Archive for the 'photo technique' Category

Thanks to ObsCar I ran across an article by Jeff Brouws where he discusses railroad photography and what makes compelling railroad photography (Please read A Word on Jeff Brouws  on the page preceding Jeff’s article).  

“…it’s also important to note: when you realize everything in the railroad landscape is potential subject matter, it’s liberating and opens up pictorial possibility”  — Jeff Brouws

In the article Jeff briefly touches on some of the history of railroad photography aesthetics and offers 6 attributes that differentiate the railroad photographs of the likes of Steinheimer, Hastings, or Shaughnessy from their predecessors.

“Rail photographers of the 3/4 school were concerned with one thing: documentation, not interpretation, emotional content or aesthetics”  — Jeff Brouws

Jeff continues his discussion with examples of non-railroad photographers and their approach.  He points out that their view point was not primarily the trains but of subjects related.  Their success was based not on a compelling railroad photograph but how the photograph supported their subject and continued their story.  In fact in the discussion of Joel Sternfeld’s A Walk Along the High Line Jeff makes a strong point urging railroad photographers to look at things differently than they have because there are so many opportunities that exist.

I encourage readers of this blog to take 30 minutes and read Jeff’s article.  I believe you will come away with a fresh viewpoint about railroad photography and possibly photography in general.

http://www.rlhs.org/rlhsnews/pdfs/nl28-2.pdf 

Back in March while the UP was still detouring around the Frazier slide I spent a couple of days chasing around the Oregon Trunk.  During one trip I finally photographed something I’ve wanted to photograph since I started carrying a DSLR.  That something is a panorama including a train.  Of course this requires the train to be stopped so just the right circumstances had to be present to make this work.  In March everything lined up….

1. A northbound UP detour took the siding at Oakbrook, OR.  The DS did not give them permission to leave the SSS Oakbrook in reverse.   Because of this the conductor had to walk up from the rear so the engineer pulled just far enough into the siding to clear and then stopped.  This meant the train was not around another corner at the NSS Oakbrook allowing more of the train to be viewed.
2. The sun was out and generally pointed in the right direction.
3. I could see nearly the entire train ( no trees or other obstructions).
4. I had the thought to remember to take the panorama instead of just shooting one shot (ahh, at age 41 this can become an issue).

This image is a 31 photo panorama (3 horizontal passes) that measures 13,481 X 4021 pixels (45″ X 13″).  On disk it is 1.6GB (TIFF files including layers).  The original images were all processed together using Lightroom’s sync features and then exported as separate TIFFs.  I used Photoshop’s photomerge to combine them to form the large image.  Rendering takes about 20 minutes.   The best statistic of all is I had a blast putting it together!

The Q-RVPW1-06 stops just inside the SSS Oakbrook.  This train is detouring over the Oregon Trunk because of the massive slide at Frazier in the Oregon Cascades. 

As I mentioned in a previous post railroadforums.com’s advanced topics challenge this month is ‘creative panning’.  To create a contest entry I shot quite a few photos through the month of June.   I ended up with about a half dozen I really liked and now I’ve posted my favorite from the month in the contest gallery.  If you are a rrf.com member, please make sure you vote for your favorite image when Leia releases the poll next week.

In my previous post I mentioned some items that I had learned while experimenting.  At the end of the month here’s my favorite tips on panning.

1. Use a tripod.  The tripod helps with some of the unwanted vertical motion blur.  Of course you still have to keep up with the train as it moves across the scene!
2. Shutter speed I found had to be regulated by train speed.  Generally trains moving 20 m.p.h. or slower need a 1/10th second shutter speed or slower to capture decent motion.  From there 1/15th second worked well up to around 35 m.p.h. and speeds above that worked well with 1/20th, 1/30th, and 1/40th of a second. 
3. Use tracking focus (called AI Servo on Canon gear) to continually refocus as the train moves by the camera. 
4. Take plenty of photos and throw away those that are not focused or panned just right.
5. Enjoy!

Besides the one I posted at rrf.com here’s a few of my other favorites.

