Christmas came a little early for me this year and I bought myself a Mac Mini and accessories to be used as a media center for my living room television. I have been wanting to build a home media center/HTPC for some time now and have hemmed and hawed over it. My basic requirements were that it would run something like Boxee, be easily administered remotely via SSH (read: UNIX), support Netflix and Hulu, and be usable by my non-technical (read: doesn’t work with computers for a living) wife. I basically wanted a set-it and forget-it machine that could be run from the couch with a simple remote control. Windows was not invited to my party, but for others would be completely capable for this task.
Mac Mini in Media Cabinet
Originally, my plan was to purchase one of the many inexpensive ($200-300) media center PCs available or something like the Dell Zino, which along with Linux, seemed like a perfect solution. However, after much research and with the advice of some helpful coworkers, I learned that Netflix doesn’t work under Linux. There may be some hacks out there to get it working, but honestly my day job is configuring and administering clusters of Linux machines and I really didn’t feel like giving myself headaches for my television. So, after much deliberation I mentally justified the Apple tax and ponied up for a Mac Mini (with Snow Leopard). Ok, it wasn’t that hard, given that I already own a 2006 15″ MacBook Pro, a 24″ iMac, and use a 15″ MacBook Pro at work. Somehow, I turned into an Apple Fanboy over the last couple years.
The configuration described below is the one I settled on based on my existing TV and sound system (both low-end, but adequate for me). I’ve provided a bunch of links down below that go into more elaborate setups, including using the Mini as an over-the-air HD tuner and DVR.
Hardware:
- Mac Mini (MC238LL) [$599.00]
- Apple Remote (MC377LL) [$19.00]
- Western Digital Elements 1.5TB External HD (WDBAAU0015HBK) [$99.99 via Holiday sale, regularly $119.99]
The Mac Mini is a late-2009 model, with a 2.26 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 160GB Internal HD, and 2GB of RAM…the most basic model they offer. Because I have a corporateperks.com account, I was able to get this for $563.00. Amazon has them for a little cheaper [$574.95 and no sales tax] than the Apple Store.
It’s all aluminum and very sexy. Because of the corporateperks account, I was able to get this for $17.00.
Cables/Adapters:
- An HDMI Cable
- Mini-DVI to HDMI Adapter [$6.94]
- 6FT 3.5mm Stereo Male to 2RCA Male Cable [$3.24]
- Mini Displayport Male and USB Male Audio to HDMI Female Converting Adapter [$37.94]
Monoprice has several of them starting as cheap as $3. For short runs, as long as the cable is up to spec, there is no difference in visual and audio quality between a $3 Monoprice cable and a $130 Monster cable (P.T. Barnum would be proud).
If you want digital audio to go over HDMI, you could get one of these instead of the MiniDVI->HDMI and 1/8″->RCA cables:
I stupidly purchased a MiniDVI->DVI adapter so I could plug my monitor into the Mac Mini for setup, but the Mac Mini comes with this adapter already. I was only a few bucks, but still…
Software:
- Boxee or Plex [both FREE]
- Remote Buddy [19.99 € which is about $28] or SofaControl [$15]
- MacPorts for all those missing standard UNIX command-line utilities that Apple forgot to include (wget, curl, watch, git, unrar, etc.)
- JollysFastVNC (not necessary if your WiFi connection is better than mine)
- Candelair IR driver
Remote Control:
I chose to use the standard Apple Remote control since my primary usage of this machine will be to run Boxee and it doesn’t require a lot of functionality to use to the fullest. The Apple Remote has 7 buttons – up, down, left, right, center, Menu, and Play/Pause. If you want to completely live in the Boxee (or Plex) world, this is all you need, really. However, I wanted to be able to start a few applications, have a virtual mouse, and perform a few other system-related tasks without the assistance of SSH or VNC, so I installed Remote Buddy. It extends the functionality of the remote – you just hold the menu button for a second or so and a separate menu pops up that allows you to perform all sorts of tasks (called “Behaviours” in the Remote Buddy world…yes, they are British) such as opening applications, rebooting the system, adjusting the volume, and even operating the mouse cursor with the remote control. These functions are very helpful particularly when Boxee crashes (which it seems to do quite frequently). Remote Buddy has built in actions for many common media center applications, including Boxee, Plex, VLC, and even Firefox.
The Apple Remote supposedly doesn’t work very well with Snow Leopard, according to various reports and the Plex startup screen. Not wanting to learn the hard way, I just installed the recommended Candelair IR driver. This replaces the OSX IR Receiver driver and seems to work just great. I believe this was addressed in a Snow Leopard Service Pack (10.6.2), but I haven’t bothered testing since the Candelair driver works well, is free, and is made by the same people who make Remote Buddy.
