The Online Photographer

This week's column by Ctein

Lately I've been having considerable success making portfolio-worthy photographs on my airline flights. I may not have any artistic control over the scenery I'm presented, but despite that, I'd have to say that nearly half my flights have produced at least one photograph I'm happy to add to my portfolio. I engaged in such photography back in my film/darkroom days but I rarely achieved success. These days I consider success the norm. So, what's different?

Where you sit
One change has nothing to do with the photographic technology. I'm sitting further forward in the airplane. There is less air turbulence in front of the wing than behind; the closer you can get to the nose, the better. The reason I'm sitting further forward is that the combined forces of rampant security paranoia and rampant airline greed have made economy-class flying increasingly intolerable to me. Most of my five to eight peregrinations each year are by air rather than ground. I like to go places. Increasingly, I'm disliking getting there.

Consequently, these days, I'm weighting my flight choices more heavily by whether I can get a cheap first class upgrade or choice of premium quality seats than by flight times and arrivals. I'll also throw frequent-flier miles and credit card points at an upgrade; it usually gets me more value both financially and comfort-wise than a free coach ticket would. I'm nowhere near the income level where I can afford to pay list for business or first class, but cheap upgrades? Oh, yeah!

Paradoxically, looking to the "discount" airlines often produces better results. Living on the West Coast and mostly traveling to the Midwest, I've got some good options. Southwest Airlines often has the lowest prices to where I want to go, when you take into account that they still allow two free pieces of checked luggage. Paying an additional sum for priority boarding (and buying and checking-in early) usually means I can grab whatever seat I want.

My favoritest airline, though, is Minneapolis-based Sun Country (half my trips are to Minneapolis). They fly direct to San Francisco, unlike Southwest. Not only are their fares low, but when I do my 24-hour online check-in, they'll allow me to upgrade to first class (which is never sold out) for $120 each way. For an average of $150–$200 more than I'd pay for a coach ticket on some other airline, I fly first class. If I want to take any checked bags with me, which I often do, knock $50–$100 off of that modest premium.

That's the nontechnological angle. Mostly, my success rate is way up because of both digital photography and digital printing. Digital cameras let me find the sweet spots in the airplane windows. Photographing through two panes of acrylic/glass doesn't degrade image quality anywhere as much as you'd think, unless you're photographing through a ripply spot in one of the panes or it's really badly scraped up. In the film days, I wouldn't know if I had picked a good spot until I developed the film. More often than not I hadn't.

Now what I do is make a test photograph and chimp it like mad at high magnification. I go over the entire frame to see if there are any sour spots in it. If there are, I move the camera over a bit and try again. Usually I can find a usable spot on the window. As long as I always photograph through that spot, photographs look consistently sharp from corner to corner.

Fig. 2.

Working with a longer lens also helps. Wider fields of view pull in more oblique rays and those cause more problems when photographing through two layers of window. I stick with something in the 75-100mm-equivalent range. The illustration at the top of this post shows the full frame of a recent addition to my portfolio that I made with the Olympus 45mm (90 mm-e) lens. It makes a critically tack-sharp 17x22-inch print. Figure 2 is a 100%-scale detail.

Color-crossover
Digital printing comes into play because aerial photography means photographing through a very long column of air. There's a huge amount of atmospheric scattering, and shorter wavelengths are scattered much more strongly than longer ones. That's what produces the blue shadows in long-distance photographs: green and especially blue wavelengths from all over the scene are scattered into the shadows, veiling them. It's not just a color shift, it's color-crossover. Even when you've overall color-balanced so that the whites are neutral, the shadows will be greenish-blue.

This was a nearly-impossible problem to address in the darkroom unless you did dye transfer, in which case it was merely annoyingly difficult. In image-processing software, it's readily addressed with a curves correction. Figure 3 shows a generic curve adjustment for dealing with this. Observe how far in I pulled the black point on the blue curve, a lesser amount on the green curve, and only a little bit on the red curve. I added control points up near 192, 192 so that the whites and highlights are little altered. This is just an approximation of what you'd need to do for any particular photograph, but it shows you the general idea.

