Winter Storms, Mat Cutters, and Other Updates

We've had some incredible snowfalls here in Michigan these first couple months of 2005. A week ago (the day before my last post) I witnessed something amazing. I was at my desk working on some photos when I heard a rumble. I thought to myself "that doesn't sound like a plane" so I ran to the window and opened it up. I thought I heard thunder rumbling off, but I figured "thunder and snow...can't be". About 30 minutes later, sitting in my living room I saw the greatest flash of light followed by a roar of thunder. Well, it seems I witnessed what is known as Thunder Snow. The was a first-in-my-lifetime experience (and everyone I asked said the same thing). It only made me wish I has been lucky enough to capture some sort of picture of the lightning in a snow storm. I did some looking around and it seems to be a rare enough event, as I couldn't find a single photograph of it anywhere. If you know of any lucky photos of such an event, I'd love to see them.

A few days later we had another snowfall. I didn't have a whole lot of time to photograph, but I figured I'd break out my extension tubes and give them a try during my lunch hour. I shot the following:



The above photo was shot with the kit lens at 52mm using one of the ProOptics extension tubes (I think I had the 13mm tube on at that point) and my Sigma 500 flash set in manual mode...I think I had it at 1/8 power. I must say I am quite pleased with the Sigma flash and ProOptics tubes (for the little bit of work I've done with them). I've yet to try the tubes on my 70-300mm APO Super Macro II lens to see just how close they let me get. We just got another snow storm today and are expecting even more snow all week. What a winter. In the next few days I'd like to make a better attempt to get out and shoot a few more snow pics, possibly some snow macros like the one above (ones which show off the texture of the snowflakes).

Last update, I said I would be committing myself to having a business plan finished by Monday (yesterday). Well....I'm happy to say I got it done. After looking around and doing some research on business plans, I must say I was quite overwhelmed by the amount of data that goes into one of those things. The samples I saw were often in the range of 30-50 pages and included all sorts of data that wasn't necessarily applicable to the sort of conditions I would be operating under. So I really started picking the plans apart and figuring out the relevant sections. I then outlined what points I wanted to cover in each section. Finally I started typing up the plan, starting with an outline and filling in the blanks (and rearranging in the process). I ended up with slightly over 5 pages of details. In all, I think it was a very valuable process. As I began I really found myself saying "what's the point of me even filling in this item" over and over again. But once it started coming together and I had all of these minute details together in one place, I started to realize how this document could end up being valuable to me.

Finally, my other news from last week was that I purchased a mat cutter. I did a lot of looking, and the Logan 450 seemed to be very highly recommended, so I went and picked one up. I found a good sale and walked out the door with one for $102 brand new. I also picked up 2 different sheets of mat board. I cut a few mats and realized "hey, this is quite easy". I was so pleased with how well it worked that I decided I was definitely going to cut all of my mats this way. I went up to the store a couple more times and bought a bunch more mats. I also tried my hand at cutting out a 7 picture, dual layered collage mat. I didn't do too bad for my first time around, but it was a bit slow going and I was just a little sloppy with the cuts. Hopefully both of those will improve my next couple of times around.

In spite of how well the Logan 450 worked, there were a few downsides. First was the difficulty in squaring up 40" mat board. You have this 40" long side, but the perpendicular bar you are squaring it against is only a couple inches long. It was hard to get very accurate there. I found I was just better off marking the mat board and eyeballing it to line up in the cutting grove. I also found that the 4 or 5 inch max border size you can cut (if you want to use the parallel bar) was a bit small for doing collages. I had to forgo the bar and (once again) eyeball the line into position.

Both of these problems would be solved with a better model (like the 750), which has a long squaring bar as well as an optional extension board for cutting larger borders. Unfortunately that model would have ended up costing me twice as much, plus another $100 or so for the extension board. Instead, I'm looking into ways that I can rig up the 450 on my own to provide both of those features for a cost of only about $20-$30. I'll post back once I figure out exactly how I want to do it.
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Getting a business rolling...

