James Duncan Davidson

The D3, D700 and Canon

2008-07-02T02:52:06Z

As has widely been reported around the net, today marks the introduction of the new Nikon D700. In my eyes, this release pretty much seals the deal that Nikon is back in the game and in a huge way. More to the point, the domination that Canon has enjoyed since 2000 in the mid to high-end digital SLR market is well and truly over. To be sure, Canon isn’t out of the game yet and no obituaries need to be written. But, a big and fundamental change has happened.

The resurgence of Nikon really couldn’t come at a worse time for Canon. The botched release of the 1Dmk3 last year certainly hurt both Canon’s pride and their reputation in the eyes of everyone who was affected. In fact, the D3 smells like a rose compared to the 1D mk3. The D700 makes an incredible entrance into the territory that was formerly occupied solely by the three year old 5D. And the obvious next step of a D3x will probably shape up nicely against the 1Ds mk3.

To somebody who has shot Canon since the mid-90’s and who was a totally happy customer until last year, this turn of events is certainly interesting to say the least. If the 1D mk3 experience had been different, I’d simply view all of this as a boon to photographers and enjoy the fact that the competition should be good for everyone. It’d be a little harder to answer the perennial question, “What brand camera should I buy?” But, that’d be a small price to pay. Overall, I’d be happy and looking forward to seeing where this roller coaster goes.

Trouble is, the 1D mk3 experience matters. I’ve been happy with every Canon body that I’ve bought since the mid 90’s right up through the 5D. My only complaint with all of the Canon digital SLRs I owned was that I thought the autofocus systems were sub-par for the money. Otherwise, they all produced great images reliably and without a fuss. My purchase of two 1D mk3 bodies last year should have been nirvana. After all, take Canon’s great sensors and pro-level autofocus and the result should be sweet indeed.

The result wasn't nirvana by any stretch. My mk3 bodies have been to the shop multiple times for both autofocus recall service as well as other issues that have rendered the bodies inoperable at times. Issues that shouldn’t affect 1-series cameras. All in all, I’m pretty underwhelmed for a camera that was touted as a flagship camera and was the pinnacle of 20 years of EOS camera heritage. Don’t get me wrong, they’ve turned out to be adequate performers and have worked out business wise. But, merely adequate performance isn’t what a 1-series camera is about. Combine that with the nagging sensation that the body might fail you when you most need it and you’re not left with good feelings, even if you have another body or two in the case to serve as a backup.

Of course, I’m not the only one that can tell this story. Many others have the same kinds of feelings. To get a good idea of how many working pros feel, all you need to do is read through Rob Gailbraith’s discussion about the AF performance issue on the 1D mk3. In June of 2007, he was putting a lot of effort into trying to help nail the problem. He continued on for months and months because he obviously wanted to find a solution to give him the caliber of performance his work required. And then, his efforts tapered off into quietness, with the last entry a post in May of this year indicating more information would be coming soon. It hasn’t. Presumably, it’s not worth Rob’s time anymore because he’s sorted out a different solution. Maybe he’s just shooting with his older 1D mk2s. Or maybe, he’s got a few D3s now. In any case, his willingness to help find and solve the problems has faded. We can only assume the reason.

As far as the 5D goes, it’s three years old. It should have been replaced a year ago. The sensor in it is great, but we all know that semiconductor tech moves fast. Surely without upping the megapixel count, Canon could eek out cleaner images by now. And of course, the rest of the 5D package is pretty stale at this point. Instead of upping the game, Canon has chosen to let the 5D come down in price, significantly I might add. It’s a strategy that I’d appreciate if they came in with a more capable version, say a 3D, above it. Without such an approach, however, Canon has shown that they’re happy to rest on their laurels for a while in a very interesting market segment.

Canon has a lot riding on what they do next. I know that this next release will matter substantially to my own business decisions, especially since the majority of my business income comes from shooting in low-light environments. But, I also think it matters to the market as a whole.

To be blunt, I think the very next camera that Canon releases, which better be a 5D replacement at this point, is going to say a lot about how they intend to meet Nikon’s resurgence. If the 5D replacement is just a freshen up of the 30D to 40D variety and which doesn’t meet the challenge that the D700 brings, then Canon will be telegraphing that they’re happy with their market position selling the crap out of the Rebel XSi without worrying about the higher end. On the other hand, if they release a competent contender, then we’ve still got a two horse race.

What will be a competent 5D replacement? At a minimum, it has to have usable ISO 6400 that is as good as ISO 1600 on the current 5D and it has to have pro-level autofocus. I don’t care about more pixels at this point, though I won’t complain about a 16 megapixel sensor. Even with a larger sensor, it is the twin metrics of low to high ISO quality—two more stops at least over the current 5D—and capable autofocus performance that will tell the story. Anything below this threshold will say volumes about the direction in which Canon intends to take the platform.

