I recently hung my show Plight of the Condor at Flagstaff’s High Country Conference Center. It’s an honor being recognized as so talented, egocentric and stupid that I’d dump hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars to fill an entire gallery with just my work. As this is my last, er, I mean first, one-artist show, of course I want to make a gargantuan impression. My subject is the California Condor, the largest bird in North America and with a population of only 425, one of the most critically endangered species in the world.

At first glance this seems like a simple shot of a condor hanging out on a bridge girder 460 feet above the Colorado River, but there’s a catch – this came from a file 24000 pixels wide.

Until you’ve seen a condor up close, it’s impossible to fathom how huge they really are. As they are so rare and most people have never seen one, I figured a great way to introduce folks to the bird would be to create a life-sized print of one. As these birds have a nine-and-a-half foot wingspan, that’s going to be an enormous print. I didn’t want some fuzzy blow up, but a print with excruciating detail down to every speck of bird dandruff. A print that would make viewers feel like there was an actual condor right next to them.

Fortunately for my wallet, my subject was at a bit of an angle to me and had some natural curl in its wings, so my final print came out to be five by eight feet. As it would hang in a corridor, viewers would not be able to step back to a “normal viewing distance” hence I couldn’t get away with a low-resolution print. It needed to be very sharp and in-your-face.

Before I created this image I did a lot of thinking. How could I shoot this live animal in the wild and create the big print I had in mind? A print with detail this fine.

How would you do it? I shared this challenge with the PL Team a couple weeks ago and got some very interesting answers. My favorite was Nasim musing that perhaps I had access to a secret camera he didn’t know about. In less time than an iPhone shutter lag, our fearless leader shook off that notion as ridiculous. Please put forth your strategies for this shot – gear used, exposure settings, techniques applied, and so forth – in the comments below and I’ll reveal how I did it in a few days.

All Contents ©John Sherman

The post How Was This Picture Made #3? appeared first on Photography Life.

First, thanks to everybody who weighed in with their strategies to make the image in question. Some very good sleuthing on behalf of our readers and as you’ll see the answer is a combination of a lot of your suggestions and keen observations. The answer to how the life-sized condor print was made was based on biological knowledge, technological application at the DSLR level and use of sophisticated software.

The Biology

Condors can fly up to 200 miles a day in search of a fresh carcass to feed on. When you fly that much, you need to keep every feather in tiptop shape. Wing sunning is a ritual performed every morning. While the actual purpose of the sunning behavior is debated, one theory is that the heat of the sun warms and softens the keratin in the bird’s feathers, allowing the feathers to take on optimal shaping. Whatever the purpose, I knew if I could find the right condor in the right setting I had a chance at my shot. Though condors sometimes rotate a bit while sunning, they generally orient their spread wings perpendicular to the sun and hold relatively still. If I got lucky, one would hold still long enough that I could snap multiple frames of it to stitch later.

Knowing the likely whereabouts of the condors was key. I scouted several possible roosting spots along the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, but never had luck with finding the birds there in the good morning light.

C’mon, spread those wings.

I tried for the shot again in Utah, but as the condors roost in trees there instead of on cliffs, I was shooting upwards at an angle I didn’t like.

Finally I hit pay dirt at Navajo Bridge. Decades back the original bridge crossing the Colorado River was replaced by a new bridge parallel to it and about 140 feet away. The bridges make ideal roosts for condors, much to the delight of onlookers at the walkover bridge.

I showed up before sunrise and Condor 354 was perched on a girder of the vehicle bridge. I could shoot from the pedestrian bridge and have him at eye level for the shot – ideal. Also the morning sun would be coming in at a nice angle. Next came the waiting – would 354 sun his wings while the light was still good? Condor 354 rewarded my patience (I’d been trying for months to get this shot) and spread his massive wings in the warm early morning light.

The camera stuff

To get the resolution I wanted I would not just need a high resolution camera, but would need to stitch multiple high res files together. This would require being close enough to the bird that just a portion of the bird would fill the frame. The South Rim locations I’d scouted seemed ideal as I could shoot a full frame DSLR with a 500mm lens and be close enough to fill the frame with half a wing or so. However the Navajo Bridge location required me to shoot from one bridge across a 140 foot gap to the other bridge. At that distance and angle the entire bird would pretty much fill a D810 frame.

Navajo Bridges – Condor 354 was perched on the right bridge, I shot from the left bridge. Note that over two percent of the world’s entire condor population is in this picture.

Time to go for all the reach I could muster. I took a Nikon D7200 and put an 800mm on it with a 1.25x teleconverter. This gave me an equivalent focal length of 1500mm. The D7200 has a tighter pixel pitch than the D810, so would give me as much resolving power as any possible combination in the Nikon DSLR lineup (going with a lens mount adapter on a Nikon 1 mirrorless would open up some interesting possibilities). With the camera oriented vertically, the condor from head to tail would fill the frame and 4 frames across would be able to capture the open wings. I was prepared for 5 frames across, but 354 was at an angle so in the end I just needed the four shots and I would have enough overlap to stitch.

I shot on a carefully leveled tripod with a gimbal head and swept back and forth across the scene constantly in hopes of grabbing 4 or 5 frames where the condor didn’t move or the wind ruffle his feathers. I had previously practiced this with a D4s shooting at 11 fps in constant motion and discovered at such a great focal length I needed 1/5000 sec minimum not to suffer too much blur. But I also needed depth of field to get the width of the bird’s body all in focus so if I shot at f/11 and 1/5000, it would necessitate an ISO of 2500 in full direct sun, not a big issue with a D4s, but a noise monster on a D810 or D7200. As my camera to subject distance at Navajo Bridge limited me to the D7200, I shot at a lower ISO 800, then shot at 1/800 sec and f/11, stopping briefly between pans to minimize camera movement. It would then take two to three seconds to pan across the entire body. I panned both left to right, then back right to left, then back again and just kept shooting. The goal was to get one sequence with an attractive head angle, ample wing spread and of course no motion on the bird’s part between frames. On most passes it was obvious while shooting that there was movement or the head turned away. The sunning lasted four minutes in which I shot 100 frames. Time to download all those shots and try stitching a shot together.

The Software Solution

With 354 angled slightly, for a life-sized image the final dimensions would have to be 7.5 feet from wingtip to wingtip. Of all the sequences I shot, there were several with appealing head angles. Of those, I only got one to successfully stitch using the photo merge panorama function in Lightroom 6.

D’oh, that didn’t work.

Ah, that’s better. Subtracting the overlaps, this stitched image ended up as 10000 pixels wide. My goal was to print at 250 ppi so people could put their noses right up to the print and count the vanes in each feather. Sadly, 10000 pixels at 250 dpi would only yield a 40-inch wide print – why heck, even some puny Red-Tailed Hawk has a wingspan wider than that.

Enter Perfect Resize. Formerly know as Genuine Fractals, Perfect Resize is an upsampling program. It analyzes every detail in your image, then using cleverly written algorithms creates new pixels to bridge the gaps between the original pixels and create a much larger file. You can also upsample in Lightroom or Photoshop, but in my experience, image quality deteriorates more quickly with those methods than with Perfect Resize. Perfect Resize has multiple upsampling methods to choose from. I chose Genuine Fractals, entered 96 inches wide for my destination size, then experimented with the sharpness and smoothness sliders until I got the result I wanted. This is very time-consuming because with such huge files it takes several minutes for Perfect Resize to crunch the data every time you push a slider or enter a new parameter.

Because I started with a very large, very sharp file, I ended up with a great result. Note however, that if you attempt to use Perfect Resize with soft files, you’ll just end up magnifying all the defects and end up with mush. My final file ended up being over 2GB, but when zipped got down to 1.9GB which just made the cut to send online to the printing company.

Summing Up

What a crazy fun and challenging assignment. A lot of things had to come together to get this shot. First I had to find the birds (there are only 70 total in all of Arizona and Utah). Next I needed one to bust a good pose in good light close enough for me to get the frames I needed. I maxed out the capabilities of the camera gear I had available. Finally, I pushed the software as far as I felt it would go and still produce the result desired. I’m pretty amazed that over 75% of the pixels in the final file were made up by software, not captured by the camera. I planned this all out in advance, felt it would be possible, practiced the techniques I’d need, then when the time came, Condor 354 was a champ.

The Plight of the Condor will be showing at the High Country Conference Center in Flagstaff, Arizona from now until Jan 5th, 2016.  The public is welcome so please drop by if you’re in the area.  To learn more about California Condors and how you can support them please visit peregrinefund.org/condor.

All Content ©John Sherman

The post How Was This Picture Made #3: The Answer appeared first on Photography Life.

One of the perks of being on the Photography Life team is all the new gear we get to test. One of the downsides is when a piece of new gear comes along and you fall in love with it and don’t want to give the review copy back. This can get expensive fast. The new Nikkor 500mm f/4E FL VR is that kind of product. My old 500mm, Edie, caught me and Flo in the act and you know how that goes – time for us to part ways.

Edie is one incredibly luscious hunk of well-cared for glass. How well cared for?

Here’s me and Edie in happier times.

Yes I love Edie and she has loved me back so many times – most recently with this Table of Contents shot in the November 2015 Arizona Highways.

And maybe you remember this Highways TOC photo from February?

And who can forget this back cover?

Edie is the legendary Nikkor 500mm f/4G ED VR – one of the sharpest lenses ever produced. She has served me reliably on many assignments but now it’s time that she venture out on her own in the world. If you’d like to be Edie’s special new someone here’s some things you should know.

She’ll turn four years old on Thanksgiving.

She likes long walks on the beach.

Nikon D4s + 500mm f/4G @ 700mm, ISO 640, 1/2000, f/9.0

Oh you mean that other stuff, like scratches and dents. First off I’m the only owner of this lens. Edie has flawless glass (no scratches, no smudges, minimal interior dust, no fungus – the glass would rate a 10) and has worn a Lens Coat all her life so the barrel looks new. She functions flawlessly and mates very well with the 1.4x teleconverter that I’m offering to sell with her. (Note: not all lenses mate well with all teleconverters which is why the Nikkor 800mm comes with it’s own serial number matched teleconverter that is custom mated to each individual 800mm at the factory.)

How well does she mate with her particular 1.4x? Like Romeo to Juliet, Antony to Cleopatra, Brad to Angie. You want proof? How’s this? (100% crop)

Nikon D4s + 500mm f/4G @ 700mm, ISO 1600, 1/1250, f/9.0

Oh yeah.

The lens hood shows minor wear and is missing 3 of the tiny screws that secure the tightening collar. The adjustment screw that holds the hood to the lens is in place and works. The tightening collar is epoxied in place. This is the result of a slow-motion tripod leg collapse – the way the hood is designed, the small screws snap if the hood takes an impact. Thus the hood absorbs the shock, protecting the lens from damage. I have 3 replacement screws but the old stubs would have to be fished out somehow. I haven’t bothered as the hood does its job shading the lens and the lens functions perfectly. This incident was three years ago so if there had been any optical issues they would have shown up by now. This is a pro sports and wildlife lens and these are designed to be run over by cornerbacks and keep shooting. If any sports or wildlife ‘tog tells you they have never dropped or banged a lens they’re lying.

Of course if you’re concerned at all about the functioning of this lens then I invite you to come to Arizona and test shoot it. I can pick you up at the Phoenix airport.

If you choose to buy this lens I encourage you as well to come to Arizona to pick it up. Plane flights are cheap now but insurance and shipping isn’t (I checked and I could fly round trip from Phoenix to Boston cheaper than sending Edie fully-insured 3 day shipping via UPS to the East Coast). Sweetening the deal is if you pick it up in person I will include a day of shooting and instruction with yours truly (a two million dollar value) so you can get the most out of your purchase.

Save some dough!

$7250 for the lens alone.

$7500 for the lens with TC-14E II 1.4x teleconverter.

Buyer covers shipping and insurance.

Comes with Nikon CT-504 case and both long and short tripod feet. Lens Coat not included.

Hurry while supplies last….

Happy shooting,
Verm

The post For Sale: Nikkor 500mm f/4G ED VR appeared first on Photography Life.

This is an in-depth review of the new Nikkor 500mm f/4E FL ED VR lens that Nikon introduced on July 1, 2015. I wrote the initial preview of the lens in a post titled “Is Nikon’s new 500mm FL too sharp?“, where some of our readers got engaged in interesting discussions and even talked about anti-aliasing filters and Nyquist frequency. Stuff that can melt your brain for sure! Today, we will be taking a closer look at the Nikon 500mm f/4E VR and see what this beast is all about.

Yes. That is the answer to all your questions about the Nikkor 500mm f/4E FL ED VR. Is it ludicrously sharp?

Nikon D7200 + 500mm f/4E FL @ 700mm, ISO 1000, 1/1000, f/10.0

This condor says yes.

Does the nearly 2-pound weight reduction from the last iteration of Nikkor 500mm make a real difference?

Nikon D4s + 500mm f/4E FL @ 700mm, ISO 1250, 1/1250, f/5.6

Not even a speedy hawk can escape this nimble beast.

Is it worth gutting my kid’s college fund to buy one?

Nikon D7200 + 500mm f/4E FL @ 500mm, ISO 10000, 1/500, f/8.0

Duh.

For $10,300, those answers had better be yes. Is there anything wrong with this lens? Is it worth two grand more than its predecessor, the legendary Nikkor 500mm f/4G ED VR, one of the sharpest, most capable lenses ever produced? Those are just two of the questions I’ll address in this review.

Note: From here on in this review I’ll refer to the new 500mm f/4E FL ED VR as the 500E FL and the older 500mm f/4G ED VR as the 500G.

Buying a supertelephoto prime lens is a big decision. Before I plunked down over eight large for my Nikkor 500G I asked a friend who owned a Canon 500mm if he ever regretted spending so much on his lens. “Not for a second,” was his reply. I can say the same thing. If you’re addicted to being out in nature and feel thrilled when you capture a great moment of wildlife action, then at some point you’ll lust for one of these big primes.

Nikon D7000 + 500mm f/4G @ 500mm, ISO 400, 1/1600, f/7.1

Case in point – this is one of my early photos with my 500G – the sun was going down, the ISO was sneaking up and only a mega-responsive supertelephoto prime would have caught this.

Now that you’ve decided which kidney you’re going to sell, let’s get down to business. Investing in a supertelephoto prime is a big commitment so this is going to be an extensive review. First, the specs according to Nikon with the 500G for comparison.

1) Specifications and Comparison to Nikkor 500mm f/4G

2) Build Quality

Even though the 500E FL is relatively light, the build feels top notch, not plasticky. All the switches feel positive and precise, the tripod collar is dreamy smooth and manually focusing feels like silk scarves silently slipping off Venus De Milo’s remaining shoulder.

The post Nikon 500mm f/4E VR Review appeared first on Photography Life.

There are two kinds of photographers. Those who admit they crop, and those who claim they don’t. The latter are glistening bastions of photographic purity whose souls glow at a constant Zone 10. They graciously lecture us heathens on the evils of cropping and try to exorcise the post-processing devils from our souls. They abhor us croppers, whom they consider inferior photographers – low down scum worse than fixer stains or a piece of grit in a bulk loader. They realize that cropping leads to even more sinful behavior, such as high speed bursts and shamelessly shooting above base ISO. I could go on, but they’ll pick up where I left off in the comments section.

Now that I’ve convinced you that cropping is an express train to Photo Hell, how can you join the fun? Ah, not so quick Bucky. Before we discuss the how of cropping we need to address the why.

Why to Crop

There is only one reason to crop a photo – to make the photo better. Judiciously used, cropping can strengthen composition.

NIKON D7200 + 150-600mm f/5-6.3 @ 600mm, ISO 640, 1/1600, f/10.0

The wind is whipping up and this grebe is taking on the surf, but in a ho-hum manner it seems.

NIKON D7200 + 150-600mm f/5-6.3 @ 600mm, ISO 640, 1/1600, f/10.0

A little help from the cropping tool and the dull part of the photo is gone. In addition the new narrower horizontal format accentuates the motion of the water versus that of the bird.

The Anti-Croppers will say all composition should be done in camera. That waiting to crop until in post is lazy. While it would be wonderful if every scene we photographed fit perfectly within a 2×3 ratio square (that used by DSLRs), in reality that isn’t the case. If it were, we’d have a real naughty time trimming all of Ansel Adams’ photos taken on 8×10 negatives to conform to the 2×3 standard. Winter Sunrise at Lone Pine? Trim the top and bottom equally to get a 2×3 ratio and the little horsey gets chopped off at the knees.

Throughout the history of photography there have been many different film and digital dimensional formats. Some popular film sizes were 24x36mm (35mm film format and 2×3 full frame and APS-C DSLR sensor formats), 2 1/4 inch by 2 1/4 inch square as used by the fabled Hasselblad and Rolleiflex cameras, 4×5, 5×7 and 8×10 sheet film in view cameras, 4×3 in many point and shoot and mirrorless cameras, 16×9 widescreen and so forth. Golden Mean be damned, there is no one perfect ratio for photography and there never will be.

So shouldn’t we constrain ourselves to only cropping one dimension of a photo? That would allow us to explore every rectangular permutation, but minimize post-processing induced laziness. Sounds good on paper, but wait, most lenses lose sharpness in the corners.

NIKON D810 + 70-200mm f/4 @ 135mm, ISO 100, 1/400, f/5.6

Here’s some nice fall foliage in Colorado’s San Juans. I’m shooting my Nikkor 70-200mm f/4 which I know is soft in the corners from 135-200mm.

A close up of the lower right corner shows some yucky blurred out trees, not the crisp foliage I want to capture. If we compose a bit loosely in camera, then crop away the soft corners in post we’ll have a sharper corner-to-corner final output.

This is why any self-respecting Anti-Cropper will only shoot crop-sensor bodies with full frame lenses attached or at least keep their D810 in 1.3x mode.

Another nice benefit of cropping is the ability to crop away distractions in an image.

NIKON D7200 + 70-200mm f/4 @ 170mm, ISO 500, 1/800, f/10.0

Even though they’re coming from a geothermal plant, the power lines on the horizon just aren’t doing it for me.

Ah yes, now we have a shot that shows what I want to share about this scene, a cool lineup of Marbled Godwits with nice curving ripples running through the shallows. If a chunk of an image is doing nothing to help convey what your vision is, then crop it away.

If you’re shooting fast-paced action you might not have time to perfectly frame your photo. What’s that? Fido is “hugging” Uncle Ralph’s leg in the last portrait shot of him before the aliens took him away? Bring on the crop tool and voila, a nice three-quarter portrait.

When shooting fast action where I’m distant enough I know I’ll have room to crop, I’ll center my subjects (taking advantage of the more accurate AF-points near the center of the array), then use the crop tool to my benefit later. That way I won’t miss something like this.

NIKON D810 + 500mm f/4 @ 700mm, ISO 640, 1/1250, f/7.1

Now later in post I can get this.  (To quickly switch from a horizontal to portrait crop box, hit the “X” key.)

Ravens can be really antagonistic birds, and will use their huge size and aerobatic flying skills to mess with their neighbors, even if it’s a Red-tailed Hawk. By utilizing all the tools at my command, both in camera and in post, I can optimize my chances of capturing such decisive moments.

Extra reach is another benefit of cropping. Many subjects don’t require this as you can simply move closer, but what if it’s a rattlesnake with one bad eye and a disposition to match?

