Eskimo North

I first got started in photography taking pictures with a cheezy instamatic type camera. It was one of those that used a little film cartridge with tiny film, I don't remember what they call the format, it's been so many years, but basically it was impossible to get non-grainy pictures of any size larger than microscopic. The quality was horrid but still I managed a few interesting pictures with it.

When I was much younger I also had an opportunity to use my fathers Mamiya camera he had at the time. I liked it, later bought one of the same used, DTL1000, completely manual body, manual aparture, manual shutter speed, manual focus, manual film advance.

I mostly used Kodak Gold 100 (this was prior to Kodak Royal Gold) and I liked the original film because you could take long exposures with good results. I liked doing a lot of night photography with exposures ranging from a second to several minutes.

When Kodak Ektar-25 came out I really liked that film. It was high definition and high contrast but unlike most high contrast films, it still had a lot of lattitude. Unfortunately, it was short-lived.

I preferred print film to slide because of the greater lattitude of print film and I also never found a slide film with decent color rendition.

I still have the 35mm gear but film, processing, and maintenance became too expensive. The Mamiya had a curtain shutter and it frequently needed to be balanced, otherwise one side of the picture would be darker than the other. In a curtain shutter, basically one curtain shadows the film prior to shutter release, you hit the button and it moves to one direction exposing the film and the other shutter follows behind shadowing the film again.

At high shutter speeds (1/1000th was the fastest speed available) the trailing shutter would follow the leading shutter at a distance much smaller than the width of the film, so you would have in effect a moving window that would expose any given part of the film for 1/1000th second, but it didn't expose all of the film at the same time.

If the trailing shutter did not follow the leading shutter at exactly the same speed, then that window would either get larger or smaller as the window moved across the film causing the film to get exposed more or less one side relative to the other.

There were weights that controlled the rate of travel of both curtains and these needed constant tweaking, I didn't know how much meant paying someone else to do it.

So I made the move to digital. Digital allowed me to do a great deal more experimentation since digitial film is reusable and there are no processing costs. The first digital camera I bought was a cheezy HP Photosmart or some such. It had everything wrong with it, absolute junk lens that couldn't focus a clean image on the 1 megapixel sensor. Software that didn't give you much opportunity to do things manually and after having worked for years with manual bodies (I acquired a Pentax Spotmatic F to use while my Mamiya was in the shop, and another which I don't even remember the make, but they were all manual) this was not to my liking.

On a trip to the PNE in Vancouver it died, processor just lost it's brains. So I was out of it for a few years, then I bought a Minolta dImage Z1 digital camera. I liked this much better, still only 3.2 megapixel sensor but the lens wasn't junk like the HP so it could actually produce a decent image. Moreover, it would let me override any of the automatic functions and do things manually if I wanted, which allowed me to get back into doing some of the more out of the box stuff I was able to do with 35mm.

I bought it from GoodGuys, swallowed up by CompUSA, and bought the extended warranty. July 18th of 2005 it broke so I took it into repair. A month went by, nothing, two months, nothing. I started calling weekly, then daily, and then eventually gave up pretty much. This August, after more than a year I decided to go take it up with the store I bought it from, now a CompUSA. I called on a friday afternoon, asked to speak to a manager, explained the situation. He told me he would check with the district and try to get me taken care of.

Saturday morning I got a call to go to the store and pick out a new camera. They lost my old camera. Minolta had combined with Konica, the whole product line was gone, and they didn't have anything close to equivalent. So I picked out a Cannon Powershot S2 IS. It has the same body style as the Z1, used AA's so I could use my NiMH rechargables, and used the same memory sticks.

It had a 5 megapixel sensor, a slight step up from 3.2, the lens zoom went farther and the macro went closer, but zoomed all the way out I could see some chromatic abberation on high contrast subjects and macro as wide as it goes there was some vignetting, not severe but it was there. But if I don't go to the extreme end it does pretty well.

The design philosophy is different, the Z1 used a small number of buttons and you had to go through a lot of menus to do anything, like switching from auto to manual focus. The Powershot has no less than 18 buttons and levers all over the body, more to learn, but the nice thing is you can get from one mode to another almost instantly. If autofocus is locking on something close when I'm trying to shoot something distant, I can press one button and focus manually. The slow menu system of the Z1 did result in missed opportunities.