Aerial B&W infrared photography is also turning out to be a big win. That'll be next week's column.

Ctein

Ctein's column appears on TOP on Wednesdays.

©2013 by Ctein, all rights reserved

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Featured Comments from:

David: "Great post. I am an airline pilot and I have taken a DSLR along on every trip I've worked since 2004. Your tips are spot on, especially the part about finding a good piece of window to shot through. Even the flight-deck's windows have their flaws. It's important to find a spot with no ripples.

"The only point where I disagree with you is the use of long lenses. Yes, long lenses help you stay clear of some of the issues associated with shooting through a window, but when I use a long lens for aerials I feel like I am not able to produce a sense of height and my pictures look flat. I advise you to pull out the wide angle and deal with the consequences. You can mitigate a lot of the flare and reflection issues by pushing your lens hood right up against the window or carry a piece of black cloth to drape around your camera.

"Your curves solution to blue shadows is quite elegant. I'm going to add it to my bag of tricks. For those who are interested, I created a video tutorial on how to edit photos taken through an airliner's window. It's kind of rambling and poorly produced but I do give away many of my secrets so it might be worth watching.

"A big part of getting good photos from an airliner is being in the right place at the right time. The same rules of lighting apply to aerial photography as landscape photography. Plan your trip so you are airborne during early morning or late afternoon. My job keeps me airborne 700 to 1,000 hours per year, so my odds of seeing something spectacular are higher than the average air traveler. Here is a gallery of some of the best aerial photos I've acquired over the years.

"For more tips about aerial photography and lots of stories, see my 'Flying the Line' series at my blog.

"Sorry for the shameless self promotion.  Sometimes I can't help myself."

Dale: "Enjoyed the column very much. Another thing to consider is using the airline website to find out what equipment is being used. Newer planes tend to mean fewer scratched windows. And as a 40 week per year flyer, I can say Southwest seems to maintain windows more often. They often seem clearer."

VK: "One of my favorite landscape subjects! And technically it is much harder than people think it is when seeing the final product, because the list of things you have to worry about is huge: sun glare, far distance haze, clouds, scratches on the window, exhaust turbulence from the engines, and that your ground speed is 3 meters per 1/60 sec. Not to mention people in the aisle seat who insist in sleeping with windows down.

"Absolutely the best airline route for such photography is British Airways Flight 118. Leaves Bangalore, India, in the early a.m., and lands in London, UK, shortly after noon, and flies over some stunning places along the way."

Eli Burakian: "Folks should check out Julieanne Kost who has a great book called Window Seat with incredible photographs from commercial flights, as well as specific and general advice."

(Second of an indeterminate number of parts)

Fig. 1. I've made some portfolio-worthy false-color digital IR photographs
but not many, and it's devilishly hard work. Consequently, it's
not high on my priority list

-

This week's column by Ctein

Last week I told you how I got my Olympus Pen E-P1 camera converted to 830 nm (a.k.a. "deep") infrared by Life Pixel. I didn't opt for the full-spectrum conversion, although I considered it. I have some theoretical interest in exploring ultraviolet photography, and I have done false-color infrared work (figure 1). Converting for full-spectrum, though, would've required me to buy a whole bunch of auxiliary filters. Just about every lens I own uses a different filter size. Even with step-down rings, I'd be more than doubling the cost of the endeavor, and the equipment would be a lot less convenient to work with. Life Pixel assured me that if I wanted to opt for that (re-)conversion later, they could do it (for additional money, of course).

As soon as I started working with the IR-converted Pen several characteristics jumped out at me. First, a Micro 4/3 type design is really ideal for IR work. There are no problems with focus shifts or corrections, because the camera is focusing based on what the sensor sees. There are many fewer issues visualizing how a photograph is going to look in the infrared, because what you see on the back screen of the camera is a black-and-white infrared photograph. It's a very natural way to work.

