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Exporting 3D to After Effects
When you create a grid box inside Vanishing Point, in addition to having the option of returning that grid back to Photoshop as a 3D object, you also have the option of exporting it as a 3D object that you can import into After Effects CS3 and manipulate in a 3D layer. Just click on [...]

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Photoshop Guys on Photoshop CS4
So a lot of people are still reluctant to upgrade to Photoshop CS4 and I am sure that everyone has their reasons. For some it seems that we only just got CS3. For others there just aren’t sure if there is anything even in CS4 that is worth the upgrade. Sure these are tough economic [...]

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Photo L.A.
By John Camp
Yesterday was a great day in Los Angeles, eighty degrees under hazy blue skies, and a happy throng of Angelenos turned out for the last day of the three-day Photo L.A. exposition (The eighteenth annual Los Angeles Photographic Print Exposition), held this year at the Barker Hangar at Santa Monica Airport.
Though the crowd was good, it seemed to me that actual photo sales were thin—in a two-hour visit, I never saw anybody actually buying a photo, and the red-dotted "sold" stickers were scarce. However, it's possible and maybe even likely that the biggest photography enthusiasts showed up on the first two days of the show, and sales were better then, and they took the photos with them.
A few notes at random:
Several photographers were showing Gregory Crewdson-style night scenes—selectively lit lonely houses and still, vaguely foreboding neighborhoods. With the high ISO cameras now available, this fashion may be with us for a while.
Lots of female nudity. I don't know exactly how these would be displayed by a collector, since so many of them—especially the life-size Jock Sturgis nudes—were so in-your-face. Maybe it's just me, but I'd have a hard time eating a Subway BMT with extra cheese while staring at the high-res pudenda of a fourteen-year-old.
I'd never heard of Michael Garlington, who apparently is well-known in northern California, but he showed a very nice, near life-size (non-nude) black-and-white print called "The Fishmonger's Daughter" (left). I liked it; it seemed almost 19th Century, with an amused smile behind it. While I was looking at it, I noticed that the wall label quoted him as saying that one of the interesting things about photography is that "you can look into someone's eyes for as long as you want, without having to look away." That stuck with me because I saw a guy with his nose about two inches from one of the very largest Sturgis nudes, and I wondered, "What in the hell is he looking at? The grain?"
Hendrik Kerstens, who did the "Bag" photograph displayed on this blog a few days ago (the Vermeer-like portrait of the girl with the white plastic bag on her head), had several more large portraits of Paula, who is his daughter, in somewhat the same vein. In one shot, her hair is elaborately done up with paper towels still on the cardboard rolls; in another, she had a black plastic wastebasket on her head, the kind you might buy at a Target store; in another, a black plastic garbage bag in a kind of throw-back veil; another, with a second white plastic bag; and then a couple of fairly straight photos. They were all individually quite interesting, but as a group, began to come off as a kind of trick. (On the second reading of this, "trick" seems a little unfair, because the quality was so good, the girl's face so striking, and the ideas so clever; but I leave it because that really was my most immediate impression.) The photo that Mike put up here a few days ago was easily the best, in my humble opinion. In the others, the actual nature of the headdress is more obviously apparent, and that takes away a bit of the sudden, amused realization of what you're seeing. The girl has an amazingly sixteenth-century face; it has a fine blue quality that absolutely would have rung Vermeer's bell.
One gallery was showing three very nice Ansel Adams silver prints, all "printed later." The asking price for "Moonrise" was $150,000, which I think is absurd for a non-vintage (printed 1977) print, especially in the essentially unlimited edition that Moonrise is. The print was beautiful, though.
Lots of C prints, beautifully done, at least to my eye—Ctein might feel otherwise. I considered buying one, a huge 78-inch wide photo of a super-cell storm apparently taken somewhere on the high plains. The problem was, the gloss on the photo was so high that you could not stand in any one place in the display and see the entire photograph, because there was always a reflected hot-spot on it somewhere. It occurred to me that with the lights in my house (an old house with center ceiling lights in each big room) that you would never be able to see the whole print at night, because of the reflections. Hmm. I don't know what that means, but the photo was nice.
Lots of manipulated photos—photo montages, cutouts, pastiches, etc. On the whole, I thought, not very interesting.
The eye-catching photos often were black-and white, despite acres of color stuff, and very often done by older, modernist photographers. On about my third lap around the place, I decided it was because the modernists were schooled in structure, design, composition; a lot of newer photographers seem to simply look for interesting stuff to shoot. But even if the stuff is inherently interesting, if the design and composition isn't there, it doesn't really reach out and grab you across a room. I saw Andre Kertesz's "Satiric Dancer" ($28,000) from fifty feet away, and knew it in an instant, because of the design of the thing.
A Robert Mapplethorpe silver portrait of Isabella Rossellini absolutely leapt off the walls, even surrounded by other portraits. Say what you want about R.M., the guy could shoot a portrait.
There were a lot of interesting landscapes in the Adams mode—high res, well-printed wilderness scenes with clearing clouds, but those of Californian Mitch Dobrowner seemed to stand out. He does digital prints and as fine as the C prints are, I would have to say that digital, to my eye, now holds its own, even with the C's.
At the same time Photo L.A. was going on, there was a sale of vernacular photos across the street in another hangar. I don't have anything to say about that, because everything I know about the vernacular enthusiasm you could write on the back of a postage stamp.
A final observation: there was a large collection of really good-looking women, of all ages, at the show. Most of the guys, on the other hand, looked like they'd just fallen off a turnip truck. I don't know why this should be. Anyway, if I were 26, male, and looking, I'd go to photos shows. I thought you'd like to know that.