I've been too busy though to really go anywhere and do much yet. I'm also messing with CopperMine and will get a gallery up here in a little bit.

Too bad the polls don't allow multiple options. Different formats for different reasons. ^_^

I started as a '70s kid with a 110-cartridge style small thing at vacations, summer camps, etc. Then on to 35mm manual-winding one in the '80s. A few family and friends had Polaroids, and I liked the quickness and certain chemical-while-processing tricks, but not the quality as much. Used my father's 35mm SLR in high school while in a photography class—where we also did things for the yearbook—but after moving on and away from the free darkroom (heh) forgot most of the darkroom skillset involved. The SLR went on to a cousin who had a class at one point, and is probably still there.

For the next few years it was a Minolta 35mm battery-wound one, "eventually" dropping off a few rolls at a time at a quickie processor shop. Throughout all of this I always liked print better than slide, and I still have a few shots in memory that I want to track down and find again, even if a few SLR ones were somewhat out of focus (my eyes use corrective lenses, although I learned to focus "off" when I wasn't wearing them instead of focusing to the eyes), but still favored.

But then one day a few hundred dollars were clawing their way through the lining of my wallet, and I opted for a then-mid-range digital 2-megapixel point-n-click with hardly any features other than "optical zoom" which was almost my only insistance at the time to keep options open and costs down. The ubiquitous-silver Fujifilm "FinePix" camera (I forget the specific model) used a near-proprietary xD card—only they and Olympus if I recall correctly, but less truly-proprietary than the Sony-only sticks—and I ran with that until I wore out the twist-control knob between the "shoot", "view", and rarely-used "movie" (without audio) settings.

My cell's "camera-phone" feature is a joke, the only thing "good enough" I ever took with it was a shot of a DVD cover to use as the phone's own background image: the "Vision in concert" cover image from the original Bubblegum Crisis anime.

Shortly before a convention where I knew I was going to take a lot of pictures, and the nearly-free-swiveling and often misdirected switch would only frustrate me, I went for a then-mid-range digital 6-megapixel point-n-click with various features like a bit of aperture and shutter control, movie mode with audio, and the like—the black Nikon Coolpix L1. Still, many indoor shots I took (I often try for flashless shots to be less obnoxious) didn't come out as well since the smaller lenses don't pick up enough light for that type of use.

Maybe a month or so later, I picked up a mid-range 6-megapixel digital SLR—Nikon D50—with simlar features and more control—ISO, shutter, aperture, both auto and manual focus, an plethora of lenses, the works—and swapped the smaller pocket-sized one as a backup. While the D50 has the same pre-programmed settings (full-auto, indoor flashless, sports, portrait, night, etc.) as the L1, I prefer the photographer-controlled aspects of other settings (manual-shutter/auto-aperture, auto-shutter/manual-aperture, full-manual, etc.)

If I dig out my old Minolta 35mm, I woudn't be surprised to find film still in it. ^_^'

Lately my shoots have been either friends' parties and photo-shoot gatherings, performing musicians (some also friends, and my shots have been up on various sites), random as-I-notice-it snaps (rare since I don't typically carry them around all the time), various conventions I try to make it to, etc. I'll get around to setting up a gallery here eventually, other than the manually-coded and other-site ones I've done. ^_^'

I'd have to say my dad got me started in photography when I was very young. I remember using one of thoes 110 film cameras for a short while. Then I was taught how to use the Pentax Spotmatic F. I took a photography class in Highschool before digital cameras were real popular yet. I had several good pictures come out of the many rolls I developed there, all were black and white photos and film.

For my 21st b-day I got a Konica Minolta DiMage Z2 4.0 megapixle. All of my digital pictures came from this camera. The highest f-stop it does is 8, and I really want to get up into the higher 12-14 fstops for night pictures. Someday when I have a grand burning a hole in my pocket I think I'll get an SLR digital camera with thoes capibilitys. But for now, I'll be continueing to use the Konica for a while.