Fig. 2. This is a "straight" RAW conversion from my IR Olympus Pen, using my normal default ACR settings

The photographs that come out of my camera are very flat (figure 2). There are no true blacks and the only time there are pure whites is if there is a direct light source or specular reflection in the photograph or the contrast range of the original scene is really extreme. I can't say whether this is inherent in the scenes themselves, in the behavior of the sensor/filter stack in the deep IR, or purely a consequence of the fact that anti-reflection coatings on lens elements don't work especially well in the IR.

Whatever the reason, photographs are typically low in contrast with extremely poor micro-contrast and tonal separation in fine detail. My standard conversion in ACR for the IR Pen pushes the contrast slider up around +65 and has the clarity slider pegged at +100. Even that's often not enough; I may pull in the black and white clipping points in ACR or do additional local contrast enhancement in Photoshop using wide radius unsharp masking or ContrastMaster. The photographs look great after I make those adjustments (figure 3).

Fig. 3. The same photograph after I greatly boosted the contrast and clarity and pulled in the black and white clipping points in ACR

High-ISO noise was less of a problem with my converted camera. That's because the first noise to kick in offensively with the Olympus Pen is chroma noise. No chroma in these photographs! I've previously written that I considered the Pen usable up to ISO 800 for professional-quality work. After the IR conversion, it's ISO 1600.

(Important side-note: in all discussions of noise in this camera, I'm going to be talking about what it looks like after I've made the contrast adjustments needed to make the overall photograph look good. The appearance of noise is awfully sensitive to global and local contrast, so what you really care about is how it looks in a photograph with good contrast characteristics, not what comes out of the camera.)

Noise is an important consideration, aesthetically, because in the IR the sky is almost always very dark and there's more noise at the dark end of the exposure scale than the light end. Furthermore, because Raleigh scattering goes as the fourth power of wavelength (that's why the sky is blue, in case you didn't know), shadows are even darker in the infrared than they are invisible light.

Most conventional cameras show little difference in noise at the lower ISO settings, but noise steadily grows with increasing ISO in my IR Pen. The camera exhibits extremely low noise at an ISO 100 setting, but every stop above that shows a clear increase in noise (figure 4). It's very uniform and smooth; really, it looks like film grain rather than annoying digital noise, but it does increase with each increment. In subjective language, I'd describe ISO 100 as being essentially grainless, ISO 200–400 as being very fine-grained (relative to 35mm conventional black-and-white film), ISO 800 still fine-grained and ISO 1600 medium/coarse-grained. Above 1600, I don't consider the camera usable because large-scale stripe patterns appear, and the "grain" loses the totally random, uniform quality.

Fig. 4. Noise in the IR Olympus Pen at various ISOs (the RAW files were corrected using the same ACR settings as for figure 3). Pay no attention to the sharpness of the leaves—it was a windy day

Between that and wanting/needing to use lens apertures in the ƒ/3.5–ƒ/5.6 range (I'll get to that in the next installment), one can wind up a bit light-starved even on a sunny day. A sunlight exposure at ISO 100 would be something like 1/300th sec at ƒ/4, after the two-stop deep-IR-conversion loss. But, with far less light in the shadows you can readily drop 3–4 stops. If you want to stop down for more depth of field or better sharpness or use a longer lens, well... ISO 100 doesn't cut it. I'm willing to accept the two stop speed loss to get purer IR characteristics, but I can understand why many folks might prefer the conventional IR conversion.

Putting this in perspective, though, the IR Pen still produces photographs at ISO 800 that are less grainy than the brute-force IR photography I talked about last time.

The next time I come back to this subject, in two (?) weeks, I'll tell you how a whole bunch of different lenses performed in the IR. Stay tuned to this station.

©2013 by Ctein, all rights reserved

Weekly columnist Ctein's work usually appears on Wednesdays, but Mike the Ed. was traveling this week.

Original contents copyright 2013 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Oskar Ojala: "Out of curiosity, is the false color IR picture taken on Kodak EIR or something else? I tend agree with your conclusions though; in my experience false color IR usually turns into a gimmick rather than something that stands on it own and thus I've concentrated on BW IR this year. There are good examples of false color IR—I've even managed to take some shots myself that I liked—but it's a very challenging medium.