Torn Tarp

Building America

X-KAL

rrf.com is at it again with another advanced topics challenge.   This month it is ‘creative panning’.  Of course with trains there’s always movement so panning opportunities abound! (well at least there should be some movement eventually, maybe, someday)   On Sunday, the first day of the challenge, I tried my hand at a couple of pans and had mixed results.  My photos ranged from completely blurry to pretty sharp and dramatic.  Some of the things I noticed are:

1. Slow moving trains in bright light are difficult to pan.  When it is so bright the shutter speed has to be so slow that getting the wanted blur causes unwanted blurs.  A couple of my attempts were at 1/10 @ f/22 which is the minimum aperture for my lens. 
2. Sharpness is difficult to achieve when attempting a pan.  There are two causes, the slow shutter speed and where the focus point is set.  I found I have to pre-focus the camera at the spot where I want to take the image and then track the subject into that spot.  I’m also going to try using my camera’s tracking focus to see how that works out.
3. Trains moving above 40 m.p.h. gave the most dramatic pan effects.

To help with some of the observations I’m considering trying the tripod.  This will require carefully levelling to make sure I can successfully pan along a level horizon.  I’m sure some practice with it will also be required.

It should be fun to work on this throughout the month!

The M-PTLPAS crosses Eighth St. and heads out of town.

Railroadforums.com is running an advanced contest this month on Creative High Contrast B&W.  I won’t claim to be an expert in this topic but for some reason the bug bit me and I spent some time editing a bunch of photos in Lightroom yesterday afternoon.  Whoops, there went an hour and a half!  Still it was a rewarding experience and I found a few old images that would work for the contest had they been taken in May of 2008.

With the demise of the Weyerhaeuser log train last Wednesday I thought this would be an appropriate topic.

The Cascades.  This is re-edit of an image I took in March.

Are you having trouble figuring out which of the Adobe Photoshop products are right for you?  Check out Scott Kelby’s discussion on his blog.  Regular readers of my posts on Lightroom will not be surprised by Scott’s conclusions. 

Even if you don’t agree with Scott I hope you can get a better feel from Scott’s post on where the main photo editing products from Adobe fit in.

As I’ve mentioned before I really like Lightroom.  As a software package it provides most of what I need to organize and edit my photos.   For those things that LR wasn’t designed to do naively Adobe provided a method for developers to construct their own export plug-ins to fill in the gaps.  LR was also constructed so develop module edits can be saved as a preset and web and slideshow outputs can be customized using templates.  I believe this flexibility will be one of the key factors to LR’s long term success (and potentially some smart developers )

I’ve started using a couple of presets and plug-ins that I’ve found useful.  With presets the field is long and wide since they are easily created out of Lightroom (click the + next to presets and choose the develop options to save) and quite a few photographers have published their presets on their websites.  Do a Google search on ‘Lightroom Presets’ and you’ll see what I mean.  Just because the field is so large doesn’t diminish the fact that this is fabulous ability it just shows that photographers want to share their skills.

Plug-ins and templates are a bit more challenging because they require external development work and testing so the field is a bit more limited.  Despite this barrier the two plug-ins I use most LR/Mogrify (export tools) and LR/Enfuse (HDR) are quite powerful and really add a lot to the basic export features of LR.   Web and slideshow templates are an area I haven’t delved into too much yet though I’m carefully watching some very intriguing web gallery and slideshow tools.  I’m hoping to take advantage of these for my gallery sometime in the future.

This photograph of a northbound BNSF Manifest at Steilacoom was made with LR/Enfuse.  The first photo was edited to maximize the exposure on the mid and foreground.  The second photo was edited to maximize the expose on the sky and background.  LR/Enfuse then combined the two to increase the dynamic range of the image to provide a better appearance in the highlight areas which weren’t the main focus of the original exposure.

Many new digital photographers ask the question “Should I use my camera’s RAW output or .jpg?”. As we move further into the digital era this question gets asked less and less, but there are still those that ask. For those that ask me, I always recommend RAW. Why? It provides complete information from the capture which image processing software can use to finish an image.

Do you still need some evidence? If so jump over to Luminous Landscape and take a look at the tutorial Michael Reichmann posted on the topic. The difference between the two is pretty significant.

Adobe’s Photoshop Lightroom has been on sale for 9 months now and with the release of version 1.2 more folks are starting to ask about it and if it is the right tool. I’ve known for a while why Adobe Photoshop Lightroom works for me, but I haven’t taken the time to put my thoughts to words. My motivation for this post comes from a blog post by another photographer that I think does a good job of clarifying the purposes of CS and Lightroom.

George Barr is a fine art photographer and user of Photoshop (presumably a CS version). In a recent blog post George helped me with placing Lightroom into the spectrum of photo editing tools. George says:

When I went to inkjet printing of my black and white images, it seemed perfectly natural to take advantage of the powerful editing tools available via computer, in my case with Photoshop. I could now manipulate both further and more accurately and in smaller areas and more areas than ever before.

