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By Richard, February 28, 2010 3:39 pm

Abby shoots with the Coolpix 885 at Navajo Bridge, July 2003

When Abby and I first met, I was still shooting some film. On the budget of a small-town news photographer in a world of $5500 digital SLRs, I wasn’t in any kind of position to buy the digital cameras I wanted. I had, however, bought a digital point-and-shoot, the Nikon Coolpix 885, in the early summer of 2002, as a travel and grab camera. I liked it pretty well, and made some decent images with it. I followed that with the Minolta DiMage 7i, which was more camera, as my “fine art” camera, and in the fall of 2002, I made some terrific images with the combination of those two.

In early 2003, Abby and I got together, and almost immediately I lent her the Coolpix. She carried it with her during her travels when she worked for a fundraising company, and shot some great stuff. The more she used it, the better she got with it, and the more she noticed its distinctive chattering sound as it focused. Soon she nicknamed it R2D2 after the chattering android in Star Wars.

The camera seemed fairly capable at the time. One reason I chose it was that it had an optical viewfinder, so that you can compose and shoot in blinding sunshine without struggling to see the monitor on the back. It has a 3.1 megapixel sensor, which seems tiny today, but which has produced some remarkably detailed 13×19-inch prints. Some of Abby’s gallery images were made with this small wonder.

A couple of years ago, R2D2 shuffled off this mortal coil, but remains above Abby’s desk as a reminder of all the great times we enjoyed and great images we made with it.

The Nikon Coolpix 885

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By Richard, February 28, 2010 1:28 am

This may seem like a trivial and/or simple principal, but I feel it is key to learn how to hold your camera and make it a habit.

My wife Abby makes pictures of cottonwood trees in southern Colorado, October 2005, with her Nikon D70S; note that she is correctly holding her camera

Early in our relationship, my wife Abby learned and adopted the correct posture for using a digital SLR, and has used it ever since, and I think it really makes a difference in her shooting.

The correct way to hold an SLR is to place the lens in your left hand so that the base of the camera sits on the heel of your hand. You fingers should then naturally wrap around the zoom and focus rings of the lens. The right hand goes around the grip of the camera’s right side, with the right index finger on the shutter release. This yields a position from which you can operate all of the critical controls of the camera without removing your hands. It also has the advantage of creating a natural “tripod” effect, with your body acting to stabilize the whole camera. To shoot vertically, the left hand stays where it is, and the right hand moves the camera to the vertical position without releasing from the grip.

Cameras are designed to work this way. I am always amazed when I see people struggling to reinvent this very obvious wheel, and I know they would do better if they learned to hold their cameras the right way.

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By Richard, February 22, 2010 1:09 pm

The key to good art and good imaging is, and always has been, expressed by the formula, “10% inspiration, 90% perspiration.” You will note that this formula does not include $50,000 grand pianos, $750 paint brushes, or, in the current context, $8000 cameras. I find the entire lustful consumerism surrounding digital photography extremely distasteful. To that end, I have always tried to make my camera purchases as frugal as I can, and that often involves buying used equipment. The irony of this for the seller is that cameras that once fetched the price of a nice used car are now fetching the price of a new toaster oven.

One of my Nikon D100s; this camera is an excellent tool for imaging, and presently very affordable

Part of this is simply that it seems idiotic to spend thousands of dollars on cameras at all. How did consumerism distort our perspective so much that we would spend the amount of money it takes to make a down payment on a house on a camera?

To that end, in recent years I have been shopping eBay for cameras, and the bargains I have made are, financially speaking, amazing. Here are some examples:

• Nikon D100 with MB-D100 vertical grip, original price: $2700
• Nikon D100 with MB-D100 vertical grip, eBay price last year: $220
• Kodak DCS 760: original price: $8000
• Kodak DCS 760: eBay price two years ago: $300

Before you launch into a pixel tirade, ask yourself this: how big is the largest print you made of one of your digital images this month? If it isn’t filling an entire wall, about 60% of those new pixels that cost you thousands of dollars are wasted. A sidebar to that is that Michael, Abby and I all have poster-sized images hanging in our homes, made from two or three megapixel cameras, and they look great. The only people who even care how the pixels look are the rich amateurs themselves. Performance? When I was at Delicate Arch in October, there were tons of rich amateurs here with D3s and D700s, blasting away at 7 frames per second, 7 identical frames of the same thing. Performance might be helpful if you are shooting for sports illustrated, but even when I’m shooting sports, timing is always more effective than frame rate.

