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1/160 sec, f/6.3, ISO 1400 — map & image data — nearby photos
Spot Metering For Lowlights
target was the head of the guy at left
1/640 sec, f/6.3, ISO 200 — map & image data — nearby photos
Spot Metering For Highlights
target was the clouds to the right of the sun
Cameras are not nearly as good at capturing a wide range of brightnesses as our eyes, so a high contrast scene that appears fine to our eyes often ends up with either washed-out highlights or dark, muddy lowlights, like the two shots above.
When using automatic exposure metering, most cameras default to trying to achieve a balance between the two extremes, often by sampling the scene across large areas of the frame. The simplest mode is for it to pick an exposure that averages the brightness levels seen throughout the frame, but this is apparently not very useful because it's been hidden deep in the menu structure on my camera (Nikon D700).
More useful, but still simple, is to balance across the whole frame, but give added weight to the center of the frame. That's what I used when making yesterday's shot. Frankly, with that scene, I'd expect that the center weighting didn't have that much impact compared to an overall averaging, but that's just speculation.
The most specific kind of exposure metering is spot, where you tell the camera to calculate the exposure from one small area of the frame. This is useful when you want to ensure the proper exposure for the thing you're spotting, but it's at the expense of caring what the rest of the frame ends up as.
Here's another example where for the lowlights I put the spot marker on the lady's black coat. Black is dark to begin with (duh!), and facing away from the sunset, all the more so, so the camera really amped up the exposure to try to make the coat bright, and as a result everything else is washed out...
There's no fundamental reason that any of this is required, it's just that technology can't currently deal with these scenes very well. It's just counting photons, so how hard can it be? 🙂 I'm sure that years from now this dynamic-range problem will all be a quaint footnote in the history books, but until then it's a real, practical, problem you face pretty much every time you pick up a camera.
Some people try to use HDR techniques to combine the detail from multiple shots, but that often ends up looking horribly fake because in the end, you still have to squeeze all that dynamic range back into the highly-limiting data container called the image file. Technology is just not up to par with our eyes.
None of the metering modes I've mentioned so far are the default mode for Nikon cameras. Their default metering mode is called “Color Matrix II”, and it involves sampling the brightness, color, and subject distance at a bazillion points across the frame, then comparing that data to a database of 30,000+ real-world scenes that Nikon must have built up by hand over years. It often works pretty well... at least for definitions of “pretty well” that have been tempered by the aforementioned limitations in current technologies.
I used that for this shot of the sun heading toward the horizon...
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 200 mm — 1/640 sec, f/10, ISO 200 — map & image data — nearby photos
The thing that perhaps bugs me the most about current limitations in technology is what happens when things are “too bright”. Let's take a look at the sun as it dipped closer to the mountains, in two heavily-cropped shots taken 14 seconds apart...
The setting sun was not yellow or white, but it ends up yellow and white in the picture because its photons totally overwhelm the camera sensor. But just as three blades of grass end up at the same height after being run over with a mower – even if one might have been short, one tall, and one very tall – the parts of the sun that end up white do so because all three color channels on the sensor (red, green, and blue – RGB) are overwhelmed. Having, therefor, lost all information about the relative strengths among the color channels, we end up with full-on color in each channel: the digital-image definition of “white”.
The parts of the sun that are yellowish were less bright, such that only two channels were overwhelmed (red and green). It's as if you have three blades of grass, one of which is actually shorter than the mower deck, and thus after the two taller ones are cut, you still have no idea about the relative brightness except that the one was shorter than the three. In this case, “blue” being shorter than “red/green” ends up as “yellow”.
In an attempt to capture the actual color of the sun, I told the camera to underexpose the image by 5.5 stops. That means that after it decided what exposure it though would give it a nice result, I instructed it to pick an exposure that registered 45× less light. When you're talking about photons from the sun, “less” is definitely a relative term, which is why it still comes out quite well in the second shot. The point of doing this was to end the exposure before the photons overwhelmed all the color channels, and to at least some extent I succeeded. It's as if I raised the mower deck to five feet off the ground: a blade of grass 10 feet high is still chopped down considerably, but even after that, relatively speaking, it's still a lot taller than a two-inch blade of grass.
Finally, I'll end with a shot that has nothing to do with the rest of these, except that it was taken at the same time. It's the guy silhouetted at the left of yesterday's shot.
