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I’ve talked to quite a few people who have the new iPhone 4 and do not even know about the HDR functionality build into the camera.  The acronym HDR often makes people think that it has something to do with High Definition or something similar, but this is not the case.  HDR stands for High Dynamic Range and it is a trick that pro photographers have been using for years that is now built in to the iPhone.   It is worth mentioning that this feature is NOT built into the 4th generation iTouch.

Dynamic Range is an indicator of the range of brightness a person (or camera) is capable of processing.  The human eye has a much higher dynamic range than a camera does.  This is what allows us to stand in a dimly lit room and be able to clearly see indoor areas that are in shadow as well as brightly lit outdoor areas.  Cameras, with their limited range have to ‘expose’ for one or the other.  If you set your exposure to produce a clear image of the outdoors, the shadows will be black.  If you expose for the shadows, the bright outdoors will be ‘blow out’ and devoid of any detail.  The HDR feature on the iPhone addresses this limitation.

Here is how HDR works.  When you have HDR enabled on your iPhone, the camera actually takes 3 pictures in rapid succession.  It then uses an internal algorithm to combine the three images into a single image, using the properly exposed areas of each to make a final image with a higher dynamic range than any of the originals.  Photographers often use ‘bracketing’ to take multiple shots of a scene with high contrast and then combine them later in PhotoShop.  The iPhone does it on its own.

Here are a couple of sample images to demonstrate the difference.  I just snapped these off right from my reading room so cut me some slack.  They aren’t high quality photos or anything — they just demonstrate the HDR.  Actually, they are both a little dark

This first image from my iPhone shows the shot without HDR. Notice how the room is basically black and the detail outside is blow out beyond recognition.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And this second was taken with HDR turned on. In this image, you can see some of the detail in the room and can clearly see the trees outside. Pretty cool hunh?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One caveat to be aware of with HDR however is this.  Since it is taking 3 pictures in ‘rapid’ succession, if you subject is moving, you will get at best a blurry image and, at worst, an extra eye, nose or mouth on their face

-john

Taking quality photos under poor lighting conditions is a common problem faced by amateur photographers.  I wrote the following article for an exclusive article directory, but since it is my work, I thought it deserved a place on my blog as well.  Kind of a one stop shopping sort of thing.  I hope you find this discussion of low light photography, enlightening.

How to Take Good Low Light Pictures

Many would be photographers go out and get a pro-sumer digital SLR camera like the Nikon D90 with the idea that they will be able to take nice pictures of, among other things, their son’s high school football games. I use the high school football example because it represents nearly a worst case scenario for low light pictures; fast action under low light. Depending on your equipment there are several ways to skin this proverbial cat, however I’m going to address what I believe to be the most likely circumstances.

The primary obstacle to getting good photos in low light is that low light typically requires a slower shutter speed. If your shutter speed is too slow, you get blurry photos. To capture the action and still allow for a slight motion blur, I typically shoot for about 1/250th of a second shutter speed or faster. One side note here: Nikon’s Vibration Reduction (VR) and Canon’s Image Stabilization (IS) lenses are said to ‘give you’ two to three stops and allow you to use to use slower shutter speeds in low light. This is true, but misleading. I often shoot still subjects at 1/30 th or 1/15th of a second with my Nikor 18-200VR lens and get good results. The key here is that my subject is not moving. The VR and IS in these lenses compensate for camera movement, not subject movement. If you shoot a moving subject at 1/15th of a second, your shot will be blurry.

The Situation
The Scenario I am describing assumes that you have a quality digital SLR and atypical zoom lens, which, when at maximum zoom, has an aperature (F-stop) of 5.6. For example my Nikor 18-200VR 3.5-5.6 will shoot as fast as 3.5 if I am not zoomed in, however, at 200mm zoom, the fastest aperture the lens is capable of is 5.6.

1. Forget the Flash
Certainly don’t try the built in flash, as it only has a range of about sixteen feet. If you are right on the sidelines (you should be) you may be able to get away with an add on flash like the SB600 or SB800, but I prefer to avoid that as well for a number of reasons.

