This photograph of a FedEx owned Boeing 727 on approach was taken at Salt Lake City International Airport. A storm was just beginning its descent upon Northern Utah as I made this capture. The afternoon light along with the darkening storm clouds made for what I believe to be an interesting airplane shot.
Canon 5D, Canon 70-200 f/4L lens with 1.4x extender – 1/320 second, f/5.6, ISO 50
Northern Utah enjoyed some springlike weather this past weekend with daytime highs in the seventies. I took advantage of this unseasonably warm weather on Sunday and headed up into the mountains to capture some scenery shots.
This aggressively filtered black & white image was taken at Deer Creek Reservoir shortly before sunset. The reservoir was partially frozen and the ice created an interesting near-black layer within the photo.
For the process of converting this shot to black & white, I used the Channel Mixer tool in Photoshop CS2. To enhance the dramatic dark tones of the scene, I bumped the red filter to its maximum setting of +200% and then adjusted the green and blue filters to a combined amount equal to -100%. One caveat of this technique is the ‘digital noise’ that the maxed out red channel introduces. I took care of this with a Photoshop plug-in called Neat Image.
This is just one method I use in converting an image to black & white. How do you do your b&w conversions? Please feel free to share your tricks.
Canon 5D, Canon 24-105 f/4L IS lens – 1/40 second, f/11, ISO 50
Feels Like Spring, photographed at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.
Canon 5D, Canon 24-105 f/4L IS lens – 1/200 second, f/6.3, ISO 50
Sometimes an “Oops!” can give you an unexpected good result. This is the case with Cross Processing.
“What is this Cross Processing you speak of?” you ask. Simply put, it is the processing of film in chemicals that are not intended for the type of film being processed. An example is developing slide film (E-6) in chemicals intended for negative film (C-41), or vice versa. I can imagine the first photographer’s reaction upon discovering that he (or she) mistakenly created this process when looking at their developed film. The resulting effect that this gives an image can vary quite a bit but one common result is blown-out highlights and colors that just “aren’t right”.
In seeking to create a cross-processed effect in Photoshop, it took a short trip to Google. The search resulted in a couple of tutorials on the subject. The easiest instruction set I found was located at PhotshopSupport.com. The tutorial there was easy to follow and included screen shots of the Photoshop steps. I created the image of Michelle in this post using their formula. Notice the yellow-green tint to the skin tone and the bright color of the lips. The effect can be a bit surreal.
Here is another example of the process on a similar shot. On this photo, I added a film border as recommended in the tutorial to add to the effect.
And finally, here is one more example applied to an image of an old mailbox.
If you have given Cross-Processing a try (either with film or digital), please share you results – I’d love to see them.
Cross Processing Info on the Web
On Wikipedia
PhotoshopSupport.com
The Wonders of Cross-Processing
Images 1 & 2: Canon 5D, Canon 24-105 f/4L IS lens – 1/125 second, f/22, ISO 50
Image 3: Canon 30D, Canon 24-105 f/4L IS lens – 1/320 second, f/9, ISO 100
Misty Valley, photographed in Draper, Utah.
Canon 5D, Canon 24-105 f/4L IS lens – 1/200 second, f/4, ISO 50
I’ve been asked why I put a film camera (and an old clunky one at that) on the newly redesigned masthead of LeggNet’s Digital Capture .
The first reason is very simple. I had this photo in my inventory and didn’t have a similar shot of a digital SLR. It was an easy capture to use until I could shoot a picture of a digital camera.
The second reason follows along the lines of yesterday’s nostalgic post. This particular camera is a PETRI FT. This is the same model as my very first SLR. I received it secondhand when I was in the eighth grade. I shot many rolls of film through it in the year I used it, before upgrading to a Pentax MX. This is not the actual camera, but one I picked up off of eBay for $10. It serves quite well in its roll of an office decoration.
I’ll be replacing the camera image up top with a shot of a digital SLR very soon, but for now – film it is.
Canon 30D, Canon 24-105 f/4L IS lens – 1/25 second, f/4, ISO 100
Kodak’s TRI-X black & white film holds a special place in my memory. At 14 years old, this was the first black & white film that I shot and the first that I developed myself. When I took PHOTOGRAPHY I at Chugiak High School we had two choices of film to choose from, PLUS-X and TRI-X. I opted for TRI-X since it was rated at ASA 400 (pre-ISO in those days) and Plus-X was only rated at ASA 125. I wanted the extra low-light ability gained by the faster speed.