I actually have a coppermine gallery up and running. I haven't gotten everything uploaded yet but I'm slowly getting there. I have it at http://www.eskimo.com/~carl/gallery I also have all of my finals from the digital camera on regular old html at

http://www.eskimo.com/~carl/photography.html

_________________
-Carl
Eskimo North, Inc.

Actually the higher the f/stop number, the less light you are letting in. For low light situations you want a low f/stop, and I think the Minolta will go down to about 3.5. The minimum f/stop is affected by how far out the lens is zoomed, the more zoom, the higher the minimum f/stop. Zoomed out, you are collecting the same amount of light from a given point but spreading it out more, resulting in a higher f/stop.

f/stop in theory refers to the ratio of focal length to aperture diameter, but that is only accurate if the aperture was at the front of the lens. Many lenses put the aperture somewhere in the middle or even behind all the elements and in that case the aperture can be smaller than what forumula would indicate. The variable placement of the aperture makes the change in f/stop unpredictable with zoom lenses. The manufacturer will usually give you some indication. One Tameron zoom lens I had was I think f4 close in and f11 zoomed all the way out. But the f/stop on the zoom lens of this Cannon Powershot S2 IS does not noticably change from all the way in to all the way out. I don't know how much of that is lens design and how much is electronic compensation.

Because f/stop is supposed to be the ratio of focal length to aperture, it is used in depth of field calculations, but some lens manufacturers erroneously use the light transmission which is really t/stop not f/stop. t/stop refers only to light transmission characteristics and if there were no losses in the elements themselves it would equal fstop, but in practice because there are losses in the elements and lens coatings, it is somewhat higher although for most still camera lenses the difference is probably less than 1/3rd stop so it won't throw calculations off much. I bet relatively few people sit and do the math, I know I don't, I just look through the viewfinder and adjust for the desired effect.

If you want a higher f/stop than the camera supports, or more accurately a higher t/stop, that is to let less light in, you can get neutral density filters that block a certain percentage of light but block all colors equally. You can get these in various f/stop ratings. Also something I've done before is to use two poloroid filters. Aligned with the same polarization they will let most of the light through, maybe 3 fstop loss, but by aligning them to opposite polarizations they will block nearly 100% of the light. This will not improve depth of field, it will only reduce light transmission.

I never let the fact that something wasn't intended for a particular use stop me from using it that way.

For night photography you really need to use a tripod and a longer exposure time. I've gotten some workable night time pictures hand held down in Chinatown only because there is so much artificial lighting, otherwise though you need longer exposures than you can get hand-held without shake.

You can also use the technique I refer to as digital push processing but that does result in noisey pictures.

I was told by one of my friends that if I wanted to get rid of the "city on fire" effect I had to use a very long exposure and high f-stop. I'm not sure how that exactly works but thats what they were telling me, and it seems to work for his camera to do it that way.

this image was done at fstop 8, and at a 15 second exposure.



And this other picture was done at an fstop of 3.5 or whatever the lowest setting was, at a 1 second exposure.


My friend pointed out that in the right side there, the city scape, in the area where Harbor island is... looks like it's on fire from all the light glare. And I was attempting to get rid of that.

Actually I think at the fstop of 8 it did a pretty good job on that first image there. I didn't get whole lot of light glare with that one.

_________________
-Carl
Eskimo North, Inc.

The "City on Fire" effect is simply overexposure. A challenge of night photography is often very high contrast. That is the ratio between the darkest region and the brightest region is very high, at least when you are photographing scenes where artificial lighting is present.

Film has only so much exposure lattitude and the same is true of digital. Only so many values can be encoded in however many bits are allocated to a pixel. With very high contrast situations you can have a situation where the contrast of the scene exceeds the lattitude of the medium. In these cases, you are either going to have some portion of the scene overexposed and lose highlight detail or you are going to have some portion underexposed and lose shadow detail, or possibly both.

With film you can choose low contrast films with wide exposure latitudes for high contrast scenes. With digital, unless your camera has a setting for contrast (and I thought the Minolta did), you're stuck with what you've got and the best you can do is find a good compromise. In your first photo, you are losing shadow detail, you can't see the clouds or water except where bright lights reflect off of it. In the second, you are losing highlight details.

When contrast is that high it is impossible to reproduce the scene faithfully, you're going to lose some details on the highlights or shadows or both. Instead consider the asthetics. What I usually do is bracket widely and then later pick the image I think looks the best.

