Photoshop Techniques

Here's a couple of things that perhaps most of you already know, but I found by accident and are quite handy.

Rescuing Blown and Blocked Areas

Sometimes, in the process of editing an image you realize too late that some small area has degenerated to pure white or pure black and can no longer be rescued. There are a couple of things you can do. First, you can select all the image, copy it, then use the history palette to revert to the original image by clicking on the image above the top of the list of steps, then paste back your edited image on top. You can use a white mask in this with a small area painted black to rescue the blocked area. You can even put adjustment layers between then to adjust the area you want.

Some times even this isn't enough and you need to go back to the raw file. In this case, assuming you have saved your edited image, you can reopen the original raw file, edit it in whatever raw processor you want, ignoring all of the image but the area that ended up blocked, adjust to make it as good as possible and then open the image, copy and paste that on top of your edited image using a black mask painted white in the relevant area.

Should you have done some cropping in the mean time, you will need to align the images but since they are the same file, this is easy using the move tool at the top of the tools palette.

Controlling Where A Layer Takes Effect

There are times you have defined an area you want to adjust with a masked adjustment layer, but then you realize you need to do more work on just that area, whether it be another curve or perhaps a saturation change or whatever. If instead of picking a new adjustment layer from the icon at the bottom of the layers pallete, you use the layers menu to create a new adjustment layer, you are given the option of using the previous layers mask to control this one, clicking that on means this layer only affects the same area of the image as the last layer.

I imagine there must be a way to do this from the layers pallete and perhaps some nice person will tell us what it is.

There are a million tricks to Photoshop, it's just a matter of finding the dozen or so that are most useful to the way you work.

Soft Proofing

The top image is the original, the bottom a duplicate with soft proofing applied. The differences aren't huge and you probably want to click on the image to bring up the large version to really see the changes.


I was reading a discussion about the value of soft proofing on Luminous Landscape and while the discussion degenerated into abuse along the lines of 'my expert is better than your expert' it did make me think more about the process of soft proofing. I'd watched 'From Camera To Print and Jeff Schewe in particular espoused the value of soft proofing. Time to look into this a bit further. I took the Athabasca Falls image that I showed the editing on for the previous blog entry and made a print on Enhanced Matte, knowing that soft proofing shows the differences with matte paper especially.

Know what, Jeff was spot on. First reaction to turning on soft proofing - 'yuck, what happened to my lovely image'. But then I did as instructed and held up the print made 90 degrees to the monitor and in the same lighting and flipped back and forth between monitor and print and guess what, the soft proof explained all the differences between my carefully edited image on monitor and the resultant print. Very impressive.

Now the trick is to learn how to change the image so that the soft proof matches as closely as possible the original. Again I did as Jeff suggested, I duplicated the image so I could compare the soft proof side by side with the original.

I used a combination of five adjustment layers to to match as closely as possible the original. I increased overall saturation by +7 (Jeff mentions that this is usually needed when printing to matte paper). I created two curves layers which could prob. have been combined, to increase contrast slightly and give a bit of punch to the dark areas - and I noted that the white water took on a bluish tinge which didn't match the rest of the image so I used a selective colour adjustment layer, working on whites to yellow them up a tinge.

The end result on screen looked darn close to the original. Of course the blacks weren't as black (because the soft proof is emulating the lower dynamic range of matte paper) but overall it looked good. I made a print. The print looks like I went just a bit too far. I'm going to try again with all the added adjustment layers set to 66% opacity, or perhaps 50%. Ah, 66% works perfectly.

I can see that with a bit of practice this is going to be very helpful in getting images as close a possible to what I want - also to making the same image on two types of paper, matte and glossy, and having them match as close as possible.

It's intersting, the difference means that rock that looked wet in the on screen image, now looks wet again in the print - it didn't before I soft proofed and adjusted.

If you are not soft proofing, you might want to start doing so. Clearly an experiment of one isn't the whole answer, but so far it's looking useful and I will update down the road.

I need to try the technique with black and white images too.

Book Availability

I see that Chapters/Indigo has announced the book in stock here in Canada while Amazon U.S. and Canada quotes Jan. 4. Barnes and Noble has it in stock.

Why Edit # 1

Above is the end result of image editing, below are the steps I took to get here.