Remote Access:
Screen Sharing Settings
To enable Screen Sharing, SSH, and File Sharing, go into Apple Menu->System Preferences->Sharing and check off Screen Sharing, File Sharing, and Remote login. Make sure to apply the permissions most relevant to your setting. It’s conveniences like this that lead me down the Mac Mini path versus a Linux-based solution.
Storage:
The 160GB local disk included with the Mac Mini was simply not enough for a media center storing 720p and 1080p HD content. I looked into several options including the super-slick miniStack which is the same form factor as the Mini, but ultimately I decided that the form factor and faster hard drive was just not important enough to justify the extra expense. A co-worker sent me a deal at Dell.com for a bare-bones Western Digital Elements 1.5TB USB drive for $99 and I jumped on it. It is quiet and fast enough for me. Additionally, it doesn’t have any lights on it, so it is stealthy in my media cabinet.
Configuration:
Really, there was very little configuration involved. The Mini correctly identified my video resolution and looked great on the TV. All I had to do to get things working was plug everything in and install the software. To make sure everything started on boot, I went into the System Preferences->Accounts->Login Items pane and added Remote Buddy and Boxee as Login items. Now, when I restart the computer, everything comes up ready to go. I also enabled Automatic login in the Accounts->Login Options preferences pane.
By default, the new Play/Pause button and the Select (middle) button on the new Apple Remote seem to have the exact same behavior. This was annoying in Boxee because I had to click twice to pause running media. After whining about it (and originally including it in the “Problems” section below), I discovered that Remote Buddy allows very granular control over the function of every button. I went into Remote Buddy->Preferences->Mapping and under “Behaviours”->Boxee, I set Play/Pause to the Pause action. This had the effect of working as both a Pause and an Un-pause button when watching media in Boxee. Problem solved!
Problems:
- Fast Forward/Rewind Media – It’s difficult to fast forward or rewind media. Local media skips ahead at least 1 minute (or 10 minutes if you use the second of the two fast forward options in Boxee), but to smoothly fast-forward or skip ahead only a few seconds doesn’t seem to work very well. In streaming environments, such as Hulu and Netflix, fast-forwarding and rewinding is unreliable at best and just plain doesn’t work sometimes.
- Boxee crashes. A lot. Mostly when using Pandora. It can be kind of annoying, but on the other hand, Boxee is free and still in Alpha. The beta is supposed to be released to the public on January 7, 2010 and I am anxious to give it a try.
Resources:
John is 7.5 months old and is now pulling himself up onto his legs in his crib and his play area. How did I take this shot? I dropped the mattress in the crib by 8 inches and John just stood up and started making like Kilroy.
Ok, so I might have grabbed a flash (Canon 430EX) and stuck it on a light stand with a shoot-through umbrella up high and camera right. You can tell by looking at the catch light in his eyes what kind of light modifier was used. In fact, at 100%, you can see the ribs of the umbrella. The strobe was on 1/8″ power and I was shooting my Canon EF50mm f/1.8 at f/5. The camera was on ISO 400. It took exactly 2 shots to lock in the exposure. So far, in my experience, light meters are completely useless.
I edited the photo in Adobe Lightroom and used the same techniques as in my post on “Great Eyes in Lightroom.” I did do a bunch of spot work with the Spot Healing tool in Lightroom, and then I did a little bit of cloning in Photoshop CS4 afterwards. Basically, I edited out a few blemishes and some left over pears from his dinner.
He’s mobile and ready to start walking. It’s going to be a whole new world now.
This weekend, I went for a walk with my wife and 6 month old son at the Elm Bank Conservation Area in Natick, MA, part of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society. There is a very nice wooded area along the Charles River that is gorgeous, but I can never manage to find a decent composition to capture it. This time, I had my Sigma 10-20mm F4-5.6 EX DC HSM hooked up and brought my new monopod out for a test drive. Again, I was unsuccessful at capturing any decent images from the wooded area, but afterward we went over to the Horticultural Society and walked around the gardens. Being November in New England, there isn’t much of a garden left, but it made for a nice desolate feel.
It was around 3:30PM, so the sun was getting low in the sky, casting a beautiful light. However, because I wanted to shoot into the sun (and I didn’t have a ND Grad with me), I knew I would be unable to capture the entire dynamic range of the scene in a single shot, so I decided to shoot HDR. I believe that HDR is a technique – a means to an end, not an end in and of itself. By that, I mean that I try to use HDR to make something look mostly realistic rather than hideously cartoonish. However, to shoot HDR, you need to have 3 (or more) very well aligned images. Sure, software can often align the images for you, but it doesn’t seem to ever come out just right. A tripod is ideal for this, but a monopod works as well. Today, knowing I was on a family outing, I brought the much lighter and more portable monopod.
