rhgphoto: May 2011

I have had my camera for almost a year now and am finally, finally, starting to get shots in low light that are somewhat satisfying to me. The key milestones on this path have been: improving to a good lens for low light (with a low/big aperture), and learning RAW (not only how to process it, but how to shoot for it).

This last weekend, we were invited to the 2yo birthday party for Isabelle, a neighborhood kid. She is seriously one of the cutest kids I know, and you know that's true because I certainly don't have to say that (none of her family reads this blog, as far as I know at least). She is half Chinese, and I think almost all biracial kids are cute. Her party was at the Children's Museum, in some rather poor indoor artificial light.

I mentioned to Amber once that the jpgs that my camera saves are almost always better, right off the bat, than my RAW files (I shoot in the mode that saves both the jpg and the RAW file). I often just use the JPG and don't bother editing the RAW. For this party, however, ALL 91 photos that I took were poor, right off the bat, in RAW and JPG format.

Using my favorite photo from the session, here is an illustration of my improved skills (yep, I'm bragging).

initial jpg saved by camera. When I first got my camera, and shot only in JPG, this is all I would have gotten. I could lighten/brighten it within a small range with my editing program, but I don't know that I would have ever felt happy with the results. It's a very average picture.

Here is the initial RAW photo. Ugh, even worse! Well, sort of...

With that RAW file, which contains oodles of data, I am able to "rescue" it to this following photo. I have to say that I think this is adorable (as do her parents, who have asked me for enlargements):

The thing is that even though the jpg starts out a bit better, you are pretty limited in the potential range of your edits. There is less data to work with. With a RAW file, you can make a lot of more finely tuned adjustments.

In March, Amber gave me a 3 min tour of the RAW processing screen in Elements. Also, for Christmas, Jay had given me an issue of Digital Camera magazine. I never actually read the magazine, but I did read a free insert that came with the magazine just this last weekend. It was a 28 page booklet that was essentially titled "RAW made easy." It has really helped me to understand a lot. Namely, given that the goal is to get as much right during the actual capture of the photograph, there are some things you can fix with RAW processing and some things that you can't.

The big things that you can't fix:

- poor focus

- significantly over or underexposed photos

- depth of field

The big things that you can fix:

- white balance

- exposure

So with that in mind, I decided to concentrate on establishing good focal points. I set my white balance to auto (gasp), I capped my auto-ISO at 800, and then set my shutter to 1/125 and my aperture to f/1.8. The meter told me the shots were underexposed by an EV of approximately 1.0 most of the time, which to me meant that the photos were "rescue-able."

I shot away with no changes to those settings, just making sure that my focal point was directly on what I wanted. I do wish that I had tried setting my ISO to 400 and my aperture to f/2.5. There are some photos with too much noise and some photos with too small of a focal plane (e.g. in one photo, not the one of this post: Isabelle's ear lobe is in focus but her nose is blurry, while I want her whole head in focus). My camera's LCD is pretty sparse in the detail that it can show, so it was really hard to see how blurry, or focused, a picture actually was.

Another thing I have learned is that while RAW rescues are great ... the workflow is SO cumbersome, at least on my computer. I still prefer to just use the original jpgs that my camera saves, when reasonable (which seems to be 75% of the time, or more). I can open RAW only in PSE9 (my CS4 doesn't have my camera definition in its RAW plugin). So I open in PSE9, do the raw conversion, and then can save in various filetypes -- but jpg is not one of them! I feel like I must be doing something wrong. I could save as jpg if I saved for web, but my files are so big that I get errors if I choose "save for web." So, I save as a TIF file, then open Picasa (out of habit) and resize/post/email the TIF photo, converting it to JPG format. Picasa is so efficient at this function. Then I end up with four versions of my photo: original jpg, original RAW, saved TIF, publishable-final jpg. Clearly, I need to get this workflow figured out -- way too cumbersome.

Bottom line: I'm happy with the progress in low light photography. Finally.

Earlier this year (in late January), Jay and I went on a short getaway to the Oregon Coast. We like exploring new towns, and for this trip we chose Astoria, OR. I was excited to do some thoughtful photography, which I consider to be one of my vacation indulgences.

We stayed at the Cannery Pier Hotel, which is right on the Columbia River. I brought my tripod and enjoyed a wonderful mostly-unobstructed view of the Astoria-Megler bridge. The bridge is about four miles in length and connects Oregon and Washington.

In late 2010, I took a class on Creative Techniques and learned more about long exposures. I thought this was a good opportunity to experiment with that. I've always heard about photographers waking up early to "get good light" or abandoning conversation right in the middle of dinner to go outside "to get the good light" for a photo. This was an experiment with understanding more about light, as well as the effects/possibilities of different weather conditions.

So with all that background, here is the same bridge, in seven different photos, over the course of approximately 36 hours (Day One is January 28, 2011; Day Three is January 30, 2011). These are largely unedited but obviously need some work to remove dust spots, crop out railing, etc. Still, I have been sitting on this post forever, so it's time to hit that "publish" button.