Cropping lets you keep your distance from shy or dangerous subjects, allowing them to relax and behave normally. This makes for better photos. More importantly, is allows us not to disturb the wildlife to where it wastes precious energy stressing out and/or trying to evade us.

NIKON D7200 + 500mm f/4 @ 700mm, ISO 400, 1/1250, f/9.0

Going for all the reach I can muster gearwise – crop sensor 1.5x factor plus 1.4x teleconverter and 500mm lens and it’s still not enough.  Time to crop for extra reach so we can see that tilapia the gull has snagged.

The big take away here? Just like the camera body and the lens, the crop tool is just that – a tool to help you express what you felt when taking the photo. Not all tools work in all situations. Don’t use a hammer when you need a wrench – only crop if it makes your image stronger or you can’t or shouldn’t get closer to your subject.

How to Crop

I’m about to give you the Lightroom keyboard shortcut that will damn you forever. Ready?

Hit the “R” key. In any Lightroom module that will take you directly to the Develop Module and into the crop tool.

You can also access the crop tool by hitting the dashed rectangle on the left side of the tool icons below the histogram.  Here we see a 8×10 ratio was chosen for cropping this image, though this is purely subjective.

We’ve already discussed how standard photo ratios don’t always concur with the best composition for a photo. For those reasons I suggest going to the cropping tool lock icon and clicking it open.

Now the cropping borders can move independent of each other. At this point you can place your mouse icon over one of the borders or a corner and drag it into whatever position you like. You might just move one border, two, three or all four. It’s up to you to judge how balanced and aesthetic the resulting composition is (this is a topic that goes way beyond this primer).

Adjusting all four edges into a rough square.

And, d’oh!  Who hasn’t gone through a grunge bird phase?

NIKON D4S + 500mm f/4 @ 700mm, ISO 1000, 1/500, f/11.0

This scene lent itself to a narrow horizontal crop.

If your photo needs leveling you can hover your cursor outside the crop tool borders and a curved icon with two arrowheads shows. Click and hold down the mouse button while pushing the mouse in the direction you want to tilt the image – release the mouse when you get the image the way you want. Alternatively, you can use the “angle” slider to tilt the image. Either way, a grid automatically overlays the image to help you straighten horizons, etc. (If your image contains obvious horizontal lines, say the edges of a building, an ocean horizon or Nebraska, then the “auto” button can be clicked and Lightroom will automatically level the picture.)

Horizon tilted above.

Now with “auto” straighten clicked.  Lightroom tilts the image until the horizon levels out.  Just click return to save the result.

If you like your crop dimensions but prefer to shift it slightly left, right, up or down, just tap the corresponding arrow keys and the frame will move in small increments.

If you have set dimensions you need to crop to – say a page layout that demands a 8.5×11 ratio image, you can click on the up/down arrow icon just left of the lock icon and a dialog screen with several standard image ratios will appear.

Choose one (or if none match your needs you can create a custom one by clicking “enter custom” then filling in your own ratios to the dialog box – I have three of my own added here, such as 3.5×2 for business cards) then click the lock icon so it shows locked. Now when you drag a border or corner the other borders shrink or expand to keep the ratio constant.

A visual aid I like to use when cropping is to “turn the lights off.” Hit the “L” key once and your screen will dim except for what’s inside your cropping tool borders.

Hit “L” again and it will go black outside the borders.  Either helps minimize the distraction of seeing the entire image with a border overlay and lets you focus on what the final image will look like.

Another way to judge this if you don’t hit “L” is to watch the small thumbnail in the Navigator box at the upper left of your screen – that will show the cropped version.

Often looking at the small version makes it quickly apparent if the crop is working – if it looks catchy small, it will look even better at final output. The small image size lets the eye pull in the bigger composition details and not get lost in the minutiae.

If you want hints as to composition, there are several overlays that give translucent white lines or curves that line up with different ratio formats, the rule of thirds, the Golden Ratio, a Fibonacci spiral, etc.

Rule of thirds grid.

And Fibonacci spiral.

You can scroll through these by hitting the “O” key – if you want to flip an overlay, hold shift and click “O”. If, like me, you hate being told what to do, then you can turn these off by hitting “H” (hide) or by going to Tools>Tool overlay>Never Show. If you hit “O” again the overlays will come back and you can cycle through by hitting “O” repeatedly.

If you don’t like your crop and want to quickly return to the original click “reset” at the bottom of the crop tool box.

Warnings

Cropping throws out pixels and thus information. The less info in your files, the less defined the details are and the more magnified any imperfections, such as image blur or noise, become. As well, the smaller the file, the smaller a print you can make from it without sacrificing resolution. I have my develop module info overlay set to give cropped dimensions in the loupe info (Develop>View>View Options>choose “cropped dimensions” for one of your boxes – shown here as third box in Loupe Info 1).

That way when I crop an image to how I like it, I can check the cropped dimensions and have an idea if it will print good as a magazine cover or only be big enough for a postcard. If you find the info overlay distracting you can turn it off by hitting the “I” key until it disappears.

Looking at the cropped dimension in upper left we see that this is 1525×1667 pixels, a small file suitable for web sharing, but not more demanding use. Probably a good thing as this might be the least flattering Roseate Spoonbill shot ever taken.

How to deal with naysayers

The naysayers are right that cropping as a first resort can lead to photographic laziness, but they’re wrong when they insist that “cropping is just for farmers”. When used judiciously, cropping can turn good photos into great photos. If you need convincing just study the famous portraits taken by Arnold Newman. The tight face shot of Picasso? Stravinsky dwarfed by his grand piano? Both carefully cropped into the iconic photos they became. “Ah,” the naysayers will quip, “but the master of The Decisive Moment, the Godfather of street photography, Magnum Photos co-founder and all-around legend of photography Henri Cartier-Bresson would include the negative borders on his prints and submit them to publishers with a stamp warning them not to crop his images. Your lazy ass will never understand the level of perfection that he and I embody.”

That may well be so, but you know Cartier-Bresson’s super-famous photo of the dude hopping over the puddle in Paris? Gare Saint Lazare? Big time crop job. Even Cartier-Bresson knew some photos improve with cropping.

For more on Verm’s struggles with cropoholism, please visit his blog here.

All contents © John Sherman, no reproduction without prior written permission.

The post How to Crop in Lightroom and Why appeared first on Photography Life.

Noise is the sleet storm Satan drenches our photos in when we stupidly leave our tripod in the trunk thinking VR will save our lazy butt, but instead we end up shooting at quadruple digit ISOs. In this article, we will take a look at a couple of techniques on how to reduce noise and how to avoid it in the first place.

NIKON D810 + 16-35mm f/4 @ 32mm, ISO 12800, 1/25, f/16.0

That grainy look to our photos is the punishment for our lack of photographic purity and wholesomeness. So how can we go about trying to minimize noise in our images and fool people into thinking we are without sin? I’m glad you asked.

NIKON D7200 + 150-600mm f/5-6.3 @ 500mm, ISO 10000, 1/1600, f/10.0, ©Dawn Kish

My girlfriend has this nasty habit of taking better photos than me. To fix this problem, when we see a great subject like this Burrowing Owl. I hand her my D7200 set at White Pelican in Flight settings (-1 stop exposure compensation with Auto ISO enabled). Before she knows it, she’s already at 10000 ISO and still underexposing as seen above. Ha, I win! Talk about a recipe for noise stew. Fortunately, she’s kindly let me use the resulting file to demonstrate some noise reduction tricks and I only have to wash all the dishes for the next ten years.

NIKON D7200 + 150-600mm f/5-6.3 @ 500mm, ISO 10000, 1/1600, f/10.0

Here’s a version I tweaked in Lightroom. It looks minimally noisy to me and get this, I didn’t nudge the sliders in the noise reduction panel at all to get this result.

Before we get into how to minimize the appearance of noise in our images let me state here that noise is one of the least important components when it comes to an image’s strength and appeal. Good composition, alluring lighting, proper exposure, appropriate focus, astute timing, etc. etc. are all much more important to a photo’s success. Noise is the last nitpicky thing I worry about when working on a photo. Some noise can even be desirable, for instance if you’re trying to achieve the gritty B&W photojounalistic look that came from the days of Tri-X film (very popular in the 60s and 70s). That said, at a certain point, noise can get so bad it degrades image quality by obliterating fine detail.

This article is written assuming we are capturing RAW images, not jpegs. In it, we’ll discuss controlling noise both in camera and when post-processing in Lightroom. Further noise reduction in other software programs such as Noise Ninja or Topaz DeNoise is beyond the scope of this tutorial.

1) Noise Basics

Noise comes in two flavors; luminance noise and color noise.

NIKON D4S + 70-200mm f/4 @ 200mm, ISO 6400, 1/800, f/9.0

Luminance noise gives the grainy look above.

NIKON D4S + 500mm f/4 @ 500mm, ISO 8000, 1/1250, f/4.0, zero color noise reduction

Color noise gives multicolored speckles.

Noise is most often the result of amplifying the signal (in this case the data collected by each photosite on your camera’s sensor) to output a file of the desired apparent brightness. As light levels drop and each photosite gets less information in the form of photons landing on it, to achieve a file that doesn’t look underexposed, we need to amplify the signal by boosting the ISO. The higher an ISO you shoot at (assuming you’re shooting the same camera), the greater the noise in the resulting files. Sensors produce the cleanest results when shot at base ISO (the lowest numbered ISO on the camera).

Smaller individual photosites (common on high megapixel crop-sensor cameras, many mirrorless offerings and point-and-shoots) get hit by fewer photons per exposure than bigger photosites (found on lower megapixel full frame DSLRs and medium format digital bodies) hence have less information to send out and thereby need to amplify that signal more to achieve the same level of brightness. This is why the 16mp full frame D4s with its Rubenesque photosites is much less noisy at the same ISO than the 36mp full frame D810 with its anorexic photosites.

NIKON D4S + 16mm f/2.8 @ 16mm, ISO 6400, 1/60, f/5.0

Here an example from the creepy Iron Door Cave in the Mojave Desert. Shot at 6400 ISO with a full-frame D4s, it suffers from very little noise – even the dark areas look fairly clean and this with some shadow recovery applied. And here is the original file with no shadow recovery applied and at 100%

NIKON D4S + 16mm f/2.8 @ 16mm, ISO 6400, 1/60, f/5.0

Contrast this with a crop sensor D7200 image at 7200 ISO at 100%. The D7200 has much smaller individual photosites.

NIKON D7200 + 500mm f/4 @ 500mm, ISO 7200, 1/500, f/8.0

This file is untweaked. The background is noisy. However, we should realize when we zoom in to 100% on a higher megapixel file than a lower one, we zoom in tighter and this actually increases the appearance of noise. If we shot the same scene on the two different cameras and zoomed to the same final composition the difference would not be as great, but the D4s would still win.

Noise can come from amplifying the signal in camera by boosting ISO, or later by boosting the signal during post-processing, for instance to recover shadow detail.

2) Avoiding Noise in Camera

The best way to avoid noise is to shoot at the lowest ISO you can get away with. This might mean using a tripod or perhaps supplementary lighting (flashes, etc.). The more photons that hit your sensor (from a longer exposure), the more info each photosite collects and less amplification required to output the desired signal (how bright or dark that part of the photo will look).

In camera high-ISO noise reduction is only applied to jpeg outputs. If you are saving the images from your camera as RAW files, turning high-ISO noise reduction on will have no effect – you will have to do your own noise reduction in post.

• Avoid underexposure. Increasing exposure in post requires amplifying the signal and is an express ticket to Noiseville.
• Exposing to the right (ETTR) is a trick to get the maximum amount of info in a file so one needs as little signal boosting in post as possible. ETTR involves intentional overexposure of the initial file (just short of blowing out the highlights), then dialing back the brightness in post. A big ETTR benefit is less apparent noise in shadows. When I use ETTR tactics, I simply bracket shots until I find the brightest exposure that gives me a file without highlight blinkies. For a more detailed exploration of ETTR, click on Spencer Cox’s article here.
• Compose tightly in camera. Cropping in post will magnify the appearance of noise. Better to step a bit closer to your subject or zoom in if you can. Shoot multiple versions in camera so you can take the one that needs the least cropping in post.
• Favor light backgrounds over dark backgrounds. Noise is most apparent in the darker parts of a photo.

NIKON D7200 + 500mm f/4 @ 500mm, ISO 7200, 1/1000, f/8.0

Note how noisy the midtones and shadows in the background are. Note how little noise is apparent in the brighter branch.

This background tip is one I put low priority on as choosing an appealing background is more important to me than choosing a background just to minimize noise.

Realize that highly detailed parts of a photo can do a great job at hiding noise. Such areas might be fur, hair, feathers, grass, sand, etc. Conversely, smooth areas, like skin or sky, will make noise more apparent. Looking at the bluebird above little noise is apparent on it’s finely textured back feathers, however the broader smoother tail feathers do look noisy. The elk portrait also hides the noise well in the facial fur.

All the above is good advice, but how practical is it? Far more important than stressing about the issues above is to get the shot. If you need high ISO to get the shot, then by all means use high ISO. If you need to underexpose most of the frame to protect highlights elsewhere, then do it. There’s a lot of post-processing trickery we can do to minimize the resulting noise so let’s get to that.

3) Minimizing Noise in Lightroom 6

There are tons of tricks to minimizing noise in Lightroom. I’ll go through some of my favorites. Be aware that every photo is an individual case and not every trick will work with every photo.

Most of these tips don’t utilize the noise reduction sliders. The luminance noise reduction slider blurs away detail to smooth out noise. I’m a stickler for retaining fine detail and I don’t like how heavy amounts of noise reduction make images look plasticky or like paintings. I only use the NR sliders after I’ve done everything else I can.

Because dealing with noise is so individualistic, don’t be afraid to work and re-work images until you get the results you like.

Let’s consider a couple of Lightroom basics. First, when you import RAW files into Lightroom, there is a default level of sharpening and color noise reduction applied. Second, Lightroom’s develop module is designed to work best from top to bottom on the right side panels. Hence I suggest doing your tone mapping (exposure, contrast and color tweaks) before dealing with the detail panel (sharpening and noise reduction).

When doing these tone mapping tweaks consider whether you want to apply them globally (to the entire image) or locally (to just a part of the image by using the adjustment brush). It’s tempting to just hit a global preset like the “Punch” option and be done with it. However, the tweaks you make to exposure, contrast and clarity can involve amplifying the signal and that of course increases noise.

Let’s work an example here. We’ll use our Burrowing Owl buddy.

NIKON D7200 + 150-600mm f/5-6.3 @ 500mm, ISO 10000, 1/1600, f/10.0

Here I’ve taken the file and done the following global adjustments:

Exposure +1.00
Contrast +19
Shadows +21
White +30
Black -31
Clarity +31
Vibrance +11
Saturation +5
Sharpening 75, 0.8, 50
Noise reduction was at default: luminance 0, color 25.

The result looks good and punchy but full of noise. Check it out at 100%:

NIKON D7200 + 150-600mm f/5-6.3 @ 500mm, ISO 10000, 1/1600, f/10.0

Blechhhh! Look at all that luminance noise. Well, I’d better apply some noise reduction.

NIKON D7200 + 150-600mm f/5-6.3 @ 500mm, ISO 10000, 1/1600, f/10.0

I’ve added +50 luminance noise reduction and much of the noise is gone.  Let’s push the slider to +75 and obliterate the rest.

NIKON D7200 + 150-600mm f/5-6.3 @ 500mm, ISO 10000, 1/1600, f/10.0

Now the noise is gone, but so is the fine feather detail, especially in those cool snowflakey bristles around the bridge of the beak.

Consider if the entire image is benefiting from your tweaks or just a portion. If it’s just a portion, then go into the adjustment brush to make a local adjustment. Case in point is the Clarity slider, or as I call it the “Add Noise” slider. This slider boosts mid-range contrast while leaving highlights and darks alone – it also enhances the appearance of noise. Because of this I suggest that if noise is an issue with your image, then only use Clarity locally. I often do this with bird photos as clarity can really make feather detail pop and as demonstrated previously, the noise increase gets hidden by all that fine feather detail. If I were to apply the clarity globally, then the smooth background around the bird becomes noisy.

Here’s our owl again with the global tweaks and at 100%:

NIKON D7200 + 150-600mm f/5-6.3 @ 500mm, ISO 10000, 1/1600, f/10.0

And now lets only adjust locally. Our first pass with local adjustments is to the owl’s face:

NIKON D7200 + 150-600mm f/5-6.3 @ 500mm, ISO 10000, 1/1600, f/10.0

The adjustment brush was set at:

Contrast +100
Clarity +100
Sharpness +50
(Global adjustments are exposure +1.00, white +25, black -11, clarity 0, vibrance +11, saturation +0.5)

That’s a pretty aggressive adjustment brush setting so I set density at 100% but flow at 55 so I could gradually brush the adjustment on until it popped like the full global version, but just on the face. Now the bird’s face looks very similar to the first version, but the background noise looks finer grained because it hasn’t been tweaked.

My local adjustments to the face have left the eyes noisy so I go back to the adjustment brush and set it to shadows – 50, sharpness -74 and noise +76. I brush just the eyes and get this:

NIKON D7200 + 150-600mm f/5-6.3 @ 500mm, ISO 10000, 1/1600, f/10.0

Another way to blur away noise is to use the adjustment brush with a negative clarity setting and paint away noisy sections. (Pushing clarity to the right increases mid-range contrast; pushing it left reduces mid-range contrast giving a softening effect.)

NIKON D7200 + 150-600mm f/5-6.3 @ 500mm, ISO 10000, 1/1600, f/10.0

Here I’ve brushed a local adjustment of -70 clarity to the background.

In my experience this works best for big blank stretches of noisy background, this background is a tad busy for best results. Note that if you got the noise by globally increasing clarity that this will just reset the clarity amount for the area painted over. For example, if you increased clarity to boost cloud detail, but then paint over with a negative clarity adjustment brush you’ll lose that cloud detail you worked so hard to get.

We’ve still got some fine noise here. At this point I don’t find it objectionable and it will probably go away if I downsample this to print it at 8”x10” (this small owl will be life size at 8×10). But what if we want to print larger than life? Let’s go to the background adjustment and push the noise slider to +80 and get this:

NIKON D7200 + 150-600mm f/5-6.3 @ 500mm, ISO 10000, 1/1600, f/10.0

Go back to the full frame crop for final output, in this case our 2048 pixel tall web output and here’s our result.

NIKON D7200 + 150-600mm f/5-6.3 @ 500mm, ISO 10000, 1/1600, f/10.0

Pretty decent for a 10000 ISO crop sensor shot that was underexposed a full stop and we never even touched the noise reduction panel (though we did apply some local noise reduction to the eyes and background).

The other big popular “Add Noise” culprit is the Shadow slider. There seems to be a trendy obsession with showing off shadow detail in photos and I admit I fall for this a lot. However there is nothing wrong with shadows being shadows and hiding detail – this can add mystery to a photo. So before reflexively trying to recover all the shadow detail you can ask yourself does this particular image really need it? If yes, then get ready to deal with the noise revealed.

NIKON D810 + 800mm f/5.6 @ 1150mm, ISO 1600, 1/1250, f/11.0

Here I’m messing around trying out a 1.4x teleconverter on a 800mm lens and due to the reach and some heat shimmers I’ve got some blurring so I’ve already applied some sharpening to this (78,0.9,51). I’ve exposed not to blow out the highlights on the rimlit wings. This is a decision I’ll question later, but for now I’m stuck with this file and there’s not much detail on the side of the wings we’re looking at. We’ll zoom in to about 170%. At 1600 ISO on the D810 it’s no surprise we’re seeing noise in the background. Let’s try and recover some detail in the wings by running the shadow slider to +100.

