What does "lifted blacks" mean? How does it affect your image? How do I do it in Lightroom?
Lifted blacks refers to the action of increasing the brightness of black areas of a raw image. This can have the effect of bringing out details in areas that previously had none, but if the blacks are too deep, it can result in visible noise.
Most raw processors have a Blacks slider, simply adjust it to lift the blacks.
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Always puzzle me to hear people list photography (in the context of it being art) and something different than art. Is there a reason for this historically?
Not all photography is art, not because it's bad, but because it never meant to be. Some documentary photography may be art, but most isn't. Much photography is just decoration, or otherwise functional, not meant to be art, let alone upper-case a Ahhrt, or Fine Art.
"What is art" is a constant question — in fact, it's a question with no fixed answer, but a continuing conversation. See some of this in the context of photography at What makes "fine art" fine art?
But you don't have to even be concerned with this question to appreciate the craft of photography, as many people do.
And of course, there's no question that there's plenty of art that isn't photography.
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What are they and what are they used for? And how are they different from regular SLR or DLSR cameras?
"Format" refers to the size of the recording medium in a camera. I say recording medium because the term originated in the film era and has continued to the digital age.
There are no hard limits but medium format is typically anything larger than 35mm film up to 6cmx7cm film. Large format is typically everything from 4"x5" up.
In addition to the size of the film or sensor there are a number of features typical of medium and large format cameras:
Medium format
Large format
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I find that some lenses are indicated with the letters "ED", referring to some special type of lens element. What are ED elements, and what advantages do they bring?
Note that this question isn't very clear on ED elements.
ED means extra-low dispersion, referring to a type of glass that to disperses light less than ordinary glass. Dispersion means breaking up light into its constituent colors due to bending different wavelengths of light to different degrees. Because dispersion can cause chromatic aberration, ED glass elements can help reduce purple fringing and other chromatic aberrations. ED elements tends to be limited to higher-end lenses because ED glass tends to be more expensive to manufacture and work with than ordinary optical glass. Canon takes this further in some of its L lenses with fluorite, which has the lowest known level of dispersion, but fluorite elements are extremely expensive to manufacture (especially if very large--the Canon EF 1200mm lens demonstrates this) and incorporate into a lens, and tend to be fragile.
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Question pretty much says it all. Seems like when I look around people are asking "what's the best wide angle lens for landscape?", but on sites like LensHero they categorize wide angle and landscape differently.
There is overlap between the two terms, as you'll see as you browse the lists of both at LensHero. Basically, they're two different directions from which to approach the problem of narrowing down lens choice, and the site offers both approaches.
A wide angle lens has a specific definition without much flexibility — it's any lens with a wide field of view, generally considered to start at around a focal length of 35mm on a traditional 35mm film camera. So that's pretty straightforward: if the lens matches that, it should be in the list.
On the other hand, any lens can be a landscape lens — even a narrow focal length telephoto lens. A landscape photograph is simply one which portrays natural scenery of an area, and a wide angle lens is the easiest way to capture a vista, but not the only one.
So, from that point of view, the landscape lens list could be every lens ever, but there are some characteristics which are useful to landscape photography which may not be present in all wide angle lenses, and which aren't necessarily important to all wide-angle photography. That helps narrow down the list in a useful way.
One aspect of this is good performance stopped-down for maximum depth of field. Most lenses fit this, but a lens for landscapes may offer even-more-constricted-than-normal choices — many lenses designed for APS-C DSLRs don't close down past f/16 because of the diffraction limit, but for landscapes, you may prioritize depth of field over overall sharpness.
The flipside of this aspect is that good wide-open performance isn't very important, and for that matter, the "speed" of a lens doesn't matter — if you're going to be shooting at f/11 or f/16 or beyond, it doesn't make a difference whether the lens is able to open to f/1.4 or f/2.8. Providing good image quality at these fast apertures requires heavy and expensive lens elements, so a lens designed with landscape photography in mind instead can be cheaper, smaller, and lighter with no disadvantage.
Another aspect is across-the-frame sharpness. If you're taking pictures of centered subjects, it's usually acceptable (or for portraits, maybe even desirable) for the corners of the frame to be softer. For a landscape, this can be problematic, particularly if you have noticeable foreground objects near the corner of the frame (a frequent choice, as a nearby tree or rock often makes for a nice composition).