• The range is still only about 50 feet or so and, at a football game, if you want to capture that interception 100 feet away, there is no time to disable the flash.
• Even if your shot is within range, a flash does not give you the shot you want. It only lights up nearby players, leaving the rest in the dark and providing no sense of the surrounding action.
• Finally, a flash will freeze the action, which causes you lose all sense of motion, ruining the whole sports action feel of the shot.

2. Increase your ISO
You could spend $1000 on an ‘Fast’ F2.8 Lens, which would allow you to shoot 2 full stops faster, however, this too is unnecessary and, in some ways, detrimental to achieving the results you want. The detrimental aspect of a fast lens is the fact that, at F2.8 you lose much of your depth of field. This is certainly desirable for portrait or sports photography, but not always for sports. Similar to the effect of the flash mentioned previously, you lose all of the surrounding action in your photo; only your subject ends up being in focus. In fact, if you are shooting at say 200mm at F2.8, you may even end up with portions of the subjects own body out of focus.

So how, in lieu of spending $1000 for the aforementioned lens, do we get our two stops back allowing us to shoot at 1/250th of a second. We crank up the ISO. Newer models of digital SLRs are getting better and better as far as minimizing Noise at High ISO settings. The bottom line is, you can live with, or even remove image noise and have a good photo, but if your shutter speed is too slow and the image is blurry, you may as well just throw it away. You can’t fix stupid with Photoshop. You can increase the ISO on many cameras up to 3200, and some can go up to 6400.

3. Shoot Raw
I can’t think of a digital SLR that doesn’t allow you to shoot in RAW format. For normal photography under decent light, RAW just adds an extra step to my processing, however, for low light shots, the extra step is worth it. Shooting in RAW format produces an unprocessed digital negative, much like unprocessed film. Just like film can be ‘pushed’ a stop or two to lighten the resulting images, RAW gives you the digital data needed to ‘pull’ about two more stops out of your digital images. This allows you to take photos which, though they may look a little dark, can be recovered in post processing. Most cameras come with a RAW image converter, but I like the Adobe RAW plugin the best.

On the topic of Adobe RAW, I would like to throw in one quick tip that primarily benefits Mac users. As you may know, Adobe offers Photoshop (expensive) and Photoshop Elements for both the PC and the Mac. The full version of Photoshop comes with Adobe Bridge image management and a very full featured RAW converter whether you are using a Mac or a PC. Photoshop Elements, on the other hand, differs from PC to Mac.

The PC version of Elements has a built in image manager and offers a scaled down version of Adobe Raw. The Mac version of Elements, however does not have a built in image manager. Instead, Adobe ships it with the full version of Adobe Bridge AND the Full featured version of Adobe RAW. It is important to note, that the Mac version of Elements itself does contain the scaled down version of Adobe RAW, and it will use this version if you open a RAW image from within Elements. Instead, open the image from within Adobe Bridge and you will be accessing the full featured version.
4. Use Noise Reduction Software
I cast, but not least, if you feel that there is a little bit too much noise in your finished product, plugins like Noise Ninja or Neat Image do an excellent job (better than Photoshop’s built in function) at reducing image noise with minimal impact on image sharpness.

So don’t beat yourself up because you spent $1500 on that great SLR and somehow still can’t seem to get good low light shots. That’s why they call us amateurs. If you follow the above guidelines, however, you should be able to get some pretty nice photos without having to go out and spend another $1000 for a ‘sports’ lens. Falls and football season is coming up. If you manage to get some good shots using the above techniques, I’d love to see them.

What is Image Noise
Image noise is something every photographer should be conscious of.
It is defined as the arbitrary variation of brightness or color data in images produced by the sensor and circuitry of a scanning device or digital camera and is regarded as an unwanted by-product of image capture. The quality of the circuitry definitely plays a part in noise reduction and cheaper cameras typically produce more noise than more expensive SLRs in low light situations. When taking pictures with a digital SLR camera, image noise is most commonly caused by utilizing a high ISO setting, especially those over ISO 800, though this varies by model. Image noise manifests as noticeable artifacts that degrade image quality. Image noise comes in two flavors; luminance (grayscale) noise, which makes an image look grainy, and chroma (color) noise, which is generally noticeable as coloured artifacts in the image. When using a scanner, image noise usually happens in the dark parts of images.

