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Color vision in our primeval brain helped us to survive, to avoid getting eaten, to identify which animals and plants are edible and which are poisonous, we even used color to help find a suitable mate for reproduction.

No wonder from a young age we are attracted to bright colors. My theory is that when we have a choice of similar images to select from we are pulled to the brightest most colorful images first.

I have gathered a small amount of web statistic data that seem to prove out my rather simplistic theory.

If you want to be part of the experiment then please click-on and enlarge the image that you are first or most attracted to. Yes I know the results are skewed by the experimental setup.

The image on the left is by far the brightest and most colorful of the series. I was trying for a lomo color flash like effect. Darkened edges and saturated and brightened yellows and blues. The effect is not unpleasant but the basic content is the same in all 3 images.

Your mission this weekend is to photograph things that are framed by other elements in the picture. It is up to you to find your primary subject and make sure it is framed by its surroundings. This exercise will help you train your eye and ultimately better your composition skills.

As always there’s restrictions to this challenge and they are as follows:

• No Cropping – you have to find the framed subject before taking the picture, not afterwards on your computer screen.

• Subject must be completely framed all around but not necessarily by the same object.

It’s open themed so you can shoot whatever you want, so long as it’s framed and follows the restrictions above…

Ryan Tacay

My response

The above photograph is all frames, five frames to be precise. This shot only works because I remembered the Flash Fill Challenge. The rest of the shoot

This weeks challenge was to take low or high angle shots but because my knees are shot most of my challenge shots were taken standing looking up high or sitting on the pavement. The location was Little Italy which is a strip of Italian restaurants on College St. West, the neighborhood now days is pretty ethnically still with a fair proportion of Italians. Best calamari at any TPMG event so far.

The picture above was taken after dinner and had to have the signs selectively darkened to show the color better. Rest of the Little Italy pictures

Final after almost 2 weeks of waiting my Canon 500D close-up lens arrived from Hong Kong. I shouldn’t complain the cost was much lower then I could have brought it locally. With the money I saved I also brought a RC1 remote and a lenspen. I broke even on the lenspen, later found out they are made in Canada so they should actually be less expensive here.

The 500D screws on to the end of my 100mm f2.0 prime lens just like a filter. What it does is to allow you to get much closer to your subject. My 100mm has a minimum focal length of 0.9m with the close-up lens I can move in closer with expanding the object size in the image by about 270%. There are negligible loses in resolution and f stop when compared to placing an extension on the body camera. Also unlike using an extension the auto-focus still works correctly. Downside it only works on one size of lens diameter in this case it is a 58mm.

The kit 18-55 mm lens allows you to get within .28 meters which is at the full 55m zoom actually about the same magnification as the 100mm with the 500D but the quality is not nearly as good and .28 mm is too close a working distance.

If you are using your built in flash remember to remove the lens hood to prevent it from casting a shadow on the subject.

I can’t wait to get up and close with nature!

See a comparison with and without the 500D lens

I missed last week’s symmetry challenged so I combined it with this week’s flash-fill challenge.

Two Halfs Make a Hole (mirror symmetry)

Mellow Yellow (angular symmetry)

This is the closest to multi-scale symmetry (related to fractals) Example: where magnified shape of the edge of the beach looks similar to the beach shoreline, looks similar to … the coast line. This type of symmetry really interests me but my close up lens hadn’t arrived yet so I could not capture it down to the degree I would have liked to get.

What Sheep Look At (mirror symmetry)

Harvest is Near (fractal symmetry)

Window Into the Past (obvious symmetry)

Some Pictures from this photographic shoot

With all the city lights this 100mm @ f2.2 ISO 200 with a 15 Second exposure appears to be shot at midday not as it was 1 hour after sunset. A plane flying by looks like a film scratch.

So the question of the day is why shoot raw? Some reasons not to shot raw: The file is at least 3 times the size. Your computer has to have more memory and power and disk space. Up to recently MS XP needed a special viewer. Extra steps are needed to process the photos. You need to learn more software. It usually at the end is changed to JPEG format anyway.