NIKON D810 + 800mm f/5.6 @ 1150mm, ISO 1600, 1/1250, f/11.0

Yuck. Now we see a bunch of noise in the wings. Because the background is dark the noise is getting worse there too. I would have been smarter lightening the wings as a local adjustment, but for the sake of example let’s continue down the path we started on. I’ll apply some more tweaks as follows to get close to where I want the tonal values to be. I’ll deal with the noise after I get the tone mapping done. Adjustments:

Exposure +.80
Highlights -100
Shadows +100
White +32
Clarity +36
Vibrance +20
Saturation +16

Those adjustments to exposure, shadows and clarity aren’t helping my noise situation.

NIKON D810 + 800mm f/5.6 @ 1150mm, ISO 1600, 1/1250, f/11.0

Time to head into the detail panel where we find the sharpening and noise reduction controls.

4) Sharpening

Sharpening images increases noise, however all RAW files need some sharpening to look presentable. In Lightroom all RAW files get the following sharpening defaults: amount 25, radius 1.0, detail 25. Sharpening works by detecting edges and increasing contrast along those edges and you guessed it, by increasing contrast it increases noise. Here’s where my favorite trick works wonders. Look at the masking slider – it has a default of 0. This means sharpening is being applied to the entire image. However by moving this slider we can mask away the parts of the image with less noticeable edges and only sharpen the more prominent edges. By using masking we can take this from a global adjustment to a local one. To judge what is being masked hold down the option key (or ALT key on Windows) while moving the masking slider. The screen will be all white at the 0 default. As we push the slider right, the image will gradually darken in the areas with less distinct edges. See Nasim’s excellent article on how to sharpen images in Lightroom to understand how this tool works in detail.

I’ve pushed the slider to about 25 and this is what I see. The areas in white are being sharpened; the areas in black are not getting sharpened. I’ll keep pushing the slider right until only the areas I want sharpened are still highlighted in white like this.

Voila – the bird is highlighted but the background is black, hence only the bird will get sharpened. Background noise will be minimized.   In this case the white areas keep the 78,0.9,51 sharpening settings I already dialed in and the black areas get zero. Looking closely here’s the result.

NIKON D810 + 800mm f/5.6 @ 1150mm, ISO 1600, 1/1250, f/11.0

NIKON D810 + 800mm f/5.6 @ 1150mm, ISO 1600, 1/1250, f/11.0

In my opinion this is the single best Lightroom trick for keeping noise down. Here’s another example side-by-side at ~200%.

NIKON D4s + 500mm f/4 @ 700mm, ISO 3200, 1/800, f/5.6

Unmasked.

NIKON D4s + 500mm f/4 @ 700mm, ISO 3200, 1/800, f/5.6

Masked.

You can benefit from this trick even if you don’t add sharpening to your image because Lightroom will have already put its +25 default sharpening on your RAW file.

The Detail slider in the sharpening panel also boosts noise when pushed to the right. When pushed right it tries to analyze blur and sharpen to correct it. When your base level of noise is low, the added noise will be small, but if you are already dealing with a noisy file the noise will exponentially increase.

The radius slider doesn’t increase or decrease noise but can sometimes make the little “grains” look smaller (with smaller radius) or bigger (set at larger radius). The smaller grains may be easier to hide using other tricks later, but I recommend not sweating the radius setting for it’s effect on noise but instead utilize it to achieve the sharpening effect you want based on the spacing of the details in your image.

One other sharpening trick is to go to the adjustment brush and only sharpen the areas that really need it. Pushed to the right of center this increases the sharpening amount (like with the detail panel slider).

At last, we’ve finally made down the developing panels to the noise reduction sliders. But wait, there’s one super important thing we need to consider before messing with those. This is final output – i.e. what size and format the final image will be viewed at. If the image will be an 8×10-inch print on our wall it’s important we view it at that size. If it looks good at that size then we’re done. One huge mistake many of us make is that we obsessively view our images at 1:1. At that magnification any noise will jump out at us. But if the final output is to be viewed at less than 1:1 then our output file will be downsampled accordingly and downsampling does wonders for hiding noise.

NIKON D7200 + 500mm f/4 @ 500mm, ISO 7200, 1/500, f/8.0

This crop sensor ISO 7200 file is straight out of the camera with zero postprocessing other than the Lightroom defaults.  You saw it at 100% at the beginning of the post and the noise was apparent.  Now the noise is pretty much gone all from just downsampling the file to web resolution.

If we bust out a test print, evaluate it from a normal viewing distance, and still don’t like how much noise we see, then we might consider going to the NR sliders, but first consider if the file may have been overcropped and if a looser crop will still look good and shrink the noise away as well.

5) Noise Reduction in Lightroom

Still not happy? Time to blur that noise away. We can do that globally or locally. The simplest method is to go to the noise reduction panel. Default is set to 0 for luminance and 25 for color noise.

When noise gets really bad, such as in the opening fires of hell shot you will start to see horizontal banding artifacts or sometimes both horizontal and vertical forming a checkerboard pattern.

(Note: I increased exposure, shadows, clarity, contrast and sharpness in that output to make the noise worse so you can see the banding effect.)

The noise reduction sliders work by blurring the image – this can wreak havoc with details. If you add excessive noise reduction you get a result like this (100% view).

NIKON D7200 + 500mm f/4 @ 500mm, ISO 7200, 1/1250, f/13.0

Hence it’s a real back-and-forth game adjusting sharpening and noise reduction to retain as much detail as you can (without halos or other artifacts) and keep the grainy look to a minimum. I find that by applying all the other noise minimization techniques we talked about above, that I rarely need to push the amount slider beyond 10. This while being primarily a wildlife photographer who shoots a lot at high ISO. I’d rather have a slightly grainy looking image than a smooth waxy-looking one – just a matter of taste.

NIKON D7200 + 500mm f/4 @ 500mm, ISO 7200, 1/1250, f/13.0

The same 7200 ISO shot above, with added sharpening, masking the sharpening and +15 NR.

You can also use the noise setting in the adjustment brush to apply noise reduction locally. This adjustment works like the luminance amount slider but without detail and contrast adjustments. This can come in handy if you did some local adjustments, e.g. dodging, that caused noise in just that section of the image. You can actually go to that local adjustment, click on the dot marking it on the image and the setting panel will show the prior adjustments. You can then just add the noise adjustment to that set rather than paint a whole new mask.

Because I rarely go over 10 on the luminance amount the luminance detail and contrast sliders don’t make a significant difference so I just leave them at default.

Color noise is rarely apparent unless you’re shooting quintuple digit ISOs. If I see tell tale color noise at the default setting of 25, I will push the color slider right until the color blobs are minimized.

NIKON D4S + 500mm f/4 @ 500mm, ISO 8000, 1/1250, f/4.0

Here’s our color noise shot again. For this version I reduced the color noise correction from the default setting of 25 to zero to show what color noise looks like.

NIKON D4S + 500mm f/4 @ 500mm, ISO 8000, 1/1250, f/4.0

Here we see the color noise gone when we just accept the default amount of 25. Unless you deal with a bunch of night sky photos, chances are you will never need to monkey with the color noise sliders.

The color noise detail and smoothness sliders might be of use in images with extreme color noise, but I can count the number of times I’ve used these on my fingers. In theory they can make colors bleed and look smeary or desaturated along edges. I reckon if I had an important image with noise so bad I needed these that I’d try a different software program such as DeNoise first.

6) Summary

Dealing with noise has a lot more to do with noise avoidance than noise reduction. Avoiding noise in camera and during tone mapping is the best strategy. By doing this I find I rarely need to push the noise reduction sliders. The amount of noise reduction needed depends entirely on final output. Hence noise reduction should only be done after final output is decided. And when all else fails you can always do the gritty black-and-white conversion trick and your friends will think you’re such a great artist they’ll all give you black turtlenecks for Christmas.

NIKON D4S + 500mm f/4 @ 500mm, ISO 51200, 1/60, f/4.0

P.S. Nasim has previously published a detailed tutorial on noise reduction that I recommend you take a look at, where he utilizes external tools to reduce noise. Selective noise reduction can yield excellent results when using such tools as Nik Dfine.

All content and photos ©John Sherman unless otherwise attributed. No reproduction without prior written permission.

The post How to Avoid and Reduce Noise appeared first on Photography Life.

Better technique and appropriate gear can help you take better photos, but that will only take you so far. To reach the next level in this pursuit you need to become a student of photography.
A student of photography is somebody who dives into the pool of photo history, soaks in the images of the masters, and seeks out the best work and wisdom of his or her contemporaries. A good student realizes that observing the work of others is crucial to one’s own development as an artist, not to copy those he or she studies, but to discover his or her own eye. I’m a ruthless tech geek, soaking in as much info as I can about reciprocity failure, signal to noise ratios, circles of confusion and the like. But I spend just as much time pouring over photo books from the great photographers. The kind of books I’m talking about don’t have exposure metadata listed with the pictures. That isn’t important – only the emotional impact of the image counts. A good photo makes you wonder about the subject, not the exposure settings.

With this in mind, I want to recommend four wildly differing books I’ve read in the last year that really helped my thinking about photography and how I can best find my own eye. A lot of our readers know me as a wildlife aficionado, so you might be surprised that three of the four books have no critter pics in them. The point is a good photo is good no matter what the subject, the techniques applied or the gear used. Good photography cuts through all that BS, grabs you by the collar and shakes some sense into you. Good photography inspires you and makes you want to become better. These books all helped me improve and all for different reasons. I suggest you check them out.

Vivian Maier – Out of The Shadows by Richard Cahan and Michael Williams

Vivian Maier’s story is odd, mysterious, and a bit creepy all at the same time. A nanny during the day, a street photographer during the day. Hang on, does that make sense? Only with Maier. So would often take her young charges into the city while she pursued her photos. I see a lot of street photography that attempts to grab your attention with gritty portraits of the down and out. Snoresville – show me something new. Maier seemingly shot anybody and everybody and she wasn’t doing it to grab attention. She was private, mysterious and often portrayed as cold and harsh. She shot for herself and only herself, never sharing her work with anyone. Her life was devoted to the process of photography, not the end result. When Maier died she left scores of rolls of 2-1/4” film she had shot, but never developed. Her work wasn’t discovered until it was found at an estate auction after her death by someone who recognized how amazing her eye was. Otherwise it might have ended up in the dump. When Maier’s images hit the internet she quickly became a celebrity, though posthumously.

2-1/4″ film spool from one to Maier’s undeveloped rolls discovered after her passing.

While the whole story behind her photo career is pretty weird, what’s really amazing is how good her photos are. I’m not a fan of street photography but I’m a fan of Vivian Maier’s photography. Go to vivianmaier.com for a few examples. Her compositions are spot on, her sense of lighting and timing terrific. Technically she was outstanding, but so are a lot of photographers. What sets her apart is her ability to capture a moment in time and make her viewers wonder what the back story is to each shot. Maier’s shots show her as one of the keenest observers of the world around her. There’s a some bizarre undercover surveillance pathos going on. Did that make sense? Probably not. Which is why you should pick this book up and check it out for yourself.

Road to Seeing by Dan Winters

I have a confession to make. I’d never heard of Dan Winters before I cracked this terrific tome open. Flipping through the pages of “Road to Seeing” I recognized many photos and was embarrassed that I didn’t connect Winters byline to the images. He’s perhaps best known for his slightly grunged-out celebrity studio portraits seen in Time, New York Times Magazine, Wired, Fortune, Esquire and other mags. He’s shot the likes of Will Farrell, Tupac Shakur, Glenn Close, Michael Jordan, Christopher Walken, Laura Dern, even President Obama and Mr. Rogers. But like a diamond, Winters has many more facets than that. He can step out of the studio and shoot hard-hitting photo essays for Texas Monthly about neo-Nazis, the Mexican Mafia or unsolved murders. He can shoot honeybees or the space shuttle. Go to danwintersphoto.com – do it now. His images will transfix your eye.

Why I recommend this book is not because Winter’s photos and skills are outstanding. They are. But rather because this is a book about being a student of photography and when to comes to that Winters graduated summa cum laude. This isn’t some egocentric babble about how Winters became commercially successful, but a look at the influences on his career, whether they be other artists or editors or something else entirely. This book features not just Winter’s work, but the work of many others that inspired Winters. You’ll be exposed to Eugene Atget, Alfred Steiglitz, Andre Kertesz, Paul Strand, Henri-Cartier Bresson, Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Eddie Adams, Gary Winograd, William Wegman, Gregory Heisler and many other photography greats. But equally important are the photos he includes from lesser known photographers as well as those from “photographer unknown”. That Winters studies the works of the great as well as the works of the unknown shows he’s a true student of photography. Good work is good work whether the artist is known or not. Beyond the photographs are the stories told. You’ll learn why Eddie Adams regrets the photo that won him the Pulitzer and how Margaret Bourke-White had her focusing cloths made out the same fabric as her custom-tailored dresses. You realize because Winters knows the images and knows the stories, that that contributed hugely to his own success. That is the power of being a student of photography. And now that I’ve studied Winters work, I’ll be a better photographer and student as well.

Capture The Magic – Train Your Eye, Improve Your Photographic Composition by Jack Dykinga

Sometimes I wonder why Arizona Highways doesn’t just save ink by declaring “all photos in this issue by Jack Dykinga unless otherwise noted.” Dykinga has been a mainstay of American landscape photography for decades. In the book 100 Greatest Photographs to ever appear in Arizona Highways magazine, 12 of the images were Dykinga’s. Ansel Adams? Only three. Check dykinga.com for a taste.

One could easily mistake Capture The Magic as a coffee table book. Heck, I don’t speak or read Swahili, but if this book were only available in Swahili I’d still get it just to look at the inspiring landscape photos. What I like about Dykinga’s images is that despite how gorgeous the final result is I still feel like I’m viewing a photo taken on the same planet I live on. I can’t say as much for many of today’s landscape photographers who seem more intent on flexing their Photoshop muscles than on revealing nature’s truth and beauty.

While the subtitle “train your eye, improve your composition” may make you think this is just a how-to book, it is much, much more. Sure there’s a ton of practical advice in it’s pages, but what I dig is while it’s a lot about how to do photography, it’s just as much about how to think about photography. This is not about exposure triangles, color wheels, and the Golden Mean; it’s about the process beyond that – light, composition, timing, perseverance, feeling. I’ve already read it cover-to-cover twice. If the book in the product shot looks a bit worn it should – I keep my copy in my van and whenever I’m out on a shoot and feel my composition is getting stale, I’ll thumb through it for inspiration or maybe a specific tip or two to get me out of my rut.

Genesis by Sebastiao Salgado

I can still remember the first Sebastiao Salgado photo I saw – it was a huge open pit gold mine with long rickety wood ladders emerging from its depths. What looked like armies of ants cling to the sides of the pit were hundreds of half-clothed workers hauling sacks of dirt and rocks up the ladders. The conditions looked abominable and though there were hundreds of workers in the photo, you had to wonder what story was behind each and every individual. What cancer of the human condition could result in such a barbaric enterprise at this stage in history? How bad could life be that so many men toiled under these conditions? Such is the power of superior photojournalism.

With Genesis, Salgado steps aside from his usual subjects – embattled and disadvantage populations – and turns his camera toward our planet as it was before the dawn of “civilization”. His stark high contrast black-and-white images feature landscapes and wildlife in a way to show Earth as it was before humans screwed it all up. It also features a number of indigenous tribes yet to be modernized, but already slipping away from mankind’s hunter-gatherer roots by slashing and burning the rainforest to make way for agriculture – the first step on the slippery slope to where we have taken our planet.

Genesis is a huge book on a huge subject. As I stated above, Salgado’s eye can suck you in with a single image. This book is full of stunning photography, perhaps too much. Trying to view it in one sitting would be like trying to eat an entire cow at one meal. While Salgado’s photos may make you want to become a better photographer, more importantly they make you want to become a better person. Can there be any higher praise? Expose yourself to Salgado at www.amazonasimages.com.

Contents ©John Sherman

The post Read These Books and Become a Better Photographer appeared first on Photography Life.

Jack Dykinga can punch you in the gut with a photo, like he did with his 1971 Pulitzer-winning portfolio, or he can seduce you with his understated yet thoroughly evocative landscape images. He’s one of the rare photographers who has excelled in multiple genres, has adjusted to multiple technological revolutions, and has successfully weathered the ups and downs of the photo industry. After over five decades in the business, Jack Dykinga’s photos remain relevant. Jack Dykinga’s photos endure.

Photo Courtesy of Jack Dykinga – All Rights Reserved

I recently had the great honor to spend an afternoon with Jack and talk photography. Dykinga is one of the most sought-after workshop teachers out there. He’s very sharp technically, but more important, he is a genius with light and composition. He has ten photo books in print including the recently released Capture The Magic – train your eye, improve your photographic composition.

Before we jump into the interview, here’s a quick bio of Jack’s career:

He first got recognition in high school, when a football photo he took for the school paper ended up winning a Look Magazine contest. For those of you not alive then, Look was a large format photo-heavy magazine and quite a heavy hitter back then – Life magazine’s direct competitor.

After high school he got a stint shooting celebrities at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. This was back in the press camera days (Look up Speed Graphic if you don’t know what a press camera is) Dykinga was about eighteen and already shooting anyone from pop crooner Andy Williams to President Nixon.

At age 20 Dykinga decided to attend college and went to the Chicago Tribune seeking night shift work as a darkroom tech. Instead of putting him to work in the darkroom, the newspaper sent him out on assignment. There was no going back. Dykinga worked for the Tribune for several years then moved over to the Chicago Sun-Times, a more liberal newspaper that embraced Life magazine-style photo essays and 35-mm shooting (the stodgy Tribune was still rolling with press cameras and medium format).

Brought up in a conservative Republican family, Dykinga became decidedly more liberal when covering the unrest of the late 1960’s. Speeding up his liberalization was the beating he received at the hands of the police while documenting the Civil Rights marches into Cicero, Illinois and the riots after Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination.

In 1970, while working for the Sun-Times, Dykinga was assigned to shoot a story on conditions at state-run mental hospitals. The state wanted to cut funding. Parents of the autistic children “warehoused” there were enraged. When he arrived, Dykinga was so horrified by the conditions he couldn’t lift his camera. The bleak wards were filled with distressed children curled up on bare benches, stripped-down beds or on the floor. Many were naked. There was an ubiquitous smell of human excrement. An hour-and-a-half passed, then Dykinga started shooting. Three days later he was done. His photo essay so shocked the public that instead of cutting funds for the hospitals, the state ended up increasing funding. This result proved how powerful telling stories through photography could be. The experts agreed and in 1971 Dykinga was awarded photojournalism’s highest honor, the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography.

Not long after, Dykinga was burning out on newspaper photojournalism. Coinciding with this was an assignment to photograph a climb of Mount Rainier. On the climb he was enveloped by a whiteout on the mountain. This near-death encounter with nature so impressed Dykinga that he soon left the big city of Chicago behind and moved west. He landed in Tucson where he worked as photo editor of the Arizona Daily Star.

