All My Blogs

Photo taken in the year 2002 with my Fuji S1Pro - how did the camera capture the ghost flame? I can still remember taking this image and wondering to myself, "What the heck is going on?"  It was a very long time ago, over 23 years now, and I took it with my first DSLR camera.  I used the lenses I owned at the time, Nikon lenses made for film cameras.   It turns out that digital sensors are highly reflective, unlike the film that they have mostly replaced.  An image projected onto the camera's sensor will, to some extent, be reflected back towards the lens.  This wasn't a problem when using film with its lower reflectance, but issues started to develop where bright spots were present in a scene, especially if they were surrounded by darker areas. The lenses made for film cameras had rear elements that did not take into account the reflective nature of digital sensors.  Newer lenses were made with this effect in mind; the solution was to place anti-refle...

Bird photos I have taken over the years.  Top:  Kestral, Anna's hummingbird, Common yellowthroat. Bottom:  Female American goldfinch, Splendid Fairywren, Gold-crowned kinglet Although a brand new, top-of-the-line camera is desirable and fully able to meet all the needs of an avian photographer, the truth is that you don't need to spend that much to capture decent photos.  If you think about it, good photos have been around for a long time, and the modern technology, although impressive, may be more than you actually need. The things that are important in photographing birds relate to buffer size, rapid frame rate, fast and precise focus acquisition capability, and a decent pixel count.  Each one of these tends to be bigger and better as models go up in price, but often you can do well with good functionality instead of the best. Buffer size:   The buffer is short-term memory storage, allowing photos to be temporarily held until data can be stored in the mem...

Sea otters (central) and river otters (insets) of the Pacific coast in Canada There are 13 species of otter in the world, two of them in all of North America.  The North American river otter lives throughout most of Canada and Alaska, while sea otters live exclusively along the Pacific West Coast of America, along the Aleutians, and along the coastline of Japan and its islands.   Sea otters are very uncomfortable on land as their large flipper-like feet are positioned and made for swimming.  They spend by far most of their time in the water, coming out rarely to avoid predators or storms.  The interesting thing is that sea otters may wrap themselves in anchored kelp to keep from being tossed about by the waves.  Sea otters sleep in the ocean by floating on their backs and may form groups called rafts that are kept together by hand-holding. River otters (which is what we will call the North American river otter from now on) prefer fresh water but are well ad...

Comparing photos and their histograms - all photographs were taken by myself. Five photos and their histograms of Derek Falls in Manning Park, BC. Understanding histograms is an important tool in understanding digital sensors and files.  Histograms are also important when editing files, as it gives an empirical reference to your work.  This is especially true if your monitor is not properly calibrated. I use histograms in the taking and editing of my photos.  I often use raw files, both on my cell phone cameras and DSLR and mirrorless cameras.  The histograms allow me to interpret exposure, extract details from shadow and highlight areas that would otherwise not be present, and to play with contrast and other variables offered in many pixel-editing programs. The top image - four different photos - shows different images where the exposure is correct (with minimal adjustments in Photoshop) in variable environments.  Each photo will have its own histogram, and you...

Photo I took while snowshoeing at Big White, showing raw image (lower) and adjusted areas (upper). There are a few things the avid photographer should work at excelling in regarding exposure.  Getting the right exposure is only part of the equation.   Evenly lit scenes, especially under cloudy skies where there are no really bright areas and shadows are soft, rarely present a challenge as modern cameras can capture a properly exposed image with little fiddling, other than perhaps some exposure compensation to deal with an overabundance of dark or light values.  The real trick comes in choosing the right file type and extracting details in areas outside the histogram's range. 1)  File type:  JPEGs typically have about 8 bits of latitude (2^8) as their pixel shades are determined by values from 0-255 in three different channels (RGB).  This means that anything lighter or darker than what can be captured by 8-bit colour will wash out and be completely los...

Photomatix Pro (trial) HDR of Big White using 3 bracketed images I played with the trial version of Photomatix (you can see the watermarks in the image) again and produced an HDR image using three bracketed photos.  Older versions of the program required using jpegs, but version 7 could import the images directly from raw format.  If you compare the above shot to the other one I did (see this blog ), you will notice that the above image is more realistic in its appearance.   Photomatix allows you to pick the degree of surrealism desired.  I chose a high degree of surrealism for the image below - you can see how different it is below. Same image as above, only I used a different blending method to achieve the result. The surrealistic image certainly has a different feeling to it from the more naturalized one above it.  The sharp contrast and saturation appeal to me on an artistic level.  I redid the image to achieve a different effect by using the vibra...