Having read all the helpful feedback about a possible future book, it seems that what is needed is not a how to book on editing - there are lots of books out there which explain the workings of Photoshop masked layers and other techniques for editing one's images. What does seem to be deficient though is an explanation of the process of looking at an image and deciding what changes are necessary to make it a better image. To that end I thought I'd go through the thought processes in an image I edited this morning.



Above is the image as it was brought into Camera Raw, with my standard defaults. Note the blown highlights in the water. Clearly this is of concern as the water is too important to accept pure white in significant areas. You could make the argument that I had overexposed the shot, however in-camera the highlights were just on the edge and from previous experience I felt they could be rescued. The reason I didn't reduce the exposure was to keep as much detail in the shadowed rocks on the left and also at the bottom right of the image.




This shows the result of a modest application of recovery to reign in those highlights without losing the shadows. The shadows warning is on but there is little to be seen in the way blocked shadows (they are dark blue).




Above shows the settings I used for sharpening. I confess it's a bit of an experiment in the last couple of months. Previously all sharpening was done in Photoshop but with v. 4 of Camera Raw, sharpening is more sophisticated than it had been and I have been taking advantage. Is it better than using Filter/Sharpen/Smart Sharpen in Photoshop - not sure, but I have it as my default in Camera Raw, so all images get this much sharpening, then I can add a little more in Photoshop if I need.




Above is the image as it arrives in Photoshop. It's time to start thinking about what I'd want to change in the image. Ideally I'd like to get a bit more detail in the white water and the shadows, though not blocked, could definitely use a bit of opening up. At the same time, the rock surface on the right of the image has some interesting detail but it doesn't really stand out. I was going to say it looks 'flat'. It occurs to me that I could improve things considerably through the use of Akvis Enhancer which should be able to help in each of these areas.



And above is the result of using Akvis Enhancer, default settings.

It's better, but seems to me the shadowed rock on the left could stand being opened up a bit and the rock on the right still seems a bit boring. I really like that small half filled puddle on the lower rock, but it needs to stand up as well, grounds for a bit of a contrast increase there.



Above shows the effects of opening up the shadows. Note that I have also lightend the mist in the canyon.




And these show the black mask into which I painted to apply the curve shown.



And this shows the effect of increasing contrast in the rock on the right - I'm much happier with it.

I haven't begun to deal with the cropping issue. Micheal Reichmann mentions in his Camera To Print Video series that he crops very first thing - but I have to tell you that there is nothing worse than deciding after two hours of working on an image that having a little more room on the left would be lovely - only it's long gone. Even if you did save the work before the crop, you are going to lose everything done since.

Photoshop does allow for cropping without losing the cropped area - it's just stored away in case of rain. If you can do your crop in a single swoop, this works perfectly. Unfortunately I often find myself refining the crop a step at a time so this won't work for me.

Bottom line is I prefer to to the basic work on the image before cropping. Personal choice, it works for me. Choose a system that works for you.

Anyway, getting back to decisions around cropping. There are two fundamental problems with the image, the small spruce branch in the bottom right and the jambed log in the bottom left. Either could be cloned out if I really need to but it gave me a chance to think about composition. There's absolutely nothing wrong with experimenting with composition via the cropping tool, until you come up with the best possible result.

On the one hand, I don't relish losing that interesting rock strata on the left, but I discover that if I crop out the log, I actually like the balance of the image better.



This shows the cropping tool in place. Note that I have elected to trim a little off the right too. It wasn't that the material wasn't good - in fact I regret trimming the curve of water at the top right, it just seems to balance better. I haven't removed all of the branch in the bottom right, but the rest can easily be removed with cloning.

I could, of course; have trimmed from the bottom of the image and removed both branch and log, but I really like that rock eddy on the bottom near right with it's rounded large pebbles and couldn't afford to lose any of it - in fact in an ideal world, I'd have kept a bit more of it so the second pebble was whole. Mind you, given that the shot was taken blind, with the camera 5 feet out on the end of my folded and hand held tripod, held almost horizontally out over the fall to eliminate foreground, I'm happy the framing worked as well as it did. I did manage to rest the tripod about a foot from the end on the safety railing to provide some steadying effect.



And this is the result of the crop and a little cloning to tidy the two bottom corners. I note that I forgot to clone out that stick lying on the rock. It could even be a fold in the rock, but if it looks like a stick, it has to go.

Other than that, I could call it quits - I like the image I have, there is good detail in shadows and highlights, overall a pleasant image.