Ultimately, I see a lot of today’s cool cameras in my hands, making great pictures, five years from now. And I won’t be in debt doing it.

Tree near Ghost Rock in Utah's San Rafael Swell, 2006; like most images, this one is successful because of light and composition, not pixel count or frame rate

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By Richard, February 18, 2010 4:55 pm

Ashlee Holloway climbs a cargo container to find an angle and to pose.

I am teaching a new session of advanced digital photography Monday nights March 1, 8, and 22. You can sign up by calling 580-310-2200.

A student from last year, Beth Grand, told me yesterday that she wanted to take the class again, and I consider that extremely flattering. The beautiful thing about the advanced class is that what we do almost exclusively is shoot, and I think the students get a lot more out of that than from the beginning photography class, in which I am up in front of a white board talking about noise reduction and focus modes. I know I get a lot out of teaching the advanced class, and I know we all have a lot of fun.

Photo students from last March

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By Richard, February 14, 2010 11:15 am

With the S200EXR (Photo by Abby S. M. Barron)

I’ve had the Fuji Finepix S200EXR since early October 2009. I got it just in time for Abby’s family reunion in Duncan, Oklahoma. I got it primarily as a hiking camera, as a replacement for my dying Minolta DiMage 7i. In addition to some walk-around shooting, I’ve shot three major events with it, the reunion, Scent of the Desert, and Circle of Dust.

Abby's uncle Dutch Shoffer and his wife Beverly at the Shoffner family reunion in October, shot with the S200EXR

This type of camera was once called a “prosumer,” since it was thought of as the bridge between big, expensive (at the time) professional digital SLRs, and small, more affordable consumer point-and-shoot cameras. In recent years, though, that gap has disappeared with the introduction of cheaper and cheaper DSLRs, and as a result, the “prosumer” became less popular, and those that remained were re-branded “crossovers.”

My wife Abby has a D70s, but seldom changes lenses; two years ago we got her an all-in-one zoom. The crossovers seem to address this purpose perfectly, with compact designs featuring lenses with huge zoom ranges. That’s why I like them for the trail; it reduces what I have to carry to just one camera, plus extra cards and batteries. This is particularly important on really long trails, on which I am limited in how far I can hike by how much water I can carry.

Needles district, Canyonlands National Park, October 2009, showing off the Fuji's excellent color

Of course, crossover cameras are a compromise. The imaging sensors are smaller than DSLR sensors, which results in more noise, which isn’t a problem at ISO 100. At ISO 800 and above, however, the noise is quite noticeable. On the Minolta, ISO 800 was the top of the scale, and the images were essentially unusable. The Fuji’s images are cleaner at the higher ISOs, but only thanks to more modern noise reduction.

Another compromise these cameras make is the lack of truly wide wide-angle capability. My Minolta gave me the “equivalent” of about 28mm, which is regarded as a pretty standard wide angle lens. The Fuji isn’t quite that wide, at an equivalent of 30.5mm. I found in the field that for the most part, I was able to work with this limitation. I was able to express those near-far relationships with the 30.5mm setting, and for broad overviews, I got proficient with shooting two images side-by-side to combine later in Photoshop’s Photomerge function.

Delicate Arch panograph created from two S200EXR images stitched together using the Photomerge function

Church near Newkirk, New Mexico, November 2009, Velvia film simulation mode

The lens zooms in to an equivalent of 436mm, which is impressively telephoto. Vibration reduction is built in and always on automatic, and seems to help with handheld shooting. I found, though, that it occasionally leads me into a false sense of security, and my longer handheld stuff is sometimes trashed by camera movement. There is a viewfinder warning, a little yellow camera symbol with vibration marks around it and an exclamation point.