Back to the LensHero site... I notice that for Pentax mount, the DA 14mm f/2.8 tops the list for wide angle, but the DA 15mm f/4 Limited gets that honor for landscape. This makes perfect sense given the characteristics above: the 15mm Limited isn't as fast, but when stopped down, it's sharper across the frame. And as a bonus, the 15mm is much smaller and lighter, which is a definite advantage if you're taking your landscape photograph from a mountaintop.
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I ran into the term "exposure safety shift" in this answer. What is exposure safety shift, and what is its intended purpose?
Exposure safety shift is a feature that overrides the set aperture or shutter speed (in aperture or shutter-speed priority, respectively) in the event said aperture or shutter speed causes the other exposure determinants required to achieve a correct exposure to exceed the camera's limits.
For example, if you are attempting to shoot wide open on an f/1.4 prime lens in an outdoor environment, and the required shutter speed exceeds the camera's limits, the camera will override the f/1.4 setting you entered, changing it to a value that will permit correct exposure within the camera's limits, such as f/2.0 if the shutter speed otherwise required is one stop faster than supported by the camera.
It helps prevent images from inadvertently being exposed incorrectly when the set exposure determinant results in other exposure values that are outside of the limits of the camera, but it may also result in unexpected changes in exposure settings.
On Canon EOS cameras, it is available in the two-digit series (...40D, 50D, 60D) and higher models. It is not available in Rebels (...500D/T1i, 550D/T2i, 600D/T3i; 1000D/XS, 1100D/T3). On Pentax, it is called "Auto EV Compensation" and is available in the higher models (eg. K-7, K-5), but is not available in the entry-level cameras (eg. K-x, K-r).
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In the Canon Rebel T3i Manual, page 59, it's mentioned that "If you have a zoom lens, use the telephoto end to fill the frame with the subject from the waist up." Same note on page 61 and another one for landscape telling to use the "wide angle end".
I have EF-S 18-55 mm IS II lens which is a zoom lens. I've googled "telephoto end or wide-angle end", but all the results were lenses not an end. I don't know if I got it wrong but I thought that "end" would mean something that can be mounted on my zoom lens itself.
'End' in this case is just referring to the end of the zoom range available. So zooming in on an 18-55 lens would take you to the 55mm end of the zoom range, which would be the telephoto end, and the 18 mm end of the zoom range would be the wide angle 'end' (although on this lens the telephoto end isn't very telephoto). So while it may sound like a physical 'end' they're referring to, it's just the ends of the zoom range of the lens they are referring to
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I have been reading a bit about astrophotography and the term infinity focus keeps coming up. What is infinity focus and how do you set the camera to infinity focus?
There's two ways "infinity focus" could be taken — "an infinite amount of focus, so everything possible is in focus", or "focused on something infinitely far away". It is the second of these — infinity focus means your lens is focused so an infinitely-distant object would be sharp.
When an object is infinitely far away, the rays of light coming from it are, in theory, parallel. A lens set at infinity focus is set so that theoretical object would be in focus.
In practice, all stars are close enough to infinitely far away to count, and in fact for most purposes for photography, everything beyond a hundred feet or so (depending on focal length) is as well.
Note that almost all modern autofocus lenses can focus past infinity. This allows for much wider tolerance in manufacturing, and makes it possible to allow for changes due to temperature. Older manual-focus lenses usually are made so turning the focus ring all the way puts it at infinity.
Some macro lenses (or macro configurations) do not allow infinity focus, and this is also the case with some situations where you're adapting one lens type to another mount.
Also, for earth-bound photography, be aware that the hyperfocal distance is often more useful than infinity focus, as this maximizes practical depth of field. If you're looking for infinite depth of field, unfortunately, you can't really have it (not with traditional optics), but this and a small aperture will do in many cases.
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It seems very counter intuitive that the amount of light let in by a lens is referred to as the lens speed. This term confused me for a while because I couldn't logically see how a speed would be associated with a particular lens, being either fast or slow.
Is there any reason why this is referred to as the speed of the lens?
Indeed, Speed is way too overloaded in Photography, we have lens speed, shutter-speed and ISO speed!
