July 2016 – Find Focus Click

Photo and Photo News

by Nancy July 15, 2016

I was so excited to take my camera to our Youth Conference, which took place last weekend on the beautiful campus of Troy University in Troy, Alabama. And while it is a lovely campus, I didn’t find a lot of compelling shots. I did see things I wanted to photograph so I could remember them, but nothing really photographic. While waiting for our group to assemble for a photo, I did look into the face of this fella and deemed him camera-worthy. A little brightening up in the Gimp, and you can actually see his facial features.

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Speaking of the GIMP (which is an acronym for Gnu Image Manipulation Program), I went round in circles trying to find a converter that would let me use it to work with RAW image files. Photoshop uses Adobe Digital Negative Graphics converter to take the RAW file and convert it into a DNG file, which Photoshop can open. And, what’s really cool, is that when you open a RAW file “with Photoshop,” a pre-Photoshop program that will let you make some basic changes to the images themselves.

Well, I wanted to do that with GIMP, and I’ve heard a few different things about how to do it. One article indicated that nothing at all was needed. Well, that didn’t sound right, and when I tried it, I was right, I got a bunch of TIFF errors, indicating that GIMP didn’t really know what to do with the RAW file.

I kept seeing articles that UFRaw would do what I needed it to do, and that GIMP for Mac already has it installed. There were installers for Windows and Linux, but not for Mac. Well, obviously my version of GIMP didn’t have it installed, because if it were, I wouldn’t be getting the errors. I found a fork of UFRaw called NUFRaw, and installing that didn’t work any better. I did find, though, that I was using GIMP version 2.8.16, and the version referenced was 2.8.14. So I rolled back my installation of 2.8.16 to 2.8.14, and —voila– GIMP is now able to open and work with RAW image files.

A final word and then I’m done for this week. I’m really disappointed in Instagram not letting people use it on a static platform. It seems like a bunch of bratty developers said, “It was designed for mobile, if you want static you’ve got other platforms.” I can still put stuff on Instagram from my computer but it’s a few extra steps. As a result, I’m not likely to do so. More’s the pity for Instagram and it’s advertisers.

Uncategorized

Fireworks!

by Nancy July 4, 2016

Taking photos of fireworks is really difficult, the many articles written on it notwithstanding. I’ve had some lucky shots, assisted by a lot of preparation and patience. For one thing, you’re asking the camera to interpret a moving object, capture it, and present it beautifully. When you see a gallery of great images, it’s important to remember you’re likely seeing the best that the photographer got–not by any means every shot he took during that shooting session. There are a LOT of rejects!

My first attempt at photographing fireworks was with my first digital camera, a Fuji FinePix A303. It wasn’t a first-generation digicam, but it was pretty early.

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The camera chose the settings, and these turned out “not bad” with an aperture of f/2.8, shutter speed of 0.5, and ISO 100. I was pretty impressed that a point-and-shoot digital camera could do that well.

Sometime between the set above and the set below, I got a newer camera, a Canon Powershot SX110 IS. It was a little “smarter” than the Fuji camera was, and had some settings I could change, a fact that I didn’t discover for a couple of years. But it got these images down in Gulf Shores, AL. The main disappointment I had with them was that the camera just didn’t process black very well, and on a large screen, the sky looked dark blue instead of a nice black. These used an ISO of 800, and all the images used an aperture of f/4.0 and a shutter speed of 1/8.

Fast forward several years; new camera, still learning the settings, and a last-minute decision to go see fireworks. If you’re trying to shoot pictures of fireworks, it’s a good idea to avoid making settings adjustments in the dark on a fairly new camera. Photographing fireworks is a lot of guesswork for an amateur anyway, because you have to kind of try and predict where in the sky the explosion will happen, and time the shutter to capture it. You have to decide whether you want an instant shot or catching the motion of the fire. You have to hold the camera steady (tripod!–I did have one, and I did use it, and I was glad I did, and it still wasn’t failsafe). Oh, and bring a chair, because you can’t do this standing up and sitting on the sidewalk for half an hour gets less fun as you get older.

I shot 273 images last night. Many were junk, like this one, just plain overexposed. The camera went nuts with whatever setting I set for it in the dark, and just started shooting frames, and the best I could hope for at that point was maybe having the camera pointed in the right place at the right second; this one obviously got a lot of light for a long time. The camera was making the decisions, the ISO was set at 3200, aperture at f/4.0 and shutter speed at 1.3

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Some turned out really neat, even though I moved the camera during exposure, like these.

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The movement of the explosives and the slight movement of the camera made something interesting and useable, but not as an illustration of how to take pictures of fireworks. ISO 3200, aperture f/4.0, shutter speed 1.0.

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