I got my first job in this business because the photographer that hired me didn’t understand the concepts behind digital imaging. He knew f/stops and shutter speeds and watt/seconds like the back of his hand. He could estimate flash exposure (without a meter) within half a stop, and his client relation skills were out of this world. But he had just mortgaged his house to buy a digital camera (Kodak DCS460) and he needed help.

That was 15 years ago. Digital imaging was just beginning to become an acceptable alternative to film for some uses. Royalty free stock photography had just entered the market and pulled the rug out from under a lot of photographers. The global economy was finally starting to come out of a recession. Fifteen years later – we’re (hopefully) coming out of recession, microstock has showed up, pulling the rug out from a lot of photographers, and integrated video is once again, to use a phrase from the ’90’s, shifting the paradigm.

Looking at the past few years, newspapers and magazines have struggled horribly as advertisers have cut back ad budgets and shifted to digital marketing. It’s pretty likely that advertising supported print publications are not long for this world. Second, recent product prototypes by publishers like Conde Nast© and Time/Warner show that e-readers are coming fast. And if Apple launches the iSlate (or whatever they decide to call it,) later this month as predicted, and it’s the game changer it’s expected to be, it’s entirely possible that the newsstand and bookstore as we know it are headed the way of Betamax and CD’s. Right now publishers are simply converting their print publications to electronic versions. But that’s soon to change. Audio and video embedded into magazine, book and newspaper articles are only a software upgrade away.

Those photographers outside of the commercial field are by no means exempt. Moving pictures embedded into family snapshots (a la Harry Potter) are currently technologically possible, but economically unfeasible – and we all know how that curve works. Wedding and event photographers are already combining their stills into slide show movies with transitions and background music. Making the jump to embedded video is a logical next step.

As with any monumental change, there will be those who resist, those who adopt early, and those who go with the flow. It’s probably too late to be in on the early adopter phase, but it’s certainly never too late to be a resistor. After all, there are those of us who still shoot film, and are sought out because of it. There are those who make images using oils and watercolors and etchings, and make livings doing so. I expect that there will always be those who make a living exclusively doing still images with a camera, but they’ll be a minority. What’s left is the middle ground of going with the flow. Usually, it’s said, that standing in the middle of the road is a good way to get run over, and it’s true. But what may be worse is not crossing the road in the first place.

A lot of the skills that we’ve learned as still photographers translate to video very well. Composition, lighting and attention to detail are still important. New skills like capturing quality audio, maintaining continuity and compression codecs steepen the learning curve – so get on it and learn. As with still photography, specialized help is needed in some instances. We hire food, makeup and prop stylists all the time in the still world. It’s no different in the motion world, other than you need more people. Freelance editors, script supervisors, line producers and audio technicians may come into play.

ASMP has just published the results of their research here. It’s well worth reading.

Fifteen years ago I got my start because an industry veteran realized that he knew a lot, but didn’t know enough. So he hired some help. That’s a lesson worth taking to heart. We know a lot, but we need to know more. Either learn, hire some help, or get run over.

What I said was “OMG, my old, clean, crisp drum scans of 50-speed film, remembered fondly, have more noise than ISO 1600 DSLR files. Progress!!!!”

Needless to say, I got called on it, so this morning I went back and looked to see if I had a few quick examples I could pull up. I grabbed a block from the scan I’d been working on, and found a comparable, recent image I’d taken at ISO 800, and grabbed roughly 500×500 pixels from each after downsampling the drumscan from an original resolution of about 7K pixels on the long side to the same resolution as the 1Ds3. While that downsampling will cost in terms of resolution, if anything, it’ll mitigate the noise in the drum scanned slide.

Now, I’m not saying these two samples prove anything by themselves. What I would say is that the general sense of noise and grain I get from using drum-scanned Velvia vs. ISO 800 on the Canon 1Ds Mark III is, subjectively speaking, well-conveyed by these two examples.

The 1Ds3 image was processed by Lightroom 2.3 and the image with sharpening and noise reduction turned completely off. With standard noise reduction and sharpening settings, the 1Ds III image is significantly cleaner than what’s shown here, and noise reduction seems a little harder to get working on the clumpier grain of the Velvia scans.

While the sky is more saturated in the Velvia image (and some of that is the nature of the scenes on those different days, but some of it is surely the extra Velvia contrast), in my experience this basic result, that modern DSLRs, even those with many, many tiny pixel elements are producing significantly better images on the whole at ISO 800 than I was getting at 1/16th the speed six years ago–particularly when the way the images respond to digital darkroom tools is taken into account.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still nostalgic about Velvia. And I played Paul Simon along with the rest of you last month when Kodak announced the end of Kodachrome. But in terms of making cleaner images and better prints, I’m more and more grateful for the advent of digital SLRs.

