Alphatracks

Certainly NOT your father’s Oldsmobile.

Jan 26, 2009: I had a chance to attend BarCamp Charlotte last weekend. If you are unfamiliar with the concept, barcamps consist of a loosely organized group of bloggers, internet marketers, computer programmers, film makers, web developers and new media types. While photographers weren’t as well represented as some of the other disciplines, there were several dSLR shooters in attendance. I also met at least one other Sony Alpha owner.

The Charlotte camp was held in an art community known as Area Fifteen, located in the NoDa art district. Area Fifteen is large meandering building with artist studios, large open areas, a labyrinth of hallways and winding stairways.

With the eclectic group of people and the fascinating backdrop of Area Fifteen, there was no shortage of photo subjects. I kept the A350 busy recording as much of the activities as I could, while still participating in the individual BarCamp sessions.

The most interesting thing about covering an event like BarCamp Charlottte, is the absolute lack of
self-consciousness of the part of the participants. There were video cameras and photographers everywhere. One of the principle themes of the barcamp movement is transparency and openness. That was a refreshing change from some ofther events I have photographed.

I took nearly 300 images during the day. No one said “Don’t take my picture!” No one turned away to hide from the camera. I could have been invisible…no one was the least bit concerned that I was aiming my lens at them. It was exciting to have the freedom to photograph whoever and whatever I wanted without interference.

I used a variety of lenses for the shoot. Because most of the activities were held indoors, I wanted the Minolta 50mm f/1.7. This gave me the ability to shoot available light under most conditions. I also brought along the Sony 18-70mm, primarily for the wideangle focal length. I thought about bringing along the Minolta beercan, but I figured the weight and f/4 aperture would be a negative.

Instead, I decided to continuie experimenting with a new acquisition, a Vivitar 135mm f/2.8 screw mount lens attached to the A350 with a M42 adapter. This arrangement has its drawbacks — no auto focusing, no Super Steady Shot, no automatic exposure. It is also a fixed focal length — no ability to zoom.

Grab shot somewhere in the depths of Area 15.

On the other hand, 135mm on the A350’s APS-C sensor equates to something like 192mm on a 35mm film camera. That meant I had the equivalent of a 200mm f2.8mm, great for capturing individual candids.

I shot some available light images at ISO 400-800, but decided to use flash for most of the images. For a flash unit I went with another oldie but goodie; a Minolta 4000 AF mounted on Control Grip 1000 flash bracket. The old Minolta flash was connected to the A350 with a Sony FA-CC1AM Alpha Off-Camera Cable. Not exactly state of the art, but extremely capable.

So how well did this somewhat primitive setup work? Quite beautifully. You can check out the BarCamp Charlotte gallery I assembled here.

I wanted to get the images online as soon as possible after the event.
I did very little post processing, other than converting the RAW images in Adobe Lightroom. Thankfully, very few of the images required any retouching, including the images from the old Vivitar.

I converted, tagged, organized and exported the entire gallery the evening after BarCamp. The next day I added some links and edited some of the CSS files. I had the gallery posted to the web by noon.

I’m not trying to brag. I just wanted to point out the images I got from the older equipment required very little editing to be ready for the web.

If there is a BarCamp in your area, I recommend you check it out. You can find out about future events in Charlotte by signing up at the BarCamp Charlotte website.

All in all, I am quite pleased with how well the old M42 lens and the 25 year old flash unit worked on the modern A350. Stay tuned. I’ll talk more about the using the M42 adapter on the Sony Alpha in the near future.

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1/64 scale steam locomotive captured with Sony A350’s tilt-out live view system.

Jan 21, 2009: For the last several years, I’ve taken the grandkids to see the “trains, trains, trains” exhibit at the Kings Mountain Historical Museum. Held each December, the event is put on by the Carolinas Division of the Atlantic Coast S-Gaugers.

