Still life photography

[Guest]

This is my favourite needle. I expect you fellow techies would like to how it was done.

Poked the needle into my favourite piece of embroidery. Got out my P&S and snap. There it was. perfection.

[pks1702]

There it was. perfection.

[Guest]

Hmm, a litle irony creeping in, Smellyloo?

Perhaps a change of subject. This is a still life grab shot at a wedding, for use as an album filler. Do I hear cries of "that's more like it?"

[Guest]

I was concerned by all the blue stuff in the middle of your picture Bruce so I thought I'd try to raise the tone a bit.

Tamron 17-50/2.8 @ 35mm, f13, 8/10sec, ISO400.

Annoyingly my Image Data Suite doesn't recognise the RAW format from this camera (my usual camera was on the bird feeder tripod) so it's an "as shot" JPEG again.

I was wondering if Odorous Toilet's needle was special new kind which does not require the use of a thimble owing to its lack of sharp edges.

[Guest chriscraft]

Argh yes my head remembers spitfire welll

[Guest]

yes Simon looks for the last pic you have a fine taste in Ales Spitfire good stuff :-D :-D

[Guest]

I

I was wondering if Odorous Toilet's needle was special new kind which does not require the use of a thimble owing to its lack of sharp edges.

Obviously a connisour. I felt the need to caracture the normally sharp pointy needle as a more delicate and soft sqidgy tool. One of the problems with photography is that the reality of the image can detract from the more abstract possibilities of the subject. I'm sure you all agree!

[Guest]

After another few Spitfires I probably would.

[Guest]

Obviously a connisour. I felt the need to caracture the normally sharp pointy needle as a more delicate and soft sqidgy tool. One of the problems with photography is that the reality of the image can detract from the more abstract possibilities of the subject. I'm sure you all agree!

Up to a point

[Guest]

At which point I feel it's time for some more beer. Or perhaps just the same two, from a different point of view.

[Guest]

Looking good Simon :-D Nice and clean, well thought out.

[Guest chriscraft]

hi

this is the last needle post i,ll do honest...anyway i went out and got a macro lens,only trouble it only fits my prime lens...doh,here are the results...thought i,d have a go at low light long exposures,lit by tungston halagen downlights!to add a little? intrest ,some unusual backgrounds best viewed big..click. top picture f1.8 d,iso 800 2.5s f/22,bottom iso 100 15s-f22 i havn,t done anything to them as taken..hence the dust specks ect

[Guest]

Nice and sharp - though I do feel a little sorry for the banana!

[Guest]

Nice and sharp - though I do feel a little sorry for the banana!

i hope ate if after

[Guest]

And the scales fell from his eyes. See my attempt at still life above with the two beer bottles? Well I took the liberty of shooting RAW and JPEG and finally my copy of Lightroom has arrived. The following is what it had to say for itself.

As my newer camera was mounted on a different tripod pointing out the window looking for birds I shot the still life with my older "spare" body. I have taken many thousands of shots over a three year period with this camera, always in JPEG mode. This was the first time I'd ever turned the RAW option on. Anyway, the picture below is a collage of two crops at 100% magnification of one of the labels in the full frame shot above. One of them is from the off camera JPEG used in the above image, the other is from the Lightroom RAW conversion.

I'll leave you to decide which one is which. I haven't even done any processing - that's just what Lightroom generated by itself. Of course it had to be turned into a JPEG from there to display here but I used almost no compression so it should be fairly true reflection of the Lightroom product. It pains me to think of the many thousands of pictures I shot in JPEG mode and how some of those might have turned out. Ever since the last NBN photo walk I have shot RAW+JPEG but until now didn't have a reliable means of doing anything with the RAW versions and, I am sorry to say, they all got "lost" in a strange computer incident a few weeks back so I am starting over again here.

[Guest]

Rest assured Simon, I'm not going to say "I told you so" ... lol lol lol lol

Seriously, have fun with Lightroom, and invest the time to learn how to use it - I wasted a lot of time trying to use Lightroom 1 intuitively, and missed a lot of features. Version 2 is far more complex, and will repay the effort of learning.

Chriscraft, nice sharp shots. Somewhat Dadaist in conception, though, and I don't know what Freud would have to say.

Bruce

[pks1702]

Glad you have seen the flash of light at last Simon

[Guest]

I've seen it. I'm looking forward to learning more but without any pictures to practice on I'm a bit stuck! Let's hope that the next NBN photo walk doesn't suffer the same fate as the last one!

[Guest]

After the relative success of the beer bottle pics last night I decided to have a go at one of the needle pics. These were shot with my newer SLR and the results were somewhat less pleasing. There are many, many complaints on the Sony SLR forums that the RAW converters Adobe use just do not do a good job with the ACR files - in fact it is considered one of the worst, if not the very worst of all available options. It's left me scratching my head a little. I don't know whether you can do the RAW conversion with a different tool and then use Lightroom to tweak the image or whether the RAW conversion is done as part of the process so if you use something else you also lose Lightroom functionality?

[Guest]

Simon, what exactly is the problem - i.e what are the symptoms of "less pleasing"?

Bruce

[Guest]

Increases in the noise level basically. Part of the problem may well be to do with on screen pixel peeping at 100% and it may well not show at all in print. Zooming the picture to fill my monitor and it becomes invisible on all the pictures below ISO3200 (and let's face it I won't be printing it at the equivalent size which would be 17x11) but when you're trying to make tiny adjustments to the image you can't help but to pixel peep! And the Sony forums are alive with people complaining that ACR produces quite rough results compared to other RAW converters.

