Mastering the UWA

Image via WikipediaOlympus has now released the 9-18mm Ultra Wide Angle (UWA) lens for the Four Thirds DSLR mount. People who have been yearning for a 7-14mm Zuiko Digital (high priced, sharp, big, bulging front element, no front lens thread) now have a affordable option. An UWA is not for everyone though and early buyers are also cautious of the lens quality. So, they're grappling with two issues - is the lens good and secondly, how do you actually use this lens well.

I came across Petteri Sulonen's article - Mastering Wide Angle. That woke me up a bit.

• If your camera is even slightly out of the horizontal, verticals will converge
• "Short focal lengths have lots and lots of depth of field." They sure do. However, the other side of the coin is that the attendant wide scenes tend to be very deep, so you're going to need all of it, and more, if you want to keep everything sharp - The trouble is that while there's lots of DOF, the scenes are very deep, and wide-angle scenes tend to draw the eye to "wander" around the frame, which means it'll eventually land on something that's not critically sharp. A second complication is that auto-focus really doesn't work that well with wide-angle. Especially with the shorter, darker lenses hyperfocal distance wide-open is really quite close. Moreover, objects even a few meters away may be quite small in the frame, while the AF sensors are quite large. This means that AF will have real trouble latching onto anything more than a few meters away.
• you as the photographer have to take flare into consideration anyway; either work it into the composition or try to minimize it while composing.
• Expose for maximal dynamic range, then correct in post-processing.

On focussing, he says:

• Stop down as far as you can.Identify the visual center, and focus on that.
• If you want infinity to be sharp, focus on infinity.
• If you have to choose, focus behind rather than in front of the subject.

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Earl Klugh makes a comeback

Lee Ritenour via WikipediaI have listened to Earl Klugh for so many years. Earl and Lee Ritenour started my listening to Jazz (along with Jim McLeod of the ABC Australia's Jazztrack). Those days there was George Mammen listening with his Prado cartridge and those German mini speakers...

Earl was there throughout the 1980s, 1990s but I lost interest because his albums became too layered and formulaic. This year, 2008, he comes back after 9 years away in The Spice Of Life.

Visiting his website, I just heard Angelina, a favourite of Lim Kang's

myFox Boston has a video clip of an interview. He plays Canadian Sunset - something I remember of the music my Dad had on his vinyl LPs. One thing with Earl and Lee, they seem to have both lost their hair and they both had hair on their 1980 albums.

There is a forum on his website with video links. Some of them:

• Heartstring - that must be the most worn out track on my vinyl and my cassette (remember those?) - memories of Eugene, Taman Seputeh, Mum and Dad, driving in K.L in the Colt and the Cordia.
  
• The Girl from Ipanema

Birdland

Number One Son's playing trombone in a Beginner Band in school. One of the bands in school put on a fun performance of of Birdland

This the season for white petals

Spring arrives, white nashi petals litter the lawn.

From Plants and Flowers

Little buzzing things alight

From Plants and Flowers

We think it's a lazy day, but they toil as well

From Plants and Flowers

JPEG Browsing / Viewing - PhotoMesa

I noticed I had Photomesa 3.1.2 installed from some time ago and gave it a spin. It's good for reviewing photos - the difference between it and something like Picasa is the seamless zoomable interface. Pity that it has weak knees (it's a .Net 2.0 app) and just dies when it has too many photos to thumbnail or when you get frenetic with zooming. It seems clean enough to install and uninstall, given it's .Net behaviour. Development activity seems to have tailed off.

Brain a bit tired

Trying hard to concentrate on a database thing, a bit tired. Let's hear a bit of Lee Ritenour in Night Rhythms - dig his bassman's work.



Then, there's Is It You?
Lee's inspired a fair number of artists. Have a look at the seriousness of the Phillipino, Lee in Co-E-sion



Even Mas Que Nada inspires him



I've been a Spyrogyra fan since their first album. Here they are, years ago in Morning Dance and more recently at Jak Jazz. They've lost the frenetic percussionist. Here's one I am not familiar - Cayo Hueso:



Lee Ritenour likes Brazilian music. Here he is is with Ivan Lins



I first heard George Benson's version of Dinorah. Here is Ivan's.



Speaking of George, I didn't know he did a set with Carlos Santana



Long ago, there was Mountain Dance. It's still a classic.



For something really new, here's Brian O'Neal with Mesmerised

When computer tech and light tech combine....

We have digital imaging. People often talk about JPEGs being 8bit and ask whether a 14bit RAW is better than a 12bit RAW. Or whether sRGB vs Adobe RGB compares with 24bit colour rendering.

Essentially though, digital capture, storage and rendering hasn't anything to do with the how light and colour looks - they overlap in the fact that one mechanism leads to another but they are different facets to the image.

sRGB - is a definition of colour space. Colour Spaces are all about the light, colour and measuring this.

8 bit - Bits are a computer concept to describe counting and numbers used in binary computers.

The two concepts, sRGB and number of Bits describe different things.

There are several display technologies - LCD panels, Plasma Panels and CRTs.

LCD Panel Types

In terms of LCD panels, the electronics and the panels vary. There are TN panels, S-IPS panels, VA panels. Xbit details LCD Monitor Parameters and Characteristics. Anandtech lists some selection criteria.

