August, 2009 | Photocrati

Olympus E-3 Digital SLR Review: Field Test Report

A versatile camera, a powerful combo.

While it was fun to use, the Olympus E-620 did not leave a lasting impression. I needed to get back to my own DSLR system and do some serious shooting. Fast forward. Now the Olympus E-3 lands on my doorstep. Obviously not the newest camera in the Olympus Four Thirds DSLR camp, the pro-level E-3 certainly is the one that takes itself most soberly, as the flagship in the fleet.

You might say, I began with the progeny and traced its lineage back to the progenitor. Well, not all the way back, an interim step but a quantum leap above the original E-1, the DNA strand from which all Olympus digital SLRs evolved.

Olympus E-3 front. The Olympus E-3 looks, feels, and works like a pro-level camera. The only thing that detracts from that impression is the built-in flash. On the other hand, it's nice to have on occasion. Copyright ©2009 Jack Neubart. All rights reserved.

The E-3 ($1,250) begins with the high-speed Live MOS sensor and 10.1 million effective pixels. It also features Olympus’s Supersonic Wave Filter dust reduction system for the image sensor, along with image stabilization built into the camera body (effective range: 5 steps, according to the specs), making it usable with every compatible Four Thirds lens (and there are lots of them). (more…)

The Tuesday Composition: A Few More Quick thoughts on Direction

Curves and Lines, Swanton Road. Reading direction, in additition to other factors, influence most Western viewers to "read" the curvy tree first, the straight trees second. — Curves and Lines, Swanton Road. Reading direction, in additition to other factors, influences most Western viewers to "read" the curvy tree first, the straight trees second.

If you like this article, you can now get the book! Joe has expanded the “Tuesday Composition” series into an inspiring new ebook on composition, especially for nature photography. Check it out: The Tuesday Composition.

Last week, we talked about direction in composition and how it relates to movement. There are several other themes that occasionally play into direction in composition, today we’ll briefly talk about a couple of them in no particular order. None of them are relevant to most images, but each of them seems to occasionally come into play when I think about how I’d like to compose an image. Perhaps a few of these ideas will be helpful to you as well.

While I’ve had trouble finding a good reference to the history of the idea, it has been understood for some time that reading direction has a cultural influence on how we look at images. In much of Western culture, we’re more likely to parse images from left to right. If there is an implied horizontal sequence in an image, we’ll probably read the leftmost object as coming first–or at least read it as the more primary object. This is far from an absolute. And in nature photography we’ll rarely have the opportunity to invert the world (at least outside of the digital darkroom), but occasionally I’ve given that idea consideration in composing an image. It’s interesting to take an image and look at how different it feels when flipped horizontally, I recommend trying it on a few of your own images.

A related idea comes from the world of graphic design, when you’re putting together something that mixes images and text, the piece will feel more harmonious if any motion in the image moves in the same direction as the text. (more…)

Developing your own style as a photographer

When you first decide that you want to be a professional photographer, there are so many things that you have to learn. You’ve got to learn the equipment, the software, and the business side of being a professional photographer. Then there’s the unbelievable amount of knowledge that you have to absorb in order to develop an eye and a talent for the entire operation. So much information, in fact, that any good photographer will tell you that they are still learning all the time. The one thing that can often fall by the wayside while you are trying to dig yourself out of of the mountain of education that has landed on your head is that you also have to develop your own style.

This can be very hard to do. When you take into consideration the fact that Photoshop provides a virtually unlimited palette from which you can paint (not to mention the hundreds of ways in which you can shoot) it’s easy to wind up all over the map. Occasionally I’ll come across that photographer who seems to have a clear idea of what they like and how they want to present themselves, right from the very beginning. I hate those guys. Nobody likes someone who seems to have it all together while the rest of us are flailing about with our water wings in the shallow end of the pool. Don’t even think about sitting at my table during lunch. Seriously.

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Where’d my Saturation Go? The Secret Life of Sharpening

Redwoods and Rhododendrons, default sharpening settings. — Redwoods and Rhododendrons. Default sharpening settings.

A couple days back Tronam made a perceptive comment on my JPEG export saturation loss post, noting that he’d noticed saturation loss being caused by sharpening, but wasn’t quite sure why that was happening. I immediately smacked my forehead, because I’d known about the ways sharpening could sap saturation, but hadn’t thought about it when writing that previous article. So, today, we’ll dive into it.

There are three key points. First, sharpening can (but won’t always) have an effect on saturation. Second, that loss isn’t always avoidable. Finally, if you’re working with images in Lightroom, it’s possible (although unlikely) that you won’t notice that saturation loss until you actually export the image. (more…)

Sizing for Alamy

One of the best stock agencies I deal with, the UK outfit Alamy, is well-known for their meticulous standards, and I totally respect that meticulousness. Still, there is one particular part of the Alamy submission process that’s error-prone and resistant to automation, and that is the seemingly trivial matter of image sizing. Due to the amount of misinformation out there on the subject, I thought I’d take a crack on explaining what it is they want, and how you can reliably make sure you meet those specs. (more…)

The Tuesday Composition: Space to Move Into, Space to Look Into

Casual Climber, Buttermilks. — Casual Climbing, Buttermilks.

