Digital Evils

I've often said that I don't think I'd be nearly as good a photographer as I am, were I working only in film. Either that or I would be just as good, but completely broke with how frequently I would be developing. The immediate play-back of images on my LCD screen after I've taken them has probably played the greatest role in getting beautiful images.

You would think that, since I look through the viewfinder, I can see exactly what I'm about to get, so what's the difference? But this is only partially true. Sometimes I'm concentrating so hard on where I'm placing the subject that I forget to run my eye around the rest of the image before snapping. Sometimes I am not holding the camera as steady as I should be, and the image is composed properly, but is entirely blurry. Sometimes my camera is numerically set to all the "right" values, but artistically, the image just doesn't work.* Especially when traveling far from home, it is great to see any of these errors in the moment, while I am still there to take another shot.

Still, I have found that there are two instances where I am pretty much powerless to tweak the image in anything but post-processing software. I almost want to create a sub-category of images called VSOTC, as in, Virtually Straight Off The Camera. I'll show you what I mean.

Look at this image.

There is a small, unnatural spot in each of the red circles, the left more obvious than the right. Often, these spots are not immediately obvious, and they're not always invasive, but trust me, once you see them, you can't unsee them. It's dust on my sensor. I know what you're thinking, "well, just clean the sensor then, Gina." Oh, believe me, I do. I am good friends with canned air.** I also have a sensor-cleaning kit for extra-stubborn dust. I've even had the camera cleaned professionally once. But I've learned over time that keeping the sensor clean is kind of like raking the lawn. You can get every single leaf, but eventually, another one is going to fall. ...You can get every speck of dust, but change the lens again, and eventually more is going to sneak in there. Sensor spots are the bane of my photographic existence.

Second thing. And this is one of the major reasons why I am not a photo purist, and am okay performing minor touch-ups in Photoshop.

Because this:

is just that much more visually appealing than this:

...I would love to know how much money Adobe makes off of people who buy Photoshop just to be able to get rid of cell phone towers.

Often times, people will look at a photo of mine, and ask if I Photoshop my images. I hate this question. Partly because I'm a horrible liar. My brain screams, "of course it's Photoshopped! Half my images are Photoshopped!" but what is harder to explain to the viewer is that by "Photoshopped," I mean I've altered maybe 1000 pixels out of the 10 million that make up the image. I prefer to think of it less as "Photoshopping", and more as "taking artistic license" to clean up a little bit of digital mess.

I am not a digital artist. I like to keep my images as true-to-the-moment as possible. Which is why any image I can get SOTC is that much more satisfying.

It's like raking up that last leaf.





* i.e. Correct exposure vs creatively correct exposure.
** If you are canned-air-phobic, settle down. I know what I'm doing.

Put a Sock [Monkey] in it OR SOTC 37/365

I did one of my best portrait shoots last weekend. There is an internal tension that exists when I shoot portraiture. I enjoy creating portraits--especially candids--but it's tricky business. I'm rarely as satisfied after a portrait shoot as I am after other shoots.

One has to move fairly swiftly in portraiture (especially with young children). There is not a lot of time to tweak shutter speeds, F-stops, and white balance settings in the moment. I can compose shots in nature for several hours; the attention span of models is not nearly as lengthy.

And I rarely get a perfect portrait SOTC.

There may be less-than-adequate lighting, so I must brighten things up a little. Even compensating in-camera by bumping up the ISO means I end up applying noise reduction afterwards.

More often than not, my angle is tilted by 1/2 a degree (I think I come by this flaw naturally--I've seen my dad's photos), which means I'm straightening and cropping.

And my most salient issue--white balance. I don't have time to set a custom white balance every 5-10 minutes as I shoot around my location (or maybe it's just amateurs that say that). So I set my white balance to automatic, and just shoot. Of course, the camera doesn't always get it right. Surrounded by plants, my models are often rendered a touch green. Indoors, the warm glow of light bulbs almost gives my models jaundice. SIGH. Back to Photoshop I go.

But with each photo shoot, I learn.

This weekend, I took some family photos for a good friend and her two daughters. I have taken their photos yearly for the last three years or so, and was quite satisfied with how this latest set turned out.

For the first time, I shot on location at City Hall. The architecture allowed for some lovely compositions. The plethora of windows allowed for nice, even lighting (though it could have been a touch brighter in some areas). And the all-grown-up models meant that I didn't feel like I had to move quite as quickly. I was even able to get a little creative, and they assisted in the set-up!

Did I still have to post-process? Yes. Admittedly, every single photo. That being said, that includes the bulk where the only post-processing required was a little bit of noise reduction to get rid of mild graininess OR a small tweak to white balance. I did not have to brighten so many shadows! I did not have to sharpen someone's features! I did not have to disappear some dude in the background that I didn't see ahead of time. And I think--for the first time in a long time--I did not have to swap out someone's head from another picture because they weren't looking at the camera!