These terms indirectly refer the possible shutter-speed. A fast lens has a bigger maximum aperture (represented by smaller numbers) which lets more light in. As a consequence, a fast lens lets you use fast shutter-speeds.
The same is true of ISO. A high ISO is called fast because you can use a faster shutter-speed with it.
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I am trying to get a greater understanding of how lenses work. Basically I bought this lens, the Sigma 10-20 f4-5.6:
The construction has really fascinated me. 14 Elements in 10 Groups?! What exactly does that mean? Are the elements the blades?
What does this do the optics?
If I think about a pair of glasses there is effectively just one element.
The "elements" and the "blades" are two completely different things.
An "element" is a single piece of glass in the lens. Most of what's shown on the diagram are the lens elements. Some elements are colored pink, to indicate that their shape is aspherical. Other elements are colored blue, to indicate that they are made of a special type of glass. Others are uncolored, because they're just ordinary "spherical" elements made of typical kinds of optical glass. Your eyeglasses have a single element for each eye. Generally, using more elements, and using exotic types of glass or aspherical elements, allows the designer to better correct aberrations, or optical faults, in a lens.
When two or more elements have their surfaces in contact with each other (instead of having a gap between them), they form a group.
The number of blades refers to the number of diaphragm blades, that form the aperture stop. The diaphragm is an iris that you can make bigger or smaller, to control the amount of light that can pass through the lens. The location of the diaphragm is noted in the drawing by the vertical lines near the middle of the lens, above and below the central axis.
The number of blades is not shown in the diagram. The diaphragm looks like this:
This diaphragm has 6 blades; you can see that the aperture (opening) is a hexagon (6 sides). The number of blades is one of the factors that affects the bokeh of the lens. Your eyeglasses do not have any blades, because there's no adjustable diaphragm in eyeglasses.
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I hear "Tone", "Tonal scale/range" in the context of photography. What does it actually mean?
It can mean one of two things in colour photography:
the overall lightness or darkness of an area of an image, similar in meaning to "luminosity"; or
the colour of all or part of the image, usually in relation to its warmth (bias towards red, orange and yellow) or coolness (bias towards blue and green).
In black and white photography, the luminosity meaning is the same, but the colour aspect refers to the colour of the paper and the developed image, with "warm tone" prints generally tending towards brown or sepia on a natural fibre base and "cold tone" prints tending towards blue or purple on an artificially whitened ground.
When people talk about a "tonal range", they are talking about the difference between the lightest and darkest areas of the picture. It can refer to either the overall contrast of the image or to the local contrast in parts of the image (with the overall contrast moderated by burning and dodging). A "tone scale", on the other hand, usually refers to an external reference image divided into distinctly different regions of lightness or darkness, like Ansel Adams' Zones 0-X.
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When I was surfing keh I found "Non-Mfg Zoom Lenses" and "Non-Mfg Fixed Focal Length Lenses"? What is the meaning of "Non-Mfg"?
"Non-manufacturer" — in other words, lenses made by some company other than the camera maker. Also known as "third party" (the "first party" being the company and the "second party" being you — or maybe the other way around; in any case "third" is definitely some other company).
If you're looking for lenses for Pentax K mount, for example, lenses made by Pentax would be under the regular section , while those made by Tamron, Tokina, or Sigma would be in the "non-mfg" category.
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When I was surfing keh I found "Non-Mfg Zoom Lenses" and "Non-Mfg Fixed Focal Length Lenses"? What is the meaning of "Non-Mfg"?
"Non-manufacturer" — in other words, lenses made by some company other than the camera maker. Also known as "third party" (the "first party" being the company and the "second party" being you — or maybe the other way around; in any case "third" is definitely some other company).
If you're looking for lenses for Pentax K mount, for example, lenses made by Pentax would be under the regular section , while those made by Tamron, Tokina, or Sigma would be in the "non-mfg" category.
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Usually, when discussing aperture of a lens, F-stop and F-number are used for quantifying. But some photographers, and especially videographers, also mention T-stop. The concept and numbering used (e.g. T/3.4) seem to be similar to F-stops.
What is a T-stop, how is it related to F-stop, and what are the differences?