John

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Film vs. 12MP Digital in Large Prints.

...Ahem, very large prints, that would be. I have to say I have seen better tests, but I'm blown away by their budget!
Kind of long but good fun. Thanks to Paul De Zan for the tip.
Mike

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Extreme Weather Photos
It’s white, it’s fluffy, it falls from the sky…that’s right it’s snow! Having moved from Alaska to the UK I wasn’t expecting to see any of the white fluffy stuff this year but Europe has been treated to a nice little spell of “arctic temperatures” to start off 2009. Check it out, it’s all pretty [...]
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Winter Fog – Great Photography Weather
I was going to say the "best" weather but I'm sure that it's not really the case as there are a few downsides over more perfect weather, especially if you hate the cold and then have to be near cars when there is fog.

Still I think this is an excellent opportunity to take great outdoor photographs.

There are 2 photographic styles that winter fog (snow on ground and fog) has the ability to enhance, such as simplify a scene and abstractness.

Simplify

There is much said about our need to simplify our photographic images. To reduce the clutter that takes our focus away from the focal point(s).

In sunnier weather this can be achieved by in-camera or after cropping of extraneous material out of a scene. Using a shallow DOF to blur background when foreground is the interest or evening using contrast to affect elements within the scene.

Fog naturally achieves a lot of this by itself by simplifying the image into those parts that are still visible within the fog. Add winter and especially snow cover and it has become even more simplified in texture.

This is the actual mask created for one of the images and was completed in under 3 minutes.

Abstractness

Abstract image allows the viewer to see an object that is either being lit a certain way to reduce full visual detail or at angle to leave out some detail to make you wonder exactly what you are seeing.

Fog and snow does some of this by removing detail, as clarity quickly diminishes as distance increases or may be lost into the fog.

This time, while out driving, I did stop when there was any inkling of interest in the landscape. I thought a few images would be good candidates for selective contrast adjustments and they were already nearly B&W in colour depth.

Photoshop Enhancements

In this series of images I wanted the majority of focus to be on the trees in the foreground and I used several techniques to enhance these trees, at the same time reducing the clarity of any other elements, in some way, as if the fog had been stronger.