Even if Canon meets the D700, they won’t be out of the doghouse yet. They’ll need a full-frame 1D mk4 that turns out beautiful ISO 6400 shots along with autofocus performance and reliability that puts to rest the 1D mk3 fiasco. And that camera needs to come pretty soon, or at least be announced by the end of the year. Anything less on the timing front will cause Canon quite a bit more face. And, anything less on the specification front will leave Nikon in the drivers seat for sure at the top end.

Of course, all of this is just my armchair opinion. Really, I should be out making more photographs instead of blathering on about this. But, right now is an interesting time because the market is changing in some fundamental ways. We know that Nikon’s back in the game. We know that Sony and others want to be in the game. The question is whether Canon is still in it. I’m certainly hoping so. The inevitable progress that comes with multiple strong players would be nice to have.

Changing Your Point of View

2008-06-27T03:59:53Z

A sure way to photographic dullsville is to take a picture from the same point of view that everyone sees the same scene from day in and day out. For example, imagine you’re walking down your neighborhood sidewalk. If you stop on the sidewalk at any particular point and simply lift your camera up to your eye and snap, the result is something you would see every day. It could be interesting, but the point of view that the photograph was made from definitely works against it.

Now, imagine that you’ve dropped down to one knee resulting in a net decrease of elevation of a foot and a half or so. For any particular subject, you’ve just increased your chances of making something visually interesting. Now, get on your stomach and repeat.

To illustrate my point, one of my all time favorite conference shots came while I was sitting in the audience at RailsConf Europe in London. While goofing with my camera, I decided to try a seat level shot looking back at the audience as they were paying attention to the speaker. Here’s the result.

I think that if I had made that photograph from eye level, it would have probably been boring and hit the bit bucket. But, from a more novel point of view, it picks up a lot of interesting qualities very quickly, not the least is that it gives a fresh perspective.

Another example is this shot I made earlier in the year at Boiler Bay on the Oregon Coastline:

To get this shot, I placed my camera on top of the curb of a parking lot and used a large puddle as a reflecting pond. People walked by me and wondered what the hell I was doing and made some rather interesting comments. Little did they know what they were missing out on. Of course, I think I got my jeans pretty dirty that evening, but oh well.

I wish I knew more about the psychology behind this, but my guess is that we as humans are visually stimulated by novel points of view. If it’s something we’ve seen before, well, it’s just not as visually stimulating as a photo taken that we’ve not ever been able to see with our own eyes. Maybe this is wired up into the way our perception of the world is significantly composed of recall from memory. When we see something that doesn’t fit in our mental database, it forces us to really look at it instead of glossing over it and letting the details fill in from other things we’ve seen just like it. I realize I’m wildly speculating here, but it seems to make sense based on the limited understanding I have of the matter. (And, if you have pointers, feel free to leave a comment! I’d love to know more!)

Seattle-based photographer (and all around great guy) Chase Jarvis is awesome at finding novel points of view to make photographs from. He's been noodling on this problem for a while and goes to the extreme of rigging cameras with remote triggers in places where no human eyeball typically is, such as right in front of a biker traveling down a mountain road. Check out this video for some highlights and inspiration:

Another great YouTube example is Joe McNally's story of photographing the changing of a light bulb. Not just any light bulb mind you, but the one on the very top of the Empire State Building.

Bottom line: Find an unusual point of view and you’re well on your way to making an interesting photograph. I’m not going to say that you should avoid the zone 5' to 6' above the ground, but you certainly can’t hurt your chances by getting out of that zone of view.

Follow up: Bill Bumgarner has posted a follow up including several examples from his photo collection.

Feeds, Republication, and Copyright

2008-06-15T02:08:49Z

Derek Powazek has yanked out full blog entries from his syndication feeds and is now providing simple summaries. He apparently hit his saturation point with ~~people~~ scum republishing his content, presumably to put ads all around it and profiteer from his work. On the one hand, I cringe at the rational for his doing this. On the other, I know from personal experience the problem that Derek is reacting to is incredibly real and he may be executing the only workable solution.

There are so many thoughts tangled up into a ball on this subject that it's really hard to know which thread to try to pull out first. You can have a discussion about making it easy for your audience to read your content. Then there's that whole line of thought that treating your audience like criminals is counter productive. And, besides all that, there's the whole fact that digital technology means that anything you place on the Internet is inherently copyable, both for good purposes and bad ones. And before going into any of those discussion paths, there has to be the acknowledgement of the wish that we all have that people are good and we should be building utopia out here on the Internet and we shouldn't let a few bad actors spoil the fun for the rest of us.

But then, well, all you have to do is slog out there into the muck and decide what you think about the reality of the situation. Google and other search engines have created a vast feeding frenzy of people trying to milk search results for advertising hits. Every get rich quick schemer and SEO specialist has jumped on board the Ponzi express and turned vast tracts of Internet real estate into a shadow land of lure and temptation to get people to click on an ad and it works because it's so damn cheap—essentially free—to stamp out duplicates of valid content and you only need a thin marginal click through rate to make it profitable enough to do.

