QUICK TIP: How to preserve the warm light of sunset in your digital pictures

Union City Soccer 08-22-10, originally uploaded by kwongphotography.

Early evening is my favorite time of day to shoot. An hour or two before sunset the light becomes directional and takes on a beautiful warm color. It's easy to capture on most films, as they're created to faithfully reproduce colors in the much cooler-looking light we see earlier in the day.

When you're using a digital camera it's possible to lose some of this beauty if you're not careful. This will happen if you choose to set your white balance using a gray card as the camera will remove all of the light's warm color.  Auto white balance may remove some -- if not all -- of this color as well.

To preserve the light's color, use your dSLR's daylight white balance preset. This will force the camera to use a white balance that will render the scene as if it were shot in the cooler-colored light from earlier in the day and preserve the color of the warm sunset light.

CAL v. University of Washington, November 27, 2010

Sometimes football can be really brutal! Believe it or not, no penalty was called on this play.
For more pictures of this game please click here.

CAL v. Stanford, November 20, 2010

 CAL v. Stanford 11-20-10, originally uploaded by kwongphotography.

The Big Game between Stanford and CAL is always a lot of fun to shoot!
For more Big Game pictures please click here.

Improving your portraits with common household items

I've been participating in various online photography forums on-and-off for many years now. One of the things that I have noticed in all of them is how often people are lead to believe that photography is complicated and expensive. They couldn't be farther from the truth.

With this in mind, I decided to take a cue from my good friend and colleague Richard Thompson, who spent many years selling cameras for Best Buy and Wolf Camera. Richard’s approach to sales is a bit unorthodox as he doesn’t always up sell a customer to complex, expensive equipment. Instead, he will often sell them on the idea of purchasing less expensive accessories that would allow them to make use of the equipment and features they already have.

Richard's method works particularly well for people that are starting out, as they are less likely to be overwhelmed by the prospect of learning something radically new. This is especially true when it comes to lighting.

The word “lighting” usually brings to mind the use of strobes. Unfortunately, many people overlook the fact that Mother Nature provides us with all the light we need to make beautiful pictures. One of the great advantages of using natural light is that there is no guesswork in the setup because we can see exactly what the light is doing. This isn’t always possible with strobes. The trick is learning to modify the light to get the desired results.

This can actually be done with ordinary household items that most of us have laying about in our cupboards.

For this article, I used the items shown above: Reynolds Wrap aluminum foil, 11” x 14” black and white mount board (white on one side, black on the other), tissue paper and painter’s tape. Ordinary cardboard that is white on one side can be substituted for the mount board and masking tape or Scotch tape can be use in place of the blue painter’s tape. All of these items can be purchased for about $5 each at your local drug store. These materials can be used in place of expensive light modification products that cost $200 or more.

To demonstrate how effective these items can really be, I started with one of my favorite “crash test dummies” in a common situation that many people are challenged with: making a portrait using window light.

As you can see in the image above, my subject is being lit by harsh, direct light from the sun coming through the patio door. The sunlight was a little warmer than I would have liked, so I created a custom white balance and took a picture from a position directly in front of my test subject. The results are very unflattering, as shown in the image below.

The light of the sun is creating a harsh shadow that covers the right-side of my test subject.

Using a few pieces of painter’s tape, I placed the tissue paper on the glass patio door to diffuse the sun light.

The tissue paper greatly improved the quality of the light coming through the patio door. Below, on the left, is the original image. The image on the right shows the result of the diffusion created by the tissue paper. The tissue caused to the light to spread out and spill on to the background, opening it up for us to see.

Portrait photographers often place a light beneath their subject to fill in the area under the subject’s chin. The light also creates a kind of radiant “glow.” We can accomplish this effect by adding a piece of white cardboard to the setup to reflect some light up into the test subject as shown below.

Once again, we see some improvement. Below, on the left, is the image made with the tissue paper diffusion. The picture on the right shows the result of the light reflected from the white cardboard. You can see that the right-half of my test subject is no longer in shadow and that it is pretty evenly lit. To reflect more light, the cardboard can be wrapped in aluminum foil.

Accent lights are frequently used to add dimension and help separate the subject from the background. The same effect can be created by wrapping a piece of cardboard with aluminum foil. Placed high and behind the subject, the foil will reflect the light necessary to create the accent.

In the image above, you can see that I have placed the dull-side of the foil towards the subject. The shiny side can also be used to reflect more light but will produce a much harsher quality of light. Which side of the foil you decide to use will depend on your needs and preference. Alternatively, the foil can be omitted altogether.

In the comparison above, the left image shows the effect produced by the addition of the tissue paper and the white cardboard. The image on the right shows the results after the addition of the aluminum foil reflector.

The final result is a huge improvement from where I started, as shown below.

I’m a firm believer that you can make photography as complicated and expensive as you want. From this example, it’s easy to see that good photography is not about what you shoot with but rather how you choose to use the resources and equipment you have.

Windows God Mode for Windows 7 and Vista

One of the things you've probably noticed about computer software is how designers like to change things around in new releases. Having begun my computer career with Windows 2000, XP was somewhat of a culture shock to me. Fortunately, the engineers were smart enough to include the Windows Classic theme which gives XP the user interface people like me had become used to. Unfortunately, in Windows 7, this feature was excluded.