"For a while I've used converted Sony NEXes for IR, before that a Nikon and have also converted a prosumer Canon as an experiment. All except the Canon were multispectral versions. The Canon, with a deep enough filter to render an entirely monochromatic image, worked very well actually. While my IR pictures tend to have flatness, it hasn't been as extreme as your example, although the settings might differ. Specifically, blacks aren't nearly black enough for me. There could be many reasons for that.

"One thing I have found is that there are huge differences in lenses for IR and especially most wide angle lenses tend to work lousy, with too many aberrations ruining everything but the center. Contrast also varies a lot. My lens selection has been a long process."

Tim: "Perfect timing with these posts, I recently (last Thursday) acquired a second hand full spectrum E-PL1. I've only used it for a weekend, but I think I'm going to have a lot of fun with it. The full spectrum images converted to black and white at first glance are really appealing to me. I wanted to let you know that I'm really enjoying these posts."

(First of an indeterminate number of parts)

This week's column by Ctein

As I mentioned in last week's column, I've done some good art in the past with digital IR. All of that's been done with "brute force" configurations. That is to say, I used a conventional IR-blocking-filtered digital camera with a visible-light blocking filter over the lens and made my photographs with the minuscule amount of infrared light that would leak past the blocking filter.

The advantage of such an arrangement is that one can use one's existing camera. The disadvantage is that those IR-blocking filters are extremely effective. On my old Fuji cameras, vis figure 4 last week, it was still possible to make infrared photographs. But, that photograph had an exposure of 1/5 second at ƒ/2.8 with the camera set to ISO 100, and the only reason it was even that short was I was photographing almost directly into the sun. Three-fold longer exposure times are more common, even in direct sunlight.

On my two Olympus cameras, this brute force method won't even work; the IR-blocking filters are simply too good. I gave up infrared photography for the time being when I got my Olympus Pen three years ago.

A while back, TOP reader Dave Polaschek lent me his hard-converted DSLR, where the IR-blocking filter had been removed and replaced with a visible-light-blocking filter. Unsurprisingly, the results were immensely better. I could work at hand-holdable shutter speeds and apertures even under less-than-direct-sunlight conditions, and the photographs had much nicer tonality and less noise.

I found myself not using Dave's camera very much, though. It was a different make and format than my Olympus, which meant there was no common hardware. It was also quite bulky compared to the kit I was using. Too much trouble to haul along. Since 99% (conservatively) of my work is still traditional color photography, Dave's camera languished on the shelf. Eventually I returned it to him.

I started thinking about getting my old Olympus Pen converted to IR, since it was not getting any use at all since my OM-D purchase. The body is so small and light that adding it to my kit wouldn't present an annoying burden, and I wouldn't have to buy lenses for it. I did some casual looking into the companies that had IR-photography products, but there was such a wide range of prices and services available, spanning more than an order of magnitude, that I put it aside as something that was going to require far more energy and time to research that I felt like putting in. I did bookmark that Life Pixel had an off-the-shelf Olympus conversion at the exceedingly reasonable price of $275, but that's as far as it went. I didn't know anything about the company, and if you attempt to research this subject online by looking at user threads in various forums, you'll find a most notable set of partisan flame wars. It's almost as if you were to ask the question, "Gee, I want to be a computer user. I hear those things are cool. So, should I get a Mac or Windows machine?" hoping to get something approaching a dispassionately informative answer.

Then a friend, Josh More, who does truly exquisite animal photography, asked me if I had an opinion on which company he should go with for a camera conversion. Well, having none, and rather liking the camera David loaned me (and besides it was of the same brand as Josh's camera) I asked Dave who had done his conversion. And, what do you know, it turned out to be Life Pixel. David been pleased with his dealings with them, and I had been pleased with his camera, so that settled the matter.

I'm not saying they are the only people who offer good service and reasonable prices; I am sure there are others. But me, I need only one. I'm not even saying they're better than anybody else. Don't know, don't care. In this case, better is the enemy of good. I will say they treated me just fine, and I don't think they thought I was anyone special (the "world-famous Ctein" only exists in some alternate reality [yes, but it's a cool alternate reality —Ed.]). I had a modest number of hand-holding questions for them that their website didn't answer (although it answers quite a few) and I received prompt and useful answers.