I've been thinking lately about what my goals are for my photography. The number one goal for me over the past 10 months or so has been to gather up a nice collection of photographs and to eventually start selling prints at art fairs as well as online. I know it's not usually the way to get rich in photography, but it means the most to me. I'm not particularly interested (at least at this point in time) in doing paid assignments (weddings, corporate shoots, journalism). I don't intend for this to become another job where I work for someone else taking the shots they want. Selling prints allows me to do photography on my terms....I take the shots I want, produce the prints I'm proud of, and don't worry if someone's not thrilled with my work (they just don't have to buy it).

So now it's about time I start transitioning into the next phase of the process...thinking more about business aspects. I've been putting together a list of things I need to do and think about. Today I mailed off the paperwork for my sales tax license. I consider that my first official step. Hopefully that will jump start my drive and motivation to get things done. At least the simple act of finally dropping it in the mailbox has gotten me a bit fired up about everything. The next thing I'd like to do is work on a business plan. I tend to wander aimlessly if I don't lay out a clear direction for what I need to accomplish. That's just my personality. I probably could have done more by now if I had done that 6 months ago, so the last thing I want to do is put it off. So I've been doing some initial research into writing business plans and coming up with a few ideas, but I'm still early in the process. However, I know myself...if I don't put my mind to it, I'll drag the process out and still be working on it in a month. So here is my goal: Tuesday I do some reading. Wednesday I do a rough outline, and then I work on doing some more research and refining it over the next several days. One week from today (Monday, February 28) I want to...no, I will have my initial version complete. So that's goal #1.

The next thing I need to do is get to work on gathering up my best prints, post processing, then printing and matting them, and even framing a few. I've been told to sell matted prints rather than framed prints, but having a few framed ones on hand is probably a good idea to show off their real potential. I've been picking up some supplies over the last couple months. I have a few frames ready, several mats, and some backing board. I'll need to pick up more of those, plus some plastic baggies that the prints go into. After that I need to work out a web site and some business cards. I should also put together a little portfolio of photos...a book I can take with me showing off a bunch more of my photos, even if I don't have them all available and matted (would allow me to take custom orders).

And of course, through all of that, I need to continue to take more photos. I still haven't been taking as many as I should, though I do have a backlog of photos I need to process, print out, and upload. I've been getting excited to go do some more shooting. I've been reading "Learning to See Creatively" by Bryan Peterson. It's a really good book. I'm about halfway through it and it's been giving me some ideas. I should finish it up in the next week or so (I'm not that fast of a reader, plus my priority should be more towards my business plan). As soon as I get the book finished, I'll post a review here.

I'll finish up here with one last thing. A week ago I started putting together this little list of things to do on a post-it sized sheet of paper. For the last thing on my list, I tried something different. I've always read/been told to write myself little inspirational/motivational messages. It's always seemed to me to be a rather hokey idea, but I finally figured "what the heck" so I added one last item onto the list. It seems to be working. I look at that list every day, and it really makes me want to get things done. I've written lists before and then never follow through, but I think I realize this time that if I ignore my little message I'll be letting myself down. This time I'm really starting to get things done. So what was my message?

STOP SCREWING AROUND!!!
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Ohio Lighthouses...applying some new ideas.

A few weekends ago my wife and I made a trip up to Port Huron, MI to try and get some winter lighthouse pictures to add to our collections. It was an OK trip, but I wasn't fully satisfied with what we saw (we only made 3 stops, and one of them was on coast guard property so we could only photograph over the fence). So this last weekend, we decided to hit some more lighthouses. Being that the sun is so low on the horizon, we made the mistake last November of hitting some lighthouses on the North side of Lake Erie. Not wanting to face similar conditions (with the resulting less-than-stellar photos), we decided it would be a good idea to head for the South side of Lake Erie, so Ohio here we come!!!

Being that we had limited winter daylight, and we didn't plan on making this an overnight trip, we picked a handful of lighthouses to hit from Port Clinton to Lorain. By the time morning rolled around, there was some very nasty fog which didn't clear up until sometime past 11AM. The thought did occur to me to get out early and get some cool lighthouse-in-the-fog shots. However, I remembered last time we tried that the photos didn't come out nearly as good as they did in my mind. So, we waited until around 9AM to leave, getting us to our first lighthouse right around 11:30AM.

We got some good shots on the trip. I was especially pleased with the shots I got from the Marblehead and Huron Harbor lighthouses. Lake Erie was frozen over as far as the eye could see. I took advantage of the opportunity to walk a short distance out onto the ice so that I could capture the frozen shoreline in a few of the shots.