As my high school photographic career advanced onto the yearbook and newspaper staff, TRI-X went along for the ride. I routinely bumped the speed to ASA 1600 for the low-light ability it provided. The extra grain was tolerated as a way of getting the shot.
I left TRI-X behind after high school and graduated into shooting roll upon roll of Kodachrome 120 while working as a studio photographer. I didn’t shoot black & white again until a few years later in college, but by then I was more interested in quality and “tighter grain” so I opted for PLUS-X in my Mamiya 645.
Today’s capture was created in Photoshop to give the illusion of TRI-X film. The black & white image of Sarah was shot digitally. I then blended a scan of actual film grain onto the image and then placed it on the scanned TRI-X film negative.
This sure reminds me of my time spent in the darkroom 20+ years ago, but it’s just not quite the same.
Canon 5D, Canon 24-105 f/4L IS lens – 1/125 second, f/22, ISO 100
The Salt Palace. Taken in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Canon 5D, Canon 24-105 f/4L lens – 1/80 second, f/6.3, ISO 50
I recently began shooting with a Canon 5D, moving up from the 30D body that I had been using. The major difference between the 5D and the 30D is that the 5D uses a full-frame sensor as opposed to the 30D’s APS-C sensor. Terms like “full-frame” and “APS-C” can be a bit confusing, so hopefully I can shed a little light on the subject with today’s post.
In digital cameras there is a sensor in place where the film used to be in film cameras. The light passing through the camera’s lens projects the image onto this sensor which then captures it digitally and records the image to memory. These sensors vary in size in both the number of pixels they contain (megapixels) and their physical dimension. Most digital SLR (single lens reflex) cameras bear a strong physical resemblance to the 35mm SLR’s we shot in decades past. But a difference between many of these cameras is the size of their sensor.
Taking Canon’s DSLR line for example, several of their cameras have an APS-C sensor which is smaller than a frame of 35mm film. The 30D model (a camera I use) has this size of sensor. Since the sensor is smaller it only records a portion of the image the lens is projecting. This results in a “zoomed in” effect on the captured image. On cameras with this size sensor, a photographer has to take the focal length of their lens and multiply it by 1.6 to see what the equivalent focal length is. My new 5D body, on the other hand, has a sensor that is the same size as a 35mm frame of film and therefore the equivalent focal length of the lens remains the same.
In the image above I took two pictures from the exact same location with a 30D and a 5D. I used the same lens (Canon 24-105 f/4L IS) on both photos at a focal length of 24mm. By overlaying 100% size images on top of each other you can see how much more of the scene is captured by the 5D’s full-frame sensor (the color 30D image is on top of the black & white 5D image).
Here is another example of the two images next to each other:
Top image taken with Canon 30D – Bottom image taken with Canon 5D
Notice how much more of the scene is captured with the 5D in the bottom image? The lens has a significantly greater wide-angle field of view. This is particularly helpful in landscape photography and architectural captures (not to mention my industry of real estate). The 1.6 crop factor sensor on the other hand can be a benefit when a photographer seeks added ‘reach’ for a lens. I recently used a 300mm lens with my 30D to photograph eagles and hawks in Farmington Utah. By putting this lens on the 1.6 crop camera, it became an equivalent of 480mm – a nice improvement.
In addition to the larger physical size of the sensor, the total amount of pixels is obviously different between the two. The 30D records an image of 3504 x 2336 pixels (8.2 megapixel) while the 5D records a 4368 x 2912 pixel (12.8 megapixel) image. This difference gives a noticeable quality boost to the 5D.
Both of these sensor types have their advantages and their applications. For the type of photography I shoot, I prefer the wide view and image quality of the 5D. The exception to this is when I need the added reach of the APS-C equipped 30D.
Which do you prefer?
Canon 5D, Canon 24-105 f/4L IS lens – 1/125 second, f/16, ISO 100 &
Canon 30D, Canon 24-105 f/4L IS lens – 1/125 second, f/16, ISO 100
Today’s image is a mosaic created from an image of colored pencils I took last summer. I made it with a free tool I came across recently on the web. The tool creates a mosaic of your uploaded image from photos it retrieves from Flickr. While I’m not sure if this violates the API rules for Flickr since the photos used in the creation aren’t attributed to their original photographer, it sure is cool.
Try it out for yourself at imagemosaicgenerator.click42.com.
