By chance I met Chris Marquardt of Tips from the Top Floor and HappyShooting podcasts on Twitter, and he kindly provided me with a mini-workshop on fine art printing in 5 tweets. For your enjoyment, here is my translation to English:

1. Image Processing: Only do it using a properly color-profiled monitor.
2. Sharpening: Keep your hands off! [The printer driver will take care of it, usually]
3. Color casts: Profile the monitor, look at the prints at daylight, best in the shade
4. If your images have a red cast after import [and your prints have a green cast!], your profile is wrong
5. While profiling, avoid any extranous light [for example by covering the sensor with a blanket]

I love this guy. Honestly, #2 got me thinking, I think this is the best tip I heard for a while!

And I need to go back and try to check my monitor profile now.

Share this

No related posts.

As an example, here is a screenshot of my archive of July 2006, showing me at one glance the 2 week trip to the wonderful Lofot Islands, a premiere landscape photography destination:

This is a feature I really find useful, and prefer anytime over the regular technocratic “browse the calendar” approach other applications like Bridge and Lightroom follow.

Taking the idea to the next level – in nature photography we keep thinking in seasons, as the yearly cycle keeps repeating photographic opportunities. How helpful would be a calendar showing me by example in which week and which day of the year I have chosen which photo opportunity? When exactly was the best time to photograph foliage in the Karwendel mountains? When do we usually see the first snow? The hike to the christmas roses blossoming?

If I could only make a calendar showing me the best photo I have taken at that day in any of the last 7 years!

To exercise the plan – what do I need?

1. Obviously, the “image of the day” for all years in my photo archive, going back to June 2004.
2. A method to layout these images on to a calendar sheet for a high quality print.

Stay tuned for progress reports, and let me know if you like the idea of a seasons calendar or have any helpful tips in getting this done!

Share this

No related posts.

This day I chose the Wildlife Refuge in Poing close to Munich as my destination, because the weather report on at least one channel had announced the chance for fresh snow – and I am still dreaming of making some images of Lynxes and Wolves while it’s snowing. Why “still”? That story is kept for another day…

Arriving at the parking lot at exactly 9am – which is when they officially open the park to visitors on weekends – I was of course the only visitor at this time. So here is my tip for everybody wanting to go there in order to take photos: Go there early. Leave when the children invade, usually two hours later.

So this morning I was the only nature photographer on site, which was a first for me, normally you meet other photogs. Guess I was the only one who left without checking the weather report again – no sign of new snow, much to the contrary at 11am the sun came out and it got really “warm”.

But before that happened, I had a quiet happy two hours alone with the Lynx family – they have actually seven Lynxes of different ages there, all one big (mostly) happy familiy, and the three “teenagers” are usually good for some fun. Now, it was not only cold in this forest, but the Lynx enclosure is also in a pretty shady and thus dark corner of the park. As the sun still hid behind clouds, exposure was actually at about 1/40s at f/4 with ISO 400. Good enough with the lens on the tripod to shoot a sitting Lynx. Or three of them!

So I could actually try out another new gear of mine – a folding chair that cost me 7€. Well spend money, because I could sit comfortably (not in the stricter sense of the word) next to the fence (get close to shoot through the wire mesh!) and monitor the action. And action it was, indeed – after some 20 minutes of mutual fur grooming the three youngsters decided that was enough idyll and it was time to hunt – fir cones.

Trying to capture that, I quickly recognized that I would get nowhere with my ISO 400 1/40s exposure time, and it was the moment to go the full nine meters and give the D300 a try at ISO 3200. Did it work? Kind of.

First of all, the exposure time went down to 1/1000s at f/4 and ISO 3200. So far so good, quick enough to catch a Lynx. And looking at the images in the Nikon View NX application I use for presorting and pretagging, I was pleasantly surprised by the level of detail and color retained in the ISO 3200 images.

Disaster struck when I opened the RAW in Adobe Camera Raw to load it into Photoshop for post production – image noise everywhere, and to an extend I had last seen from my D70 at ISO 1600. I had thought the D300 to outperform the D70 easily, even despite the smaller pixels. It does, but seemingly only in terms of noise reduction software algorithms.