While I was out taking shots, I figured it would be a good opportunity to try out some of my new ideas picked up from "Understanding Exposure". First, I decided that I was going to shoot mostly in M mode.

In trying to look up just how many of my shots were manual, I noticed a bug in C1. It seems that it's reporting my manual mode shots as being shutter priority. Interesting....

Anyway, my purpose for shooting in M was (as I mentioned in my last update) to try and avoid the pain of dealing with erratic meter readings in Av or Tv when pointing the camera at slightly different subjects. Since taking pictures of a given setting should give roughly the same exposures, I was hoping to be able to set it and (mostly) forget it.

So after switching to M mode, I pointed the camera at the (clear blue) sky to take a meter reading. Unfortunately, I was expecting to have to do a lot of fiddling with settings, so I didn't clearly make note of what my original adjustments were, but as best as I can recall I originally came up with 1/200 or 1/250 @ f/11 with ISO 100. In my sample shots, there was a little bit of blown out highlights in the snow and sky, so I bumped the shutter speed up to 1/400. This gave perfect results for almost everything. When pointing directly towards the sun, I did bump up to 1/500 to avoid blowing out the sky immediately surrounding the sun, but other than making that adjustment every now and then, the settings seemed to be fine. When going into the shadow of the trees, I did have to go to a 1/160 to 1/200 shutter speed, but that was the majority of my fidgeting.

The end result is that I got some great photos with these settings, and I enjoyed myself a lot more in the process . Not having to take the same shot 2 or 3 times because the meter readings would jump all over the place was a relief. I also found that after a while I was plenty comfortable that the exposure was good, and I found myself looking down at the LCD (ie: "chimping") a heck of a lot less.

So here are a few of my favorite pics from the trip. The rest of the pics can be found here: http://www.pbase.com/ldkronos/lighthouses


Marblehead Ligthouse


Watching over a frozen Lake Erie


Huron Harbor Lighthouse


Geese on the Portage River - Port Clinton


Sea Gull plays Spin the Bottle







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My thoughts on "Understanding Exposure"

As I mentioned last time, I decided to pick up a few gifts for myself after not getting any photography books for Christmas. Among those was "Understanding Exposure" by Bryan Peterson. Now, I first must say that this book certainly had a lot to live up to in terms of expectations. For many, many months now I've heard nothing but praise about this book and how helpful it was. So how did it live up to the hype?

After reading though this book, I've been reminded of something I touched upon in one of my entries a while back, and that is how I take some of the things I know for granted. I've had a very good understanding all along of how shutter speed & aperture affect the captured exposure, and it's something I've always assumed everyone else has just picked up on. I therefore was expecting this book to contain some sort of "magic" of which I had no clue existed...something that was going to transform the entire way I thought about photography. Well, as it turns out, about 80% of the important stuff covered in this book is all about how aperture and shutter speed come together to create depth of field, motion blur, freezing action....stuff like that. I'd just forgotten that not so many people understand how that works and how to use it to their advantage. So, there was no "magic" element in the book for me.

So does this mean I was disappointed by the book? Not by a long shot. It was just one of those cases where I built the book up so high in my mind, there was no way it could have lived up to what I expected. Again, I had no idea what I thought it was going to teach me...I just thought it would contain that unknown "magic".

Not wanting to come away from the book hating it, I was determined to look a little deeper into the book and find the things there that I though might be helpful to me. Well, I had no trouble finding some interesting ideas. Some were a bit new to me, while others I had known but just kind of glossed over before and not thought much about. As I went through the book, I made note of what I thought were the most important things I wanted to remember when I was done. Here's what I came away with.