So, what's a content creator to do? Does one make things easier for their readers and thereby serve as an uncomfortable participant? Are you better off ignoring the issue and pretending it doesn't happen. Or does one clamp down a bit and go back to treating syndication feeds as a notification mechanism that there's new content on your site. In the world we had a few years ago before this became all quite so prevalent, it was easier to make the call. At least then the discussion points usually revolved around whether you wanted to get people to come and enjoy your site's look and feel.

There's something else at play here. The nature of blogging and individual content creation on the web is changing somewhat lately. I'm not really able to put my finger onto any one thing, but microblogging, Twittering, and the like are part of it. Facebook and other social networks are another. And the fact that there are now too many interesting feeds to read in NetNewsWire anyway is another. Besides, one of the big reasons I used to like full feeds in my news reader is that I would read them offline. I no longer do that so much. Furthermore, thanks to EVDO and my iPhone (and soon iPhone 3G with faster network speeds!), the number of places where I'm offline at all if I'm reading content is limited now to the airplane and lately, when I'm stuck in seat 6F, I'd rather sleep instead.

Part of me thinks that I want to gripe about Derek shutting down his feed to provide summaries only. I should be mad and tell him that he should ignore the bad actors out there and just deal with it. Part of me thinks he's right to be offended by those bad actors and is doing the right thing and that I should follow suit. And part of me thinks that this ambivalence is probably the result of using Twitter and finally moving past the "I must read everything that somebody posts" line of thought to really just browsing and jumping on the good stuff. In that kind of world view, short summaries in feeds actually makes a lot of sense.

The Longest Week

2008-06-11T21:52:42Z

I started out this week like many of my friends, attention solidly placed on WWDC and the Stevenote on Monday. Pınar Özger and I checked into our hotel room on Sunday night so that we could be up at 5-something AM to shoot the most tenacious of attendees that were already in line. When we got there at 6AM, the line was already wrapped around the building on 4th street and was far down Minna. We went straight to work and worked our way up and down the line and got lots of good shots for our client.

The shots for the client are embargoed and won't be going up on my Flickr feed as usual, but here's a screenshot of one that was used on the web on Tuesday:

This shot is one of my favorites from the day. The attendees shown are the first ones in line that had been waiting over 12 hours to get in and were enthusiastic as anything to be riding up the final escalator to the 3rd floor of Moscone West. All it took was a bit of verbal encouragement, along the lines of, "OK everyone, show your iPhones!", and they were happy to share their enthusiasm.

After shooting the Stevenote and subsequent state of the union talks, I quickly wrapped up loose ends and threw a few things in my bags and went to SFO to fly to Washington DC.

Washington DC??? Um, hello? Doesn't WWDC go all week long?

Yes, it does. The last two years, I've worked for Apple to shoot WWDC and shot the entire week. But this year, life threw me a wrinkle. When Apple announced dates for WWDC, they conflicted with the O'Reilly Graphing Social Patterns East conference. I was really bummed when it looked like I wasn't going to be able to shoot WWDC this year. But then, after talking with all the parties involved, and thanks to having Pınar as part of my team, I was able to put together a nutty plan to shoot both WWDC and GSP East. To make it work, however, I had to take a red-eye flight from SFO to IAD, arriving at 5-something AM EDT in time to start shooting at 9AM at the Hyatt Crystal City.

It worked. I arrived on time and powered through a long day Tuesday after getting three hours of sleep on the airplane. The O'Reilly staffers were very kind and forgave my tired eyes and my insistence on skipping a nice meal in DC on Tuesday night. After a lovely 8 hours of sleep night in a real bed instead of an airliner seat, I shot the second day of GSP East and got everything accomplished with flying colors, including packing up and grabbing a car to the airport right as the conference ended.

As I write this, I'm at IAD again about to catch my flight back to SFO. Pınar has shot WWDC during the days I've been in Washington DC, including lots of sessions as well as the Apple Design Awards and Stump the Experts. I'll be joining her on Thursday and Friday for WWDC again, and I'm looking forward to catching a few sessions on all the cool technology in Snow Leopard as well as shooting the party in Yerba Buena Gardens. I can't believe it's only Wednesday.

Who would be stupid enough to try to shoot two simultaneous conferences on two coasts of the United States? Yeah, that would be me. At least now, enough of the hard part is behind me that I'm willing to even admit how crazy I am in public.

Pragmatic Screencasts Debut

2008-05-28T02:53:12Z

In another launch of a new product today, Mike Clark and the rest of my friends over at the Pragmatic Programmers have launched Pragmatic Screencasts with four screencast series covering a range of topics: Expression Engine, Core Animation, Erlang, and Active Record. Each series has several episodes ready to go with more to come.

