monday, march 23rd–water and woods

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16 Comments

1. Crissy, March 23, 2009:

   I think Sam is lying.

   He just wanted to draw something other than his usual boners and swastikas on the picnic bench.

2. Ken, March 23, 2009:

   actually i figured something out…

   i don’t think it’s SAM so much as 5 AM!

3. Crissy, March 23, 2009:

   Oh I see it too! Maybe! Probably! Wendy and Lisha must have been pri-tee shit faced. IF it happened at all.

4. Crissy, March 23, 2009:

   I mean, really. Who the hell goes to Lincoln Woods to fuck people? That’s so 1993.

5. k8, March 23, 2009:

   I love the rushing water pictures.

6. Aditya Sakumalla, March 24, 2009:

   Hi Ken, I was a silent admirer of your work for quite a while, but I have to say your woods-water collection is by far the most awe-inspiring and so I just had to comment. They’re all so beautiful, especially no. 6, the aesthetics and colors of the shot were just transcendental, you think you can share the settings and hardware used?

   Keep up the brilliant work

7. Aditya Sakumalla, March 24, 2009:

   sorry, I meant no. 5 although 6 has it’s own place.

8. Ken, March 24, 2009:

   aditya:

   first of all, thanks for de-lurking. 🙂

   on to your question…

   

   let me start off with the technical stuff during the shutter release:

   • canon 20d — the only body i have.
   • raw, no jpg — after making the jump to lightroom, i only shoot raw.
   • manual exposure mode — i just feel much more comfortable shooting manual. the rear quick control dial of the 20d makes this possible by giving me a separate input for aperture directly.
   • AF set to rear * button via custom function #4 — this avoids the camera refocusing during the shutter press.
   • tokina 11-16mm f/2.8 lens — fantastic ultra wide angle lens.. big, heavy, sharp. it’s on my camera most of the time. this shot was at 11mm, which is equivalent to around an 18mm on a “full frame” format in terms of field of view.
   • f4.5 — a sweet spot in terms of sharpness. i don’t like to go past f5.6 or so if i’m chasing sharpness (diffusion starts to become more of a problem).
   • iso200 — the 20d keeps iso noise very well controlled up to 1600 or so. as it was getting to be sunset, i bumped it up off its native iso of 100 to get another stop of shutter speed and only picked up a very small amount of grain/noise.

   now the post processing:

   • white balance — as shot. the canons seem to do a very good job in natural light (not so good under tungsten).
   • adobe camera raw custom camera profile — if you shoot in raw, and use some form of the adobe camera raw engine to convert your files (in LR or PS for example) you owe it to yourself to go here and create a userid, then download the custom profiles. these are basically much more “accurate” translation tables to interpret the raw image data and render it into colors and luminosities.
   • zero blacks — this is something i’ve been doing more of lately… i basically zero out any black clipping in ACR, and instead get my blacks back through the parametric tone curve using the “shadows.” i’ve found this preserves a bit more compression of the brighter luminosities instead of increasing their contrast via a global black point adjustment.
   • -100 shadows — in the tone curve section i bring back the depth of the shadows with this control. it’s not always -100, and sometimes i’ll adjust the midpoint (though in this case i did not).
   • vibrance +55 — the vibrance seems to do a good job of increasing relative color changes in the frame, without making colors too ridiculous. here i wanted to accentuate the difference between the blue water and the red/orange/yellow vegetation.
   • saturation (red orange purple magenta) — i pushed up the saturation in these color ranges, to bring some warmpth back into the shot (it was a bit “cold”).
   • crop — if i remember correctly i had to rotate this one a couple of degrees to get the water horizontal. no other cropping was done.
   • gradient tool — in lightroom there are some powerful tools to apply corrections to PART of the image, essentially masking off the other sections. in this picture i used a simple gradient tool to mask off the portion of the top third, right about where the leaves are no longer visible through the water. then i pulled down about a quarter stop of exposure (to burn down the treeline and sky reflection) and also used a little bit of negative clarity (which softens local contrast). both adjustments were subtle but tended to bring attention to the foreground element–the leaves under the surface of the water.

   it SOUNDS like a lot, but most of these corrections don’t make a huge difference. i usually like to find a point where i like the effect and it’s noticeable, and then back it off halfway to make sure i’m not overdoing it. i could tell as soon as i saw the picture that it was worth spending a little bit of time on to polish up.

   if you have any other questions, let me know. 🙂

   ken

9. Dingo, March 24, 2009:

   As usual, I love your pictures. I think my favorite from this set though is the black and white waterfall. You can miss the swan if you are not looking carefully.

10. Aditya Sakumalla, March 27, 2009:

    Wow Ken!! Thanks for all the feedback, I didn’t think you’d come back to me in so much detail–It just goes to show how much you love photography and like to share it with the world. You rock! Do you document all your settings and adjustments for each photograph cause you couldn’t have gone thought the effort just for me. Anyway, I’ve learnt quite a few valuable things from your reply and was surprised to know you use (pardon me for this) an old 20d; hard to believe you can produce art like no.5 from it.

    Actually, if I could bother you with a couple of questions more, you’d be a great help. They are as follows:

    I’m in the market for a prime lens for my 40d and I usually don’t shoot portraits; I am into landscapes, low-level shots, night, perhaps still life, but mostly street photography of candid moments. I can’t say I have a wide budget so something affordable is preferable. I don’t know a thing about camera lens brands either. All in all, I need your help in picking out the right lens, of the right brand, for the right price.