Out west, he sought out Phillip Hyde, a student/protege of Ansel Adams. Hyde was using landscape photography as a tool to save wild places. Hyde became a mentor to Dykinga, who put the 35mm camera down and shifted over to large format view cameras. He went from “f/11 and be there” to “f/64 and live there.”

From then until the present, Dykinga has traveled near and far documenting the natural world and promoting conservation. He strongly believes one must get to really know an area before they can successfully photograph it. In the process, he has worn out nearly as many camper trucks as cameras. In 2011 he was awarded the Outstanding Photographer of the Year award from the North American Nature Photography Association. While the name Dykinga has now become synonymous with top quality landscape photography, Jack has remained true to his photojournalism roots, using the power of his photography to affect positive change.

At that let’s go to the video and turn it over to Jack, soak in some photo wisdom and enjoy some magnificent images.

For more of Jack’s work, pick up Capture the Magic and also visit Dykinga.com. Jack’s currently on a mission to scan his massive film archives into digital for a career retrospective project. Lucky for us he is frequently posting incredible images from his archives on the Dykinga Photography Facebook page.

Text © John Sherman, Video © John Sherman and Dawn Kish with Included Photos © Jack Dykinga

The post Jack Dykinga Interview: From Pulitzer-Winner to Landscape Photography Legend appeared first on Photography Life.

At long last they’re all out, in stock and making every aspiring wildlife photographer on a budget scratch their head and wonder which one they should own? Of course I’m talking about the Tamron 150-600mm f/5-6.3 VC, the Sigma 150-600mm f/5-6.3 DG Contemporary and the Nikkor 200-500mm f/5.6E VR. These three budget super telephoto zoom lenses compete with each other directly at their price points, reach and heft; but the big question remains – how do they stack up optically? This was my quest when looking at the three lenses: I wanted to find out which of the three deserves the crown as the best budget-friendly super telephoto zoom. Let’s take a look at the lenses in more detail.

Two years ago, getting through the wildlife photography door required a five-figure cover charge. That all changed when Tamron introduced their 150-600mm f/5-6.3 zoom for the ridiculously low price. 600mm at a thousand bucks? It had to suck. But it didn’t. While not as razor sharp as the Nikon or Canon 500/600mm primes, it was still a lot sharper than anyone imagined such an affordable lens could be. And at just over a grand it let a lot more people experience the joys of wildlife photography. Tami became my go to lens when I would scout a new wildlife location – I could move fast covering more ground and if something amazing presented itself, say a bobcat peeking through the woods, I had a capable lens to capture the moment.

NIKON D810 + Tamron 150-600mm f/5-6.3 @ 600mm, ISO 2500, 1/640, f/8.0

Now Tami, as I affectionately call her, has company – both Sigma and Nikon have produced competitors in the budget super tele zoom market. Sigma introduced not one, but two 150-600mm zooms. One, their budget Contemporary model is $1089, the other is the Sport model at twice the price and a lot more weight. It’s the former we’ll be comparing today – let’s call her Sigi. Not to be outdone, Nikon answered the challenge and has recently released the Nikkor 200-500mm f/5.6 ($1399). Canon so far hasn’t answered the bell – the closest they come is their 100-400mm zoom, which is over 2K and really doesn’t have the reach to join the Tamron/Sigma/Nikon super tele zoom group we’re comparing. Note that both Tamron and Sigma versions are available in both Nikon and Canon mounts. The Nikkor, AKA Niki, is Nikon mount only.

1) General Considerations

When you start getting out into the 500-600mm range you’re shooting at 10-12x magnification – more than a standard 8x pair of binoculars. There aren’t many photo subjects other than wildlife that require such reach. Perhaps a few sports where you can’t get close to the participants – like motorsports – or taking photos of the moon. If you’re not shooting small, shy critters, then you probably can get by with a lighter, more compact zoom like a 70-300mm or an 80-400mm/100-400mm. 400mm is generally long enough for larger wildlife like deer, elephants, lions and the like.

NIKON D4S + Tamron 150-600mm f/5-6.3 @ 320mm, ISO 8000, 1/640, f/5.6

Most zoom owners shoot mostly at the far or near end of the lenses zoom range and less frequently at the intermediate focal lengths. With these supertelephoto zooms, users will most likely be spending a lot of time at the far (500/600mm) end. I’ve been shooting the Tamron 150-600mm for over a year now and when I check my usage stats 63% of my shots were at 600mm and 5% at 150mm, leaving a third of the shots at the intermediate focal lengths. Why lug such a big, cumbersome lens about if you don’t need 500-600 millimeters of reach? For birds you can use all the reach you can get.

This is at 600mm with about 50% crop
NIKON D810 + Tamron 150-600mm f/5-6.3 @ 600mm, ISO 640, 1/500, f/8.0

As these lenses will likely be used more at the far than medium or near end, performance at the far end will be more important for most folks.

In general, most wildlife shots feature the animal somewhere around the center of the frame, not in the corners. Hence for wildlife I would tend to favor a lens with superior sharpness in the center of the frame over one with less sharpness in the center but better corner-to-corner sharpness.

NIKON D810 + Nikkor 200-500mm f/5.6 @ 380mm, ISO 500, 1/1600, f/6.3

On the flip side, when shooting landscapes, corner-to-corner sharpness is more important.

NIKON D810 + Sigma 150-600mm f/5-6.3 DG @ 150mm, ISO 250, 1/500, f/8.0

Sharpness is not the paramount consideration when it comes to wildlife lens performance. Did I just say that on Photography Life? Let me state this another way. I could give a s#!+ about how sharp all the shots are that I miss. Paramount in wildlife photography is the ability to capture the moment. You usually don’t get a second chance when an animal does something unique.

NIKON D4S + Tamron 150-600mm f/5-6.3 @ 600mm, ISO 5000, 1/400, f/6.3

Therefore attributes like autofocus speed and accuracy, focus-tracking ability, effective image stabilization, convenient zooming and the like become just as important as sharpness. Heck, even the ease of removing the lens cap with the lens hood on could be the difference between getting the shot or cursing yourself (Tamron wins the lens cap challenge, with Nikon second and Sigma a distant third). These attributes are hard to quantify, but I’ll try my best to give every lens a good workout and find out which one performs best in the field.

2) Fixed Versus Variable Aperture

Sigi and Tami both have a variable maximum aperture while Niki has a fixed maximum aperture. Historically, fixed aperture zooms have been faster, sharper and more expensive than variable aperture lenses. But that pretty much applies to the f/2.8 zooms. Those were made for the professional market and built to higher standards than the slower variable zooms of yesteryear. At a fixed f/5.6 the Nikon 200-500 is not a fast lens and only 1/3 stop faster than Sigi and Tami at maximum zoom. Is there an advantage to a fixed aperture? Very little it turns out. The two cases are: 1) when shooting manual wide open, setting your exposure, then zooming and forgetting to reset your exposure; and 2) when zooming wide open when shooting video. In case one this is pretty inconsequential given how much exposure latitude modern sensors give us. In case 2, DSLR videos are usually shot at 1/50 sec, hence it would have to be real low light to shoot wide open even at base ISO. Add to that that zooming is out of fashion these days (get a boom dude) and any advantage of fixed over variable won’t come into play for 98% of consumers. With Sigi and Tami, once you stop down to f/6.3 (only 1/3 stop slower than f/5.6) the lenses will stay at the same aperture when zooming. If shooting video with the aperture wide open then you can’t zoom without altering your exposure (because you’ll probably be at 1/50 sec you’ll only be able to shoot wide open in very low light or with a neutral density filter attached [95mm ND filters start around $300]).

So there’s little advantage to a fixed aperture in this case and Sigi and Tami are faster at their wide ends than Niki. Bottom line – I wouldn’t worry at all about one being fixed and the other two not.

3) Why Not Primes?

If most of one’s time will be spent shooting at the long end of these zooms, why not just buy a prime lens? After-all, it should be much easier to design a fixed focal length lens than a zoom as less is being asked of it. The reason is because the latest Nikon and Canon 600mm primes cost over ten grand. For that price, why not just buy a pet tiger and shoot the kitty with your iPhone?

The reason those big primes cost so much is because at f/4 they are fast. Faster lenses let in more light, improving AF performance and allowing one to work in dimmer conditions – conditions under which many animals are most active. The faster the lens is (given the same focal length) the bigger diameter the elements need to be to let in that much light. Bigger elements are more expensive to make than smaller ones, so much so that these monster primes end up with equally monstrous price tags. If your goal is to shoot quetzals in the rainforest, start saving up now. But if you’re shooting in brighter conditions (say on safari), you should be able to get by with f/5.6. Bear in mind too that as sensor technology continues to improve, cameras are getting better and better at shooting in low light. To me, the biggest advantage of the f/4 lenses over the f/5.6-f/6.3 lenses is in AF-performance. Camera AF modules simply work better when they get more light. When you get to 500/600mm, your depth of field wide open is wafer thin, so if you want to get both eyes of your subject in focus, but the subject isn’t perfectly aligned to your camera, then you’ll be stopping down to f/8 or so anyway. f/4 might give a bit nicer out of focus background, but the difference between that and f/5.6 isn’t really much.

All of this makes me wish Nikon and Canon or other manufacturers would produce 600mm f/5.6 primes that would be far less expensive than the f/4 primes, and a whole lot lighter too. But let’s stop daydreaming and look at the affordable lenses available now. We’ll break this down into the various significant attributes and compare each lens against the others in terms of sharpness, AF and manual focus performance and tracking, image stabilization, build quality, and general handling.

The post Nikon 200-500mm vs Tamron 150-600mm vs Sigma 150-600mm C appeared first on Photography Life.

Lost in all the recent excitement of the Nikon D5/Nikon D500/Canon 1DXMkII/Pentax K-1/Sony a6300 and Fuji X-Pro 2 announcements was Nikon announcement of their new DL “premium compact” camera line-up. The DL line-up consists of three models all sporting fixed lenses, 1.0” 20.8 megapixel sensors and the new EXPEED 6A processor. The Nikon DL18-50 ($850) with its 18-50mm equivalent lens is there to tempt the landscape and architecture shooters. Street ‘togs and all-rounders are offered the DL24-85 ($650) with a 24-85mm equivalent lens. For nature and wildlife buffs the DL24-500 ($1000) sports a 21x superzoom 24-500mm equivalent lens.

This DL line-up is designed to attract serious enthusiasts and pros. All three shoot RAW and 4K UHD video and the controls and menus are laid out to closely resemble the Nikon DSLRs making transitioning between cameras easy for Nikon users. The DL18-50 and DL24-85 are “pocketable” (not in a cell phone pocket, but a bigger pocket). The DL24-500 is based on the “bridge-camera” (AKA superzoom) platform used for the popular Nikon P900.

So in a world where point-and-shoots are lining up to commit hara-kiri, why would Nikon introduce not one but three very expensive point-and-shoots? Because they still hope there is a market for something between a DSLR and a smartphone. As smartphone image quality continues to improve, any compact camera that wants to survive will have to produce very high quality images. Enter 1.0” sensors. These have roughly four times the surface area of the standard 1/2.3” sensors found on most point-and-shoots (the Coolpix line-up for instance), and 2.8x the area of 1/1.7” sensors (such as found on the Canon S120). The 1.0” sensor is the same size (Nikon calls it CX) as found on the ill-fated Nikon 1 cameras. The Nikon 1 was Nikon’s attempt to capture the better than point-and-shoot, but smaller-than-DSLR market, but never caught on with consumers because other interchangeable lens mirrorless offerings had larger sensors (micro-4/3rds and APS-C) and superior image quality. There are other 1” sensor compacts out there such as the Canon GxX series or the Panasonic SX100, but the DLs’ real competition and the one many pros slip into their pocket as a backup is the Sony RX-100 (all four versions have proved popular).

The Sony RX-100 IV is no slouch as Nasim’s review proves. If the Nikon DL hopes to compete it will need superior optics and handling. Fortunately it seems Nikon realized this and did their best to keep the menus and controls compatible with their DSLR line-up. This seems like a good strategy as the Sony RX-100 line-up has been the dominant choice in the pro-pocket camera world for years, but lots of RX-100 users hate Sony’s confusing and disorganized menus. On the optics front Nikon included lots of the upper-end Nikkor lens features like fluorine coatings, aspheric elements and ED glass. The DL18-50 lens is even Nano-coated.

Nikon DL24-85

In any title fight, if there’s a tie, the reigning champ, in this case the $950 Sony RX100, keeps the crown. So how does Nikon plan to take down the RX100? The obvious direct competitor is the Nikon DL24-85. With a 24-85mm equivalent lens it squares up closely against the RX100 III and IV’s 24-70mm equivalent lens (The RX100 I and II featured a 28-100mm equivalent zoom). At f/1.8-2.8 the Nikkor and Sony’s Zeiss lenses are equally fast. The Nikon has a 20.8 MP sensor, the Sony 20.1 – call it a tie for resolution. They both claim to shoot up to ISO 12800 but I’ll believe that when I see it. As Nikon generally uses sensors made by Sony I’m guessing the DLs have Sony sensors and I’d be surprised if there is a significant difference in performance at final output. Nikon lands punches with 1:1 macro focusing mode and hybrid phase-detection/contrast-detection autofocus. Sony counters with a slightly slimmer build, lower weight and a built in electronic viewfinder. What could be the knockout punch for Nikon is the price – 300 bucks cheaper. However when one is spending $650 or more bucks for a compact camera, price is likely secondary to image quality in the final buying decision. Which is why I’m eager to get a review copy and put it up against the Sony. (PS – if you’re thinking of buying an RX100 it could pay to wait a bit and see how far Sony drops the price to stay competitive.) If the Nikkor lens outperform Sony’s Zeiss-branded lens, then Sony is in trouble. Oh yeah, the Sony shoots at 1/32000 sec and the Nikon only at 1/16000, but wait, the Nikon has Bulgarian language support – gotta say I’m pretty torn on which would be more useful.

Why would I be excited about the DL24-85? As many of you know I’m a dedicated rock climber and a quick nimble optically superior camera that would fit in a tiny pouch on my harness is very enticing. For a long time I shot Canon Powershots – the S95, S100, S110 and G10 and G12. The image quality was pretty darn good but all of them had the same crappy lens shutter that would scratch the outer element when exposed to the tiniest bit of grit. As outdoor cameras they sucked. Despite endless consumer complaints about this on the Internet, Canon never fixed the issue (at least as of the S110) and would refuse warranty fixes unless you really hounded them. I would describe the problem to their service reps who would then tell me “you are the only person who has ever told us of this problem.” To which I would reply, “you never read the hundreds of complaints on the internet about the exact same issue?” After which they would grudgingly replace the lens so it could get scratched another month down the road. I finally gave up on Canon Powershots after my S110 broke on the first day of a five-day ascent of El Capitan. I’ve been looking for a replacement ever since, but even though friends raved about their RX100s I wasn’t convinced I wanted to drop a grand on a point-and-shoot. My finger has hovered over the RX-100 buy button a few times, but always on last year’s model that was being discounted, but never quite enough. So yes, I am excited by the Nikon DL24-85, especially for climbing photography, and a bit for it’s promised macro capabilities. I can’t wait to report back to all of our readers on its performance when we get a review copy. If I feel the DL24-85 yields publication-quality images then I might push “buy”.

Nikon DL18-50

One DL camera with no competition is the DL18-50. The combo of super-wide-angle capability, 1” sensor and pocket sizing makes this perhaps the most exciting member of the DL line-up. I see this fitting in great for several uses – how about a lightweight landscape camera for a backpacking trip from one rim of the Grand Canyon to the other? Or utilizing the superwide capabilities in Antelope Canyon? Or when shooting wildlife where I already have a pack crammed with a 500mm or 800mm lens, a 150-600mm and a D4s and a D500 (please Santa!) and the last thing I want to add is a 16-35mm and a 50mm lens to my load in case a landscape opportunity presents itself. The DL18-50 is half the weight of the 16-35mm alone. Oooh, I’m just drooling over the possibilities. Before we get too excited, and I hate to do this, but perhaps we need to bring back those sad memories of that first Match.com date where everything looked so good on the monitor, but in real life a basketball could kiss better. We’d better wait to see how the 18-50mm lens performs. This is the one DL that has Nano coating on the lens – a good choice as at 18mm you’re just begging flare to enter your lens. I’ve seen some pretty good sample pics, but I’ll hold judgment until I’ve seen my own results. Nikon boasts of some other goodies like 20 fps shooting, optical VR and perspective control, but realistically I see high frame rate and VR as nice touches, but bigger plusses on the other DL models than the 18-50 as most wide angle shooting is of static or slow moving subjects. But for when you need it – the mountain bike jump sequence or low-light landscape sans tripod – these will be nice. The perspective control feature is something I could duplicate myself in Lightroom, but would need the foresight to give myself cropping leeway – no a big addition in my mind, but could help save some shots at the wider angles if you don’t give yourself enough leeway. So in the end I think the success of the DL18-50 will depend heavily on it’s corner-to-corner sharpness throughout it’s zoom range. This will make or break this camera for the landscape photographers that are the primary target.

Nikon DL24-500

Last, but not least is the DL24-500. This is the guilty pleasure camera of the DL family. The one you’ll hate to love in front of your photogeek friends but can’t wait to get your hands on. I would never say this if the Nikon P900, another supertelezoom “bridge camera” hadn’t been so damn fun to shoot. Check out my review of the P900 here. The P900 had an insane 83x zoom range. Unless you were shooting the moon or tiny birds, the long end of that range was wasted. And, as stated in that review, even though an 83x zoom range would suggest a huge compromise to image quality, this really wasn’t the case. Nikon’s optical engineers did a great job. Sure it wasn’t DSLR quality, but for a huge zoom range on a 1/2.3” sensor it way surpassed my expectations. Which is why I’m excited to get my hands on the DL24-500. At a cool grand one has to think the lens is far superior to the 600-dollar P900’s. The other issues I had with the P900 that made me not lust after owning it were poor low-light performance, long shutter lag, slow zooming and lack of RAW file output. The DL24-500 shoots RAW, has a far bigger sensor with bigger pixels (with backlit technology for better low-light performance) and we’ll have to wait to see about the shutter lag and AF speed. If the shutter lag and AF speed aren’t issues I can see this being a great “safari camera” for enthusiasts and those intent on traveling light. For the pro wildlife photographer I could see this being something I’d bring on a scouting mission so as not to miss some crazy once-in-a-lifetime happening, but not a camera I would pack when I knew when and where I was going to shoot.

The DL24-500 won’t fit in your pockets unless you still have some MC Hammer parachute pants in your closet. It has an electronic viewfinder, unlike the DL18-50 and DL24-85 which have optional EVFs (not priced yet, but rumored around $280 which negates the price advantage over the Sony RX100 IV).

One thing I can’t help but praise is the presence of custom exposure modes on all the DL models. These modes (e.g. U1 and U2 on the D7200, et al) are sorely missing on Nikon’s pro models such as the D4s and D810. These are hugely useful to any photographer and especially pros because they intimately understand exposure. Why Nikon doesn’t offer these on the D5 or D500 is puzzling/infuriating/moronic/aggravating/f’ed-up/add your own expletive here. HELLO NIKON – THIS IS AS SIMPLE AS A FIRMWARE UPDATE TO THE PRO LINE-UP – WHY, WHY, WHY DO YOU DENY YOUR MOST LOYAL CONSUMERS THIS VALUABLE FEATURE??????? (Hee hee, as an aside, autofocus was invented by Leica, but as they deemed it a feature pros didn’t need they sold the technology to Konica-Minolta. Nikon doesn’t have a monopoly on misunderstanding the needs of pros.)

