tom_mann1

FWIW, the reason I didn't suggest desaturation in PP was because the OP said he was doing a book, so that probably meant he had, at minimum, several dozen pix to process. If he globally desaturated yellows in PP, even just a narrow band of them, my guess is that this would have had the unwanted side-effect of also changing the saturation of skin tones, some hair, etc. To prevent this, he would have had to select the yellow clothing in each image, a potentially time consuming operation with this many pix to do. OTOH, if switching from flash to tungsten illumination works as I expect, it would selectively reduce the yellows caused by fluorescence, but not touch "normal" (ie, reflective) yellows such as skin, hair, etc., thereby potentiallly saving him quite a bit of time manually selecting the shirts in each image. My guess is that the reduction in fluorescent yellow would look much the same one would get by having the subjects wear old or faded tops, just not so grungy looking, and no change whatsoever (if properly white balanced) to the yellow components of skin, blond hair, etc. Just my $0.02, Tom M PS - This question is intriguing -- I going to try to hunt down some yellow fluorescent items and see if my theory works.

Excellent point, Matt. Not blowing any channel is fundamental to almost any type of photography. +1 Tom M

Although I've never run into this problem myself, my thought is that if the dye used in the garment is truly fluorescing, then there will be a maximum wavlength, such that if it is illuminated with light of any longer wavelength, it will not fluoresce, and hence appear much less bright to both the camera and the eye. This suggests that you may want to perform and experiment in which you first illuminate a sample of the problematic fabric with household tungsten illumination (ie, containing very limited amounts of short wavelength blue and UV radiation), and then correct the WB as apropriate for that color temperature. The results of this should be compared to illuminatijng the same fabric with a conventional flash (which contains lots of blues and UV), with the camera WB set to daylight or flash. If fluorescence is a major contributor to the color, you should see a big difference in how vivid the fabric appears in the two experiments, and you may have a workable solution to your problem. However, if fluorescence is a minor contributor in this paricular fabric, and conventional, non-fluorescing pigments are the main source of color, there should be little diffference between the two tests. Anyone whose work involves fluorescence microscopy (ie, for biology) will be able to verify the importance of the excitation wavelength in their imaging studies. For example, compare the excitation and fluorescence spectra of the very common yellow dye, fluorescein: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorescein Anyway, I've never performed such an experiment in the context of clothing dyes and photography, but it's easy enough to give it a try. Tom M

Just checking -- you aren't concerned about the retro-reflective properties of the yellow vests and other clothing typically worn by emergency services personnel, are you ... just the bright yellow itself, right? Tom M

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My guess is something like this: http://t.homedepot.com/p/Workforce-500-Watt-Halogen-Portable-Work-Light-509-953/202071325 Tom M .

<p>After decades of taking landscapes, city-scapes, sunsets, flowers, bugs, dogs, cats, etc. I've experienced exactly the same concern as the OP.</p> <p>Many of the above posts have taken a broad view of this issue. I'm simply going to tell you how I personally solved that problem, and what presently turns me on.</p> <p>My solution has been to take pictures of events and "things" for which pix on the web simply doesn't, and maybe can't exist. My interest level goes up one more notch if someone else is paying me for the photographing something in one of the above categories.</p> <p>Probably the most popular form of photography, snaps of family and friends falls right into the above category -- no one else is likely to take such pix, certainly not at the level people on this forum can take them. I don't feel the least bad about stating that I think this most humble form of photography is a very worthwhile and important activity.</p> <p>The same goes for pictures of my students and student teams, unique equipment produced by my students, tests of such equipment, etc. Quite of few of these pix have been published and had world-wide distribution.</p> <p>I also have become one of the official photographers for my county's fire and emergency services organization. This gives me access to events and gear that few others have. Some of these shots might be considered completely mundane (eg, we're selling an old ambulance and want to get the best price for it, so could you come over and take a few nice photos), but this doesn't bother me in the least, either, because *somebody* wants the shot and it will benefit an organization. Other tasks for them are at the opposite end of the spectrum, eg, a request to photograph a deeply emotional private memorial service for fallen fire and EMS personnel. You can't find these on the web, either.</p> <p>So, to the OP, I would say that maybe what's troubling you (as it did me) is lack of unique subject matter. If so, think about how you might find it.</p> <p>Just my $0.02,</p> <p>Tom M</p>