    Secondly, you wouldn’t be having any experience with apple’s aperture 2 would you? Cause I’d really like to know how effective it is for post-processing images( I do not do much touching-up anyway) and creating a work-flow.

    Well, thanks again for your reply and keep on clickin’

11. Ken, March 29, 2009:

    Wow Ken!! Thanks for all the feedback, I didn’t think you’d come back to me in so much detail–It just goes to show how much you love photography and like to share it with the world.

    well, i’ve been known to be verbose at times. 😉

    You rock! Do you document all your settings and adjustments for each photograph cause you couldn’t have gone thought the effort just for me. Anyway, I’ve learnt quite a few valuable things from your reply and was surprised to know you use (pardon me for this) an old 20d; hard to believe you can produce art like no.5 from it.

    the settings i just mentioned are mostly from the metadata that adobe lightroom appends to the jpg. it makes it MUCH easier to go back and figure out what i did.

    i just read of someone getting a lightly used (~5k shutter clicks) 20d for $275. that is an amazingly low price for such a capable piece of machinery. as you can see investments in lenses and/or experience are a much better choice vs. the latest and greatest camera body (which depreciate at an astounding rate).

    i definitely think people should seriously consider buying a used DSLR body from a reputable seller (preferably a professional who used them as backup bodies and is now upgrading)… you get HUGE bang for the buck!

    I’m in the market for a prime lens for my 40d and I usually don’t shoot portraits; I am into landscapes, low-level shots, night, perhaps still life, but mostly street photography of candid moments. I can’t say I have a wide budget so something affordable is preferable. I don’t know a thing about camera lens brands either. All in all, I need your help in picking out the right lens, of the right brand, for the right price.

    i really can’t say enough about this tokina 11-16mm… it is a fantastic lens.

    with candid street photography i’ve found you generally have to go one of two ways:

    telephoto, to “snipe” a shot from far away without being noticed.
    wide angle, to grab a shot from up close without having to compose the shot with the camera at your eye.

    almost all my my “street” shots are with the wide angle approach. for example:
    

    
    

    

    
    

    part of this came from my experience shooting from the hip with my daughter… with kids things happen so far that you don’t always have time to get down on one knee, put the camera to your eye, compose, and take the shot. i found myself holding the camera away from my body and “eyeballing” what would be in the frame. with practice (and an ultra wide angle lens) it gets easier and opens up a lot of possibilties:
    

    
    

    

    in fact, the biggest obstacle with taking these kinds of shots completely unnoticed has been the very loud mirror slap/shutter of the 20d! you have to be up close with your subject, but you don’t have to have the camera in a conspicuous place.

    now, i know that you said prime lens. the tokina is a zoom. however, one of its defining characteristics is that it has a very limited zoom range. in fact, most people basically consider it a prime for that reason. it is very much like one in some respects.

    in restricting the zoom range, tokina strove for image quality, and in the majority opinion it paid off. the lens is VERY sharp for an ultra wide, and it has one of the fastest apertures in its class (f/2.8). i picked the lens for its IQ (image quality), its focal length, and its low light capacity, and i have been absolutely thrilled with it ever since. i can’t recommend it enough. it rarely leaves my camera.

    Secondly, you wouldn’t be having any experience with apple’s aperture 2 would you? Cause I’d really like to know how effective it is for post-processing images( I do not do much touching-up anyway) and creating a work-flow.

    i don’t have any experience with it. most compare its feature-set with adobe lightroom’s. i believe they are both good programs but i have to say i do not want for much with LR.

12. Aditya Sakumalla, April 3, 2009:

    Thanks Ken, for the second round of your detailed insights. They were helpful as ever. I am convinced and looking to get that very Tokina myself–it sells for rather cheap too! I wanted to comment back when you posted the above street collection on your blog, but I guess I was too much of a lurker then! that collection was also one of my favorites because it’s so redolent and keeping with what I like in photography: capturing street life. I can’t agree with you more on being spontaneous with theses kind of shots; I often never get to raise my camera any higher than my neck and I didn’t even have a kid on my hip to thank for. I never tried zooming for ‘sniping’ shots before, because going telephoto usually gave me blur, but I hope the Tokina will change all that.

    thanks again Ken

13. Ken, April 4, 2009:

    aditya, if you’re getting blur on your tele shots is is probably due to camera movement. the “rule of thumb” for handheld shots is to use a min shutter speed approximately the reciprocal of the focal length in mm. so, for example, with a 300mm lens, you’d need around 1/300th or faster.

    what can help here is to get a lens with some kind of image stabilization, which can provide up to 4 stops of shutter speed.

    obviously when you go with the ultra wide lenses, this can be a great benefit, as much slower shutters can be handheld successfully.

    of course the SUBJECT motion is an entirely different matter.

14. Aditya Sakumalla, April 10, 2009:

    Well, I am aware of that reciprocal rule you’ve mentioned, but I don’t think I make a conscience effort in applying it; I still feel it’s the subject’s motion that’s to blame for blur. Anyway, before I get myself the Tokina, is there any noticeable wonky distortion, aberration, etc. that I should know about.

15. Ken, April 10, 2009:

    there can be some CA in cases, and i’ve heard people complain about lens flare.

    neither of them is particularly bothersome to me, but i tend to like camera artifacts like that.

16. How to Get Six Pack Fast, April 15, 2009:

    The style of writing is quite familiar . Have you written guest posts for other blogs?