Mistakes, and the wonders of the digital age

[pecunium]

I made a stupid mistake today.

No, I made two, one exacerbated the other.

The second, I trusted the damned LED screen on the back of my camera, which made the underexposure of the images I was taking less apparent.

So, why did I underexpose them?

Because I forgot that snow is white.

This is what I wanted the pictures to look like.



This is what I actually shot



Why the difference? Because the flowers are white.

The meter in a camera is really simple (no matter that modern meters are really sophisticated), it's trying to make the entire image fall into a range the recording medium (be it sensor, or film) can record. Really bright subject, or really dark, will fool it.

A really bright subject (like the plum blossom) will be dulled, because that's the way dealing with all that bright stuff, is handled. I was fooled by my eyes (which are more sensitive than film, mostly because the diaphragm of the eye is able to adjust to subsections of the scene), and thought the amount of background (the image is uncropped) was enough to balance out the white of the flowers.

It wasn't.

Happily, this is not as big a problem with digital cameras as it is with color film (black and white film is more forgiving of this sort of mistake than color, because the paper stocks have more variation than color paper does, but I digress), and shooting RAW makes a huge difference.

My primaring editing program (LightZone) has some handy tools, which allow me (some) to correct for this sort of mistake, at which point all I have to do is treat it as if I'd not played the fool. Some of the shadow detail is lost, but this image doesn't have a whole lot of detail in the shadows, so I got away with it.

Comments

[shunra.livejournal.com]

That sort of issue has led my in-house paparazzo to suggest a redecoration of our kitchen - which is painted a highly saturated and extraordinarily bright yellow and deep blue (a.k.a. "a room one CANNOT be depressed in"). He claims that the camera tries to figure out what the colors are, screams, and lies on its back with its legs in the air in response to my preferred kitchen coloration.

(Snow is as white as my kitchen is yellow and blue).

Nice fixing, though.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Digital is awful for really saturated colors. Which is a pain, because I like birds, and flowers, which are strongly saturated.

I need a camera with better resolution (the D3 is on my list of lusts), which will reduce some of that (makeing edge effects less notable), but film is still best for that sort of subject.

TK

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

The fix was, actually, not more than just saying, +.75 on the exposure scale.

The rest was normal attempts to make it look as I saw it.

TK

[shunra.livejournal.com]

The rest was normal attempts to make it look as I saw it.

I take pains to explain to the inhouse paparazzo that making it look as you see it is what's known as "art". "normal attempts" are in the range of "easy for you, difficult for me".

(And he's using an Olympus E-510 now, and recently LightRoom, too. It makes for some fascinating results where he brings me pieces of the world as he sees it and it is totally, totally alien to anything that I see. Photography is just as much art as any other form.)

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Yes.

What took me a long time to realise is that what I do (with photography) is art, as much as the things I thought of as, "Art".

In part because I know how much I faiil to get close to what I want, and how many things I want to catch, which I've not the skill/practice, to pull off.

I always feel I'm failing to show what I see, because I'm failing to get the image I was after.

TK

[shunra.livejournal.com]

Art is about trying to break free of the osteoprison of one's own mind and really truly share consciousness with others.
Per definition, it is impossible.

And yet it seems to me that we are all compelled to try (and fail, and try again).

You know Bradbury's poem about that, yes?

[bifemmefatale.livejournal.com]

I'm surprised you haven't bought Photoshop yet. I don't know what I'd do without it. I know you'd rather snap the perfect picture the first time, but it's invaluable for situations like these, and for such fun things as icons, macros, "watercolor tinting" old photos, turning something modern sepia-toned, etc.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

I have Photoshop (CS2). I dislike it, as a tool for editing. I find it counterintuitive, heavy-handed, storage intensive (because to work on a file I have to duplicate it, lest I mistakenly perform a destructive edit), difficult to try variations on a theme, and a host of other flaws.

I use it, primarily, to correct spots, and do color space management for printing.

LightZone (my preferred editor) does non-destructive edits, automatic layering, has a complete history, any part of which can be addressed; at any time, allows me to move the sequence of edits, and defeat them temporarily.

All the information is contained in a file of about 100kb.

I also have Bibble, which I use to do brute force conversions of RAW to .jpg, and some noise correction for pictures I shot at high ISO.

TK