Workshop Introduction…

"I believe that the electronic image will be the next major advance. Such systems will have their own inherent and inescapable structural characteristics, and the artist and functional practitioner will again strive to comprehend and control them." — Ansel Adams, 1981

With that sage prediction [everyone DOES know who Ansel Adams was…right?] I’ll kick off this Workshop.

Our goals are to:

• Improve your photography skills a little bit; to help you “comprehend and control” your digital cameras.

• Change the way you take photos; if you keep doing the same things, how can you expect different/better results?

• Encourage you to edit SOME of your pictures!• Encourage you to send your good [edited] photos to Maverick Region for our

various uses. Send your RAW, unedited files too.• Document our history w/ excellent images!• Make you PROUD to be a photographer!• Have some fun while doing all this.

We need a volunteer to write an article about this Workshop for Slipstream.

We have 5 uses for your pictures:

1. Articles in Slipstream2. Event Ads in Slipstream and on the website3. Photos on the website4. Photos on the new Maverick Region Photo Gallery5. Entries in our Photo Contest at Founder’s Day Banquet

We have a wonderful, award-winning magazine, but it often suffers from a lack of good photo choices. Our website needs even MORE help with photos. Did you know that PCA has a Website Contest each year? Every time, the judges “gig” us for not having enough good photographs! Let’s solve that.

We have recently transitioned from the old flickr gallery to a new jAlbum gallery. The primary difference is that just like Slipstream & Panorama don’t publish every photo that is submitted, we will not put every photo submitted to MAVPCA in the Gallery. It will be “curated”. There are many good reasons to do this:

• At most events, there are many photographers. They often take very similar shots. There is no justification to have several, almost-identical images in the Gallery.

• Digital cameras take pictures quickly, at about 3-8 frames/second. When this burst mode is enabled, even a single photographer has “duplicates”.

• Not every photo is a good photo. In PCA “Excellence is Expected”!

Most of you have dSLRs; that is good. But you don’t have to use an expensive camera to take good pictures. Having good equipment, however, gives you more options. The brand is not too important; today, it’s really hard to buy a “bad” camera.

And the number of pixels your camera has is, if possible, even less important than the brand. Today, all cameras have too many pixels! As long as you have at least 5 MP, you can take good pictures. For example, here are two photos taken w/ 6 MP and 36 MP cameras of the same scene, at the same time:

Although the subject matter is not very interesting, both pictures look good, at this scale.

There is much more to digital photography than how many MP your camera has! Even your choice of phone vs P&S vs dSLR is not too important, as long as you learn to work within the performance envelope of your equipment:

• Color Fidelity• Dynamic Range• Depth of Field [DoF]• Focal Length Range [Zoom Range]• Auto-focus Speed• Lens Resolution, Distortion, & Vignetting• Sensitivity• Noise

These are the really important parameters. Many of them can be adjusted after the picture was taken, if you learn how.

A very important issue [one that is widely overlooked] is that if your camera is uncomfortable to hold and use, you won’t often use it. Also, the size of a camera should be suitable for the size of your hands [just like shoes]. The shape is important too. Always “test drive” a camera before you purchase.

"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take." - Wayne Gretzky

I don’t think Wayne was referring to photographs, but it was too good to skip.

Part of being a “good” photographer is being discerning, even critical of your photos. One of the hardest things for a novice photographer to do is to cull out the images that should never be shown to anyone! When you become a Professional, you can expect to achieve a 20% success rate. When you start out, you’ll be lucky to get 1%!

You can improve those odds by editing your images. Back in the distant past, when cameras used film, we sent the rolls somewhere to be processed. If we wanted prints, it went to a machine w/ an operator who [together] edited the pictures before they were printed. Most people didn’t know that. The reason this was done was that many people would refuse to pay for ugly prints; it made good business sense to just go ahead and “fix” them. With slides you paid in advance, so no problem customers.

Today, you don’t have a guy or gal at the drugstore running a Fuji Frontier processing machine to fix your digital images. You have to learn to do this yourself.

