Posts in Category: My Photography
Harnessing Depth Maps: Preserving Space and Point of View
Introduction: Editing in the Third Dimension
A photograph is a projection of a 3D world onto a 2D plane. When we edit, we often focus on color and luminance, neglecting the image’s inherent depth. This doesn’t just remove spatial cues—it can fundamentally ruin the camera’s original point of view and the feeling of space.
The goal of using a depth map is not just to create 3D-looking effects, but to respect and enhance the spatial relationships that make a photograph feel immersive. It’s about the feeling of light entering a space, of atmosphere receding into the distance, and of the viewer understanding their position relative to the scene.
A depth map is a grayscale image that estimates the relative distance of every pixel from the camera. This “luminosity map of distance” becomes a powerful tool for applying edits that reinforce, rather than flatten, the scene’s three-dimensionality.
The Artistic Application – It’s About Feeling
The technical steps serve an artistic goal: preserving and enhancing the photograph’s spatial integrity.
- Atmospheric Perspective: use to add a soft, blue-white haze to distant areas. This mimics how light scatters through the atmosphere, making the scene feel deep and vast.
- Foreground Relighting: Use to punch a beam of light through a forest canopy. The depth map ensures the light correctly falls on the path behind the trees, not on the trees themselves, creating that magical “light entering a space” effect.
- Point of View Protection: When dodging and burning, using a depth-aware mask prevents you from accidentally brightening a distant mountain as if it were a foreground rock, which would confuse the scene’s perspective.
- Quick masking: Many times the subject is separated from the surrounding by depth allowing a detailed mask of the subject to be made from the depth map.
Combined they can establish the overall depth of the scene, then add a dramatic spotlight to create a focal point that guides the viewer through the space you’ve defined.
Conclusion
Using depth maps is not about gimmicky 3D effects. It is the key to responsible editing that honors the original scene’s spatial relationships. By using these methods—the dynamic control group for broad adjustments and the depth-masked spotlight for precise lighting—you move beyond correcting a flat image to actively sculpting the light and atmosphere within a three-dimensional space, preserving and enhancing the very feeling that made you press the shutter.
Note: the examples below are fairly simple only illustrating a small number of possible uses.
This first example is a straight forward relight, selecting depth by using a luminosity mask on the depthmap. In this case the mainlight is behind the trees. A depth map makes short work of masking the areas into 3 areas: In front of the trees, behind the trees, and the far end of the path
I am using a 16bit depth map instead of the common 8 bit as this allow a finer adjustment, especial in the far distance like the sky and the far end of the path. An 8bit map has poor granularity. To run the program and output the 16bit depthmaps on my windows desktop I modified DepthAnythingAC on github.
This next example adds motion blur to the depthmap allowing it to closely simulate sunlight illumination streaming through the tree branches from the right hand side.
Deblur
Deblurring should not be confused with sharpening. Main cause of blur is out of focus or motion of the camera or the subject. Other causes could be weather such as rain or mist. A debur algorithm attempts to reverse engineer the blurred image. AI image enhancements can look good but it usually replaces blurred features in an image with made-up information, not a good thing if you are trying to read a license plate from a satellite image. In the case of my favorite chicken above notice the slight blemish at the bottom of the eye and the complicated structure around the base of the beak. Standard AI enhancements tend to smooth out these areas making them almost cartoonish (definitely not real-life). Algorithmic deblur image enhancements also have to make assumptions but the transformation is basically mathematic. Modern methods also use AI methods with the object to get a best fit algorithmically rather than nearest fit to an AI database of birds parts (I know an oversimplification). I used this model and only on the head.
Moved Uptown without a Downtown
Big to Small
Must have been prescience as just before covid I move from Toronto up to Lake Simcoe. Most difficult was the lack of places for doing street photography. Lots of pretty sunsets, birds and mushrooms, and a town that has an uptown but no down town.
Note On Scanning Black and White Negatives With Epson V500 Using The Individul Gain Setting In Vuescan
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| With R, G, B gains set as below with the scan imported into Lightroom and using a custom colour profile |
A recent release of Vuescan has new functionality of be able to use individual gain setting:
This allows me make a DNG output scan with each of the RGB channels having different gains.This has been an extension of the single image (hdr) techniques mentioned at the bottom of this introduction to the Epson V500.