Getting Rid of Image Noise
Most image editing packages allow for you to add and decrease noise, as an effect or filter. This works well enough for adding noise, but removing it is a much trickier process which, when applied with simple built in filters causes the image to lose sharpness. Enter Neat Image. Neat Image is a digital filter application specially designed to efficiently reduce visible noise in digital photographic images. Neat Image is provided as a stand alone application, but also as a plug-in for a wide range of image processing applications, like Adobe Photoshop, Corel Photopaint, Ulead PhotoImpact, PhotoLine32, IrfanView and others. Neat Image reduces the high ISO noise associated with image sensors in digital cameras and scanners, the film grain visible in scanned slides and negatives, JPEG artifacts of over-compressed images, and color banding. Another benefit of noise reduction by Neat Image is that the reduction of noise produces smaller file sizes for JPEG image with the same quality setting generating a file which is about 30% smaller.

Neat Image incorporates the most advanced noise reduction algorithms in the industry that surpass the quality of all classic noise reduction methods and even that of the wavelet-based methods. It provides the most accurate noise reduction currently available. Neat Image uses device noise profiles to make noise reduction custom-tailored to your camera or scanner model, making it the the most accurate noice reducer available. It offers premium noise reduction and image sharpening utilizing an advanced noise filter to reduce noise and grain in digital images. The professional editions of Neat Image fully even support 48-bit RGB and 16-bit grayscale images.
No Noise Dude
Saving Money with Neat Image
As we’ve already discussed, Neat Image does noise reduction best, but why do you need or want it. Well, if you have any modern hand held point and shoot, you’ll love what it can do to improve your low light images. But what if you already have a nice Digital SLR? This is where you can save a little money with neat image. When it starts to get dark out (think football game) you have a few choices if you want to capture sharp images. You can get up close with a flash, but this really freezes action and eliminates the opportunity for desirable motion blur. You can spend $900 (minimum) for a fast lens, like an F2.8 zoom but, apart from being cost prohibitive for many of us, this low f-stop also dramatically reduces the depth of field of your image so that only your immediate subject is in focus, which may also be undesirable. The alternative is to use a good variable zoom lens at say F 5.6 and shoot at a higher iso setting. This does cause image noise, but for $75 or less depending on the version you buy, you can clean up the noise without losing sharpness and leave the $900 in the bank.  To get your own copy, check out Neat Images website at http://www.neatimage.com where you can download the demo version for free.

Both my iPad 2 and my Zagg mate case are on order. Watch for my review of these two exciting products coming within the next couple of weeks.

Well, Looks like my baby boy is all grown up and leaping out of the nest… head first as usual. After a challenging and rewarding marching band season, followed by an award winning concert band season and an exciting jazz band, er season, Tyler Riemsma is wrapping up his senior year and preparing to head off to college at GVSU.

Tyler will be majoring in Music as a percussionist and is looking forward to a busy 4 years before he heads off to grad school. Please join us in wishing him well in this new stage of life and in his career as a promising new musician. If you would like to wish Tyler well and help him on his way, you can make a donation to his college cause on the Tyler Riemsma blog. Just look for the donate button in the right side bar.

Get Web Graphics Wherever

Just bought a new Kodak Zi8.  I’ll post some sample videos later.  In the meantime, here is some good info about why I picked this model.

The Kodak Zi8 is the greatest pocket video camera I have seen to date. It hits all of the angles and hits them nicely. The Kodak Zi8 includes a 5 MP sensor, a substantial jump from the competition, which only offered 1.6 MP sensors. The Kodak Zi8 Pocket Video Camera features a 6.3 mm, fixed focus lens with not one but two focus modes: normal and macro. The Kodak Zi8 has obviously been made with a focus towards ease-of-use, and it shows both in the camera’s design and the way it interacts with software. Macintosh users will experience a fast and easy video clip editing and import process.

The Kodak Zi8 sets the standard for all pocket video cameras. And not only by a little bit, but by a huge margin. The Kodak Zi8 weighs about 3.9 ounces (110g) without a battery. The battery weighs in at about .63 ounces (17.5g). The Kodak Zi8 takes a mid-range approach to memory, coming with just enough to shoot a couple of test shots. Nevertheless, this memory isn’t enough to shoot any amount of video which would permit the buyer to avoid having to purchase an SDHC card .