Ten years ago, the photo editors were pretty bad [from a human factors aspect]. Some still are pretty bad. Then a revolution happened: In 2005, Apple released a wonderful new editor, called “Aperture”. Those of us w/ PCs were envious.

Meanwhile, Adobe was working on a similar program, called Shadowland in their Minnesota office. By 2007, it was out as Lightroom Ver. 1. Initially Lightroom and Aperture were quite similar, but Apple was unable to keep up the development pace and recently, Aperture was pulled. Sad, but this is the way business works.

Lightroom [LR] has become Adobe’s most popular Photo Editor. Unlike “conventional” photo editors, LR and Aperture used a new paradigm that was [and is] easier to understand. It is very visual and doesn’t use many legacy [wet darkroom] terms.

LR is a “global editor” in that it primarily operates on the entire image as a whole. For example, if you change the “Exposure” or “Contrast” sliders, each pixel on the image is affected the same way. If you change the WB, the entire image is changed. If you add “Clarity”, “Vibrance”, or “Saturation”, the whole image is affected.

But not everything is totally “global”. There are slider controls for “Highlights”, “Shadows”, “Whites”, and “Blacks”, which are less “global”; still, they operate somewhat equally across the pixels that fall into their respective categories.

As LR matured, each version had new tools that were not as “global” as the above. There are now “Zone” tools that let us remove spots, remove red-eye, add a gradient to any of the “global” tools [either linear or radial], and a tool to allow you to “brush” on changes to specific parts of the image. More of these tools will undoubtedly come in the future.

But LR can’t use layers, or select parts of the image, or apply filters, or utilize masks, etc. Those features are what made it difficult for novices to quickly learn Photoshop [and it’s many clones]. But it’s also what makes PS powerful.

Even for people who have a good relationship w/ Photoshop, they often report that they can do 90% to 95% of their editing in LR. That means that most of you can do 100%.

Note however that LR is MORE than a photo editor. It starts out as a very powerful DAM application. DAM stands for “Digital Asset Management”, which are fancy words that mean it’s a “photo database” of sorts.

In simple terms, that means it facilitates edits and additions to the metadata associated w/ each image [regardless of format].

There are many types of metadata in your photos [the NSA has backups]:

• Camera settings• Photographer information• Copyright status• Model information• Descriptions of scene and event• Location [GPS]• Direction

The first thing you should do when you get home is to sort your pictures into 2 groups: Keepers and Discards. You actually don’t discard anything, just put it out of sight.

The second thing you should do is to add tags to the Keepers that describe the event and the people! I can’t stress this enough. You can’t imagine how difficult it is for the Slipstream Editor and his helpers to try to come up w/ names for all the people in the pictures!!! All because our cadre of photographers is not disciplined.

Those of you still using iPhoto, STOP! It is a 2002 application that has not kept up with current paradigms. If you simply must have a pixel-level editor, get PS Elements, but I’d rather have you transition to LR. LR is the future of photographic editing!

I have and use both LR and Elements. They each have their place, but if you only want to learn and use a single editor, it should be LR. If you have a pixel-level editor, like Elements, put it aside for a while and embrace the LR paradigm; then use Elements when necessary.

I know that, as a group, you only edit 20% of your images; but your editing rate probably varies from 100% to 0%. It turns out that 20% is about right.

Nobody should be at either extreme!

The way to keep from editing 100% of your images is to throw away 80% of them! Unfortunately, there is no equivalent, simple solution for the 0% group except step up.

When I give this “lecture” I ALWAYS have someone who touts the approach of making sure images are “correct” as they leave the camera. Heck, that was the way we did it with film! I’m sure Ansel spent hundreds of hours agonizing over every image, striving to make it as “perfect” as possible. Yet a few know that he also agonized over each print in the darkroom. Some people estimate that he spent MORE time in the darkroom than hiking around the Western US carrying his huge camera/tripod!

The vast majority of you, I assume, save your images as JPEG files in your camera. This approach lets you use the camera to render the RGB bitmaps. On most cameras, you are allowed to control the saturation, contrast, sharpening, local contrast, as well as the size of the image and how big/small the JPEG file is [level of compression].

