Thursday, 26 March 2009
What would you like to know?
Welcome to the attendees of our March 26 workshop. Put your questions in the comments section of this post and we'll create new posts to address the different questions.
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3 comments:
Histograms - clipping - can I just check that when you talk about clipping it was not about the graph going too high, rather it was just about the graph going past the left-right edges?
(Great fun workshop and it was illuminating to try new things.)
Hi Rob,
You're right, the clipping you need to be careful of is to the left and right.
Using the Histogram will help improve JPEG captures and when used with RAW capture will help give the optimum RAW file for a given lighting situation.
It's important to remember that a picture can survive clipping to the left (black/dark areas) because some scenes do have just black in them. To avoid having too much black it's best to reframe or re compose to include a wider range of tones. (How much of your page do you want to print full black?). Trying to put detail back into the dark areas of a digital file (by using a curves adjustment in Photoshop for example) will just result in digital "noise").
On the other hand, clipping to the right (in the bright areas) is to be avoided at all costs. You can't get back information that isn't there. Of course, there will be some specular highlights (eg sun glare reflections on chrome) that are pure white. These are usually very small and not a problem. Just as you might reframe to avoid large blocks of dark/black areas you should do the same if large amounts of glare are in the scene and not really making a contribution to the effectiveness of the picture as it will be on your "page".
Generally, it is good to expose a RAW digital image to the RIGHT of the Histogram but not so far as to clip the highlights.
All this decision making does take a bit longer but will become somewhat quicker with practise. However, considering a scene and the light on it will always take a little longer.
Here's a good article that goes into more depth about Histograms. It does get a bit techy though.
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/understanding-series/understanding-histograms.shtml
Taking photos - off the cuff!
Would like a section to address "getting good photos from bad situations" - trying to get the best from bad (photographic) circumstances.
What I mean is that in Local Gov we take photos on the hop, quickly and without much chance to dabble with many variables. Plus, influencing the light is probably the last thing we can do while it's the first thing you, quite rightly, pointed us at doing.
Crowd shots, the backs of people's heads, people eating or drinking, moments that lack focus - we have situations to contend with that are less than ideal and must strive to extract an interesting shot.
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