Once you get to understanding how to use shutter speed and aperture to create various effects, there was one concept in that book which I thought was the most important: The Creatively Correct Exposure. "A creatively correct exposure always relies on the one f-stop or the one shutter speed that will produce the desired exposure". The idea here is that, while you can take a picture using any of a half dozen to a dozen different aperture/shutter speed combinations and maintain proper exposure, there is usually only one of those combination which will give the effect that will make a good photo into a great one. Its a concept I'd like to try to focus a little more on. Occasionally I find myself taking pictures worried about the depth of field, and then later on I realize what I needed to be concerned with was a slow or fast shutter speed. Its really easy with modern cameras, and especially with digital, to just start snapping away at a scene with whatever setting you might have left on the camera for your last shot, and probably just leave it in Av or Tv (or heaven forbid...full auto) to let the camera determine the correct exposure. The idea is to stop and think first: "what effect will make this scene jump out of my photo, and what setting will achieve that effect"

The next most important thing I took from the book was to reexamine how I do my exposure settings. Tv and Av modes make it really easy to just pick the one setting you want (the one that will give you the "creatively correct exposure"), point the camera, and take the shot. In the ideal world, the camera would determine proper exposure and you'd end up with a nice photo (not to dark, but not blown out). Well, thats a nice theory, but it never quite works out like that. It seems inevitable that I take the shot and the sky ends up half blown out. So I set the exposure compensation to underexpose by a stop or so and then try to retake the shot. Only this time, I point the camera ever so slightly different and the meter gets a different reading. This time it makes a good guess at exposure, but I've told it to underexpose, and the end result is a dark image. Even without using exposure compensation, just point your camera a couple different ways and the exposure will jump all over the place (1/500 here, but turn a few degrees and now it says 1/250). The end result is that if I'm trying to take 3 or 4 angles of a given shot, I might end up taking 6 to 12 attempts to get those 3 or 4 angles all exposed properly. Its really a frustrating thing to deal with.

As I was reading through the book, I realized just how often manual mode was used and how little emphasis was placed on Av and Tv modes. It seems that these days, using manual mode excessively is interpreted by people one of 2 ways: you're an old timer who can't get with the times (we have smart cameras now, grandpa...they're smarter than you) or you're a newbie who's trying to learn to swim by jumping in the deepest end of the pool. Of course, it's well accepted that even manual mode has it's proper place and time, but still...if manual mode is your everyday setting, you are likely to find people looking at you one of those 2 ways.

However, manual mode is a wonderful tool to combat those jumping-exposure problems I talked about. I noticed how Bryan was alway saying he pointed the camera at this or that and took a reading in manual mode, then pointed where he wanted to actually take his shot and fire off a frame. Of course, you can do this same thing in Av or Tv by using the exposure lock feature on your camera. The trouble with that is, every time you want to take a shot, you either need to keep the exposure lock held down or take the reading every single frame. The thing is, even if you are recomposing the scene, often the exposure is going to be about the same. So why not just take the reading once, leave a little bit of headroom so a slight variation in lighting doesn't blow out the shot, then just fire away multiple angles. This is a concept I plan to work with quite a bit in the future.

In the process of taking readings for shooing in manual mode, one thing that comes to mind is where do I point the camera to take the reading, and what kind of reading can I expect? Bryan gives a few pointers for different situations. Is there a bright sky? If so, point the camera at the sky (but not straight at the sun) and take a reading. Chances are that the sky is the brightest thing in the scene and your exposure will come out best. Trying to take a shot of something that's back lit? Again, point the camera to expose the background properly (but again, don't point it at the sun...point it to the side of the sun) and your exposure should come out ideal. Taking a shot of a water sunset? Point at the reflection in the water and take your reading. Is there no sky, but lots of green in the shot? If so, point the camera at the green, and then underexpose by 2/3 of a stop. Is it night time? Just meter the sky and let everything else silhouette. Shooting a portrait? Move in really close so your subject fills the frame, take your reading, then back off to get the composition you want. Also mentioned is a concept of using your palm as a substitute for carrying around a grey card.

Another concept from t he book that I just loved was the "who cares" shot. Sometimes you want your shot to have huge depth of field, so that everything is in focus. Other times you want a shallow depth of field. But then there is this whole class of photos in between where you could say "it really doesn't matter". In these cases I was always inclined to just pick a random aperture (and usually, it was whatever aperture I used in my last shot). However, an important concept to remember is that lenses always have a range where they produce the optimum quality results. Usually this is in the f/8 to f/11 range. So the whole idea is, if I don't care what the depth of field in the shot is, then I'm going to use f/8 to f/11 so that I get the best quality image possible.

Other interesting notes:

Aperture_diameter = focal_length/f_stop (ex: 50mm lens, f/2.0 ==> 50mm/2 = 25mm wide aperture). Doesn't really mean much in terms of how I work, but it's an interesting little factoid.