F-stops are purely geometrical, the ratio of aperture to focal length, regardless of actual light transmitted. But all lenses absorb a part of the light passing through them, and the amount being absorbed varies lens to lens. So, in situations where even the slightest change of lights being transmitted affect the output, i.e cinematography, where many images are seen in rapid succession and even small changes in exposure will be noticeable, T-Stop is used as an standard. Since all lenses absorb some light, the T-number of any given aperture on a lens will always be greater (less light transmission) than the f-number. For example, a lens with f-stop 2.8 can have a t-stop 3.2, meaning a small portion (0.4) of the transmitted light have been absorbed by the lens glass elements.
A real lens set to a particular T-stop will, by definition, transmit the same amount of light as an ideal lens with 100% transmission at the corresponding f-stop. A f/2.8 lens can have t/3.2 and another f/2.8 lens can have t/3.4, so the actual lights being transmitted are not the same though they both have the same f-stop.
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On 1x some people have said that this picture has warm colours.
I wish to understand what qualifies to be a warm colour, cool colour, and how does that matter?
Warm means bright? and Cool means dull?
Warm colors are those near the red end of the spectrum, reminiscent of fire: red, orange, yellow:
Cool colors are those near the blue end of the spectrum, reminiscent of ice: purple, blue, cyan:
Green is often considered to be within the cool colors, but depending on the hue and on the context can be warm as well (for example, when in a composition with earthy browns).
Warm colors are generally thought to evoke feelings of comfort, closeness, and passion.
Cool colors are considered to evoke feelings of sadness, remove, and calm.
Additionally, cool colors are said to recede into the background, while all other things being equal, warm colors seem to be closer.
The concept of warm versus cool colors is often attributed to Goethe, who certainly wrote about it as part of his overall theory of color opposition. It may also be the idea of one of Goethe's contemporaries. And it may be very culturally Western. For example, in English, we say that someone who is sad is "blue". I don't know how this association relates to theories of aesthetics and emotion from Eastern cultures, and it seems very different from the associations of the Lakota Sioux color wheel. But, in any case, the associations in western art are well-accepted.
The diagonal line in this 19th century color chart represents an axis (not a division), where warm colors are closer to the top-right and cooler colors closer to the bottom-left.
From George Field's Chromatography; or, a Treatise on Colours and Pigments, and of their Powers in Painting, 1841
In your example picture, the red tree and sunlit leaves on the ground are warm. The blue sky behind the trees makes the background cooler, but the green trees, with their touches of warm sun demonstrate how green can have a warm feeling as well.
Cool colors can be bright, and warm colors can be dull, or the other way around. It's a question of the hue, not the saturation or lightness or other qualities.
Note that this an art theory concept and is completely different from color temperature as used in photographic white balance. That comes from physics, and low color temperature corresponds to conceptually warmer red and yellow hues, and high color temperature corresponds to "cold" blue. This is because our instinctive feel for the warmth of color has to do with our ancestors' experience of fire, and blue-hot fires don't occur in our normal experience of nature, where fire is usually burning at relatively low temperatures.
For further reading, I highly recommend Michael Freeman's Mastering Color Digital Photography. This is out of print in the US (may be available used) but is available in the UK as Colour: The Definitive Guide for Serious Digital Photographers. Like other Lark Press books (and unlike Freeman's later books from different publishers), it suffers from some annoying editing and layout glitches (misplaced captions, typos), but the content is still really good.
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Is the term Gaussian blur used strictly in post-production, or can it also be used as a term for an out-of-focus area in your image when you-re taking the picture? I'm pretty sure that bokeh is used to describe an area out-of-focus when you're taking the picture, can gaussian blur also be used when you're taking the picture?
It's not appropriate to use the term "Gaussian blur" for the out-of-focus parts of an image, because "Gaussian" refers to a specific blurring function. It's the same Gaussian curve that you may know from the "normal distribution" or "bell curve" in statistics. A bright point that's smoothed by a Gaussian will taper smoothly from a bright center to a dark edge.
Example of bright points with Gaussian Blur, made in the GIMP.
