes, even under the full moon in a cloudless sky

This moonlit scene was exposed at ISO 400 at f/4 for 480 seconds - roughly EV -7

Articial Light
Can be continuous - like home, ofce or stage lighting - or come in brief ashes - like a strobe Comes in a range of color temperatures and corresponding white balances - tungsten, tungsten-halogen, HMI, uorescent, mercury vapor, LED, etc. Light intensity falls off with the square of the distance from the light source (the inverse square law) - each time you double the distance, you decrease the light intensity by a factor of four Also true for sunlight, but the Sun is so far away to begin with, that, on Earth, it makes no practical difference Articial lights are generally close to the subject, so it does matter

White Balance
Thermal light sources give off a broad spectrum of frequencies (white light) characteristic of black-body radiation; light from the Sun comes from its 6000K/10000F surface, the chromosphere, and incandescent light from the 2500K tungsten lament in a regular light bulb. Compared to one another, midday sunlight is more bluish, and incandescent light and sunlight around sunrise and sunset (during the socalled golden hours) are more yellowish. Fluorescent lights, LEDs and the xenon tubes in ashes produce light by spontaneous emission; compared to sunlight & incandescent light; uorescent light is somewhat greenish and white LEDs often give bluish light compared to midday sunlight, whereas the light from a xenon ash is a good match for sunlight.

Which White Balance?

Most digital cameras can be adjusted for white balance or WB to take these differences into account. In the old days, you would buy tungsten-balanced or daylight-balanced lm and/or use correction or conversion lters on the lens to get the right white color Many cameras will also have an AWB for automatic white balance mode. They will take an educated guess but can get it wrong - again, theres no magic.

White balance set for 2500K

White balance set for 6000K

Flickering Fluorescents
Fluorescent lights also icker. If your shutter speed is < 1/60s, you can get weird color shifts, dark bands, etc. LEDs will also icker unless they are powered from a clean DC source.

1/30 second - I caught two complete cycles of 60Hz AC with this one - the illumination is even

1/100 second - not so lucky this time light was almost completely off while the shutter was open

1/320 second - above X-sync speed light was turning on or off as the shutter was traveling

Flash - Savior of the Universe

Modern photographic ash tubes, aka strobes, ash guns or speedlights(*) produce very intense light for a very short period (~1ms or less) by creating a highvoltage electrical discharge through a clear glass tube lled with xenon gas The rst photographic ashes were created with magnesium powder, then later, strips of magnesium metal in a glass bulb, and then nally zirconium metal, which gave an even brighter light Light from a ash tube has a complex spectrum and a color temperature around 5600K, but for most purposes is a close analog for natural sunlight
* Irritatingly, Nikon and Canon trademarked similar words for their battery-powered ashes. Nikon calls theirs the Speedlight, Canon, the Speedlite. Because of this, many photographers use the term in a generic sense for battery-powered portable ashes.

Flash/Shutter Interaction
Flash duration is extremely short, so the maximum shutter speed at which you can use ash is the one where the shutter is fully open, otherwise only part of the image will be illuminated by the ash This is called the X-sync speed Some ash/camera combinations offer a form of ash sync at higher shutter speeds called FP (Nikon) or High-Speed Sync (Canon) - instead of a single, short-duration ash, the ash unit produces a series of ashes one after the other that produce nearcontinuous illumination for the duration of the X-sync speed, so shutter speeds higher than X-sync can be used Because the ash is producing multiple pulses of light, overall light output is greatly reduced so the ash circuitry does not overheat

Timing is Everything
There are (at least) three points in time when the camera might trigger the ash to re: 1. When the rst curtain starts to move 2. When the rst curtain stops moving 3. When the second curtain starts to move Point 1 is used with FP or High-Speed Sync ash (aka FP-sync or HSS sync) Point 2 is normal X-sync Point 3 is second-curtain sync

Second-Curtain Sync
Below the X-sync speed, the ash typically res as soon as the rst curtain has opened Many camera/ash combinations offer the choice of ring the ash immediately before the second curtain closes, so-called second-curtain sync or rear-curtain sync With rst-curtain sync, the sharp image will instead be at the beginning of the trail of movement With second-curtain sync, moving objects will show a trail of movement where they came from, and a sharp image at the end of the exposure - sample exposure here was 1/4s
First curtain sync

Second curtain sync

Bright Flash, Dim Flash?