It was a natural extension to continue these techniques when I started working in colour and it didn’t even occur to me that I should have any loyalty to the original colour as recorded.

Gasp! No loyalty to the original color? For a railfan photographer that (for the most part) is a no no. He continues…

This is radically different from colour slide photographers (whatever the format) who have very strong ideas of maintaining colour fidelity and go to great lengths to do so. When these people switch to the digital darkroom, they tend to make global changes (as if they were filtering in the camera) and that’s about all. For people like this applications like Lightroom are all they need…

Those of us who have no loyalty to the original scene, thinking of it only in terms of fodder for our art work tend to prefer to use Photoshop and it’s powerful ways of manipulating an image.

Now we’re talking! Most railfans have a strong loyalty to the original color of the image and to the original scene, especially when their favorite paint scheme or location is depicted. Based on that thought the reality is we don’t all need Photoshop CS^* for what we do, we need something that can globally edit the image to get the look just right quickly…and that Lightroom does well and that’s why I use it.

^*While CS may not be required, Lightroom does not have output sharpening, so another tool is required to perform that work.

Every time I’ve looked at this photo since I shot it in 1988 I’ve chuckled to myself. At that point I’d had my 70-200 zoom a mere four months and had shot just a handful of photos with it. Clearly I hadn’t mastered the art of using a zoom lens to do something other than get close to a subject. I place this photo in my ‘learning experience’ category.

BN’s Highball rounds a curve north of Garfield, WA

As with everything I do, I always seem to keep refining my work flow as I learn new things or become dissatisfied with existing processes. My Lightroom work flow is no different. For now though I’ve settled on the following process that takes me from import to final product.

I. Import - I use Adobe Photoshop Elements Organizer as my primary media browser so when I import I import my images into it.

1. On initial import assign an Event (synonym for a shoot)
2. Assign location, engine numbers, people’s names, and captions to my images as time permits

II. Editing (Lightroom 1.1 Library)

1. Import selected images into LR
2. Assign image to a Collection of the same name as the Organizer Event
3. Use Library features (ratings, quick collections, slide shows) to find best images

III. Editing (Lightroom 1.1 Develop) - (every photo is different, so steps below are for the most part used every time)

1. Capture Sharpen
2. Set White Balance (either through dropper or Temp/Tint sliders)
3. Set Blacks
4. Set Clarity
5. Crop/Straigten(varies)
6. Clone/Heal(varies)
7. Set Tone Curve (varies)
8. Set HSL (varies)
9. Set Vibrance (varies)
10. Set Noise Reduction (varies)

IV. Export (Lightroom 1.1 Library) - (I’ve created presets for all my normal output formats)

1. Export will convert from ProPhoto RGB color space to RGB
2. In the export dialog chose the output size
3. In the export dialog chose to open in Elements

V. Edit in Elements

1. Apply edits as necessary. Generally this is limited to adding a standard copyright notice.
2. Final sharpen
3. Save

Simple….

Lots of folks love to bash Railpictures.net.  Sure, the site’s claims of being “The best railroad photos on the ‘net” are perhaps a bit ego-centric, but the reality is that they host a lot of photos, and like most other photo repositories on the internet, some of the photos are pretty good.  If you check out the most popular photos and the People’s Choice winners, you probably won’t be disappointed.

A lot of photographers won’t submit work to their site because they don’t feel the accept/reject judging is done correctly.  My attitude: who cares?  Do I agree with all of their decisions?  Of course not. I know whether or not I like a photo.  If I post it to their site, and they like it as well, then I get more exposure for my work.  If they reject the photo (for whatever reason), then I haven’t lost anything, and perhaps their reason for rejection could spur some thought.

I’ve sold a few photos to magazines based on exposure on their site.  And now they have twice chosen one of my pictures as their “Photo of the Week” featured on the site homepage.

So while some folks sit back and complain, I’ll take the free publicity.

The final segment in this series was posted yesterday at Luminous Landscape.  In this last installment George Barr challenges the photographer address all levels of technical and aesthetic quality because as he says “…all photographers shoot at more than one level.  All one needs to do is look at your thumbnails or proof sheets to see that there is a clear variation in the skill applied to each image.” (emphasis added)

I couldn’t agree more.  Looking at my collection I see the full gamut of technical and aesthetic and on any given image I’d be happy if all the stars aligned and both technical and aesthetic were at a sufficient level that the image could be called ‘good’. 