Up to last Sunday my laptop was just too old and too short of resources to use Raw. How old? NT OS and no USB port that’s how old. Saturday evening it was working. But on Sunday morning the hard drive was going ping ping ping … The usual fix of rebooting and rebooting just resulted in an system error. More drastic methods such as turning it over and shaking (gently) resulted in the screen blinking off and on. Oh well its only money and a new this time a desktop is almost ready to go. After spending 8 hours loading all my legal software and extra drivers, updating XP security flaws and dumping all those special promotional 6o day free software, then the system crashed while removing the after market firewall and using the XP firewall. I hate bloatware plus I hate MS even though I use it. Anyway the system self repaired by reloading itself over all the updated drivers and such. Shades of the 3 week ordeal of loading MS NT on a “NT compliant IBM laptop”. Know only one thing not working and a call to Tech support who if I had followed their instructions would have resulted in the foot being healed and the leg being amputated( I have the log to prove it). Fortunately by not following all their instructions to the letter I removed another usless piece of the manufacturer’s software and XP has been working reliably for 4 days now.

So now I have 500 meg of memory, 200 geg hard drive, two dvd/cd read/write drives, plus a cd read only, multiple usb and flash card readers … and a NEC LCD 17″ monitors that is so clear that I am looking at a color slide projector makes my old monitor seem like I was looking through coke bottles, not to mention stereo speakers that make noises for no apparent reason.

MS is actually fully supporting RAW in the future. Presently you can download Microsoft’s Raw Image and Thumbnailer Viewer. So now I am ready for Raw. Oh yes had to go down to the Toronto Beaches to supplement my current collection of 4 Raw shots.

A bit of correction makes it look closer to sunset but we lose the fine details of the waves lapping on the rocks.

There is really only one reason to use Raw; its because its the purest form of image that your current camera electronics and software will allow you to record! From when the light hits the lens (maybe before if you are using flash) to when the image shows up on your desktop there are a series of compromises in the signal chain. After the lens the sensor is the first big compromise.

The sensor is the point where the light falling on a pixel is transformed into electrons and accumulated usually as a charge and then read out as a voltage or current. We all know that a image is broken down into pixels but at the sensor each pixel is actually 3 pixels one each with a red, green and blue filter (rgb). Just imagine if we could buy a 24 meg B&W rebel xt, well it would be easy if there were a demand! Because each pixel is broken up into 3 sub pixels the sensor loses 2/3 of the light following on it. Each pixel in the sensor does not have exactly the same sensitivity of it neigbour. Both reducing the noise and the variation of sensitivity between pixels are areas that sensor manufacturers are hard at work trying to improve. On long exposures you might notice a few bright pixels, these are caused by pixels that leak current.

The output from each sub pixel is accessed (read out) is amplified by variable gain amplifier and then converted to a digital number. This number has a precision of x = 10 to 14 bits with a noise level of plus or minus y bits. This noise level is roughly speaking the sum of sensor noise, readout noise, amplifier noise multiplied by the gain of the variable gain amplifier. The gain of the amplifier will increase with ISO setting thus increasing ISO will increases noise.

Patience I have almost got to the RAW part. In the mean time you read this much more complete discussion on RAW from The Luminous Landscape. The camera software takes those x bits per sub pixel and applies some corrections which only the camera software has control over. Next it takes the user selections which includes color conversions, sharpening and lastly output format.

If you select Raw you can bypass all these changes to you image it is important to turn off any spatial filtering (in Canon rebel XT select parameters menu item parameter 2 to turn off filtering) The complete image will now be saved without any additional lose of detail and color information.

If you select JPEG all sorts of spatial and color detail will be lost plus some unwanted artifacts will be added. With JPEG the 3 x bit sub pixal values will be remapped into 3 8-bit bytes using the selected RGB color space. The jpeg compression algorithm will futher mix up the image in subtle spatial ways. Once these spatial details are changed and colors remapped information is lost that can’t be recovered!

If you are shooting for the web JPEG is fine but if the work is more important then use RAW that way you can process the images over and over again. As you get newer, better tool you will always have the highest quality original to work from. For anything other then web you should also always work in 48 bit color or 16 bit B&W. Noise filtering and sharpening should be the last step before saving the image in the color format that you are going to be using for printing. In that way you will never lose precision through arithmetic truncation on 24 bit color 8 bit B&W images.

Too bad I focused on the backdrop instead of the pier.

This motion blur unlike the images in previous posting does not give a feeling of motion but gives a ghosting effect. Too bad they are not in white.