Flash tubes can only produce light at one level of intensity, but can do so for different, but short, periods of time. This is how ash tube power output is effectively regulated. The fast pulse of light from a ash tube can be used to freeze motion - a large studio ash at full power may produce light for as long as 1/400s, but a small battery ash may produce a ash as brief as 1/30-40,000s (25-33 sec) on its lowest power High-speed photography need not rely on fast shutter speeds, but rather short, intense ashes of light. This was taken 1/250s @ f/16, Canon 580 EX II ash @ 1/64 power, giving a ash duration of about 1/31,000s

Multiple Exposure with Strobes

Electronic stroboscopes were invented by Harold Doc Edgerton (the E in EG&G) in 1931 to study moving machinery Stroboscopes (or strobes) produce multiple, shortduration bursts of bright light in quick succession Some battery-operated ash units, eg the Canon 580 EX II, can also do this, up to about 200 Hz

Canon 580 EX II, ash rate about 5 Hz. Best results are obtained with a light, reective subject against a dark background

The Evils of On-Camera Flash

The quickest and easiest way to ruin a picture is to use the ash mounted directly on your camera, pointing straight at your subject Result: Harsh, at lighting with dark, unattering shadows, and red eyes

Bounce Flash
Bounce ash theory - instead of direct light from the ash, bounce it off the ceiling or a wall Easy to do with a ash that has a tilting head, or you can improvise with a piece of card for a pop-up ash When it works well, it can give soft, even illumination - denitely a step up from harsh, direct, on-camera ash - but still not a panacea When it works poorly, you can get color casts from non-white walls and ceilings, ugly shadows, and lack of denition

Off-Camera Flash
Red-eye is primarily caused by having the light source (ash) too close to the optical axis of the lens If you only have one light, at least move it off the camera, with an off-camera shoe cord About 12 directly above the lens is a good place - youll still get some shadows, but they wont be as noticeable because mentally we accept them as looking somewhat like shadows from overhead sunlight Soft, even illumination is safe and inoffensive, but you can do even better with some directional light Recommended resource: OneLight Workshop, 2-DVD set by Zack Arias - $250 + shipping

More Than One Light

Once you make the move to off-camera ash, you are ready to start to consider multi-light setups One step above the single light is a twolight setup - providing key and ll Requires some kind of system to synchronize ring two ashes - wired, or wireless, optical or radio

A Simple Two-Light Setup

Rule of thumb - put the key light at ~90 to the camera, a little above eye level, and the ll light above the lens, with a 4:1 ratio of key:ll light Key light is bright - so you want it to be soft light = large, diffuse light - umbrella is a good choice\ Fill light lls in the dark shadows - can achieve much the same effect with a reector
Key light ash with shootthrough umbrella Fill light ash with diffuser

More Advanced Lighting

Beyond two lights, a three light setup gives you key, ll and a background, hair, or kicker light Can go to even more - four lights gives you key, ll, background and hair/kicker, etc. More creative possibilities, but more complex, more $$$ Background light lights the background, creating visual separation of the foreground subject from the background Hair or kicker lights the subject from behind (and maybe above or to one side)

A Three-Light Setup
Hair light

Key light ash with shootthrough umbrella Fill light ash with diffuser

Three-light setup with key, ll & hair lights

Light Modiers
Light can be changed in intensity, color, softness/ hardness, coverage, direction etc with various modiers Diffusers - eg Sto-Fen OmniBounce, umbrellas (reector or shoot-through), soft boxes, bounce card, tilt head Blockers - ags, barn doors, snoots, grids Cookies (cucoloris), gobos, gels, silks
Band lit with 3 Canon ashes gelled red, yellow & blue

Putting It All Together

You dont take a photograph, you make it Ansel Adams

Realizing Your Creative Vision

A camera is a tool that lets you capture images Move from taking pictures to making pictures Whether you just see something you want to photograph on the spur of the moment, or youve planned out the perfect picture beforehand, you have artistic decisions to make

Whats Your Style?

