Photographs of the Partial Eclipse

         A collection of photos as I photographed a projection of this morning’s partial solar eclipse from my backyard.

The Shadow Portrait Method, free light meter for digital cameras.

Looking back through my photos I notice I have a lot of “shadow self-portraits”, those shots where you take a picture of your shadow. However there is method in my madness. With a digital camera it is possible to get a reasonable idea of the correct exposure even without a light meter. Just point your camera at your shadow on the ground. Looking at the image on the back of your camera, can sometimes be difficult, because of the glare and strong reflection but even so you will usually be able to tell where the detail is in the image. If all you see is a very strong silhouette of the shadow and some detail in the ground you may be underexposed and you should do one or a combination of the following,open the aperture by perhaps an F stop, move to a lower f number, decease the shutter speed or raise the ISO a little, Alternatively you could increase The EV Value (exposure compensation). When detail is spread across the shadows and sunlit ground your exposure will probably be ok for an subject also illuminated by the same light (except if you are wanting to point at the sun or the sky!) If the sunlit ground looks washed out and the shadow not so strong and/or the shadow has the best detail you are on the overexposed side. So in this case you might close the aperture, move to a higher f number, decrease the shutter speed or lower the ISO a little. In this case you you want choose a negative EV. If you don’t trust the screen because of glare, the histograms for shadow portraits generally have two distinct bumps. If the bumps are over on the left there's a risk of under exposure, over on the right your probably find your photos are overexposed. Once your changed your setting taken another shadow portrait to check

Underexposed Shadow Detail Lost	Exposure OK	Over exposedLosing detail on the sunlit sand

Next time you are out on a sunny day, set your camera to M (for Manual) and point it down and at your shadow. Then start experimenting with a few or one of the above options. You should find you can find the correct exposure with as few a three or four test shots.

Waiting for the Watched Pot

Over the past few days I have been loading my photos (and Videos) from SD card onto my photographic laptop and timing how long it takes to load using various software packages. Its a lot like watching a pot to boil (yes the old adage is “A watched pot never boils”) it does but it takes a long time. At first the results didn’t make a lot of sense, The number of files or combined file size didn’t seem to relate to the time taken. Clearly Picasa was fastest and Lightroom 5 Beta (LR5b) was generally slowest, with Photo Mechanic (PM) and Lightroom 4.4 (LR4.4) occasionally taking the longest. This didn’t make a lot of sense because whilst a lot of folk seem to complain LR4.4 is slow, many have suggested that LR5b and PM are much faster. I suspect they are faster for JPEG and Cannon’s RAW format .CR2 but they don’t perform so well with .mov or pentax’s RAW format .PEF, then I realised there was a serious flaw in my testing. The cards I used in the two cameras were rated for different speeds, You can tell from the little number inside the circle that should be printed on the SD cards label. My Canon was loaded with a 10 (10mb/sec) but the Pentax was only a 6 (6MB/sec), clearly this has had the biggest effect on the results but like watching the pot I’ve lost interest in trying to be scientific and fair. I just need to only use SD cards rated 10 and load my photos onto my computer using picasa. Enough time has been wasted already!

Number & Size	camera	Type of files	picasa	PM	LR4.4	LR5b
52(640mb)	canon	.jpg .cr2	25	37
215(1.7GB)	pentax	.jpg .pef	32	75	80	73
11(1.13gb)	Canon	.mov	35	36	75	111
134(1.4GB)	pentax	.jpg .pef	42	54	104
184(2.4GB)	pentax	.jpg .pef	57	100	102	129
8(889mb)	Canon	.mov	28	53	86	103
13(286)	Pentax	.jpg .pef	6	22		19
72(920mb)	pentax	.jpg .pef	18		58.9	73
3(69mb)	Canon	.mov	7		15	22

Saving face, after a picasa database corruption

I spent a lot of last weekend carefully timing how long it took various programs to load my photos from cards. Picasa was the outstanding performer by now it has let me down badly. It refuses to start on my main photographic computer at all just giving me this error message and if I say yes, reporting an error with that specific file.

I have picasa on several other computers and two of them, both updated last week are showing occasional signs of corrupted data base problems (ie they often display the wrong thumbnails for recently uploaded photos. This has a frequently report problem since 3.8 but something has clearly made this worse on my computers. I suspect the 3.9 update. The recommended way to fix a corrupted database in picasa is to firstly delete picasa and then reinstalled the software a fresh. Yes that’s what it recommends!