There is, however; a lot more that can be done to polish the image. For example, though the highlights are there, it might be possible to give them a bit more punch by increasing contrast from pure white to light gray - easy to accomplish with another black masked curves layer.





The first of the three images shows the effect of the curve, applied across all the image. Note that the effect is way too strong in most places but remember that since I am painting into the mask I can control the amount of the effect and I want a few areas to receive the maximum effect shown here so this much will be just fine, once tamed.

You can see the curve used. Note the second point almost at white. That was essential to keep the curve from muddying the white water. If you doubt it, try clicking in the before image to show it full size, then bring it into Photoshop yourself and play with curves to help the water.

The third image shows the effect applied where and to what degree I want. There is a lot more detail to the water, but I see that in some places the water has become too dark in the highlights. As this is very easy to fix later, I'm not concerned.



Above is the result of a little fine tuning. I decided to increase the contrast in the puddle and on the flat rock, though I used separate curves so I could get things just right. It turned out that in both cases, the colour saturation increased with the increase in luminosity contrast. In the case of the puddle, it was really objectionable so I set the layer blend to luminosity. This worked perfectly for the puddle but left the rock looking dull again. Setting it at normal has left the colours a bit unrealistic but I can tone that down later with a hue/saturation layer.
In increasing the contrast in the puddle, I liked the effect in the part that is reflecting the rock, but the bright part looked unrealistic and had to be toned back.

Time to stop and reflect, what further changes would help the image?



OK, so what have I done this time. You will remember I thought the colour of the flat rock was a bit too much but what really bothers me is the yellow green tinge to the rocks on the left. What if I applied a subtle change in colour here to better match the hue if not the saturation of the flat rock? There are a number of ways to do this. I could use the separate colour curves in the curves adjustment layer but that's more control and hassle than I want to deal with for a very modest change. I could use colour balance but it tends to change everything. Oddly, I have found that using the hue setting in hue/saturation adjustment layer is often quite helpful. A small shift to the left (-6) nicely takes the yellow green out of the rock without fundamentally changing it. Applied with a black mask painted into as usual it better blends with the flat rock. I then did the opposite with the flat rock, moving the hue +4 to the right and now I see that I don't need to desaturate the colour and there is an overall consistency to the image without going too far. I see that the small triangle rock in the bottom left is too bright so I do desaturate the colour in it - but the hue is correct so no other changes.

I could go on making more and more changes, but the image is very close to what I want at this point and there's a real risk I'll adjust it too far - just one more change needed - the water needs cleaned. I could use another curves layer but experience tells me that subtly whitening water isn't easy with curves. Better is using the dodging tool set to highlights and the amount set to around 5% so I don't over do it. Even better is if I have some way to tell how close to pure white I have come since staring at the monitor, the difference between a brightness of say, 245 and 250 is subtle, and the difference between 250 and 255 impossible to see.

Can't remember where I read about it but what I use is a threshold layer, set to around 250. Applied on top of the layer I am dodging, this tells me when I 'break through'. This is so handy I set it up as an action. I also have one for shadows, warning me when I drive the tones below around 10. Depending on the printer and paper, these numbers may need to be changed but the latest printers and semi gloss papers can actually show the difference between zero and five, between 253 and 255 - heady stuff.

One more precaution, I want to do the dodging on a duplicate of the image, so it's time to flatten the image (you can save beforehand if you are inclined - I don't an do occasinally regret it but the files are so large...



This shows the application of the threshold layer on top of my image. Note that only a tiny area of water in the upper left is even as bright as 250. All of the bright water on the right hasn't come close to paper white - it looks fine on screen but I'm losing out on a lot of punch here so I'm definitely on the right track.

I start applying the dodging highlights at 5%, gradually building up the effect I want, occasionally flipping back and forth between the image and the threshold layer by turning it on and off (but all the work being done on the image of course).





And now you see that I have broken though 250 in a few more areas, not a lot, but it took quite a bit of lightening the water to get there so I know it will make a more impressive print. The second image shows the results of the dodging.

I still wasn't 100% satisfied though and decided to darken the water a bit further now that the whites are a lot closer to white, two more curves helped with that and voila you have the final, for now, image.

It's time to walk away from the computer. I might well make further adjustments in the future, I already have some ideas, but at this point I am not sure if they will really improve it and experience tells me I'll do a better job coming back to the image in the future, if at all. Don't forget you can click on any of the images to bring up larger versions. I did an especially large version of the final result at the top of the blog entry.

