Archive for

August, 2005

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and the river flows

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This is from Yellowstone National Park, in Sep 2002, with a small 2 MP Olympus C-2040 [terrific camera, I still repent selling the camera. This shot is not without flaws, but I really like it for some reason :)

The 70-200 AF-S VR f/2.8 Nikkor lens is out of stock everywhere. It is absolutely ridiculous that old copies of the lens are selling for more than new retail in ebay right now!. Rumors abound that Nikon is going to release a slow AF-S VR lens in this range. We might know tomorrow, won't we? :)

Waiting for …

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This is inside the beautiful church inside Stanford University. I used to work very close to Stanford before. It is a gorgeous place. I often wonder how it would be to spend a lifetime inside a campus like Stanford :) .

Does White Balance matter when you shoot RAW? Ron Reznick once mentioned that even in RAW, wrong WB can cause subtle color shifts that can not be corrected and also that it affects exposure. He was stating this fact from his experience of seeing thousands of photos. At that point, it did not make much sense to me.

Last week, I had an email conversation with Dave Kapp regarding this photo. Dave mentioned that the light was so bad that the red color inside had completely taken over all the colors and he found it impossible to fix the colors in post – even though he shoots RAW.

This week, Owen has been doing terrific color Infrared photos. I decided to muck with my old infrared photos like this one and try to colorize them. I had not used custom / preset WB for these shots. Rule of thumb says for infrared, WB off bright green grass with the filter on, I had not done that and I had shot these with “cloudy-2″ WB, somewhere in the 5000+K range.

Turns out that with the infrared filter on, WB hovers in the low 1000K range :( . Most software [Capture / ACR] stop at 2000K range and don't go below that. Even at 2000K, the shifts in exposure is so bad that I lost detail in pretty much every channel :( .

So, coming back to what Ron Reznick said :) , WB does seem to affect exposure and color, even when shooting RAW, which may not be fixed in post processing all the time. The two examples I quote here may be very extreme, but there possibly are minor shifts that we don't notice in normal photos.

Moral of the story? Try to get WB as close to real as possible when you take the photo :)

Peaceful sunset

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From my archives.

A colorful sunset shot from Treasure Island in San Francisco, looking towards Golden Gate bridge.

I had an email conversation with Jamie regarding RAW files and Nikon. From my experience, if you shoot RAW in nikon, the best way to extract most colors out of it is to use a nikon RAW converter (View, Capture). Only these software seem to understand the changes you do in your camera and in general seem to give colors with a lot more “pop”. I rarely get similar results with PS CS2 ACR. ACR seems to ignore most settings in the RAW file and you often end up with a bland image. What are your thoughts?

Two links about cameras.

The “noise” about Nikon D200 is growing louder by the day. Of the many rumors I have seen, this seems to be the most credible. I hope they keep the list price below $2000 :) .

Next, this time a released camera.

Check out 5D samples from Mike Soo here . Don't ask me anything more, but that camera *rocks* :) .

Talking about Mike, he won the Pop Photo Photographer of the year contest. He followed it with a great write up here. Pop photo is running the full story of the contest with his photos and all in the coming issue, check it out :) .