First, I decided on my composition. I wanted the fountain in the foreground with the fountain wall leading to the path, which leads to the house. I put the fountain in the lower left third of the image and the house somewhere in the middle-right upper third. Additionally, I wanted to make sure that the horizon wasn’t dead in the middle of the image. In retrospect, I wish I could have gotten a bit higher up, so that the fountain itself was not quite as aligned with the horizon as it is, but I am only 6′ tall and didn’t have a step-ladder with me! After I got my composition figured out (including a few test shots), I set my camera up for Auto Exposure Bracketing (AEB) and my aperture to f/7.1 @ ISO 200. With this wide a lens, depth of field is rarely a problem, so I mostly decided on that aperture so that I would be working in the lens’ sweet spot for sharpness. I fired a few test shots and realized that the normal exposure was still very blown out, so I adjusted my Exposure Compensation (EV) to -1 stop. With AEB set to 2 stops, I ended up with these three shots:
-
- “Normal” (f/7.1 – ISO 200 – 1/320″)
-
- -2 Stops (f/7.1 – ISO 200 – 1/1250″)
-
- +2 Stops (f/7.1 – ISO 200 – 1/80″)
-
- After Tone Mapping
Fast forward – I’m home and my images are downloaded. I now have those 3 shots in Lightroom. I then exported them to Photomatix as TIF files (to retain as much bit depth as possible) and after tone mapping to look as realistic as possible, I ended up with the “After Tone Mapping” shot above. There is no magic formula with tone mapping – I just drag the sliders around until I get the effect that I’m looking for. When in doubt, less is better than more, and if you get halos around strongly contrasting edges, back the strength off a bit. As is often the case, freshly tone mapped HDRs lack contrast and impact so back in Lightroom, I added that contrast back in by changing the Point Curve (under “Tone Curve”) to “Medium Contrast” and by bumping up the Blacks, Clarity, and Vibrance. A little highly masked sharpening, and I was ready for uploading to Flickr! If you want the specifics, the exact Photomatix settings are in the EXIF Data on Flickr.
“Where’d Aaron go?”
“Here I am!”
Anyone who has played peekaboo with their kid will probably recognize the above exchange. It’s been seven months since I last updated the blog (Why do I feel like I’m going into a confession booth or something?) and the picture here should explain why. That’s my son, John, born May 7th, 2009. With the new addition to the household has come a big change in my photographic focus. I barely ever have a lens other than the Canon EF 50mm/1.8 on anymore. It’s just the right focal length for portraits of my little guy and I can take indoor shots at ISO 1600 at f/1.8 with a nice shallow depth of field. I have also been playing around with off camera lighting a lot recently. Most of the time I keep one flash on a stand with an umbrella ready to go and one bare. I’ve gotten pretty decent at guessing the right settings to use to get the effect I want. This shot of my son with his Turtle Truck (and his tongue hanging out) is an example where I just grabbed two flashes and started playing. You can see from the catch-lights in his eyes that I have two strobes set up, one small (or far away) and one larger (or closer). In this case, it was a shoot-through umbrella camera right and a bare strobe camera left for fill.
But this post isn’t about lighting. It’s about Lightroom. With the thousands of pictures I’ve taken of my son, I’ve managed to figure out a few quick and dirty tricks to edit these pictures fairly quickly. Since the eyes are the window to the soul, it is critical that they “pop.” Most of my editing involves getting the eyes to look great without looking unnatural. Of course, the process begins when you are taking the shot – put that focus point right on the eye nearest to you. If you didn’t get the focus right on the eyes in your original exposure, no amount of post-processing will help and you might as well just try again. Note, this is easier said than done with a 6 month old who is learning to crawl and thinks that the big box in front of Daddy’s face is oh so interesting.
After adjusting exposure and getting rid of any obvious blemishes with the healing tool, I do a few things:
- Soften skin by lowering Clarity to approximately -15. Clarity adjusts the edge contrast and lowering it has the effect of softening skin. Raising it brings out the blemishes.
- Add a sharpen mask – I zoom in on the eyes then hold down the Option key (Mac) and drag the Masking slider around until the skin texture isn’t being affected and only the eyes are showing with white lines in them. Holding down the option key shows you a gray-scale version of the sharpening mask being used – light areas will be sharpened and dark areas will not. Masking basically sets the threshold for when sharpening will be applied. By moving the mask slider (with the option key pressed) until skin texture isn’t being affected, you are essentially applying the sharpening only to the areas where you want it. I tend to apply the mask in the 80-100 range, which filters out most skin textures.