Overall, sharpness with this lens is good, but it appears to me that with 12 megapixels crammed into such a small sensor, the camera may be approaching the Nyquist limit, meaning that it’s physically impossible to extract any more meaningful sharpness from a sensor of this size. At longer telephoto settings, there is some spherical aberration and loss of contrast, but I was able to address those problems in Photoshop without too much fuss.

One feature of this camera that I have been unable to explore is its CCD-RAW capability. The version of Photoshop I have, CS3, doesn’t support the files from this camera, and the software furnished by Fuji is, quite honestly, terrible, taking upwards of three minutes to perform any edits at all. Instead of RAW files, I’ve been shooting JPEGs, and the camera makes pretty good ones.

Old truck on the Taff farm in Duncan, Oklahoma, shot using the S200EXRs Velvia film simulation mode

The feel and handling of the camera are excellent. While it is smaller in my hands than the DSLRs I use at work every day, it still fits my hands nicely. Abby, whose hands are smaller and thinner than mine, likes its feel as well. It appears to be very well made, with alloy construction in key areas. The lens is smooth and easy to zoom, with a big, grippy ring.

One thing that really shines with Fuji cameras in general has always been color, and the S200EXR is no exception. This camera features several film simulation modes, including a mode that emulates their legendary photographic slide film, Velvia. In this mode, colors absolutely pop, yet don’t seem artificial at all. During the mid-day periods of my hikes when the sun is shining, I usually have a polarizing filter on the lens, and the sensor responds well to that combination, giving me the deep blue skies and sparklingly bright clouds that express the high desert skies.

In conclusion, this camera fills a fairly specific niche, and it fills it very well. I am happy I have it, and wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it.

The Fuji Finepix S200EXR, with a B+W screw-in lens hood

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By Richard, February 6, 2010 2:26 pm

Removing the infrared filter on my DCS-720x for cleaning; this camera does not have an anti-aliasing filter

Most digital imaging sensors are equipped with a set of filters, either adhered to the surface of the sensor itself, or, as is the case with some of Kodak’s digital SLR cameras, in front of the viewfinder mirror. Typically there are at least two filters, an infrared filter designed to block the long wavelengths that can pollute an image and show up as noise, and an anti-aliasing filter, also sometimes called a low-pass filter. The purpose of this filter is to suppress the interference caused by the mixing of two frequencies to form a third, unwanted one, which in photography is manifested as unwanted colors. Typical aliases in a digital images are opposite-color mixes, like red plus cyan, or blue plus yellow. When it’s really bad, it causes a glittery pattern nicknamed “Christmas tree lights.”

In the early 1990s, the first digital cameras didn’t have either of these filters, and the images were something of a mess. Moderns digital cameras have very sophisticated, very refined filtration. As imaging evolved in the past 15 years, however, these filters have undergone various iterations. Among other things, the anti-aliasing filter robs an image of sharpness, since it effectively blurs the image slightly to remove the aliasing. Over the years, low-pass filters of various strengths were employed. The Nikon D100, for example, had a fairly strong one. The D70, on the other hand, had a weaker one. In an effort to maximize sharpness, a couple of Kodak’s DSLRs, like the DCS-720x, the DCS-760, and the DCS-SLR/N didn’t have one at all, and relied entirely on software to handle the issue.

Red/cyan aliasing pattern in an image of my dashboard, made with the 2001-era Nikon D1h

I thought of this the other day when I was photographing ice forming on my windshield to illustrate an approaching winter storm. I was using my Nikon D1H, and I noticed that the pattern on my dashboard speaker, which is a tight matrix of small holes, was rife with aliasing.

The worst example of aliasing I have ever managed was a few years ago at Oklahoma University football media day. I was photographing Dan Cody, an Ada standout who started for the Sooners. I posed him on the field, showing the seats of the 100,000-capacity stadium behind him, with my 14mm to help emphasize Cody’s size. Unknown to me, the repeating pattern of the stands in the background was exciting the aliases in the 720x sensor to a ridiculous extent, and later that day, I found there was nothing I could do for it in software.