If you like this article, you can now get the book! Joe has expanded the “Tuesday Composition” series into an inspiring new ebook on composition, especially for nature photography. Check it out: The Tuesday Composition.

We’ve talked a fair bit about symmetry and asymmetry, it’s time now to talk about direction-various meanings and feelings that come along with where in absolute terms we place subjects in an image. There are several concepts “in play” when we talk about direction, so I’ll be devoting two, perhaps three columns of the Tuesday Composition to the topic.

The connection between direction and movement is a significant part of deciding where to best place objects in an image. When we have a moving subject in a scene, we often find it more natural when there’s more room “in front of” the moving object than behind it. That additional space we give the object to “move into” seems to suggest more movement from the object and can be part of telling a story about where the object is going to.

In Casual Climbing, providing the rock climber more space to ‘climb into” contributed to a sense of movement and also provided, along with other cues, a sense of danger and excitement. We’re left with no doubt that the climber is heading up. (more…)

Canon Rebel T1i (EOS 500D) Review: Field Test Report

Small and compact, a good choice–if you don’t mind some compromises.

Canon Rebel T1i--front. The Canon Rebel T1i is a neat little DSLR to tool around with. You'll hardly know it's hanging from your neck, owing to the cozy size and heft of the camera/kit lens combo. By the way, look closely at the lens: if it appears that there's no focusing ring, look again--it's an annoyingly very thin knurled ring on the very front of the lens barrel. Copyright ©2009 Jack Neubart. All rights reserved. — Canon Rebel T1i–front. The Canon Rebel T1i is a neat little DSLR to tool around with. You’ll hardly know it’s hanging from your neck, owing to the cozy size and heft of the camera/kit lens combo. By the way, look closely at the lens: if it appears that there’s no focusing ring, look again–it’s an annoyingly thin, knurled ring on the very front of the lens barrel. Copyright ©2009 Jack Neubart. All rights reserved.

The Rebel has always been Canon’s sleek but inexpensive choice in a digital SLR. That’s true even now. The T1i, while still not the sharpest tack in the bunch, manages to make a point with a solid feel and comprehensive feature set.

Each succeeding Rebel climbs one rung up the ladder, with this latest Rebel offering higher resolution–15.1 MP–and faster processing–Digic 4 (one of those acronyms that has never really caught on as such, but does appear to deliver in principle) on its CMOS chip. Then add a larger LCD and HD video capture (if you go in for that), and the camera becomes even more appealing. Of course, when you include an image-stabilized lens in the package and price it all under $900, there are bound to be some compromises. But are these compromises you can live with? Well, that depends. (more…)

Using Neutral Density Gradient filters

Mt. Oberlin Alpenglow, Glacier National Park. I used 2 ND grads, a 2-stop soft, and a 3-stop soft, to capture the enormous dynamic range of this image in-camera.

One of the great things about the advent of digital photography is that it has greatly reduced the number of filters I need to carry. Many of the functions we used to carry out with filters (warming/cooling, color filtering for B&W, soft-focus effects) are now much more easily and more accurately controlled in post-processing. But a few filters are still impossible for me to replace, particularly my polarizers and my set of neutral density gradient filters (ND grads).

ND grads were designed to address one of the fundamental challenges of photography, the challenge that light has too much dynamic range. We see the world with image sensors of seeing detail in a range of 13-14 stops in the same scene, our cameras tend to top out (even if we nail our exposures perfectly, which we don’t always do) at a few usable stops fewer than that. This means that we often see scenes in the world where we can make out detail and color in the shadows and in the highlights, scenes that our cameras cannot capture entirely. Because we often have the situation where the highlights are on on side of an image (e.g., the sky) and the shadows are on the other (e.g., the land), ND grads are an attempt to address this by darkening the lighter part of the image to bring it closer in exposure to the darker part. They’re grey (neutral) on one side, clear on the other, and there’s usually some sort of transition zone between the transparent grey area and the clear area to possibly make the effect less overt. (more…)

Playing with white balance…

I think what I love most about digital photography is the experimentation and freedom it allows. One quick little nugget that I’d like to share is playing with the white balance. Yes, that lovely feature that makes sure your whites are white and blues are blue is also a useful little tool when you want to add a bit of warmth to your images or change the “expression” of a photo by cooling it down. (more…)

Accepting Criticism

One thing I really like about this business is the fact that it’s subjective. There is no one right way to do things. Of course that can be a double-edged sword. An image you’ve poured your heart and soul into can elicit a reaction of, “meh” from a client. That’s ok because it can go the other way too. An image you considered a throw away can get a “wow!”

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