S-gauge is a model railroad term that indicates the scale of the model trains; larger than HO scale but smaller than the O-Gauge rolling stock from Lionel and other makers. American Flyer is the best known maker of S-Gauge rolling stock, but manufacturers like American Models, S-Helper Services and others produce compatible 1/64 scale locomotives, cars, track and accessories.

Naturally, I always haul a camera to these events. This year, the choice was the Sony Alpha A350. I figured the Live View option on the A350 would come in handy. I was, however, surprised how great the adjustable LCD screen proved to be for this type of work. By placing the camera right on the layout and composing with the LV screen, it was like I walked right into the scene. I’ve shot models at various times in the past, but the A350 Live View opened a brand new dimension for me.

The Carolinas Division of the Atlantic Coast S-Gaugers has created a large layout table, with two tracks running around the perimeter. While the trains are the centerpiece, there are dozens of buttons arranged around the table. Each button triggers an animated display of some sort. One button might cause a building to light up, while other buttons trigger railroad sounds, a plane to swoop over the layout or some lumberjacks to saw away at a fallen tree.

You can spend hours experimenting with the buttons, but for a photographer, the layout offers a host of wonderful subjects. Live View allowed me to capture some interesting viewpoints that I missed when shooting in the past.

By flipping the A350’s LCD into the horizontal position, I found I could aim directly down the track at an approaching locomotive. Choosing a vantage point outside a curve let me compose a head-on shot, secure that the train would swing away before it hit the camera.

Shooting in this manner, I did encounter one of the limitations of the Live View system. Like most electronic view finders (EVF) the Sony Live View LCD can’t show you an instant preview. There is a slight lag between what you see on the screen and what is actually happening. You can prove this by moving the camera quickly from side to side. You notice the image on the LCS screen will look smeared, because the LCD can’t refresh quickly enough.

In the case of the train heading directly at the camera, I found I had to shoot slightly before the locomotive looked in focus. If I waited until the front of the engine was perfectly focused on the LCD, the train would be unfocused in the actual image. Because of the shallow DOF, the engine would move beyond of the zone of sharpness while it still look perfectly focussed on the LCD.

Once I understood what was happening, I was able to significantly increase the number of in-focus, head-on shots using the LCD.

Shooting models (not that kind of model…we’re talking toy trains here) is always a challenge, due to depth of field issues. If you read the my basics article on depth of field, you know that the closer your lens gets to a subject, the shallower the depth of field will become. It is tempting to use a macro lens for this type of shooting, but with a macro lens the DOF is so shallow that only a very slim part of your subject will be in focus.

Even without resorting to a macro lens, you’ll probably notice very shallow DOF. Usually I would stop the lens down to create more DOF. However the trains at the King’s Mountain Exhibit were always moving. This led to an interesting dilemma. If I stopped the lens down, the shutter speed became too slow to stop the moving trains. Opening the lens up to the maximum aperture gave me a sufficient shutter speed to prevent the trains from blurring, but the DOF became too shallow to display an entire locomotive — let alone an entire train.

I tried some flash images, with a hand held Minolta 4000 AF flash cabled to the Sony A350. By hand-holding the flash I could aim it in various directions to get some interesting, shadowless light. This gave me some decent DOF and effectively froze the motion of the trains. Actually the flash was too effective in freezing the motion. The 4000 AF stopped the locomotives so well that they appeared static. If I was going to shoot with the flash, I might just as well have asked the guys from the Atlantic Coast S-Gaugers to stop the trains so I could shoot them while they were not moving.

I could have upped the ISO, which would have allowed me to shoot at faster shutter speeds with the lens stopped down. However, I was concerned that this would increase noise, which might obscure some of the fine details on the models. So I tried a variety of shooting techniques. I scrapped many of the captures because they didn’t work out. But I got a few I really liked, and there were enough interesting ones to create a nice magazine or newspaper spread.

Take a look over the gallery and tell me what you think. After shooting the layout with the Sony A350, it is hard to imagine photographing this kind of subject with any camera that doesn’t offer a tilt out LCD.

Check out the model train image gallery to see how the A350 performed.

