photog
I’ve had a pretty productive day, which is quite rare lately. After my walk this evening, I took some slices of lime and experimented with my 100mm macro lens.
Other angles -
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“There is only you and your camera. The limitations in your photography are in yourself, for what we see is what we are.” -Ernst Haas
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Topic – What is Raw Mode?
David did a great job of summarizing a tutorial/article on using RAW. The below has been taken from this article on Luminous Landscape.
What is Raw Mode?
When a digital camera makes an exposure the imaging chip (whether it's CCD or CMOS) records the amount of light that has hit each pixel, or photo site. This is recorded as a voltage level. The camera's analog to digital circuitry now changes this analog voltage signal into a digital representation. Depending on the camera's circuitry either 12 or 14 bits of data are recorded. Incidentally, if the camera records 12 bits of data then each pixel can handle 4,096 brightness levels (2^12), and if 14 bit then it can record 16,384 different brightness levels (2^14). (To my knowledge no current imaging chip records a true 16 bits worth of data).
Of course what happens after you've taken the photograph depends on whether you have the camera set to save images to the memory card as raw files or JPGs.
If you've saved the file in raw mode when it is subsequently loaded into a raw conversion program and then saved to a TIFF or .PSD format file it can be exported in 16 bit mode. The 12 or 14 bits recorded by the camera are then spread over the full 16 bit workspace. If you've saved the file in-camera as a JPG than it is converted by the camera's software to 8 bit mode and you will only ever have 256 brightness levels to work with.
I took away from this that unless you are going straight to print or web, you should refrain from saving and re-saving to JPEG files. The tutorial contains quite a bit more information on using RAW files, so I suggest giving the entire article a read.
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Additional Information & Links
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"Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever... it remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything.” -Aaron Siskind
High Dynamic Range Photography (HDR) is performed by taking two or more different exposures of the same scene and merging the photos to create a unique looking, evenly exposed photograph. Wikipedia defines HDR as a set of techniques that allow a greater dynamic range of luminance between the lightest and darkest areas of an image than current standard digital imaging techniques or photographic methods.
The main process is to set your camera to bracket your shots (my Nikon D90 brackets 3 shots). The bracket includes one regular + one underexposed + one overexposed shot. A tripod is pretty much required, unless you have a really stable surface to sit yout camera on. I then take the three shots and merge/process them in PhotoMatix Pro. I am sure, I am not doing everything correctly, but I like what I see so far. There is a lot still to learn. Below I have listed some of the resources that I have run across online.
Tutorials and Resources
Software
Inspiration
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Happy shooting!
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“There is only you and your camera. The limitations in your photography are in yourself, for what we see is what we are.” - Ernst Haas