With respect to f/stop and exposure time, think of filling a bucket. The digital imager or film is the bucket. You can fill the bucket with a hose just dribbling water over a long period of time, or you can fill it in a short time with the hose on full blast. What is important is the total volume of water. Same for light, for a given exposure you can use a high f/stop (only let a dribble of light through) and a long exposure time, or a low f/stop (let a lot of light through) for a short time. It is the product of the rate at which light is allowed through and the amount of time that it is allowed through that determines the total exposure.

F3.5 will allow 5.34 times as much light through as F8, so a one-second exposure at F3.5 is equivalent to 5.34 second exposure at F8, so something is wrong with your numbers above, the 15 second F8 exposure should be about 300% more exposed than the the 1 second exposure at F3.5.

However, there is an additional factor complicating this and that is the fact that focal length is clearly not the same in the two images above. Assuming they had been the same, this is how you can understand and calculate the effect of f/stop on exposure.

For a given focal length, the amount of light that will reach the film or digital imager is a function of the area of the aperture. The f/stop is actually the focal length divided by the aperture diameter, if the aperture was at the front of the lens, usually it is not so that mucks up the calculation if you looked at the real diameter of the aperature, but the value printed on the lens or that you see when you set it on the digital camera is as if it were up front.

So lets say you've got a 55mm lens. An f/stop of 3.5 would mean the ratio of the focal length (55mm) to aperature diameter is 3.5, therefor the aperature diameter is 15.71mm. At F8, the ratio of focal length to diameter is 8, so the aperature diameter would be 6.8mm. The aperature approximates a circle. The area of a circle is pi r^2, the radius is half of the diameter. So at F3.5, the aperature area is 3.14 * 7.86^2 or 193.74 square mm. At F8, 3.14 * 3.40^2 or 36.30 quare mm. 193.74 / 36.30 = 5.34, actually calculated at higher precision I get 5.22, but close enough. Anyway, that's how you can calculate the relative exposure of two different f/stop values. The total exposure being the product of aperature area and exposure time, 1 second at F3.5 is equivalent to 5.34 seconds at F8.

With digital this will be accurate. Film suffers to varying degrees to what is termed repricocity failure which means it acts like a lower speed film with long exposures so the exposure time * aperature area doesn't strictly hold with long exposures.

Back to digital, now that you know you can get the same exposure with a high f/stop and long exposure or a low f/stop and a short exposure, there are other things to consider. A high f/stop gives a wide depth of field, that is you can have things far away and relatively close both relatively in focus. With a low f/stop, you get a narrow depth of field, getting closer or farther away from the distance where things are completely in focus, things will be out of focus.

The other thing to consider is motion blur, a longer exposure, necessitated by a higher f/stop, results in more motion blur. Say you are taking a picture that includes the freeway. Cars are moving at around 60 mph, or about 88 feet/second. So if you take a one second exposure you're going to get light streaks 88 feet long, if you take a 15 second exposure, the streaks will be 1320 feet, or a quarter mile long. Water and clouds move, do you want to freeze the waves or create a blur? Clouds move, do you want to see cloud detail or a blur?

One more variable you have is film speed which is tweakable on most digital cameras. Just like real film, higher speeds are "grainier", that is there is more noise in the image. Unlike film, higher speeds on digital does not degrade color, contrast, or resolution. Higher speed film uses larger grains which results in lower resolution and lower loss chromatic filters resulting in lower color, and generally contrast is lower as well.

One other thing to consider with a digital camera is that you can do some post processing. What I have found with the Minolta is that when the highlights appear saturated, they truely are. But when the shadow detail appears lost, it is in fact still there and you can stretch out the low end of the dynamic range with the Minolta image processing software. So what I would do in this situation is go with the lower exposure and then stretch out the low end of the brightness range to recover some shadow detail.

Anyway there ya go, there is some science involved. Don't let it get in the way of asthetics, but being aware of it can help you achieve the asthetics you desire.

I'll have to try some of these things... I'll get pictures posted as soon as I have time to do said expirmentation

_________________
-Carl
Eskimo North, Inc.

There are times when I just totally ignore the rules and take a picture that I like.

This one I call Ghost Building.

This was taken on Kodak 100 Gold print film and scanned. I used a 500mm Seimar glass lens, big long thing that looks like a telescope screwed into the camera, with not one but two 2x teleconverters stacked behind it giving an effective focal length of 2000mm. The camera was a Mamiya DTL1000 (completely manual) 35mm.