Wicked bad "Christmas tree lights" aliasing due to the repeating pattern of the seats at Okahoma Memorial Stadium combined with the lack of an anti-aliasing filter

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By Richard, January 26, 2010 5:41 pm

Here’s a fun little photography game we played a few years ago, which I am now resurrecting, and which you are invited to play too.

This is the original image, scanned from a 35mm negative. Click it to download the full-sized version so you can edit it.

It stared in 2000, on a trip called The Shooting Spree. Coming south out of Farmington, New Mexico, just after sunset, I saw the moon rising to my left. As I moved along, I saw a handsome peak ahead, Barber Peak, and stopped to photograph the moon rising behind it. At the time, I was mostly shooting black-and-white film, and didn’t have all that much experience with shooting the night sky in the desert. I made three exposures at about f/8, of 30 seconds, one minute, and 90 seconds. With the ISO 32 film I was using, all three frames ended up too thin (that’s filmspeak for underexposed or underdeveloped), and the best of them, made at 90 seconds, doesn’t print or scan very well.

I still thought it was a seminal moment, and, after some ponderance, decided to play around with it in Photoshop, and share it with a few friends and see what they could make of it. I got some interesting results.

My readers are welcome to download the full-size version by clicking on the thumbnail at left, then saving it to your hard drive. When you are done editing it, email the result to me  at groups@richardbarron.net and I will post it here.

Here are the results of the first round of efforts, including a couple of my own, which were quite amusing. They might give you some ideas about what you’d like to do with this image…

Image by Richard R. Barron

Image by Richard R. Barron

Image by Brenda Wheelock

Image by Brenda Wheelock

Image by Michael D. Zeiler

Image by R. E. Stinson

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By Richard, January 21, 2010 9:57 pm

A simple two-light setup with excellent results

At a basketball game tonight, one of the player’s parents joined me courtside to ask a couple of pieces of photographic advice, then stayed for nearly two quarters for what ended up being quite a cordial chat.

One of the things she asked me was, “What would be the advantage of getting an additional flash for my camera?”

I told her that while it would provide a lot more power (producing more light), the biggest advantage would be that she could start using bounce flash. I told her about the recent session I had with Abby, when she came home looking so beautiful and I photographed her. The setup was incredibly simple, involving a white blanket, a desk lamp, and, of course, bounce flash.

For those who have never bounced flash before, it is this: instead of pointing the light from the flash unit directly at your subject, you point it at an object and let the light “bounce” off that object onto the subject. Typically, this object could be a white wall or ceiling, a reflector, or some other surface that causes the light to spread out, thus illuminating the subject with a much softer appearance.

For the session with Abby, I hung an off-white blanket from the coat closet over a nearby lamp, to my right. I then simply pointed the head of my flash unit at the blanket, bouncing it toward her. As you can see, the light is soft and flattering, and in some ways resembles window light. For the amber highlight in her hair, I turned on a halogen desk lamp and set it behind her.

It doesn’t get much simpler than that, yet the results don’t get much better.

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By Richard, January 14, 2010 11:08 am

I started teaching another round of beginning digital photography Monday night. One thing we cover in the initial stages of this class is file formats. Of course, my students are very familiar with JPEGs, since these files are ubiquitous, from the photos on this blog to the shots of me at the front of the class in their cameras. I make it a point, though, to tell them about RAW files, and about their strengths and weaknesses. Anyone with experience using RAW files knows about these traits; RAW files are much larger than JPEGs, and are proprietary, meaning that they need special software to open and edit. But RAW files offer a lot too.

The image of Tracey in Vanoss with no correction, just as it came straight out of the camera

An example of the magic of the RAW file format happened the next evening, Tuesday night at Vanoss High School, where I was covering a couple of basketball games. I shot bunches of decent stuff in the third quarter, so I went into the stands and sat with my friend Tracey, who had promised she would take my class but can’t until later in the year. We talked about all kinds of stuff, but one thing she wanted to know was why her photos in gyms around the state were too dark and too yellow. I gave her the five minute tutorial on white balance and exposure compensation, then asked her if she ever considered shooting RAW files in area venues. She never heard of RAW files, but since by then the next game was about to start, I told her I hoped to see her in class this spring.