The out-of-focus parts of your photograph are not smoothed in the same way. Instead, an out-of-focus bright point in your image will appear in the shape of your aperture. So if your lens isn't stopped down, it will look like a bright circle. It doesn't taper smoothly from the center to the edge like a Gaussian does. (If your lens is stopped down, you'll get a polygon instead of a circle—for example, a hexagon if your aperture has 6 blades. But the same point applies: It doesn't smoothly taper from bright to dark like a Gaussian does.)
In the above picture, notice that the out-of-focus lights are evenly filled circles, not Gaussian profiles (which would fade gradually from a bright center to a dark edge).
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I've heard that one of the tricks designers use for a more effective result is placing an object in the visual center.
Where is the visual center in an image, why is it important, and how could it be used in photography?
From http://www.digital-web.com/articles/principles_of_design/
Visual Center
The visual center of any page is just slightly above and to the right of the actual (mathematical) center. This tends to be the natural placement of visual focus, and is also sometimes referred to as museum height.
The question is why? Is it to do with Western culture where we read top to bottom and left to right? It is said that when a curtain opens in a play, the audience will usually scan the set from their left to right. Would this be true in Eastern cultures?
Or is it to do with left or right-brain dominance?
The Psychology of this is discussed in the boook Art and Visual Perception where the claims are made that
Pg 3
Weight in the upper part of perceived space counts more than in the lower part
Pg 4
Any pictorial object looks heavier at the right side of the picture
If we scan left to right, then having something "centered" slightly to the right would allow the eye to scan from the left, then settle on that centred object.
Whereas the Rule Of Thirds, placing something off-centre, provides a more dynamic image, placing a subject at the visual center should be the opposite, very settling and comforting to the eye.
So if you want a calming image where your subject is centred, it seems that placing it slightly above and to the right will be more comforting to the eye.
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Can we talk about a portrait photograph if, let's say, a grandmother and her 3-year-old grandchild are in the picture? Or, must it be only one person in the photograph?
The Focal Encyclopedia of Photography includes an article by Kathleen Francis on the subject, which says in part:
Portrait photography produces pictures that capture the personality of a subject by using effective lighting, backdrops, and poses. A portrait picture might be artistic, or it might be clinical, as part of a medical study. Frequently, portraits are commissioned for special occasions, such as weddings or school events. Portraits can serve many purposes, from usage on a personal Web site to display in the lobby of a business.
One can find other more or less "official" definitions of portrait photography, but this one captures several aspects that are important to portrait photography (or to portraiture in the visual arts overall) which may not be explained in detail in a general-purpose dictionary.
A portrait:
By the very existence of the term "group portrait", clearly such a thing exists. One can also say "individual portrait", but generally the implication of the term alone is that a single person is portrayed. However, if there are multiple subjects — the grandmother and granddaughter, for example — the picture isn't automatically a portrait without some of the above.
A successful photograph of a grandmother and granddaughter might be thought of as two portraits in one: first, a portrait of the grandmother, showing her personality through her relationship to the child; second and simultaneously, a portrait of the granddaughter, showing her personality through her relationship with the older woman.
A lesser photograph might succeed at just one of these, being effectively a portrait of one person with the other person as a prop. Or, if the focus is on the activity of the two subjects, or on their surroundings, it's probably not really a portrait.
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I understand that "exposure fusion" is a method for combining different exposures into a single image. How exactly does it work, and how is it related to HDR?
Exposure fusion is a process that takes multiple images and combines them to create a single image while only keeping the properly exposed elements. In contrast to HDR images, exposure fusion is more basic, gives a more realistic effect, and requires fewer steps.
The exposure fusion(fusion, or EF) process takes each individual pixel and assigns a weight to it for the contrast, saturation, and luminosity of that pixel. It is the software that then determines the balance of pixels in the final image. Some applications refer to this decision as the selection of the "good" or "best" pixels. You can tweak the settings that determine the balance in some software implementations of exposure fusion software.
A great example of when exposure fusion might make sense is when you don't have a neutral density(ND) graduated filter available to you, or the scene that you are shooting does not have well defined areas that usually work well with these filters. You can use exposure fusion to combine bracketed exposures to balance elements such as sky, foreground, and subject. HDR can also achieve this, but many times the results after tone mapping become unnatural and undesired.
Here is a three image example of exposure fusion with a comparison to the output of an HDR process with tone mapping.