The key element was to darken and increase the contrast of the foreground trees and soften and reduce contrast for objects in the background.

Adobe Photoshop CS3 through the ACR Interface allows you to load both layers into a Photoshop file. One set to enhance the softness of Fog and the second loaded as a smart layer with different ACR settings.

Base Layer
Clarity set to –80

And another layer adjusted to make the tree branches stand out better and loaded as a smart-object.
Clarity set to +80

There just needs a mask created to permit the finer detail of the branch layer to show through and then final curves layer to adjust brightness in some tonal ranges.

Quick and Simple Method to create fine detail Mask

It might seem at first glance that creating a mask for the 3 trees would be a laborious job but there are simple tools to quickly help you make such a mask.

For this type of masking, I usually do the editing directly on the channel layers Tab but for Photoshop Images I also did same using normal Photoshop layers. Either way it will work fine.

For these types of masks with fine detail, it's always good to zoom into regions of the branch tips where background is to be removed. I carefully watch the branch tips during any of the adjustment processes.

The next set of 6 images shows the progression of changes through the various steps.
Not all masks will need this many steps. The process remains the same until there is good enough separation of mask and then a little cleaning for final mask.

Since I am mainly using Screen mode to further lighten the background, I will adjust the curve of each mask to first compensate for this overall lightness. I apply a curves layer first to set the black point of curve near the left most part of histogram, which also extends the range of blend mode effect.

In the Channel Tab method I would duplicate the best of the RGB channel (contrast separation) and then in this order
Cntrl-M (set curves)
Cntrl-A (select all –channel)
Cntrl-C (Copy all)
Cntrl-V (Paste back into same channel)
Then before anything else, FADE to desired blend mode

For the purpose of this article, I will be using the standard layers in Photoshop to create the mask. The first image was made using the channel method.

Duplicate Blue channel to new layer

Curves layer and set dark point to 0/50

Cntrl-Alt-Sft-E which takes all active layers and makes a new layer on top. This layer will then be set to Screen mode for contrast effect.

For channel method
Copy channel (select All and Copy and then Paste into itself and fade to screen mode.

Then new curves layer and set dark point to 0/28

Cntrl-Alt-Shift-E once more and set to screen mode

I then quickly create a mask for the 3 trees by going around the branch edges and then filling the rest of the trees. In the Channel Tab mode I just erased the lighter background material. This mask may be used later and that is why I created it.

Use mask to duplicate layer and set to Multiply mode to darken the trees

Then a final curve Cntrl-M with low point set to 0/120 to really darken the mask and we have the mask image shown as the second image in this article

It may seem a little convoluted but when you are familiar with the copy-paste and fade to blend mode on channel masks then these become second nature as you play around to see which mode produces the best effect you want.

This close-up section shows how the branch tips are being preserved through the copy and fade actions and the few curves adjustments. (Normal, Blue Channel), the 2 screen blends and then the final with the multiply layer and mask.

insert missing photo.

In the above image you can just make out the outline of a house on the right of the image.

Another Fog image this time with a singular tree in foreground and the soft tree shapes in the backgound

Niels Henriksen

For a fellow blogger who has done horses in the past I included a workhorse playing around in the fields further down the road.

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The State Capitol of Texas at Dusk
I went down on Saturday evening to do some shooting around Austin and caught the capitol around sunset. There are all kinds of interesting things about the Texas capitol, like this cool underground Illuminati chamber you can see here, but the one thing that all Texans seem to know is that our capitol is [...]
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Quote O' the Day
[Henri] Cartier-Bresson would never nominate a favourite photograph of his own. But in a 2003 exhibition of his favourite works by others, pride of place went to a 1931 snap by the Hungarian Martin Munkacsi, portraying African boys playing in Lake Tanganyika.
"When I saw that photograph of Munkacsi, of the black kids running in a wave, I couldn't believe such a thing could be caught with the camera," he said. "I said damn it, I took my camera, and I went out into the street."
(Jon Henley, writing in The Guardian, 2004)