Note that depending on the scanner under inspection with the gains being equal one of the RGB channels might be cleaner or have better resolution. One might best use this as the channel with the middle gain.
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Same as above plus color has been flattened back to Black and White
Mamiya C220 80mm f2.8 TMAX 400 Film D76 1:1 10 minutes 22c |
So You Have Just Brought A New Camera – Health Care For The Undead
So you have just brought a new camera, consider it as a wake up call that we are mostly mindless consumers of things that we are made to think we need or should desire to own. With the commercialization of social media the brainwashing is almost complete. This is neither a good or bad thing it’s just the reality as it is now.
So you have your: {first; new; cheap; free; expensive; fantastic;shiny; retro… cell; film; consumer; dslr; rangefinder; pro; (2/3rds, c, full frame) and/or …} camera so what now? Each one of those cameras as sure as you breath is capable of taking a picture that in the right hands could be a masterpiece.
Now that this new camera is in your hands it’s time to stop for at least a short while being a mindless consumer of photography goods and services and instead learn to take better photographs! To that aim if you haven’t already you may want to evaluate or re-evaluate what your own development goals are and alter your current path to a direction that might result in you achieving those goals.
If it turns out that you just want a shiny new toy then that’s OK. But if you don’t use your brain to effect changes in the way you take photographs then you shouldn’t expect any changes in the results.
Mom: “You haven’t eaten your meat yet.”
Son: “But mom!”
Mom: “Son, you know that: ‘If you don’t eat yer meat, you can’t have any pudding. How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat yer meat?”
Son: “Don’t be quoting Pink Floyd on me again…
Hansa 135mm f3.2 Lens
I have this Hansa 135mm f3.2 lens. Made in Japan it came with an adapter to fit on my Nikon. I bought it for a few dollars attached to a Nikor closeup bellows. Not a bad little performer. Notice the 2 rings at the top. Those are for “stop down metering”. I suspect one should lock so you can preset aperture and then open up for focusing but doesn’t lock. The lightly coated optics are very clean and clear. With a 16 or 17 rounded aperture blades should mean nice out of focus highlights.
The origin of the lens is veiled in the mists of time. Some say they were made for Hansa Japan rebranded from another still to be determined Japanese lens manufacture maybe Cosina. Others say it might be a house brand for Hansa Foto in Cologne. Another even remoter idea is that it was a Nikkor lens made for Hanson Canon imported into the USA under the Hansa name.
Once you get use to the stop down aperture control it is a nice little performer.
Cellphonography Love/Hate Relationship
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| Digitally Monitoring The World |
The things I hate about my cell phone camera:
- Poor Optics
- Glare
- Poor image quality
- Many too many Pixels for the resolution
- Shutter,Timing and Focus Uncertainty: STFU and take the shot now!
- Results only look good if printed small
- Fixed wide angle view of the world
- No bokeh
- Strange motion artifacts
- Weird HDTV aspect ratio
- The awkward ergonomics for photography
- The tacky fake special effects and instant post processing
- Instant posting of images many which I will regret in the morning
The things I love about my cell phone camera
All of the above!
A Note On Long Exposures, Reciprocity Failure For Kodak Ektar And City Night Shooting
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| Kodak Ektar |
City Streets At Night
Reciprocity
Without going into the The Gurney-Mott Theory or subsequent rewrites the standard characteristic curves can be used to accurately predict how much compensation is needed for what part of the image. Of course you have to do conversions to put it in terms that you can use it on the different zones of your image.. When you do long exposures you are effectively working in the lower part of the curve how much of the image and by how much depends on where each zone lies on the curve and where you want it to end up in terms of density.
Reciprocity Failure For Ektar (1)
metered time — adjusted time
1 —————– 1.4
2 —————– 2.9
4 —————– 6.3
8 —————– 14.1
15 —————– 29.7
30 —————– 68.4
60 —————– 159.0
90 —————– 261.2
120 —————– 371.7
240 —————– 871.5
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| Toronto Nights Old Style 10 second exposure at f11 in a 1953 Kodak Retina IIa Efke KB21 Expired April 1977 |
First Look A Day With The Sony ZL Cameraphone
I had to replace my old Motorola cell phone because of planned obsolescence as it decided to go crazy and send a continuous stream of empty text message to the first land line on my contact list (sorry about that).