This is fine for most features because the editing processes for your photos are actually stored in the picasa.ini files that are located in the same directory as the photos. the central databases just storing a thumbnail of the photo and its location, EXCEPT for some details if you are using face detection feature and any albums you have used. The flag that a photo might contain a face is stored in picasa.ini file BUT the detail of who is who (ie the names you have given the face are actually stored in . I suggest you might want to read the well prepared tutorial "Saving Faces When you Re-Install Picasa"

As I am in the middle of rethinking how and where I storing my working copies and archives I figure now is a good time to bit the bullet and re-installed picasa a fresh and get it to re-index only the photos and directories I want. I guess if it all goods well you probably won’t hear more in here BUT I am a little worried its going to be more complex than that! Things didn’t great off to a great start, when I tried to report why I was uninstalling picasa, I repeated got the following error!

See also my Un-Jumbling picasa update

PhotoFriday :: Temperature

For PhotoFriday‘s topic Temperature

Winter is coming, and the lighting can be dramatic

Winter is approaching and the skies are getting much more animated, In particular the glimpse of strong sunlight between dark clouds so often bringing the landscape alive. Its a good time of year to always have your camera with you and not be afraid to stop and take in the wonderful lighting effects and get a few “special” shots. Both of these shots, where taken by the side of the road when I noticed a fleeting moment of great lighting. Both where shot without filters but I did use the Adjustment brush in lightroom to lift the highlights a little. The Panorama below was created with autostitch using 8 “portrait” orientated overlapping photos.

Dark Skys

Autostiched panorama created from 6 photos.

PhotoFriday :: Remembering the Little Things

 Some older photographers may get nostalgic about the "good old days" of film, but I remember when working 1:1 meant using a magnifying glass on contact prints or the slides and negatives themselves. We have made progress!

For PhotoFriday‘s topic Little Things

Photo Importing Times

I decided to try out the loading times for some common photo management software (ie packages I have and am familiar with from my many mistresses project). All photos where loaded from the same memory card, a Lexar Platinum 4GB with a 4 speed rating. There where 24 images ( 12 photos of clouds with both jpeg & raw versions saved) with a combined file size of 225MB, taken over two days. All where loaded onto an older computer (running windows Vista) which I knew would be slower but that would give more a better chance to more accurately record and compare load times. Finally the loads followed my normal procedure to upload the photos and delete them from the card (ie I had made a copy of the cards contents and restored them between each test). In lightroom I used no extras, no keyword/exif updates and minimal preview render.

Package	Load from SD card	Smart previews	Comments
Picasa	8 secs
System Copy	11 secs		Drag & drop from card
System Move	14 secs		Drag & drop from card, set to move rather than copy.
Windows Live Photo Gallery	13 secs		* Did not load some RAW files
Synkron	17secs		** Does not include setup time
Lightroom LR5b	18 secs	27 secs	Does not catalogue matching JPEG but did load them
Photoshop Element PSE	-		knew better than to try it!

(**) I have been experimenting with using file synchronization to move my photos around my LAN and I have added using synkron as a photo import function. So I had to set up a customized synchronization task to move the photos to a folder based on the date photographed and verify the copy before deleting it

I was actually a bit shocked by these times. Whilst I already knew picasa would be the fastest I didn't realize it was faster than a file copy at system level? I now have a lingering doubt that picasa may not verify the copy before deleting the original on the card, However you do see the thumbnails of each image being created from the folder on the hard disk, which does give immediate feedback and some confidence that the file load went ok. Windows Live Photo Gallery was also fast, again as I expected, however it was disturbing that it had chosen not to load some RAW files(*) while it did load others, and there was no message about this at the import time.

All packages correctly loaded the data into two separate folders based on date taken. However there was quiet a variety in the actual names, so they all loaded into different folders in practise! This could become very frustrating.