The Kodak Zi8 supports up to 5.3-megapixel (16:9 wide screen) JPEG image capture. The Zi8 also includes a monaural built-in microphone, I/O interface including USB 2. (high speed), AV out, HDMI, DC in plus an external stereo microphone jack.  It has a standard 1/4 inch tripod mount and is powered with a KODAK Li-Ion Rechargeable Camera Battery KLIC-7004. The Kodak Zi8 approaches a $500.00 high definition video camera in terms of quality. The Kodak Zi8 produces a great image that rivals any pocket HD camera available on the market, however buyers will need to endure some annoyances which could sway them to other camera options. The lack of flash memory requires users to buy an SDHC card (preferably a class 6 8GB or higher card) so that they can comfortably film and transfer files.

The Kodak Zi8 uses removable SD/SDHC media cards, which Kodak says can store as much as 10 hours of video on a 32GB card. The Kodak Zi8 is available in many colors including metallic black, blue, and burgundy.

I went for the burgundy model myself.  It does not come with a case, so you’ll want to get one.  Another suggested accessory would be a tripod, or at least a monopod which will really help improve panning quality.  Kodak also offers a remote control for the Zi8 which is available for under $15.00.  This is perfect for shooting video of yourself.

January 2012 zi8 web graphics update.

I’ve been using this hand held video camera for months now.  I just wanted to report that I’ve been very happy with the results.  The 720 dpi 60fps works great for catching the grand kids in action.  With double the standard 30fps, slow motion looks really nice.  I’ve also used it for 5 Mega Pixel stills and, of course, I’ve shot a bunch of 1280 dpi video.

The hand held stuff looks good, but if you can manage it, I’ll reiterate the fact that it’s even better if you use a monopod.  I wouldn’t buy a large tri-pod for this little guy for a couple of reasons.  One, you are no longer portable, which is kind of the point right?  Two,  the mount pads on most full sized tripods cover the USB latch, so you have to take it off just to get your videos.

That does lead me to one little design flaw which I’ve identified.  The bottom of this portable video camera is rounded, so it won’t stand on end on its own.  For that reason, you may want a small desktop tri-pod to allow you to shoot video of yourself.    By the way, I did pick up the remote on Ebay and I like it very much.  It was only about $12.00.   All in all, I handy little tool that I can easily take anywhere which makes it easy to get whatever web graphics I need, both photo and video.  Happy shooting…

john

Graphics Design Defined

When considering the question, “what is graphics design” I’m reminded of the movie Groundhog Day, where the camera man tells a would be female companion, “you know, people think I just take a camera and point it at stuff, but there’s a lot more to it than that.” The same goes for graphic design. Take a look at the video these guys put together. I can’t say that I’m excited about their choice of background music, but the meat is there anyway. Good job dude.

Adobe Creative Suite 5 Announced

Adobe has at long last announced Creative Suite 5 and furnished specifics regarding its innovative new features.  The new Creative Suite 5, along with the various programs inside it, is supposed to deliver within thirty days.  It doesn’t seem like that long ago that I got CS4, but here we go again with a new and improved Creative Suite of products.  Here are just a few of the benefits of going with the new upgraded version.

New CS5 Features
Creative Suite 5 programs, for the very first time, incorporate access to Omniture technologies–Web tools which capture, store, and evaluate information and facts created by World-wide-web sites and some other sources.  Creative Suite 5 Design Premium will additionally integrate with Adobe CS Live, a brand-new collection of services which Adobe claims will speed up crucial elements of the creative work-flow and allow designers to concentrate on making their finest work.  Furthermore, Creative Suite 5 introduces Adobe Flash Catalyst CS5, a new design tool which enables you to generate web application interfaces without the need for writing code.  Creative Suite 5 delivers complete version upgrades of flagship creative tools, as well as features integration with on-line content and digital advertising and marketing measurement and optimization abilities along with technology from Adobe’s purchase of Omniture.

Are you buying CS5?
Creative Suite 5 builds on the user interface improvements brought in by its predecessor to draw the integrated tools even closer together, with a stronger emphasis on the designer workflow, while at the same time incorporating around two hundred and fifty fresh features to the bundle. I’ll give them a little time to get the bugs worked out, but in the meantime I’ll be saving my pennies so that I can add CS5 to my own suite of design tools.