For the average user or anyone who has been using Windows Vista over the last few years, this might not be a big deal. For XP users that skipped Vista, this can be a big problem, as many of the features they have become accustomed to have been renamed and/or moved to different places. Thankfully, Microsoft included a nice search engine with the OS which can be a big help in finding things.

Don’t like having to use a search engine to customize your computer settings? Try using Windows God Mode.

Windows God Mode is basically a hack that allows you to create a control console that has pretty much every setting imaginable for Windows 7 and Vista.

Accessing God Mode is a simple three-step process that involves creating and renaming a folder:

1. For simplicity, I like to create this folder on the C: drive. Open My Computer and double-click on the C: drive. This will show you the contents of the hard drive.

2. Right-click in the white space of the window and select the option new folder.

3. Right-click the folder you created and rename it to the following, EXACTLY as it appears here:

GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

It’s that simple.

Open the folder and you’ll see a window similar to this:


Now you'll be able to customize your systems settings from one place.

Third-party RAW conversion and preserving your in-camera settings

Over the last ten years I’ve seen a lot of discussions about the advantages of shooting RAW over JPEGs. While I have been a dedicated RAW shooter for about five years now, I have to admit that I started out shooting JPEGs.

Why? Quite simply, the cameras I had access to when I made the switch to digital – the Nikon D1 and Canon EOS D30 – were not practical platforms for shooting RAW on news and sports jobs.

Advances in camera shooting rates, burst depth and camera-to-card write speed changed all of that, and I found myself making the changeover to RAW after upgrading to the Nikon D1h. Loaded with a modest-performing Lexar 80x CF card, I could capture 27 images at five frames-per-second and have the buffer cleared out and ready for another action sequence in about the same amount of time it took to put a new roll into an F3. It was almost like shooting film again.

Fast forward to 2010. Most of today’s modern professional cameras have far surpassed the speed and capacity of my D1h and film cameras. Nikon’s current flagship – the D3x – matches the performance of the D1h while capturing images at nearly 10x the resolution.

Amateurs also benefited from the advances made in camera design. Once only found on cameras aimed at professionals and advanced amateurs, RAW found its way into $500 entry-level digital SLRs and high-end point-and-shoot cameras.

This necessitated the need for better conversion tools. The camera manufacturers and many third-party software companies responded by producing a plethora of programs capable of performing conversions. Microsoft and Apple even added RAW support to their operating systems.

Unfortunately, as some of us have discovered, not all RAW converters are created equal. Some users have reported that the quality of conversions vary greatly in quality from program to program. Some applications have more capabilities than others. Some offer limited camera support. Due to these differences, each program renders images differently.

One of the most obvious of these conversion differences is the ability to include all of the in-camera settings when the files are processed.

For the purposes of this article, I have converted two D2x images using Adobe Camera Raw in Photoshop CS3 and Capture NX2. No adjustments or crops have been made to the files. While these pictures came from a Nikon camera, the differences between conversions would also be apparent with RAW files from other camera manufacturers.

On the left is a D2x file conversion made with the default settings in Adobe Camera Raw version 4.6. This version is available as an update to Photoshop CS3. At right is a conversion made with Nikon Capture NX2 v2.2.4. The image was shot using the color mode I setting, which Nikon says is optimized for skin tones. You’ll notice that the skin tones have taken on a yellow tint in the ACR conversion. The blue color of the uniform is also different. In comparison, the Capture NX2 version has much more pleasing skin tones that were produced without any adjustment. Please click on the image to see a larger version.

The differences are subtle, but become more apparent if your camera has the ability to capture RAW and JPEG simultaneously.

The image shown at the left is a JPEG. On the right is the corresponding RAW image as converted using the default settings in ACR 4.6. These two images should be identical. While the colors of the television remote are the same, you'll notice that the blue of the flex fill cover and the black cardboard background are very different.

By default, ACR v4.6 uses a setting called ACR 4.4 located in the camera profile tab, shown above.

Nikon refers to these in-camera settings as Picture Control settings. In Capture NX2 they can be found in the Camera Settings menu in the Edit List. These options are not available in ACR.

Now it’s not that Adobe Camera Raw is a poor converter. It actually makes beautiful conversions. In fact, ACR has a few useful features that Capture NX2 lacks.

By default, ACR kept the white balance. It just didn’t keep any of my other in-camera settings like contrast and saturation.

Sure, it’s possible to make adjustments to the image to compensate for these differences, but this can be time consuming and the adjustments required may vary from image-to-image. If you’re like me, you want to spend as little time in front of the computer as possible.

So is it necessary to use the camera manufacturer software to maintain the look you intended?

Thankfully, the answer is NO.

Adobe and a few other third-party software manufacturers have been able to decode these camera settings into what are called camera profiles.

The conversion on the left was made with a beta version of the D2x camera profile that I added to Adobe Camera Raw. The conversion is nearly identical to the conversion made with Capture NX2, which is shown again on the right.

Adobe has released a beta camera profile add-in for Photoshop CS3 that can be found here.