<p>Thank you very much for posting that link, Christopher.</p> <p>I just shared it with the VFD that my EMT daughter and I are members of. I'm sure many of our guys and gals will enjoy it, especially the many old-timers who have a strong sense of the history of this profession.</p> <p>It turns out that just a couple of days ago, I was doing an equipment shoot at a neighboring firehouse that was built in 1903 and got a great tour of their photo collection, many of which date back to the early 1900s. A lot of them are in pretty bad shape, so I'm going to talk to the Chief there and see if he would like to have them scanned, archived, and time permitting, partially restored.</p> <p>Regards,</p> <p>Tom M</p> <p>PS - I'm in the Washington, DC area.</p> <p> </p>

<p>Baffling is a major design aspect of any reasonably high performance optical system ranging from X-ray to IR astronomical telescopes, microscopes, etc. The necessity for good control of stray light has been known since shortly after the discovery of the first microscopes and telescopes centuries ago, and papers on baffling still appear regularly in optical design design journals and conferences. A good part of my career was spent doing the design of IR systems for physics research.</p> <p>IMHO, for Nikon to let a system like this out the door tells me that they did a poor / incomplete job on it's optical design. IMO, they really fell down on the job. To me, it *is* a big deal, because the standard in the industry for stray light suppression in camera bodies has long been much higher than this. </p> <p>I shouldn't have to use this particular camera body in a way different from the way I would use any other modern camera body. If I want to shoot with the sun a reasonable distance out of the frame, I should be able to do so without having to remember to treat this body specially. Also, if I had been the person who posted a report on this, I certainly would not like to be told to "stop looking for problems and just go out and take pix".</p> <p>If I had just spent $2k and was now dealing with a body that probably has worse stray light suppression than the Nikon F I used in the 1960's, I would have every right to be upset.</p> <p>Tom M</p> <p> </p>

Fluorescent lights turn on and off at twice the mains frequency, so if a relatively short (say, under 1/125th of a sec) exposure occurs at the peak of current through the tube, you will get more of a green cast than if the exposure occurs at the minimum. This also is a very common problem when shooting sports at night under Hg, Na and other types of high power lights. A work around is to shoot at slower speeds. At least then, you'll get consistency, but if you go too slow, you might get motion blur. Tom M

I just did almost exactly the same thing when shooting a recruitment poster for firemen. I had to light two large fire trucks parked end to end with a space between them to put the logo / badge of the county fire service. The only difference from what you proposed was that I wanted to see things from the camera position to make sure I was getting full coverage, no bad reflections from the shiny parts of the trucks, nobody was wandering through the set, etc. I found that doing it this way (ie, instead of wandering around myself) is always a better approach. I controlled the camera, and my assistant carried an sb-910 on a tall light pole. I had one Pocket Wizard TT5 on the camera hotshoe, and a second TT5 under the remote flash. I used a walkie-talkie to tell her where to stand, how to angle the flash, etc. Typically, she was about 50 - 75 yards away. The TT5's worked flawlessly, but probably any good quality RF trigger would work as well outside, at that relatively short range. Like you, I composited the images aftter the fact. The process worked beautifully. HTH, Tom M

