Off to San Francisco

Off to San Francisco

Quick one today:

- I'm leaving for San Francisco on Monday for work, and my camera will travel with me. Hopefully I'll get some nice shots!

- At the Canberra Photographic Society meeting on Tuesday I watched a demo of Blurb. Blurb is a service that prints books (at any quantity!). They are very well priced, ship world wide, and the software (available for both Mac and PC) looks pretty good - I'll be definitely giving Blurb a go.

- I'm up to Module Five of the photography course - Light & Colour. I've packed it for reading on the plane. Results so far are: Module 1 = 9/10, Module 2 = 10/10 and Module 3 = 10/10 :)

- Really enjoying working in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, can't say enough good things about this software.

- I'm a bit pissed off that the copy of Nikon Capture NX that came with the camera is in Japanese... grrrr.

- After shooting many identical shots in both RAW (14bit) and best quality JPEG and comparing them, JPEG comes out the clear winner. The photos are equally sharp, but the JPEG photos contain almost no chromatic aberrations and I think the colour looks better. I'm sure the RAW file can be fixed to look better than the JPEG straight out of the camera, but that would be a considerable amount of work and I really doubt that the end result would be noticeably better. The burst rate for JPEG is much higher than RAW, and of course I can fit many more photos on the 4GB card.

Grey Card and Dynamic Range

A bit late with this blog post, oops!

I spent quite a bit of time trying to track down a grey card. I needed the grey card for my third assignment from "The Photography Institute" course I'm doing. Grey cards (or at least the one I bought) are a complete rip-off for what they are. But now I have one.

I used the grey card to measure the dynamic range of my camera - here's how: Fix the grey card to an object (outdoors in the shade) and then completely fill the viewfinder of the camera with the card. Set the camera to manual, manual focus, f8 exposure, and then change shutter speed to expose the scene correctly. Take a shot. Increase shutter speed by one stop and take another shot - repeat about 6 or 7 times. Then return to a correctly exposed photo and repeat in the opposite direction. After this is complete, import photos to your computer and you'll see a range of photos from completely black to completely white. Set up a little table of results and get an average RGB reading for each photo (but discard any duplicate completely black or completely white shots). Then count up the number and you have the dynamic range in stops.

Here's the results of this experiment that I did with the Nikon D300.
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pJtsF7O3f1aq0Lho49IZQVg

I also repeated the exercise at different ISO's to see what difference they made, but as you can see from the chart, it made no appreciable difference. The shots for the ISO 200 were made about an hour before the other shots, and at a different part of the garden which might account for the slight differences.

I went along to a meeting of the Canberra Photographic Society on Tuesday evening. They had a competition night, which was quite interesting. Many people displayed their works around the room on a pinboard, and then a judge commented on each photo finally giving it a score out of 5. The night was very informative, and the judge very entertaining! Next month I'll be submitting some photos for some constructive criticism.