Some worrying questions arise when thinking about this new line-up. First in my mind is battery life. How much juice will the EXPEED 6A suck (or the optional EVF) and how many spare batteries will I need for a rim-to-rim crossing of the Grand Canyon? How will the new sensor do in low light? If battery life and noise are acceptable then I think the success of the DL line-up will come down to optical performance. And the one last niggling worry – will quality assurance be good this time around?

My hopes are high because I think Nikon is finally listening to its customers (yay D500!) and coming out with new products that aren’t the purse-ready Nikon 1 or hipster-ready Df. The DL line-up comes as a surprise to me as Nikon has seemed so oblivious to consumer demand for years. Launching a competitor to Sony’s cherished RX100 and a whole new creature with the DL18-50 seem like very positive announcements indeed. Hopefully this also extends to dealing with their numerous QA issues of the last 5 years.

If your final output is website sharing or small prints, the DLs are probably overkill. This might change as monitors and bandwidth improve, but for now smartphones or smaller sensor point-and-shoots will suffice for this market. For publication or printing large, the 1” sensor will be good for most applications, though at higher ISOs image quality will break down quicker than larger sensors. This leaves Nikon treading the fine line between DSLR image quality and point-and-shoot size and convenience. The DL specs appear they right on track, but whether the price point is right remains to be seen. We won’t know until they actually hit the market.

Are you excited? Let us know in the comments.

Can’t wait? Here are the pre-order links:

• Nikon DL18-50 f/1.8-2.8
• Nikon DL24-85 f/1.8-2.8
• Nikon DL24-500 f/2.8-5.6

The post The New Nikon DL Line of Premium Compacts – Should You Be Excited? appeared first on Photography Life.

You know the drill.  You pick up a magazine or browse a website and flip through the photos.  Most you look at for less than a second, but a select few grab your attention and demand a longer look.  What’s different about these select photos?  What makes some photos great and others mediocre?

I’ve bounced this question off of several distinguished photographers and the answers are always quite similar.  They may disagree on some of the ordering, but the list of qualities goes something like this:

1. Emotion
2. Light
3. Composition
4. Creativity
5. Timing
6. Context
7. Layers

We’ll break these down in a bit, but first let’s list some things that aren’t important to a photo’s success.  These are in no particular order and constitute what I call The Box of Technical BS. Behold the contents of The Box: megapixels, noise, corner performance, RAW headroom, coma, xenon afterglow, diffraction, OLPFs, missing midtones, 14 bit files, MTF charts, dynamic range, monitor calibration, reciprocity failure, 1:1 sharpness, ETTR, chromatic aberration, ART lenses and let’s not forget the aptly named Circle of Confusion.  I could go on and on adding to the contents list of the Box of Technical BS, but the one thing all these technical attributes share is that no matter how much you possess of any of these, they won’t increase the emotional impact of a photo one iota.  The only technical aspects one really needs a handle on is the exposure triangle and focus and most cameras will do these tasks for you.  Which brings us back to the important stuff.

1) Emotion

Hands down the most important aspect of any photograph is it’s ability to invoke an emotional response.  This response is what gets you to look longer at some photos than others, maybe even decide to buy a print and hang that photo on your wall.  The response can be anything from happiness to the blues, warmth to chill, serenity to horror.  It could inspire curiosity or a call to action.  It could simply be a cat video saying “cute” or a food photo that makes your mouth water.  If you can pin an adjective/s to a photo other than “boring”, then the photo is succeeding on some level. The stronger the emotions invoked, the more successful the photo and the longer you’ll remember it.

Add clouds to any landscape and pump up the emotional value.

The intensity in this adolescent condor’s eye demands attention.

I’ve got to say this shot is pretty average technically, but because it shows a mom and her chicks, it evokes a response and this shot will sell.
Yes, babies are adorable…

Well maybe not the cutest kid, but did you have a response when you saw this?  If so, it worked.

2) Light

The word photography, literally means painting with light. The quality of the light directly impacts the quality of the photograph.  There’s soft light, harsh light, warm light, cool light, Rembrandt light, beauty light and so forth.  Your camera’s light meter can measure intensity of light, but only you can judge quality of light. There are no equations to evaluate light quality – it’s purely an aesthetic judgement.  How does one learn to make this judgement?  By studying good photography and painting, watching how movies are lit to invoke emotion, hanging out with photographers and other artists who have an eye for it…  Good photographers key into good light.  When they see good light, they find a subject to shoot.  When they see a good subject, they wait for the good light (or create it themselves with studio lighting, modifiers, etc).
Warm rich light from a low angle – quick find a subject.  This Reddish Egret will do nicely.

Got a classic subject you want to shoot, like Sedona’s Cathedral Spires?

Exposure is right on and it’s razor sharp.  But because the light sucks it’s boring, boring, boring.  But come back for sunset and you get yummy results like this.

Often the good light is very fleeting.  Below is the Organ Mountains in New Mexico – a rugged strong landscape.  I had my subject, now wait for the light — wait, wait, wait….

Boom.  The light only lasted a few seconds.

Here I had very diffuse light from overcast skies – pretty blah unless I find the right subject.  In this case this Great Egret made for a splendid high key rendition.
Backlighting can give striking silhouettes…

or fun fringe lighting.

And of course there’s the tried and true north-facing window light – perfect for nude studies like the one below — oops, my bad, this is a family site.  Trust me, the shots are awesome.  As a consolation here’s a window-lit still life.

3) Composition

Composition is the arrangement of subjects within a photo.  A good composition gets the viewer’s eye to travel throughout a photo.  A weak composition leads the eye to one spot where it subsequently gets stuck.  There are scads of articles and books written about composition and the various “rules” and concepts are beyond the scope of this article.  The point I want to make is that a photo with strong composition combined with good light has more emotional impact than one of the same subject with lousy composition and/or poor light.

Here we have a nice shot of an eagle – it’s properly exposed and focused, very sharp at 1:1, and terrifically boring.  (So boring I didn’t bother to clone out that sensor dust.) It’s just another bird on a stick shot – nothing original or compelling about it.

Here’s the same eagle on the same tree but with a composition that complements the shot.  The eyes are invited to wander back and forth on the sweeping branch and as the eagle tears off a chunk of fish, his stooped shoulders add a complementary curve to the composition.
Which would you rather look at?  Oh by the way, the first shot was taken with an $18,000 lens, the second with a $1000 lens – toss those in The Box.

4) Creativity

Creativity is all about seeing a subject in a way others don’t.  It’s about being original.  Photographers whose work stands out does so because it’s original.  With the most creative ones you can tell who shot the photo without reading the byline, because their style is so unique.  Avedon and Salgado come to mind.

Other than the model’s stunning good looks (the baby gator that is), there’s not a whole lot going for this shot.

Here we’re getting a bit more creative, framing through the jaws of a dinosaur.  A smidge of creativity makes this a lot more fun to look at than the first shot.  How about a bucket of creativity?

Selfie, meet Bizarre Atmospheric Phenomena.  Bizarre Atmospheric Phenomena, meet Selfie.  The subject of this is a tad ambiguous until you realized that is a human figure, in this case the photographer, casting his shadow into a fogbow in the rainforest (technically this is called a Glory [the circle rainbow] and Brocken Spectre [my shadow]).
Some scenes you just don’t want to put yourself into.

Here’s a nice captive adult gator all plumped up on the turkey dogs the tourists at Gatorland toss him (and maybe an egret or two).  Now for a more creative look at an egret with one of Gatorland’s finest.

5) Timing

Capturing the peak of action or human emotion or even just waiting for some clouds to move into position can make or break a photo.  After all a photograph is a minuscule slice of time captured and preserved for the ages.  Not all slices of time are as visually compelling as others.

A second before these ducks were calmly loafing in the water.  Now they explode.

The peak of action is one thing, but sometimes more powerful is the moment of emotional dread immediately preceding the peak.  Hard to look at this and not be relieved that you aren’t in that raft going through Lava Falls.

6) Context

Context is fundamental in storytelling – showing the subject relating to other subjects (animate or inanimate) or the environment gives the viewer more to chew on than just a straight portrait.

Two Laughing Gulls smooching prior to getting their groove on.
Then there’s the classic little subject in the large landscape.

Here the vastness of the landscape gives a sense of isolation to the subject which can invoke feelings of isolation, loneliness, independence or even confidence depending on how one looks at it.  Great Blue Heron on Florida’s Gulf Coast.
Let’s go with another tiny figure in big landscape shot.

Here the tiny figure puts the surrounding landscape into perspective creating a sense of vastness we don’t get if we clone out the person as below.

Here we still have a nice landscape but the sense of scale has diminished, giving a more abstract feel to the scene.

7) Layers

Layering in a photo is a broad and somewhat ambiguous concept.  Different photographers define it differently.  Here’s my take.  A photo with layers does more than one thing at a time, giving the viewer more to muse over.  Layers can be visual elements, the obvious example being a strong foreground with a strong background.

Here’s classic near/far layering, with the well-traveled guitar case in the foreground, the guitar-toting rock star (John Stirratt of Wilco) strolling out into the desert in the mid-ground and lastly the sandstone buttes in the background.

More near to far with the rock formations in Antelope Canyon.  In this case the layering is more subtle as there is a steady progression from near to far.  Nevertheless there are several more definitive points that establish foreground, mid-ground and background layers.

Did you really think I’d forget a bird photo?
Note that single layer photos can succeed just fine if the subject is strong enough.

Here’s the same cormorant we saw before, but this time its gesturing (in this case yawning – when will that photographer stop shooting?) carries the photo.
Layers can also be story telling layers – where two or more elements of the photo inspire the viewer to consider multiple story lines.

Here we return to Antelope Canyon and the same vantage point the black and white study was done from.  Only now we’re not just looking at visual layers but the added story-telling layer of the crazy crowds is included – yes this is what to expect if you visit Antelope Canyon, though you might not see the trendy wedding photo shoot going on.
These are the more obvious examples but there can be layers of meaning or feeling and on and on – basically anything that causes the viewer to come up with multiple interpretations of what’s going on.

8) Wrapping up

When you view a good photo you get lost in the subject, the story and the feelings evoked.  You don’t wonder about the metadata.  Let’s revisit the opening shot of the condor landing at sunset.

Here we have exquisite light, strong composition and spot on timing. The foreground and background layering puts this incredibly rare bird into context within the beautiful landscape it lives in.  All this adds up to emotional punch and a winning shot.
What makes a photograph work is what makes any piece of art work, whether photo, painting, sculpture or other.  Shooting with a Leica or Hasselblad won’t make your photos better.  Shooting with feeling will.  To take your photography to a higher level, think outside The Box.

The post What’s Important in a Photograph, and What Isn’t appeared first on Photography Life.

Recently I’ve been experiencing one of those existential photo crises. Low motivation, cliché results, slumping Instagram likes. When I get bummed about my photography I do what any self-respecting unprofessional photographer would do – put on some soft jazz, pour myself a fine single malt, then pull out my favorite Zeiss lens chart results and pleasure myself. But even that didn’t make me feel better. What’s a listless soul-wrenched photographer to do? Ha, I know what will do the trick – no better way to demonstrate my photographic élan and self-assurance than to dis on a kit lens.

Kit lenses are generally known for their convenience, light weight, and optical inferiority. Because one lens replaces many, it’s a recipe to turn one into an slothful photographer. Not the kind of lens we like to talk about here at Photography Life, but as a matter of due diligence someone has to review them so I’m taking one for the team ;) Recently (well not that recently), Nikon released the Nikon AF-S DX Nikkor 16-80mm f/2.8-4E ED VR. This is the DX equivalent of Nikon’s popular full frame 24-120mm f/4. Both sport an equivalent 5x zoom range – very convenient for all-around photography. The 16-80mm has been bundled with the D500 as a kit, albeit a high-end DX kit. By itself the 16-80mm boasts a MSRP of $1069.95. Ouch, for less than the 16-80mm alone you can currently pick up a D7100 with the 18-55mm kit lens plus the 55-300mm lens. The good news is that Nikon currently is giving $500 off the D500 + 16-80mm kit (regularly $3069.95, now $2569.95). I was in the market for a D500 so I took the bait. If I didn’t like lens, I’d just use it to pound out schnitzels.

From 16mm:

NIKON D500 + 16-80mm f/2.8-4 @ 16mm, ISO 200, 1/200, f/8.0

To 80mm:

NIKON D500 + 16-80mm f/2.8-4 @ 16mm, ISO 640, 1/30, f/9.0

1) Key Features

The 16-80mm sports the coveted “gold ring” at the end of the lens barrel. Unlike the magic ring that turns hobbits invisible, the Gold Ring brings attention to you and your camera, announcing you are pro material because you only shoot the best. Besides the hefty MSRP, what gives the 16-80mm this distinction? It pretty much has most of Nikon’s top end technologies – fluorine coating on the front and rear elements (makes it easier to clean with a dry lens cloth), Nano-coating to control flare, electromagnetic diaphragm for consistent results and stepless adjustment (good for video), 4-stop Vibration Reduction, extra-low dispersion glass, aspheric elements, silent wave focus motor, and Beyonce’s unlisted phone number (just checking to see if you’re still with me). But do these add up to good pictures?

Because I like to photograph nature, I’m a much bigger believer in actual field test results than in how well a lens shoots a flat target at a fixed distance in a lab somewhere. What you’re going to see in this review are shots from the field at a variety of focal lengths, apertures and distances. If you want MTF diagrams go here.

Below are the lens specifications.

2) Nikon AF-S DX NIKKOR 16-80mm f/2.8-4E ED VR Specifications

The post Nikon 16-80mm f/2.8-4E VR Review appeared first on Photography Life.

One of the perks of being on the Photography Life team is all the new gear we get to test. One of the downsides is when a piece of new gear comes along and you fall in love with it and don’t want to give the review copy back. This can get expensive fast. The new Nikkor 500mm f/4E FL VR is that kind of product. My old 500mm, Edie, caught me and Flo in the act and you know how that goes – time for us to part ways.

Edie is one incredibly luscious hunk of well-cared for glass. How well cared for?

Here’s me and Edie in happier times.

Yes I love Edie and she has loved me back so many times – most recently with this Table of Contents shot in the November 2015 Arizona Highways.

And maybe you remember this Highways TOC photo from February?

And who can forget this back cover?

Edie is the legendary Nikkor 500mm f/4G ED VR – one of the sharpest lenses ever produced. She has served me reliably on many assignments but now it’s time that she venture out on her own in the world. If you’d like to be Edie’s special new someone here’s some things you should know.

She’ll turn four years old on Thanksgiving.

She likes long walks on the beach.

Oh you mean that other stuff, like scratches and dents. First off I’m the only owner of this lens. Edie has flawless glass (no scratches, no smudges, minimal interior dust, no fungus – the glass would rate a 10) and has worn a Lens Coat all her life so the barrel looks new. She functions flawlessly and mates very well with the 1.4x teleconverter that I’m offering to sell with her. (Note: not all lenses mate well with all teleconverters which is why the Nikkor 800mm comes with it’s own serial number matched teleconverter that is custom mated to each individual 800mm at the factory.)

How well does she mate with her particular 1.4x? Like Romeo to Juliet, Antony to Cleopatra, Brad to Angie. You want proof? How’s this? (100% crop)

Oh yeah.

The lens hood shows minor wear and is missing 3 of the tiny screws that secure the tightening collar. The adjustment screw that holds the hood to the lens is in place and works. The tightening collar is epoxied in place. This is the result of a slow-motion tripod leg collapse – the way the hood is designed, the small screws snap if the hood takes an impact. Thus the hood absorbs the shock, protecting the lens from damage. I have 3 replacement screws but the old stubs would have to be fished out somehow. I haven’t bothered as the hood does its job shading the lens and the lens functions perfectly. This incident was three years ago so if there had been any optical issues they would have shown up by now. This is a pro sports and wildlife lens and these are designed to be run over by cornerbacks and keep shooting. If any sports or wildlife ‘tog tells you they have never dropped or banged a lens they’re lying.

Of course if you’re concerned at all about the functioning of this lens then I invite you to come to Arizona and test shoot it. I can pick you up at the Phoenix airport.

If you choose to buy this lens I encourage you as well to come to Arizona to pick it up. Plane flights are cheap now but insurance and shipping isn’t (I checked and I could fly round trip from Phoenix to Boston cheaper than sending Edie fully-insured 3 day shipping via UPS to the East Coast). Sweetening the deal is if you pick it up in person I will include a day of shooting and instruction with yours truly (a two million dollar value) so you can get the most out of your purchase.

Save some dough!

$6750 for the lens alone.

$7000 for the lens with TC-14E II 1.4x teleconverter.

Buyer covers shipping and insurance.

Comes with Nikon CT-504 case and both long and short tripod feet. Lens Coat not included.

Hurry while supplies last….

Happy shooting,
Verm

The post For Sale: Nikkor 500mm f/4G ED VR appeared first on Photography Life.

This is an in-depth review of the new Nikkor 500mm f/4E FL ED VR lens that Nikon introduced on July 1, 2015. I wrote the initial preview of the lens in a post titled “Is Nikon’s new 500mm FL too sharp?“, where some of our readers got engaged in interesting discussions and even talked about anti-aliasing filters and Nyquist frequency. Stuff that can melt your brain for sure! Today, we will be taking a closer look at the Nikon 500mm f/4E VR and see what this beast is all about.

Yes. That is the answer to all your questions about the Nikkor 500mm f/4E FL ED VR. Is it ludicrously sharp?

This condor says yes.

Does the nearly 2-pound weight reduction from the last iteration of Nikkor 500mm make a real difference?

Not even a speedy hawk can escape this nimble beast.

Is it worth gutting my kid’s college fund to buy one?

Duh.

For $10,300, those answers had better be yes. Is there anything wrong with this lens? Is it worth two grand more than its predecessor, the legendary Nikkor 500mm f/4G ED VR, one of the sharpest, most capable lenses ever produced? Those are just two of the questions I’ll address in this review.

Note: From here on in this review I’ll refer to the new 500mm f/4E FL ED VR as the 500E FL and the older 500mm f/4G ED VR as the 500G.

Buying a supertelephoto prime lens is a big decision. Before I plunked down over eight large for my Nikkor 500G I asked a friend who owned a Canon 500mm if he ever regretted spending so much on his lens. “Not for a second,” was his reply. I can say the same thing. If you’re addicted to being out in nature and feel thrilled when you capture a great moment of wildlife action, then at some point you’ll lust for one of these big primes.

Case in point – this is one of my early photos with my 500G – the sun was going down, the ISO was sneaking up and only a mega-responsive supertelephoto prime would have caught this.

Now that you’ve decided which kidney you’re going to sell, let’s get down to business. Investing in a supertelephoto prime is a big commitment so this is going to be an extensive review. First, the specs according to Nikon with the 500G for comparison.

1) Specifications and Comparison to Nikkor 500mm f/4G

2) Build Quality

Even though the 500E FL is relatively light, the build feels top notch, not plasticky. All the switches feel positive and precise, the tripod collar is dreamy smooth and manually focusing feels like silk scarves silently slipping off Venus De Milo’s remaining shoulder.

The post Nikon 500mm f/4E VR Review appeared first on Photography Life.