<p>To make the comparison with a daytime photo easier, I tried a little experiment: I cut out the foreground (ie, building, ground, hills, etc.) brightened it up, and slightly cooled it. I then composited in a photo of clouds taken in the daytime. Finally, as suggested by Tim, played with the contrast of the foreground objects. Attached below is one version where I increased the foreground contrast.</p> <p>My impression is that even with the tweaks mentioned above, the photo still does not look like it was captured "naturally" in the daytime. To me, what grabs my attention (in a negative way) is that the left side wall is too red (ie, instead of classic blue "open shade"), and, as Tim said, too bright (even with after increasing the contrast as described above).</p> <p>That being said, I don't think the original looks like a naturally lit moonlight photo, either. The brightness of the LH wall is too bright for a night-time shot, just as much as it would be for a daytime shot. In addition, the color balance of the non-sky areas looks somewhat too warm.</p> <p>Interesting discussion, guys.</p> <p>Tom M</p><div></div>

<p>Tim_L: <em>"...Moonlight offers a diffused type of nightlight ..."</em></p> <p>Hi Tim - I often hear this said, but I don't agree. The (angular) size of the moon is almost exactly the (angular) size of the sun -- that's why we can have total eclipses. So, on a clear night, why should moonlight be any more diffuse than a sunlit scene under the same weather conditions.</p> <p>The only reason I can think that might make one think moonlight is more diffuse is if the moon is not full and there is a substantial amount of sky glow, say, from the lights of a nearby city. However, that's more like fill light, not a truly diffuse main light source.</p> <p>Tom M</p> <p> </p>

<p>OP: <em>"...I forgot to mention that I use an external flash on the camera that I usually move in different positions to try to get the best shot..."</em><br> This is a great first step, but I don't see much evidence in the photo that you posted that your flash made the foreground as bright as, or even a bit brighter than the background. If it had done this, you would have been able to reduce the overall exposure. Then, the sky and rest of the background would have picked up more detail, but the subjects would have been properly exposed.</p> <p>I am not familiar with the controls on that camera, but for many other cameras, the flash is typically adjusted to be about "one stop down" (plus or minus a lot - adjust to taste) from the main exposure. If you did not explicitly make such an adjustment, chances are that doing so will make your picture more like what you want. </p> <p>Also, read your instruction manual carefully: To separately adjust the flash power and main exposure, one usually has to set the camera in a mode that allows this, certainly not full automatic. I don't know what this mode is called on your camera, but on other cameras it often has a name such as "balanced fill flash".</p> <p>Once you have this technique down, you may notice that the lighting from your on-camera flash looks a bit harsh and not very flattering. At this point, you should read up on more advanced techniques, eg, off-camera flash, use of softboxes, multiple flashes, etc.</p> <p><br />HTH,</p> <p>Tom M</p>

<p>One has to be careful to distinguish between JPG compression artifacts (ie, blocky looking), and quantization artifacts (ie, smoother, band like structures due to inadequate bit depth). To me, the artifacts that the OP is concerned about are clearly the latter. </p> <p>Also, re Chris' comments on Norbert's recommendation to down-rez by doing multiple intermediate size steps, letting the JPG algorithm run over it more often, I completely agree with Chris. </p> <p>Down-rez'ing by multiple intermediate size steps was a popular technique about a decade ago. Some folks (...the Luminous Landscape crowd?) offered their own actions and software to do this. However, since then, there have been numerous experiments performed to compare it to various single-step techniques, and the consensus has been that multiple steps almost always is inferior to modern single step resampling techniques such as PS's bicubic followed by a bit of sharpening. The issue is essentially settled, so one rarely hears about multiple step techniques anymore.</p> <p>What I read as the second part of Norbert's proposal (multiple JPG compressions) is absolutely and clearly bad advice. By doing a jpg save and re-open at each down-rez'ing step, one is guaranteed to effectively add the JPG compression artifacts introduced at each step, the exact opposite of preserving detail. If anyone has any doubt about this, it's trivial to perform one's own test to verify this, but I, for one, see no need to do so.</p> <p>Tom M</p> <p> </p>

Also, a couple of (obvious) things to pay attention to is whether or not the individual pieces of the mosaic lay flat or are all are intentionally embedded intentionally at slightly different angles, and, if these are ceramic or other reflective material, and have a glaze or they are matte. FWIW, ever since I had to shoot two fire trucks at night (... lots of glints) for an recruiting shot, I've become a huge fan of the flexibility of the separate layers approach. One can, of course, do each individual shot with whatever lights are most appropriate. Tom M