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Scan of 1968 Kodak Instamatic negative produced this. Not bad for a cheap, plastic lens camera, but even at this reduced size you can see it is loaded with dust marks.

Tip of the Week: This week’s tip involves a free piece of software from — surprise — Polaroid Corporation. (PRDCQ) You’ve no doubt heard that Polaroid recently stopped production of their instant film stocks. That is a sad event for those enjoy shooting with Polaroid cameras; but I’m more concerned with the survival of Polaroid software. More specifically, Polaroid’s free Dust and Scratches application.

If you are anything like me, you probably have a fair collection of film negatives. Even if you shoot nothing but digital today, some of your best work may have been captured on film.

Red marks indicate the mask created by the Polaroid software. When you clean the image, only the red areas will be effected.

If you want to use some of those older film images in today’s digital world, you basically have two choices. You can pay a lab to create digital images from your negatives; or you scan the negatives yourself. Professional scanning tends to be expensive, so if you have more than a handful of images, a film scanner may be you best choice.

Negative scanning, however can be quite labor intensive. One of the biggest problems, particularity with older negatives, is dirt and scratches. Even tiny particles of dust will be magnified when the resulting scan is enlarged to a usable size. You can clone out the dust marks with a program like Photoshop, but if the dust spots are numerous, retouching becomes extremely time consuming.

Scanner manufacturers usually incorporate some form of dust removal in their scanners. These systems can be effective, but you don’t usually have much control over a hardware based dust removal system.

Image on the left shows a portion the image as it came from the scanner.

As you can see it would take hours to spot all the dust marks. Right image shows the same area after cleaning with the Polaroid Dust and Scratch Removal software. There is still work to be done, but more than 80% of the spots are gone. Tweaking the settings might eliminate even more marks.

Enter Polaroid’s Dust and Scratches Removal software. In the past, Polaroid manufactured a number of film and flat-bed scanners. I’m not sure if they are still producing this equipment, as according to the Polaroid website, most of the scanning equipment is no longer in production.

Fortunately, much of the software is still available online.

“So what?” you say. “I don’t own a Polaroid scanner.”

I’ll let you in on a secret. I don’t own a Polaroid scanner either. But I use Polaroid software with my Minolta Dimage Scan Dual III film scanner. I also use it with my Microtek flat bed scanner.

I first discovered Polaroid Dust and Scratch Removal Software a few years ago. I was scanning in a number of old 126 negatives taken when I was in my early teens. Besides being over 40 years old, it appears the original drug store processing lab wasn’t very concerned with cleanliness. The negs were a mess.

The Minolta Dimage III isn’t designed to scan 126 negatives, but 126 and 35mm negs are exactly the same height. So I was able to insert the 126 strips into the Minolta’s 35mm film carrier.

Because the carrier is not intended for the 126 format, I lost about 1/8″ at the top of each frame. That was no a big deal. What was a big deal was the hundreds of dust specs sprinkled over the final scans.

Of course there will be times the software thinks a crucial part of the image is dust or dirt.

Notice how the cleaning process has removed some of the lettering on this race car (left.)

After reverting the image, I use the select tool to make a loose selection around the effected letters. Now there are no red marks around the lettering, so the cleaning process will ignore this section of the image.

Retouching all those dust mites was out of the question, so I started to cast around for some sort of chemical cleaner. I doing so, I came across Polaroid’s software.

I wasn’t expecting much from Polaroid’s offering. I’ve used other dust removal software, including the despeckle filter in Adobe Photoshop. All of the applications I tried in the past remove dust specs by applying a soft blur to the image. This eliminates the visible dust, but you lose overall sharpness. The decrease in sharpness isn’t overwhelming, but I am of the opinion that any loss of sharpness is unacceptable.

I was pleasantly surprised to find Polaroid D&S software worked differently then the old “blur the image to hide the dust” applications. In the first stage of the process, the application analyzes the image and creates what appears to be vector mask of the image. Anything that appears to be a dust or scratch is flagged. You have a great deal of control over the masking process, so you can eliminate flaws of various sizes, as well as dark and light dust marks.