After too much procrastination (I was dealing with a rather large print sale; you might've heard) I sent off my camera to them with payment. I opted for the "deep IR" (830 nm cutoff) over the "standard IR" (720 nm cutoff) conversion. They cost the same, and I figured since I was most interested in pure IR, I would go for the purest experience. Deep IR conversion loses an additional stop of camera sensitivity over the regular conversion—two stops instead of one. In other words, a camera setting of ISO 100 becomes an effective setting of ISO 25 (assuming you think ISO applies to IR, but we won't go there). Still, for a great deal of work ISO 25 is plenty, so I decided that would be more than sufficient. Turns out it's not quite so "plenty" as I thought, which I'll get to in future columns, but it's still pretty great.

Since their estimated delivery date was after I'd be leaving for Minneapolis, I asked them if there'd be any problem contacting me on completion to see if I wanted it shipped to a different address. Nope, no problem.

Two days before I was due to fly out, and nearly a week earlier than they had estimated, they were done with my conversion and sent me an e-mail asking where I'd like the camera sent. I fired one back saying that since I would be leaving town in two days, was there any chance they could get the package shipped out that same day via UPS for overnight delivery?

Before I was done telling Paula that she might need to keep an eye out for delivery in the morning, I got a phone call from Life Pixel. Yes, they could get the package out the same day, and the reason they were calling me is so that I could make the payment for the faster shipping with no unnecessary delays. Great! That meant I didn't have to have the camera shipped to Minneapolis and I could check it out before I left.

UPS screwed up and the package didn't arrive the next day but the day following, the day I was going to leave. That still gave me time to run some quickie tests to make sure the camera performed OK, and it did. And, pleasant surprise, it came back with a custom white balance programmed in, so the photographs come up on the back screen and in ACR looking almost perfectly neutral with no futzing about on my part. I've got Mike's beloved black-and-white camera (not counting the IR business) [this alternate reality is no fair —Ed.].

The full frame from an "ISO 100" infrared photograph from my converted Olympus Pen

A 100% section from the center of that frame. Nice detail and low noise.

While waiting to board at the airport, I sent a short e-mail off to Life Pixel letting them know that UPS screwed up and asked them to check into whether I'm due for some kind of a refund on shipping. No problem, they said, and they went and smacked UPS around a bit and the next morning there was an e-mail saying it's done and they've credited me back with all my shipping charges.

And that's how I got my camera: flawless conversion, ready to use out-of-the-box, finished a week before I expect, and an appropriate amount of handholding the whole way through the process. Complaints? None.

Next week I'll start to tell you what it's like working with this camera and the image characteristics of the photographs it produces. Then, probably, tea, and after that, probably, some reports on lens performance with this camera (Yeah, I rearranged my upcoming writing schedule since I spelled it out a week ago. Anyone truly surprised?)

©2013 by Ctein, all rights reserved

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Harold Merklinger: "A cameras once criticized for its high IR sensitivity but seldom seen recommended for IR photography is indeed the Leica M8. Hand-held IR images are quite possible with typical exposures such as 1/60 sec at ƒ/5.6 with ISO set to 320.  The filter offering the best hand-held opportunities is the B&W 092. The bright foliage effect is present with this filter, although skies may not be as dark as with stronger filters. The on-screen review image is quite purple, flarey, and may seem to indicate a hot-spot problem, and yet the final image will be fine.

"A near-unique feature of the M8 is that it meters correctly in the IR spectrum! I have learned to trust the meter and not the screen. Of course the appropriate focus off-set for each lens needs to be known. ISO settings higher than 320 are certainly possible, but I find that definition suffers. Better results are obtained at ISO 160 although this often entails shutter speeds of 1/15 sec and a tripod becomes a near necessity. (The M9 will offer even better definition, but requires 30 to 60 times the exposure—depending upon the filter used.)