A partial list of cameras supported by the beta can be found here.

Once installed, you can access the new profiles in the camera profile tab:

In the screenshot above, I have applied the D2x profile for color mode I.

This add-on can only be used with version 4.5 or 4.6 of ACR. If you are using Photoshop CS3 and need to update ACR, you can do so by going to the Adobe update site. Updates for ACR v5 which is designed for Photoshop CS4 and Lightroom v2 can also be found there.

I have not had the opportunity to use Photoshop CS4 or Lightroom v2, but my understanding is that profiles for many of today’s dSLRs are included with the new version of ACR and are accessed in the same manner.

Adobe has also created a profile editor so that you can create your own profiles. It can be downloaded from this page.

The profile editor can also be used with the DNG converter to convert your RAW files to the Adobe DNG format. The use of a color checker chart such as the industry standard GretagMacbeth ColorChecker chart is required to create your own custom profiles.

Great free panorama software

In the past, the bulk of a photographer's expenses came from the purchase of cameras, lenses and film. The cost of processing film and producing prints could also amount to a good chunk of change. The digital era changed all of that, but while we no longer have to contend with the cost of film and processing, we now have the added expense of computers, software and software updates.

Keeping your arsenal of software up-to-date can be a budget breaker. However, staying current can not only make the difference between being able to offer special services and products to clients, but also allow you to offer them in an efficient and cost-effective manner.

In most cases you'll get what you pay for, but sometimes you can actually find a real gem of a program at a five-finger discount.

If you're into producing panorama pictures, that's exactly what you'll get with the Microsoft Image Composite Editor aka ICE.

This program will take a series of images and automatically stitch them together into a single image. Amazingly enough, ICE does all this with the drag-and-drop ease that Apple users will argue can only be found on a Mac.

Here, you'll see that I have combined three images into one by dragging them into ICE from Windows Explorer:

The results are simply stunning.

What's more, ICE will also output the combined image into tiled formats such as Microsoft HD View or a Silverlight Deep Zoom web page. I've posted a few samples here.

There are 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the program available. ICE seems to work well on even the most modest of computers running Windows XP or newer Microsoft operating systems. ICE is available for download here.

Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard and 64-bit computing, revised 02/14/10

A lot of noise has been made over the switch to 64-bit computing lately -- especially now that many manufacturers are bundling their computers with 64-bit versions of Windows Vista and 7 with their machines. This changeover was long overdue, as most desktop computers have been 64-bit capable for about five years now.

The move to 64-bit architecture is important because it allows computers to process twice as much data at any given time while also giving them the ability to use more memory.

For Mac aficionados, 64-bit computing has come in the form of Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard -- if, that is, you know how to fully enable it.

Last night I discovered that Apple enables the 32-bit kernel by default on any machine other than a Mac server. The kernel, as defined by Wikipedia, is the central component of most computer operating systems. It acts as a bridge between applications and the actual data processing done at the hardware level.

The funny thing is that I made this discovery in a very round-about way: I was installing Windows 7 with BootCamp and VMWare Fusion. I had purchased Fusion v2 several months ago and was checking to see what updates I would need to install to make it run properly with Snow Leopard. The folks over at VMWare wrote up a nice article about the two kernels on their site.

Oddly enough, all of the built-in applications and any 64-bit programs you install will run in 64-bit mode with the 32-bit kernel and extensions enabled. Apple claims that the user will experience the benefits of 64-bit computing, even though at its core a computer not configured to run in 64-bit mode will still be a 32-bit machine.

So how do you enable the 64-bit kernel?

First, start by verifying which version of the kernel you have enabled. You can do this by opening the System Profiler.

You'll notice that that I have enabled the 64-bit kernel in the field 64-bit Kernel and Extensions. If the 32-bit kernel is enabled you'll see the words 64-bit Kernel and Extensions: No.

Chances are you're not using a Mac Xserve server, so the likelihood is that you have the 32-bit kernel enabled.

The simplest way to enable the 64-bit kernel is to hold down the "6" and "4" keys when starting your machine. Unfortunately, if you use this method, the 64-bit kernel will not be permanently enabled and you'll be forced to do this each time you start your computer.

If you're UNIX command-line savvy, you can enable the 64-bit kernel by making changes to a particular text configuration file and restarting your computer. You can find detailed instructions on how to do that here.

If you're like me and prefer to have a nice GUI interface to work with, you can use a program such as the free K64 Enabler application.



K64 can be downloaded here.

Where did the term "Photodog" originate?

My understanding is that the term “Photodog” goes back to the Presidency of George H.W. Bush who coined the term, referring to the press photographers that “hounded” him like dogs.  I thought it was appropriate to put it into the name of my blog since I started out as a news photographer.

Welcome Photodogs!

Rex Redstone -- a former Seagate colleague -- suggested that I start a photography blog site last year and I am finally taking his suggestion. This site is intended to be a forum to share information on photography, techniques and trends in the photo industry.

As I spend most of my time working in the Information Technology field, I'll also be sharing tips on computer issues that followers might find helpful.

Please feel free to contact me with any suggestions or things you feel should be included on the site.

Ken