During our talk, though, she got up to wrangle her two year old, and I snapped a frame of her with my D100, which I deliberately made sure was too dark and too yellow. That’s not hard in the poorly lit basketball courts around our area. I knew that I could fix it right up in Photoshop, since of course it was a RAW file. Sure enough, it took about three clicks and a short drag of the”Exposure” slider in Photoshop’s Camera RAW dialog to remove a ton of noise, fix the white balance, and bring the exposure to where I wanted it. If I’d shot a JPEG, I might not have been able to make these corrections nearly as effectively. RAW made it easy.

Color, exposure and noise all fixed, thanks to shooting in RAW

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By Richard, January 1, 2010 12:38 am

In 1998, the company bought me a film scanner, and the computer to go with it. Within a few weeks of tweaking and adjusting, I was scanning everything. That left two 500-sheet boxes of Kodak Ektamatic SC black-and-white, single-weight paper sitting on the shelves in my office. For a while I kept them, just in case I needed them, but by the following summer, I realized I would never use them, and decided to conjure some kind of fine art project I could shoot and print on this abandoned black-and-white paper. Since I have always been drawn to the high desert, I decided to go on a driving tour of New Mexico. That tour, in July of 1999, yielded less than I had hoped, since I am, by profession, a news and sports shooter, with little experience at the time shooting fine art in the desert. I might have made 15 passable images, but it served to inspire me to return and shoot black-and-white again in September 2000. My film was usually Panatomic-X for 35mm, and Verichrome Pan Film for medium format. Occasionally I would play around with Technical Pan Film or High Speed Infrared, or even more rarely, Ilford and Agfa films.

I have boxes and boxes of black-and-white prints spanning a couple of decades. When I get them out, I am reminded of the pleasure black-and-white shooting provided me, and of how much my photography owes this heritage.

Approaching thunderstorm, Puyé Cliff Dwellings, New Mexico, July 1999

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By Richard, December 29, 2009 1:25 pm

Garden of Eden, Arches National Park, 2002; note pleasant but predictable mid-afternoon light

Photographers who shoot outdoors a lot try to take advantage of what has become known as the “Golden Hour” or “Golden Moment.” In reality, this period of time during the first or last light of day can vary depending on what you are shooting and how you want to use the light. Essentially, this moment is when the sun is low in the sky, and providing desirable illumination, whether on human faces, or the landscape all around. It differs quite dramatically from the harsh glare of midday sun, and also from the soft light of cloudy days.

Light from the Golden Moment is generally warmer, meaning that it is rich in reds and yellows that convey warmth. An additional element of the Golden Moment is that the sky itself is often beautifully lit by the setting sun, though this often happens shortly after the Golden Moment on your subjects subsides.

I look at first and last light every day, and shoot using it when I can. The only thing a photographer can control about this light is where he is when he expects the light to be right.

Garden of Eden, Arches National Park, 2004, just before sunset; note dramtically warmer tones and a more inviting character of the image

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By Richard, December 26, 2009 12:47 pm

A unique view of East Central University football practice; deleted from the gallery

One thing I stress to my photo students is the value of editing. Specifically, I tell them that no one wants to see 1200 photos of anything, and that no matter who shot those 1200 photos, only a tiny fraction of them are any good. (I cite 1200 based on a gallery of someone I knew years ago who simply uploaded the entire contents of his camera to his gallery after his vacations.) Editing is more critical than ever in the information age, since viewers of the internet look at hundreds or even thousands of images a day, and very few of them have any real value.

Of course, I make myself edit, too, and it’s never easy. As I write this, I am in the process of creating a web page of my photojournalism from 2009. I am building two pages, one of sports, and one of news. Since I shoot a lot more sports, I have more images for that page. News rounded out at about 40 images, and I felt it would be smart to make my sports page have the same number of images. I had to delete a lot of images I thought were pretty cool. But in the end, I don’t imagine page viewers are going to want to see hundreds of images.

It’s not easy, but editing is an essential tool in the box of great photographers.