"Some cameras—like the Nikon D800—are almost entirely unsuitable for IR photography unless modified. In my brief tests with a D800, 100 to 300 times the exposure was required (compared to the M8) and the bright foliage effect was weak to non-existent. This implies that the net effect of the IR passing filter and the IR blocking filter is essentially a neutral density visible light filter. And even live-view metering was way off. (I never use the in-camera JPEG files from the M8; I only use the DNG files.)"

Ctein replies: That is indeed a remarkable amount of IR leakage in the M8. But what a great way to turn a bug into a feature. And you get to use your Leica lenses, yet!

Your D800 performed a lot like my Olympus Pen, pre-conversion.

This week's column by Ctein

One of the complaints I've seen raised about Adobe's new subscription-based license for Photoshop is that if you fail to keep up your subscription, years of your work will become unavailable to you. Which brings to my mind two questions:

1) Are you completely out of your friggin' mind?

2) If not, what unmitigated fool ever managed to convince you that Photoshop Document (.PSD, hereinafter rendered without the "dot") files were an appropriate way to be archiving your work?!

PSD's should not be considered an appropriate format for archiving. Especially not layered PSDs. Especially, especially not layered PSDs that include active elements like un-rendered type or smart filters or objects. No way, no how.

There is no guarantee that previous versions of Photoshop can open your current work product correctly. Equally, there is no guarantee that future versions will be able to open it correctly, or at least in exactly the same form it is now. Filter algorithms change. Type rendering changes. Just to give two examples. These complex structures you're building right now? They're intermediate work product, highly dependent upon the platform you're interpreting them with. It is nice and convenient when they endure; God knows, I take advantage of that. But they are not an archival format. There is no guarantee you will be able to read them in the future in the same way.

It's not just about a subscription-based license. What happens when Adobe goes out of business? It will. Very few companies and product lines of any sort make it to the age of 50. Only a minuscule number will make it to 100. None of them are immortal. Some of you reading this will be around and still making photographs when Adobe disappears.

Personally, I'm hoping it doesn't happen in my lifetime, and not 'cause I'm hoping for short life. But it will happen.

If you're treating these fragile and temporal constructs as your long-term archives, you're just asking for trouble.

There's an easy way out of this. So easy, in fact, that no one can be excused for not implementing it. It doesn't take terribly long or very much money, even for a very large base of PSD files. Which means that even if you don't do it now, like you should, you can do it when the time comes that you no longer feel able or willing to support a Photoshop subscription.

Here's the scheme:

Grab yourself a spare coupla-terabyte hard drive. Don't have one at hand? Go spend $100. Seriously, this is your "life's work" you're talking about; if it ain't worth that much to you, you've got nothing to whine about. Besides, you know you'll just need the new space in the next year, anyway. Admit it. Nature abhors an empty hard drive

Go through your existing inventory of work and copy anything with a .PSD extension to that drive. Specific details depend on exactly what directory structures and naming conventions you use for your work. You can figure it out; it is definitely not rocket science. If this takes you more than a day, no matter how large and complex your inventory is, I'll be amazed. Most of your time will be spent waiting for hundreds of gigabytes of data to get copied over.

Open up one of the files in Photoshop and create an action that does the following—first it flattens the file and second it saves it as an uncompressed TIFF. Yes, uncompressed. Less fragile, nearly universally readable and it will be for the rest of our mortal lifetimes, barring the complete collapse of technological civilization. (In which case, honestly, the disposition of your photographs is not going to be your biggest concern.)

Now tell Photoshop to batch-process all the files on your new hard drive using that action, and let 'er rip.

Come back an indeterminate amount of time later, and now you have rendered, universally (almost) readable versions of your work in its most current final state. Archive those, according to your taste.

That's it.

Oh, not quite. All of you complaining about being forced onto the upgrade treadmill so that you can read the RAW files from your newest camera? Adobe still distributes its free DNG Converter, which is kept as current as Adobe can, so you don't need the latest and greatest Lightroom or Photoshop to be able to access the files from your latest and greatest camera.

Now I'm done.