This has been a test run for a future book. I'd appreciate feedback on whether exercises like this are helpful and if so for what level of photographer (hey, market research). If you don't find it useful, that's ok to report too. Thanks.

From Jasper - Maligne Canyon

Making Luck

While working on the image for the previous post, I was thinking to myself how lucky I have been in capturing the images I have, then it occurred to me that I'm a lot luckier than I used to be, and that generated thoughts about how to become lucky.

Here's my thoughts on how to get 'lucky'!

1) Cameras that sit in bags, photographers who never go shooting, cannot have any good luck at all - so get out and use the damn thing!

2) Be there at the right time - good lighting can be partially luck, but it's also being there when there is at least the possibility of good light. Sleeping in till the odds are good that by the time you get to the scene, you are going to be working around harsh vertical light with short shadows. It's almost impossible to tell what the lighting is going to be like 20 miles and two hours away from now, with the possible exception of a clear sky sunrise - so be prepared to be lucky. Get there early in the day. Put the effort in and get lucky.

3) Be prepared to flexible - try to avoid preconceived ideas of what image you are going to get - the day may not be right for that image, but perhaps it's perfect for something else and if you can only think of the original plan...

4) With modern reliable equipment, auto exposure, auto focus, good tripods etc., screwing up technically is just not acceptable. If you are unlucky in that the one good image is the one which is out of focus, then spend some time analyzing where you are going wrong and come up with a plan to fix it and follow through on the plan, including lots of practice. Some kinds of photography you simply cannot expect to get things technically right every time - say the focus in a football game, but you can sure practice and increase your percentages.

5) Although I like the concept of previsualization, truth is not even Ansel could predict which images were going to hold up over time. This means that it pays to give yourself options. Maybe you have the camera in the absolutely ideal spot, but perhaps later you will realize that 3 inches to the right would have been better. Work the scene - actually go about earning your successes, make your own luck.

Seeing With A Fresh Eye

I was printing an image for a customer, an image I particularly like. I am on the third 'edition' as Brooks Jensen calls it - each time I think I'm finished an image and ready to sell it, that's an edition, then any time I re-edit the image after that makes for a new edition - I like the concept.

The changes I was making involved cropping - I frankly don't understand how I could not have seen this as the right way to crop it but somehow I didn't despite two previous attempts. it really does seem to be 'another day, a new way of seeing'.

It seems to come down to a matter of priorities - sometimes one has different priorities - on Tuesday the corner is critical, but on Thursday the sunlight on the left is paramount. Nothing wrong with either changing one's mind for good and valid reasons, or for that matter to be uncertain which is best.

In the bottome image, I cropped tightly, but in hind sight, why ever did a crop off the corner of that light area on the left. A second attempt rescued the entire light area on the hull, but complicated things, perhaps unnecessarily.

In the top most image, the most recent version, I have cropped to the corner of the sunlit hull and tightened things on the right so the sweeping reverse C on the hull reaches the edge of the image. I've given the bow a little more breathing room, but darkened the water around it to better match the rest of the water.

Is this the perfect composition? No idea - just the best I can do on the day.

Merry Christmas

May you and yours have a wonderful holiday, may Santa bring you gifts which will open your eyes to new vistas and may you recharge your batteries with Christmas nibblies.

Book Availability

I note that Amazon.com has announced a Jan. 4 availability date for my book 'Take Your Photography To The Next Level'

Black And White Landscapes Redone

I have gone through the black and white landscapes and replaced all with freshly resized images. There are even a few new ones, like the image above. I debated about toning the black and white but in the end decided neutral was probably best for now, with a variety of images including ice.

Developing The New Site

Once I found Rapidweaver and had the sense that it could do what was needed, it was time to learn the software.

Requirements included:

1) ability to upload changed without reuploading the whole website and hundreds of pictures - no problem in Rapidweaver
2) blog software - Rapidweaver has this built in but in my searches I found a Rapidweaver plug-in called RapidBlog. This allows me to integrate my blogspot.com current blog and it's over 750 entries, but within my website and best of all, with my website colours and design. This has worked extremely well and also gave me inline comments.
3) I needed to have clean looking albums with a painless way to move from image to image - Rapidweaver has solved 80% of that battle for me but I'm keeping my eye out for a way to move from image to image from the keyboard and for the position of next not to move as you go from the first image.
4) I needed some help to come up with ideas for a webdesign - and Rapidweaver's templates are ideal for that purpose. Some are more customizable than others - Camino has been particularly good with extensive control over size, shape, and colour.

