Aurora Borealis

Shortly after the Tucson workshop, I traveled to Fairbanks, Alaska, to photograph the aurora borealis, the northern lights.  The last time I shot the aurora I was using film…digital cameras were still in there infancy.  And what a difference digital makes!  On this trip I used both my Nikon D4 and D800E, at shutter speeds between 6 and 20 seconds with the 14-24mm and 24-70mm lenses wide open at f/2.8, and ISOs of 1600, 2200, and 3200.

The northern lights, the aurora borialis.

 

The northern lights, the aurora borealis.

 

 

ETTR TO THE FAR RIGHT

If you’re a RAW shooter you should already know about ETTR, Expose to the Right.  The theory behind ETTR is that the best image capture for the most possible information is when the histogram is pushed to the right, to the “bright” side.  Just keep adding exposure until that histogram is over to the right side of the graph.

OK, but how far to the right?  You definitely don’t want to clip the highlights.  DSLR cameras have a clipping warning display, the “blinking highlights,” or “blinkies” as they are commonly called, which shows up on the camera’s LCD.  Many cameras will even display the blinkies for each individual color channel, besides the composite luminosity.  But remember that the image displayed on the LCD is not the actual RAW file; it’s a jpeg thumbnail created on the fly by the camera.  Camera manufacturers have coded in some headroom with the blinkies, as they don’t want customers to be angered at blown out highlights.

Fine.  But I would suggest running a test to determine exactly what the correlation is between when the blinkies start, and the actual clipped highlights in the RAW file.  You can easily run a test to determine this.  Set your camera to Aperture Priority, lock it firmly on a tripod, and aim at any scene.  Increase exposure until the first blinkies appear.  Note this frame (probably the easiest solution would be to delete any previous frame you shot to get to this point).  Now shoot several more frames, using  Auto Compensation to add 1/3 stop to each successive frame.  Open this series in your RAW file software, such as Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw, turn on the clipping warning in the software, and check each frame.  I’ll bet that the starting frame, the one the camera blinkies said was clipped, is actually not clipped at all.  In fact, you might be surprised at just how much headroom you have.  With my particular Nikon D800E and a medium toned test subject, I have to add 1.3 stops beyond the blinkies before the RAW file has clipped highlights.

So what’s the point of doing this?  Why worry?  Well, with digital capture, noise lives in the dark exposures.  If you want the best possible data, start with the best possible exposure.  With my particular camera I’ll add some extra exposure whenever the subject is such that I can, especially when working at higher ISO values where noice is always a problem.  Recently I shot a landscape at ISO 1600.  I shot at both the metered ETTR exposure, and at my “extra 1.3 stop” ETTR settings.  The difference was remarkable.  The first image needed noise reduction.  When I looked at the second shot, the one when I had added 1.3 stops, the image on the LCD appeared almost washed out.  But when I reduced the exposure in Lightroom (my standard RAW file software), all the noise was gone.  In fact, my tests suggest there is even a slight difference when the camera is set at base ISO 100, where I use the camera the most.

Does this really matter?  The answer depends on how compulsive you are about quality, the realities faced in the field, and on how the photograph is to be used.  Just remember, ETTR is for RAW capture only.  And  you don’t want to lose an image by blowing out the highlights.  There are indeed some scenes with the highlights already maxed out.

Once you know how the blinkies in your camera correlate to the actual RAW histogram, a simple and safe solution — particularly for static subjects such as landscapes — is to set your camera to bracket another  frame that is 2/3 stop more exposure than the ETTR histogram on the LCD.  When I shoot with my D800E, I know that I’ll be adding that extra bit of light whenever I can.

 

Lightroom & Camera Raw

I recently received an email with a question about processing an image in Lightroom.  When the same image was opened from Bridge into Camera Raw, none of the Lightroom work was applied.  This question has come up before, and there seems to be quite a bit of confusion over what is happening.

Any time you make a change to an image in Lightroom, that information is saved only in Lightroom’s catalog.  It’s not part of the file.  The solution is simple:  after working on a photo in Lightroom, save the final metatdata settings to file (and all edits in Lightroom are metadata edits).  Select the photo or photos you have worked on, and do Ctrl/Command + S.  You can now open an image from Bridge into Camera Raw or Photoshop, and they can see what you’ve done in Lightroom.

You could select Automatically write changes into XMP in Lightroom’s Catalog Settings, but I suggest not to do so, as this has to record every edit you make.  Move any slider from 0 to 1, and then move it to 2, then back to 1, and finally back to 0, and all four of these moves have to be recorded…but in terms of the image nothing at all has happened.  Ctrl/Command +S (menu item: Save metadata to file) saves the summation, which is the only thing that matters.

Suppose you work on an image in Lightroom, and then choose “edit in Photoshop” to finalize the image.  When you’re finished working in Photoshop you select either “save” or “save as,” and the image is returned into Lightroom’s catalog and all is happy.  Lightroom knows what you have done in Photoshop.