Aerial! Architectural! Astrophotography! Black and White! Candid! Commercial! Cloudscape! Documentary! Erotic! Fashion! Fine art!Fire! Food! Forensic! Glamour! Head shot! High speed! Landscape art! Miksang! Nature! Nude! Panoramic! Photojournalism! Pornography! Portrait! Post-mortem! Senior! Sports! Still life! Stock! Street! Underwater! Vernacular! VR! War! Wedding! Wildlife! etc!

Finding Your Creative Vision

Aspiring authors spend much of their time reading other authors books Would-be lmmakers watch an enormous number of movies Reading and watching barely captures what they are doing though In fact: critiquing, analyzing, deconstructing, appropriating - even plagiarizing

How To Look at Photos

To become a better photographer, you must look at a lot of photographs But dont just look at them - analyze how the picture works, understand how it was taken, and what was done before, during and after the shot Not just what and how - but why Compelling photographs need to tell a story, or raise questions, or both - capture drama, or create it

Capturing Drama

Creating Drama

Source Material
Magazines - Time, National Geographic, Vogue, Architectural Digest, Outside, Playboy, etc Books - Ansel Adams, Gregory Crewdson, O. Winston Link, David Bailey, Anne Geddes, Sally Mann, etc Web - Flickr, Smugmug, Picasa, Google Image Search, deviantART, stock photo sites, etc Look - see - save as - analyze - take notes discuss

Beauty can be seen in all things, seeing and composing the beauty is what separates the snapshot from the photograph Matt Hardy

Ask Yourself ...

What am I trying to say with this picture? What is the visual focal point of this image? What competing focal points are there? What is in the background & foreground? Should I blur it out or keep it sharp? Am I close enough? Too close? What is the main source of light? Is my framing straight? Maybe it shouldnt be? What other perspective could I take this shot from? What if I turned the camera 90? How will the eye travel around this image?
2-second exposure and zoom adjusted while shutter was open

Technical Considerations
Focal distance - what is my point of focus? Depth of eld - small or large aperture? Shutter speed - fast, to avoid camera shake? Or slow, to create motion blur? Sensitivity - as high as necessary for the chosen combination of shutter & aperture, but as low as possible for best quality Exposure - aperture/shutter/sensitivity combination compensation +/- ? Light - source(s), direction, apparent size? Color temperature - right white balance? Focal length - do I have the perspective I want? Does the subject ll enough of the frame?

Rule of Thirds
Avoid the temptation to always place the point of interest smack in the middle of the frame Rule of Thirds says that points of interest in your photograph should be 1/3 of way in from each edge A good starting point Can be hard to do when shooting, especially when you dont know how the nal picture will be cropped & used, so bear it in mind when shooting, but dont be a slave to it

Rule of Thumb for Exposure

The Sunny 16 rule of thumb says that on a bright, sunny, day (say, LV16), set the aperture to f/16, and shutter speed to (as near as you can) 1/ISO sensitivity, eg: ISO 100, f/16, shutter speed 1/125 By extension, the same rule applies at other LVs - with f stop set to (roughly) f/ LV and ISO sensitivity of x, set shutter to roughly 1/x

Rule of Thumb for Grabbing a Shot

Old saying from photojournalism: Tri-X, f/8 and be there! Tri-X was a classic Kodak B&W lm rated at ISO 400 Choose exposure settings that give you a reasonable degree of exibility so you can concentrate on getting the picture

Rule of Thumb to Avoid Camera Shake

For a 35mm lm camera, the rule of thumb is to set shutter speed to at least 1/(focal length in mm) in seconds E.g. - for a 200mm lens, set exposure to 1/200s or shorter Affected by crop factor on digital sensors, size of circle of confusion, and image stabilization ssytems