One of the really useful tools in learning to use Rapidweaver was the videos by ScreencastsOnline which explained Rapidweaver and also some of the plugins.

It didn't take long to flesh out a basic website. I found it helpful to go to my outliner and create an outline of all the webpages and their subpages and so on. Once I saw the layout, I could quickly create the pages.

Rapidweaver has a number of different possible pages from text and images to blog to album to file sharing and contact forms - PHP without knowing a thing about it.

I did have to change my server to one that could cope with PHP and found Siteground recommmended and in fact highly useful and easy to work with. Uploading Rapidweaver to Siteground has been absolutely painless.

I found some other plug-ins for Rapidweaver helpful. Accordion was cute but not useful if there is a lot of text, Blocks is extremely useful, turning Rapidweaver into almost a full WYSIWYG web design programme. It allows precise placing of text, images, links and so on, with full font and size control. Collage made for convenient thumbnails for the various album categories.

I'm still a complete novice and there's huge scope to learn HTML and PHP to do really incredible things, but the point is that I have been able to do everything I have without a single line of code in any language.

Time To Bury The Old Website

The new Rapidweaver driven website seems to be operating well so I'm moving it over to georgebarr.com and the old site is history.

I still have a lot of work to do, including reprocessing every single image so there is no resizing within the blog so it remains a work in progress but already functions better than the old one and contains image, blog and website all in one.

Soft Proofing

Having watched the segment on soft proofing on the "From Camera To Print' Videos from Luminous Landscape and having read the questions generated on their discussion groups, it appears that a lot of people still don't GET soft proofing.

Many months ago I had to ask some repeated and blunt questions with followups to get the experts to explain the real story to me so let me add the following explanation to what Jeff and Michael presented on their talk.

A printer profile does two things. First it attempts to adjust the printer output to match the computer file as closely as possible. It can't match it perfectly - pigment and dye inks are not the same as monitors, either in colour or in dynamic range. There are limitations to how close the printer can get. If the computer file includes an intense orange but no combination of printer inks can print that intense an orange, then the printer profile isn't going to make for a perfect match.

When profiles are made, the difference between where the printer got to and what the computer wanted is noted along with the instructions for getting as close as possible. it's like catching a bus to a friend's house. It can take you most of the way there, but it can't usually deliver you to the door. In the case of the printer profile, it does at least provide you with a map from the bus stop to your friend's house so you know what direction to walk.

It's this business from best possible to ideal that most people don't even know about in printer profiles, and this is the part that makes soft proofing work.

By using the printer profile, the soft proofing knows that no matter how you try, there is only so much orangeness in the inks to represent the carrot picture. The soft proof shows you this difference by toning down the orange of the original computer file to the maximum the inks are capable of. As you can toggle soft proof on and off quickly you can get a sense of what's missing.

You then have the option of adjusting the original computer file to compensate for the deficiencies in the printer. For example, if you can't get the printer to make the orange that intense, perhaps you can increase the grayscale contrast to make the carrot look more snappy. Maybe you can add a bit more red to compensate for the orange deficiency.

Every printer and every set of inks has these deficiencies. Mostly we can live with them, but sometimes we need to work round them, and soft proofing is the tool that helps you do that.

The other problem with the print is that the dynamic range from brightest paper white to blackest black is going to be a lot less than you can get on any computer screen. If you turn on paper white in the soft proofing, the computer attempts to emulate the narrower dynamic range of your print. If you are using glossy paper with it's increased dynamic range, the differences aren't all that huge, but the blacks are more of a muddy gray. With matte papers though, the soft proofed images tend to look terrible, very flat and dull. it turns out they are accurate, it's just that we get so used to the full range of brightness on the computer screen, and of course you can still see full white and full black surrounding the soft proofed image on screen. If there were no other part of the screen showing at all (ie. the image filled the screen to the edges in all directions), you would be more able to buy in to this flatter looking image. Jeff mentions in the video removing as much of the screen clutter as possible but the problem with the black surround is it makes the dark areas of the print look pathetic. I suspect a gray background would actually work better.