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 62 mm — 1/160 sec, f/2.8, ISO 2000 — map & image data — nearby photos
like me,
Hoping for a Nice Sunset
I find something oddly appealing about this shot. I think it's due to the blurred background and almost complete lack of shadows, it makes it look as if I pasted the guy into the empty scene from a different shot. But I didn't do anything in post-processing. Nothing. All the shots on this page are rendered out of Lightroom with all default settings, except for shrinking to fit my blog, and for the sun-closeup shots, normalizing the white balance and then cropping.
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Nikon D700 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 70 mm — 1/640 sec, f/11, ISO 200 — map & image data — nearby photos
Sunset from the Shogunzuka Overlook
Kyoto, Japan
I'd planned to write up a bit about the fun of spot metering, but have run out of time for today.... it seems that I'm extra busy lately. I did take a moment yesterday to run up to Shogunzuka in hopes of catching a nice sunset. It was pretty dull, but through the magic (or mistake, depending on your point of view) of spot metering, some of the photos of it came out okay. [UPDATE: here's the post on spot metering]
I tend to like this kind of silhouette shot at this location, as the nearby photos link shows, including: this, this, this, and this.
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Today's been particularly busy, email-wise, after yesterday's post, but I'd like to at least post something today. Here are a bunch more bamboo-related pics from my recent western-Kyoto mountain drive....
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 70 mm — 1/250 sec, f/3.2, ISO 1400 — map & image data — nearby photos
Irregular
not all bamboo is photo-op straight
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 60 mm — 1/250 sec, f/5, ISO 400 — map & image data — nearby photos
4" Cross Section
cleared and discarded after having fallen across the road
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 70 mm — 1/1000 sec, f/5, ISO 200 — map & image data — nearby photos
Indecisive
freaky curved bamboo stalk reaching for the heavens
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 70 mm — 1/160 sec, f/5, ISO 2500 — map & image data — nearby photos
Bichromatic
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 62 mm — 1/160 sec, f/5, ISO 720 — map & image data — nearby photos
Roots
what, you didn't think bamboo had roots?
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 70 mm — 1/160 sec, f/5, ISO 560 — map & image data — nearby photos
6” Wide Trunk
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 70 mm — 1/160 sec, f/6.3, ISO 320 — map & image data — nearby photos
Brief Moment of Sun
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 24 mm — 1/160 sec, f/6.3, ISO 400 — map & image data — nearby photos
Height
lots of it
( less pretty than this quintessential bamboo shot, but still impressively tall )
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 70 mm — 1/160 sec, f/6.3, ISO 1600 — map & image data — nearby photos
Stay Out
barbed wire and old-CD defenses
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 35 mm — 1/160 sec, f/6.3, ISO 1600 — map & image data — nearby photos
I'm guessing that the CDs were to scare off crows or cats... I've seen them used for that before. Not sure why either would bother a bamboo grove, so maybe I'm off base.
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I do a lot of Lightroom-related development. I don't get paid for it, but I'm a geek and I really enjoy it.
In case you're familiar with Lightroom, but not with what I've provided, here's a bit about what I've done...
First, I built and released my Lightroom Metadata Viewer Preset Builder, which allows you to create a custom metadata view so that you see just the items you want about each photo. Building it took weeks of intensive research, coding, testing, and tweaking. I didn't need this myself (I knew how to build templates by hand), but I spent so much energy on it because I thought it would be really helpful to a large segment of the Lightroom-using community.
Then I built and released my Lightroom Configuration Manager, which allows you to customize a bunch of things about Lightroom. It also took a long time, but this one involved a lot more trial and error, trying to figure out what knobs and buttons Lightroom had under its hood for me to configure.
Then came plugins. I was hired by Adobe for a period to help test and debug their plugin infrastructure, and so I became well acquainted with it. I put that knowledge to work and built export plugins for Zenfolio and for SmugMug. These are pro-level photo-hosting sites, and although I personally had no interest in using either, I knew that they matched Lightroom's demographics, and so I knew a lot of people would appreciate having such plugins.
There were quickly calls for more plugins, and I ended up making one for Flickr, one for PicasaWeb, and one for Facebook. The early versions of Lightroom's plugin infrastructure was severely limited, so I worked overtime to figure out a way people could get more out of my (and others') plugins, inventing the Piglet extension that perhaps served as the inspiration for post-process actions in Lightroom 2.
I've also done other plugins... for Geoencoding, metadata maintenance, proximity searching, and more... the full list is on my Lightroom Goodies page.