So far, I've checked out a bit of the Expression Engine and Core Animation screencasts, both in full-sized and iPod/iPhone sized video. Both levels of resolution are nice and easy to follow along and the quality of the videos is nicely done, which is important when you're reading along with what the author is typing. Here's a grab from Ryan Irelan's Expression Engine Episode 1 in iPod/iPhone size:

The full size videos are even better. It's actually really hard to tell that you're watching a movie instead of letting the narrator drive your own screen.

The best part of these new screencasts, other than their content of course, is that the entire process of buying and downloading the videos is integrated into the same infrastructure that the Pragmatic Programmers use for their PDF eBooks. Just as you can download new PDFs of your books at any time, you can jump into your account page and grab the screencast episodes that you've purchased. Here's a grab from my own bookshelf showing the screencasts alongside my PDF books:

This kind of smooth integration is one of those things that's obvious when you see it, but it's the result of somebody thinking things through and doing the leg work to make it work nice and smoothly. Congrats Mike and Dave for getting this out the door. And congrats to Ryan Irelan, Bill Dudney, Kevin Smith, and Ryan Bates for their first screencast episodes. This stuff is a lot of hard work and you guys should be proud.

Strobist on DVD

2008-05-27T18:08:24Z

This weekend, as I was prepping photos for the store, I was also watching a very special set of videos put together by David Hobby, AKA the Strobist. David has been working on this project for a while now and I'm super happy that it's out the door and shipping now.

So, what's on the DVD set? In a nutshell, it's a recording of his one day seminar spread across 4 DVDs, a kick start DVD about gear, and 3 more DVDs covering specific shoots. All in all, its a firehose of information that's presented in David's patented we're gonna talk about everything at once style and screw the step by step outline because really, it's all interrelated and you just need to live and breath it a few times and then you'll get it style. Did I say it was a firehose? Yes I did. But, when the material is on DVD, you can rewind, play things again, and go back to something you missed earlier.

If you ever wanted to go to one of his seminars, but couldn't, you'll get all the content from his seminar by picking up the DVD, and at a discount over the ticket price and any travel expenses you might have spent. If you've been to one of his seminars, the three DVDs, labeled Bonus, are the real meat and potatoes of the set and are worth the price of admission on their own.

In fact, these so-called "Bonus" disks are best part of the set. Far from being just extra material, the content on these disks is where you get to see it all really come together. The 5 "Main" disks are just the warm up for the real show on these last three disks. For example, watching David work through shooting a model in a pool under crappy sodium vapor lights and coming up with a great shot with the help of an assistant holding a light on the end of a monopod and another assistant holding a backdrop in the water was fascinating, to say the least. And watching David accidently dip his camera in the pool, recover after a moment of worry and drying everything off, and then move right on along shows the kind of things that really do happen on location.

David is the first to say that this is not a slick production by any means. He's chosen to go for more content rather than better production. Really, what else do you expect from the man that brought you all the fun DIY projects like cardboard snoots and homemade ring flashes? It may be low in production value, but in my mind, that's appropriate for David. It's part of his philosophy top to bottom. On the other hand, some might hate the low tech approach, so watch the video below. If you dig it, you're on the right wavelength.

Bottom line, as long as you're cool with the production, this set is highly recommended. And, even if you've been to one of David's seminars, I still rank this as highly recommended because of the value of the content on the three "Bonus" disks alone.

The DVD set goes for $139 and there are reportedly 1000 copies at Midwest Photo Exchange ready to go. Why only 1000? David is funding this out of his own pocket and that was what he could do for the first run. He'll turn around what he makes from this run and reinvest in future runs. I'm thinking this first set is going to sell out fairly quickly, so if you really want this and want it soon, I'd jump fast.

Lack of International Print Shipping

2008-05-27T05:21:48Z

Just a few hours after announcing the store and a snag has appeared. Unfortunately, it seems that orders are currently limited to the United States and Canada. This was a wee bit of a problem as I had intended to select a vendor that could ship internationally. The problem seems to be that in recently partnering exclusively with Mpix, Zenfolio is no longer working with EZPrints who were the option for international sales. This created a bit of a void, one that I missed until a few people let me know about it this evening.

From what I can tell, the Zenfolio people seem well aware that they need a solution for this issue. As well, depending on how confident I am about how quickly things are resolved on that front, I'll be working on a plan B for international shipping and will know more soon. I'll update this particular post with information as I sort things out.

The Store is Open

2008-05-27T00:14:28Z

After a long time of wanting to do something like this, and after asking for your opinion about what photos to include, I'm happy to say that as of today, the store is open. I'm launching with 20 photographs spanning a broad range of the non-conference work I've done over the last few years. And, I will be adding more to the collection as time allows.

The process of opening up this store has been a very interesting. I've chatted with lots of people about what my approach should be. I've considered building my own store. I've auditioned lots of stores and fulfillment partners. In the end, I've decided to go with Zenfolio as the online storefront. They in turn use Mpix as their print and fulfillment partner. Between Zenfolio's competent e-commerce system and the fabulous prints and fulfillment that Mpix offers, I've been able to just focus most of my attention on honing the images to launch the store with.