If I saw something in my viewnder that looked familiar to me, I would do something to shake it up Garry Winogrand

Up High, Down Low

Shoot from up high, or down low If youre taking a picture of a small child, get down to their level, or below Use different focal lengths use the additional space created by a wide angle lens, or moving back, to put your subject at the intersection of thirds Alternatively, try lling the viewnder with your subject - zoom in, or move closer

Low angle shot, wide-angle lens

High angle shot, wide aperture

On the Level?
The eye is remarkably good at detecting when an image is not level - even fractions of a degree However, straight and level is not the only way to shoot German lmmakers of the 1930s popularized the technique of shooting scenes with the camera tilted relative to the horizon, creating a sense of unease or tension in the shot The public later conated the word Deutsch (German for German) with the word Dutch, and this style of shooting became known as a Dutch tilt or Dutch angle If you use a Dutch tilt in your shots, tilt it like you mean it!

Unusual Perspectives
With their innate curiosity and sense of wonder, small children often seek novel and interesting perspectives on everyday scenes and objects - learn from them!

Youve got to push yourself harder. Youve got to start looking for pictures nobody else could take. Youve got to take the tools you have and probe deeper William Albert Allard

Using Space

Filling the Frame

Keeping Things in Perspective

Use the natural lines of perspective to draw the eye to the area of interest

A wide angle lens tends to exaggerates perspective

Background Information
Use a wide aperture to throw an otherwise distracting background out of focus Photographers term for background blur is bokeh (Japanese for fuzzy)
Flowers at f/5.6

Flowers at f/32

Which of my photographs is my favorite? The one Im going to take tomorrow Imogen Cunningham

Steady = Sharp
Single biggest thing you can do to improve the sharpness of your photos is to keep the camera steady Image stabilization/anti-shake/vibration reduction can help, but has its limitations Brace the camera against a solid object, brace your arms against your sides But really? Get a tripod, a Gorillapod, or even a monopod Get a quick-release mechanism too, otherwise you will never use your tripod because its too ddly

Quick Disconnect

Illustrated: Bogen Manfrotto RC2 system, one of many systems

Choosing a tripod
Primary job of a tripod is to keep the camera steady If it doesnt do that, nothing else matters A tripod can be cheap, solid, or lightweight - pick any two ... Think about two purchasing different tripods Portable or travel tripod - lightweight with telescopic legs - high-end models made from carbon ber can be quite sturdy and expensive Studio tripod - heavy, may not fold down much, may have castors, can be very tall

Choosing Equipment - Format

Full range of choices includes lm vs. digital, compact vs. SLR, 35mm vs. medium format vs. large format The larger the camera, the larger the sensor, the higher the picture quality Large = expensive We will look at digital compacts vs. digital SLRs

Compact vs. SLR

Compact cameras, also known as point-and-shoots or P&S, are, as the name implies, physically quite small and almost always have a zoom lens that is not interchangeable Cheaper than most SLRs, partly due to small sensor size, which implies small lens size, which makes lens cheaper Small sensor size limits image quality Low price also means slower computer circuitry - slower to react, can be frustrating to use - missed shots, etc Almost all offer live image view on the rear LCD screen, some dont even have an optical viewnder Can still pack a lot of sophistication inside, very convenient, quite economical

Why SLRs Arent Compact

Historically, most SLRs are based on 35mm lm, and modern digital SLRs usually t in the same physical size range This is mainly to retain compatibility with lenses and other accessories for 35mm lm cameras Most digital SLRs have a sensor quite a bit smaller than a 35mm lm frame One frame of 35mm lm is 36mm x 24mm Most digital SLRs have an APS-C sized sensor about 24mm x 16mm This is the source of the so-called 1.5x/1.6x crop factor for lenses on a digital camera - some lenses, eg Canon EF-S etc are lenses made especially for APS-C digital SLRs, and cant be used on full-frame cameras A few digital SLRs exist with an APS-H size sensor with a 1.3x conversion Some full-frame digital SLRs exist, but they are expensive because its very costly to produce such a large sensor

