Showcase your vacation pics! but EDIT!

Your vacation is over. You have many digital pictures and maybe even some video to enjoy. Do you want to share the experience with your friends? Of course you do.

Remember when Dad or Uncle would get out the slide or movie projector after having people over for supper and spending what seemed like the next three years that night droning on and on about "well, it looked better in person", "you really had to be there", or "this is right after that occurrence I told you about happened" ? What was it that made those shows boring? Usually, not enough editing.

If you want to share your pics and movies with people, whether by PowerPoint, QuickTime, Instagram, or some other electronic means, first ... EDIT, EDIT, EDIT.

Yes, edit it down to what is most important, the best shots, something that will catch an eye without boring it out. Remember, you have the memories of the entire trip. Make the presentation of the highlights. 

There are many different programs available to aid in this, some may even have been included with your equipment. So, we won't do any product placement today.

What will really make your photos and movies stand out as very enjoyable is really very simple. Only show your best. If that means editing out the middle 5 1/2 minutes of an AVI file, do it. If it means limiting how many photos of any one subject you put in the show, limit them. If it means cropping out extraneous fluff from the image, make it so! Be harsh with yourself. You will still have all the original footage or files. So, you won't be missing anything. And your friends will be lining up to "like" or forward or even "Pin" your presentation.

Some Dads and Uncles way back when knew this secret, too. Those were the slide shows and movies you really liked. Remember saying "OOh!" or "Ahh!" or giggling and even laughing out loud? Sure you do. Those presentations made an impact, were enjoyable, and are remembered because someone knew how to EDIT.

Enjoy!

 

Choosing Which Slides to Scan

We've talked about sending in our old slides or negatives for scanning or even doing it ourselves. That way, we get to use our film images in this digital age.

How do we choose which chromes or negs to use? Well, you'll have to look at them. 

An easy way to do this is with a light table and a loupe. Even when we were loading slide trays or printing our own enlargements, we still needed to know which slide or neg was sharp enough, had the right details, had good focus, and so on. Holding up a kodachrome or a tri-x neg to the light would hardly tell us anything. A light table (aka light box) with a color correct lamp (daylight, 5000K) and a good loupe what what we used then. That will work well for our current needs, too.

A camera store was where we needed to go then, and it's where we go now for these specialty accessories. 

One place I've used for years is B&H Photo.

I found a small battery powered light box. And a larger, plug in light box/table. That's the light source and flat surface. To see the film's image, we need some magnification. 8X is a good standard, with 6X to 10X also being very usable. Here's a nice one and a better one.

You spread your slides (chromes) on the table/box, turn on the light, and check them through the loupe.

We don't want to waste our time and money sending unusable film out to a scanning service, or spend time on our own scanner for an image not worth considering. So, use the light box and a loupe to find only our best shots. 

As we have seen in previous scanning posts, the time and effort we spend doing this task is well worth it.

Fun Camera & Photo Gadgets!

Camera accessories have always been an interesting part of the photographic solutions for certain problems or situations. (See the pun?)

Current digital cameras and software take care of many things we used to have to do a lot of head scratching and mechanical engineering for. Things like fill flash ratios, panorama stitching, exposure or focus for tricky subjects, etc... But, we still find ourselves wanting something to take care of a photo thought we have.

Such as... Ever see a great shot of lightning bolts? We could take chances (as has been done for years) with anticipating and using really long shutter speeds. Or, we could use a new (ish) product such as a lightning trigger! Available for a variety of cameras and brands. Check compatibility with your camera.Then, set up your foreground or background subject as the storm comes in, sit back, and shoot. Use safety precautions when shooting in foul weather.

I said "Foul" not fowl.

Low cost underwater housings  can enable us to get some nice pics at colorful vacation spots. Yes, $130 is low cost when you consider what a hard housing or true underwater system can set us back (hint: hundreds to thousands of $). Many subjects on a coral reef or in a lagoon are shallow enough to make an item like this very usable. Besides, much deeper and we need supplemental lighting to combat the color shift of deep water photography. If lightning is your underwater lighting, it's time get out of the pool!