©2013 by Ctein, all rights reserved

Original contents copyright 2013 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Jack: "According to John Nack, Adobe will be offering a way to use files once you've stopped paying the monthly tax. I'll believe it when I see it."

Mitch: "One copy on one hard drive isn't enough for archiving. Hard drives always eventually fail, so you should archive to at least two drives. Ideally, a) buy the drives at different times from different manufactures so the drives and components within aren't from any of the same production runs. This will reduce the likelihood of both drives failing around the same time; b) store the drives in different places, preferably in different geographic areas. If a major natural disaster or fire destroys your home, having a second drive at a friend or family member's home in another city/state means you're much less likely to lose work."

Ed Hawco: "Well, that seems very sensible. It doesn't fully apply to me, as I don't use Photoshop. I do everything in Lightroom, where I do all my adjustments on 'virtual copies,' which are essentially another locked-into-Adobe format. (In fact, they're not even a format proper; they're just descriptions of adjustments that are applied to previews and export files).

"My big worry is that I'll reach a point where I just cannot live with Adobe anymore (I'm not far from that now). The solution is obvious: Export all of those virtual copies (or at least the important ones) to TIFF.

"I think your idea makes some people uncomfortable (wrongly) because of its apparent finality. For those of us who do this more casually than professionally, we don't necessarily want to fully 'commit' our edits. We like to think we can always go back and tweak a bit more for the next print or export. We're not always convinced we got it right, so we don't want to commit.

"It's a completely bogus worry, of course. Just because you commit to a TIFF doesn't mean you can't still tweak the virtual copy/PSD, at least until such time as the plug is pulled on the format. But we're talking about fear of commitment, not practical methods.

"After reading this I'm going to make it a project to go through my Lightroom library and commit all of the images I've tweaked as virtual copies. The nice thing about Lightroom is that I can make those committed copies part of the library, grouped with the 'originals' so it will be easy to keep track of them.

"Thanks for the kick in the pants!"

By Ctein

In early July, my friend DDB (David Dyer-Bennet) and I went off to Willow River State Park in Wisconsin to do some more of the infamous stochastic photography that some readers have found so controversial (example below) and to just photograph nature and waterfalls in general.

More "frozen" water. I love this stuff.

A successful and most pleasant outing, as usual, although the day was unpleasantly warm. Consequently, there were many folks playing in the water, a custom I still find a little disquieting, since the rapids and falls on West Coast rivers are typically much more rugged and dangerous. It just seems wrong to be splashing about in white water that way. Indeed, a small number of west-coast visitors die from not realizing how vigorously many of the rivers west of the Great Divide run.

Nonetheless, it does appear to be a Midwest "thing" and when we arrived at Willow River Falls, we discovered it was lousy with bathers and sunbathers.

I use that word by choice.

I don't like people in my nature. I am at my most misanthropic when I am out in the countryside, and I am especially so when I am photographing. Strange people are variously distracting, annoying, and an outright intrusion in my photograph endeavors.

I tried working around it, treating all the brightly and scantily-clad hominids as if they were some slightly mobile variety of wildflower, working them into the compositions. For all I know, I even got good results. Here's an example:

The scene at Willow River Falls on a hot summer day, as I found it.

But honestly, this kind of work is not to my taste. Whether or not other people think it's a nice photograph doesn't really matter. I don't like it. I'm interested in the waterfall, not the human intrusions into it. Too bad I left my magic wand (or, in a pinch, the mass disintegrator ray) at home.

But wait! I've got this nice shiny new copy of Photoshop CS6 that I've been breaking in, with its new and improved content-aware tools. I wonder how hard it would be to render all those pesky hominids into, well, nonpersons?

Whaddaya know! It was much easier than I thought it would be. It took me less than 45 minutes of work mostly with the Spot Healing Brush (and just a bit of cloning) to get to this:

The scene at Willow River Falls on a hot summer day, as I wish I had found it.

For those who would like to pixel-peep and see just what a good job the new tools do, I've posted full resolution versions of the before and after pictures on my website.

Instant pristine wilderness. What's not to love?!