What am I going to do to take my photography to the next level?  First I’m going to stay with what I consider a continuous learning process about the technical aspects of photography.  I will read George’s thoughts and continue to read various online resources.  Heck, I might have to consider a photography course since its been 23 years since the last one!

The one area I really want to change in my photos is to incorporate more emotion, add more of myself, and improve impact.  Unfortunately that isn’t as much book learning as it is study, practice and persistence.  This sort of a change won’t happen as fast a technical improvement, but I believe it is worth the long term commitment. 

As an aside, I reviewed some of my older photos this week and I have say that I’ve seen a change in terms of both a technical improvement and an aesthetic improvement.  As with everything, there is certainly more work to be accomplished though.

So, where does your photography stand and what are you going to do about it? 

In Part II George Barr discusses ways that a photographer can assess their technical and aesthetic skills.  One method he suggests is a method many of us railfans are familiar with and that is posting to Internet forums.  He also suggests peer reviews, and joining a club as other methods.  The one he recommended the most though is participating in a workshop that involves shooting followed by peer and instructor reviews.

For us railfans the usual outlet for online reviews are the forums at sites like Trainorders, Railroadforums, or other forums.  We also have the detailed (ahem) reviews we get at railpictures.net.  Despite people’s complaining about railpictures.net it certainly has its place and the feedback you get from there (however terse) certainly will give you an idea where your well lit wedgies stand. 

My favorite place for quality peer reviews lately has been Railroad Photo Essays.  The group there is hard hitting and honest, but what they say is constructive and if you listen (er read) carefully to their comments you’ll get the sort of feedback George talks about in his essay. 

One of the easiest was to post your ‘portfolio’ online at Railroad Photo Essays for feedback is to participate in one of the ‘Best Of’ Forums Bob puts up.  The last couple of years I’ve posted my best for the year and have received a variety of feedback.  What I’ve found interesting is how sometimes I receive little or no comment on the photo I think is the very best while something I didn’t think was the best of the show will get rave reviews.  Based on George’s essay, this is sort of feedback just one more way you can assess your skills against the levels presented in part I.

Has someone reviewed your portfolio lately?

I read an interesting article on Luminous Landscape tonight that caused me to step back and look at my own photography.  The article is the first of a three part series about assessing the technical and aesthetic qualities of the photos you take.  Part two of the series promises to help guide the photographer through the levels and help them assess their current position while part three will make suggestions to help you move up through the levels.

I will hold off on sharing my assessment of myself until part two comes out.  Until then take a look at the article and start to think about your own photography.  Are any of you out there a 6, G?

Last summer I made a post about Adobe’s new photographer’s photo processing tool, Lightroom.  Since then Adobe has worked with photographers and the Lightroom user community to improve the tool and release subsequent versions for evaluation.  As expected, Adobe made the announcement of the release of Lightroom 1.0 last week.

Why should anyone spend $199 ($299 after 4/30/2007) on this software?  What I’ve found it Lightroom blurs the lines between RAW conversion and editing by building solid tools into a single streamlined work flow.  The photographer is removed from thinking about the two things as distinct processes and instead is given the image as the primary focus and the methods of processing are made secondary.  The bottom line for me is image post processing is faster and easier. 

According to several things I’ve read, this product is designed to enable the photographer to spend more time behind the camera and less time in front of the computer.  I’d certainly agree with that statement and that is one of the major factors in my decision to purchase this software.

I don’t need any more convincing on its value, but in case you want to hear it from someone other than me, here’s some excerpts from an interview with Scott Kelby President of the National Association of Photoshop Professionals. 

“…I think the controls for processing RAW photos are far superior in Lightroom than in Adobe Camera Raw in Photoshop. (Lightroom has all the controls from Camera Raw plus a number of incredibly helpful features that even Photoshop CS3 still doesn’t have.)”

“Then there’s Camera Raw. It’s really great, but Lightroom has all the features of Adobe Camera Raw, and some features Camera Raw still doesn’t have, including some amazing interactive features that take Lightroom over the top.”