Use a sprinkler and back lighting to simulate rain shots (use with fruit, flowers, anything that looks good in the rain).

Back light semi-transparent object (like leaves) to make them glow.


So despite this entry starting off sounding like I was going to bash the book, the book is really quite excellent, and I'd recommend it to anyone (even an accomplished expert).

Yesterday I took a trip to get some winter lighthouse photos. In the next day or two, I share a few of my shots from that trip along with some of the ways I applied the ideas from this book to come up with some nice shots.
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Christmas Toys - Part 2

So, after all of the troubles I wrote about yesterday in my quest to get an updated version of my Sigma 500 DG Super EO-ETTL flash, I finally can get to the details of that and the rest of my presents.

The Sigma flash is actually quite a nice unit. For only $200, it holds up quite nicely next to the Canon 550EX flash (which runs about $100 more). It has nice range, supports ETTL (and ETTL-II...as I discussed yesterday), second curtain synch, and a bunch of other stuff. One feature which it supports (which the Canon doesn't, at least as far as I could tell) is that it can serve as an optical slave. That means that you can have the Sigma detached from the camera, and it watches for another flash to go off and then triggers itself. This is nice for getting 2 angle flash coverage. It doesn't seem possible to trigger the Canon 550EX remotely using the Digital Rebel's built in flash. The downside to using the optical slave is that the Digital Rebel does a pre-flash for determining ETTL exposure. That pre-flash is done just BEFORE the exposure begins, and unfortunately it also triggers the Sigma so that it goes off before the exposure. The work around for that (at least for now) is to hold the flash exposure lock button (FEL) on the Digital Rebel. That gives off a pre-flash when you press the button but (as long as you keep the button held down) doesn't do one before opening the shutter for exposure.

One downside I've noticed so far with the Sigma vs. the Canon is that the Canon has auto focus assist for most (all?) of the auto focus point, whereas the Sigma only has center focus point assist.

In addition to receiving the Sigma flash from my wife, she also got me a Sto-fen Omni Bounce for the flash. The omni bounce is just a translucent piece of white plastic that fits over the head of the flash and diffuses the light from the flash (at the expense of a few stops of light). I haven't had the chance yet to experiment with this and see just how worthwhile it is (or if it was just a waste of money). I'm considering getting some other bounce attachments for the flash. Possibly an 80-20 bounce unit. The purpose of such a unit is that you configure the flash head to bounce off of the ceiling, but then you put this attachment on and it lets 80% of the light bounce off the ceiling like it normally would, but it immediately bounces 20% of the light back forward. It gives you some stronger direct lighting while still providing plenty of light to bounce around filling in shadows.

The last gift my wife got me was a set of Pro-Optics extension tubes. These tubes allow you to focus with an ordinary lens at a much closer distance, giving you extra magnification and essentially turning it into a makeshift macro lens. The extension tube set comes with 3 tubes: 13MM, 21mm, and 31mm. You can use the tubes individually, or combine them in any combination for up to 65mm of extension. A lot of people have been raving about the Kenko extension tubes, but these tubes are a much better deal. They are about $40 less expensive, and unlike th Kenko tubes, they actually support EF-S lenses right out of the box, without making any cutting modifications (and voiding the warranty) like the Kenko requires. The only advantage I can see of the Kenko's is that they are 12mm, 20mm, and 36mm for a total of up to 68mm of extension...ever so slightly more the the Pro Optics, but that's so slight it's not worth the extra cost and lack of EF-S support (at least in my book). I've done a little but of work with these so far, but I'm just now getting around to it (since I really needed to have my flash exchange resolved first to use it to work with these things). I'll post some updates and samples later this week.

Lastly, on my Christmas list I also had several other things I didn't get. It seemed everyone would rather buy me video games from the store rather than order stuff online. However, there were some books there that I really wanted, so the week after Christmas I went and bought them as a gift to myself. I picked up "Understanding Exposure" and "Learning to Set Creatively", both by Bryan Peterson, as well as "Night Photography" by Andrew Sanderson. I've already finished the first book and am just now getting started into the second on. I'll post some of my thoughts on those in the coming week or so.
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Christmas Toys - Part 1

OK, so it's already a month past Christmas and I'm just NOW getting around to saying what I got? Well, bear with me, because I have a pretty good excuse.

