Category: Saturday Evening Post

When I was a wee broth of a photographer and served my time in a portrait studio, one of the jobs was “Spotting” the final finished prints of a client shoot. (Now it wasn’t always portraits, as products and insurance claims and the like were the bread and butter of the High St. photographer in those far flung days.
Spotting was—for the uninitiated—taking a fine brush, some suitable photographic ink, and carefully touching up any white marks that dust or fine lint may have marred the photo in printing. Dark marks were removed with a touch of “ferro”, (a highly poisonous product, called Potassium Ferrocyanide), which would, if carefully applied, (and you didn’t wipe the brush between your lips to get a fine point), slowly dissolve away black silver on the print to match the grey surrounds.

Another technique was hand colouring of portraits and wedding assembles. Careful note was made of the colour of shirts, dresses, hats, etc and passed on to the Hand Colourist who would carefully add the appropriate colour to the, usually toned to sepia (brown), prints.
One studio I was associated with had a reputation among the southern Mediterranean clientele. One of them finally revealed the secrets. Oh, we love your photos as they always give us Blue Eyes!
The hand colourist not knowing any different had just added blue to the eyes as she had always done.

Fast forward to the digital age. And among the first things just about anyone who was on the cutting edge of that revolution did, was to take a face and put it into a daffodil or rose. A person I knew, gained quite a reputation for being ‘creative’ as he showed prints of family and friends all looking good in the garden. And now most phones have a built in app for just about everything, including the famous tic-tok filters. Or was that snap-chat, I can’t recall.

I once had to ‘do’ a country wedding. Involved five sisters of the bride. Who wanted a group shot of the girls. Should be easy.
Makes photographing wayward birds a walk in the park. Literally.

Said girls all lined up. But to get them to look in the same direction at the same time for just say, 1/250th of a second proved impossible. Too many people to wave at, smile at or generally get distracted. In the end, I made about 10 shots of the group, and sent them on their way.
Loaded up all the images in Photoshop, did a quick softedeged cut and paste of each face, placed each on a seperate Layer in Photoshop and then carefully positioned it in the right location, body! Lots of hair, and hats and stuff to hide the edges so for all intents—it looked the part. Made the prints. No one complained.

I was quite astounded at the brouhaha, this week when the good Princess KaKa had the audacity to ship out a family pic of the royal brood, and of all things it seems to have “been fixed up in Photoshop”

Really. Must be the first mother in al history that has taken a shot of the kiddiewinks and then had the thought to clone out a hair or two, polish up the shoes, or get that crease out of the dress. When will that child learn to dress properly.
(Another reason to hire a pro. We check for things like that before we press the shutter as we are not emotionally involved in getting to all smile at the same time. )

How it all got past the sleeping Royal PR team is beyond me, but really. It was a pretty nice photo of the family, and normally, a print to hang on the wall.

But truth in the news business is as we all know, of first importance. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.

Famed photojournalist Steve McCurry got himself in a lot of hot water a few years back for some off-handed ‘photoshopping’ on some of his pics.
Incidently, Steve also shot some of the last rolls of Kodachrome.
Don’t know Steve. Think Afghan Girl.
I remember the day I walked into the local newsagent and the latest copy of National Geographic was on the front shelf. I think I was mesmerised.

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Been a quiet week for us. Between awful weather, a scarcity of birds and a few family activities we’ve been a bit of the home body has us.
But
I do want to share a link to a Flickr friend on mine. He live in Wales and has a Sparrowhawk come and land on his back fence. True!
He has made a few minutes of video of it preening. This is right up there with the best of Steve Mc, so click on the link and enjoy an invitation to the best front row seat you’ll get with a Sparrowhawk.

Thanks Martyn, Sparrowhawk.

Oh, and the header photo of Cassia, of Cinnamon, has had a little play around in Photoshop. !!@$$#W****&&^% 🙂

After the long and rambling sometimes confusing post last week, I thought I’d best be a bit simpler this post.

Among some of the tools that I’ve used down the years for obtaining a successful exposure has been a Weston Exposure Meter.

I was fortunate enough to be gifted one of these as a teenager. As time has progressed I’ve owned about five. Three met with sad endings, being dropped or mishandled, one I think was stolen, and one became lost when we moved, once or twice.

There are some clever settings on the dial that records the correct exposure, and to avoid making this a long post I’ll just ignore them, other than to say they could be used to determine the exposure for the darker or lighter areas.

The meter was not battery operated, but used a light sensitive cell to read the light values. It could read a ‘Reflected” reading by pointing the meter at the subject and reading the light ‘reflected’ back.
The meter was also supplied with a little plastic dome, called uncannily, an “Invercone”. To use it in this mode, I’d attach the plastic dome to the meter and then hold the meter in the subject’s position and point the meter at the light source for an “Incident” reading of the light falling on the subject. (Bit more complex to describe here.)

For most of my own work over the years, I’ve always preferred the Incident method. Once you change to a meter built into the camera, incident light readings become hard, and so called solutions to that problem are at best workarounds.