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Brassy Chic

I don't know about you, but I really dig the look of a brassed-out old camera. The coolest finish for a camera in my opinion is black paint over brass—but only after you use it enough to see some brass. (And it's gotta be real wear, too—no cheating.)
This one's for sale if you're interested. (Although isn't that cheating too?)
Mike

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More Savvy Shopping
By Ctein

Last column I presented some rules for getting the most for your dollar when thinking about buying new gear. Here are some more to further refine your sensibilities.

You aren't buying an average, you're buying a camera.

A distressing number of comments that I read run along the lines of "I would never buy camera X because...it's made by A and B makes better cameras/it has a small sensor and they're all crap/it has too many pixels to produce good quality/etc."
Comments like that are not the hallmark of savvy shoppers. Broad rules of thumb are good ones to tell your neighbor or relative who doesn't know much about cameras, when you don't want to take the time to look at individual models for them. Very sensible.
But when it comes to your own shopping, it's not. Indeed, large sensor cameras produce better quality than small sensor cameras...except when they don't. And higher pixel densities produced poor image quality than lower pixel densities...except when they don't. For every general rule like this, there are exceptional cameras. In fact, no camera out there performs according to the average. It will always be better in some ways and worse in others, and usually in some particular characteristic it will turn out to be much better or much worse. If that happens to be the characteristic you especially care about, then relying on the average wisdom is going to be a poor use of your dollars.

I made this photograph at ISO 100 with my Fuji S100fs. Although it has a sensor 2.5 times smaller in dimension than the Nikon D200 (hence, pixels six times smaller in area) and cost only half as much, at low ISO's the picture quality is identical. It's an exception to the rule that bigger means better. Exceptions are not the norm (that's why we call them exceptions) but they're ubiquitous.

Concern yourself with how the camera of interest performs, not with the mean of all the cameras in that class.

Numbers don't mean much if you don't know what they mean.

Numbers don't tell you more than words or (more importantly) pictures, especially if you're less numerate than literate. I can tell from reading posts that many people are. Here are some basics. First, all digits are not significant. Just because a posted test result has four digits, it doesn't mean all four of them are accurate or meaningful. Don't sweat the fine details, look at things on a bigger scale. Don't obsess over numbers you don't understand. When cameras are ranked on an arbitrary scale on some website and their reading differs by one part in 100 or even less, it doesn't really matter whether or not you understand why the ratings differ. It's an arbitrary system and they're close enough that doesn't matter.
What's significant and what isn't? Well, pixel counts, pixel densities, and sensor dimensions that don't differ by at least 30% just plain aren't. Even in terms of the aforementioned, maligned averages, they won't produce visually significant differences. Resolution figures that differ by less than 15% are also not significant. You can't see that small a difference. Sensors speeds that differ by less than half a stop just aren't worth worrying over.
Now, go and spend wisely, but not too well.
Ctein

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10 unersetzliche Fotografen der Schwarzweiss Fotografie
Heute möchte ich Dir 10 Fotografen vorstellen, welche meiner Meinung nach für die Schwarzweiss Fotografie von besonderer Bedeutung sind. Viele der genannten Fotografen werden dem ein oder anderen schon bekannt sind, denn hier handelt es sich um keine “No-Names”. Doch dazu möchte ich jetzt keine weiteren Worte verlieren sondern wünsche Dir nun viel Spass beim [...]
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The Light Sculptures in The Breakers
These light sculptures are incredible to capture. I normally don’t like taking photos of “art”, and I rarely carry my camera around museums any more… I just feel strange taking a photo of something that is already a piece of art. I was explaining this to my mom a few weeks ago, [...]
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Richard Prince Sued for—What Else?—Appropriating Photographs
A nice post by Greg Allen on Greg.org lays it all out better than I could. (My own meta-opinion is that Richard Prince simply isn't a very good artist. Sniff.)
Mike
(Thanks to Sean Keane)