When I created my list, I picked out a number of photography accessories I was interested in, including some books, some cokin filters, extension tubes, and a flash. The flash was the major ticket item on the list. I was interested in the Sigma EF-500 DG Super flash. It is very much similar to the Canon 550 EX flash (a few things better, a few things worse), but $100 cheaper. However, there was only one problem...Sigma released a new version of the flash with the same model # but a different part #.

According to some of the Sigma tech support people and the FAQs on their web site, it seemed that the new version of the flash added support for ETTL-II, which the old version was missing. Being that ETTL-II is supposed to be a function of the camera, that didn't seem to make a whole lot of sense. However, it is worth noting that Sigma builds their Canon equipment by reverse engineering the hardware, not through official licensing. Therefore, it is conceivable that they reverse engineered the spec incorrectly, and that mistake only shows itself once you try to take advantage of newer feature. In fact, this very type of thing has happened several times before, where a Sigma lens which worked with older Canon cameras fails on a newer model and needs to be sent back to Sigma to be rechipped before it will work. So it seemed very possible that this is indeed what happened with this flash.

Now, the Digital Rebel doesn't have support for ETTL-II, but since I anticipate upgrading my camera body at some point, it only seemed to make sense that, given the choice of two flashes otherwise identical in features and price, I should choose the model with ETTL-II support.

So, back to the issue of locating one in stock. Looking around, Amazon was the only one I saw specifically listing the new part number, but they were continually out of stock. Then, after keeping an eye on the flash at several places, I noticed that B&H delisted the flash with the old part numbers and listed a new flash with a different B&H part # and the Sigma part # corresponding to the new model. That seemed like a good sign, so I told my wife that she could now order the flash from B&H if that was what she was going to get me.

So, Christmas arrives, and I open my gifts and find (among other gifts, which I will get to in my next update) the Sigma flash I asked for. The box said "EO-ETTL" on it (which was an indication of the new model...the old one just said "EO"), however the flash on the inside was only labeled EO. It seemed someone had put an old model flash into a new model box. A quick check with Sigma tech support indicated that this was indeed the old flash, and that it would NOT support ETTL-II. Checking with other people on internet message boards, it seems many people had the same problem, and got the same advice from Sigma. One of the higher ups from B&H even chimed in and was also under the impression from his conversations with Sigma that there was a difference. So with that, I contacted B&H to arrange for an exchange of the old version for the new version. I sent back the flash and included a notice indicating how to identify the new model flash and to ensure that I get the correct one this time.

A few weeks later I finally receive my replacement, only to find that once again I received the old flash in the new box. So it was with displeasure that I contacted B&H to arrange to resolve this problem, only they couldn't guarantee that I would get the correct one next time. At that point, I was prepared to simply ask for a refund, however, that's when the story took an interesting turn. B&H contacted Sigma once again, this time speaking to the company president, and Sigma seemed to reverse their stance on the issue, indicating that the differences were purely cosmetic. That seemed mighty shady...like they were trying to cover it up while unloading all the old inventory on unsuspecting customers. However, there was also another detail...several people with the 20D camera (which DOES support ETTL-II) were claiming that they were seeing definite improvements with the old flash on the 20D versus the Digital Rebel, a sign that ETTL-II was working correctly. In addition, one person indicated that they saw absolutely no difference between the old and new versions of the sigma flash when used on the 20D, further evidence that they were the same. However, I imagined that there could still be some differences that might only show up under special conditions. Also, in spite of Sigma's president's statement, their web site was still indicating that the old model flash did NOT support ETTL-II.

At this point, I didn't know what to thing. Then a few days later, Sigma finally updated their FAQ to indicate the flashes were the same, and the only differences were cosmetic. With this public endorsement of the facts, I was ready to take off my tin foil hat, forget the idea that sigma was trying to pull a fast one, and accepted the idea that Sigma had just made a mistake, and the flashes WERE the same in every way that actually mattered to me.

Luckily, I was still waiting on B&H to send me the UPS label to ship my second flash back to them. In light of the new evidence, I decided to cancel the return. So, after getting my flash for Christmas and not being able to use it for nearly a month, I finally was able to take it out of the box and slap it on my camera. Tomorrow, I'll update with a little about the flash as well as my other Christmas presents.