While it's possible to just upload photos to Zenfolio and flip the switch to offer prints of them, I didn't take that approach. Instead, I evaluated each potential image on my workstation and printer for color, resolution, and sharpness. There were quite a few photos that I wanted to offer that didn't make the grade after their test prints. There are more in the queue waiting to be worked up so that they're in proper shape for the store. All in all, it's been a lot of work to get to this point. Fun work, mind you, but work nonetheless. There's still a bit more to be done. I'm going to work links and content for the store into this site over the next few days and give it the emphasis it should have.

That said, I'm incredibly glad be at this point. It wouldn't have happened with out a lot of encouragement from friends and family. I'm in debt to everyone who I've consulted with and especially in debt to all of you that chimed in with tags on my Flickr stream and helped me identify what images should be considered. You guys are the best, you humble me, and I hope that you'll keep telling me what you want.

All that said, please check out the photographs and let me know what you think. Thank You.

Surprised about Oil Prices? Really?

2008-05-22T17:44:58Z

Oil broke $135/barrel last night. Airlines are making changes to sneakily raise the price of tickets, such as American Airlines announcing that they'll charge money to check in bags, as well as cutting back flights. Ford is going to miss profitability in 2009. $4/gallon gas is definitely here in a big way and that's going to have major impact on America's suburban lifestyle. And, as a kicker, the news people are running around talking about experts and ordinary citizens being surprised. Surprised?

How the hell can you be surprised about this? Really?

Let's get this straight. It's been almost 35 years since the 1973 oil crisis, which validated Hubbert's Peak Oil theory about American oil production and made it obvious that at some point, the same dynamics would apply to global oil production. You can argue about the details of when, especially since the largest oil producers treat their reserve numbers as state secrets, but basic economics apply to finite resources.

The seven presidents who have been in office since the 1973 crisis from Nixon on have all paid varying degrees of lip service to the fact that this nation and this world need to find other sources of energy. Some of those presidents paid a bare minimum of lip service. Others a bit more. But no action was taken, at least no substantial real action other than encouraging more oil production.

No matter what you think about the current U.S. administration, you have to admit that it is taking the current run up in oil prices seriously. President Bush has asked OPEC, and the Saudis in particular, several times this year to increase oil production to help with the supply issues that are obviously effecting the market. In general, the oil producers have politely declined to increase production, even with Bush flying to the middle east to personally meet with them. Only recently have the Saudis committed to a minor increase in production after yet another personal visit by the President.

Don't misunderstand me. When I say that Bush is obviously taking the issue seriously, that's not to say that I think the current administration is doing the right thing or doing enough. I don't. In fact, I find it galling in the extreme that the head of state has to effectively go beg for more oil to run the machine that we've built over the last century. It's appalling, in fact. And, almost every member of the United States government shares responsibility for the mess that we're currently facing. It's not just the reaction of Bush II that is wrong—it's the result of 35 years of U.S. policy that is wrong.

As interesting as it is that the head of the U.S. has to go begging is the rather tepid reaction he's gotten. If there were great big reserves ready to go in Saudi Arabia and other places, at $135/barrel they should be cranking up production to rake in the profits. That they aren't is a damn good sign that they are probably running near the peak of their capacity to produce right now. But I digress...

Despite this and even though this particular story has been written large on the wall for 35 years, the press is making it sound like everyone is surprised when basic economics around finite resources makes its effect felt. And, of course, the press is just echoing what we all see and hear out in the world. Every time I stop at a gas station lately, people are acting surprised and dismayed about the prices they have to pay. I get the dismay. On Tuesday, I spent over $60 to fill up my 4 door sedan. But surprise? Really?

The only surprise there should be about this story is the timing of things. $4/gallon gasoline isn't surprising. The exact timing of when we would see it first in May of 2008, sure, that's a surprise. The current rate of price increases now that the $100/barrel barrier has been broken is a bit of a surprise. But the fact that oil would eventually get to this price, and that it would come sooner rather than later, is no surprise at all.

And what should be no surprise at all is that this isn't over. The price of oil and gas may fluctuate down again in the near future, but if it does, it'll come back up and go even higher. It's a simple story of demand meets supply of a finite resource. $4/gallon gas may be new, but it's a good bet that we'll soon see that price as quaint and low.

Adding Depth Strobist Style

2008-05-18T01:20:37Z

When photographing conferences, sometimes I have more than enough light to work with on stage. Sometimes I don't. When I don't have enough light on stage, I pull out the portable strobes and set up lights, using all sorts of things I've learned from the Strobist blog. For example, my recent gig shooting at OnCopyright 2008, I lit all the speaker shots with with two Canon 580 EX strobes and CTO gels. The lights were set up in such a way to mimic the traditional theater lights that were in use at the show, but which were just not putting out enough light.