All glass lenses have some chromatic aberration, even those made out of so-called achromatic glass. Normally, this would be an undesirable thing, and without the teleconverters it wouldn't have been noticable. But in this particular case and one other photo I shot the same day, I really liked the Ghostly appearance it gave to the building and surroundings.



Moon Cloud Tree

This photo I took at night shot through a small tree in our back yard, the clouds behind the tree backlit by a setting moon. I'm afraid that I don't remember the technical details of this shot.

I know the technicalities of both of these shots are crap, but sometimes it's not about being technically correct. I like the way these look, you may not, but I never claimed to have good tastes.

Finally bought a digital a little over a year ago. Definitely like the convenience of having your pictures now and being able to take a lot more shots than in the past.

Got a little Nikon 7 megapixel camera with a built in small zoom lens. Wanted something small and light for backcountry purposes. Got Nikon because of their reputation for good lens quality. Was a bit disappointed to find out that yes, Nikon still has good Optic quality, but to compete they use very cheap plastic parts for the mechanism. So good lens optics but crappy lens mechanisms. Too bad. Good company is giving themselves a bad reputation.

Previously had a Canon 35mm SLR for many years. Bought myself a film scanner a while back. Gets about 9 megapixels from a 35mm negative. Of course prices have dropped and scanners have gotten better. Get a decent 4000 dpi film scanner and you can still get 19 megapixels or so from a 35mm neg. People say digital is just as good as film. It's still not there yet but getting pretty good. Convenience of digital though makes it just not worth my while dealing with film anymore.

I'd recommend to anyone still using 35mm equipment to get a film scanner to digitize your images. (Also gives you another storage medium to keep your photographs as well as making it easier to share and make copies / enlargements) A scanner with a transparency adaptor is OK, but a dedicated film scanner will give you better results and better depth.

I've done both, used 35mm and digitized film.

With respect to people who say digital is "just as good as film", I would argue that both have their distinctive advantages.

35mm film I think has at best a very marginal resolution advantage over digital, sure you can get 19 megapixels with your scanner, but probably five of those adjacent pixels have nearly the same value because there is a limit to the films resolution even if you scan at a higher resolution. But digital can not yet match medium format film and probably will never match large format such as 8x12 glass plate formats.

One aspect I like about digital is that the exposure latitiude is much greater than any film I have ever used. There are still some very high contrast situations that are too much, but not nearly so much as with film. And on my camera at least I can adjust the contrast for the situation at hand.

In my experience the color has been truer than film, that is to say, the digital camera sees color much more the ways my eyes do than any film I have ever used. The ability to set custom white balance to damned near any lighting situation is very nice also. I can take a photograph under sodium vapor lighting and have the color turn out natural if I use this feature.

And then there is the issue of not giving a photolab the opportunity to screw up your work. I don't have my own darkroom so I'm at the mercy of commercial photolabs. The only photolab I ever liked in the Pacific Northwest was Jet Colorlab that used to be over in Bellevue, but they're long gone.

I've had other labs accidentally (on purpose I think) put a huge scratch through my negatives when I sent something in to be developed that contained some nudity. With digital, I don't have anybody else editorializing my content or accidentally harming it.

I'd consider myself a pretty dedicated digitial convert at this point. I don't see myself going back to film unless I strike it rich and can own medium or large format equipment and my own darkroom to process. Just not enough advantage to 35mm to make it worthwhile anymore.

Memories of sending my best sunset shot to the lab and getting it back with a big thumbprint in the middle of the negative.

My 2720 dpi scanner that gives me 9 megapixels will see the grain on ISO 200 film. Finer films will give higer resolutions though. Digital will be there in another 5 years or so. Also when digitizing film, an extremely small dust speck can be a large spot on the image.

Good comments on the easy ability to adjust lighting with digital.

Personally, the photos I'm getting with a 5 megapixel Canon Powershot S2 IS are mostly better than what I was getting with 35mm even though I had some nice 35 lenses. I've done 16x20 enlargements from images taken with the Canon and they've been sharp and without pixelation.

I think the whole 'pixel count' thing is overblown anyway. A gazillion pixels without a good image focused on them are useless. As far as digital cameras go, if you don't have a DSLR then you're stuck with the lens that comes with the camera (my case since a DSLR was and still is out of my price range for the moment). Getting a sharp clear image on however many pixels you have is far more important than raw pixel count.