Now I struggled and tried all available noise reduction methods easily discoverable in Photoshop, but I still don’t like the result. Quality is certainly good enough after resizing the image down to Web/Monitor viewing friendly dimensions, but thoughts about printing need to be dismissed immediately. This might explain why Noise Ninja and Neat Image still make money. My conclusion: Photoshop – at least CS3 – doesn’t solve the problem. The additional tools might, and definitely the Nikon software does. I should review my assessment of Nikon Capture NX. Such a pity, I still own a license to Capture 4.4, but that is discontinued and doesn’t support the D300′s files.

But judge for yourself if the image is usable at Web resolution, this is the best I could do with CS3 alone:

As a bonus, when I already were packing my things I could spot two male fallow deers – please be gentle with me if I got this wrong – practicing with each other. I was able to sneak in on them on get a shot from close between two trees, which makes the whole composition look, well, interesting. I kind of like it.

Needless to say the moment their heads merged they were not within my viewing window. That would have been perfect, but as usual – keep trying.

On my way out at about 11:15am I met three Canon photogs with their big white guns having just arrived, and couldn’t help but cheer them a friendly “Guten Morgen” when they were coming in together with approx 100 Bugaboos

Share this

No related posts.

They were relatively tame, because according to him they “knew the plantation was fenced, and no dogs or humans would leave the path”, and these two actually had no trouble with me getting down low, setting up the tripod and taking some dozen pictures through the mesh wire fence.

Now, how did I compose? Well, obviously I placed the albino (well, it is just really light-colored) out of the center to the lower right, and made sure that I had a nice framing using the plants. Once I had it framed I snapped some pictures, being nervous that I do not get it into focus… I still have not yet fine tuned the Sigma 100-300/f4 I am using using the new manual focusing feature of my D300. This proved to be not a problem at all, and the sharpest images are those where I placed the autofocus point on the ear of the deer using the multi-selector control.

Then, another deer passed through the frame, and I snapped some more images with it in different poses, walking, standing, checking. I liked the presented image best because I didn’t have one where the two interacted – and only that would make it successful for me. Now in this one, both interact with the photographer, and thus the viewer.

The next challenge was, that I knew I could not possibly get both into focus. Now at home I can check the DOFmaster, and estimate the range of the closer of the two at probably 20 meters, which results with the selected aperture of f/5 (get a fast shutter speed when doing wildlife! This gave me 1/500s at ISO 400) in a depth of field of only 88 centimeters, clearly not enough. If I had stepped down to f/22 I would have had 4 meters, which could (just) have sufficed, but of course exposed me to the danger of motion blur at about a 1/25s I would have ended up with. I actually did try quickly an f/10 with 1/100s (not knowing in the field that it would also just give me 1.77 m, still not enough), but discarded that as also not being sufficient after a quick check on the display.

So knowing I had insufficient depth of field, I had snapped a second frame very quickly, focusing on the second deer.

Now looking at both images, I like the one with the focus on the lower right deer better, but still my eyes keep jumping to the second, and being disappointed that it is not sharp. Obviously I have two competing subjects, and one of them is out of focus, ruining the image.

Solutions? Either take a frame with only the first deer, or next time use the large aperture to get both in focus. Workaround? Fix it in Post Production!

I have used the free program CombineZP in this case. I read about, but did not try, Helicon Focus, which is a commercial software package for the same applications.

Wow, you say, that worked well. And so easy! Not quite. If you could see the 12 MP version of the image I of course did not upload, you would clearly notice that I did focus on each of the two deers, but as I have only two shots I have none focused on the grass between them. It is not immediately apparent (if at all) in the screen resolution version, but this nic prevents this image from being used at full res. So next time I try this, I should remember to make a nice focus series including the distances between the two subjects. Learned something again

Share this

Related posts:

1. Sold off my old Sigma 70-210 f/3.5-4.5 tele-lens