Well, that's enough of tooting one's own horn... you get the picture.
I don't actually use most of these personally, and I don't get paid for them; I work on them because I enjoy it. I enjoy creating useful stuff, I enjoy that people use the useful stuff I've created, and I enjoy the warm fuzzy feelings that people sometimes return when I give them useful stuff.
It'd be nice if it were as simple as that, but more and more, the unfun aspects of software development have been creeping in. It seems that the mere act of giving actually creates much more work than it took to make the thing in the first place. Some days the crush of email – mostly bug reports, feature requests, and complaints – is so overwhelming that I can't even get through them, much less actually fix something or add a new feature. As I write this, my inbox has 1,544 messages that I've yet to fully attend to. This is stressful. Why do I feel a responsibility to follow through on something I've done for free in my almost-nonexistent spare time? I don't know, but I do.
Some days, of course, I do have time to work on things, and so far, for example, I have pushed out 72 upgrades to the Flickr plugin, and that's just since Lightroom 2 came out. For Lightroom 1 there were 47 additional versions. And that's just for one plugins; I've so far written 10.
I've been working on these as a warm-fuzzy side project for over two years now, and it's come to a point where it's now work and I have to make a change, to decide to let them languish, or get more serious about making it more tangibly worthwhile for me to attend to the unfun parts.
I sort of took a step last year when I quietly added a “donate” button to the plugins and to my blog. I have received some donations, and I am grateful. Oddly, the largest donation (a hundred bucks!) was unrelated to Lightroom: someone in Denmark simply enjoyed my blog.
Anyway, I'm thinking of ways to carry this further, to make the time and effort I spend on plugin development and maintenance – the work – worthwhile in a way that justifies it to me and my family. This is the point where most people would start a business, and start selling their work.
But I don't want to run a business. I don't want to sell a product. I don't want to deal with marketing or irate customers.
What to do?
The approach that plugin-developer Tim Armes has taken has a certain appeal. His freely-available plugins are limited (in his case, to process only 10 photos at a time) so that you can at least try them out. However, by making a donation via PayPal – a donation of any amount you like, whatever you feel the plugin is worth – you can remove the restriction.
A lot of people have been using my plugins freely for a long time, and may feel “cheated” to be suddenly restricted and hit up for registration. Sure, they could do it with just one cent (or whatever PayPal's minimum is), but perhaps even that's more hassle than it's worth for some. Some people might have philosophical issues with it, not wanting to part with even one cent, on principle. I expect that having used my free plugins for so long, some may even feel a sense of entitlement for them. How much of that is my responsibility?
I'd like to hear your comments. If you're a user of one of my plugins, how do you feel about this? What kind of approach would sit well with you, feel reasonable to you? What about if you use more than one plugin, and/or do so on more than one computer?
You can leave a comment on my blog, or via email. Thanks.
(To head off one thing I'm sure some plugin-users will comment on: I'll likely remove plugin expiration, but at the cost of rejecting bug reports that aren't for the most-recent version.)
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I took a ride out to the mountains in the south-west of Kyoto, where I'd not been before. Here's a summary...
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 70 mm — 1/160 sec, f/5, ISO 4500 — map & image data — nearby photos
Bamboo
lots of bamboo
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 48 mm — 1/3200 sec, f/3.2, ISO 200 — map & image data — nearby photos
Trash
striking it rich on a slot machine dumped with lots of other garbage off the side of the road
I'd headed toward a road that looked like it wound up to the top of a mountain that should provide a commanding vista, but it turns out that the road has been closed to public traffic for the last 10 years. The road-closed gate was a perfect spot to dump your trash, apparently, because there was plenty all around. Sigh.
I had another mountain road in mind, but had to dip back into civilization to get to it...
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 24 mm — 1/160 sec, f/5, ISO 640 — map & image data — nearby photos
More Bamboo
( really, there was a lot of bamboo in these mountains )
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 56 mm — 1/500 sec, f/8, ISO 200 — map & image data — nearby photos
Old Farmstead
now encircled by suburbia
(It was very hazy with flat, dull light, and it was difficult to coax any life out of these pictures. This one, in particular, is just dull, but it shows an old, really pleasant Japanese farmstead house and storage building, so here it is.)
When I came across an area with houses like this, strong feelings of nostalgia suddenly washed over me, and I remember that I had been in this area, and on that now-closed road, on my motorcycle in the early 1990s. Twice, I think.