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Images Are Fixed....Somewhat

Well, it took a bit of a hack to do it, but I managed to get the images working. And contrary to what I said, my hour or so of scripting was NOT a waste. In fact, it was a nice start. With a lot more hacking, I have a nice generic script working to serve links to any of my pbase images, and it does it automatically, so I don't have to add any files or settings for each new image.

What the script does is take an image ID and size from the URL query string. It then uses those parameters to construct a url to request from pbase. This url returns the pbase page in which the specified image of the specified size is displayed. The script then parses out the image url from the rest of the text and html. Now, at this point, my instinct was to tell the browser to redirect to the pbase image url. That seemed to work fine when viewing images, so I built in a bunch of intelligent url caching and such. Then when I put the links into a web page, I ended up with one problem. When redirecting off a single image or a local html page, the web browser doesn't specify a referrer. However, when viewing an image embedded into a web page from a web site, the referrer DOES get sent to pbase's server. Well, it turns out that some of their servers reject your request when there is a referrer from another site.

So my next attempt was to rewrite the script to have it download the images and cache the entire image locally. When the script does the request, it's sure not to pass along a referrer, so all works fine. With that problem solved, the last issue was what to do about the resized images that were missing. My solution there was to attempt to use the real image of that size from pbase, but when the image was missing, I found the largest available sized version of the image, downloaded, resized it locally, and saved it to a file. This seems to work fine, because I've yet to find any images where the original size was missing. However, I coded the script to handle that situation if it does occur. If the best image available is smaller than the size requested, I don't bother to upsample (what's the point). I just return the smaller image.

So, a little programming trickery and I've now hacked it to work. Now back to...what was this blog supposed to be about...oh yeah, photography!
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Update on Broken Links

Well, it seems that the problem with the broken links is actually due to some serious problems over at pbase.com. It would seem they had some drive failures and have been having problems recovering. From what I can gather, people have been complaining about this off and on for a few months now. No word from them when they expect to have it fixed.

To resolve the issue with the links, I started working on a script that would take the image request, figure out how to get the image from pbase, and substitute the URL in it's place. Seemed to work fine with my test images, but as soon as I went to try using it to fix a blog entry here, I discovered that it's not just a problem of broken pbase external links. While that is a major component of the problem, it also seems a bunch of the images are missing in the resampled sizes, which are what I post in these blogs. As a result, the hour or so of scripting that I just did appears to have been wasted, as not all the images are there.

Even programming prowess and trickery can't seem to overcome this problem. I might just have to give in and find a new place to host these images. I'm disappointed that pbase can't get this fixed any sooner.
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Broken Links

Well, looking back through my blog, I realize now there are a bunch of broken links. I've seen people complaining about linking to pbase lately, but never got around to checking out my stuff. Now I see a lot of it's broken. Now I have to go through and see what I can do about it.

Also, I just had a though...my month+ long absence from posting updates combined with the broken links probably made a few people think this blog was now officially history. Well, it certainly wouldn't have been a record for the fastest site to go stagnant, but I'm not about to throw in the towel here after only 3 months. So I apologize again for the lack of updates. I promise to do better.
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Getting Back Into Things...Custom Color Profiles

Wow, long time since my last update. Really didn't mean for this to happen. Time to sum up what's been going on.

Since my last post in December, I spent some time working with Wayne from my photography class (which has now ended). He picked up a GretagMacbeth Color Chart, and we did some work with Adobe Photoshop setting up some custom RAW conversion profiles. Normally I do all of my RAW conversion with C1, which doesn't give you the option of setting up custom profiles (or at least the LE version doesn't...not sure about pro), but it does have some built in profiles, including one for the Digital Rebel. I really couldn't imagine having to go back to Photoshop's RAW workflow (very primitive and clunky compared to C1). However, my goal was to learn how custom profiles work, learn how to create them, and then decide if the difference was significant enough to consider using Photoshop for RAW conversion, either full time or (more likely) just to process my most important images.