Incident readings overcomes all the issues of working out where a ‘zone’ should sit.
If I were to take a photo of say, Ansel the fluffy Mid-toned Grey Cat in bright sunshine, then one of Fluffy under a bush in the shade, and then a third of Fluffy looking out the window on a cold overcast freezing day, the amount of light falling on Fluffy is going to be significantly different. Obviously the greatest amount of light falls on the sunny day version. And the meter reacts accordingly and I’d change the rotating dial to match the Light Reading value on the screen. The BIg Red Arrow points the way.

Just for the ducks of it, I took my D500 and a 55mm lens outside and photographed the garden. I set the camera to A for Auto and made a picture. ISO 100, 1/125. f/11
Then I set the camera to M for Manual and took the trusty Weston and waved it about a bit, and found it read, ISO 100, 1/125th, f/11. I set that and made the shot.

Looked at both on the screen side by side and didn’t perceive any differences. 🙂
Not that I was surprised. 🙂

Here is a look at my current companion. Although these days it does spend most of its time in the camera cupboard. It also carries a scar of honour in the crack on the glass from one of its many adventures The “Invercone” is in the background.
And I placed it on an 18% reflectance Grey Card (Kodak R-27)

And here is Ansel, the Fluffy Mid-toned Grey Cat. Just in case anybody wondered.

Fluffy and I were being naughty, as she was sitting on my daughter’s table looking out the window.

Had a couple of comments and an enquiry about an off-handed remark I made on St Ansel and the “Zone System” last post.

So for the Non-tech heads—Click away now. Nothing to see here!

If you’re still reading, the majority of the blog is a tad (ok a great big bulge) Tongue in Cheek.

The Zone System, and pre-visualistation (What last weeks blog was about) were the brainchild(ren) of Ansel Adams and Fred Archer. Historical issue, they were photographing in the 1930s using mostly large format cameras, exposing one sheet of filum at a time. Due a range of limitations in technology at the time, the filums cannot be compared to today’s clever chemisty and technological advancements, nor can they begin to be compared to whatever clever senor you have in your sparkling new Mirrorless camera. (What. Don’t tell me you’re back in the days of wooden wagon wheels with one of them oldfashioned, outdated DSLRs (Taylor Swift wouldn’t been seen out with one of them))

Adams and Archer worked with scientists from Kodak who had explored the amount of light reflected from most average scenes. (You know it was what was printed on the box or leaflet with each roll of film) Kodak Scientists had figured out the average scene reflected around 12-13% brightness or more correctly incident illumination . And designed their exposure recommendations accordingly.
St Ansel (et al.) wanted the number to be closer to 18% and after some discussions Kodak introduced into their product line the truly amazing “Neutral Test Card” with its equally infamous Publication “R-27” leaflet. Which orginally—then didn’t—and then did again—included a paragrah that the reading from the exposure meter needed to be increased by 1/2stop from the meter reading. (Of course who reads instructions? and that maybe is why a certain copywriter took the paragraph out sometime in the late 1960-70s, and why it was reinserted after the ‘error’ was discovered.)

St Ansel (et al.) needed the extra one half stop or so exposure to comply with their:
Maxim of the Day
1. Always expose for the shadows and let the highlights be corrected in development.
(As an aside if you’ve ever seen an St. Ansel original negative its a very thin low contrast thing.)

2 Previsualise how the range of tones will print.
So they could work out what was going to be printable or not, they Pre-visualised those brightness values into 11 “Zones” Oh, welcome back skim reader.

Zone 0 would be as black as old boots and contain no detail, Zone X would be white as driven snow and contain no detail. In the middle Zone 5 would contain…….
Mid-tones.
And midtone err sorry, Zone 5 was 18% reflectance.
Insert Small ding ding bell to large clang of claxton.

What does all this have to do with Digital Photography.
Memo: Absolutely Nuthin!

Current Maxim from Michael Richman for Luminous Landscapes and Thomas Knoll—He, the author of the orginal Photoshop
1. Expose to the right. (ETTR) Or another way to say Expose for the Highlights and correct Shadows with the clever sliders which have replaced mixing up your own special developer brew. These days we call them “Presets” and who doesn’t have a harddrive full of them and never used?

2. Be careful what you point the “Spot” meter in camera at to be sure it’s going to be Zone 5. Or you could point it at say a Zone 3 value and adjust the exposure accordingly. But…really. Read the Memo.

If you point it at say the black feathers on a Black-shouleder Kite, and make no adjustments, the shot is going to be “Over Exposed” as the meter will try to expose to make the black—mid grey. if the Kite stays still long enough and you point it at the White chest feathers, and make no adjustments, the end result is gong to be…… wait for it…… Yes. Correct. Underexposed. Because the meter will try to expose to make the white—mid grey.

St. Ansel, exposed one sheet of film at a time and made notes on the development required.
We shoot a burst of 50 shots and hope we can find the right slider to correct it.

