A Bit of Knowledge: What a Habit, a Forest and the ISO Setting Have in Common

Nothing really, just thought it will be interesting title for my post. However, this bit of knowledge tip has nothing to do with a digital camera technicalities, and probably some of you don't want to be bother with. This post has to do with our habits we need to work on, or let's just say I need to work on. So you are a nature person, and if you on the lookout for birds and animals you need to be sometimes fast, and if it is something rare, boy then you really need to be fast. One turn and your object of interest may run away or fly away. Therefore, if you are going into a deep forest and you have limited time because of the moving object, then do this - before entering increase your ISO accordingly. For the longest time I would come from hiking in the forest, and yet be very disappointed with my photos quality, especially nice action photos, yet blurred. This time I made a point to increase ISO to 400 or 800, and yet happy results - I think I can live with graininess, but not blurriness. Small tip if applicable - sometimes you can use flash if you wish, but it will not work with telephoto lenses.

I am actually happy with the above photo. It could have been better, but I couldn't do much about background. Its the bit of back light on the squirrel on this photo that I am not that happy about, but still, I am satisfied. Lastly, if you notice the photo has green tint. Interesting enough, in this area every time I take photos, I always get this green natural light shining on the object. It happened the same when I took photo of Matthew once too in the same spot - he looked a bit green to me when I processed the photo, wasn't sure why.

What is so nice about digital SLR or digital point and shoot cameras today? The ISO can be changed on the fly. The newer cameras now have also less graininess, and some have higher ISO than 1600. Do you remember the conventional SLR? Yes, ISO was function of the film we used to shoot with.

Lastly, speaking of habits. If comes to operating a digital camera I have few more bad habits. The list goes like that - sometimes I forget to take the cup of the lens, I forget to put back the flash card after download [I did it many times, and I did with film too], and many times I forget to change to default settings when I take moon photos the night before. This is because I don't change it right after, and I am fanatic if comes to shooting objects in action - I am fast, but not fast enough to think about changing my settings. So I thought this would be a nice exercise to work on my bad habits.

The above photo was taken at our local Shepard's Bush Conservation Area, Aurora, Ontario - so be on the lookout for that tint of green light and of course the squirrel.
'Good habits, once established are just as hard to break as are bad habits' ~ by Robert Puller quotes

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Happy Father's Day

God Made Dads

'God took the strength of a mountain
The majesty of a tree
The warmth of a summer sun
The calm of a quiet sea
The generous soul of nature
The comforting arm of night
The wisdom of the ages
The power of the eagle's flight
The joy of a morning in spring
The faith of a mustard seed
The patience of eternity
The depth of a family need
Then God combined these qualities
When there was nothing more to add
He knew His masterpiece was complete
And so
He called it ... Dad'

~ Author Unknown

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A Bit of Knowledge: Chose Sharpen or Blur Tool in Photo Editing

It is never too late, you can always fix the image you are not happy with. Today I want to talk about sharpening and blurring tool. If you have an image and it is not perfectly nice and crisp as you anticipated, do not use the sharpen too. When I was doing photo restoration years ago I worked with lot of customers who asked for sharpening their images a bit, or remove the backgrounds. Depending on the image quality, sharpening does not always worked because it can really digitize the image, and removing a background I found that it looked kind of superficial, especially if the object was taken on the busy background. So instead of sharpening tool, I would use blurring tool. You probably saying, what more blur - no way. Yes more blur, but what I would do I would add blur to the selected background. The reason is that if you add more blur to the background the contrast difference is greater between the main object and the background, and our eyes then automatically perceive the main object to be sharper. Now I will lead you through a verbal steps how I fixed the blue heron photo. When I was taking this photo, the branches were very close to the heron, so I could not get the portrait effect, or that nice blurred background in order to emphasize the heron. Therefore, the photo itself looked very busy, as a matter fact since I was taking this very fast to make sure I will not loose him, the auto mode focused on the branches behind - as they appeared more sharper. I liked the photo of the heron and I wanted to use it in my postcard to people, so there was a little fixing to do, and here are steps using Adobe Photoshop, and I am sure that it will be similar for other photo editing software.

[1] Crop the image to the desired size - 400 px by 400 px in 72 dpi.
[2] Duplicate background photo and create a new layer for reference.
[3] Select the background around the heron and save the background.
[4] Ensure that you are working with duplicate later. Then go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur and set radius to 1.5 px.
[5] Deselect the background and see if you like the effect, if not just undo and try different radius.
[6] Perform final touches on the image by using curves, color and level adjustments. Auto color and auto level may work well to sometimes.

If you still not happy and you think that the main object is not standing out as much as you want then you can do few more steps.
[7] Reselect the background or load the selection, and then inverse the selection to select the heron or main object.
[8] Instead of using sharpening tool which can be very crude, use Unsharpen mask instead by going to Filter > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask, set Amount to 100%, Radius to 0.4 px, and Threshold to 0. To get the result I usually play with radius and leave the other two fixed.

Note the above instructions are for web photo so the resolution is 72 dpi. For printing always use 200 dpi or more, therefore, you may want to play around with the suggested settings below to get the best result as they may not work for the low resolution photo.

Hope you can use this tip in the future. It may be old info soon as more and more cameras come equipped with technology called face recognition. However, never never know.

'Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.' ~ by Benjamin Spock

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