My current preferred procedure for loading into lightroom or photoshop elements for that matter, is to only import the photos from the hard disk location after they are loaded via picassa (ie from the two directories Picasa had set up). So the following table has two times, because there are two folders, 14 photos in the first sub-directory and 10 in the second)

Package	Import From folder	Smart previews
Lr4.4	4 secs 3 secs
lr5b	3 secs 2 secs	16 secs 15 secs
PSE	6 secs 4 secs

These results are consistent with the general discussion about the new lightroom 5beta, it is somewhat faster than lightroom 4.4. The interesting outcome is that excluding the time lost swapping packages and selecting two different folders. It is clearly faster in elapsed load time to import from the cards into picasa (8 seconds) then import into lightroom (4.4->4+3=7 total 8+7=15seconds, or 5b->3+2=5 Total 8+5=13seconds). The creation of smart previews actually took longer, which is a bit of a puzzle. For a few photos this difference may not amount to much but for a full card or several full cards the time saved will be significant and measured in minutes! I am not surprised that the photoshop element was the slowest, my version 7 organiser is showing its age, and hopefully the organiser has been performance tweaked in more recent versions, I just keep PSE around for the few occasions I want advance manipulation and perhaps layers, although I usually prefer to use Corel Photo Paint in such situations.

So really I have just confirmed what I had already chosen. Picasa is my favoured mistress to load photos from camera cards and to do the preliminary organisation and weeding of my photos. Then I later import only the ones I want to keep into lightroom, my favoured mistress to finesses my raw photos, but from the date based folders created by picasa. Thus the story of more than one mistress continues … ...

Numbered Stacking, is great BUT…

I often take a number photos, in a specific set, usually bracketed groups of +/- EV settings, or adjacent & overlapping images for panorama stitching, etc. These can clutter and overwhelm your grid view or film strip. Light room has a great feature called stacking (it has been around since LR3 days) that lets you, hide the rest of the series behind the first image. It works a lot like having a set of photos underneath the first photo (normally the first photo taken, although it is possible to select the photo you want to be on top of the stack. The photo stack are identified in the library model and grid view by two vertical lines on each side of the photo. Clicking on either line will expand the stack, click on the vertical bar again with close the stack, The short cuts for this is S to open the stack (and once the stack is open press S again to close it). There are a few more stacking options under the menu item Photo/Stacking.I use this feature a lot and couldn't help noticing a very nice new way the stacks are displayed in LR5b (that's lightroom 5 beta). The stacks now have a small stack icon displayed (the icon is simple overlapping rectangles with the number inside the inner rectangle) at the upper left which shows you the number of photos in the stack. This is much more obvious than the two vertical lines (which are still there) and because I know what it is I usually leave the stacks compact. The problem at the moment is if I am showing others my recently loaded photos, they are immediately inquisitive and expand the stacks, or  want me to expand each stack. So I got to wondering was it possible to toggle off the stack numbering (and I can't find a way to do it) Then I realised it would be wonderful to be able to flag these boxes with colour (or a different shapes) to differentiate the type of stacked images, (eg HDR set, stitched panorama, group photos). Oh that’s right lightroom doesn’t yet support any form of photo merger (yet!)!
So here are a couple of interim solutions that work fine for me.

1. I must remember only show others my lightroom collections (not original folders) so they only get distracted by what I want to show them.
2. I have started to use the colour flagging to identify what are bracketed EV ranges (red) versus overlapping images for stitch panoramas (green)

Lightening, Overcast & Humid, No Glimpses of the Moon

 

I did get up especially and spent nearly an hour with my camera pointed skyward, hoping for just a glimpse of the lunar eclipse, but the skies here in Jakarta remained heavilyovercast. In fact the clouds where so low they where well lit my the city lights. The constant thunder and lightening did backlight the clouds and give hints of a few gaps, but the slightest trace of the moon, or the shadow of the earth on it, never materialized. Adding to the challenge was the extreme humidity, so everything on the camera fogged up. Even after half an hour to acclimatize, I found I still need to have my cleaning cloth wrapped around the camera.

I did manage an available light photograph of the fountain, beside which I had set up my tripod.

Cross Town Traffic

The traffic in Jakarta is a really intense, albeit very slow experience, but it is a challenge to show in still photos. Such disorganised chaos that actually still moves is pretty amazing, but oh so tedious if you are in a hurry. To help those stressed out many street corners now host massive flat screens continually showing commercials!

Watching the Sky Cloud Over

This morning I had high hope because the sky was so clear (very unusual in Jakarta at this time of year) but as the day progress the storm clouds began to form and my nightfall it was totally overcast. Not so hopeful about photgraphing the lunar eclipse tonight.

