The importance of white balance revisited

A little post for all you photographers out there. This is a revisit of an older post that gets a fair amount of hits every month. In the previous post I showed how the white balance setting in your raw converter, whether it is your camera or in software, has an enormous influence on the look and feel of an image. Also, there are many situations that simply confuse your camera's automatic white balance algorithms and so you often cannot trust it. This is especially true in landscape photography done at the edges of the day or in situations where there are deeply saturated colors present. A few days ago, I was photographing the sunset at a lake near my house and my D600, although far better at interpreting white balance correctly than any other camera I have shot with clearly got it wrong as should be evident from the image below.

Click for bigger!
This was shot with a 3-stop graduated ND darkening up the sky. The left image shows what the camera thought of the color balance. It rendered the water weirdly green. The white balance it chose is actually pretty close to a tungsten white balance but with a large green value. It is pretty close to the out-of-camera jpeg as I chose landscape picture style and chose the same profile in Lightroom. second from left is the result of clicking on auto in Lightroom. This gives an interesting result with very blue water. I did not use a Blue/Yellow polarizing filter for this image so this does not correspond to what I saw, but is still an interesting image. Again, the automatic system thinks the white balance is close to that of a tungsten bulb. The right three images are daylight, cloudy, and shade in that order. Those all correspond to the mood of the scene much better and choosing between them comes down to taste I think. In fact I would choose close to "Cloudy" if I were pressed.
I haven't posted this and other images from this sunset yet except for the panorama I posted a few days ago where I actually went for the bluish look that the camera itself selected but will do so soon.

The focal lengths I use

A long time ago I wrote a small script that spits out a histogram of all the focal lengths you use. This is done by querying spotlight on Mac OS X. The script is as follows:

#!/usr/bin/perl

$start=shift;
$end=shift;
$delta=shift;
$flength=$start;
$onlyin=shift;
$filetype=shift;

print "Generating histogram of focal lengths starting at $start, ending at $end, and with stepsize $delta in the directory $onlyin\n";

while ($flength<$end)
{
print "$flength\t";
$endbin=$flength+$delta;
$commandstring="mdfind -onlyin $onlyin \"(kMDItemFocalLength>=$flength) && (kMDItemFocalLength < $endbin) && (kMDItemDisplayName = '*.$filetype*'cd) \" | wc -l";
system($commandstring);
$flength+=$delta;

}


#mdfind "kMDItemFocalLength>=10 && kMDItemFocalLength < 15) " | wc -l

Copy and paste this in a textfile (I named it flengthscript.pl) and save it in your home directory. Now open a terminal and type

perl flengthhistoscript.pl 0 300 5 "Your directory location here" NEF

Replace the location with the location where you store your images and replace NEF by whatever filetype you use or leave it blank to analyse all filetypes.

The script spits out a simple tab delimited list of focal lengths followed by the number of images it found in the range of the focal-length number+the delta that you chose. You can simply graph this in any graphing program such as Igor Pro, gnuplot, Numbers, IDL, Excel, etc.

Here is the output on about 20k RAW files that are currently on my harddisk. You can see I favor 18, 35, and 50 mm and also the top of my tele range which is 200 mm. This indicates I might like some longer lenses as well as wider lenses to add to my repertoire.

New post at inside Lightroom

I wrote a new post at inside Lightroom about the inner rewards of landscape photography. Check it out. I talk about a evening photohike a little while ago on an evening that it was -19F (-30C) where I was. Wonderful evening and wonderful hike. Here is an example image:



Check out the post and check out the hike images. There is a flickr set of the same place here.

Film vs digital?

Saw this on a Dutch photography blog. A comparison by a British technology show of absolutely giant blowups of studio shot images from a D700 and A F4 using the same lens. Can you guess which one won? Now guess when you know they used ISO 400 film. While interesting and they are certainly correct that in this comparison the digital camera will be the clear winner, if you're a landscape photographer and you plop a good ISO 50 film into any old film 35 mm SLR, you will not match it with a D700. You'll need a 25 MP DSLR to match the resolution of Velvia 50 for 35 mm technology for example.

Gallery of stitched images

I put together a quick gallery of images that I stitched from multiple images from simple DSLRs to get a high resolution landscape for an upcoming howto article. The gallery can be found here. Enjoy!