I remember that the second time I took a friend or a date or something, but I don't remember who. I do remember stopping on one of the winding cutbacks that offered a nice view, and chatted with a driver who had also stopped. And I remembered coming into this area of old-style farmsteads.
I was sort of confused for a while by the strong nostalgia, wondering what it was that I was not quite remembering, until I eventually figured out that the memory was simply one of my youth. Fifteen or so years have passed since I last drove this mountain road.... the same me and the same road, but so much has changed. Having needed reading glasses for the first time last week probably has left me somewhat nostalgic for my eyesight.
Anyway, I headed a bit further south, then cut into the mountains on the next road that would take me into them...
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 28 mm — 1/2500 sec, f/7.1, ISO 200 — map & image data — nearby photos
Rural Mountain Farming
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 24 mm — 1/400 sec, f/6.3, ISO 200 — map & image data — nearby photos
House on “Reclaimed” Mountainside
( I'm not sure really what the proper phrase is )
Somewhere along here I realized that the now-closed road to the top of the mountain was/is a dead end, but my memories were descending from it, so I realized that the road I was on now was the one I was on all those years ago.
Nothing at all seemed familiar, though.
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 70 mm — 1/160 sec, f/2.8, ISO 2500 — map & image data — nearby photos
Did I Mention Bamboo?
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 48 mm — 1/160 sec, f/4.5, ISO 320 — map & image data — nearby photos
Stone Thingies
They look sort of like grave markers, but I have the feeling that they're more likely related to something Buddhist
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 26 mm — 1/160 sec, f/10, ISO 5600 — map & image data — nearby photos
Lotsa' Steps Going Up
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 70 mm — 1/160 sec, f/14, ISO 1100 — map & image data — nearby photos
Nice Views
or, at least, they would be on a less-hazy day
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 24 mm — 1/160 sec, f/3.2, ISO 2500 — map & image data — nearby photos
Random Mountain Waterfall
and mini shrine/temple tabernacle-like thing
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 70 mm — 1/160 sec, f/4.5, ISO 2500 — map & image data — nearby photos
Caged Life-Sized Wooden Demon
Unfortunately, I didn't think to throw beans at him
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 24 mm — 1/160 sec, f/4, ISO 400 — map & image data — nearby photos
Lots and Lots of Steps
hundreds of meters of steps
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 58 mm — 1/160 sec, f/10, ISO 320 — map & image data — nearby photos
More Views, More Haze
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 24 mm — 1/160 sec, f/5, ISO 1100 — map & image data — nearby photos
Splendid Vista-Enjoying Tea-Sipping Hut
at least it was long ago
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 26 mm — 1/160 sec, f/8, ISO 1600 — map & image data — nearby photos
Temple Building
on a flat spot carved into the side of the mountain
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 48 mm — 1/160 sec, f/10, ISO 1000 — map & image data — nearby photos
Rain-Gutter Chain Thingy
a lower-cost, lower-maintenance version of this
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 48 mm — 1/160 sec, f/2.8, ISO 560 — map & image data — nearby photos
Last Rays of the Sun
on ceder, I think
( most of the day, I didn't know there was a sun, so it was nice to see some )
It was getting late and the sun was dipping below the top of the mountain (still two hours prior to sunset proper; the mountain is steep) and I was about to head home, but just before I did, I came across the cutback I had remembered stopping at. Nothing else in the mountain seemed familiar at all, but upon leaving the mountain, the view of the old Japanese suburbia again brought nostalgia.
Anyway, heading back down...
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 70 mm — 1/160 sec, f/6.3, ISO 2800 — map & image data — nearby photos
Disturbed Bamboo
A large area of bamboo below the road level was like this, as if a massive flood of water had wreaked havoc with it some time in the not too distant past. There were a lot of streams in these mountains, and the occasional dam, so the flash-flood idea seems reasonable.
And then not too far away...
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 38 mm — 1/250 sec, f/2.8, ISO 200 — map & image data — nearby photos
Series of Dams
The one in the back is massive, but far enough away to look small
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 28 mm — 1/160 sec, f/3.2, ISO 1000 — map & image data — nearby photos
A Touch of Sun
and some kind of tall, straight, segmented grass
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 35 mm — 1/320 sec, f/6.3, ISO 200 — map & image data — nearby photos
Ah, Civilization Again
30 minutes later I was home in downtown Kyoto