Looking for Superblack

I have been struggling with creating a DYI calibration card for photographing art work. Not so much in the theoretical mainly in the practical aspect of getting a true black on the card. then Today's "Here's a Thought" podcast by Brooks Jensen was on the very relevant Three Kinds of Blacks.

... then it struck me my inkjet printer doesn't do super black! (it doesn't do CMYK all at once just K)

I'll discuss how this calibration card can be used in a future post.The card itself does appear true black here because it was created in sRGB colour space (and black set to R:0 G:0 & B:0) and that is the colour space of your browser/monitor

If you art interested in a more art and philosophic perspective on photography I can highly recommend Brook's Lensworks podcasts.

Photographing Black on Black

I’ve just finished my colour theme daily photos, and finished off with a black image. I discovered largely black subjects (my camera gear) against a black background are hard to capture.  First issue is of course that black is not really a colour, it is what happens when all light (including all colours) is absorbed by the objects surface and no light (or Colour is reflected. Thus black is really the absence of colour, however expect intricate arguments on this question because a lot of folk have strong views.

Secondly taking a black on black photo with a modern digital camera Is actually very difficult if you rely on the camera’s exposure selection. Basically your camera’s light meter is trying to make the resulting exposure a mid tone grey, with perhaps some white highlights and some areas of deep shadow being black. (see photo on right). It has kept the shutter open longer than necessary and many areas that should be black not appears grey. Our eyes do not have this problem, our brain knows it was black and will not try and make it grey, we just see black.

One way to compensate for this to use exposure compensation, to deliberately underexpose your photo when you are capturing the image. This is available on most digital camera but might require a bit of investigation. Look for a little +/- button(with an icon like that shown on right). The allows the camera to shift towards under exposing (increasing negative numbers) or over expose (Increasing positive numbers). Normally this will be achieved using an EV (exposure value) which is a number to reference the amount of light reaching the sensor. Bu convention each unit increase in  EV represents a doubling on the light. (eg EV=1 is twice as much light as EV=0). For the image on the left I deliberately underexposed to EV=-3 (a 1/16 of the light compared with the image on the right above. This is much closer to what my eye sees. Some default phone camera apps may not allow EV compensations but may offer modes to achieve this eg night, snow etc. Also most DSLRs do not allow EV compensation in all modes, but you should be able to use it in P (programmed auto) Tv (shutter priority) Av (Aperture priority) and M (manual) modes.

A favourite shortcut of mine when I am not sure of the right amount of exposure compensation is to use bracketing, where the camera takes a series of exposure (usually 3) but varying the EV (offend 1 EV or 0.5 EV). Most DSLRs will let you set the number of exposure and the steps size. My camera lets be set the starting EV as well so In the series below I took EV=-1.5, EV=-0.5 & EV=+0.5.

I ended up selecting the EV=-1.5 image, and being Raw photos I have more flexibly to alter the white balance and exposure in post processing, but I have only done some minor tonal tweaking.

One problem I have not solved in my photo at the top is related to light sources. There was natural light coming from a window behind the camera (on a very dull day) and I had an incandescant side light (and had to do a little white balance in post processing). But I should have used at least one white reflector just on shot to bring a little bit of sift backlighting to highlight the outer shape of the cameras. There is always time to learn

Right Place, Right Time … now where is the camera?

I was visiting the New Eastland and there was a lot of special entrainment in each of the mall. These performers dressed in complete black where standing like statues and then moving in an elaborate synchronized dance. Wonderfully creative photo opportunity, but where was my DSLR?

However most of us always have a smartphone in our pocket. So I pulled out my LG Android and suddenly there was a crowd all filming on their smart phones, making it a little difficult to get in the prime position for the best composition. So please excuse the clutter and people in the backgrounds.

   

I have the flickr app on my phone so it also loads the phone capture up to flickr, as private, once I have WiFi connection. Which is a nice feature however when I went to straighten the images in aviary (ie within flickr) I was surprised to find there was no small adjustment rotation, aka straightening tool). These may not be wonderful photos but the are great figure gesture sketch reference photos.

The moral of the story is, don’t miss a good photo opportunity, if you don’t have your regular camera hand use your camera phone.

PhotoFriday :: back to B&W

I normally skip over the B&W effects and presets but I thought I would have a look around the OnOne’s Perfect B&W filters, to try and bring out the drama in the sky and texture in the waves in what was an otherwise bland image. Takes me back to the days of Kodak Tri-X and Ilford Grade 5.

For PhotoFriday‘s topic Black & White

Dark but not part of "Black Day" on flickr

after glow., originally uploaded by imageo.

This was an experiment of an upload directlty from photology into flickr, but on checking in, I was invited to try out the new interface format for the Photo Page in flickr. Ok its very dark, and organized differently but I wasn't too suprised and think I can live with it. However a lot of existing users are not happy and have organised a "Black Day" of protest. So expect to see a lot of black and non-photos in the flickr photostream today. Not that this is such a big deal because that is what you generally see as you wait for the next images to load as you scroll down  (ie lag displaying photos leaves black unfilled boxes for a while) anyway.

The one little problem I found is I can no longer do a Blog This to my defined blogs. Sharing to blogger now just gives a generic html link code to be cut and pasted into blogger, a bit of a retro-grade step. I had to swap back to the old version to post this.

All the other changes are leaving me and many others behind anyway, Why should this change have worried so many?

Patterns

Unexpected

I was down Ricketts Point, Beaumaris on the bay south of Melbourne. and spotted a group of black swans. I hadn’t many along the coast for the past few years and this is the second group I have seen this month. I went to get my DSLR camera and the battery was flat (sad face) but I did have my android phone and as is my preference at the moment I took at HDR camera shot (actually its three shots)

As is typical taking such a series with a moving subject (the sea gulls, the waves and even the swans themselves) I was expecting ghosting. However looking at the final result the waves and seagulls and swan on the right are all nice and sharp and just as they where in the first photo. Even though Almalence, the creators of the HDR camera app, claim the correct handling of moving objects and de-ghosting I do find this pretty amazing.