The Drudgery of Film

Back in2000, I finally traded in my film camera for digital.  My film camera had been a Minolta SLR, for which I had purchased an after market flash and a  couple of lenses of varying focal lengths.  It was somewhat laborious trying to teach myself to take good photos with a film camera.  I had to take notes of the conditions and camera settings for each frame and them compare those notes to the finished product after I had the film processed.  Needless to say, this did not produce much fruit.  There are so many variables involved in creating good photographs that, even with my notes, I didn’t learn a lot about improving my photos.  For the most part, I resigned myself to taking snapshots under good light or with a flash, and left the creative photography to the professional photographers.

Digital Saves the Day

Then came that fateful day, I think it was my birthday in the summer of 2001 when I sold my film camera to an aspiring photography student and purchased my first digital camera, a Toshiba PDR-M70 for $799.  This was a nice little camera for it’s day as the review in that link will tell you.  After installing the downloaded firmware upgrade, it was even capable of shooting in full manual mode.  It was 3.3 MegaPixel camera with an aluminum body and a rechargeable lithium-ion battery.  This latter feature was a big deal when most of the digital cameras available at the time used AA’s which they went through at an alarming rate.  I looked into getting a spare, but never ended up needing to.  I didn’t use the camera super heavily, so the original battery pretty much lasted me through the four years during which I used it.  The camera itself held up nicely; it still works, with the exception of the 4-way control button on the back which, as is customary among consumer electronics, broke (no lie) 6 days after my four year extended warranty expired.  Alas, it had served me well, but it’s day had finally come.  The most important benefit I gained from going to a digital camera was the ability to experiment and instantly see the results of that experiment.  This allowed me to really see the effects of different lighting, angles, apertures and shutter speeds on the shots I was taking.  It also gave me the freedom to ‘fire away’ knowing that I could just delete bad pictures.  Of course at 3.3 Megapixels, my 16MB smartmedia card only held about 27 photos.  Fortunately, however, I was able to pick up a spare 32MB card on sale for about $65 at the now defunct Circuit City.  I probably still have that too.

Modern Digital Cameras

Fast Forward a couple of years and I’ve got an itch for a new camera again; maybe two. I won’t begin again the age old debate about Canon vs. Nikon.  I had no bias originally, I just tried to do my due diligence and ended up selecting a Nikon D80 with the 18-135mm kit lens along with an SB-600 flash.  Ken Rockwell may have had something to do with my decision.  He has a great site if you are interested in a highly opinionated, yet largely accurate review of Nikon (mostly) and Canon hardware.  As you may know, my D80 is already several models behind the times, but it’s a far cry from my old Toshiba and a lot better, in many ways than the latest model point and shoots.  I’m not going to get into reviewing specific models or comparing brands.   Each brand carries similar levels of cameras.  To keep things simple, I’ll just discuss the Nikons with which I am familiar since they have a broad range of models (Kodak fore example doesn’t have a high end SLR).

Available Camera Types

For the purpose of this discussion, which is regarding non-pro consumer / amateur photographic equipment, there are three types of cameras.

Compact digital cameras, which are typically the size of a deck of cards and quite capable of taking descent still images in good light.  This cateogry  includes cameras like the Coolpix L22 or the higher end S8000.  These cameras have lenses which collapse inside of themselves.

Handheld cameras that are SLR-Like, like the coolpix P90 offer more features, better performance, but with a reasonable price, in a slightly larger package.  These cameras have what appears to be an external lens, which contains better optics than the compact cameras, however the lens is fixed and cannot be replaced.

True SLR cameras like the D90 and D700 offer the most flexibility and power at a range of prices which are a good deal above the previously mentioned compacts and handhelds, but for good reason.  We’ve discussed that electronics get old and obsolete.   The same is true for Digital SLR bodies.  The replaceable lenses, however, if well cared for can last a lifetime.  Nikon has done a great job of ensuring that newer camera bodies are compatible with older lenses.  It is the flexibility of replaceable lenses which, more than any other feature makes the SLR stand out from among the other types of cameras available today.