- Sharpen – This is where things begin to really pop off the screen. You’ve set up your skin to be nice and soft and masked off the areas you don’t want affected. Now drag that sharpening slider to the right. Keep going. A little more. Yup, that’s it. With the masking set to affect such a small area, you can afford to apply a liberal dose of sharpening. I will often have my sharpening set in the 80-110 range. You’ll have to use your judgment, though. If it looks unnatural, back it off a little, or increase the mask a bit more.
- Make the colors pop – Now play with the Vibrance setting to really make the eye color pop. You can also use the selective saturation controls and select a color from the eye. I like using Vibrance because it only adjusts colors that aren’t already saturated resulting in a much more natural look.
One of the failings of Lightroom is that you can’t actually see the results of your work unless you are zoomed in, which is probably not how you will eventually be viewing the image. So, there is a little of trial and error involved and may result in you exporting your image a few times. I understand that this will be rectified in Adobe Lightroom 3 (now in beta). In the end, with a well exposed, correctly focused picture, this recipe should get you some pretty decent eyes without having to have 15 different layers set up in Photoshop.
That’s all for now. Let me know if there is a topic you would like me to write about in the future!
Have you run into this situation before? You and your tripod get up at 4am to capture that perfect long exposure ocean sunrise shot, only to find that when you get home the shots are all fuzzy? I have and it usually goes something like this…
You get to the site, set up your tripod, and plug in your remote shutter release. You want to get that creamy effect on the incoming surf, so you choose a long exposure (30 seconds), low ISO (100), and high f-stop (f/11) for maximum depth of field. After framing the shot so you have those nicely textured rocks in the foreground with the ocean and sky taking up the backdrop you fire off some test shots, which of course look brilliant on the 1.5″ x 2″ LCD screen on the back of your camera. You spend an hour taking the exact same perfectly framed shot waiting for the awesome sunrise light to peak and finally capture just the right moment. Ecstatic and reveling in your photographic magnificence, you pack up your gear and head home for a much needed 6am nap.
But, when you get home you can’t sleep because you just have to see awesomeness of the shots you just took. You plug in your card reader and start downloading that full 8GB card…
… 3 hours later …
Your images are all downloaded, and you start going through them. They are all soft – almost out of focus, but not quite. Now that feeling you had a few hours ago while packing up your gear is replaced by despair and frustration. “But, I used a tripod!!!”
What you should have done is used that feature hidden in the “Custom Functions” menu that you briefly read about in your camera manual: Mirror Lockup.
With a SLR camera, the mirror that allows you to use the viewfinder has to pop up to get out of the way of the sensor every time you fire the shutter. That’s why the viewfinder briefly goes black during every shot. The motor driving the mirror has to work at ridiculous speeds so is pretty powerful – at least powerful enough to cause a little bit of vibration in the camera that is sufficient to add some hideous motion blur into your photograph.
When mirror lockup mode is enabled, you will have to press the shutter twice for every shot. The first shutter press flips the mirror up (and thus, blacks out the viewfinder). The second press will take the shot and return the mirror to the down position. This prevents the shutter from shaking the camera while it’s sitting on the tripod. Voila – sharper images. The reality is, you only really need to utilize this feature when you start getting to shutter speeds down below 1/15″, but if your brain is thinking “long exposure,” you should go and navigate that maze of custom functions and enable mirror lockup.
After doing this, I think you’ll find the story changes to something more like this…
You get home and download your pictures and they are almost as awesome as you thought they would be. The next day, you go to take a picture of your kid running around in the yard, switch to your 70-200mm lens, set the camera in shutter priority mode to freeze the action, and fire a shot. “CRAP….what happened, everything went black!”
You forgot to turn OFF mirror lockup. I do this almost every time and I doubt I’ll ever learn.
My wife and I went out for a little walk at Cochituate State Park last weekend. She’s 7 months pregnant right now, so we’re not hiking any mountains these days, but do like to get out and see some nature still. Cochituate State Park is composed of three ponds separated by the Massachusetts Turnpike (I-90) and surrounded by woods. It’s really a nice place, close to home, where we can walk around in the woods for an hour with pretty scenery. As usual when we go on these walks, I brought my camera along. I don’t often get great shots as we are usually out on beautiful clear days with nice weather where the light is hard and boring. Also, my focus is mostly on family time, not capturing great images, though I do often get some fun family shots that mean a lot to me personally. But, just because a photo has personal meaning, doesn’t mean the rest of the world wants to look at it!