There is a little computer inside your camera that “edits” your pictures according to your rules or the manufacturers default rules. All the various camera parameters are “global” in nature. The smaller and cheaper your camera, the smaller and weaker the processor!

Each camera manufacturer has well known beliefs about how their cameras should render images. Experienced photographers can often view photos and ID the brand.

If there is anything that I want you to take w/ you from this Workshop, it is that there is nothing “religious” about a digital image. There is no way to make an image come out of a camera in a “perfect” state, especially since the JPEG format is anything but perfect. The JPEG format was created to allow small file sizes, but still have sorta OK quality.

There is not ONE universal JPEG format. The JPEG from each brand is different; often various models of the same brand have different JPEG formats! JPEG defines a set of algorithms that can be adjusted by any camera or program to balance size vs quality. Most cameras give you 3 choices. Photoshop gives you 12 [or 20] choices. Nobody gives you ALL the choices possible, which run into the millions.

However, there IS a “perfect” format that most cameras allow you to use. It’s generically called “RAW”, but each camera manufacturer comes up with unique filename extensions so that programs will know from whence it came:

• Nikon = “NEF” and “NRW”• Canon = “CRW” and “CR2”• Sony = “ARW”, “SRF”, and “SR2”• Olympus = “ORF”• Pentax = “PEF” and “PTX”• Panasonic = “RAW” and “RW2”

There are others, but this gives you a start.

So, what is a RAW format and what makes it “perfect”. Well, it’s simply the actual photosite data from the sensor w/o ANY changes to it. This data is not a viewable picture yet, because the photosites do not capture all the colors; normally there are 1 red, 2 green, and 1 blue photosite organized into a matrix, like this:

Thus, each photosite can not be mapped to an RGB pixel w/o first looking at the values of surrounding photosites and performing an interpolation to estimate what the RGB numbers should be. This is called “Bayer Demosaicing”, in honor of Dr. Bayer, a Kodak scientist, who invented this in 1974.

Cameras have analog-to-digital converters that are deeper than the 8-bit data used in JPEG files. Normally ADCs in cameras are 10-bit to 14-bit deep and when this data is recorded in RAW files, they are large. They can be compressed either lossy [like JPEG files] or losslessly to reduce the size w/o affecting the quality.

Having 14-bit data allows even large-scale edits to produce smooth colors in things like the sky. If you did a large-scale edit on an 8-bit JPEG, there would be banding.

During the development of digital cameras, the quality of the image has steadily improved. There are still some improvements in the pipeline.

As an example, in 2004, Nikon introduced the D70, which had a Dynamic Range of 10.3 EV and a Color Depth of 20.4 bits at 200 ISO. In 2014, the D810 has a Dynamic Range of 14.8 EV and a Color Depth of 25.7 bits at 32 ISO. That is a big improvement in 10 years!

When you take 14-bit RAW data and render it as a JPEG, you throw away about 99% of the data! That means you must be pretty sure about all the settings in your camera before you render a JPEG and throw away the RAW data [which is what you are doing when you choose to have your camera render and save only JPEG files]!

When you save the RAW data, that gives you incredible latitude later; you can adjust the settings ad nauseam and as many times as you want. As long as you preserve the RAW file [the “digital negative”] you can always try new adjustments at any time.

Let me summarize:

1. Use LR to import and save your RAW data.2. Use LR to select only the best images [less than 20%]…be ruthless!3. Use LR to add metadata as the first step.4. Use LR to edit the selected 20% of your images.5. Use LR to render and export JPEGs only when you need them.6. Send PCA pictures to http://mavpca.org/photos/PhotoDrop [both RAW & JPEG].7. Be a proud Photographer!8. Have Fun…

Here are some links for you:

• These PDF lessons can be found at: http://mavpca.org/photos/PhotographyWorkshop/• I have additional information, both more basic and more advanced at:

http://www.1derful.info/Help/Help.htm• The URL of the Maverick Region Photo Drop is:

http://mavpca.org/photos/PhotoDrop/• Download Barnack: http://www.stegmann.dk/mikkel/barnack/• Download Core FTP LE: http://www.coreftp.com/• A great resource for information is: http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/