I suppose as I am not a pro I should just live with it and maybe Adobe will work on it some more for the next release. It'll probably be invisible in printed versions unless I'm going to be making poster sized prints of ISO3200 shots - and I can't see that happening. Most of the cheap end of the SLR market doesn't even go up to ISO3200 anyway so I suppose I could consider it emergency use only!

[Guest]

Until recently there was no camera that had a usable 3200 ISO. If you want completely clean shots at 3200 you need the D3/D700 sensor - otherwise there will be noise. As you know, noise gradually increases as you move up from your camera's base ISO, and there comes a point where the images become unusable for reproduction purposes - that point varies with each camera.

I haven't seen the forum entries on this particular problem, but have seen recent reviews of the A900 in pro photography mags where they processed the RAW files with ACR - if there was a known problem I assume they would have used something else. The way a raw converter deals with noise in higher ISO shots is to apply an automatic level of noise reduction to high ISO images. The trade off against noise reduction is always loss of detail - softening to remove noise also removes detail. It may be that a different converter in auto mode would produce less noisy images, but they would be softer. Oviously you can play around with the detail sliders in the develop module of Lightroom.

The real test to see how your camera is performing with Lightroom is to shoot at the lowest ISO (which is what you should always use for the finest quality, and only increase where you need to - that's one reason to use a tripod). You shouldn't see any noise when you zoom in to 100%. Take more shots of exactly the same subject (on a tripod) in the same light at increasing ISOs, and process them in Lightroom. You will see the point at which noise starts to become intrusive, and that will help you decide in future when to turn up the ISO and when to avoid it.

Hope that helps and isn't all stating the obvious.

Bruce

[Guest]

Yes but the images I was processing were ISO200.

From Anandtech.com to quote but one:

The Sony seems to be fine up to ISO 1600, but above this noise really starts to intrude. It is not the wide ISO wonder of the 5D2 or the D700, but it is definitely the highest resolution image at lower ISO ratings. The 5D2 is close in resolution, however - much closer than the D700/D3. Recently we have also seen some professionals getting extraordinary high ISO Sony results with RAW post-processing with programs other than Adobe Camera RAW. They claim ACR is quite poor at processing noise in the A900 images and there are much better tools. We are experimenting with their suggestions for A900 RAW post-processing.

I think Alpha shooters are becoming increasingly frustrated with online review sites which zero in on the apparently poor high ISO performance of the A900 whilst ignoring all the things it does extremely well - which is pretty much everything else. It seems to have become a popular stick with which to beat it (and Alpha cameras in general) despite the fact that there are a lot of dual system shooters now using it who say the high ISO performance, whilst not quite equal to the D700, is so close as to be largely meaningless in anything other than pixel peeping terms. One even posted some identical shot comparisons on DPReview and had people guess which shot came from which camera - and the split with about 60% guessing correctly. Yet this issue has been concentrated on almost to the total exclusion of everything else. In your previous link to Michael Reichmann's Luminous Landscape he even sites the A900 (which he's now bought) as a large part of the reason why he's cancelled his D3x order.

Having read all the reviews myself I grabbed the EOS400D and did some trial shooting with my A200 in low light conditions using ISO1600 (the none of the cheaper Canon cameras actually have ISO3200). I didn't have Lightroom at the time so was stuck with JPEG shooting. The A200 has a "High ISO NR" setting whereas the Canon doesn't so had to shoot the A200 twice each time to compare. With High ISO NR turned on the A200 produced lower noise images than the EOS400D though there was some loss of detail (not as much as you might imagine though). With it turned off the Canon produced cleaner images. Of course, that only tells part of the story - I only have two lenses which are exact equivalents in the both systems; the Canon 50/2.5 Macro and the Minolta 50/2.8 Macro. Whether Canon doesn't consider 50mm worthy of a decent lens I don't know but the Minolta outperforms it by such a margin that they're barely in the same ball park so the EOS400D was always at a disadvantage in terms of sharpness. In addition its AF proved very hit and miss in the poor light so a number of images had to be discarded because they were too out of focus - meaning I got a lot more usable images out of the A200 and thus demonstrating why the complete concentration on a single issue to the exclusion of others doesn't necessarily paint an accurate picture.

Sorry to sound a little paranoid but I'm getting as fed up with reading about Alpha shooters being told to dump their rubbish equipment and buy a proper camera (i.e. Canikon) as I was of being told my unsuitable boat should be banned from the Broads by some members of another forum.

Rant over.

Anyway, I am hopefully going to get to do some shooting today, so that should provide me with some decent pics to attack in Lightroom.

[Guest]

I see what you mean. Quotation from this month's review of the A900 in Professional Photographer: "Raise the ISO above 400, however, and the Sony begins to struggle. By ISO 3200 images from the 900 are unusable" ... "Sony was quite open about this aspect of the 900's performance, though, saying we shouldn't expect as good low light performance as you'd find in, for instance, Nikon's D3." The review generally is highly complimentary, especially about the quality of images at base ISO, describing it as "astounding".

[Guest]

And it never was going to be able to match the low light performance of the D3 / D700 with double the pixel density. It was aimed at a different type of shooter but despite that there are many people using it real world situations who say it is actually very good, just not AS good as the D3/D700. Anyway, trip to Horsey was good - images going up shortly.