I replaced it with a Sony Zl “smartphone” The camera is 13 megapixels, sigh now we have got that out of the way on to important things. The screen is ultra high resolution with a more natural colour rendition which makes what you see more of a what you get then most of the flashy high saturation tablet/smartphones.
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| Portrait Aspect Ratio Of The Screen |
Interesting aspect ratio in portrait mode if you tire of the normal 4:3 of a DSLR
The camera has many creative modes that differ from the normal after the fact as you adjust them by touching the screen before you take the shot and not in post. This I find even if the mode is sort of gimmicky (like the image below) it makes me think more about the composition before I take the shot.
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| Sketch Mode |
Actual like the selective colour mode even though normally I’m not a big fan of doing it after the fact. You select the colour by using your finger tip to brush in the colour before you take the photo.
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| Selective Colour Orange |
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| Selective Colour Orange |
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| Selective Colour Red |
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| Selective Colour Blue |
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| B&W Mode |
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| Kaleidoscope Mode Is Amusing |
The next three were taken with a deep red Infrared filter held over the lens. Infrared sensitivity with the new sensors is not as good as the older less sophisticated sensors.
Automatic in camera HDR mode works as long as the subject doesn’t move. Normally either the top would be blown out or the bottom would be too dark
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| Late bloomer: this 75 years old agave americana at Allen Gardens Toronto blooms once and then dies. |
On the fly hand panoramics are also an interesting feature except when as in this case there is a moving object.
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| Stretch Limo Pano |
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| Using the smile detector function to fire the shutter seems to be a failure! |
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| Closeup where is the beauty mode when you need it? |
- Shoot in burst mode
- Drop shots in MS Movie Maker (free)
- Set zero inter frame transition time
- Set duration of every photo 0.1 seconds
- Make a short movie clip
- Drop movie into Microsoft Research Cliplets (free)
- Fool around in Cliplets
- Export final product
- Have fun driving people crazy
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| A Vilk Trying To Fly |
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| What I saw |
Because I shoot mainly medium format film I use a lightmeter so as a possible travel light replacement I tested many of the android light meters apps and ended up with this one play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dq.fotometroNa
From 1 ev to bright sunlight both in incidence and reflective mode it was within 1/2 of a stop when checked against 2 different Gossen meters plus a Nikon and Canon film camera.
The accuracy IMHO has a lot to do with what model of cell phone you have yet some software was clearly better than other software. The spotmeter function is quite useful.
Silver Alchemy – Xtol Plus Rodinal Part II
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| Overheard on the street: “My dad say I should remarry him” Kodak Tri-x developed 5min. Xtol 1:2 and then 4 min. Xtol 1:2 + Rodinal 1:115 25c |
This is a short update on my original article of adding Rodinal to Xtol. I have been adding Rodinal to Xtol to good effect since 2010.
So why change now? With a purchase of a higher resolution 35mm scanner I’m finding that I want even more control both of the grain and of the compensation in the shadow areas. While I can do it by controlling the ratio of Rodinal to Xtol it becomes a bit tricky to manage all parameters especially when it comes to temperature compensation.
In the last few months through a series of experiments I have come up with this variation on my original method which gives both good results and fine control.
Set up the dilution ratio of Xtol as normal. I try to keep the normal developing times between 7 to no more than 16 minutes. For the last 4 minutes I pour the xtol into a container that has had rodinal added, then pour it back onto the film and then develop the remaining 4 minutes.
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| Mohawk In Support Of Maggie’s: The Toronto Sex Workers Action Project Same roll as above |
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| Still Mine Kodak Kodak TMAX 400 developed: 5min. Xtol 1:1.125 and 4 min. Xtol 1:1.125 + Rodinal 1:115 at 22c |
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| Fresh Air Fomapan Action 200 developed: 5min. Xtol 1:1.125 and 4 min. Xtol 1:1.125 + Rodinal 1:115 at 20c |