But what happens when you do not start from Lightroom?  Use Bridge to open an image that is already in Lightroom’s catalog, make some edits in either Camera Raw or Photoshop, and then save the image…but now Lightroom doesn’t know what you have done.  When you next open Lightroom, the image will be tagged with a small badge, indicating that settings have been changed outside of Lightroom.

Click on the badge, and this message box appears:

So, what do you want to do?   If you want Lightoom to show what you did in Camera Raw or Photoshop, click on Import Setting from Disk.  If you want to to keep the Lightroom settings as they were, click Overwrite Settings.

Four Wheel Campers

A problem facing landscape photographers in the western US is the vastness of the region.  It’s often a very long distance from a good location to the nearest lodging.  Consequently, most of the nature photographers I know who live here have some sort of self-contained vehicle, so that they can stay on-site.

I just got back from southern Utah, where a group of photography friends got together to spend a week in the remote back country.  This was really just a social gathering, but with some very serious photography tossed into the mix.  What set this gathering apart, though, was another connection.  All of us have four-wheel drive pickup trucks (from Toyota Tacoma to full-sized GMC) with a popup camper mounted in the truck bed.  More specifically, we’ve all bought camper models manufactured by a California company:  Four Wheel Campers.  Yes, this is a plug for their products.  I’ve owned a Four Wheel Camper for a number of years now – and am planning to upgrade to a new model this coming spring – and have nothing but good to say about both the campers themselves, and the company.  The company definitely understands photographers as Tom Hanagan, the owner of Four Wheel Campers, is a Nikon shooter himself.

The truck camper is my base-camp, my home on the road, my office in the wilderness – with all the creature comforts of stove, refrigerator, furnace, 85-watt solar panel, queen bed, and lots of storage room.  The weather can be awful, but I remain dry and warm, able to work on my laptop, cook a meal or make coffee, or read with a glass of wine at hand.  And I can set up camp – or break camp and be on the road – in just a few minutes at most.

For specific details, check out their website:  www.fourwh.com.

Here are a few photos from my trip.

Rock and cracked mudFirst lightAgave and lichened rocksIce crystals over streamLake Powell sunsetSunrise on Burr TrailRocks and cracked mudHoodoos at sunriseTemple of the Moon by moonlightSunset light on ridgeWeathered juniper in sandMorning light on hoodoos

 

D800 Email question

For the past four weeks I’ve been on the road, traveling in parts of the world where there has either not been any Internet connection at all, or only a dialup connection which was so slow and flaky that I could barely check for email, let alone post to this blog.  Yes, to all you digitally connected and addicted people, there really are many such locations around this planet.

Now I’m home for a short while, and in the backlog of emails I’ve discovered several (five, to be precise) almost identical messages.  Let me quote part of one:

I’m going to purchase a Nikon D800E.  What lens should I buy?  I want to purchase the best all-around lens.

Wow!  I would stongly suggest that if you have to ask that question about a lens, you should definitely first think twice about the camera purchase.  The D800/800E bodies are, in my opinion, specialized cameras for specialized applications.  They are not general purpose bodies.  Why do you need so many megapixels?  Tell me the truth, do you really make large prints?  How large and how often?  Do you always use a tripod?  Do you own a tripod?  Are you shooting RAW?  Or do you primarily post images to the Web, where a “large” image is around 800 pixels in the long dimension?  Before you purchase the camera body, you need to define exactly why that particular body, of all cameras, is the best choice for you.  What are your criteria?  Specifically, how will a D800 make you a better photographer?

Asking me what lens to buy is a pointless question.  How am I supposed to know what subjects you want to photograph, what your budget is, what lenses you already own (or if you indeed do already own any lenses)?  And I have no idea what an “all-around lens” is, let along which one is the best.  The best lens for wildlife is certainly not the best lens for architecture, while the best lens for architecture is probably not the best lens for portraiture, and the best lens for portraiture is most likely not the best lens for macro work.  Actually only one lens fits the “best all-around” bill, the mythical Nikon 15-600mm f/2.8 eight stop VR, macro focusing, levitating, voice activated, postitive AF…you know, the one with a $5 list price.  Oh, wait a moment, I just heard it was being replaced with an improved 12-800mm version which will be free.  Yeah, right.

Lightroom travel catalog

When I travel I make a new Lightroom catalog for that trip on my laptop.  Image files are downloaded and added by date, into a folder with the month and shoot name, such as 09 Alaska (September, Alaska).  I discussed this in a previous blog so please refer back a few entries.  All my images from this particular trip will be within this folder.  Every day I flag any image files I work on, then save metadata to file (select by flag, then Ctrl/Command+S).  And every day I copy all that day’s shoot from my laptop to two external USB powered hard drives, so that by the end of the trip I have three duplicate copies of all my images. I also have Lightroom set to automatically backup its catalog to the external drives every day.

When I get home I export the trip catalog to one of the small USB drives that has all the trip images.  I plug this drive into a USB port on my desktop computer, and copy the folder with the image files over to the correct date location on my main hard drive array, the tower JBOD I discussed earlier.  Then I import the trip catalog into my master Lightroom catalog.  I disconnect the small USB drive, point Lightroom to the location of the trip’s folder of images on the JBOD, and I’m done.   My backup software kicks in, and automatically backs up the new images.