I find that it is more useful to look at the detail in the shadows in the soft proofed image rather than the absolute darkness of the blacks and use that to adjust the shadows as needed to better show shadow detail. If there is lots of detail in the soft proofed shadows, then it will be readily apparent in you print too. If it isn't, then there's a good chance that no matter how deep the blacks are in your print, the shadow detail isn't going to be great.

From Camera To Print - Luminous Landscape

I finally decided to order and download the 6 hour video series 'From Camera To Print' on Luminous Landscape and made by Michael Reichmann and Jeff Schewe. I'd felt at first that I have a pretty good routine for making prints and doubted I'd get much out of the video, but truth is that the videos have been very interesting. Jeff is an insider when it comes to a lot of this stuff, being an Epson Expert as well as working with the Photoshop and Lightroom teams and having worked with the late Bruce Fraser and written the latest version of 'Real World Camera Raw'. Michael has been digital for a long time and worked with many of the insiders including Thomas Knoll, the original author of Photoshop and the primary author of Camera Raw. Both have been involved with the development of Lightroom.

What I found helpful was understanding some of the whys and how things got to be where they are. I did learn some new and useful facts. It was reassuring to find that some of the frustrations I have had they have too (ie. not my fault). I found the information on soft proofing to be very helpful.

I highly recommend this series for any photographer making inkjet prints, whether from scanned film or from a digital camera or back. Besides, it was entertaining and unafraid to slay some giants.

Making Money As A Part Time Photographer

It's been my observation that the real limiting factor in making money in photography is that it takes energy and time, both of which eat into our photography time. I nipped into a fast food restaurant for supper (I'd run out of bread) and am working late. I noted the tacky artwork on the wall and thought, I should be displaying my work here - or perhaps at my favourite movie theatre lobby, then I remembered, I already have work at the Glenbow museum gift shop and Trains N' Such and just when the hell am I going to find the time to make prints, matte, frame and deliver pictures, all of that before selling a single one. I quit the farmers market, not because it wasn't successful - it was coming along very nicely, but because it was a hassle and took a lot of time and things weren't getting done around the house and my wife was paying a significant price, both in me not being available, or being tired and grumpy.

Truth is,the biggest limiting factor in being successful as a part time photographer is the limitations in your energy and time and your commitments to others. If you are single and don't have an overly demanding job and a goodly amount of energy and ambition, then the sky is the limit - more power to you.

For those of us with more mortal limits on our capacities, perhaps we shouldn't worry so much about selling. Perhaps we should be looking in other directions for affirmation of our work - through publication and through our website and maybe the occasional show just for the ego of it.

Another Book Idea - Feedback Please

With all the talk of doing most if not all of one's image editing in global adjustment software like Lightroom or Camera Raw, I'm wondering if there is a place for a book on local adjustments in a digital world to enhance images. it would be less about the tools and more about creative changes. It would be based on Photoshop but applicable to other editing programmes with the ability to make local changes.

I've been watching Micheal Reichmanns Camera to Print video series on Luminous Landscape and very much enjoying it but it struck me how little he uses Photoshop to adjust images, preferring to do all his work with across the image changes in Lightroom (exc. sharpening).

What do people think - you have seen some of the sequences I have posted in the past in which local adjustments were crucial to the result - is there a place for a book showing both why and how to do these changes?

There are books out there that show some of the commercial photography editing - thinning legs, shortening noses, removing bulges and wrinkles but I'm more concerned with the expressive print and how local changes can help that.

How Bright Should A Print Be?

Seems like an obvious question - bright enough! But if there is a brightness which best gives a sense of reality, that doesn't necessarily imply it's best for our image. This is an opportunity to be creative. In the old and darken days, one could simply adjust the exposure under the enlarger and prints that were muddy dark or weakly pale were all too common.

With computer editing, it's much easier to nail the white and dark points via your raw converter or levels or curves in Photoshop. this means that a really bad print is harder to achieve, though not impossible.

There are times that a particularly dark print looks out of place, but often it can be very effective for creating a mood, especially when parts of the image are maintained, while other areas are driven a lot darker. Done well it looks natural if not reminiscent of the scene and can turn ordinary into great.

Likewise it's possible to make a really light print without looking washed out, giving a sense of the light flooding the subject. It has to be done well and doesn't suit all subjects, but can be just as powerful a tool.

What about trying some high and low key printing of your own on previously "normal" images. You might just like what you get.

Depth Of Field

When people talk of depth of field, they generally mean the area from near to far that falls within the focus of the lens, implying that everything is sharp within this area.