Noise is the sleet storm Satan drenches our photos in when we stupidly leave our tripod in the trunk thinking VR will save our lazy butt, but instead we end up shooting at quadruple digit ISOs. In this article, we will take a look at a couple of techniques on how to reduce noise and how to avoid it in the first place.

That grainy look to our photos is the punishment for our lack of photographic purity and wholesomeness. So how can we go about trying to minimize noise in our images and fool people into thinking we are without sin? I’m glad you asked.

My girlfriend has this nasty habit of taking better photos than me. To fix this problem, when we see a great subject like this Burrowing Owl. I hand her my D7200 set at White Pelican in Flight settings (-1 stop exposure compensation with Auto ISO enabled). Before she knows it, she’s already at 10000 ISO and still underexposing as seen above. Ha, I win! Talk about a recipe for noise stew. Fortunately, she’s kindly let me use the resulting file to demonstrate some noise reduction tricks and I only have to wash all the dishes for the next ten years.

Here’s a version I tweaked in Lightroom. It looks minimally noisy to me and get this, I didn’t nudge the sliders in the noise reduction panel at all to get this result.

Before we get into how to minimize the appearance of noise in our images let me state here that noise is one of the least important components when it comes to an image’s strength and appeal. Good composition, alluring lighting, proper exposure, appropriate focus, astute timing, etc. etc. are all much more important to a photo’s success. Noise is the last nitpicky thing I worry about when working on a photo. Some noise can even be desirable, for instance if you’re trying to achieve the gritty B&W photojounalistic look that came from the days of Tri-X film (very popular in the 60s and 70s). That said, at a certain point, noise can get so bad it degrades image quality by obliterating fine detail.

This article is written assuming we are capturing RAW images, not jpegs. In it, we’ll discuss controlling noise both in camera and when post-processing in Lightroom. Further noise reduction in other software programs such as Noise Ninja or Topaz DeNoise is beyond the scope of this tutorial.

1) Noise Basics

Noise comes in two flavors; luminance noise and color noise.

Luminance noise gives the grainy look above.

Color noise gives multicolored speckles.

Noise is most often the result of amplifying the signal (in this case the data collected by each photosite on your camera’s sensor) to output a file of the desired apparent brightness. As light levels drop and each photosite gets less information in the form of photons landing on it, to achieve a file that doesn’t look underexposed, we need to amplify the signal by boosting the ISO. The higher an ISO you shoot at (assuming you’re shooting the same camera), the greater the noise in the resulting files. Sensors produce the cleanest results when shot at base ISO (the lowest numbered ISO on the camera).

Smaller individual photosites (common on high megapixel crop-sensor cameras, many mirrorless offerings and point-and-shoots) get hit by fewer photons per exposure than bigger photosites (found on lower megapixel full frame DSLRs and medium format digital bodies) hence have less information to send out and thereby need to amplify that signal more to achieve the same level of brightness. This is why the 16mp full frame D4s with its Rubenesque photosites is much less noisy at the same ISO than the 36mp full frame D810 with its anorexic photosites.

Here an example from the creepy Iron Door Cave in the Mojave Desert. Shot at 6400 ISO with a full-frame D4s, it suffers from very little noise – even the dark areas look fairly clean and this with some shadow recovery applied. And here is the original file with no shadow recovery applied and at 100%

Contrast this with a crop sensor D7200 image at 7200 ISO at 100%. The D7200 has much smaller individual photosites.

This file is untweaked. The background is noisy. However, we should realize when we zoom in to 100% on a higher megapixel file than a lower one, we zoom in tighter and this actually increases the appearance of noise. If we shot the same scene on the two different cameras and zoomed to the same final composition the difference would not be as great, but the D4s would still win.

Noise can come from amplifying the signal in camera by boosting ISO, or later by boosting the signal during post-processing, for instance to recover shadow detail.

2) Avoiding Noise in Camera

The best way to avoid noise is to shoot at the lowest ISO you can get away with. This might mean using a tripod or perhaps supplementary lighting (flashes, etc.). The more photons that hit your sensor (from a longer exposure), the more info each photosite collects and less amplification required to output the desired signal (how bright or dark that part of the photo will look).

In camera high-ISO noise reduction is only applied to jpeg outputs. If you are saving the images from your camera as RAW files, turning high-ISO noise reduction on will have no effect – you will have to do your own noise reduction in post.

• Avoid underexposure. Increasing exposure in post requires amplifying the signal and is an express ticket to Noiseville.
• Exposing to the right (ETTR) is a trick to get the maximum amount of info in a file so one needs as little signal boosting in post as possible. ETTR involves intentional overexposure of the initial file (just short of blowing out the highlights), then dialing back the brightness in post. A big ETTR benefit is less apparent noise in shadows. When I use ETTR tactics, I simply bracket shots until I find the brightest exposure that gives me a file without highlight blinkies. For a more detailed exploration of ETTR, click on Spencer Cox’s article here.
• Compose tightly in camera. Cropping in post will magnify the appearance of noise. Better to step a bit closer to your subject or zoom in if you can. Shoot multiple versions in camera so you can take the one that needs the least cropping in post.
• Favor light backgrounds over dark backgrounds. Noise is most apparent in the darker parts of a photo.

Note how noisy the midtones and shadows in the background are. Note how little noise is apparent in the brighter branch.

This background tip is one I put low priority on as choosing an appealing background is more important to me than choosing a background just to minimize noise.

Realize that highly detailed parts of a photo can do a great job at hiding noise. Such areas might be fur, hair, feathers, grass, sand, etc. Conversely, smooth areas, like skin or sky, will make noise more apparent. Looking at the bluebird above little noise is apparent on it’s finely textured back feathers, however the broader smoother tail feathers do look noisy. The elk portrait also hides the noise well in the facial fur.

All the above is good advice, but how practical is it? Far more important than stressing about the issues above is to get the shot. If you need high ISO to get the shot, then by all means use high ISO. If you need to underexpose most of the frame to protect highlights elsewhere, then do it. There’s a lot of post-processing trickery we can do to minimize the resulting noise so let’s get to that.

3) Minimizing Noise in Lightroom 6

There are tons of tricks to minimizing noise in Lightroom. I’ll go through some of my favorites. Be aware that every photo is an individual case and not every trick will work with every photo.

Most of these tips don’t utilize the noise reduction sliders. The luminance noise reduction slider blurs away detail to smooth out noise. I’m a stickler for retaining fine detail and I don’t like how heavy amounts of noise reduction make images look plasticky or like paintings. I only use the NR sliders after I’ve done everything else I can.

Because dealing with noise is so individualistic, don’t be afraid to work and re-work images until you get the results you like.

Let’s consider a couple of Lightroom basics. First, when you import RAW files into Lightroom, there is a default level of sharpening and color noise reduction applied. Second, Lightroom’s develop module is designed to work best from top to bottom on the right side panels. Hence I suggest doing your tone mapping (exposure, contrast and color tweaks) before dealing with the detail panel (sharpening and noise reduction).

When doing these tone mapping tweaks consider whether you want to apply them globally (to the entire image) or locally (to just a part of the image by using the adjustment brush). It’s tempting to just hit a global preset like the “Punch” option and be done with it. However, the tweaks you make to exposure, contrast and clarity can involve amplifying the signal and that of course increases noise.

Let’s work an example here. We’ll use our Burrowing Owl buddy.

Here I’ve taken the file and done the following global adjustments:

Exposure +1.00
Contrast +19
Shadows +21
White +30
Black -31
Clarity +31
Vibrance +11
Saturation +5
Sharpening 75, 0.8, 50
Noise reduction was at default: luminance 0, color 25.

The result looks good and punchy but full of noise. Check it out at 100%:

Blechhhh! Look at all that luminance noise. Well, I’d better apply some noise reduction.

I’ve added +50 luminance noise reduction and much of the noise is gone.  Let’s push the slider to +75 and obliterate the rest.

Now the noise is gone, but so is the fine feather detail, especially in those cool snowflakey bristles around the bridge of the beak.

Consider if the entire image is benefiting from your tweaks or just a portion. If it’s just a portion, then go into the adjustment brush to make a local adjustment. Case in point is the Clarity slider, or as I call it the “Add Noise” slider. This slider boosts mid-range contrast while leaving highlights and darks alone – it also enhances the appearance of noise. Because of this I suggest that if noise is an issue with your image, then only use Clarity locally. I often do this with bird photos as clarity can really make feather detail pop and as demonstrated previously, the noise increase gets hidden by all that fine feather detail. If I were to apply the clarity globally, then the smooth background around the bird becomes noisy.

Here’s our owl again with the global tweaks and at 100%:

And now lets only adjust locally. Our first pass with local adjustments is to the owl’s face:

The adjustment brush was set at:

Contrast +100
Clarity +100
Sharpness +50
(Global adjustments are exposure +1.00, white +25, black -11, clarity 0, vibrance +11, saturation +0.5)

That’s a pretty aggressive adjustment brush setting so I set density at 100% but flow at 55 so I could gradually brush the adjustment on until it popped like the full global version, but just on the face. Now the bird’s face looks very similar to the first version, but the background noise looks finer grained because it hasn’t been tweaked.

My local adjustments to the face have left the eyes noisy so I go back to the adjustment brush and set it to shadows – 50, sharpness -74 and noise +76. I brush just the eyes and get this:

Another way to blur away noise is to use the adjustment brush with a negative clarity setting and paint away noisy sections. (Pushing clarity to the right increases mid-range contrast; pushing it left reduces mid-range contrast giving a softening effect.)

Here I’ve brushed a local adjustment of -70 clarity to the background.

In my experience this works best for big blank stretches of noisy background, this background is a tad busy for best results. Note that if you got the noise by globally increasing clarity that this will just reset the clarity amount for the area painted over. For example, if you increased clarity to boost cloud detail, but then paint over with a negative clarity adjustment brush you’ll lose that cloud detail you worked so hard to get.

We’ve still got some fine noise here. At this point I don’t find it objectionable and it will probably go away if I downsample this to print it at 8”x10” (this small owl will be life size at 8×10). But what if we want to print larger than life? Let’s go to the background adjustment and push the noise slider to +80 and get this:

Go back to the full frame crop for final output, in this case our 2048 pixel tall web output and here’s our result.

Pretty decent for a 10000 ISO crop sensor shot that was underexposed a full stop and we never even touched the noise reduction panel (though we did apply some local noise reduction to the eyes and background).

The other big popular “Add Noise” culprit is the Shadow slider. There seems to be a trendy obsession with showing off shadow detail in photos and I admit I fall for this a lot. However there is nothing wrong with shadows being shadows and hiding detail – this can add mystery to a photo. So before reflexively trying to recover all the shadow detail you can ask yourself does this particular image really need it? If yes, then get ready to deal with the noise revealed.

Here I’m messing around trying out a 1.4x teleconverter on a 800mm lens and due to the reach and some heat shimmers I’ve got some blurring so I’ve already applied some sharpening to this (78,0.9,51). I’ve exposed not to blow out the highlights on the rimlit wings. This is a decision I’ll question later, but for now I’m stuck with this file and there’s not much detail on the side of the wings we’re looking at. We’ll zoom in to about 170%. At 1600 ISO on the D810 it’s no surprise we’re seeing noise in the background. Let’s try and recover some detail in the wings by running the shadow slider to +100.

Yuck. Now we see a bunch of noise in the wings. Because the background is dark the noise is getting worse there too. I would have been smarter lightening the wings as a local adjustment, but for the sake of example let’s continue down the path we started on. I’ll apply some more tweaks as follows to get close to where I want the tonal values to be. I’ll deal with the noise after I get the tone mapping done. Adjustments:

Exposure +.80
Highlights -100
Shadows +100
White +32
Clarity +36
Vibrance +20
Saturation +16

Those adjustments to exposure, shadows and clarity aren’t helping my noise situation.

Time to head into the detail panel where we find the sharpening and noise reduction controls.

4) Sharpening

Sharpening images increases noise, however all RAW files need some sharpening to look presentable. In Lightroom all RAW files get the following sharpening defaults: amount 25, radius 1.0, detail 25. Sharpening works by detecting edges and increasing contrast along those edges and you guessed it, by increasing contrast it increases noise. Here’s where my favorite trick works wonders. Look at the masking slider – it has a default of 0. This means sharpening is being applied to the entire image. However by moving this slider we can mask away the parts of the image with less noticeable edges and only sharpen the more prominent edges. By using masking we can take this from a global adjustment to a local one. To judge what is being masked hold down the option key (or ALT key on Windows) while moving the masking slider. The screen will be all white at the 0 default. As we push the slider right, the image will gradually darken in the areas with less distinct edges. See Nasim’s excellent article on how to sharpen images in Lightroom to understand how this tool works in detail.

I’ve pushed the slider to about 25 and this is what I see. The areas in white are being sharpened; the areas in black are not getting sharpened. I’ll keep pushing the slider right until only the areas I want sharpened are still highlighted in white like this.

Voila – the bird is highlighted but the background is black, hence only the bird will get sharpened. Background noise will be minimized.   In this case the white areas keep the 78,0.9,51 sharpening settings I already dialed in and the black areas get zero. Looking closely here’s the result.

In my opinion this is the single best Lightroom trick for keeping noise down. Here’s another example side-by-side at ~200%.

Unmasked.

Masked.

You can benefit from this trick even if you don’t add sharpening to your image because Lightroom will have already put its +25 default sharpening on your RAW file.

The Detail slider in the sharpening panel also boosts noise when pushed to the right. When pushed right it tries to analyze blur and sharpen to correct it. When your base level of noise is low, the added noise will be small, but if you are already dealing with a noisy file the noise will exponentially increase.

The radius slider doesn’t increase or decrease noise but can sometimes make the little “grains” look smaller (with smaller radius) or bigger (set at larger radius). The smaller grains may be easier to hide using other tricks later, but I recommend not sweating the radius setting for it’s effect on noise but instead utilize it to achieve the sharpening effect you want based on the spacing of the details in your image.

One other sharpening trick is to go to the adjustment brush and only sharpen the areas that really need it. Pushed to the right of center this increases the sharpening amount (like with the detail panel slider).

At last, we’ve finally made down the developing panels to the noise reduction sliders. But wait, there’s one super important thing we need to consider before messing with those. This is final output – i.e. what size and format the final image will be viewed at. If the image will be an 8×10-inch print on our wall it’s important we view it at that size. If it looks good at that size then we’re done. One huge mistake many of us make is that we obsessively view our images at 1:1. At that magnification any noise will jump out at us. But if the final output is to be viewed at less than 1:1 then our output file will be downsampled accordingly and downsampling does wonders for hiding noise.

This crop sensor ISO 7200 file is straight out of the camera with zero postprocessing other than the Lightroom defaults.  You saw it at 100% at the beginning of the post and the noise was apparent.  Now the noise is pretty much gone all from just downsampling the file to web resolution.

If we bust out a test print, evaluate it from a normal viewing distance, and still don’t like how much noise we see, then we might consider going to the NR sliders, but first consider if the file may have been overcropped and if a looser crop will still look good and shrink the noise away as well.

5) Noise Reduction in Lightroom

Still not happy? Time to blur that noise away. We can do that globally or locally. The simplest method is to go to the noise reduction panel. Default is set to 0 for luminance and 25 for color noise.

When noise gets really bad, such as in the opening fires of hell shot you will start to see horizontal banding artifacts or sometimes both horizontal and vertical forming a checkerboard pattern.

(Note: I increased exposure, shadows, clarity, contrast and sharpness in that output to make the noise worse so you can see the banding effect.)

The noise reduction sliders work by blurring the image – this can wreak havoc with details. If you add excessive noise reduction you get a result like this (100% view).

Hence it’s a real back-and-forth game adjusting sharpening and noise reduction to retain as much detail as you can (without halos or other artifacts) and keep the grainy look to a minimum. I find that by applying all the other noise minimization techniques we talked about above, that I rarely need to push the amount slider beyond 10. This while being primarily a wildlife photographer who shoots a lot at high ISO. I’d rather have a slightly grainy looking image than a smooth waxy-looking one – just a matter of taste.

The same 7200 ISO shot above, with added sharpening, masking the sharpening and +15 NR.

You can also use the noise setting in the adjustment brush to apply noise reduction locally. This adjustment works like the luminance amount slider but without detail and contrast adjustments. This can come in handy if you did some local adjustments, e.g. dodging, that caused noise in just that section of the image. You can actually go to that local adjustment, click on the dot marking it on the image and the setting panel will show the prior adjustments. You can then just add the noise adjustment to that set rather than paint a whole new mask.

Because I rarely go over 10 on the luminance amount the luminance detail and contrast sliders don’t make a significant difference so I just leave them at default.

Color noise is rarely apparent unless you’re shooting quintuple digit ISOs. If I see tell tale color noise at the default setting of 25, I will push the color slider right until the color blobs are minimized.

Here’s our color noise shot again. For this version I reduced the color noise correction from the default setting of 25 to zero to show what color noise looks like.

Here we see the color noise gone when we just accept the default amount of 25. Unless you deal with a bunch of night sky photos, chances are you will never need to monkey with the color noise sliders.

The color noise detail and smoothness sliders might be of use in images with extreme color noise, but I can count the number of times I’ve used these on my fingers. In theory they can make colors bleed and look smeary or desaturated along edges. I reckon if I had an important image with noise so bad I needed these that I’d try a different software program such as DeNoise first.

6) Summary

Dealing with noise has a lot more to do with noise avoidance than noise reduction. Avoiding noise in camera and during tone mapping is the best strategy. By doing this I find I rarely need to push the noise reduction sliders. The amount of noise reduction needed depends entirely on final output. Hence noise reduction should only be done after final output is decided. And when all else fails you can always do the gritty black-and-white conversion trick and your friends will think you’re such a great artist they’ll all give you black turtlenecks for Christmas.

P.S. Nasim has previously published a detailed tutorial on noise reduction that I recommend you take a look at, where he utilizes external tools to reduce noise. Selective noise reduction can yield excellent results when using such tools as Nik Dfine.

All content and photos ©John Sherman unless otherwise attributed. No reproduction without prior written permission.

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Better technique and appropriate gear can help you take better photos, but that will only take you so far. To reach the next level in this pursuit you need to become a student of photography.
A student of photography is somebody who dives into the pool of photo history, soaks in the images of the masters, and seeks out the best work and wisdom of his or her contemporaries. A good student realizes that observing the work of others is crucial to one’s own development as an artist, not to copy those he or she studies, but to discover his or her own eye. I’m a ruthless tech geek, soaking in as much info as I can about reciprocity failure, signal to noise ratios, circles of confusion and the like. But I spend just as much time pouring over photo books from the great photographers. The kind of books I’m talking about don’t have exposure metadata listed with the pictures. That isn’t important – only the emotional impact of the image counts. A good photo makes you wonder about the subject, not the exposure settings.

With this in mind, I want to recommend four wildly differing books I’ve read in the last year that really helped my thinking about photography and how I can best find my own eye. A lot of our readers know me as a wildlife aficionado, so you might be surprised that three of the four books have no critter pics in them. The point is a good photo is good no matter what the subject, the techniques applied or the gear used. Good photography cuts through all that BS, grabs you by the collar and shakes some sense into you. Good photography inspires you and makes you want to become better. These books all helped me improve and all for different reasons. I suggest you check them out.