Because the program could identify small parts of the image as dust, Polaroid allows you to edit the mask. If the program confuses fine lines in the image with dust, you can edit the mask to protect the fine details.

Once the image mask is created, you can “clean” the image. This removes the masked imperfections without touching the unmasked zones. If you aren’t happy with the results you can adjust the settings and clean the image again.

The program is fairly fast. On my Powermac G5, creating a fairly detailed mask took about 30 seconds, while cleaning the image took another 40 seconds. Not exactly speedy, but far quicker than spotting hundreds of dust specs one by one.

The application does involve a bit of a learning curve, but once you learn how the settings work, it is simple and straight-forward.

The price tag for all this high-tech magic? How about zero. You can download the Dust and Scratches program for free. Not a demo or feature limited sample — you get the full working application with no restriction.

Want more? It is available for both Mac and Windows. In addition, you can choose between a stand-alone application or a Photoshop plugin. Because you load your images into the program after you have scanned them, there is no hardware compatibilities to be concerned with. As long as your scanner can create a standard TIFF or JPEG, you can use the software to clean the image.

The only problem I have experienced is that some images won’t load into the program. I use Vuescan as my scanner software for both my slide and flatbed scanners. For reasons I don’t understand, most of the scans saved out of Vuescan aren’t recognized by Polaroid’s software. Opening the image in Photoshop and re-saving as either a TIFF or JPEG generally fixes the problem. Sometimes I have had to save files several times before I could get the Dust and Scratches program to recognize images.

This isn’t Polaroid’s problem, as the software is designed to be used with their own scanning hardware. They offer no guarantee that it will work with a Minolta scanner. Polaroid should be congratulated for offering the software to anyone who wants to use it. If there is a problem with files created with non-Poloroid software and hardware, that should not be Polaroid’s concern.

The final step is to clone out any marks the software didn’t find and to color balance the image.

Even with the file opening hassles, I find Polaroid’s Dust and Scratch Removal software to be a huge time saver. Poloroid is still in business and they are even said to be on the verge of releasing a new digital camera with a built in printer — continuing the “instant print” legacy.

Despite this, you can’t count on the dust removal software being available in the future. My suggestion is that you download the software now, even if you don’t have a need for it right now. If you find yourself with a box full of dusty, scratched negatives, you will be awfully glad you did.

Download http://www.polaroid.com/service/software/poladsr/poladsr.html Poloroid Dust and Scratch Removal Utility

UPDATE 10/25/2009: The original links for the dust and scratches software have gone dead, and I was afraid the software had become unavailable. Thankfully, Alphatracks reader Jurek Woźniak discovered links where you can still locate copies of this software. Remember, there is no support for the D&S software, so don’t bother the folks at Polaroid if you run into difficulties.

Woźniak’s links are:

Download Dust and Scratches for the Windows PC:

Download Dust and Scratches for the Mac

Follow the comments stream below to find links for the appropriate read me files.

Thanks Jurek! You’ve made a lot of photographer/scanners very happy!

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Jan 6, 2009: Two great announcements for Mac using photographers today. Apple announced iPhoto 9, with a host of new features. At the same time, Google released the long awaited beta of Picasa for Macintosh.

I was really excited with the chance to use Picasa for the Mac. I’ve used the Windows version of Picasa and was very happy with it. The fact that Picasa can seek out and index all the images on your hard drives without being told is a “killer feature”. It works quietly in the background indexing every image it can find, while you concentrate on other stuff.

For a long time, I’ve hoped Google would develop a Mac version. Early last year, rumors surfaced that “Big G” was working on Picasa for the Mac. Today those rumors have proven true.

My excitement was short lived however. My Mac met the system requirements — but I don’t have the minimum hardware. Turns out Picasa for Mac (or least the initial beta) only runs on Intel processors. PPC Macs, such as my lowly dual processor G5, need not apply.