Here's a shot of Clay Shirky on stage at OnCopyright, totally lit strobist style:

At last week's Where 2.0 Conference, I had just enough light to work with, thanks to a proper lighting truss set up in front of the stage. Working with Chris Legrand, the lighting designer, I was able to nail in a good set of settings for shooting the conference while preserving the background lighting design and was pretty happy with the results. Don't get me wrong, I didn't have a lot of light up there. I was shooting 1/100@f/4.0 ISO 1600. But, it worked and if I had added my own light to the stage, I would have started washing out the colors on the backdrop.

Here's a shot of the mashup panel on the Where 2.0 stage using just the conference stage lighting:

When looking at these kind of wide shots of the stage, I'm always of two minds about whether I like the audience in silhouette. On the one hand, it's very punchy and graphical. On the other, the audience turns into a 2D layer and doesn't have any depth.

Seeing a possibility to do more, I decided to try an experiment to see if I could add some depth to the audience. I broke out two strobes and set them up on the right and left of the room and aimed them up at the ceiling to reflect light down into the audience in front of the stage, being careful not to push much light onto the stage itself.

Here's the setup in action:

As you can see, the result is depth in the audience and a different sense of layering in the composition. I'm still split on which way I prefer things to be, but I think that different shots will want different treatments. Now that I've sorted out how to do this, it becomes a choice rather than an enforced mandate.

A cool part about the setup I engineered is that I was able to use the same exposure whether or not I was pushing light into the audience. It took a bit of experimentation along the way, but after a couple of tweaks, I had things balanced just right, including using 3/4 CTO worth of gels to match color balance with the stage. If I was shooting tight and didn't have audience in the frame, I would turn off my PocketWizard transmitter and shoot away. But, when I did want to have light on the audience, all I needed to do was flip a switch.

Best of all, I was able to use this lighting setup to capture audience shots. I found all I needed to do was open up a stop to f/2.8 and I could work interesting shots at various places in the audience, such as this one:

Learning to light over the last few years has been a very enjoyable journey. It's a revelation when you turn the corner from thinking about lighting as a binary decision between existing light and not. But that revelation doesn't come all at once. Instead, it's like so much of photography in that it reveals itself in stages. A bit here and a bit there. Each little experiment helps open up a new range of possibilities.

Why Auto White Balance Isn't Perfect

2008-04-28T00:42:13Z

Every digital camera made comes with a promise of making perfect pictures with the click of a button. This promise is made possible by a considerable amount of computer processing horsepower as well as both simple and complex algorithms for determining a solution to use for the photographic variables of exposure, aperture, sensitivity, and white balance, assuming you haven't overridden these settings with ones of your own. These algorithms, however, are by no means perfect, including the auto white balance algorithm used to process the RGB sensor data into an accurate color image that resembles the scene you photographed.

Oh, come on, surely you don't mean that modern photographic technology hasn't figured out how to set the white balance automatically for every situation.

Actually, that's exactly what I'm saying. Sure, modern electronics do a pretty good job a fair amount of the time. But, there's one thing that prevents auto white balance from doing a perfect job and that is that the data it works with is the light reflected from your subject. Unless the light source is in the scene, there's no way for the camera's electronics to know what the color the light used to illuminate a scene is. And, even if the light source is in the scene, there's no easy way for the camera to say "ah, here's the light source. Let's process the data from right there to figure out what white balance setting to use." Instead, because the light source is almost always never in the scene, the auto white balance algorithm has to guess.

For example, let's look at this photo of Moscone West in San Francisco. There's no particular reason, by the way, for using this photo other than it's one that I'd recently posted to my Flickr account. It's actually a pretty average photo taken in daylight with a blue sky on top and a grey street on the bottom. By looking at the photo, you can figure out the basic relationship of light source to subject to camera and you know it's daylight illuminating the scene. But what does the camera know? Only what it can deduce through its algorithm.

The problem is that until cameras sport artificial intelligence, the mass of transistors and circuits in your hand has no blinking idea what it's looking at. The auto white balance algorithm doesn't know that it's a street scene with a big glass building and cars and a street in it. If it had your brain in there, it'd know that it should process the image data as being illuminated by daylight. Without a brain, all it knows is that it's looking at a big array of RGB data and it needs to make some quick guesses to determine what white balance settings it will use.

Well, that image you used is pretty obviously a daylight image. Shouldn't the camera be able to figure out what's going on by doing some fancy image processing? For example, there's that grey street there...

How smart do you think a camera is? Trying to suss out what part of an image is a neutral grey to use to deduce a white balance setting from is a pretty challenging problem. There are probably as many different white balance algorithms as there are camera makers, maybe more. But, in the end, they all do about the same thing. They look at the incoming data, smoosh it together in some way, look at the results, and then make a guess.

