Best of the summer

Bug season is pretty much winding down here in the northeast, and I've been going through my work from the summer, taking stock of what I've gotten. This is the first year I've done this type of photography, and it's gratifying to see the improvement I've made.

I thought I'd post a handful of what I feel is my best work from the season. I've posted a couple of these here before, but these all reflect some aspect of how I've developed as a photographer this year. (This post was written for dgrin.com this morning, but I thought it would be worth posting here as well.)


This is really the first macro shot I was able to accurately previsualize and then produce; it's also my favorite image since going digital. On top of that, this shoot was the first time I learned about metallic bees, which I think are fantastically cool :)



An Asian ladybug on the fence in my front yard; like the green metallic bee, this was among the first images where I was capable of controlling the light in a way that gave me the image I was visualizing. This was taken on a pretty sunny day, not ten feet in front of the white-ish siding of my apartment.



A simple carpenter ant on some kind of flower. (Plant ID is a real weak spot for me -- I'd captioned one photo as an insect on 'some kind of flower', until my girlfriend pointed out that it was, in fact, a common rose.)

I don't think I'd have been able to get a shot with this degree of contrast, with the soft lighting of the buds, and with a hyperactive ant, earlier in the summer, without so much exposure and focus chimping I'd lost the shot. I've gotten good enough at those, particularly at focusing, that I can usually get the shot I want without having to do much of that at all; I find I take two or three shots out of habit, and all of them are technically fine.


I have very few good butterfly images. I definitely need to learn how to approach them, and then get an exposure that's not entirely blown out, since I was mostly seeing these cabbage whites this summer. This one is pretty standard as far as composition goes, but I do like the contrasting shapes of the animal and flower.



This greater angle-winged katydid was just fun to shoot. It was pretty mellow and climbed right onto my hand, so this is from one of the few times I got to shoot a single animal in different compositions over a somewhat extended period of time.



This photo was a real goal of mine all summer. I was on my way home from the park the last week in August when I spotted this tiny orchard spider at the base of a shrub, and I got exactly what I had tried for with any number of less colorful spiders, by laying down behind the web and shooting upwards.

ISO 102400

Canon and Nikon have both released cameras recently that have ridiculous ISO ranges. My 40D can get up to ISO 3200; the just-announced-today 1D Mark IV gets a full five more stops of sensitivity. I haven't seen any samples yet, though Vincent Laforet says the camera can basically see in the dark, and that ISO 6400 is at least as good as what we expect from ISO 1600.

And then think of some of the new image stabilization technology. Canon's new 100mm Macro has a new system that apparently can work well at 1:1 magnification. I don't know how well, but even if it works respectably well, that might give us another two stops.

I think this is going to enable some tremendously interesting things for macro shooters -- it will let us take some of the weight off the camera, which means staying out longer and being able to move the camera easily for better compositions. Imagine a rig designed for daylight shooting, with, instead of a heavy flash and diffuser, a scrim and a reflector on flexible mounts to modify the natural light. Or lightweight flashes with low guide numbers that are working at low/fast power levels. Both of these will still be able to shoot around f/11 or so, without having to pay nearly as much in noise.

Hopefully, this technology will filter down to my personal price range sooner rather than later...

Flash pulse duration

Chuck Westfall's October Tech Tips is out, and he answers a question regarding the flash pulse duration of Canon's speedlites. Canon doesn't publish these numbers so there's quite a bit of speculation, but he points out one thing that I didn't know: at lower power levels, the xenon bulbs used in the flashes are not as efficient as they are at high power. Therefore, a flash firing at 1/16th isn't necessarily firing 16 times faster than it does at full power, since it's putting out less than 1/16th as much light per millisecond.

Without actual numbers or the tools to do some testing, it's impossible to say how much it matters. It's probably still firing faster than it would at 1/4 or 1/8, which is important in flash-based macro because your flash pulse duration is, effectively, your shutter speed.

The bit I find most interesting is where he says "I suspect that if you use a higher power setting on the 430EX to match the output of the 550EX, the flash durations from both Speedlites will end up being very similar if not identical." I've been considering the 430EX II over the 270EX, on the assumption that they'd have similar pulse durations at full power, and therefore the 430EX II would be faster since I'd be using it at lower power levels. It may be that the 270EX at 1/2 or 1/4 power isn't as much of a compromise in speed as I had thought; in terms of price and weight, it's obviously the better choice for macro.

This may seem like nitpicking, but it does have real application for the small animal photography I like to do. On a warm, sunny day, it's simply not possible to get a sharp image of a fast-moving insect without a flash pulse fast enough to freeze its motion. 1/250th of a second is a looong time in that shooting scenario. This photo was taken with the flash pulse at 1/4 power; the bee is quite noticeably blurred, even in the eye and legs, though I don't think it detracts from this particular shot.

