Category: Photography

Don’t Forget the Highlights!

As a source of neutral midtones to set color balance from, I mean.

Black leather jackets. Asphalt pavement. Black t-shirts. All of these, if they have highlights going on, can easily get tones up into the midrange (which I think of as 90-180, roughly) suitable for use with the gray eyedropper for setting color balance.

If it’s dark mixed with specular highlights, though, it’s usually not useful; specular highlights are by definition not a useful source of color balance, since the ability of the sensor to capture the light falling on it has been exceeded. The ratio of colors in a specular highlight pixel doesn’t tell you anything about the actual color of the light falling on it there.

Dyer-Bennet’s Dictum

“All photos are best taken from a camera position that hurts your knees.”

I’ve just been reviewing (and responding to comments on) an LJ post where I brought this up, and I found myself thinking this several times last night while photographing at a party, and it occurred to me that I might as well get it down solidly on my record.

It’s amazing how often my best shot seems to be just a foot below eye-level.  Or else just about 3 feet off the floor.

Seeing Flaws in Photos

Introduction

When I look at photos, my eye is often drawn to things I consider flaws. (We’re talking art here, so everything is subjective; so I won’t be repeating “I consider” over and over again throughout this article, I’ll just pretend my preferences are definitive.) Finding the good aspects often takes me more conscious effort. Thus my critiques tend to be about technical deficiencies.

Continue reading Seeing Flaws in Photos

Inadequate Preparation

I seem to have left the house without a record of my home server static IP address. Also the Dreamhost server my stuff is on. Best place for this is built in to Putty records and perhaps Thunderbird (so I’m not dependent on DNS working to get to my own stuff at least). Having it in the Palm Pilot address book and/or Passwordsafe would be nice, too.

I apparently don’t have my registered Focus Magic on this laptop.

I don’t appear to have the Photoshop plugin for Noise Ninja on this laptop at all.

I didn’t have Photo Mechanic on this laptop (thought I had the demo). Got the registration info off my server via ssh once other things got working.

Would have been nice to have a lightstand; but it needs to be in a portable light kit with a good bag to carry it in, or it’s too much trouble. I kept having to put the slave flash too far away and not high enough.

Not being able to put tags on the raw files on this laptop is a pain; means that doesn’t happen until late, and that the early postings to the snapshot gallery are mostly missing that information (and sometimes those postings are all that ever happen). (Thumbs Plus won’t put IPTC data into NEF files currently; Photo Mechanic will put the data in sidecar XMP files but I don’t believe Thumbs Plus doesn’t pick that up. Attaching it just in the database means it’s lost when I transfer the files from the laptop to the desktop. If I had permanent connectivity to an SQL database I could share a database between the two, and then do the transfer in a way that kept database info, but that depends too much on net connectivity, plus might have performance issues. Maybe Thumbs Plus 8 will do better with NEF, or understand sidecar files.)

On the plus side, I not only brought a swimsuit, I used it (in the hot tub).