After talking with Mike Gurley, our local Canon rep, about my image quality problems (he got right on the case) I tried, at his suggestion, the dreaded Canon RAW processing software that comes in that disk with the camera that none of us has ever loaded. Here's a badly underexposed shot (there's correcting for highlights, and then there's just blowing it) and what the various RAW converters have to say about my ineptitude.
The Canon conversion is a good salvage job. The Adobe conversion looks just dreadful. The problem, however, with leaving an Adobe pathway is that, as far as I know, every other conversion workflow leads to a tif or jpg output. In Adobe there's no need to convert files after correction, though I archive in dng format so I don't have to keep tabs on that little xml sidecar. It would be a big disruption to my archive pattern to have a second conversion path.
I'm open to other ideas. One problem I had was finding a converter that works with Mac OS 10.4 (I've resisted the upgrade to Leopard, as I don't know what all will stop working if I do). I'd love suggestions on what else to try.
The wedding was scheduled for noon. On a sunny day, a week out from the solstice. This is the digital photography nightmare scenario.
My tactic in these circumstances is to underexpose a stop or more, to where I see in the histogram that I'm not clipping highlights. This is the opposite of what I would do under a cloudy sky, where typically the round hump of a histogram fits neatly in the middle of the graph. Then I have room to bump it to the right by overexposing a stop, and gaining all that extra shadow detail in raw processing. Under a sunny sky, the histogram resembles the bowl of an ocean with high cliffs on either shore. You get to pick just one shore to swim to.
Black shadows are less ugly than blown out highlights, and that's the direction I go. Under the new controls in raw processing, I have a life raft for those shadows in the Fill command. It's like gaining two extra stops in the shadows when used carefully. When used poorly, it looks like an entry in a Flickr HDR group pool.
I'm photographing a wedding, and I'm going to have a mountain of data at the end of the day. I decided to take advantage of the Mark II's smaller RAW file option, and generate mere 12mb files every click intead of 24mb. But I ran into a nasty consequence of that decision in my raw processing.
The shadows looked purple and noisy when I lifted them. Then I noticed that my second camera body, the old 5D, didn't have that problem. So I ran a test, visible here. In any setting other than full size, you get ugly, noisy purples. It's the worst at the intermediate RAW1 setting.
My advice now—never, ever use the smaller RAW file settings on the Mark II. Your shadows will thank you.
Dream Tea's entry in the 48 Hour Film Project, Superhero Genre. A strangler (using the mandatory prop) finds victims using the search engine Bing. Our superhero's power reside in her bluetooth device. She attracts the strangler using Google, and vanquishes the villain.
Oh my. I get it now. This is why people make movies.
To be with other people watching the movie you made.
Last night was the night TechWoman vs The Necktie Strangler hit the bit screen. It looked really, really good. At least next to the competition. The 48 Hour Film Project is decidedly an amateur affair, and some of the “finished” films (which is stretching it) have various, shall we say, problems. Not that ours doesn't. It's a grainy, available light production of a very thin story. But our pacing, editing and camerawork were, I thought, the best of the evening.
And people laughed. They responded. They got our jokes. And when our team leader, Hina, stood up at the end we got the loudest ovation of the evening. At least I thought so.
I'm a graduate of an unusual school, The Evergreen State College. It stresses liberal arts in a cross disciplinary learning structure. I studied art and printmaking there, selecting my own course of study, and pursuing at one point an independent study with a Philosophy professor on the nature of landscape imagery, which was my abiding interest at the time.
Every year Bob Haft, the photography professor at Evergreen, brings his class to my office/studio/home, and I get to pontificate on whatever is on my mind at that moment. Apparently, what was on my mind this year, reinvention, made a deep impression. I showed up on nearly a fifth of the student evaluations (Evergreen doesn't issue grades—faculty and students trade written evaluations of each other). They commented about learning that the the life of a photographer is about the embrace of continual reinvention. Even if you've been successful for decades. It never ceases.
I can look at any five year interval of my career, and what I was doing at the beginning and end of any period hardly resembles each other. I started in the early 80s as a wannabe wildlife photographer and an assistant, then did event and PR work, then assignment work for institutions, mostly educational and medical, then stock photography took off, as did editorial work for national publications, then stock cratered, as did assignment and everything else, then digital came along and assignment work came back in a whole other form. Somewhere in there I had New York gallery representation, had my panoramic work widely published and exhibited, and then I didn't. Now I'm adding video to the mix, betting on that to be my next big thing.
Most often though, thinking I know what is going to happen next only guarantees that something unexpected will instead.
Here is the latest video, a paid gig for a local dance studio. About 7 hours on site (and about 50 minutes of tape) and 14 hours editing (I kept a spreadsheet). Run time is just over 2 minutes.
Kodak is ending production of Kodachrome. The film now joins the ranks of the Daguerreotype, Albumen, Kallitype, Palladiotype, Ozobrome, Artigue, Autochrome, Bromoil, and Polaroid.
It's as though a relative that I haven't seen in decades has passed away. Us older photographers cut our teeth on Kodachrome—in the 60s and 70s it was really the only viable choice for color photography, and we learned to expose within its limited dynamic range. There was nothing like that dense black of a Kodachrome shadow—any other chrome film of the era showed a color-tinted miasma of golf-ball grain in the dark areas. Yet I probably exposed my last roll of Kodachrome around 1992.
The shot above is on 4x5 Kodachrome film that my father used in the Navy. That's him, in 1944, about to head out on an aerial shoot.
Yikes, sorry about that. I just got word from our team leader that we're not allowed to post our films until they're shown at the 48 Hour Film event. Stay tuned, TechWoman vs The Necktie Slayer will be back Friday.
Ages ago, I registered at the Seattle website of the 48 Hour Film project. The idea is, you make a film, 4 to 7 minutes long, in 48 hours. Write the script, get the props, rehearse, film, edit, deliver. It attracts a lot of pro film-type people. I was hoping to join an experienced team so that I could learn something.
The day before the weekend started, I got an email from a Meetup group of “International Women,” wondering if I wanted to join their team. They signed up on a lark, realized they hadn't a clue, and, found my name at the bottom of the resource barrel.
I offered an ambivalent “maybe”, went off to the Fremont Solstice Parade like I planned, and kept in touch by phone as they worked out a story. Their assigned genre (given at the beginning of the 48 hour period, on Friday night) was “Superhero.” At 4pm on Saturday, I was in a condo in Bellevue, with five women, working out a storyline that I thought I might be able to produce.
We started filming two hours later, and finished at midnight, at a Lake Washington park, with our villain tied to a tree with neckties.
That we were a diverse crew is an understatement. Brazilian, Korean, Chinese, Indian, Japanese, and me. The film is not likely to win any awards (except, perhaps, entry by most naïve crew), but I had a total blast making it. I loved the collaboration, the challenge (how do I convert my pajama clad character into a superhero?), the command of a story and a process of telling it.
I wish I knew how to handle sound in Soundtrack Pro. I've seen Larry Jorden's Lynda.com training about 5 times now, and it hasn't helped much. I wish I knew how to color correct. Heck, I wish I knew how to properly expose video with my Canon XH A1. I hit many of my limits with this project. It shows.
But boy, was it fun. I logged video until 1am, and was too hyped up to get to sleep for another hour. I was up at 7 labeling clips. By 9 I had a rough cut (funny how much faster it is to edit when you've shot with a sequence already in mind). By 5 I had the rough edges in the sound and color sanded as smooth as I knew how.
The theatrical premiere is this Thursday (6/25), 9pm, at the Harvard Exit, in Seattle.
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