Miss Oklahoma 2009/Miss Ada 2006 Taylor Treat; deleted from the gallery

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By Richard, December 8, 2009 10:52 pm

A multiple-flash plus existing-light "commercial" image of Jean Claude Grand Am

Last night was the second of our three sessions of this go-around of advanced digital photography. Last week we played with light painting and casual portraiture, and this week we put some of that into practice. One of my students, Toni, missed class because she was stranded in Midland Texas after fog grounded her flight, but I think she can catch up with us pretty quickly next week.

By the end of the evening yesterday, we found ourselves gathered around a desk, having a pretty good Q&A session.

Julie, who missed last week's class, models for a light-painting experiment

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By Richard, December 5, 2009 2:25 pm

My 50mm f/1.8 AF-Nikkor on my Nikon D1H

Most of my photography students have the same gear: a digital SLR, the “kit” lens sold with it, and sometimes a telephoto “kit” lens as well.

In the long-ago days of film cameras, SLRs were frequently sold with a 50mm lens, for several reasons. They were cheap to make, they had fast (meaning “large”) maximum apertures, and they gave a “normal” angle of view, meaning that images made with it had a perspective close to that of human vision.

In the transition to digital, the popularity of the 50mm lens waned, also for several reason. On a 15×24mm digital sensor (the so-called “DX” format), 50mm wasn’t a “normal” lens any more, but a short telephoto. There was also the advance in technology that allowed small, light, computer-designed zoom lenses to be made as cheaply as the 50mm was in the film days. These zooms, usually in the range of 18-55mm or 18-70mm, were versatile, but that’s not what made them popular. They got popular because zooming is more fun that just looking through a fixed lens.

I digress. My students have these “kit” zoom lenses, but aren’t always satisfied with the results they are getting. Frequently this is because these lenses are small and cheap at the expense of a significant factor: maximum aperture. Typically, an 18-55mm will be an f/3.5 at 18mm, and darker at longer focal length, ending up at f/5.6 at 55mm. What, they ask me, can I do to get better pictures with these lenses?

The choices are several:

• Add light. You can bring strobes, move to a brighter spot, etc.
• Crank up your ISO.
• Tolerate a lot of blur.
• Open up your aperture.

Image made with my 50mm at a basketball game last night, f/2, 1/500th of a second, ISO 3200

Ah, there’s the rub. With a kit zoom on the long end, there’s no more aperture to open up. That’s fine in blinding sun or with four White Lightning strobes in a studio, but for existing light where you want to stop action, you need bigger glass. For my students, I tell them about the joys of shooting with a 70-200mm f/2.8 or an 85mm f/1.8, but frequently they’re not comfortable dropping $500 to $1500 on a lens they may or may not be able to use regularly. In steps a hidden gem: the “fast fifty.”

Even lighter and smaller than the kit lenses, and very affordable, the 50mm lenses are a great choice for all kinds of available light shooting. I have an AF-Nikkor 50mm f/1.8, for which I paid about $90, but they come in several flavors, including the marginally brighter f/1.4 version, all the way up to Canon’s absurdly expensive f/1.2.

While it’s true that the 50mm isn’t as versatile in some situations as a short zoom, in the right hands and the right circumstances, it can shine. I’ve been shooting mine more lately, just to reassure myself that I’m not mistaken in giving this advice. The stuff I’m getting is working great; sharp, reasonably tight, clean-looking images.

There’s one last reason I like the 50mm, and this is another reason I’ve been using mine more lately: tendinitis. Now that I’m older, I can’t keep lugging the big glass to every single ball game and theater event without paying for it the next day. My 80-200mm weighs about 60 ounces. The 50mm weighs just 5.5 ounces.

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By Richard, December 1, 2009 12:01 am

Photographing a Christmas tree in the lobby of the Ponototoc Technology Center

It is always such a pleasure to have people in my class who get it, and who are there because they want to be there. Tonight’s first of three sessions of advanced digital photography gave me the privilege of hosting just such a group.

Long-time friend Toni Pyrum, now photography student, poses as we practice making casual portraits

It was a cold night, but everyone was having so much fun exploring light painting that we ended up staying outside photographing a fire hydrant for nearly two hours.

A frame from our light painting session