It's my understanding that the granddaddy of these algorithms, first deployed in those awesome-for-the-time Kodak lab machines, blended the overall image into a single color and then used that to set a target white balance, as well as many other settings, to make a print that would be acceptable to the majority of the people most of the time.

As you can see, the smooshed color value from the scene above is still cooler than neutral and, if you used it to set a white balance setting from, you'd end up with a photo that was a bit too warm, and it'd probably look something like the photo to the right. Come to think of it, I remember sometimes getting photos that looked too warm from those one-hour places. Hrmm....

These days, it's a safe bet to assume that the algorithms used in modern digital cameras are quite a bit more advanced and do a lot of screening out of colors that can be ignored and might even look in the top half of the photo looking for something that resembles a sky or the like. No matter how advanced the algorithm, however, nothing is going to change the fundamental situation at hand. Without being able to see the light source illuminating the subject, the camera will always be making a guess.

Of course, it's easy enough to set a white balance setting manually and with a little practice, you can do a much better job than AWB. You can use one of the presets on your camera, such as daylight when outside and tungsten when inside. Better yet, you can use a tool like a WhiBal or ExpoDisc, which provide great results when you are shooting in challenging lighting situtations. Any of these options takes just a few seconds and will almost always result in a more pleasing solution than AWB.

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Print Store Update

2008-04-27T22:20:25Z

On April 2nd, I was pretty optimistic that I was just a couple of weeks away from launching an online store with the first of my prints for sale. As you know, I asked for a bit of help from all of you to help out in the selection process. That process turned out to be a fantastic experience and resulted in a lot of feedback. Awesome feedback.

There was so much feedback, in fact, that I had to go back to the archives and pull up some photos that weren't yet under consideration. Mix in April 15th—tax time—and then working two conferences and I'm feeling about like the engineers at Apple did last year when they were working on both the iPhone OS and Mac OS X 10.5. Stretched a bit thinnnnn.

But, the store will be opening up soon! When the counters are installed and the signs arrive, and it's time to open the doors you will be the first to know.

Ignite SF April 2008

2008-04-23T14:48:26Z

As part of Web 2.0 Expo SF 2008, Brady Forrest and company hosted an Ignite SF at the DNA Lounge last night. Ignite nights are always a good time. What's Ignite? Take 14 or so speakers, give them 5 minutes each to talk, and see what happens. The result is almost universally fun. And, thanks to the format, if somebody's talk is a dud, well, you only have to wait 5 minutes for the next one.

The challenge of shooting in the DNA Lounge is that it was dark. Really dark. The speakers were illuminated by a single light and, if they stayed in the light, the exposure was 1/100 at f/2.8 using ISO 1600. If they drifted out of the light, well, forget the exposure. The cool part, however, was that there was lots of red and purple light around the perimeter of the club, which was useful as a backdrop lighting to the highly contrasty speakers.

The only bad part of the night? Trying to catch a cab in the rain to get back to the hotel. Thankfully a friend of a friend helped out and snagged a cab on Folsom street and brought it around to the club to share a ride back to our respective hotels. Thanks Jamie for that!

MySQL User Conference 2008

2008-04-20T02:54:04Z

I've been in Santa Clara, California this last week photographing the 2008 MySQL User Conference and Expo. This is the fourth year that I've been the official photographer for this conference. Wow, has it really been that many years in a row? I guess it has. Of course, there was one big difference this year: MySQL is now part of Sun Microsystems.

As part of the transition, Mårten Mickos (pictured above, and who is one of those guys the camera loves) has traded in his CEO title for the title of Senior Vice President of the Database Group at Sun. All the other MySQL folks have similarly changed titles, but so far, they don't seem to have changed roles much. If anything, they all seemed remarkably well relaxed and content this year. Of course, I guess I would be as well if I was a party to a one billion dollar acquisition. I hope that the terms of the deal ended up quite favorably to all of the employees of the former MySQL AB.

Over the years, the number of exhibitors on the expo floor have ebbed and flowed. This was certainly a banner year as it seemed like there were more exhibitors than ever and there were several times that the expo floor were jammed packed. And, this was the first year that I had some decent light in the expo hall. I guess that at some point in the last year, the Santa Clara Convention Center replaced some of the light bulbs in the exhibition areas with stronger ones.

During the conference, I got to meet up with several old friends. I didn't get to spend much time with Ask Bjørn Hansen this time around, but Pınar and I did go out to dinner with Dick Hardt and spend some time talking about travels, technology, identity, and fast cars.

I also had the pleasure of running into my very good friend, Jim Driscoll, who I used to work with at Sun Microsystems back when I worked on many things Java. I bumped into him walking through the hallways one day and I think we were both surprised and pleased. He hadn't planned on being at the conference, but got pulled into doing some time in the Sun booth in the Expo. I bumped into him right at the lunch break, so we were able to play hooky for an hour or so and catch up on life and such.

I so love those kind of surprises.