My most popular flickr images

One of those interesting things about flickr is that you can check which of your images are most watched. For my flickr stream, the following 10 come out on top:

	#1: Boulder and Blue Lake • 830 views
	#2: It's alive! • 493 views
	#3: Dawn at the tip of White Crack at Canyonlands National Park • 477 views
	#4: Precipice • 433 views
	#5: Dune clouds over the front range • 357 views
	#6: Lake Haiyaha in the mist • 332 views
	#7: sunset 11/20/06 • 286 views
	#8: Blue Lake reflection • 284 views
	#9: workflow • 279 views
	#10: Rushing into the sunset • 268 views

What I find interesting about this list is that #9 is an image I put up for this blog and whose only way of being viewed is people clicking on it on the blog. That's great and must mean it is being read. It is probably just because it is a post about lightroom ;). Also interesting is that the most popular image (also the most favorited) is made using my old film camera. Strangely in the interestingness series, different photographs show up than in the most viewed or most favorited series.

Capitol Reef National Park

After Goblin Valley, we stayed at Capitol Reef National Park. An often overlooked, but absolutely gorgeous place. We camped on the campground in Fruita, which was great as it is in the middle of orchards where you can just pick fruit from the trees around you. There are deer everywhere and beautiful old structures. Anyway, I managed to get up early and take some shots on a hike up the nearby mesa. Here are a few:

Along the trail upwards:


Sunrise in the wash:


The nose:


Faces:


Boulders:


Breadcrumbs:


Treestump:


The tree:


Bat caves:


Tree on slope:

Goblin Valley State Park

We (me, my wife, and my daughter) went to camp out in several beautiful places in Utah. One of the places we stayed was Valley of the Goblins State Park. An amazingly beautiful and outerworldly place. The story on how these were formed is very interesting and this place is well worth a visit. I want to go back there when the light will be better, but the threatening storm is pretty good already. Here are a few images. Bigger versions can be found by following the flickr links:

I call this one "The sewer":


Juxtaposition of green plant and red stone:


The crowd:


Alien seashore:


Lost ball


Mushroom:


As an aside, I just love lightroom to zoom through all these images and choose some good ones.

Mountainbiking White Rim

I spent last weekend Mountain biking with good friends around the White Rim trail in Canyonlands National Park. Highly recommended. We had two days with a good distance (>40 miles) and one morning with a short but good uphill out of the Canyon. The two campgrounds we stayed at were White Crack and Taylor. Both single-site campgrounds in crazy settings. The presence of a support vehicle made it possible for me to take most of my photogear. While I did not take many pictures during the riding (I have no pictures of people on bikes funnily enough!) I was able to get up before sunrise each day (Brrr cold!) and shoot some, I think, awesome images and panoramas. Here is one for example:

See more in my Canyonlands set on flickr, or in this temporary gallery. I am also trying to sell a few of these images as prints on ImageKind.

Shooting a panorama using a fisheye lens

Some time ago, I built myself a panoramic head that allows for full 360 degrees panoramas in both space angle directions. The point of such a head (I'll post some pictures and instructions later) is to allow you to rotate the camera/lens combination around its entrance pupil and not its nodal point as you will often read, to avoid parallax. Now I used to shoot panoramas using my normal wide angle lens of 18 mm (28 mm equivalent in35 mm cameras) which made it necessary to shoot 32 portrait-oriented pictures for a full panorama, 4 at 60 degrees down every 90 degrees, 12 at 30 degrees down every 30 degrees, 12 at 30 degrees up, and 4 at 60 degrees up. Rather tedious indeed. So I got
myself a fisheye lens (the 10.5 mm Nikkor) which has a much wider field of view. I experimented with some patterns. The most popular on the web seems to be to shoot 4 pictures in landscape horizontally at 90 degree angles and then make a nadir and apex shot. These are very tough to stitch, so I settled on a much smarter strategy that gives way more overlap between shots and is far easier to accomplish since you do not have to change the camera from landscape to portrait orientation, but you can keep it on its side. The pattern is simply 4 pictures at 30 degrees down every 90 degrees and then 4 pictures 30 degrees up every 90 degrees, but shifted 45 degrees from the bottom row.



This can then be easily stitched in a program like hugin to the result below:

Trying the blogger thing

After blogging for a while using Apple's iWeb (see my old blog here), I got so frustrated with it that I am looking for something better. This might be it. I write mostly about photography and especially digital photography. One of my favorite things to do used to be the old chemical photography in the darkroom. Needless to say, that had some problems in the sense that it takes a lot of preparation and effort and it takes a long time between the shot and seeing the actual photograph. Digital is, in those respects, much better. Immediate feedback, accurate colour, easy road onto the web, etc. There are many things I do miss about the old way, such as dynamic range, versatility and especially resolution. I am very happy though with my Nikon DSLR and for most purposes, the resolution is good enough. Anyway, for this blog, I'll revisit a few subjects I put on my older, mostly undiscovered by the world ;-), blog and thrust into new "uncharted" waters.