Digikam

I'm a long-time user of Linux, and one of the minor annoyances I put up with in photography is the need to use Windows for an efficient workflow with good post-processing control. I've been dual-booting with Ubuntu for about a year now, and had frankly stopped really using it because of a few problems I was never able to resolve. I've always been more of a Gentoo guy, and what with their tenth anniversary this month, I decided to switch back. Except for this past year, I've used it as my primary OS since 2002, so even though it's a lot more DIY, I'm quite comfortable with it.

Anyhow, I've been looking more seriously into Linux RAW processing software. I know there are some really powerful options out there, but I honestly find a lot of that power is more than I need. I've currently got the latest beta of Digikam installed and I think it's about 95% of what I want, but there's still a lot I need to learn about it.

I'll be looking closely at its output later, and hopefully it'll turn out to be a good alternative to Lightroom or even DPP.

Lightroom vs. DPP comparison

I've put together two 100% crops of a recent picture, comparing the results from Lightroom 2.5 and Digital Photo Professional 3.6.1. Where I could, I processed them identically, but generally speaking Lightroom has much finer control than DPP, so to a degree I had to just ask myself how I'd normally process the image in that program.


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The comparisons show the problem I have with Lightroom: the JPGs I get out of it lose their texture to noise. The second crop is a perfect example. There are places that are much sharper in LR, like the tip of the flower bud, but towards the edges of the in-focus region, the fine detail is lost in the noise very quickly, and there's even some color banding in the bokeh. The DPP crop, though not as detailed in the in-focus areas, doesn't have that harsh, noisy, almost plastic texture to the bokeh and nearly-bokeh regions. Lightroom's sharpening tool, incidentally, can mask out the low-detail regions, so it didn't touch the areas I'm unhappy with.

This image was shot at ISO 200, with +0.33 exposure in both LR and DPP. Noise reduction is 3 luminance and 1 color in DPP; 24 luminance and 34 color in LR. (The DPP scale is 0-20, LR is 0-100. The color slider doesn't have much effect in either on this image, as long as it's not 0.) I don't see much improvement in LR's noise reduction below about 90, which seems unbelievably high for an ISO 200 image from a 40D, even with the background a stop or two intentionally underexposed. So I don't know what's going on here -- I have to assume I'm missing something. Do I just need to crank up the noise reduction?

Lightroom

I'm playing with the Adobe Lightroom trial again. I've used it in the past and wasn't happy with the JPGs I got out of it: there was a weird plastic texture that I think had to do with noise reduction, and the contrast just didn't seem quite there. Canon's DPP gave me much better results in that regard, even though the organization, tagging, and interface are so poor, so I never made the jump to Adobe.



But lately, the workflow issues around DPP have just gotten to me. I've caught myself letting photos sit on the camera because I don't want to deal with the ordeal of processing them in DPP. Don't get me wrong: individual photos are fine to work with, but sorting through 200 shots, deleting the rejects, and then getting to the individual picks is a pain. And that's not even looking at DPP's total inability to handle data like tags and captions, which means my DPP workflow often has to involve two, three, or sometimes four separate programs to get my work online. And Lightroom can do all that stuff easily.



So, I'm reading up on Lightroom again, and already found some good advice for dealing with sharpening and tone curves in it. I'm looking through old favorites to see what I can do with them, and we'll see how it goes.

Covered in bees

So, I hadn't really done anything interesting in about two weeks. I had to go out of town for a weekend, and on returning, I lent my roommate part of my macro rig for about a week. Then Boston started breaking all kinds of heat records... I know, it's no excuse. I hope you can forgive me, just this once at least. In penance, I offer up some new bee images.



One thing I really like is the effect you get when you shoot through the leaf or flower. Especially when you have something nice and neutral, like the grains of pollen on the back of the bee, to go and set your white balance to in post. The brilliant glowing effect is, I think, pretty striking.



This is a good example of where I think a TTL flash with low power settings would work better than my 1/16th-and-hope Vivitar. The flower still has detail, but not as much as I'd like. I could fix this in post, but I prefer chanting 'get it right in-camera' to justify a fancy upgrade I can't afford.



This is similar to a shot I took last month of a carpenter bee entering a hollyhock flower, but I absolutely love the eye peeking out from under that thick carpet of pollen. Worth mentioning is that this bee (an entirely black species I don't recognize) buzzed my face right after I took this photo. Not as mellow as most bees around here...

And, a tip I discovered on this photowalk: wear long pants when shooting bees, lest they be inclined to fly up your shorts and cause you much distress before they leave.