Okay, if you're a documentarian, this is unacceptable. And I am, of a sorts. My stated aesthetic and artistic reputation is that I try to make prints that look like the way I see things (when I can see them, anyway). At the least, that what people are seeing in the prints has a reality in front of the camera. My audience trusts that my photographs aren't the result of special effects. A photograph like this last one, below, of the forest fire smoke, is accepted to be real by folks who know me. They do not think I used a tobacco filter on the camera or gradient filter in Photoshop to get that effect. My reputation lies in rendering it beautifully, not in inventing it.

Smoke creates a lovely kind of golden Renaissance light. What makes this photo work for me (and my audience) is that it's a real thing. If it were the creation of filters (hardware or software), it would be much less interesting and appealing.

Consequently, the Willow River Falls photograph is never going to end up on my public website or as part of my portfolio. It would poison that reputation. But that doesn't mean I can't amuse myself.

Even from the documentary point of view, though, it might be acceptable. If one were interested in portraying what the waterfall looked like, with no particular space-time context, I'd see nothing wrong in using the depopulated photograph. It accurately portrays the falls themselves. Just not their relationship to those pesky people.

Ctein

Columnist Ctein depopulates reality on TOP mostly on Wednesdays.

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Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by John Holland: "So, Ctein's hero turns out to be Marvin the Martian, the fellow who wanted to disintegrate the Earth because it obstructed his view of Venus. I clicked on each picture above to open them in separate windows, then alt-tabbed between them. Mesmerizing. People...waterfall. People...waterfall. Watching them disappear was more fun than I would have expected, because for one thing, I'm not a misanthrope—at least, I don't think I am. Second, I actually like to have a human or two (but no more) in outdoor pictures to give a sense of scale, especially if the vista is immense. (But no red shirts!) However, this particular herd of hominids was too dense; your instinct to reach for the Illudium P-36 Space Modulator is entirely understandable."

Featured Comment by Jim: "There's still one small fragment of humanity surviving near the top of the waterfall, towards the right, just next to the large boulder. And there's me thinking I don't pixel-peep. Sheeesh."

Featured Comment by Andre: "With regards to Ctein's fire picture, I recently ran across some really stunning photos of tornadoes and other severe storms from a news site link—stunning, that was, until I found a post by one of the photographers showing the original capture and the amount of manipulation that had been done to get the final result. The finished photo made it look like the photographer had captured some spectacular natural light that illuminated the lower part of the storm while the clouds above were ominously dark. The base Raw file showed the exact opposite —the higher clouds were lit up while the lower reaches were dark. At that point I completely lost interest in the photograph.

"Certainly not everyone feels that photographs need to maintain some amount of documentary accuracy—at least one contributor to the Luminous Landscape site has stated that if all his photo does is capture reality then he doesn't see much point in it. But for me, I've found that I expect a fair amount of realism in a photograph. I'll happily accept dramatized-beyond-reality poses/lighting/colors in other media (paintings, drawings, etc.) but have no tolerance for them in photography. Not sure why my mind draws that hard line, but it does.

"I much prefer photographers with Ctein's philosophy—where what you see is pretty darned close to what they experienced."

Featured Comment by Clayton Jones: "I have no hesitation in using the Spot Healing Brush/Clone Tool to remove unwanted objects. I assume as much freedom to do whatever I want as I would if painting a canvas from scratch. Why should painters be the only ones allowed to create compositions the way they want? I don't invent things that don't exist, but I will modify if needed. Just yesterday I removed a small foreground tree that was ruining an otherwise nice composition. I have removed power lines and beer cans, and once I moved a bird in flight to a better location which made the composition more balanced. It's art, not documentation. I like the falls picture, by the way (without the people). Very nice."

Featured Comment by Rodger Kingston: "For me the people in the original photograph are what keep it from being just another boring nature calendar photo. Usually I find that nature itself trumps photographic representations of it. (I'm an equal opportunity nature photography bigot: more often than not I have the same feeling about Ansel Adams' images, including most of the current Adams exhibition of photographs of water at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass.)"