“So, it comes down to this: if Adobe designed a product from the ground up exclusively for Photographers, and it was created, moulded, and tweaked by pro photographers to address the work flow issues they face every day, and it’s faster, more customizable, and has more power (not to mention features that Photoshop CS3 still doesn’t have), why wouldn’t you use it instead? Now, Adobe probably isn’t thrilled to hear me saying this, but it’s their own fault. Surely, they realize Lightroom is better at managing, sorting, and displaying thousands of images? In fact, they are the one’s who let Lightroom’s Develop module have many more features than Adobe Camera Raw in CS3, so surely this didn’t catch them by surprise.”

“In my opinion, every part of Lightroom is better than it’s corresponding part in Photoshop. For example, Lightroom’s Print module blows away the printing features of Photoshop CS3. Blows them away—no contest. The Color Management is nearly invisible (which it should be), and you can’t compare the silent, highly limited features of the Bridge’s slideshow to Lightroom’s full featured Slideshow module. Plus, Lightroom’s Web module, with it’s slick built-in Flash and HTML templates and are a breeze to customize is leaps and bounds ahead of Photoshop’s Web Photo Gallery. I can’t explain what Adobe’s thinking, but I know what I’m thinking: I’ve pretty much stopped using the Bridge and Camera Raw for most of my photo management and Raw editing, and I recommend the same thing to my friends.”

Q: So what does Photoshop do better?
“For one thing, retouching: Lightroom doesn’t really have retouching tools so if you need to remove a wrinkle, make someone thinner, clone something, or any of a thousand other retouching tasks, you need Photoshop. Also, Lightroom doesn’t have layers (yikes!), so compositing (and many other tasks) still needs to be done in Photoshop. And you can’t make selections of any kind in Lightroom (double-yikes!). Lightroom doesn’t have filters—not a one (no Unsharp Mask, no Gaussian Blur, no nothin’). Plus there’s no Brush tool or brushes in Lightroom, or professional control over type, or Layer Styles, or guides, or a Pen tool, or blend modes, or Layer Masks, or Actions, or Extract, or Feathering, or a Gradient Tool, or Shapes, or Channels, or Lab Color Mode, or CMYK conversions, or …well…I could go on and on, but as you can see, these two programs really need each other big time.”

Not always does the sun shine in Washington.  I know, that’s a shock to many but it is the truth.  So do I stop using the camera?  By all means no, our weather provides some interesting opportunities to combine it with railroad photography and come up with something different. 

What better to shoot on a foggy day than a marine scene?  An empty Union Pacific garbage train (U-GLSE) crosses over bridge 14 at West Tacoma on a dreary October 28, 2006.  You can see more from this weekend over on railroadforums.

I think the difference between a foamer, FRN, etc and a photographer can be summed up in this RailroadForums thread.

Only a foamer could say that’s a good looking consist. A photographer looks at that mis-matched bunch of crud with no consistent lines and wonders whether or not to even press the shutter button…

Do photographers have a “zone”?  Are you always on the lookout for something interesting?  Do particular lighting situations lend themselves to looking for a photograph?  Today in his blog Doug Plummer talks about when his wife notices that his “eyes are on.”

A couple of Saturday’s ago I went to a railfan slide show (not a multi-media presentation) in Portland that was attended by many nationally and regionally known railfan photographers.  It seems in the past few years at these gatherings, a discussion of film vs. digital always breaks out.  This time was no different and the discussion this time made me more aware of one of the barriers to entry into the digital world.  One of the film photographers commented he’d attempted digital but has been less than impressed by the results.  The common theme was the images just didn’t look as good out of the camera as slides. 

I’ll agree with him on that point because DSLR produced digital images (as we know them today) need post processing.  I have to believe that this is the most complicated transition point for a film shooter who is used to the images arriving in a yellow box fit for showing. 

How to handle images after loading them onto the computer can be an adventure because unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your point of view) there is no single ‘perfect’ post processing workflow.  My film friends should not be frightened by this though because there is help available.  I have found three workflow tutorials that I return to over and over for guidance.  These are Workflow Guidelines on the Fred Miranda Post-processing & Printing forum and Luminous Landscape tutorials A Digital Workflow Primer and An Image Processing Workflow.  All three are written for the full version of Photoshop (6, 7, CS) so using a different tool requires adaptation, however the general concepts still apply.

These tutorials will probably not make new digital photographers experts overnight, but I hope they will help others improve their output like they helped me.

One last note on the film vs. digital discussion.  Most of the traditional film photographers agreed that digital will likely take over eventually. Until it becomes impossible for them to use film most agreed that they’ll be sticking to it for the foreseeable future.  In my opinion this is just fine as they are comfortable with the medium and they still produce long lasting quality images.