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What Is Bokeh?
There's another lively long thread about "bokeh" at Photo.net that's garnering some attention over there. It's a bit disorienting for me now when I post at other sites; despite the fact that my name was referenced several times in the thread before I commented, no one paid the least bit of attention to anything I said. Not that it was so important...it's just that, around here, I tend to get listened to. A lovely luxury, and thanks for that.
"Bokeh" simply means blur, specifically out-of-focus blur (as opposed to the kinds caused by subject or camera movement). It includes, but is not limited to, out-of-focus highlights. Out-of-focus specular highlights are simply where aperture shape will show up most easily in pictures (i.e., spots of bright sky in out-of-focus foliage, for example). The reason people think it only refers to highlights, and that the shape of the aperture blades are the defining feature, is because that's the most obvious effect. Humans like obvious. The only lens I ever got rid of because of its specular highlight bokeh was a Zeiss 100mm ƒ/3.5 for the Hasselblad. It had five aperture blades, and small, bright out-of-focus spots were perfect pentagons.

The original articles about bokeh were published in the March/April 1997 issue of Photo Techniques magazine, which I edited at the time. (Long sold out, unfortunately.) Carl Weese introduced me to the term. The articles were written by John Kennerdell, Oren Grad, and Harold Merklinger. Harold's article is online at The Luminous Landscape. Oren and John still write for me on occasion here at The Online Photographer (John just the other day). The only reason we added the "h" to the end of the Japanese word in the magazine was that English speakers persistently mispronounce "boke." It's properly pronounced in two syllables, "bo" as in "bone" and "ke" as in "Kenneth" with equal stress on each syllable. "Bokeh" simply renders that a little more accurately. At least adding the "h" stopped all the "toke" and "smoke" jokes. Er, and the "joke" ones.
The word or spelling have nothing to do with the French word "bouquet."

The other nice unintended consequence of the spelling was that it made the term easily searchable on the internet. In the weeks following the publication of the issue, I was able to watch as the number of search engine hits for "bokeh" went from 15, to 90, to 450, to 8,000 and so on. (A Google search yesterday yielded 2,790,000 hits.)

Some commenters on Photo.net apparently object to the word, and at least one called it "pretentious." I fail to see how "bokeh" can be "pretentious," any more than the terms "sharpness" or "saturated" are pretentious. It's simply a descriptive word for a property some photographs exhibit (and some do not). It's shorter than saying "out-of-focus blur," which is the English equivalent. That's all.

There's also no "good" or "bad" bokeh, at least not per se. As my father likes to say, "If it works, you're right, if it doesn't work, you're wrong." Same for bokeh: if you like it, then it's good. If you don't like it, then it's bad. That goes for the presence of blur, as well as for its specific properties. Some people just don't like blur in pictures at all. And some pictures have none.

In this picture, everything but the screen is bokeh (out-of-focus blur).

There's some agreement, but it's very rough. For instance, more people than not seem to dislike "ni-sen" (Japanese for "double-line") bokeh, but the late Phil Davis (author of Beyond the Zone System, a book every large-format black-and-white photographer should have) showed me a picture he liked taken with a very odd, very old camera that featured a church steeple way in the distance. The lens had rendered it as two very blurry church steeples, quite widely separated. I've still never seen more egregious ni-sen. Phil liked the effect enough that he had framed the picture. (See above, under "if you like it....")