I’ve been trying to get the hang of my new Canon 70-200 f/2.8L, so I brought that along. The lake was completely frozen over, with people ice skating at the far end. We took a walk through the woods, and on our way back stopped on the snow covered beach. Here there were 3 lifeguard towers with signs on them indicating that there were no lifeguards and swim at your own risk. I tried to get some shots of the three towers in a line, but just couldn’t capture anything that seemed interesting. Then, I came along the sign that said “Unguarded Waterfront” with a lifeguard tower, frozen lake, and snow-covered beach behind it. It just seemed somewhat ironic and amusing to me.
I was shooting aperture priority mode (Av) at f/3.2 because I wanted the sign in clear focus with the background blurry, but still slightly identifiable. As it turns out, I am kicking myself for not trying something with a smaller aperture, as the sign on the lifeguard tower is completely indecipherable. If I went back, I’d probably choose f/8 so that the background was a little more identifiable. Because I was shooting a primarily snow-covered scene, I dialed in a slight bit of exposure compensation (EV) – +1/3 stop. Camera meters take what they see and assume that the entire scene would average out to be 18% neutral gray. This is normally a decent assumption and is one of the many reasons why 18% gray cards are used frequently by photographers. Snow isn’t even close to 18% gray – it’s like…2% gray, especially in sunlight. If I were to shoot with no exposure compensation, I’d end up with an underexposed scene because the camera would try to make the snow into gray. I usually have to play with the exposure compensation value a bit to get it right, but as a rule of thumb, when taking pictures of bright snow, bump the EV up a bit, and if taking a picture of your black cat, lower it a bit.
When I downloaded the images last night, I was drawn to this photo. I like the humor of it and I like the way it is framed. What I don’t like, as I mentioned above, is that I chose too shallow a depth of field, so you don’t really know what’s behind the sign. If I had picked something more like f/8 or so, I think the humor would have shined through better.
Here you see the original image, straight out of the camera and imported into Adobe Lightroom. It’s pretty boring. Almost no color, with little texture in the snow, and no contrast in the wood grain. So, I went to work on it. In Lightroom, I adjusted the white balance to 7100K by using the white balance eyedropper tool and selecting the white of the sign. I usually shoot in Auto White Balance mode when I’m shooting in RAW simply because I can easily adjust it later. With JPG, you don’t have as much latitude there. I bumped up the exposure by +1/4 stop and increased the clarity and contrast some. I also set the tone curve to “Strong contrast”. I knew I would be bringing this into Photoshop and sharpening it there, so I lowered the sharpening in Lightroom to 0.
Then, I exported it to Photoshop CS4. There, I applied a very strong unsharp mask to the Lightness channel in LAB Mode. This pulled a lot of texture out of the wood without creating halos and odd colors. I also applied a technique used in a few of my other images (as in the one shown here) where I duplicated the background layer, desaturated it, and set the blend mode to Overlay with about a 60% opacity. This has the effect of really kicking up the contrast and making a dull image pop a lot more. The reason for the desaturation is otherwise, you end up altering the colors of the image as well. I also did a slight crop of the image, removing the fence visible in the bottom of the frame, and did some slight adjustment with a levels layer – moving the middle slider to the left to increase contrast. Finally, I added a saturation layer and lowered the saturation of the image by about -50. This had the effect of making it almost black and white, but not quite. Then, I saved it, and exported it to Flickr from Lightroom with medium sharpening.
That was a lot of editing for a mediocre photo, but I’m fairly happy with the way it came out. I’m always trying to stretch myself creatively and in this case I think I had a partial success in doing something slightly out of my normal comfort zone of landscapes.
Leave me a comment and let me know what you think!
Erik, Matt, and I went to the Franklin Park Zoo last weekend. Previously, I wrote a post about taking shots of the resident lion at the zoo. After meandering around the zoo for a while, we went to the Tropical Forest. Dressed in our winter garb, complete with hats, gloves, and scarves to combat the 20 degree weather and 25 mph winds, we entered the warm, humid Tropical Forest.
Where I was able to shoot at 1/1000″ at f/2.8 and ISO 200 outside, inside was another matter. I walked around for awhile, checking out the Gorillas, various birds, some hog-like creature, and various other animals when I found the lemurs. A whole bunch of them. Though their environment was naturally lit via skylights, it was still pretty dang dark, and behind a thick pane of reflective glass. I immediately knew I would have to start shooting at ISO 1600. Knowing we were going inside, I had borrowed Erik’s monopod, so thankfully I would be able to keep my non-IS Canon 70-200 f/2.8L lens steady. Recall from the previous post that at a minimum, one needs to shoot at 1/efl (effective focal length) if hand-holding a camera. Using a monopod greatly reduces that requirement, though and I was able to shoot down to 1/30″ and still get sharp pictures, even at 200mm. I was still shooting Aperture Priority Mode with Exposure Compensation to +1/3 stop on my Canon Rebel XTi/400D at f/2.8 to let enough light in and to get a nice shallow depth of field. When I started shooting these rapidly moving little buggers, I was getting between 1/30″ and 1/60″ for a shutter speed! That’s a full 7-8 stops darker than what I was finding outside. Thank goodness for that monopod and fast lens!