Hopefully, I’ve provided a brief introduction to the benefits of going digital and an even more brief look into what your options are when selecting a digital camera.  Watch for the next installment, where I’ll go into a good deal more detail on at least one of the above camera types.  If you have any specific questions in the meantime, please feel free to comment on this post and I’ll do my best to answer.  Until next time… Keep pointing, keep shooting.

john

Adobe Creative Suite 4 Really Fits the Bill

It doesn’t matter if you happen to be an artist, a webmaster or a graphic designer, you have without doubt relied upon Adobe software applications to help you get your work completed. At present, the graphics community is still aglow in regard to Adobe Creative Suite 4, a compilation of computer imaging design tools which are thoroughly integrated to permit users to operate in nearly any medium.

Adobe boasts 6 various editions of CS4, created to suit the requirements of a wide variety of graphics pros. The six versions are as follows:

Adobe CS4 Design Premium – Created for the graphic designer that operates in mobile, Internet, as well as print publications, CS 4 Design Premium consists of the ‘Pro’ or extended variants of Flash, Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Acrobat and Dreamweaver.

Adobe CS 4 Design Standard – Ideal for the specialized designer who functions mainly with printed output, CS4 Design Premium comes with Illustrator, Photoshop, Acrobat Professional, and InDesign.

Adobe CS4 Web Premium – Adobe has taken this world wide web design software package to a higher level by giving designers the ability to work on projects that cross virtually all Adobe products, including Photoshop Extended, Flash Professional, Illustrator, Fireworks, Dreamweaver, Bridge, Contribute Cue, and Device Central.

Adobe Creative Suite 4 Web Standard – Perfect for website design, this graphics software integrates Dreamweaver, Flash Professional, Fireworks, and Contribute to create an unmatchable set of internet design tools.

Adobe Creative Suite 4 Production Platinum – Adobe has attacked the difficulties of video production and post production by incorporating a broad variety of solutions, such as Dynamic Link, Bridge, Device Central, After Effects, Acrobat Connect, Photoshop Extended, Premiere Pro, Illustrator, Flash Pro, Encore and Soundbooth. For pros operating on an MS Windows platform, Ultra and OnLocation are included as well..

Adobe CS 4 Master Collection (cue the angelic choir) – The CS4 Master Collection is a proffesional graphic designer’s dream package, including practically every single Adobe product built-in  so one may develop graphics in pretty much any medium, whether it be print, web, interactive, mobile or video. The Master Collection comes with Photoshop Extended, Acrobat Pro, InDesign, Dreamweaver , Illustrator, Contribute, Fireworks, Soundbooth, Encore, After Effects and Premiere Pro. Web apps include Bridge, Device Central, Version Cue, Acrobat Connect, Stock Photos, Dynamic Link, Ultra, and OnLocation.  I’m kind of drooling just thinking about it.

Basically, CS4 supplies professionals with software configurations which  allow them to effortlessly achieve their particular goals. For instance, creative designers are able to design web pages, user interfaces, develop games, create  e-learning products, produce animations, and do develop for mobile devices as well. Those of us who like to edit video for a living can do production and editing, multi-media, audio production, as well as visual effects. It goes with saying that CS4 users, as always, are able to combine and edit images and produce sophisticated page layouts for print.

Graphics pros will also appreciate Adobe website design software as it works on a number of platforms, eg. Windows XP and Vista on the PC and either Tiger or Leopard on the Mac. In addition, for those who have already purchased Adobe products, it is straightforward to upgrade to Creative Suite 4 – even if you currently have stand alone graphics applications. Last but not least, for those of you who buy one edition of  CS4 but then change their mind and decide that they need a more powerful version, going from say, Creative Suite 4 Design Standard  up to Design Premium, are able to effortlessly make the switch and get the additional functionality they need to accomplish their goals.

Apparently, the creative feats of designers in the various mediums has encouraged Adobe to rise to the challenge and create a set of tools which has, in turn, empowered video, graphics and web pros to achieve far greater results than could previously have been imagined.

Other Interesting Sites

• Graphic / Web Design Companies and the Art of Web Design « Blog by Ravont
• The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Book: The Complete Guide for Photographers, 0321385438 | Free Computer & Business ebooks