All in all, I uploaded 106 photos from the conference to Flickr for public viewing, all processed with Aperture 2.1 and uploaded with FlickrExport.

Color Temperature and White Balance

2008-04-09T22:07:09Z

Color temperature gives a way to describe the composition of light, specifically the spectrum of colors in light used to illuminate a subject. Light from 3200K tungsten photo flood bulbs contains more orange and red than blue while daylight, which typically has a color temperature between 5500K and 6500K, contains a more equal amount of the various colors of the spectrum. So, what does knowing this get us?

Visualize, if you will, daylight striking a flag. It can be a United States flag or, maybe you'd prefer a Union Jack, a French flag, or even one from the Netherlands. It doesn't really matter, as long as the flag you visualize has red, white, and blue in it. Since daylight has a fairly equal spectrum, it follows that the intensity of the light reflecting from the red and blue parts of the flag and toward us (and our camera) is roughly equal. And the light from the white part of the flag is reflecting all the components of the daylight equally.

Now, lets take that flag indoors and light it up with tungsten light. Because tungsten light is rich in reds and poor in blues, as illustrated by the graph to the right, the light reflecting from the red part of the flag is going have a higher intensity than the light from the blue part. In addition, the white part is going to reflect all the spectrum of the illuminating light, so the white in the flag is actually going to be composed of more red and orange than blue as well.

Because of the differences in the light between these two situations, the data captured by our camera is going to be different. And, without doing something about this difference, the image taken under tungsten light might not be recognized as a flag from whatever country it originally came from.

I'm not sure I follow. I've seen these flags both outdoors and inside. I don't remember seeing any difference between them.

You, my friend, have a highly evolved visual cortex which automatically compensates for the kind of light you're standing in. But, the sensors in our digital cameras don't compensate. Instead, they literally record the absolute amounts of red, green, and blue light that is reflected by the subject. In fact, if you take a neutral surface and photograph it using different sources of illumination, you'll end up with very different amounts of red, green, and blue data being recorded.

Here's an illustration that shows the relative amounts of red, green, and blue that is captured using different illumination sources:

In order to make a neutral surface look neutral under different kinds of light, the software in either the camera or in your RAW processing tool uses a color temperature value to derive a compensation to apply to the data recorded by the sensor. The result, if performed correctly, is a neutral rendering of your subject. It's the visual equivalent of using an equalizer to balance the various frequencies in music.

Of course, not all the surfaces in your scene will be neutral, but neutral surfaces are easy to talk about and use as illustrations. Also, because a neutral surface should reflect all colors equally, the compensation to make a neutral surface appear neutral will usually make all the colors in your image render correctly.

So, that's it? That's all there is to it?

Well, almost. The one thing I've been glossing over is that color temperature is defined by a theoretical black body. Some light sources are modeled by a black body fairly well. Other sources emit light that aren't modeled as well by black body radiation. And sometimes, our subjects are illuminated by multiple kinds of light sources, each adding its own special spectrum to the mix. In many cases, a color temperature value can get us pretty close, but other times there will be differences between theory and practice.

These differences will usually show up in your images as a green or magenta cast after the color temperature correction has been applied. To help you tame this difference between theory and real life, RAW software processing tools provide you with a tint control to dial in a compensation for this green or magenta shift. You can use it to perfectly tune the colors in your photograph.

OK, smarty-pants, how come we never had to worry about this with film?

Back in the days where we had to hike to school uphill both ways in the snow, this whole discussion of color temperature did matter, at least to professionals and advanced amateurs. When you bought film, you had your choice between daylight film for shooting in 5500-6500K light, and tungsten film for shooting in 3200K light. If your light was different than this, you had to break out the filters for your lens and start correcting for it the old fashioned way. Or, hope that your lab was good enough to correct everything up when it printed your color negatives.

In any case, it was a concern, but there was less flexibility to deal with it. So most people didn't even think about it. And, most print labs did a good enough job to where a lot of people were able to ignore the problem. Some would say that ignorance is bliss, but I for one am actually glad to be able to adjust to different lighting conditions so easily. And I'm glad to have the ability to tweak white balance so easily after the fact. If I want a warmer tone for a photo, I can just tweak the color temperature a tad in Aperture, Lightroom, or Camera Raw and get the results I want after the fact instead of being bitter that I didn't use a warming filter when I took the picture.

What about other light sources, like fluorescent and sodium lights?

Fluorescent and sodium lights are much harder to talk about when it comes to white balance as they don't have the same kind of continuous spectrum output that the sun and incandescent lights do. The better, newer fluorescent bulbs are getting there, but old school fluorescent bulbs have a huge green spike in their spectrum. But really, a discussion about how to deal with color correction with fluorescent lights is one for another day. As far as sodium lights, their spectrum is so spiky as to require beer or even more suitable beverages to really talk about.

Related Posts:

Measuring the Color of Light, which gives some background on why the color composition of light is measured using the Kelvin unit of temperature.

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