[tangent]
When I used to shoot with my Canon S2 IS point and shoot camera, I wouldn’t even bother taking a shot if I had to go over ISO 200 and ISO 400 was a grainy mess. The world of DSLRs changes that. Now, I don’t hesitate to shoot at ISO 1600. Heck, ISO 400 is kind of my starting point and I adjust from there. Sure, 800 and 1600 are noisier than lower ISO settings, but if you get a good exposure, exposing to the right, the noise is not objectionable at all, especially once you take a 10mp image and reduce it to an 800×600 image on the screen. Even printed 8×10″, the noise just doesn’t really show up….if you got the exposure right. I can’t emphasize this enough – an under exposed low ISO image will have more objectionable noise than a well exposed high ISO image. So, if the light gets low and bumping up the ISO will allow you to get a better exposure, don’t be afraid. I tell you, a blurry, dark ISO 400 shot is going to look a heck of a lot worse than a sharp ISO 1600 shot. Plus, if you’re using flash, you’ll be able to capture some of the environment and not just end up with a blown out head sticking out of a black hole.
[/tangent]
Now the problem wasn’t camera shake, it was getting the lemurs to stand still long enough to shoot them at such a slow shutter speed. 1/30″ – 1/60″ is just too slow to capture rapidly moving primates swinging from trees and chasing their friends. I quickly gave up on trying to catch these guys running around playing, so I started focusing on the little guys eating lunch. Did I mention that they were also behind glass? So, I got down low to the floor, got my lens as close to the glass as I could (to eliminate glare) as much as possible, and went to work. Because of the large aperture, long focal lengths, close shooting distances, and subsequently shallow depth of field, I ended up with a lot of well framed shots where a nose, or a claw, or an ear was in crisp focus, but the eyes were not. It doesn’t matter if it’s an animal or a human, a portrait just doesn’t work if the eyes are not in focus. If you can’t get both eyes in focus, the near eye really needs to be in sharp focus. Also, because of the slow shutter speeds and the spastic creatures, I ended up with a lot of pictures where the fur on the body and arms was in crisp focus, but the head was a blurry mess as they moved their heads around. Again, focusing on the slow moving, feeding lemurs was the way to go and I got several decent shots.
Sweating from our winter garb in a tropical environment, we packed up at closing time when the zoo staff kicked us out. When I got home and downloaded the images into Lightroom (after some warm Tazo Chai…mmmmm), I flagged the ones I liked, deleted the total losers (out of focus, blurry, etc), and keyworded them. The lion picture from the last post took a lot of post processing work to get it to pop, but these lemur pictures came out of the camera almost like you see them. For a few of them, I had to bump up the exposure 1/3 of a stop or so. Because I was shooting through glass…again…there was a little loss of contrast, so I bumped up the black level a little bit, as well as the contrast and vibrance. Then, I exported them straight to flickr and Facebook with sharpening set to high, using Jeffrey Friedl’s Facebook and Flickr plugins for Lightroom.
Did you learn something? Have some questions? Am I full of it? Do you hate my photos and wish I’d shut up about them? Let me know by posting in the comments!
Back to Part 1
Saturday, I went to the Franklin Park Zoo in Dorchester, MA (just outside of Boston) with my friends Erik and Matt for a blustery January photowalk. We all showed up with our long lenses and winter apparel and started our journey outside. I was taking my new Canon 70-200 f/2.8L out for it’s first spin, attached to my Canon Rebel XTi/400D. I really took it (and my ability) through the ringer, shooting in bright direct sun at ISO 100 handheld all the way to dimly lit interior shots requiring high ISO, slow shutter speeds, and a monopod.
First up, a lion in the snow!
Being winter in New England, there were very few animals outside, but we were quickly greeted by an earth shaking lion’s roar. As we approached, the guy you see here was standing on top of his rock, as if to tell us that we would be food if he could only get out of his pen. If you’ve never heard a lion’s roar live in concert, it is quite a thing to experience. Plus, the juxtaposition of a lion with a foot of packed snow on the ground was equally unusual.
