I was never a big fan of flash photography. When I got my first DSLR, the D60, I got the most basic available flash with it (the $100 SB-400) so that at least I could try and bounce light off the ceiling, and avoid the reflections and highlights that are inevitable when you flash something head on. I greatly preferred not to use flash at all, but the high ISO performance of the D60, and relatively low speed of the 18-200 lens I used exclusively on the D60 didn’t really make this possible. Indoors, flash was required, though fortunately the SB-400 was a cheap and competent performer. With the D60, 34% of the pictures I took used flash.

The D90’s improved high ISO looked like it would allow me to avoid flash even more, especially because it coincided with getting my first prime lenses, the 50/1.4 and 85/1.8, which do much better in low light situations. But this was mitigated by a couple of things. First, besides being relatively dark inside, the quality of light in our home was poor – ISO aside, things looked better and colors looked more natural with flash. Second, Greg convinced me I should get the better SB-600, which I did; the ability to bounce at any angle and remotely trigger the flash from an off camera position caused significant improvements. Thanks Greg! With the D90, 40% of the pictures I took used flash.

Moving to the D7000 offered even better high ISO performance, but was so clear at ISO 100 that staying low using flash was also appealing. Most of my time with the D7000 has seen in paired with the SB-600, though I did recently go to the marginally better SB-800 (which also provided two flashes in total), after picking it up in that lot sale I mentioned earlier. So far, I’m a good bit lower at 33.5% flash with the D7000, though this is artificially low because I spent winter (usually a high-flash situation) in Asia, often outdoors, with flash not being necessary. So interesting that my flash use seems more or less consistent!

One thing that didn’t change, though, is where I used flash – almost all indoor photos, if light was poor, used flash, and virtually all outdoor photos did not. Fill flash even outdoors can be recommended, but I rarely used this for three reasons – it’s usually head-on (no walls to bounce off outdoors!) so it has that direct flash look I don’t like, it adds too much bulk if I’m not carrying a camera bag (which I usually don’t), and perhaps because of different light temperatures, I just never liked the actual color that was created.

This past weekend was the first real exception to this rule; Wen and I dragged some flash gear to Edwards Gardens to try things out, and the results were interesting! We brought the umbrella I got recently (and had only used it to shoot the pictures of the Lensbaby I mentioned in this post), but with the top removed for use in shoot-through mode, paired with an SB-800. It’s a matter of taste, but I liked the result:

An unexpected side effect of this was that the output duration of a flash is so fast (typically 1/700th – 1/1000th of a second) that it freezes those ever-moving kids, often much more than is possible with available light shooting (natural light allowed for 1/60th, f/4.5, ISO 200). In conjunction with the awesome sharpness of the 70-200/2.8 used to take the above, the amount of detail captured was pretty stunning (a 100% crop of the eye area):

Greg commented that it looked like the umbrella was too close, and he might be right, though I actually don’t mind the effect and indeed think I prefer it. I actually thought it should be close, both from the few explanations I’ve seen of how people light a scene, and from this very helpful article for beginners by David “Strobist” Hobby, “Lighting 101: Umbrellas” – well worth reading – in which he states a preference for shoot-through umbrellas “because you can bring it right up next to someone’s face for both power and softness“. Of course, just do what you think looks good!

We tried a few other things, like using a second SB-600 from behind to create some hair highlights; this picture wasn’t focused well, but does demonstrate the effect:

A more subdued version of this with Linxi:

It was actually impossible to really adjust this because you had to get lucky to get the kids in the frame at all and to have both flashes fire (with no walls for reflections, the rear flash often won’t fire). Still interesting, though!

You might look at this and say hey, this (and several recent posts) don’t look at all like supposedly non-photographer stuff; walking around a public park with multiple remote-triggered flashes and a shoot-through umbrella seems to cross some sort of “seriousness” line. I’ll comment on this separately at some point, but will just mention a couple of things:

1. I agree! This was just a fun experiment, and has zero chance of becoming part of my regular kid-shooting routing. It doesn’t work at all if there aren’t two of you taking pictures, and believe me, Valerie is not going to ever help me with something like this!
2. I still prefer natural light, since as a non-photographer I want to capture a memory as opposed to creating a photo that isn’t what things actually looked like. That said, we go out when it’s convenient for the kids, not when the light is good, so having this as an option is a good idea.
3. If you already have a flash, a shoot through umbrella is actually just about $25-30, and is actually more portable than a regular umbrella. We did have a bracket for the flash, but didn’t bother with a stand and often just let the umbrella sit on the grass. This is a pretty cheap way to get a lot more out of your existing flash!

Olivia’s reaction to the whole umbrella thing was funny, of course, she was convinced we were just bringing it along because it was going to rain – even though there was barely a cloud in the sky! Of course, then she proceeded to show who’s the boss, by making it rain grass on the umbrella!

Since I seem to have written way too many posts that are related to photography, I created an index page to organize this a little, since I don’t even know what I said anymore. Hopefully this will keep me from saying the same thing many times! It’s also a menu option on the header.

Some video Wen sent me – high-speed HDR by NASA using multiple cameras – prompted me to think about this topic again.