Vivian Maier – Out of The Shadows by Richard Cahan and Michael Williams

Vivian Maier’s story is odd, mysterious, and a bit creepy all at the same time. A nanny during the day, a street photographer during the day. Hang on, does that make sense? Only with Maier. So would often take her young charges into the city while she pursued her photos. I see a lot of street photography that attempts to grab your attention with gritty portraits of the down and out. Snoresville – show me something new. Maier seemingly shot anybody and everybody and she wasn’t doing it to grab attention. She was private, mysterious and often portrayed as cold and harsh. She shot for herself and only herself, never sharing her work with anyone. Her life was devoted to the process of photography, not the end result. When Maier died she left scores of rolls of 2-1/4” film she had shot, but never developed. Her work wasn’t discovered until it was found at an estate auction after her death by someone who recognized how amazing her eye was. Otherwise it might have ended up in the dump. When Maier’s images hit the internet she quickly became a celebrity, though posthumously.

While the whole story behind her photo career is pretty weird, what’s really amazing is how good her photos are. I’m not a fan of street photography but I’m a fan of Vivian Maier’s photography. Go to vivianmaier.com for a few examples. Her compositions are spot on, her sense of lighting and timing terrific. Technically she was outstanding, but so are a lot of photographers. What sets her apart is her ability to capture a moment in time and make her viewers wonder what the back story is to each shot. Maier’s shots show her as one of the keenest observers of the world around her. There’s a some bizarre undercover surveillance pathos going on. Did that make sense? Probably not. Which is why you should pick this book up and check it out for yourself.

Road to Seeing by Dan Winters

I have a confession to make. I’d never heard of Dan Winters before I cracked this terrific tome open. Flipping through the pages of “Road to Seeing” I recognized many photos and was embarrassed that I didn’t connect Winters byline to the images. He’s perhaps best known for his slightly grunged-out celebrity studio portraits seen in Time, New York Times Magazine, Wired, Fortune, Esquire and other mags. He’s shot the likes of Will Farrell, Tupac Shakur, Glenn Close, Michael Jordan, Christopher Walken, Laura Dern, even President Obama and Mr. Rogers. But like a diamond, Winters has many more facets than that. He can step out of the studio and shoot hard-hitting photo essays for Texas Monthly about neo-Nazis, the Mexican Mafia or unsolved murders. He can shoot honeybees or the space shuttle. Go to danwintersphoto.com – do it now. His images will transfix your eye.

Why I recommend this book is not because Winter’s photos and skills are outstanding. They are. But rather because this is a book about being a student of photography and when to comes to that Winters graduated summa cum laude. This isn’t some egocentric babble about how Winters became commercially successful, but a look at the influences on his career, whether they be other artists or editors or something else entirely. This book features not just Winter’s work, but the work of many others that inspired Winters. You’ll be exposed to Eugene Atget, Alfred Steiglitz, Andre Kertesz, Paul Strand, Henri-Cartier Bresson, Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Eddie Adams, Gary Winograd, William Wegman, Gregory Heisler and many other photography greats. But equally important are the photos he includes from lesser known photographers as well as those from “photographer unknown”. That Winters studies the works of the great as well as the works of the unknown shows he’s a true student of photography. Good work is good work whether the artist is known or not. Beyond the photographs are the stories told. You’ll learn why Eddie Adams regrets the photo that won him the Pulitzer and how Margaret Bourke-White had her focusing cloths made out the same fabric as her custom-tailored dresses. You realize because Winters knows the images and knows the stories, that that contributed hugely to his own success. That is the power of being a student of photography. And now that I’ve studied Winters work, I’ll be a better photographer and student as well.

Capture The Magic – Train Your Eye, Improve Your Photographic Composition by Jack Dykinga

Sometimes I wonder why Arizona Highways doesn’t just save ink by declaring “all photos in this issue by Jack Dykinga unless otherwise noted.” Dykinga has been a mainstay of American landscape photography for decades. In the book 100 Greatest Photographs to ever appear in Arizona Highways magazine, 12 of the images were Dykinga’s. Ansel Adams? Only three. Check dykinga.com for a taste.

One could easily mistake Capture The Magic as a coffee table book. Heck, I don’t speak or read Swahili, but if this book were only available in Swahili I’d still get it just to look at the inspiring landscape photos. What I like about Dykinga’s images is that despite how gorgeous the final result is I still feel like I’m viewing a photo taken on the same planet I live on. I can’t say as much for many of today’s landscape photographers who seem more intent on flexing their Photoshop muscles than on revealing nature’s truth and beauty.

While the subtitle “train your eye, improve your composition” may make you think this is just a how-to book, it is much, much more. Sure there’s a ton of practical advice in it’s pages, but what I dig is while it’s a lot about how to do photography, it’s just as much about how to think about photography. This is not about exposure triangles, color wheels, and the Golden Mean; it’s about the process beyond that – light, composition, timing, perseverance, feeling. I’ve already read it cover-to-cover twice. If the book in the product shot looks a bit worn it should – I keep my copy in my van and whenever I’m out on a shoot and feel my composition is getting stale, I’ll thumb through it for inspiration or maybe a specific tip or two to get me out of my rut.

Genesis by Sebastiao Salgado

I can still remember the first Sebastiao Salgado photo I saw – it was a huge open pit gold mine with long rickety wood ladders emerging from its depths. What looked like armies of ants cling to the sides of the pit were hundreds of half-clothed workers hauling sacks of dirt and rocks up the ladders. The conditions looked abominable and though there were hundreds of workers in the photo, you had to wonder what story was behind each and every individual. What cancer of the human condition could result in such a barbaric enterprise at this stage in history? How bad could life be that so many men toiled under these conditions? Such is the power of superior photojournalism.

With Genesis, Salgado steps aside from his usual subjects – embattled and disadvantage populations – and turns his camera toward our planet as it was before the dawn of “civilization”. His stark high contrast black-and-white images feature landscapes and wildlife in a way to show Earth as it was before humans screwed it all up. It also features a number of indigenous tribes yet to be modernized, but already slipping away from mankind’s hunter-gatherer roots by slashing and burning the rainforest to make way for agriculture – the first step on the slippery slope to where we have taken our planet.

Genesis is a huge book on a huge subject. As I stated above, Salgado’s eye can suck you in with a single image. This book is full of stunning photography, perhaps too much. Trying to view it in one sitting would be like trying to eat an entire cow at one meal. While Salgado’s photos may make you want to become a better photographer, more importantly they make you want to become a better person. Can there be any higher praise? Expose yourself to Salgado at www.amazonasimages.com.

Contents ©John Sherman

The post Read These Books and Become a Better Photographer appeared first on Photography Life.

Jack Dykinga can punch you in the gut with a photo, like he did with his 1971 Pulitzer-winning portfolio, or he can seduce you with his understated yet thoroughly evocative landscape images. He’s one of the rare photographers who has excelled in multiple genres, has adjusted to multiple technological revolutions, and has successfully weathered the ups and downs of the photo industry. After over five decades in the business, Jack Dykinga’s photos remain relevant. Jack Dykinga’s photos endure.

I recently had the great honor to spend an afternoon with Jack and talk photography. Dykinga is one of the most sought-after workshop teachers out there. He’s very sharp technically, but more important, he is a genius with light and composition. He has ten photo books in print including the recently released Capture The Magic – train your eye, improve your photographic composition.

Before we jump into the interview, here’s a quick bio of Jack’s career:

He first got recognition in high school, when a football photo he took for the school paper ended up winning a Look Magazine contest. For those of you not alive then, Look was a large format photo-heavy magazine and quite a heavy hitter back then – Life magazine’s direct competitor.

After high school he got a stint shooting celebrities at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. This was back in the press camera days (Look up Speed Graphic if you don’t know what a press camera is) Dykinga was about eighteen and already shooting anyone from pop crooner Andy Williams to President Nixon.

At age 20 Dykinga decided to attend college and went to the Chicago Tribune seeking night shift work as a darkroom tech. Instead of putting him to work in the darkroom, the newspaper sent him out on assignment. There was no going back. Dykinga worked for the Tribune for several years then moved over to the Chicago Sun-Times, a more liberal newspaper that embraced Life magazine-style photo essays and 35-mm shooting (the stodgy Tribune was still rolling with press cameras and medium format).

Brought up in a conservative Republican family, Dykinga became decidedly more liberal when covering the unrest of the late 1960’s. Speeding up his liberalization was the beating he received at the hands of the police while documenting the Civil Rights marches into Cicero, Illinois and the riots after Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination.

In 1970, while working for the Sun-Times, Dykinga was assigned to shoot a story on conditions at state-run mental hospitals. The state wanted to cut funding. Parents of the autistic children “warehoused” there were enraged. When he arrived, Dykinga was so horrified by the conditions he couldn’t lift his camera. The bleak wards were filled with distressed children curled up on bare benches, stripped-down beds or on the floor. Many were naked. There was an ubiquitous smell of human excrement. An hour-and-a-half passed, then Dykinga started shooting. Three days later he was done. His photo essay so shocked the public that instead of cutting funds for the hospitals, the state ended up increasing funding. This result proved how powerful telling stories through photography could be. The experts agreed and in 1971 Dykinga was awarded photojournalism’s highest honor, the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography.

Not long after, Dykinga was burning out on newspaper photojournalism. Coinciding with this was an assignment to photograph a climb of Mount Rainier. On the climb he was enveloped by a whiteout on the mountain. This near-death encounter with nature so impressed Dykinga that he soon left the big city of Chicago behind and moved west. He landed in Tucson where he worked as photo editor of the Arizona Daily Star.

Out west, he sought out Phillip Hyde, a student/protege of Ansel Adams. Hyde was using landscape photography as a tool to save wild places. Hyde became a mentor to Dykinga, who put the 35mm camera down and shifted over to large format view cameras. He went from “f/11 and be there” to “f/64 and live there.”

From then until the present, Dykinga has traveled near and far documenting the natural world and promoting conservation. He strongly believes one must get to really know an area before they can successfully photograph it. In the process, he has worn out nearly as many camper trucks as cameras. In 2011 he was awarded the Outstanding Photographer of the Year award from the North American Nature Photography Association. While the name Dykinga has now become synonymous with top quality landscape photography, Jack has remained true to his photojournalism roots, using the power of his photography to affect positive change.

At that let’s go to the video and turn it over to Jack, soak in some photo wisdom and enjoy some magnificent images.

For more of Jack’s work, pick up Capture the Magic and also visit Dykinga.com. Jack’s currently on a mission to scan his massive film archives into digital for a career retrospective project. Lucky for us he is frequently posting incredible images from his archives on the Dykinga Photography Facebook page.

Text © John Sherman, Video © John Sherman and Dawn Kish with Included Photos © Jack Dykinga

The post Jack Dykinga Interview: From Pulitzer-Winner to Landscape Photography Legend appeared first on Photography Life.

At long last they’re all out, in stock and making every aspiring wildlife photographer on a budget scratch their head and wonder which one they should own? Of course I’m talking about the Tamron 150-600mm f/5-6.3 VC, the Sigma 150-600mm f/5-6.3 DG Contemporary and the Nikkor 200-500mm f/5.6E VR. These three budget super telephoto zoom lenses compete with each other directly at their price points, reach and heft; but the big question remains – how do they stack up optically? This was my quest when looking at the three lenses: I wanted to find out which of the three deserves the crown as the best budget-friendly super telephoto zoom. Let’s take a look at the lenses in more detail.

Two years ago, getting through the wildlife photography door required a five-figure cover charge. That all changed when Tamron introduced their 150-600mm f/5-6.3 zoom for the ridiculously low price. 600mm at a thousand bucks? It had to suck. But it didn’t. While not as razor sharp as the Nikon or Canon 500/600mm primes, it was still a lot sharper than anyone imagined such an affordable lens could be. And at just over a grand it let a lot more people experience the joys of wildlife photography. Tami became my go to lens when I would scout a new wildlife location – I could move fast covering more ground and if something amazing presented itself, say a bobcat peeking through the woods, I had a capable lens to capture the moment.

Now Tami, as I affectionately call her, has company – both Sigma and Nikon have produced competitors in the budget super tele zoom market. Sigma introduced not one, but two 150-600mm zooms. One, their budget Contemporary model is $1089, the other is the Sport model at twice the price and a lot more weight. It’s the former we’ll be comparing today – let’s call her Sigi. Not to be outdone, Nikon answered the challenge and has recently released the Nikkor 200-500mm f/5.6 ($1399). Canon so far hasn’t answered the bell – the closest they come is their 100-400mm zoom, which is over 2K and really doesn’t have the reach to join the Tamron/Sigma/Nikon super tele zoom group we’re comparing. Note that both Tamron and Sigma versions are available in both Nikon and Canon mounts. The Nikkor, AKA Niki, is Nikon mount only.

1) General Considerations

When you start getting out into the 500-600mm range you’re shooting at 10-12x magnification – more than a standard 8x pair of binoculars. There aren’t many photo subjects other than wildlife that require such reach. Perhaps a few sports where you can’t get close to the participants – like motorsports – or taking photos of the moon. If you’re not shooting small, shy critters, then you probably can get by with a lighter, more compact zoom like a 70-300mm or an 80-400mm/100-400mm. 400mm is generally long enough for larger wildlife like deer, elephants, lions and the like.

Most zoom owners shoot mostly at the far or near end of the lenses zoom range and less frequently at the intermediate focal lengths. With these supertelephoto zooms, users will most likely be spending a lot of time at the far (500/600mm) end. I’ve been shooting the Tamron 150-600mm for over a year now and when I check my usage stats 63% of my shots were at 600mm and 5% at 150mm, leaving a third of the shots at the intermediate focal lengths. Why lug such a big, cumbersome lens about if you don’t need 500-600 millimeters of reach? For birds you can use all the reach you can get.

As these lenses will likely be used more at the far than medium or near end, performance at the far end will be more important for most folks.

In general, most wildlife shots feature the animal somewhere around the center of the frame, not in the corners. Hence for wildlife I would tend to favor a lens with superior sharpness in the center of the frame over one with less sharpness in the center but better corner-to-corner sharpness.

On the flip side, when shooting landscapes, corner-to-corner sharpness is more important.

Sharpness is not the paramount consideration when it comes to wildlife lens performance. Did I just say that on Photography Life? Let me state this another way. I could give a s#!+ about how sharp all the shots are that I miss. Paramount in wildlife photography is the ability to capture the moment. You usually don’t get a second chance when an animal does something unique.

Therefore attributes like autofocus speed and accuracy, focus-tracking ability, effective image stabilization, convenient zooming and the like become just as important as sharpness. Heck, even the ease of removing the lens cap with the lens hood on could be the difference between getting the shot or cursing yourself (Tamron wins the lens cap challenge, with Nikon second and Sigma a distant third). These attributes are hard to quantify, but I’ll try my best to give every lens a good workout and find out which one performs best in the field.

2) Fixed Versus Variable Aperture

Sigi and Tami both have a variable maximum aperture while Niki has a fixed maximum aperture. Historically, fixed aperture zooms have been faster, sharper and more expensive than variable aperture lenses. But that pretty much applies to the f/2.8 zooms. Those were made for the professional market and built to higher standards than the slower variable zooms of yesteryear. At a fixed f/5.6 the Nikon 200-500 is not a fast lens and only 1/3 stop faster than Sigi and Tami at maximum zoom. Is there an advantage to a fixed aperture? Very little it turns out. The two cases are: 1) when shooting manual wide open, setting your exposure, then zooming and forgetting to reset your exposure; and 2) when zooming wide open when shooting video. In case one this is pretty inconsequential given how much exposure latitude modern sensors give us. In case 2, DSLR videos are usually shot at 1/50 sec, hence it would have to be real low light to shoot wide open even at base ISO. Add to that that zooming is out of fashion these days (get a boom dude) and any advantage of fixed over variable won’t come into play for 98% of consumers. With Sigi and Tami, once you stop down to f/6.3 (only 1/3 stop slower than f/5.6) the lenses will stay at the same aperture when zooming. If shooting video with the aperture wide open then you can’t zoom without altering your exposure (because you’ll probably be at 1/50 sec you’ll only be able to shoot wide open in very low light or with a neutral density filter attached [95mm ND filters start around $300]).

So there’s little advantage to a fixed aperture in this case and Sigi and Tami are faster at their wide ends than Niki. Bottom line – I wouldn’t worry at all about one being fixed and the other two not.

3) Why Not Primes?

If most of one’s time will be spent shooting at the long end of these zooms, why not just buy a prime lens? After-all, it should be much easier to design a fixed focal length lens than a zoom as less is being asked of it. The reason is because the latest Nikon and Canon 600mm primes cost over ten grand. For that price, why not just buy a pet tiger and shoot the kitty with your iPhone?

The reason those big primes cost so much is because at f/4 they are fast. Faster lenses let in more light, improving AF performance and allowing one to work in dimmer conditions – conditions under which many animals are most active. The faster the lens is (given the same focal length) the bigger diameter the elements need to be to let in that much light. Bigger elements are more expensive to make than smaller ones, so much so that these monster primes end up with equally monstrous price tags. If your goal is to shoot quetzals in the rainforest, start saving up now. But if you’re shooting in brighter conditions (say on safari), you should be able to get by with f/5.6. Bear in mind too that as sensor technology continues to improve, cameras are getting better and better at shooting in low light. To me, the biggest advantage of the f/4 lenses over the f/5.6-f/6.3 lenses is in AF-performance. Camera AF modules simply work better when they get more light. When you get to 500/600mm, your depth of field wide open is wafer thin, so if you want to get both eyes of your subject in focus, but the subject isn’t perfectly aligned to your camera, then you’ll be stopping down to f/8 or so anyway. f/4 might give a bit nicer out of focus background, but the difference between that and f/5.6 isn’t really much.

All of this makes me wish Nikon and Canon or other manufacturers would produce 600mm f/5.6 primes that would be far less expensive than the f/4 primes, and a whole lot lighter too. But let’s stop daydreaming and look at the affordable lenses available now. We’ll break this down into the various significant attributes and compare each lens against the others in terms of sharpness, AF and manual focus performance and tracking, image stabilization, build quality, and general handling.

The post Nikon 200-500mm vs Tamron 150-600mm vs Sigma 150-600mm C appeared first on Photography Life.

Lost in all the recent excitement of the Nikon D5/Nikon D500/Canon 1DXMkII/Pentax K-1/Sony a6300 and Fuji X-Pro 2 announcements was Nikon announcement of their new DL “premium compact” camera line-up. The DL line-up consists of three models all sporting fixed lenses, 1.0” 20.8 megapixel sensors and the new EXPEED 6A processor. The Nikon DL18-50 ($850) with its 18-50mm equivalent lens is there to tempt the landscape and architecture shooters. Street ‘togs and all-rounders are offered the DL24-85 ($650) with a 24-85mm equivalent lens. For nature and wildlife buffs the DL24-500 ($1000) sports a 21x superzoom 24-500mm equivalent lens.

This DL line-up is designed to attract serious enthusiasts and pros. All three shoot RAW and 4K UHD video and the controls and menus are laid out to closely resemble the Nikon DSLRs making transitioning between cameras easy for Nikon users. The DL18-50 and DL24-85 are “pocketable” (not in a cell phone pocket, but a bigger pocket). The DL24-500 is based on the “bridge-camera” (AKA superzoom) platform used for the popular Nikon P900.