It's great to know when I am building up skill in Photoshop.
But it's even better to know I'm building up skill in-camera.

SOTC 11/365

Yup. I'm pretty much a walking advertisement for HP today.* I've been meaning to purchase an external hard drive for a while, now, and finally just bit the bullet today and bought one. On sale, and available at an Air Miles sponsor store--win, and win!

This external hard drive will soon house a back-up copy of every photo I've ever taken. I always burn my photos onto DVD so that they don't accumulate space on my lap top. That being said, I know that CDs and DVDs wear out over time. Given the nature of my photography, a more permanent back up is a smart idea to catalogue all this data.

So.

At about 6" tall, 2" wide, and 5" deep, this piece of hardware contains 2 terabytes (TB) of 'space'.

Two terabytes.

Can we just reflect on that for a minute?

2TB.
That's 2,000GB.
2,000,000MB.
2 trillion bytes.

At 2TB, this thing has just over double the hard drive capacity of my laptop. 250x more capacity than my iPhone. And almost 8,000x more capacity than the first Windows computer our family ever owned (if I remember correctly).

I'm not really surprised, and yet I'm continually surprised, by the way technology advances. It was not so long ago that megabytes were considered soooooooo huge, was it? And now I pull 2TB off the shelf expecting nothing less.

Crazy.







* "A few hours later..." I thought it odd that I couldn't create folders directly on the hard drive to start plunking photos into, but figured I could cut & paste from my laptop drive instead. After assembling some of my first digital photos into a folder, I attempted to copy it to the external drive; it didn't work. Upon further inspection, it turns out this hard drive is not Mac compatible. Grrrrrr. Apparently that was the other model I had been looking at. HP, you fail.

So What Next?

I have thoroughly enjoyed the last year of putting together my 365 project. Over the course of the year, I have also taken time to peruse the projects of others--to see what challenge they've set for themselves, and the creativity that has come out of that.

Even before my project had ended, I was already thinking of 'what next?' Will I do another project? What will be the theme/challenge/goal? The answer to the first question was an unequivocal YES! I enjoy the way my first project stretched my photography skills just that extra bit. And despite the occasional days where the last thing I wanted to do was set up a shot, I had a ton of fun creating so many different portraits.

So, what to shoot, what to shoot... In thinking about the next project, I wanted to make sure I would still be challenging and honing my photographic skills. I wanted it to be qualitatively different than the first project. And I still wanted to make sure it would be fun.

Two ideas came to mind.

1. Shoot in film.
2. No digital post-processing.

I REALLY like the first idea. I occasionally play with film, but not nearly enough. It would really test my skills as a photographer, because the instant feedback of the LCD display would not be there. I really would have to get it right the first time.

That being said, the practicality and price point of shooting film all year would be insane. The cost of film and printing the photos would probably be about $150-200, if I only took one shot per day. Not so bad over the course of a year, I guess, but the digital is absolutely free. I feel the real hassle actually comes in the publishing. While you can get your film images scanned and burned onto a CD when you get them printed, that costs even more, so of course, I would opt to scan and upload each of these photos myself. Which means I'd have to scan and upload chunks of 24-27 pictures at a time. ...Well, I guess I wouldn't have to scan the whole roll's worth at once; still, I would never be posting current material. I just have the sense--based on how I managed to upload my content with the last project--that I would take photos for a year, but spend the next six months after that finishing up the scanning. That doesn't sound fun. Perhaps as a Project 52 idea down the road....

So, then idea #2 came to mind. I could still take digital images as if I were shooting film. That is, I would not post-process my photos in any way, with any software. There are people already challenging themselves this way on Flickr and other photography sites. The "technique" is being called Straight off the Camera (or Straight Out of the Camera); SOTC (or SOOC) for short.

Yes, but, you could still alter it in Photoshop and just say it's SOTC.

Well, first of all, I don't work like that. I value honesty and integrity. Second, technology has advanced far enough to hold me accountable. For those unfamiliar with the ways of digital media, digital photographs have something called EXIF data. This data includes the time stamp, info on the lens used, shutter speed, ISO, etc. But EXIF data will also tell you if the photo has been post-processed with any sort of software.

Compared to many digital artists, I don't use Photoshop a whole heck of a lot. Generally, if I'm editing an image, I'm doing fairly simple things like brightening it up a little, boosting the saturation, straightening out a horizon, lightening up dark shadows. Not generally altering the composition significantly. Still, these are all things that--with a little more attention or patience--I could do in-camera.

So. I have a challenge.
A photo a day for an entire year.
Any subject.
I must take the photograph.
No post-processing allowed.

Straight off the camera.

Starts September 1.