As an aside, my fav Black and White Monochrome software is Nik Software’s Nik Silver Efex
It has in its repertoire a little thumbnail and a tiny Zone system. Click on a ‘zone value’ and it gives Zebra stripes to those values in the photo. Yellow/Orange down the 1 and 2 end and a curious choice of Red to Black in the uppers. I’ve put some examples at the end of the blog.

So shoot often, shoot regularly, shoot with thought and don’t be bogged down with a system that for the vast majority of photographers (specialist landscapers, you won’t have read this far anyway).
We all get caught—some over or underexposed shots. But, we learn from that, and hopefully next time we are better prepared.

St. Ansel and Fred did the photography community a great service in helping to figure out the tonal values of a scene. Michael and Lord Thomas, gave us some freedom to experiement to get the best out of our digital chips, and no doubt have helped engineers train their product better.

So there you have it the 7 mega-zillionth explantation of St. Ansel’s system, Or you could just read his “The Negative ” book, and cut out the middle man.

Keep takin’ pictures. We do.

Here are three images from the SFx software.
Best to click on the images full size to see the colours. I made some corrections to the lower zones in the third one of them and you can see the change in the little tiny (next to useless) “Curves” view.

All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be the blade that was broken
The crownless again shall be king.

J.R.R. Tolkien

I have used, “Just because I wander, doesn’t mean I’m lost” as catchline for birdsaspoetry blog for quite a number of years. I realise it is a bit of a corruption of J. J. J. Tolkien’s work of, “The Riddle of Strider”.

And while this is not a book review, nor a poetry examination, the meaning of the original intent of the riddle is quite clear. Yet there are so many ways part of the quote can be taken and applied. 
In our rambles looking for suitable birds, it might often seem we are wandering about aimlessly. Such is the nature of the way birds appear to work to the casual observer.

Several weeks ago we had a number of days of intense heavy rainstorms. Most mornings I walk early before breakfast, along a section of the nearby Davis Creek. This is an old watercourse and in the past times, before housing estates were established on either side of the bank, it would have been for most of the year a series of ephemeral water holes, most of which would be dry by mid-summer.

These days, the housing estates stormwater drains (is that a verb or a noun?) into the Creek. With the housing stretching for kilometres up the creek, after several days of rain, the creek overflows its normal watercourse and spreads out over the lowlying river flats. 
Melbourne Water, have constructed quite a number of wetlands along the creek that help control the quality of the water. The thick reed beds capture and hold silt and debris that comes down the creek, the water leaving the wetlands is well filtered. But as a storm water entry point is about every 500m or so there is lot of debris that enters the waterway.

A footbridge, in my area, was constructed to give access to housing estates on both side of the creek. As I walked across with the water running through the grasses on the lowlands I was struck by the pattern that an Australasian Swamphen had made in its journey about in the flood affected grasses. 
At first glance it might appear random. But no doubt the bird had a purpose in mind.

Enjoy

Photography, if you’ll pardon the pun, has been the lens through which I’ve explored the world around me.

From the very first photo attempts with Mum’s Box-camera, “Keep the sun over your left shoulder, Dear!”, through a Kodak Star camera as a present, to graduating to a the Magic Carpet of a Super-Balda 120 roll film adjustable camera, the visual journey has always inspired the enthusiasm, imagination and dedication of making remarkable images of everyday things and events.

Those first ‘photos’ of Blackie the cat, asleep, in the sunshine, on the porch, to the blurry shots of a “Red Rattler (train) passing under the footbridge at Hampton railway station, may not have passed on down through the tunnel of time, but each press of the shutter today, still carries the memories of those early moments.

Photos have always been part of my life. The National Geographic Magazine, stacked year by year ready to fill in a rainy day on the couch, later, Life Magazine at the local library on the way home from school, and I’ve mentioned before the special librarian who must have had a fascination in Photo-folio books that let me explore how others saw the world around them.

And on reflection, (another photo pun!) each press of the shutter, like a tiny drop of water shimmering on a leaf, opens up new vistas of exploration. David Malouf said it this way.

… in dreams that blow in from out there bearing the fragrance of islands we have not yet sighted in our waking hours, as in voyaging sometimes the first blossoming branches of our next landfall come bumping against the keel, even in the dark, whole days before the real land rises to meet us.
– David Malouf, An Imaginary Life

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We don’t get Sooty Oystercatcher on our beach zones as regular visitors. Their Pied cousins while not regular are among some of the usual visitors.
So its always pretty exciting to spot a Sooty along the beach. Unfortunatey they are quite human adverse and will fly further down the beach or wade out on low tide to the safety of rocks far to far away for photography.
This one chose a halfway point, and I tentatively tippy-toed around the small shallow pools in the low tide sand to get the chance to isolate the bird against the water. Fortunately it stayed.

There is dear reader no connection. that I’m aware of, between the black of the Sooty’s feathers, and Blackie the cat.