So in a world where point-and-shoots are lining up to commit hara-kiri, why would Nikon introduce not one but three very expensive point-and-shoots? Because they still hope there is a market for something between a DSLR and a smartphone. As smartphone image quality continues to improve, any compact camera that wants to survive will have to produce very high quality images. Enter 1.0” sensors. These have roughly four times the surface area of the standard 1/2.3” sensors found on most point-and-shoots (the Coolpix line-up for instance), and 2.8x the area of 1/1.7” sensors (such as found on the Canon S120). The 1.0” sensor is the same size (Nikon calls it CX) as found on the ill-fated Nikon 1 cameras. The Nikon 1 was Nikon’s attempt to capture the better than point-and-shoot, but smaller-than-DSLR market, but never caught on with consumers because other interchangeable lens mirrorless offerings had larger sensors (micro-4/3rds and APS-C) and superior image quality. There are other 1” sensor compacts out there such as the Canon GxX series or the Panasonic SX100, but the DLs’ real competition and the one many pros slip into their pocket as a backup is the Sony RX-100 (all four versions have proved popular).

The Sony RX-100 IV is no slouch as Nasim’s review proves. If the Nikon DL hopes to compete it will need superior optics and handling. Fortunately it seems Nikon realized this and did their best to keep the menus and controls compatible with their DSLR line-up. This seems like a good strategy as the Sony RX-100 line-up has been the dominant choice in the pro-pocket camera world for years, but lots of RX-100 users hate Sony’s confusing and disorganized menus. On the optics front Nikon included lots of the upper-end Nikkor lens features like fluorine coatings, aspheric elements and ED glass. The DL18-50 lens is even Nano-coated.

In any title fight, if there’s a tie, the reigning champ, in this case the $950 Sony RX100, keeps the crown. So how does Nikon plan to take down the RX100? The obvious direct competitor is the Nikon DL24-85. With a 24-85mm equivalent lens it squares up closely against the RX100 III and IV’s 24-70mm equivalent lens (The RX100 I and II featured a 28-100mm equivalent zoom). At f/1.8-2.8 the Nikkor and Sony’s Zeiss lenses are equally fast. The Nikon has a 20.8 MP sensor, the Sony 20.1 – call it a tie for resolution. They both claim to shoot up to ISO 12800 but I’ll believe that when I see it. As Nikon generally uses sensors made by Sony I’m guessing the DLs have Sony sensors and I’d be surprised if there is a significant difference in performance at final output. Nikon lands punches with 1:1 macro focusing mode and hybrid phase-detection/contrast-detection autofocus. Sony counters with a slightly slimmer build, lower weight and a built in electronic viewfinder. What could be the knockout punch for Nikon is the price – 300 bucks cheaper. However when one is spending $650 or more bucks for a compact camera, price is likely secondary to image quality in the final buying decision. Which is why I’m eager to get a review copy and put it up against the Sony. (PS – if you’re thinking of buying an RX100 it could pay to wait a bit and see how far Sony drops the price to stay competitive.) If the Nikkor lens outperform Sony’s Zeiss-branded lens, then Sony is in trouble. Oh yeah, the Sony shoots at 1/32000 sec and the Nikon only at 1/16000, but wait, the Nikon has Bulgarian language support – gotta say I’m pretty torn on which would be more useful.

Why would I be excited about the DL24-85? As many of you know I’m a dedicated rock climber and a quick nimble optically superior camera that would fit in a tiny pouch on my harness is very enticing. For a long time I shot Canon Powershots – the S95, S100, S110 and G10 and G12. The image quality was pretty darn good but all of them had the same crappy lens shutter that would scratch the outer element when exposed to the tiniest bit of grit. As outdoor cameras they sucked. Despite endless consumer complaints about this on the Internet, Canon never fixed the issue (at least as of the S110) and would refuse warranty fixes unless you really hounded them. I would describe the problem to their service reps who would then tell me “you are the only person who has ever told us of this problem.” To which I would reply, “you never read the hundreds of complaints on the internet about the exact same issue?” After which they would grudgingly replace the lens so it could get scratched another month down the road. I finally gave up on Canon Powershots after my S110 broke on the first day of a five-day ascent of El Capitan. I’ve been looking for a replacement ever since, but even though friends raved about their RX100s I wasn’t convinced I wanted to drop a grand on a point-and-shoot. My finger has hovered over the RX-100 buy button a few times, but always on last year’s model that was being discounted, but never quite enough. So yes, I am excited by the Nikon DL24-85, especially for climbing photography, and a bit for it’s promised macro capabilities. I can’t wait to report back to all of our readers on its performance when we get a review copy. If I feel the DL24-85 yields publication-quality images then I might push “buy”.

One DL camera with no competition is the DL18-50. The combo of super-wide-angle capability, 1” sensor and pocket sizing makes this perhaps the most exciting member of the DL line-up. I see this fitting in great for several uses – how about a lightweight landscape camera for a backpacking trip from one rim of the Grand Canyon to the other? Or utilizing the superwide capabilities in Antelope Canyon? Or when shooting wildlife where I already have a pack crammed with a 500mm or 800mm lens, a 150-600mm and a D4s and a D500 (please Santa!) and the last thing I want to add is a 16-35mm and a 50mm lens to my load in case a landscape opportunity presents itself. The DL18-50 is half the weight of the 16-35mm alone. Oooh, I’m just drooling over the possibilities. Before we get too excited, and I hate to do this, but perhaps we need to bring back those sad memories of that first Match.com date where everything looked so good on the monitor, but in real life a basketball could kiss better. We’d better wait to see how the 18-50mm lens performs. This is the one DL that has Nano coating on the lens – a good choice as at 18mm you’re just begging flare to enter your lens. I’ve seen some pretty good sample pics, but I’ll hold judgment until I’ve seen my own results. Nikon boasts of some other goodies like 20 fps shooting, optical VR and perspective control, but realistically I see high frame rate and VR as nice touches, but bigger plusses on the other DL models than the 18-50 as most wide angle shooting is of static or slow moving subjects. But for when you need it – the mountain bike jump sequence or low-light landscape sans tripod – these will be nice. The perspective control feature is something I could duplicate myself in Lightroom, but would need the foresight to give myself cropping leeway – no a big addition in my mind, but could help save some shots at the wider angles if you don’t give yourself enough leeway. So in the end I think the success of the DL18-50 will depend heavily on it’s corner-to-corner sharpness throughout it’s zoom range. This will make or break this camera for the landscape photographers that are the primary target.

Last, but not least is the DL24-500. This is the guilty pleasure camera of the DL family. The one you’ll hate to love in front of your photogeek friends but can’t wait to get your hands on. I would never say this if the Nikon P900, another supertelezoom “bridge camera” hadn’t been so damn fun to shoot. Check out my review of the P900 here. The P900 had an insane 83x zoom range. Unless you were shooting the moon or tiny birds, the long end of that range was wasted. And, as stated in that review, even though an 83x zoom range would suggest a huge compromise to image quality, this really wasn’t the case. Nikon’s optical engineers did a great job. Sure it wasn’t DSLR quality, but for a huge zoom range on a 1/2.3” sensor it way surpassed my expectations. Which is why I’m excited to get my hands on the DL24-500. At a cool grand one has to think the lens is far superior to the 600-dollar P900’s. The other issues I had with the P900 that made me not lust after owning it were poor low-light performance, long shutter lag, slow zooming and lack of RAW file output. The DL24-500 shoots RAW, has a far bigger sensor with bigger pixels (with backlit technology for better low-light performance) and we’ll have to wait to see about the shutter lag and AF speed. If the shutter lag and AF speed aren’t issues I can see this being a great “safari camera” for enthusiasts and those intent on traveling light. For the pro wildlife photographer I could see this being something I’d bring on a scouting mission so as not to miss some crazy once-in-a-lifetime happening, but not a camera I would pack when I knew when and where I was going to shoot.

The DL24-500 won’t fit in your pockets unless you still have some MC Hammer parachute pants in your closet. It has an electronic viewfinder, unlike the DL18-50 and DL24-85 which have optional EVFs (not priced yet, but rumored around $280 which negates the price advantage over the Sony RX100 IV).

One thing I can’t help but praise is the presence of custom exposure modes on all the DL models. These modes (e.g. U1 and U2 on the D7200, et al) are sorely missing on Nikon’s pro models such as the D4s and D810. These are hugely useful to any photographer and especially pros because they intimately understand exposure. Why Nikon doesn’t offer these on the D5 or D500 is puzzling/infuriating/moronic/aggravating/f’ed-up/add your own expletive here. HELLO NIKON – THIS IS AS SIMPLE AS A FIRMWARE UPDATE TO THE PRO LINE-UP – WHY, WHY, WHY DO YOU DENY YOUR MOST LOYAL CONSUMERS THIS VALUABLE FEATURE??????? (Hee hee, as an aside, autofocus was invented by Leica, but as they deemed it a feature pros didn’t need they sold the technology to Konica-Minolta. Nikon doesn’t have a monopoly on misunderstanding the needs of pros.)

Some worrying questions arise when thinking about this new line-up. First in my mind is battery life. How much juice will the EXPEED 6A suck (or the optional EVF) and how many spare batteries will I need for a rim-to-rim crossing of the Grand Canyon? How will the new sensor do in low light? If battery life and noise are acceptable then I think the success of the DL line-up will come down to optical performance. And the one last niggling worry – will quality assurance be good this time around?

My hopes are high because I think Nikon is finally listening to its customers (yay D500!) and coming out with new products that aren’t the purse-ready Nikon 1 or hipster-ready Df. The DL line-up comes as a surprise to me as Nikon has seemed so oblivious to consumer demand for years. Launching a competitor to Sony’s cherished RX100 and a whole new creature with the DL18-50 seem like very positive announcements indeed. Hopefully this also extends to dealing with their numerous QA issues of the last 5 years.

If your final output is website sharing or small prints, the DLs are probably overkill. This might change as monitors and bandwidth improve, but for now smartphones or smaller sensor point-and-shoots will suffice for this market. For publication or printing large, the 1” sensor will be good for most applications, though at higher ISOs image quality will break down quicker than larger sensors. This leaves Nikon treading the fine line between DSLR image quality and point-and-shoot size and convenience. The DL specs appear they right on track, but whether the price point is right remains to be seen. We won’t know until they actually hit the market.

Are you excited? Let us know in the comments.

Can’t wait? Here are the pre-order links:

• Nikon DL18-50 f/1.8-2.8
• Nikon DL24-85 f/1.8-2.8
• Nikon DL24-500 f/2.8-5.6

The post The New Nikon DL Line of Premium Compacts – Should You Be Excited? appeared first on Photography Life.

You know the drill.  You pick up a magazine or browse a website and flip through the photos.  Most you look at for less than a second, but a select few grab your attention and demand a longer look.  What’s different about these select photos?  What makes some photos great and others mediocre?

I’ve bounced this question off of several distinguished photographers and the answers are always quite similar.  They may disagree on some of the ordering, but the list of qualities goes something like this:

1. Emotion
2. Light
3. Composition
4. Creativity
5. Timing
6. Context
7. Layers

We’ll break these down in a bit, but first let’s list some things that aren’t important to a photo’s success.  These are in no particular order and constitute what I call The Box of Technical BS. Behold the contents of The Box: megapixels, noise, corner performance, RAW headroom, coma, xenon afterglow, diffraction, OLPFs, missing midtones, 14 bit files, MTF charts, dynamic range, monitor calibration, reciprocity failure, 1:1 sharpness, ETTR, chromatic aberration, ART lenses and let’s not forget the aptly named Circle of Confusion.  I could go on and on adding to the contents list of the Box of Technical BS, but the one thing all these technical attributes share is that no matter how much you possess of any of these, they won’t increase the emotional impact of a photo one iota.  The only technical aspects one really needs a handle on is the exposure triangle and focus and most cameras will do these tasks for you.  Which brings us back to the important stuff.

1) Emotion

Hands down the most important aspect of any photograph is it’s ability to invoke an emotional response.  This response is what gets you to look longer at some photos than others, maybe even decide to buy a print and hang that photo on your wall.  The response can be anything from happiness to the blues, warmth to chill, serenity to horror.  It could inspire curiosity or a call to action.  It could simply be a cat video saying “cute” or a food photo that makes your mouth water.  If you can pin an adjective/s to a photo other than “boring”, then the photo is succeeding on some level. The stronger the emotions invoked, the more successful the photo and the longer you’ll remember it.

Add clouds to any landscape and pump up the emotional value.

The intensity in this adolescent condor’s eye demands attention.

I’ve got to say this shot is pretty average technically, but because it shows a mom and her chicks, it evokes a response and this shot will sell.
Yes, babies are adorable…

Well maybe not the cutest kid, but did you have a response when you saw this?  If so, it worked.

2) Light

The word photography, literally means painting with light. The quality of the light directly impacts the quality of the photograph.  There’s soft light, harsh light, warm light, cool light, Rembrandt light, beauty light and so forth.  Your camera’s light meter can measure intensity of light, but only you can judge quality of light. There are no equations to evaluate light quality – it’s purely an aesthetic judgement.  How does one learn to make this judgement?  By studying good photography and painting, watching how movies are lit to invoke emotion, hanging out with photographers and other artists who have an eye for it…  Good photographers key into good light.  When they see good light, they find a subject to shoot.  When they see a good subject, they wait for the good light (or create it themselves with studio lighting, modifiers, etc).
Warm rich light from a low angle – quick find a subject.  This Reddish Egret will do nicely.

Got a classic subject you want to shoot, like Sedona’s Cathedral Spires?

Exposure is right on and it’s razor sharp.  But because the light sucks it’s boring, boring, boring.  But come back for sunset and you get yummy results like this.

Often the good light is very fleeting.  Below is the Organ Mountains in New Mexico – a rugged strong landscape.  I had my subject, now wait for the light — wait, wait, wait….

Boom.  The light only lasted a few seconds.

Here I had very diffuse light from overcast skies – pretty blah unless I find the right subject.  In this case this Great Egret made for a splendid high key rendition.
Backlighting can give striking silhouettes…

or fun fringe lighting.

And of course there’s the tried and true north-facing window light – perfect for nude studies like the one below — oops, my bad, this is a family site.  Trust me, the shots are awesome.  As a consolation here’s a window-lit still life.

3) Composition

Composition is the arrangement of subjects within a photo.  A good composition gets the viewer’s eye to travel throughout a photo.  A weak composition leads the eye to one spot where it subsequently gets stuck.  There are scads of articles and books written about composition and the various “rules” and concepts are beyond the scope of this article.  The point I want to make is that a photo with strong composition combined with good light has more emotional impact than one of the same subject with lousy composition and/or poor light.

Here we have a nice shot of an eagle – it’s properly exposed and focused, very sharp at 1:1, and terrifically boring.  (So boring I didn’t bother to clone out that sensor dust.) It’s just another bird on a stick shot – nothing original or compelling about it.

Here’s the same eagle on the same tree but with a composition that complements the shot.  The eyes are invited to wander back and forth on the sweeping branch and as the eagle tears off a chunk of fish, his stooped shoulders add a complementary curve to the composition.
Which would you rather look at?  Oh by the way, the first shot was taken with an $18,000 lens, the second with a $1000 lens – toss those in The Box.

4) Creativity

Creativity is all about seeing a subject in a way others don’t.  It’s about being original.  Photographers whose work stands out does so because it’s original.  With the most creative ones you can tell who shot the photo without reading the byline, because their style is so unique.  Avedon and Salgado come to mind.

Other than the model’s stunning good looks (the baby gator that is), there’s not a whole lot going for this shot.

Here we’re getting a bit more creative, framing through the jaws of a dinosaur.  A smidge of creativity makes this a lot more fun to look at than the first shot.  How about a bucket of creativity?

Selfie, meet Bizarre Atmospheric Phenomena.  Bizarre Atmospheric Phenomena, meet Selfie.  The subject of this is a tad ambiguous until you realized that is a human figure, in this case the photographer, casting his shadow into a fogbow in the rainforest (technically this is called a Glory [the circle rainbow] and Brocken Spectre [my shadow]).
Some scenes you just don’t want to put yourself into.

Here’s a nice captive adult gator all plumped up on the turkey dogs the tourists at Gatorland toss him (and maybe an egret or two).  Now for a more creative look at an egret with one of Gatorland’s finest.

5) Timing

Capturing the peak of action or human emotion or even just waiting for some clouds to move into position can make or break a photo.  After all a photograph is a minuscule slice of time captured and preserved for the ages.  Not all slices of time are as visually compelling as others.

A second before these ducks were calmly loafing in the water.  Now they explode.

The peak of action is one thing, but sometimes more powerful is the moment of emotional dread immediately preceding the peak.  Hard to look at this and not be relieved that you aren’t in that raft going through Lava Falls.

6) Context

Context is fundamental in storytelling – showing the subject relating to other subjects (animate or inanimate) or the environment gives the viewer more to chew on than just a straight portrait.

Two Laughing Gulls smooching prior to getting their groove on.
Then there’s the classic little subject in the large landscape.

Here the vastness of the landscape gives a sense of isolation to the subject which can invoke feelings of isolation, loneliness, independence or even confidence depending on how one looks at it.  Great Blue Heron on Florida’s Gulf Coast.
Let’s go with another tiny figure in big landscape shot.

Here the tiny figure puts the surrounding landscape into perspective creating a sense of vastness we don’t get if we clone out the person as below.

Here we still have a nice landscape but the sense of scale has diminished, giving a more abstract feel to the scene.

7) Layers

Layering in a photo is a broad and somewhat ambiguous concept.  Different photographers define it differently.  Here’s my take.  A photo with layers does more than one thing at a time, giving the viewer more to muse over.  Layers can be visual elements, the obvious example being a strong foreground with a strong background.

Here’s classic near/far layering, with the well-traveled guitar case in the foreground, the guitar-toting rock star (John Stirratt of Wilco) strolling out into the desert in the mid-ground and lastly the sandstone buttes in the background.

More near to far with the rock formations in Antelope Canyon.  In this case the layering is more subtle as there is a steady progression from near to far.  Nevertheless there are several more definitive points that establish foreground, mid-ground and background layers.

Did you really think I’d forget a bird photo?
Note that single layer photos can succeed just fine if the subject is strong enough.

Here’s the same cormorant we saw before, but this time its gesturing (in this case yawning – when will that photographer stop shooting?) carries the photo.
Layers can also be story telling layers – where two or more elements of the photo inspire the viewer to consider multiple story lines.

Here we return to Antelope Canyon and the same vantage point the black and white study was done from.  Only now we’re not just looking at visual layers but the added story-telling layer of the crazy crowds is included – yes this is what to expect if you visit Antelope Canyon, though you might not see the trendy wedding photo shoot going on.
These are the more obvious examples but there can be layers of meaning or feeling and on and on – basically anything that causes the viewer to come up with multiple interpretations of what’s going on.

8) Wrapping up

When you view a good photo you get lost in the subject, the story and the feelings evoked.  You don’t wonder about the metadata.  Let’s revisit the opening shot of the condor landing at sunset.

Here we have exquisite light, strong composition and spot on timing. The foreground and background layering puts this incredibly rare bird into context within the beautiful landscape it lives in.  All this adds up to emotional punch and a winning shot.
What makes a photograph work is what makes any piece of art work, whether photo, painting, sculpture or other.  Shooting with a Leica or Hasselblad won’t make your photos better.  Shooting with feeling will.  To take your photography to a higher level, think outside The Box.

The post What’s Important in a Photograph, and What Isn’t appeared first on Photography Life.