1.3333333333333?
Olympus, together with some other manufacturers, launched a new format called Four-Thirds Reference is to the aspect ratio of the resulting image - most SLRs produce an image closer to the 3:2 proportions of 35mm lm; Four-Thirds system images are 4:3 Based on the idea that a traditional 35mm body is overkill for an APS-C sensor, so why not build a camera system scaled appropriately for a smaller sensor? Four-Thirds also standardizes lens mounting, so different Four-Thirds system components from different manufacturers will interoperate There is also a even smaller variant called Micro Four-Thirds, sized for the sensors typically found in compact models - many models have only an electronic viewnder and no optical viewnder - this saves space and reduces mechanical complexity. Thus, these models are single-lens, but not reex, so even when they have interchangeable lenses. they are not SLRs

Advantage: SLR
Bigger sensor = better quality = bigger lenses = higher prices Higher prices = more processor power = faster reaction time Bigger camera body = larger battery = more electrical power Physically larger lenses allow for direct manual control of zoom and focus Automation is ne so long as it can be overridden and prevented from getting in the way ...

Choosing Equipment: System Brands

Many brands - Nikon, Canon, Pentax, Olympus, Panasonic, Casio, Fujilm, Cosina, Kodak, Sony, Ricoh, Samsung, Rollei, Mamiya, Contax, Leica, Konica, Hasselblad, Voigtlander,
Zeiss, Zenit, Sigma, Vivitar, Epson, Konica, Yashica, Speed Graphic, Ilford,
etc

All make ne cameras, BUT ... Nikon & Canon are the 800-lb gorillas Generally means widest selection of brand-name and third-party lenses and accessories Nikon vs. Canon is a fruitless debate for most people, much like Ford vs. Chevy

Choosing: Lenses
Basic choice is camera manufacturer, or third-party Manufacturers lenses are often high quality at high price Third-party lenses are often cheaper Generally speaking, leading third-party lens brands are Sigma, Tokina and Tamron Sigma does not generally license the AF systems from the manufacturers and instead they reverse-engineer the AF circuitry - may not work if the camera manufacturer changes their AF algorithms

Zeiss makes outstanding lenses to t Leica, Canon, Nikon, Pentax, Olympus and others Leica have outsourced the manufacturer of many of their lenses to Cosina in Japan for many years

Choosing Equipment: Primes and Zooms

Prime lenses - Fixed focal length + Best image quality - Change view = Change lenses + Large maximum aperture + Lower cost - maybe + Light weight, simple ! Highest-quality image Zoom lenses + Variable focal length - Good image quality + Vary your view with a twist - Small, often variable maximum aperture - More expensive - maybe - Heavy and complex ! Convenience & exibility

Choosing Lenses: Primes vs. Zooms

Bottom line - even though prime lenses generally offer the best optical quality, dont let that put you off buying a good walk-around (big zoom ratio) zoom The photo you did get, even with a budget zoom, will be better than the one you didnt get because you left your camera or the right lens at home

Your rst 10,000 photographs are your worst Henri Cartier-Bresson

Practice, Practice, Practice

Shoot lots and lots of pictures - but do so mindfully and then still cull ruthlessly Example: NatGeo assignment on the Columbia River Photographer shot 30,000 frames over a 2-year span - on lm NatGeo used 150 of them - 0.5%, or 1 in 200 Take your camera with you everywhere, shoot lots of pictures Experiment, document, and try again Costs next-to-nothing with digital

Twelve signicant photographs in any one year is a good crop Ansel Adams

Before, During & After

The factors that go into making a successful photo start occur before, during and after the actual exposure Before you expose the image, you make lighting and composition choices During the exposure, you can re ashes, move the camera, vary the zoom, lter the light in various ways, etc After the exposure, Photoshop and its ilk give you myriad choices - cropping, resizing, compositing, black & white, sepia tone, contrast, color balance, exposure adjustment, soft focus, retouching, and on and on ... Photo manipulation is whole artform in itself