"Selective focus," another term causing confusion, just means choosing which part of a picture is in focus and which part isn't—hopefully, photographers know enough to control which is which. (Some photographers don't, sadly. I see a lot of close-up portraits of dogs where the eyes are in focus and the end of the nose isn't.) The opposite of selective focus is sometimes called "pan-focus," which just means that everything is sharp from front to back. The term pan-focus has nothing to do with panning, which is a different technique altogether. I know, photographic terminology is a mess and getting worse. Don't blame me.
One excellent and intelligent Photo.net commenter by the name of Matt Laur is eloquent on the subject of selective focus. What he says is worth quoting at length:
"Selective focus" is a compositional technique. When you say "the photographer shrewdly chose to use selective focus" you're talking about a tactic. Saying, "the use of selective focus on the ornamental fencepost caps focuses the viewer on the architectural details of the landscaping, rather than on the colonial facade of the house in the background" means you're talking about the photographer's approach, or the art director's communication requirements.
But when you say, "The harsh, ringed highlights in the bokeh are competing aggressively with the subject of the photograph because they are the same size as her eyes," you're having a different discussion. One that's driven by the behavior of the lens. You might also be talking about the photographer's choice (to use that lens, on purpose, vs. another with different bokeh characteristics), but that's not the same things as "selective focus." You can selectively focus any lens. The resulting bokeh artifacts are a separate thing. They are separate topics with separate causes, and separate vocabulary to define them.

The Japanese term for the connoisseurship of lens bokeh—its aesthetic effect—would probably be (according to Oren) boke-aji, which translates roughly to "taste of blur."
I created a .PDF download ranking some specific lenses for boke-aji. It's probably of fairly limited usefulness these days, but here it is if you're interested:
Download Bokehrankings5

There's no perfect lens for bokeh. Please don't ask me how I know, as it's very painful to suffer from such a blatant mental infirmity. (Well, okay, the correct word is embarrassing, not painful. A friend from Minneapolis once sent a picture postcard that had an out-of-focus brick wall in the background. I looked at the picture first then flipped it over to find he had written, "Mike's eyes go straight to the brick wall...." Ouch. Sure enough. As Dad also used to say, it's hell to be predictable.)

Learning how your lens renders blur is no different from learning its other characteristics, such as whether it's unsharp at certain apertures or whether it smears the corners or whatever. Some people like that kind of thing, some people don't. It's all good. If you want to learn it so you can attempt to apply it or control it, fine; if you don't, and prefer just to take pictures and let the chips (both the sharp and the blurry chips!) fall where they may, that's fine too.

Most often, these days, I just say "blur" rather than "bokeh."

There are some great example pictures in the thread.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Michel Hardy-Vallée: "I think that thread is interesting for another inevitable point of internet forums: the basic principles shall be re-explained all over again every other month or so.
"I follow mostly film forums, so the typical questions are: D-76 v. ID-11, what is a film's true ISO (you mean EI?), my T-MAX is purple—HELP!!!, how do I keep a fiber print flat, etc. But the same principle applies for digital topics as well: should I calibrate my monitor, is pigment better than dye, etc. (The magazine world follows also this principle: every other month, Pop Photo explains all over again how a polarizer works.)
"You'd think that for all the information that's already there, we would have finally cued in to the meaning of the "Information Age" and used the Net to find information....
"I think it shows that the archive is not a concept we have really mastered to help our day-to-day life. Sure, we look up things in dictionaries, encyclopedias, interwebs, but we are seldom efficient at finding information in those archives, so we rely on asking the neighbour. We're not good either at organizing our own archive of data and knowledge: most people's photo collection (mine included) resembles more a heap than a library.
"Maybe it just means that most people prefer the interactivity of discussion to learn (after all, weren't the first philosophers also great dialecticians?) instead of the medieval approach of parsing attentively the books of knowledge to extract patiently their deepest meanings and cautiously confront it against the remainder of one's knowledge, nowadays more typical of people with at least two academic degrees."

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Blog Notes
You might notice a few compositional differences in the post above this one. That's because TypePad, the blogging service I use for this site, has introduced some nice new compositional features. I'll be able to change a few of the graphic standards of the interface. It might take a few weeks for this to settle down into new standard formatting.
Mike

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