The first step is to lay out your color chart, get it very evenly lit, and then take your shot. You want to get the chart as straight on as possible (without shadowing it) and to get it exposed as hot as possible (without blowing it out). After you do this, you then load the image in Photoshop's RAW converter, set the exposure, set white balance, then adjust brightness contrast and shadow, and finally the saturation. The goal in the above adjustments is to get certain patches on your exposure of the color chart as close as possible to the reference numbers on the source color chart. Finally, you go through the settings on the calibrate tab, adjusting them all repeatedly until everything is as close as possible. Its a real pain to do it, but when you are done, you should end up with a reasonable close match.

Well, our first time through it, for the life of us, we just couldn't get anything to match up very well. We went strictly by the numbers, and when we finally got things not perfect, but as good as they wanted to get, our colors were horribly wrong. We spent a couple hours working on this without success before finally calling it quits for the day. My hope was that I'd be able to go home and work on my own a little more freely and be able to figure out what went wrong.

Well, it didn't take me long at all to figure out what happened. The reference chart we were using was designed in the PhotoPro RGB color space, and the (R,G,B) values printed on it were the values in that color space. However, the images we were working with were in AdobeRGB color space, and we were trying to get the (R,G,B) values in AdobeRGB to match the (R,G,B) values for PhotoPro. A recipe for failure.

So, feeling stupid enough, I got back on track, created color charts for working in AdobeRGB and sRGB space, and was able to hammer out a reasonable configuration. However, it was a real pain and very nerve racking since you can never get it perfect and changing a setting to make one color a better match ends up making another color a worse match. My next attempt was to download the ACR-Calibrator script written by Thomas Fors. It goes through the process of RAW conversion iteratively changing each parameter a little at a time until it finds the best set of parameters. Seems like a quick and easy script to run. Well, it's certainly easy, but not quick. The process took over 2 hours on my AMD 2800+, as it took nearly 900 RAW conversion to come to a solution. And the results were quite promising, matching much better than my by hand configuration did.

So, how did it end up? Well, the grayscale patches on the chart matched up very well, but the colors were hit an miss. Some were nearly indistinguishable from the source chart, but other were way off. So after all of this, the real question was, how did it hold up to C1? Well, it was a very mixed result. First off, it feels like a really unfair comparison since Photoshop gives you all these option to adjust it precisely, and with C1 you really just have to eyeball things and make a few slight tweaks. However, you have to remember that comparing what kind of results you get with the options available to you is what this whole test was about. So with any unfairness safely out of mind, here is what I felt after coming up with my best approximation in C1.

The grayscale patches were definitely closer in Photoshop, but the color patches were a toss up. Overall, I think Photoshop did a better job matching the brightness of the colors. C1 tended to give brighter results on many, but reducing the brightness in C1 to make those colors match would just make others darker. I don't doubt that with enough tweaking (contrast, curves, etc) I could get C1 looking better (and this would probably give better results for the grayscale patches too). On the other hand, when it came to the tone of the color, I think C1 tended to give better results. The results from Photoshop just seemed to have strange tints to them.

So in the end, I didn't seem to be satisfied with any real improvements in Photoshop. I think I'd be more likely to get a better match in C1 by just adjusting the levels and such. In addition, this custom profile business seems very theoretical. Yes, you can get a profile set up for a shot, but realistically you should have a custom profile for each ISO setting under each different lighting condition. That seems like too much of a pain. I'd probably end up with just a few profiles for different conditions, and then use the one that is closest. I'm not sure that approximating in Photoshop is necessarily any better than approximating in C1. Seems like you'd lose out on the extra flexibility that Photoshop offers.

Finally, when it came down to it, I started thinking about how important the whole idea of precise color matching is anyway. Certainly there are those really art oriented people, who will raise a fuss if the colors aren't exactly as they saw at the time...wanting to be true to the spirit of the original subject and all. Myself, I seem to find myself happy with close approximations. Who's to say that the "true" colors are the best. I can certainly come up with photos that give me satisfying results in C1.

So in the end, it might seem like wasted time, but it was educational, and it was also reassuring to prove to myself that C1 is indeed the right tool for me. It's never bad to go back and reexamine your tools. As you gain experience and knowledge, you may find yourself outgrowing tools that seemed fine before. It felt good to prove to myself that C1 is NOT one of those tools I have outgrown.

So, that was my experience working with custom color profiles. In a few future posts (which I'll really try to get up this week) I'll mention my other year end/new years projects and my Christmas goodies.
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