Mr. Lion was kept in by two different types of barricades. On two sides, he had an extremely deep and wide sheer rock chasm. This provided us photographers with a nearly unobstructed view of the King of the Jungle. On the other sides, he was glassed in with very thick, contrast reducing, flare inducing glass.
The shot above was taken through thick, scratched glass as he was staring me down. It was difficult to capture him through the branches, but I stood on my tip-toes and leaned against the glass and was able to get a clear shot of his face. As usual, I was shooting aperture priority (Av) mode, which allowed me to chose my f/stop and ISO while the camera chose the shutter speed. In this case, I picked f/2.8 to get that nice shallow depth of field. Because I would be shooting moving animals with a long lens, I had to keep the shutter speed high. The rule of thumb is to keep the shutter speed no slower than 1/(effective focal length) to avoid shake blur from hand holding the camera. I chose ISO 200, which in this shot gave me a shutter speed of 1/1000″ – plenty fast enough to get a sharp image, hand-held, at 200mm.
In order to avoid flare and reflections from the glass I was shooting through, I made sure to have the lens hood pressed up against the glass as close as possible. Even then, I could see a reflection coming in, so I used my left hand to block the source of the reflection. I took a number of similar shots to this, but tried to wait for the moment when he was staring me down. I focused on his eyes and recomposed the image so that he was not smack in the middle of the photograph. The rule of thirds always helps make for a better image.
Here is what came out of the camera. As you can see, the image is pretty sharp, but seriously lacking in contrast and color vibrance. The Lion is also somewhat back and side lit, causing his face to be a bit too dark and the background a bit too bright. The first thing I did in Lightroom was to bring up the black levels substantially (+30). This took care of the biggest problem, which was a lack of dark tones in the image. I tried a number of things to bring out the colors in the image, but they were just lost behind the glass. So, I converted the image to black and white. My philosophy is that if the colors in an image do not do anything to improve the image, get rid of them. Black and White also gives you the ability to greatly increase the contrast of an image, which I did in this case by setting the tone curve to “strong contrast” and bringing contrast up to +77.
I also did some messing around with the color luminosities to darken the rocks and bring out some detail in the lion’s face. This changed the image from a flat grayscale image to one with some more depth and contrast. That left me with the dark face to deal with. I used the adjustment brush set to +1 stop exposure and drew all over his face. Because the feathering level on the brush was set quite high, it doesn’t end up looking unnaturally brightened. I cropped the image a bit from the left, added a slight vignette, and then uploaded it to flickr.
This is more post processing work than I usually put into my images, but I think it paid off here. I don’t consider this my best work by far, but I think it shows what you can do with a decently composed, yet somewhat technically flawed image.
To finish up, I present you with this odd juxtaposition:
Let me know what you think or if you have any questions.
Next up, LEMURS, indoors!
This past August, my wife and I found out that we were expecting. Knowing that our vacation time would be limited for the next, oh, 18 years or so, we decided to take an impromptu vacation around labor day up to Weirs Beach in Laconia, NH. We rented ourselves a nice cabin with a beautiful view of Lake Winnipesaukee and went up there for a brief vacation on Labor Day.
The town was dead. Very few businesses in the very small town were open, and there was hardly a soul around. This was perfect for us since we hate crowds and all we wanted to do was spend some nice time together, go hiking, and generally just relax. I, of course, brought my camera everywhere we went.
One evening, while my wife was taking a nap, I went out to get some sunset shots at the marina right by our cabin. I spent a good hour or so waiting for the light to “happen”, but came back with nothing great. The lake is to the east, and the clouds weren’t crazy enough to provide an interesting sky in the east. So, the next morning, I decided I would get up at the crack of dawn – before first light, if possible – to get some sunrise shots of the marina. In my limited experience photographing sunrises, I’ve found that the light is far better than sunset light.
Something like 5AM came, I begrudgingly rolled out of bed, put on some warm clothes, grabbed my camera, tripod, filters, and remote trigger and walked down the hill to the lake. It was, unfortunately, well past first light, but the light was still beautiful. Since I had been there the night before, I had some ideas for compositions already, so I got to work.
I had decided on using my Sigma 17-70 lens since I knew I would want to take shots from a variety of focal lengths. I love my Sigma 10-20, but it’s not very easy to adapt to changing conditions and ideas since even 20mm on a crop camera is only 32mm, which doesn’t get you very close. It was pretty dim light, but the sky was still significantly brighter than the docks and water, so I put on a 2 stop graduated neutral density filter to bring the exposure of the sky down. Without it, I’d either have a shadowy foreground with little detail and a lot of noise, or I’d have a blown out sky. The color in the sky was a beautiful pastel color and I wanted to make sure I captured that. I didn’t have my gray card with me to custom white balance, but I was wearing a gray sweatshirt, so I turned the camera around and set a custom white balance using my sweatshirt. (Note to self, purchase an 18% gray t-shirt and sweatshirt).
