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DAFOS Photo World

Why??

To catalogue my thoughts and experiences on things photographic and related topics, aiming to promote open-minded creativity and respect that hopefully contribute in some way to general peace and well-living.

Serendipity rules

General Posted on Sun, May 02, 2021 15:45:34

An interesting concept popped out of a recent conversation with an artist friend.(Well, I thought it was interesting…). I was admiring the creativity of the underlying concepts in their work, explaining that – as a photographer – I regard myself as something of a ‘functionalist’ (at least, as far as my little business goes): I make photos that people need, mostly for purely practical reasons (and, increasingly these days, making pictures of others’ artistic creations). I set up my kit, adjust the lights, make some necessary steps to be able to calibrate the outcome later and click…

“Oh, that’s very technical” they said. Which made me think – well, isn’t the knowledge of how your paints and colours combine and flow, how they cast their shadows on the canvas; how the clay and plaster forebears of your bronze sculptures bend to your will, expressing that inner purpose and beauty in a way I could never imitate; is that also not “technical”?

I am starting to wonder now if there is indeed such a clear polarisation between the “technical” and “creative” aspects of any art. It is so that technical parts, once mastered, become second nature and we tend to no longer think about them: we concentrate on what we somehow feel in our mind’s eye when constructing the [insert name of artefact in question here: e.g. photograph] . We are in that sense “being creative”.

But if we never question the technical part, won’t the output of our endeavours somehow converge to being the same after a while? Is it not a good idea to try out different technical approaches to see the result?

Experimentation costs nothing, but it does challenge the imagination, and from this can come some new, really great art.

In the creatively technical land of technical creativity, serendipity rules …



Naturally flashed …

Pictures Posted on Wed, April 24, 2019 21:16:55

A recent post in the Viewfinders Facebook group brought up the subject of flash vs natural light. This is indeed an “emotional” topic, with proponents and denigrators on both sides.

Personally, I take the view that light is light (I’m a physicist by degree), and – as a photographer – you need to be able to work with the light where it is and it’s perfectly acceptable to augment it, if you have to, by artificial means. After all, photography is itself an “artificial” process, but that does not mean to say we cannot turn nature to advantage… 

As a response to the discussion I posted a very brief description of a photo shoot I had done that very day. “Portraits, outside. Using flash.” Yep… Here is the set-up.

A bright sunny day, so the model needs to be in the shade somehow. A garden shed provided shade and, actually, quite a nice and rustic setting for the shot. A hedge in the background gave a contrasting plane behind the model, who was peeping out from behind the shed.

Knowing that, without intervention, this arrangement would look a little dull, I got a trusty assistant to hold a gold (for warmth) reflector to illuminate the subject. This gives some directionality to the light, so a nice level of contrast to the general picture.

To be sure that there are nice catch-lights in the oh-so-important eyes (used as the target for manually selected, centre-point auto-focus), I use a flash. Not pointing at the subject – that would be too much here: we don’t want to interfere with the natural illumination – but at 90 degrees, using the little pop-up catch-light card in the flash itself. This creates just enough of a bright source to give a specular reflection on the eye, without actually changing the illumination much (if at all).

Another problem in settings like this is colour temperature. Portraits in the shade on bright sunny days have quite a cold, bluish cast (the light source is in effect the beautiful blue sky). Selecting a “Shade” pre-set colour balance can help, but given the context I wanted quite a strong, warm glow on the subject: hence the choice of a gold reflector.

However, the “shadow” side of the face is illuminated by the diffuse light from above and behind. So, it was darker (no issue really), but also rather blue. The light source illuminating from behind was of course the sky, which makes for a quite dowdy-looking shadow-side of the face. Given time (and a very patient model), I could have gone back and set up (for example) a remote triggered flash with suitable gel to fill in from behind, and adjusted it to cancel the blue shadow light and lift the level of the “dark side of the face” some (phew!), but that would have really been trying the patience of the model. This kind of tweak is faster and easier to do “in post”.

So, into Capture One Pro. Basic adjustments done (very few – just limit a slight blown-out highlight on the sliver jacket, really), a mask applied to the “too dark” areas of the face to lighten it a little and, using the same mask, the colour-temperature shifted towards the red to provide just enough compensation to do the job.

Customer happy.

And me.

Because I like taking portraits.

Especially of little angels…

Other adjustments: A small scar on the face removed using the “spot removal” tool, which is great for quick fixing such things (it seems that little angels can fall off bicycles sometimes, too), plus some bird poo on the shed removed by cloning a piece of the shed over itself, and some “clarity” tweaking to taste. Out of 50 shots in this short shoot, 8 were selected by the client. Total selecting/processing time a little over 30 minutes together with the client, who took away the JPEGS exported from Capture One Pro in two resolutions on a USB stick. Job done.



Deeply dippy … about DPI

Things Digital Posted on Wed, April 24, 2019 21:10:50

The world is unjustly full of misunderstandings about Dots Per Inch, or “dpi”, sometime also referred to as “pixels per inch” or “ppi” (but then my cool title wouldn’t work… 😊 ).

For my work (day-job or as photographer) I often get asked to “send the picture to me in high resolution – 300dpi”: the person asking often doesn’t seem to realise that this is a meaningless request. In order to comply, I then have to ask “how many inches will the picture be printed to?”.

Silence…

I usually end up just sending the picture with the maximum number of pixels I have in the image, which is often a very big file and certainly “overkill” for most uses (with a file from my Canon 5DmkII, which has 21MPx, a 300dpi print would be about 30×45 cms big – roughly A3 size).

One time, to make a point, I sent a “300dpi” file which had 300px on each side, which is of course the same as 300dpi (ppi) for a 1 inch (2.5cms) square print, but which looks rather poor when printed on an A4 page…

The moral of this sorry tale? There are a few:

  • Digital files don’t really know about “dpi”, as this refers to the physical size of a print. All they know about is pixels, and how many there are. The “dpi” data found in some digital files is calculated from: dpi = (number of pixels along a side of the print) / (length of the side of the print in inches) – literally “dots per inch”.
  • Start thinking about your image in terms of how many pixels it has. Some typical applications have typical numbers of pixels for optimum use. See the table below.
  • Learn how to re-size your digital pictures to give files with a suitable number of pixels. There are some tutorials on the Viewfinders web-site under “Resources” that can help with this.

Typical pixels needed for various uses:

 200 –  400 px highSmall web-page image / thumbnail
 900 – 1200 px highLarger web-page image
1050 x 1980 pxFull HD image (computer monitor / TV)
4200 x 7920 pxQuad HD monitor (but this is getting silly…)
1200 x 1800 px10×15 cms print
2500 x 3500 pxA4 / 20×30 cms print
3500 x 5000 pxA3 / 30 x 45 cms print
 900 px short sideVF newsletter, small illustration
1600 px short sideVF newsletter, large image