From Anandtech:
"Almost all LCDs today are 6-bit or 8-bit LCDs. This means that each subpixel - Red, Green, and Blue - can display one of 2 to the n shades where n represents the number of pixels. A typical 8-bit LCD can produce 256 shades per pixel, or 16.7M color combinations. A 6-bit LCD panel can display 64 shades per subpixel, and since there are three subpixels per pixel, the monitor can display 262,000 color combinations per pixel"

From wikipedia:

"For colour representation many panels use 6 bits per colour, instead of 8, and are consequently unable to display the full 24-bit truecolor (16.7 million colour shades) available from modern graphics cards. These panels can display interpolated 24-bit color using a dithering method which combines adjacent pixels to simulate the desired shade. They can also use FRC (Frame Rate Control), which quickly cycles pixels over time to simulate a given shade. These color simulation methods are noticeable to most people and bothersome to some[citation needed]. FRC tends to be most noticeable in darker tones, while dithering appears to make the individual pixels of the LCD visible. Overall, color reproduction and linearity on TN panels is poor."

How do you find out what type the LCD panel you are interested in is? Try TFTCentral and Flatpanels.dk A concise list and summary of features is at Hardforum.

Gamut of backlights

In addition to the different panel substrate technologies, these panels have to be lit - thus they can choose to use different bulbs (lights).

From wikipedia:

"Shortcomings in display color gamut (often referred to as a percentage of the NTSC 1953 color gamut) are also due to backlighting technology. It is not uncommon for displays with CCFL (Cold Cathode Fluorescent Lamps)-based lighting to range from 40% to 76% of the NTSC color gamut, whereas displays utilizing white LED backlights may extend past 100% of the NTSC color gamut – a difference quite perceivable by the human eye."

You hear about Henri Cartier Bresson a lot

Image by monkeyc.net via FlickrAnd see his innovative Henri Cartier Bresson black and white photos. There is this video of an interview and he seems to have been a likeable chap.

The Photograph Takes Me

The Stages of a modern Photographer

Tongue in cheek

Stage 0: Which camera gives me the best IQ? Guys! Recommend me a camera! Anybody?

Stage 0.1: I'm serious, which camera gives me the best IQ, cut out the BS about the skill of the photographer.

Stage 0.2: I'm gonna buy a D3 or a 1D, your camera sucks. (See attached sample lab photos of paperclips shot with a D3 / 1D vs your crummy camera.)

Stage 0.3: Why does everything look blurry? What does DOF mean?

Stage 0.4: Why is everything so white (or black?). What do you mean the camera doesn't fix things if I set the dial to "M"?

Stage 0.5: What doesn't the AF work properly when I point it at the shaggy black dog or the black cat? Should I send the lens in for a repair or the lens and the body?

Stage 0.7: But I want both the shadow and the sun - this camera can't be any good, it's only got 15 stops of Dynamic Range. Why do people's faces come out so dark?

Stage 0.8: Here's a photo of back of my dog, squirrel, kid - why can't they stay still? Why doesn't IS work?

Stage 0.9: Should I use or not use a UV filter? What other filters do you recommend?

Stage 0.99: And what filter should I use or should I just Photoshop it?

Stage 1: Why waste time shooting RAW? JPEG is lovely!

Stage 1.1: Aah, wasted all this time shooting JPEG. RAW rocks!

Stage 1.2: Help! My prints come out too dark! What do you mean I have to spend more money on a spider? What's a helicopter and a spider got to do with this?

Stage 1.3: RAW sucks! You know how much time I'm spending on the computer?

Stage 1.4: APS-C sucks. Go full frame! And don't let me get started on Four Thirds. Just look at the achievable low light high ISO noise and the MTFs.

To be continued...

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Dreaming in Melbourne

There is a field of Dreamers in Melbourne for the Festival. Chia and I went for a shoot. It turned out sunny on Saturday, lots of interesting angles. Hard to chimp and think though. The bright sun made LCD viewing difficult and I had to figure out whether the white Dreamers would bias exposure towards dull greys or whether the metering system would be completely confused and burn the highlights. In the end, I bracketed but not enough EV 0.7 is a minimal bracket in such situations and to have clear differences, it would be better to go for EV 1 or EV 1.3. But then, do you bracket to get near choices or do you bracket to throw away the extremes? If you bracket to throw away the extremes, then why bracket?

With a field of Dreamers do they dream all the same dream or do they dream contentiously?



Do we dream in the sun or only in the dark?

And the perennial, do you dream in colour



or in black and white

From Dreamers

UWA is not for getting it all in

Image via WikipediaI'm still learning with my Ultra Wide Angle. It can be quite an intimidating lens - it's not demure, genteel or anything like that. Well it is, if you use the bow tie third of it's range - the 12-14mm (24-28mm EFL). But the other third of it's range is emotional, passionate - the 7-9mm.

Here's what Ken Rockwell says about this kinda lens. 

I think there are two kinds of approaches (perspective is a heavily used word in photography).

You have to decide whether you are recording a scene without personal emphasis vs whether you are artistically interpreting and emphasising the scene for the benefit of the viewer.

Some people will say that to shoot the photo, you are already recording a perspective and an emphasis - it's the emphasis you record without explicitly agreeing that you have chosen an emphasis. And that is correct if you are awakened to your power as the photographer. To others, who don't think of themselves as photographers, they just want the scene "as is". Except that they are unaware that people "see" with different eyes, not to mention, from different heights and from different distances.

In this one below, I have decided to emphasise the two ducks, with the rocks and sky as very strong decorative elements. Yes, the ducks are real small but they are the point of the photo.

From Blackburn Lake

In the one below, yes, it's there but not quite there. I wanted to emphasise the retro-ness of the car, the large mudguards, the bulging headlights, the thread pattern on the tyre.

From Zuiko Digital 7-14mm

The one below is actually of a smal sportscar, a SMART. I wanted to emphasise the bulge of the bonnet.

From Zuiko Digital 7-14mm

This last one is scenic and calm and lonely to me. There is no particular shape or geometric emphasis of the bench or the buildings. But the sweep of the foreground grass strikes me as an emphasis. Because it is so quiet an emphasis, it is almost a bow-tie shot.

From Zuiko Digital 7-14mm