The power of the human eye (and the brain behind it) really never ceases to amaze when you consider what it’s capable of. We can see perfectly well on a bright day, but well enough with the same eyes to walk around a dark room at night without bumping into things. At least not too many things. In challenging scenes, like a dim room with a window out to an exceptionally bright day, cameras often fall apart and display a pitch black interior and an over-exposed outdoor scene; but our eyes seem to render this perfectly, at least as far as our brain is concerned – we can see interior details and still see a normal, sunny day out the window. It’s all quite remarkable.

The fundamental problem above is one of dynamic range – when there’s a huge variation between the brightest and darkest parts of a scene, it can be a real challenge for the camera to deal with. The camera has a limited dynamic range, so it basically has to pick whether to capture shadow detail and blow out the highlights (turning everything white), or to capture the highlights and turn everything in shadows to pitch black. One approach for dealing with this which is becoming increasingly easy – and popular – is High Dynamic Range (or HDR) imaging – in which the camera takes multiple shots at different exposures to increase the total range of light values that can be captured.  So it takes one shot that preserves the highlights, another that captures the shadow detail, and then combines these later (usually in software, but sometimes in camera).

In reality, the problem is only in part what the camera is capable of capturing; monitors have less dynamic range than cameras, and print has less dynamic range than a monitor.  Wikipedia cites 10-14 stops for the human eye, 11 for DSLRs (less for compact cameras), 9.5 for computer LCDs, and 7 for prints. So a lot of HDR is actually about how to map what the camera captured (whether in a single exposure or with multiple) into what can be displayed or printed. How that mapping is done determines whether the end result is a natural looking recreation of how our eye perceives an image – or a more artistic/dramatic interpretation of things. I’m personally not a big fan of the over-the-top HDR style – it’s just not what a non-photographer like me would use to capture their kids! But I must admit that some images produced this way are pretty interesting.

2009

About once a year, I try and generally fail to produce an image using HDR. In part, this is because I’m a non-photographer – I never carry a tripod (which is important if you want multiple exposures of exactly the same thing), and HDR is so rarely useful in pictures of the family that I’m not willing to spend money on HDR tools. I’m sure my lack of knowledge is a bigger factor, of course. My first not-so-successful attempt was in Yosemite, taking a picture of Half Dome:

I consider the attempt not so successful because the end result is just kind of boring. I hadn’t started doing any post processing on any photo back then, but even so, the above image was sort of flat. It wasn’t a total failure, mind you; the original default exposure for the above scene looked like this:

As you can see, Half Dome itself is blown out beyond recognition, yet the trees are still very dark, and only the reflection looks about right. So I guess the HDR version is preferable for remembering what it looked like being there, even if it’s not a particularly compelling photo. Of interest might be that I used a free tool that you can find and download online, called Qtpfsgui, to create the above. It was pretty straightforward to use, and offered a lot of different tone mapping options. I’m sure that it’s possible to produce better results than the above by using the tool more effectively than I did. It’s a good cheap way to give things a try!

2010

My 2010 attempt came as I was boarding a flight from Tokyo back to Toronto, as the sun was setting. As with the above example, I only even thought to try HDR because without it, everything was a silhouette against the setting sun:

Besides still being boring, the above fails for another reason – once you bring up the detail in the shadow areas, all the reflections off the glass I shot through become painfully obvious. Since this was literally after showing my boarding pass and on the way to the plane (not the one pictured, mind you), I didn’t really have a chance to get a better picture, go flush up against the glass, etc.  And as usual I had no tripod so I was just balancing the camera away from the window itself. For this 2010 attempt, I had gotten suckered into buying Photoshop CS5, which has HDR capabilities – this was my first attempt to use it for that purpose. It was easy to import things; however, I found that the options for tone mapping the HDR were very limited, and I couldn’t produce any sort of interesting results with it. Oh well!

2011

On to 2011! A couple of weeks ago, I was in Naperville, IL – my company has a big office there – and went for a walk since I had to fly in the day before to make an early morning meeting. Another too-much-dynamic range scenario came up but this time, without something to prop my camera up on, I tried doing some hand-held HDR in spite of my past failures. The original, default exposure image was as follows:

The processed image looks a good bit different – and overall, I like it much better:

However, as you probably guessed from the title, this isn’t the story of how I fell in love with doing HDR. Indeed, while I took 3 handheld exposure bracketed shots of the above, trying to using Photoshop to do HDR with the image failed miserably. First, without any sort of support, the alignment between shots was off by enough that Photoshop’s “auto-align” feature didn’t do a great job at putting things back together. Second,it was windy, so the leaves and especially the flag was notably different between shots. And finally, I couldn’t tone map things in an any reasonable way using CS5 (my lack of knowledge again, I’m sure).

So what’s the above then? I took the middle exposure in what had been intended for HDR use – and applied a large dose of local adjustments. Essentially, I darkened the sky and increased its clarity, brightened the foreground, especially brightened the middle column of stairs, added a little vignetting, and a few other things. It was actually quite time-consuming to do this; the sky needed about -1.5 stops of adjustment relative to the foreground, but when you make adjustments that big, if you cross even slightly into the building, you see a big black splotch; if you don’t come right up to its edge, you get a noticeable halo. The above isn’t perfect, but it’s good enough for me!