I always thought good photos were like good jokes. If you have to explain it, it just isnt that good Unknown

Photography & Objectivity

The idea of photography as an objective record of reality is deeply ingrained in our culture photographic proof the camera never lies pics, or it didnt happen

The deeper issue here is that reality is subjective, and, as we experience it, a continuous phenomenon Photography, by denition, freezes a moment in time Dynamic range/latitude of photography struggles to come close to that of the human eye Wide-angle and telephoto lenses create images with perspectives we cannot see with the naked eye Color/white balance of the human eye is not xed - keep one eye closed for a minute or so, then compare the view through each eye

The Shifting Norms of Photography

Early photography was always black & white Earliest media were not even sensitive to the whole visible spectrum Color lms & prints came much later - with attendant issues of color balance & tonality Kodak, Ilford, Agfa, Fuji, etc Slides vs. prints Tungsten vs. daylight-balanced lm

B&W pictures have taken on the cultural baggage of journalism, serious pictures vs. frivolous color, suitable only for snapshots Sepia toning was a way to replace silver salts with more stable compounds that many surviving early photographs are sepia-toned is testament to the longevity of sepia. Similarly for platinum & selenium prints What was once a matter of necessity is now an artistic choice

Photography & Impressionism

Much early photography sought to emulate the artistic style of the painters of the period - impressionism, or pictorialism Ansel Adams was one of the pioneers of a more honest, realistic approach to photography - sharp focus, high resolution, deep blacks, vivid highlights As careful as he was in making the exposure, Adams spent much time in the darkroom ensuring his prints matched the scene he had seen in his minds eye Even the most straightforward traditional photographic process produces results that are at the whim of the chemists who formulated the photographic emulsion & solutions, and the development process Example - lightning photography. What is true? What is real? What is realistic?

It can be a trap of the photographer to think that his or her best pictures were the ones that were hardest to get Timothy Allen

Honest Photography?
Miksang is a Tibetan word that translates as good eye Miksang philosophy is to capture and display images that rely upon minimal manipulation Strict interpretations of the philosophy even excludes cropping Digital conundrums - demosaicing & JPEG compression for example both involve signicant computation - is this manipulation? Nevertheless, denitely an interesting exercise emphasizes contemplation, preparedness, patience

Nothing happens when you sit at home. I always make it a point to carry a camera with me at all timesI just shoot at what interests me at that moment Elliott Erwitt

Why Take Travel Photos?

Try to be clear in your intentions from the outset Dont set out just to try and reproduce the clichs of postcard photography - bring your own creative vision to the scene Fortune favors the prepared eye Memory is a porous, incomplete phenomenon - use photography to augment and stimulate your own memories

Wellington, NZ

Tokyo, Japan

Hong Kong, ROC

Darmstadt, Germany

Talinn, Estonia

Basic Post-Production
Once you know the basics, you can make major improvements to a photo with image-editing software in a matter of seconds Most bang for the buck comes from things like: Fixing color casts/white balance problems Exposure adjustments Levels adjustment (tonal range/contrast) Hue/saturation Straightening (eg tilted horizon) & cropping (eg rule of thirds)

For example, we perceive lack of contrast between shadows & highlights as haze

Original

Color Correction & Levels

Straighten & Crop

Beyond the Basics

More subtle but still easy enhancements include: Sharpening (but dont overdo it) Removing blemishes (clone stamp, healing brush etc) Black & white/sepia tone conversions

Intermediate Skills
Slightly more advanced techniques Selective color or focus (blurring) Skin softening (airbrushing), cleaning up hot spots (shiny noses, etc) Dodging & burning Whitening eyes & teeth Merging multiple shots of a group (autoblend layers)

Original

Retouched

Advanced Editing
Heavy-duty photo manipulation Digital make-up (foundation, eyeliner, lip gloss) Digital plastic surgery (nose job, liposuction, etc) Compositing (inserting other people or real objects, changing background or sky, etc), HDR, color replacement, adding articial clouds, smoke, re, etc etc

Q&A