Say, "Feesh!"

More ideas to come in a future post. Stay tuned for more stuff!

Final word on the scans

Well, maybe not the final final word...

Back in April, I posted about sending film out to a service to get high quality digital files from our old photography. I sent about 50-60 35mm slides to Scan Cafe on April 23rd. 

Scan Cafe was offering the best price and the highest resolution. Resolution is important. A fairly high end scanner for consumers can scan negatives and slides (chromes) at a decent enough resolution for web use, but that level of resolution isn't good enough for greatly enlarged prints. A scanning service uses very high end machines that produce a resolution similar to current high end digital cameras.

In other words... Right now, we can shoot with our DSLR and a high quality lens and get files of 12, 18, even 24 MB, which can give us enlargements of 24x36" or bigger. (Provided that things like focus, subject motion, camera steadiness are done well.) When we looked at our old photos, we know that they are sharp, well exposed, properly focused. We used to send them off (or do ourselves) for HUGE prints. So we wondered, "Why can't I do that now?" 

Things is, we always have been able to. What changed was pricing and preferred format of the lab. To get a high quality very large enlargement from film stock today is getting pretty pricy. At the same time, we could upload one of our pic files from our DSLR to a myriad of places and get a low cost, very high quality enlargement.

That's why I was looking for a good scanning service. Many scanning services until now could give us the results we wanted, but we would pay a good amount per scan. Because scanning also often requires repair. Repair from warpage, color shift, mold, and lots and lots of dust. The new generation of commercial scanners and their supporting software make this much easier and faster. Thus, prices are lower. Large firms dedicated to scanning only, make it even easier and faster. The files I got back from my slides were anywhere from 10 MB to 22 MB. Of course, they were also sharp because of being created with proper photographic technique.

The only downside to the new situation is timing. From April 23rd, I waited until June 2nd before I could download my scanned files from the FTTP site, my finished disc and original slides didn't come back til June 18th.

Even so, I'm very pleased with the whole experience. The old chromes that I so carefully and artfully crafted all those years ago are now residing on my computer, on a DVD, in a back up drive, even on The Cloud. I can send a file of them to places like Canvas People where I can get the photos enlarged on a stretched canvas up to 24x36" for a reasonable price, sometimes even a sale price.

Final verdict: The wait is long, but the results are worth it. Rush orders are available. Next time, I'll try the rush service and report back to you all about that.

I'M SEEING STARS!

Always wanted to be a backyard astronomer but afraid of the cost or size of telescopes?

A great way to start is with a table top mini telescope. A modified dobsonian mount will not cost very much.

Check out this little scope! (click here)

When shopping for telescopes, don't be fooled by magnification factors. The real difference between scopes is the aperture and mount types. A larger aperture has more light gathering ability, so you can see fainter objects (like nebulae). Higher magnifications can even make your viewing experience troublesome. Too much shaking and being hard to find the item to center in on it can discourage a neophyte astronomer from continuing.

The simpler a mount is, the cheaper it can be. The scope linked to above has a very simple mount. Computerization of mounts can be intriguing, but be sure you want to continue before shelling out that much money.

Another great alternative for getting started in astronomy is a good binocular. I use my Pentax 10x42 binocs more than I do my telescope. Learning to brace yourself well will enhance your viewing pleasure. Check out this price! (click here)

Summer seems to be when many newcomers start thinking about backyard astronomy. It's comfortable at night, and we maybe are taking a vacation away from the city lights. It is a great time to start. Did you know, tho, that some of the best astronomy viewing is in the Winter? Cooler sky temps equal clearer vision. So, get started now. Get used to your equipment. We'll talk some more about Winter viewing in a future post.

Playing With Software

There are a lot of resources, both on the web and in books, to help you figure out how to use whatever image manipulation software you have. So, I won't be posting tips for ACDSee users, Photoshop Plug-ins you need, or any LightRoom for Dummies type stuff.