This is not entirely correct. What in fact happens is that at smaller apertures, the degree to which the image looks out of focus gets less, eventually being sufficiently small so as not to be noticed on your print.

Here's some points to consider:

1) what looks sharp on a small print, may well look significantly fuzzy on a large one - depth of field is inversely proportional to the size of the print.

2) Depth of field most certainly won't work when you inspect your image at 100%. This is particularly true of higher pixel count cameras in which parts of the image may look significantly out of focus at 100% but look just fine in a normal size print.

3) You may want to forget about things like hyperfocal distance (at which everything is supposed to be sharp from infinity to half the hyperfocal distance) and focus instead on what's really important in the image. If two areas are of equal importance and one is significantly further away than the other, you might even want to blend two exposures. As there is some image magnification as you focus, blending isn't straight forward, but usually is achievable, even without things like Helicon Focus.

If you do want to rely on depth of field tables or settings and plan fairly large prints, you may want to "pretend" that you are using an f stop two stops or twice as wide - eg. your camera is at f16 but you rely on the table or lens setting for f8.

4) given a rock or a person or a bush in the foreground and mountains in the background, my experience suggests that the focus should be on the foreground and stop down enough so that the background, if not absolutely sharp, is adequately recorded.

5) don't forget that there is a law of dimminishing returns - as you get to quite small apertures, diffraction robs you of any gain made in depth of field by blurring the sharpest parts of your image. Eventually you find that the fuzzy bits don't get sharper and the sharp bits get fuzzier - clearly a losing proposition. For me, on a full size sensor 1Ds2, that cutoff is f16. At f16, I can sharpen the image sufficiently to compensate for the loss by diffraction, but by f22 I cannot. So, that means there is never ever a reason to go beyond f16, unless in total desperation you really need a slow shutter speed to blur water and even then you should have had a neutral density filter with you.

Music And Photography

The Theory: We might understand our photography better though comparison with similar issues in music.

The Example:

We are told our images need emotional impact, but how do you go about putting emotion into every single landscape image. It's unrealistic. Can we learn anything by comparing this problem to something similar in music?

The same situation in music would be having to make every song, all tunes, each composition a tear jerker or arousing patriotic fervour or raising our blood pressure.

We'd have to eliminate any pleasant catchy tunes because they don't slap you in the face with a message. We'd expect emotion with songs about war and lost loves, but perhaps not about Saturday night, or Santa Coming. Can you imagine if every Christmas song played at this time of year played with your emotions, some holiday that would turn out to be.

Truth is we need "filler" songs, ones that don't play with our emotions but are simply nice music.

Music can be about the spontineity and invention of jazz or the mathematical complexities of Bach, the fun of Arrogant Worms "I Am Cow".

Perhaps this means that we can be forgiven for simply making a nice picture, a cute picture, an amusing picture, an illustrative picture, without tackling the great themes of love, loss, war, regret, revenge and so on.

There are tunes that do grab at our heartstrings, without us even knowing why. How many people get a litle choked up as they hear Amazing Grace played on the bagpipes. I assumed it was because I was Scottish, but other bagpipe music doesn't do it, and lots of non Scottish people react to the same music. Some of the opera choruses have a similar effect, even though the operas are sung in a foreign language and non opera fans have no clue what the plot is about. Perhaps it's enough that we react to the scene enough to take the picture, and somewhere there are a few others who also get a reaction, that no one can explain, nor need to.

Speaking for myself, there is no single photographer, or even book of photographs from a series of photographers, in which I react equally to each and every image. On the contrary, there are a small minority of the images that 'do it' for me and experience tells me that those are not the same ones that 'do it' for you.

I'm guessing that there's music that you don't like and your neighbour loves, just as you disagree on the best images, even when you both like the same kind of music or photographs.

I think what this is telling us is that if we really want to play on the emotions of the viewer, we should shoot war images or puppies. Otherwise we should stop worrying about the message the image has and concentate on what makes us react, regardless of whether we can analyze that reaction.

In other words, photograph what interests you and present it in the best possible way and let people decide for themselves how they should react, if at all.

The New Site

Jakub points out correctly that I have lost inline comments on blogspot. Oddly though I have gained them on my website. In the long run, I think that will be the way to view the blog so I'm not overly concerned, but do understand it is the old blog that everyone has bookmarked or is connected to by RSS feed (which I can get with the new one - so bear with me as I work out the bugs).