Then aside from pixel count, there are other attributes of the sensor that are very important; how linear is it, that is does it digitally respond to light in a predictable linear way? How noisy is it? And with respect to noise, not just white-noise or grain type noise, but things like hot areas, parts of the sensor that are somewhat more sensitive than other parts create artifacts in low contrast images. How sensitive is it?

The camera itself; does it permit long exposures? Does it have enough memory for long exposures? Is there any mechanism for remote or delayed shutter release so that you can take long exposures without camera shake? The Powershot S2 IS has image stabilization and that has proven to be a very valuable feature.

16x20 is about the limit of what I would do in terms of enlargements with five megapixels but really that was too much for 35mm for the most part, one exception being with Ektar 25 film, but Kodak discontinued that (it was my favorite). I really liked the combination of contrast and latitude that film provided as well as sharpness and low grain. But it wasn't suitable for point-n-shoot so it's gone.

Anyway, pixels are rarely the limiting factor, problems I run into relate to the sensor quality; it's noisy, too noisy at any ISO setting above 50 and marginal at 50. Even at 50, it's not good for high contrast because if you expose it enough for the noise to be tolerable the highlights are saturated. If you don't saturate the highlights, the noise is intolerable. I've heard CCD's are supposed to be quieter than CMOS sensors, but Canon's cameras with CMOS sensors seem to be much quieter than their cameras with CCD's. My understanding is that they are phasing out the CCD's altogether.

Then the lens, it's mediocre; really a disappointment for a Canon product. It has a 12x zoom, it has vignetting over the entire range zoomed all the way in to all the way out. It has some problems with chromatic aberration when zoomed all the way out, in fact at 352mm, the chromatic aberration is worse than a 500mm glass lens I have for my 35 mm camera with two 2:1 barlow teleconverters stacked behind it. Granted, the 500mm lens cost more than the whole Canon camera, still the lens quality is just not what I would have expected.

It only has a six leaf iris and it can only go down to F8; that makes it impossible to get a photograph with a really deep depth of field. A couple of Mamiya lenses I have for my 35mm camera will stop down to F22, and at that it's almost pinhole camera depth of field, and they are sharp even stopped down like that. The lens on the Canon is really only sharp at the middle of both it's zoom range and f-stop range. Either extreme of either of those things and the image becomes less sharp.

Another factor in digital cameras is the software. The Canon software seems to be better in terms of flexibility than the Minolta dImage Z1 that I had before it in terms of getting the maximum resolution out of the number of pixels it has. However, there are some problems with Moire pattern (color banding on detailed patterns caused by the light/dark part of the pattern aligning with certain colored pixels). This shows up also on single high contrast lines and mimics chromatic aberration to a degree. I can pretty much remove this with Paintshop (I don't own Photoshop, too expensive). Since I can remove it with Paintshop, it seems to me that the in camera software should be more intelligent and handle this.

The camera is limited to 15 second exposures maximum. If there isn't enough RAM in a camera for longer than that, it ought to be smart enough to page off the SDRAM card, but it's not. 15 second at ISO 50 isn't enough for low light situations and the sensor is too noisy for higher speeds.

The camera is good for moderate contrast subjects, like people, animals, most natural objects during the day. At night contrast increases and it is problematic. The image stabilization does allow me to get away with things hand held that I otherwise could not; like 1 second hand held night exposures in Vancouver BC when I didn't think to bring a tripod (stupid me).

A real plus of the camera is video; the image stabilization really works well in video mode, sound on the camera (stereo 16-bit 44 Khz) is very good, the quality of the microphones is good, so for video it's really pretty nice though it won't accept a memory card larger than 2GB and that is a limitation I wish it didn't have. In video mode, 640x480 isn't a high enough resolution to reveal the deficiencies in the lens and at 30 fps, you really don't see the noise even at higher ISO settings.

Anyway, I hope this will provide others with some issues to consider when shopping for a digital camera, and not just the megapixel count. More megapixels is good, but if they are noisy, if the optics can't focus a decent image on them to begin with, if there isn't enough dynamic range to handle high contrast lighting situations, then all those pixels are of little value.