When I’m positive that all the image files are actually on my main system, I wipe the trip catalog off my laptop, reformat the small external USB drives, and I’m good-to-go on my next adventure.

 

File storage

Shooting digitally produces lots of files, which is turn creates the problem of how to store and access all these files.  Here’s how I do it.

For several years now I have used an external storage enclosure that holds five hard drives, each of which can be up to 2 TB in size.  It’s a reasonably small enclosure, 6 x 8 x 11 inches, has its own power supply, and connects to my desktop computer via one eSata cord.  I bought this box on-line from www.sansdigital.com, (the actual enclosure I have is the TowerRAID TR5M).  You might think this is a RAID configuration, but instead it’s set up as a JBOD (Just a Bunch of Drives).  When I power on the box, the drives show up as five separate, additional hard drives.

I file my images by year, date, and shoot name, renaming all my files to YYMMDD as I download.  Nikon lets me name my cameras so that a file from my D4 might be named something like 120621_D4N_3746 (YYMMDD = June 21, 2012; D4N = D4 Nikon; 3746 = file number generated by the camera).

I keep track of all my files with Lightroom, which is programmed using templates to automatically organize my files as images are imported.  My files are added sequentially by date and by shoot.  For example, there is a 2012 folder, which has subfolders by month and by shoot, such as an 03 Arizona  folder (pictures taken in Arizona in March 2012).  03 Arizona is then broken down into each day’s take, organized once again automatically by Lightroom.  If I do several locations the same month, these are labeled and named as 03.1 Oregon, 03.2 Arizona, 03.3 Utah, etc.

All files are stored in chronological order on the external hard drives.  Each drive has one master folder (Digital Images 1, Digital Images 2, etc.) for all the data on that particular drive, which makes reassociating drives much easier as I mentioned in an earlier blog.  As each hard drive is filled, I simply start adding files to the next one.  But all five drives are available at all time.  Click any image in Lightroom, and it is immediately available.

The hard drives are on sleds, and are hot-swappable.  The makes backup relatively easy, since I can insert another hard drive, copy any changes to this backup drive, and pull the backup drive out.  Note that I don’t want a proprietary backup format; I want a copy of the data.  I use ViceVersa Pro software to take care of this.  When Drive 1 has been backed up, I have no reason to back it up again, unless I make some change to a file on Drive 1.  I actually have two sets of backup hard drives, exact copies that is, of the working set of drives.  I rotate through these drive sets (working set becomes backup 1 set, backup 1 set becomes backup 2 set, backup 2 set becomes working set, etc.).  If any one hard drive goes down, I can plug in a copy of that drive and keep right on working.

Copy, don’t move

Let me follow up a bit on my previous blog about “lost files” in Lightroom.

A possible problem with moving files and folders, whether by dragging and dropping in Lightroom, or by using the Move command in Explorer or the Finder, is that Move deletes the file or folder from the previous location after completing the move.  Call me paranoid, but what if something happens as the files are being moved?  The deleted version of the file or folder is not in the trash; it’s just gone.  While I’ve never had any problem, I do know one person who, while moving several large folders of images, accidentally bumped a bus-powered USB drive and disconnected it.  The folders — and all the images — were gone, never to be found again.  For relocating folders, I use the Copy command outside of Lightroom, and then re-link the missing folders inside Lightroom as described in my earlier blog.

Lightroom lost my pictures

At every workshop I teach, someone always complains that “Lightroom lost my pictures.”  Well, not exactly true.  There are no pictures actually stored in Lightroom.  Lightroom is a database of the last known location for those pictures.  Remember library card catalogs?  They told you where a book was located on a certain shelf.  But if someone moved the book, how was the card catalog to know?  It’s the same with Lightroom.

If you move an image file outside of Lightroom — using your operating system’s tools (Move or Copy) — Lightroom has no idea what you have done.  There is no way that it can know.

Consequently, the next time you look in Lightroom for that image there will be a ? thumbnail badge.

Click on that badge and a dialogue box opens.

Click on the Locate button and navigate to wherever you moved the image.  If you have several missing images and they are all from the same folder, locating one will automatically locate all the others.  If they are from multiple folders, you’ll have to locate each individual image.

If you have used your operating system to move a folder of images, the folder in Lightroom will have the ? thumbnail badge.

Right-click on the ? badge, and you get this option:

 Select Find Missing Folder, and either Window’s Explorer or Mac’s Finder will open.  Navigate to the missing folder and select it.  Lightroom will now be reconnected to the folder, and the ? badge will be removed from both the folder and the images within that folder.

Petrified wood

Several years ago I bought some pieces of polished petrified wood, intending to photograph small sections of abstract color.  This past week I finally got around to doing so.  Here’s one of the images, taken with my Nikon D800 and Nikon 70-180mm macro zoom.  The area I photographed is about 2 inches in the long dimension.  My wife and I liked this one so much that I made a very large print.  Matted and framed, it certainly draws attention.

Petrified wood