Look out for the Lunar eclipse on Friday Morning

There is another lunar eclipse about to happen on Thursday night to early Friday morning before sunrise.It will be a partial eclipse for New Zealand and eastern Australia in the hours lending up to day break. In Indonesian there will be a full eclipse earlier in the morning. I happen to be in Jakarta at the moment so I will be hoping for clear skies. Its been very wet and overcast here for the past few days but tonight there was some hope the clouds cleared and the sky was clear enough to get a good view of the moon.

I did some some decent photos for the last partial/almost full lunar eclipse in June 2011. Including a free wallpaper/poster, which you can download from flickr.

There will be 2 more lunar eclipse this year.

Taming the Glare with my Polarizing Filter

My polarizing filter has been on my camera for most of summer and it does a great job, although I have noticed the general exposure is often appears a little under exposed on some foreground detail, It is well know to photographers that such filters do a great job making the sky more interesting, specifically making clouds look whiter and giving depth to the sky. This is well know and discussed often and probably the main reason given to use a polarizing filter. However there is an even more amazing feature that filtering polarizing light.can fix. That is cutting the glare reflected on the surface of water. This glare is strong polarized itself by the reflection from the flat surface of the water,and crossing the polarizing filter normal (ie at 90°) to this actually cut the glare so you can see into the water.

Vertical	Horizontal

On my polarizing filter their is a small triangle ∆ etched into the rim of the filter, That marks the direction of the polarizing filter alignment. So I can reference this to see when it is vertical (Ie on top of the lens), Or rotated to horizontal (ie point to the right or left side of the lens). You can also see the effects are fairly dramatically through the view finder.

Underwhelming or out of balance?

Looking at the Adobe Forums and the social net, it is apparent that many users (not everyone) share my private view of the Lightroom 5 beta. It is very light for a major release, There is quiet an imbalance between what it delivers and the general user needs/expectations.Here is a incomplete list of things different folk (including me) had expected or desired to be included the next upgrade to Lightroom, but alas none have been delivered -

• LAN support, Catalogues on the server

• MultiUser access to shared catalogues
• Face Recognition
• Multi-image merges, HDR, Pano, Photofuse

• Better Publish Services to #social #net #hashtags

• Multi-Catalogue Sync/Exchange

• Custom Brush Shapes

• Non Alphabetical #keywording

• Book –> eBooks (e-Pub)
• Folder Flagging/colour

I still think Lightroom is great but I have drawn the see-saw so unbalanced because I fear Adobe might not realise, rather than achieving an equilibrium, the plank could break and the users will either just stick with version 3 or 4 or maybe abandon lightroom altogether, while they go looking for solutions to their needs elsewhere.
Version 3 was a dramatic improvement, I think everyone knows that and version 4 has some beautiful improvements in the Development module.. The Map, Book, Slideshow and Web stuff have had less universal appeal and are often not used. I can see the advanced brush healing feature saving a lot of tedium and time, but is that compelling enough for the majority of existing and potential new users? .
On a very cynical level, maybe more frequent, lighter and hopefully a little cheaper updates are just be a way for Adobe to make their Creative Cloud Service a more attractive proposition.

What is so important about 2048?

• This is the size in pixel of photos you can upload to google+ for free (as long as the longest side of your image is 2048 or smaller the image can be loaded and does not count against your 2GB limit.
• It is also the size of the DNG files (again the longest dimension) stored as the smart previews in Lightroom 5 beta.
• 2058 by 1536 is equivalent to 3.1 megapixels
• Most current smart phone cameras are around this size, or a little larger.
• Probably Ok for a 10" by 8" blow up.
• Definitely fine for a 6" by 4" print.
• It is bigger than necessary for an email or blog post.

Dimensions in pixels	Mega pixels	Jpeg File size	DNG File Size
2048 X 1536	3.1	0.5-1MB	1.2-1.8MB

 If you click on this photo you will see what 2048 by 1361 looks like on your screen. Big isn't it

Photos that are 2048 across apparently are now considered Standard Size! (at least for the web)

The forlorn pelican

 I haven't seen a pelican at the lake for some time. This shot was a good chance to play with Ligthroom 5 beta's new radial filter (aka flexible vignettes)