I knew I wanted to get some long exposure shots in order to blur the water to a glass-like surface with frosty reflections of the dock, and I also wanted everything in clear focus. So, I chose f/11, ISO 100, and tried a 25 second exposure. I find that the light meter only gets me in the ballpark on shots like this, so there is a bit of guesswork involved to get the ‘correct’ exposure. I wanted to use the dock to lead the eye out into the lake, mountains, and those beautiful cloud wisps beyond, so I started the dock in the lower left corner, and brought it out to the middle of the image. I adjusted my height so that the sky took up a third of the image, and the water took up 2/3rds. The dock occupies 2/3rds as well. By now, you should be getting the fact that I like utilizing the rule of thirds to help compose my images. Centered images are boring (usually) and offsetting the subject matter does a great deal to bring interest to a photograph.
I set up my tripod (yeah, I know Ken Rockwell doesn’t like tripods – I’d like to ask him how to get shots like this without one), set the mirror lockup mode on, and took the shot using the settings above, and it came out just as I wanted. My histogram looked as you see here. Nothing was blown out, but it was nicely exposed all the way to the right, just as I wanted. The first thing I noticed was the incredible pastel yellow throughout the image. I loved it! The color actually came from some blue fibers that were woven into my “gray” sweatshirt that I had white balanced to.
[tangent]
The basic idea of exposing to the right, minus all the technical jargon is that you want to expose your shot so that it is as bright as possible without clipping off the highlights. Most cameras that show a histogram will flash clipped highlight areas when you display the histogram. The basic reason for this is that half of all the information the camera captures is in the brightest one stop of exposure. Conversely, the least amount of information is stored in the shadows. So, to get a noise-free image, expose it as far “to the right” as possible (without clipping) because you can always darken it in post processing, but recovering detail from the shadows is all but impossible.
[/tangent]
I moved around quickly as the sun was coming up fast – once the sun breaks the horizon, the game is over. The light is spoiled and it’s back to bed. I got 3 ‘keepers’ from the few dozen that I shot over a period of 30 minutes or so. It just so happens that they were the first 3 shots that I took! I find that happens frequently – my best images are often the ones that seem most intuitive. After I’ve gotten the shots that seem right and natural to me, I start looking too hard for other images to take and end up getting into analysis paralysis to some degree. This is especially prevalent with sunrise and sunset shots, as the light is constantly changing and you never know what is around the next temporal corner.
The sun came up, and I went back to the cabin, knowing I had a few keepers. I didn’t have my computer with me, so it would be another few days before I could download them. So, I did what any sane person who got up at 5AM on vacation would do…I went back to bed.
The final version of the first photograph I took that morning is the first image in this post and is the one I will be talking about further.
When I got back home a few days later, I downloaded the images. To the right is what came out of my camera. As you can see, the dock is a little darker than in the final image, the horizon is a bit crooked, and there is a beer can on the dock that I didn’t notice at the time, but other than that, there was very little editing required. I always try to do my best to get the shot as close to the way I want it in the camera since editing is not something I generally enjoy. I brought the RAW image into Adobe Lightroom and went to work. First, I 
straightened the image with the straight edige tool resulting in a -1.14 rotation. Try as I might, I can never get my horizons straight when I’m on the scene. I think I need to get a bubble level for my hotshoe. Then, I added +25 Fill Light, to bring up the brightness of the dock and mountains without adjusting the midrange and highlight tones, added +43 contrast, +43 clarity (to bring out some texture in the wood), and +17 Vibrance. I added a slight vignette to the image and did a tiny amount of sharpening, also in Lightroom. Because the beer can was so small and unobtrusive, I was able to avoid going into Photoshop, and I just used the dust removal tool in Lightroom to edit it out.
Hopefully, this gives you some idea of the how and why of creating this image. Questions? Ask in the comments section!
If you are interested in photography, you shouldn’t miss the Boston Globe’s Big Picture. Just stick the RSS feed in your Google Reader and wait for the magic to show up. I’d suggest going over there now and looking through some of the archives, too.
Recently, The Big Picture just put up their 2008 In Photos. There is some absolutely amazing photojournalism there. Take a look:
2008 In Photos Part 1 of 3
2008 In Photos Part 2 of 3
2008 In Photos Part 3 of 3
Here are a couple of my favorites from the 2008 In Photos series that inspire me to become a better photographer:
(#31 from Part 2)
(#1 from Part 3)I can only dream having such a developed eye that I can see and capture those moments as they happen.