The above is possible for one simple reason; the dynamic range of modern DSLRs is simply awesome.  The D7000 has 13.9 stops of dynamic range at ISO 100; if you compare that to the 10.3 stops at ISO 200 of the D70 (the great-grandparent of the D7000, released 7 years earlier), it’s like having +/- 2 stops of exposure bracketing on every single shot. If there’s enough light to shoot at base ISO, there is just so much to work with that doing HDR just seems like an unnecessary nuisance. As long as you shot in RAW, that is; with JPEG you’re stuck with the first image!

Now, if Lightroom could import multiple RAW images into a single HDR image and then let you do all the usual adjustments, that would still be a real win; sometimes, you don’t have enough light to shoot at ISO 100, or you have more dynamic range than the scene above. But for the most part, I just can’t see myself using any dedicated HDR tools or the built-in HDR functionality in CS5, when the natural dynamic range of the D7000 combined with some local adjustments seems to do all I need!

Directly or indirectly, I’ve mentioned my friend Herman a couple of times.  First in discussing the D90 vs. D7000 (and recommending the D90 for most people + extra accessories), and then again in the whole discussion on lenses in which I said most people should really not buy full frame lenses on crop cameras. Well, the advice clearly didn’t work since Herman ultimately decided to go with a D7000 + 24-70 + the 80-200 that I upgraded from. Well, I tried!

Since Herman has bugging me incrementally for my settings, as if there’s some magical way that I set the camera to prevent my pictures from being blurry, I thought I’d just document them once and for all to avoid future questions.

In the M/A/S/P post from a while ago, plus the first in the series of pages I wrote on Shooting for non-photographers, I actually covered the rationale behind the “main” decisions I made, namely:

• Shooting RAW (NEF), so that I can fix mistakes later;
• Using Aperture Priority mode most of the time, since in most cases aperture has the most direct impact on what your pictures look like;
• Enabling Auto ISO (except when using flash), with a maximum ISO of 3200 for the D7000, and a minimum shutter speed that is the higher of:
  • What’s needed to avoid blurriness due to camera shake, typically around 1/focal-length (less with VR lenses)
  • What’s needed to avoid unwanted motion blur, typically around 1/80 or 1/100 for still subjects and 1/200 – 1/500 for moving subjects

I guess there are a bunch of other settings, here’s what I change from the default values:

• Main settings (not in menus)
  • Single point AF (AF-S), with manually selected focus point; I just find it easier to focus and recompose, but this is situational
  • Exposure compensation -0.3 or -0.7 for outdoors/high contrast; 0.0 for indoors.  The D7000 doesn’t have as much headroom to recover from over-exposure as the D700, but it has really low noise at ISO 100 – so I prefer to bump up exposure as necessary when processing vs. finding that I blew highlights irreparably.
  • CL (continuous, low speed) shooting mode by default
• Shooting Menu
  • File naming -> Custom name (MS7 for my D7000), to easily tell my pictures vs. stuff E-mailed to me named DSC_0001.jpg
  • Role played by card in Slot 2 -> Backup
  • ISO sensitivity set to Auto-ISO, max 3200, shutter speed as needed
  • Movie settings -> manual movie settings -> On (I don’t like ISO changes mid-video)
• Custom Setting Menu
  • a7 Built-in AF assist illuminator -> Off
  • d1 Beep -> Voume Off
  • d2 Viewfinder grid display -> On
  • d3 ISO display and adjustment -> ISO
  • e1 Flash sync speed -> 1/320 s (Auto FP). This allows you to go above the default 1/250 sync with a flash like the SB-600/800; you get reduced output but for fill flash on a bright day, often quite sufficient.
  • e3 Flash control for built-in flash -> TTL in some cases, but usually Commander mode even if I’m holding the SB-600/800 in my left hand.  Getting the flash off camera helps a lot!
  • f1 Light switch -> Info
  • f3 Assign Fn button -> Access top item in my menu
  • f5 Assign AE-L/AF-L button -> AE lock (hold);  I find this better than holding the button down, especially across multiple shots, but watch out in case you have AE-L hold on and don’t realize it!
  • f8 Slot empty release lock -> Lock, just to prevent my own errors!
• My Menu
  • #1 = ISO sensitivity settings.  In conjunction with f3, I can press the Fn button and change minimum auto-ISO shutter speed quickly.  Not as quickly as I’d like, if you recall my M/A/S/P post.
  • #2 = Flash control, for switching between TTL and CMD.  I press Fn, back, down, OK, and I can adjust this easily.  Though I’d rather assign the preview button to My Menu # 2 instead.

I have been trying a more radical setting using the ‘U2’ mode, in which the AE-L button maps to AF-ON and the shutter releases immediate, and in which 9-point AF-C mode is used, but I’m still getting used to it.

I don’t think my settings are anything special, just personal preferences, but Herman has this odd belief that the camera comes configured to make fuzzy pictures till you find the magic settings. Sadly, even if he uses exactly what I do, he’ll discover there are no magic settings :).