I started with these three source images:
This is the output after the initial exposure fusion was done:
This is the output after the exposure fusion was done, and Lightroom adjustments made:
This is the output from the same three source images that used HDR tone mapping and Lightroom adjustments:
Exposure fusion is significantly different than high dynamic range(HDR) images that most of us are familiar with, in that it creates a low dynamic range image without any intermediate step of tone mapping. The two can be confused because they both take multiple input images and turn them into a single output image. The enfused output of exposure fusion is much truer to a scene than HDR photos. HDR photos have very uneven transitions and many times look unrealistic. Exposure fusion images on the other hand only capture exactly what tonalities the scene had, without any tone mapping.
The term exposure fusion is now typically given to the automated process of combining multiple images into one using software. Prior to software automating this, photographers have been doing this for years, in both film terms and digital. In the digital sense, we could take two or more images, and splice in elements from each to combine them into one final image. The result many times would prevent areas from being overly blown out highlights or lost detail.
The real magic of exposure fusion is that the software is very quick at determining what are the best pieces from each image. You could do this yourself in Photoshop with a huge amount of time, but the entire process is automated using algorithms in the software and really speeds the process up. To a degree this is the same as exposure fusion, but at a much more basic scale. An example of this is given below in the further reading for the Luminous Landscape.
Exposure fusion can also be used to stack focus and achieve images that otherwise would not be possible due to a narrow depth of field. This can be handy in many instances and the real trick is that exposure fusion can usually calculate the optimal image on its own.
Some examples of exposure fusion software include:
Overall, exposure fusion is a technique that overcomes the obstacles put forth by limited dynamic range digital cameras. By capturing a set of bracketed images we can take the full dynamic range of a scene and turn it into a single image. HDR photography does this as well, but since modern displays are low dynamic range, we must tone map to display the image. Exposure fusion works around this step and combines multiple exposures into a single low dynamic range image in a typically automated and efficient fashion. The output is very true to the original scene, and can help overcome over or under exposure cases.
In the past the process has also been referred to as "Exposure Blending", so research on that topic may benefit those interested.
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Viewfinders (both optical and electronic) typically come with two stats: magnification and coverage. The latter measuring how much of the actual exposed area (film or sensor) one sees. But what is magnification?
The magnification is not a solitary measurement; in the case of optical SLR viewfinders in 35mm-format or APS-C, it's usually stated as "magnification with a 50mm lens focused at infinity" with the standard viewfinder optic diopter setting (no user correction applied).
It's only when all of those factors are taken into consideration: the focal length of the lens (which can be changed with the focus distance even without zooming, depending on the lens design) and the viewfinder diopter (adjustments for negative diopter correction will make the viewfinder image appear smaller, and positive will make it appear larger) that you can talk about magnification. And then it's pretty simple -- it's the apparent size of what you see through the viewfinder compared to what you'd see with the naked eye.
Ideally, I suppose, you'd want 1x (1:1) magnification with a normal lens so that when you're living the single-lens lifestyle you can easily shoot with both eyes open and everything matching in both eyes. That will almost always lead to some vignetting of the screen, though, and make the in-viewfinder data areas almost impossible to see without shifting your eyes around the finder's viewport. For this reason, the magnification is usually slightly less than 1x. (Some very-high-eyepoint finders, especially the lovely optional "sports finder" for the late, lamented Canon F1n, can be 1x or larger—but you could look through that sucker with both eyes.)
And because you're spreading a smaller amount of light over a larger area, a given magnification (with a purely optical system) will be significantly dimmer for a small sensor than it would be for a larger one (since the focusing screen is the same size, roughly, as the sensor). That's why, all else being equal (same screen design, same prism design and materials, etc.), a full-frame 35mm-format DSLR's viewfinder will be brighter than an APS-C's with the same magnification spec.
Electronic viewfinders, of course, can always pump up the brightness to compensate for the image magnification, but they still have to allow for the viewport problem in an eye-level finder—a 1:1 picture in the viewfinder is only helpful if you can see the whole thing.
The actual magnification of the viewfinder image will change, of course, when you change lenses or zoom. The specification, though, will give you some idea of the apparent size of the focusing screen -- a larger number means you will see a bigger picture through the viewfinder, and that can make composition a lot easier.
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