Another approach is to take a half dozen or more different shots of the item using only one light, but moving the light (but not the camera or object) between shots. Load all the shots into separate layers in PS with layer masks. Next, you go through the layers one by one, and paint out the bad specular reflections in each layer mask. The final step is to set the blending mode of all layers except the 1st to "lighten". The net result should be pretty close to a nice, glint-free version of the item. The shadows around each of the mosaic pieces may be flattened too much by this technique, but a bit of tweaking of the layer opacities usually gets rid of this and restores three dimensionality. Tom M

IMHO, for most common photographic subjects (eg, family snaps, landscapes, art photography, street, situations where the lighting is not under your control, etc.), there is no single best color balance. Not only are the best colors subjective, but there are often different color casts in different areas of the image, as well as different color casts in the brights, the mids, and the shadow areas. In fact, for the best visual / psychological effect of the image, one rarely wants true color accuracy. However, for some very important technical uses of photography (eg, copying /reproduction work, advertising, etc.), it's critically important that the colors that the final viewer sees match the original item as closely as possible. In these cases, the original often is available for comparison. In addition, the photographer will have stable, color calibrated lights, a color neutral studio environment, a profiled camera, etc., and even with all of these precautions, will still include a shot of something like a McBeth color checker chart anytime any one of the above things changes. Comparison of the final rendition of the color checker with its known values provides the basis for final, hopefully small, color ttweaks. Tom M

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<p>I'm not familiar with that particular projector, but if it has no other electrical inputs, I would hazard a guess that just maybe it powers the motor and the light. ;-)</p> <p>Tom M</p>

There are many programs that can do what you want. However, no matter which program you use, be absolutely sure you are clear on the difference between cropping a 1000x800 pixel area out of a larger image (say, 2000x1600 pixels) versus resizing the larger image down to the desired pixel dimensions. In the first case, you are removing parts of the image. In the 2nd case, the new image will show the entire area of the original image, just at lower resolution. You wouldn't believe how much confusion this distinction causes, and the concept is used in all image editors. As Alan suggested, Irfanview works, as does the editor supplied by the mfgr of your camera, as does Google's free program, Picasa and many, many others. HTH, Tom M

<p>RJ: <em>"...The Bokeh looks pleasant enough to me, but surely it would be better, compositionally, to avoid those distracting white blobs altogether..."</em></p> <p>To give me a quick and dirty idea of the point spread function of a lens, I prefer a frame brimming over with in- and OOF Christmas lights, but personally, instead of waiting for Christmas to roll around, LOL, I'm quite happy that the OP found the best thing easily available right now, light filtering through leaves.</p> <p>BTW, not to derail this thread, but FWIW, I bought the new 28/1.8 a couple of weeks ago and have been absolutely delighted with it.</p> <p>Cheers,</p> <p>Tom M</p>

<p>Ask yourself if this trip is primarily for photography, eg, you, by yourself, or with a group of other photographers who won't mind stopping for enough time to look for, and set up high quality shots, or is it with your spouse or other people whose primary interest is not photography.</p> <p>If it's the latter, and you know that your shots will turn out like those of every other tourist that came to that spot because you simply can't devote the necessary time to them, then treat yourself to a small, new, high-end point and shoot, maybe even with a retractable fixed lens, relax, and just join in with the socializing, bird-watching, nature walks, etc. Take a major part of your kit only when your photography will not be hindering the activities of others (including talking to your spouse / friends, LOL).</p> <p>Just my -$0.02,</p> <p>Tom M</p>

<p>Tan-legged prosumers are sometimes blown off-course, and one or two can sometimes be spotted mixed in with a flock of common blue- and black-legged consumers, e.g., http://dansplainephoto.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/WWPW-Nashu-Group.jpg.</p> <p>Tom M</p>