What I hope to do is to inspire you to learn what your program is capable of, so you can make the most out of your image files.

Let's look at a raw photo I have on file:

A nice, moody shot of a famous landmark, from a camera angle that is fairly unique (most Golden Gate Bridge pics are from above or at street level on the San Fransisco side). Nice, but it needs work to bring out all its potential. 

First, let's tweak that exposure. There is plenty of info in the file, so I opened up the shadow detail and toned down some highlights. Doing that made the famous red color a bit weak, so I punched up the burnt red color profile by re-sampling an exposure curve broken down into additive and subtractive colors (can't do that in any darkroom!) to adjust only that color. About a 5% add on the red curve (very slightly skewed toward yellow), and flattened out any blue/green tint. Next, the tilt was bothering me, so I moved everything 3.5 degrees counter clockwise. I cropped for a true 4x6 (usable in many enlargement sizes, too) without choosing to lose much. 

Here's the final file:

Now, here's one where I did more color work.

Original file:

This is the melt lake below the St Mary's Glacier in Colorado's Rocky Mountains. 

I first adjusted the exposure a bit, mostly lowering the entire value, and dropping out some of the non detail holding highlights. Then, I did colors. I enhanced the blue already present by sliding the vibrancy up about 10%, and adjusting the hue to a more realistic blue after that. Bumping up the vibrancy by itself would look a little too fake for what I was wanting with this photo, but can be a great enhancement for other types of subjects. Next, I sampled the deep, rich green in the middle foreground and applied its values to the rest of the greenery. (The distant trees are actually a bit blue/green because of distance haze effects, so I left those as is.) Finally, I cropped out some distractions on the left side.

End result:

The results in both cases is that a nice picture gets made a little more pleasing. 

This post is geared towards a natural look end result. In future posts, I'll go over some other ideas, including special effects and false colors. People will be another subject altogether.

Hopefully you are inspired to play with your own programs and image files by reading this.

Scan Results

The scans are finished. Now I can download them from the fttp website. Full resolution files were put up, took me an hour and forty five minutes at high speed cable internet speeds to get them. A DVD hard copy will still come in the mail.

What do I think?

I liked how they turned out. 

I am rather meticulous about dirt, dust, scratches, smudges, etc... but they are, too. I had my chromes stored properly, and I cleaned them all before packaging them off. A high resolution scan will show even the minutest amount of dust. So, I wondered how well these guys would care for the images. They cleaned them very well themselves, and applied the ICE dust and damage management system from Nikon, plus they post processed them to virtual perfection. So, no dust or scratch problems.

Now, the resolution. Certain old slides I had were taken with a mass market 35mm of late 50s vintage equipped with a simple anastigmat lens. The film base varied from the early 1960s version Kodachrome II to various european brands. These slides ended up resolving into 4.5 - 6.5 MB files. That's good enough for up to 11x14" enlargements.

Two examples (re-sampled to lower resolution for the blog):

As you can see, the scans preserved the tonal variations of the originals as well as their sharpness.

Now, let's turn to some of my chromes from my modern era of film photography. Using high end equipment such as Leitz and Nikkor lenses specially designed for the sharpest transmission of image tonality and resolution. And shot with highly disciplined photographic techniques used in my professional photography business and in my teaching photography to advanced students. Films used varied from the sharpness champion Kodachrome 25, to pro versions of Fuji, Agfa, and Ektachrome. 

So, you would think that those images would resolve into bigger files, right? Well, they did. Those slides gave results from 18 - 21.5 MB file sizes. I could easily print up to 24x30" or bigger from that size of a full file.

Some samples:

Web sized images don't quite do the scans justice. The detail, both in the tonal range and actual resolution, is phenomenal. In both the older images and the newest ones. I'll post later some of what I have been able to do with the higher resolution images and my image manipulation software. Let me just say that there is more than enough detail in the files to enhance to my heart's content.

Final cost per image, including the DVD and all shipping costs to and from ScanCafe, was a surprisingly low $0.77 per slide.

Verdict: High end digital scanning is very much worth it!