Let’s start by saying that color is a science. It’s a big science. It’s so big that there are entire institutes full of people so smart it makes my head hurt, all studying color. So I think it’s safe to say we’ll not be comprehensive here. We will cover the basics of color balance and differential color temperatures, as they pertain to shooting. Color management on the back end, calibrations, color profiles are for another time.

As I touched on in part 1, our brains are incredibly nimble. Vision is perception and we can adjust our perception so quickly and subconsciously that we don’t even understand it’s happening unless we look for it. One way it adjusts our perception is with variable color. Remember from elementary school when the teacher took a crystal prism and showed us how sunlight can be spread out into a spectrum?   That spectrum represents daylight broken down into it’s constituent colors (ROYGBIV.) Equal amounts of those colors combine to form what we call white light, or daylight.  

However different sources of light put out varying amounts of lights at different frequencies. For example, ordinary incandescent lights put out much more light on the warmer side of the spectrum. When we view things under incandescent light we don’t usually see this orange cast since our brains compensate for it. But it’s there, and without smart cameras, or smart photographers we would have orange photos. Digital cameras have preset color balances as well as auto white balance. A few digital cameras allow the user to set a custom white balance based on either color temperature, a visual sample, or both.

Just like auto exposure, auto color balance is good enough for most people and works well in many situations. But it can get us into real trouble when shooting under mixed lighting conditions or when trying to capture a special affect or vision. Shooting under mixed lighting sources is problematic and is to be avoided whenever possible. We can only balance for type of light at a time so if we’re trying to shoot with incandescent, daylight and fluorescent all in the same image, we’re going to be disappointed.   The way to avoid this situation is to keep all light sources of the same type, and barring that, balance the sources all to the same standard.   In other words, if you’re shooting   in a large room primarily lit with fluorescent light, but you want to supplement that light with your flash, you’ll need to manually set your white balance to fluorescent, and gel your flash green to match.   If we hadn’t gelled that flash the area where the flash was used would appear magenta by comparison.

Likewise, if shooting inside under primarily incandescent light, any source of daylight, be it a window or your flash, should be gelled orange to match.

Keeping colors balanced and avoiding mixed lighting sources and differential color temperature is one of the most important skills to master when shooting color.   Practice.

Today’s cameras are pretty smart. They know when you’re shooting outside, or in. When you want to shoot a portrait or a close up. They can tell that you need to use a flash, and in some cases, will even find a smile and shoot it for you. But even with all of the advances in digital camera technology, the smartest camera is still not as smart as you are. The human brain is incredibly adept and nimble, and with a bit of training you’ll begin to see things differently when looking through a viewfinder.

Understanding how cameras see the world is not intuitive. Our brains involuntarily adjust our irises to adjust for various brightnesses. Compared to even the best digital imaging devices, our eyes have the ability see in relatively bright or dim conditions. We’ll also subconsciously adjust for variables in color temperature and relative brightness. These are advantages and abilities that film and digital devices simply don’t have.

Most times our cameras do a pretty good job of properly exposing photos automatically. But in order to better express our creativity and our art, more in-depth understanding of exposure is key. A properly exposed image is one in which the appropriate amount of light reaches the image plane. Exactly how much light is needed will depend on a number of factors but the most important to the end user is the sensitivity of the chip (or film.) This sensitivity is expressed as an ISO (International Standards Organization) speed. Typical ISO ratings range from 50 to 3200.   These values are linear in terms of sensitivity, ie, ISO 200 is twice as sensitive as 100. Generally speaking lower ISO speeds have less noise and higher resolving power than higher speeds. Many cameras, when set on full auto, will fluidly adjust ISO to adjust for a given situation. For the purposes of this lesson, we’ll assume the ISO is fixed.

The other two factors to consider in proper exposure are shutter speed and aperture. These are the two factors that will usually be varied from shot to shot in a given session. The classic illustration for proper exposure is that of a glass filling with water from a tap.   The object is to fill the glass all the way, but not overfill (overexpose) or underfill (underexpose.) If the tap is open all the way the glass takes   1/2 second to fill, if the tap is open half way, 1 second.   Likewise, an exposure at f/2 for 1/2 second is the same as and exposure at f/2.8 for 1 second.

Note that each whole stop increase in aperture or shutterspeed increases the amount of light reaching the image plane by 2, each whole stop decrease halves the amount of light. So closing down from f/2 to f/2.8 decreases the flow of light by half. Lengthening shutterspeed from 1/2 second to 1 doubles time.   It is at times counter-intuitive, increasing the f from 2 to 2.8 decreases the aperture, increasing the shutterspeed from 125 to 250 decreases exposure time.   But it’s helpful to remember these values are fractions, f/2 and f/2.8 represent the width of the lens opening divided by it’s length, 125 and 250 are actually 1/125 and 1/250 of a second.

Most beginning photography courses restrict students to shooting black and white. There are a number of reasons for this however one key reason is that it eliminates one big variable associated with color photography – and that’s color temperature. We’ll address that in part 2.