I’m disappointed, but not completely surprised. Intel Macs are the way forward, while the G5 machines are rooted in the past. Why should Google devote resources to developing for an out of production machine? In fact, the next OS X operating system to be released, “Snow Leopard,” is rumored to run only on Intel processors.

I don’t blame Google, but it is a shame. Even though the G5 towers are outclassed by the newer Mac Pro machines, they still offer solid, powerful performance. If they can run Lightroom and Aperture (they can), I can’t see any performance problems with running Picasa. I’m guessing it was simply a business decision on Google’s part. Developing for architecture that even Apple may soon stop supporting probably didn’t make too much sense..

Of course this is just the initial beta. There is a chance that at some point Google will invite PPC Mac users to the Picasa party. After all, most thinly staffed open source Mac projects manage to support both Intel and PPC chip sets. For the time being, however, if you use a PPC Mac, Google’s stance is “no Picasa for you.”

I was hoping to report on how well the beta ran on my G5. I also wanted to see if Google had included any support for Sony Alpha ARW files. The last time I tired Picasa for Windows, it offered support for certain RAW formats. The Alpha wasn’t one of them. I was hoping that with the influx of new Sony dSLRs (A200, A300, A350 and A900), Google would include Sony Alpha RAW support.

I guess that my testing will have to wait until I upgrade to a Mac Pro or Big G offers a PPC version of Picasa. Meanwhile, if anyone with a Intel Mac tries the beta, please let everyone know what you think in the comments.

Update:

Should post the beta download link here. You can download Picasa for Macintosh at http://picasa.google.com/mac/

System Requirements:

• Mac OS X 10.4+
• Intel CPU
• 256MB RAM
• 100MB available hard disk space

Picasa also runs on Windows XP and Linix.

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Jan 1, 2009: Observant Alphatracks readers might have noticed a new Photography Basics section listed on the sidebar. The Basics area is still in development; in fact there is currently only a single article: a treatise on Depth of Field.

The idea behind Basics came about because I’ve noticed that Alphatracks readers are comprised of all experience and skill levels. Some have been shooting as long or longer than I have, while others have just acquired their first Sony Alpha. Some haven’t even bought that shiny new dSLR, but they frequent the site because they are looking for advise on which model will fit their needs.

I’m happy to have such as a diverse readership, but when I’m writing a technical post, I struggle with how much background information to include. I don’t want to turn off experienced photographers by spending too much time on introductory topics. At the same time, I worry that new Alpha shooters may find some posts too difficult, unless I delve into the fundamentals. So I am torn between offering too much or too little peripheral information.

For 2009, I have plans to look more deeply at Sony and Minolta lenses, flash units and accessories. For obvious reasons, some of these posts will be somewhat technical. It occurred to me that if I had a section on the site that was dedicated to photographic principals, I could eliminate the need to include much of the raw detail of a technical piece. If I think a particular post might require additional info, I can simply link to the relevant text in the Basics area. In that way, experienced photographers won’t feel bogged down by elementary material, but I can direct those requiring more clarification to a thorough explanation.

It seemed like a good idea, so I created Basics.

I think it might become a popular addition to Alphatracks. I added the Depth of Field piece just to get everything organized. I did none of the usual promotion I typically do to encourage readership of a new post. With only a single, small link on the sidebar, the depth of field article attracted dozens of viewers in the first hour. I seems that many readers were looking for that information.

I will be adding to the Basics section as time permits. Just simple, bite-size discussions of basic photographic theory. Of course the usual posts won’t change. I think I have lined-up material that will appeal to all levels of Sony Alpha users. If I can just find the time, I have ideas for product reviews, interviews, more “Alphatracks Visits” pieces and the technical lens and accessory discussions I alluded to earlier. I’m sure that Sony will have some interesting news in the coming year as well. And now that the holidays are over, I will resume posting weekly tips. So if you liked Alphatracks in the past, I think you’ll enjoy the 2009 edition.

Here’s wishing everyone a great 2009, filled with great images.

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