As you can see in the image above I am still getting use to the work flow and tool set. I use Raw Shooters Essentials 2005 as my Raw processing package. I find its much easier to use and has a better work flow then Canon’s Raw software that came with the camera. People in the know say its one of the best if not the best. Excellent package and so far its free! For the rest I use Picture Window Pro less expensive, not as sophisticated and not as complicated to learn as Photoshop, their website is a very good resource for all things digital photography and color profiles.

One last thing about Raw there has been a call to standardize Raw format, IMHO this will be slow coming, standardized Raw format is almost an oxymoron the whole Idead of Raw is to give the camera owner ability to access the image before it is polluted by layers of conversion software. They may end up standardizing part of raw format but not the manufacturer specific part.

Notes:

1. MS raw viewer has a problem with large tiff and some avi files, it locks them and will not unlock them so you can’t move or edit them best to dis the tiff viewing function until the next version comes out O well its from MS next generation will be better I hope.
2. Google has a free program called Picasa which does a nice job of finding, html slide shows, backing up and organizing you photos

Most of older Toronto was built from bricks out of this huge derelict factory located at the base of the Bayview extension in the Don Valley. Evergreen has big plans to redevelop the property while keeping the character of the structure. Some more of my Brickworks Photos

This last Sunday the TPMG went to the CNE with a challenge for the day. As I replied to the posted challenge I choose to loosely interpret plaid as a color 🙂 Some more of my photos shot for the challenge.

Challenge by: Ryan Tacay

“In collaboration with the upcoming event at the CNE this Sunday, I’ve put together another challenge for you guys to participate in. If you choose to accept, your mission this weekend is “The Creative Colour Challenge”. In this challenge you will pick a colour of choice and during the event, hunt for shots that display your chosen colour only. Of course there are certain restrictions to make things a bit harder for you so, here are the rules:

1. You can only use one lens during this challenge – focal lengths, aperture etc. can change but you must choose your lens of choice and stick with it.

2. You have to fill your frame with at least 80% of your chosen colour. None of this, “I choose blue and the sky in the background is blue” stuff lol.

3. Whatever colour you pick, you must stick with for the duration of the day – no switching colours mid-way through or jumping between 2 colours just because it presents itself there at your convenience. The point is to move around and hunt so let’s get going and work up an appetite ’cause you know we’ll be eating again at the end of the day. ;)”

Do we all see colors the same way? The simple answer is no, otherwise why would some people dress in such awful colors. This is not to imply there is anything wrong with the colors of the clothes on this Wards Island clothesline. We also know that some people have various levels of color blindness making it difficult for them to differentiate between colors.

There is often confusion between what we know as color because we can see it with our eyes and the scientific description of color being the wavelength of light in the visible spectrum somewhere in between the short wavelength near-ultraviolet and long near-infrared wavelengths. If a prism was used to split up sunlight the resulting spectrum would look like the diagram below. If we had a light meter to measure the intensity of the light along the x-axis (= wavelength) we would have a spectrometer. The spectrum of the sun is wideband as the sun has light at all wavelengths. If you could look even closer at spectrum you would see very fine peaks and valleys of intensities this is called the fine line spectrum caused by some element of the sun emmitting light. Many sources of man made light but excluding the the good old incandescent light bulb are narrow band emitters having just a few narrow lines in their spectrum, devices such as lasers may have only one narrow line.

What does this have to do with how we see colors, actually very little. Unlike our ears where we can hear minute differences in frequency (1/wavelength), intensity (volume), in pronunciation and in enunciation (sound envelope) our eyes were not designed for such subtle distinction.

Eyes can only detect 3 wide overlapping frequency bands, our brain merges these inputs together to form our perception of color. These 3 bands as every artist knows are the reflective primary colors of red green blue (RGB). The eye can’t distinguish between a yellow light and mixed red and green lights. But for the mixed red and green light a spectrum analyser would not measure any yellow! The red and green will not pass through a yellow while the true yellow wavelength light will pass right through. To our eye there are millions of ways to form the same shades of yellow. The brain interprets the colors that eye sees in ways that help us deal and make sense of the environment, the colors and color intensities are relative to the surrounding. A red box surrounded by blue will look to be a different shade when it is surrounds by green. Also the brain interprets colors seperate from outlines. We all know that the brain doesn’t care if we color the box and go outside the lines, the box will still look red.

To end this long winded discussion IMHO there is no way that it is possible for each of us to see colors exactly the same way. Also as we don’t reproduce colors using the real spectrum of light but instead use an imitation of our own visual system all media will look different from the original scene and also look different to each individual.