A Photographer Produces Photographs...

Short observation.  Since most of us are digital these days, does this mean we are no longer Photographers?  After all, Kodak is on life support.

If a photographer produces photographs, or a photo or pictures, who produces IMAGES?  An IMAGIST?  An IMAGE-OGRAPHER?   When we change the names, the meaning changes.  Marketing is very powerful and SUBTLE.  HOW IS IT DIFFERENT? AND WHY?


How has this term IMAGES infiltrated the culture? How are images meaningfully different from Photographs?  We know how BOTH are different from SNAPSHOTS.  I contend we need to do away with the word IMAGES.  Fragments use as components of Photographs should be called by those names.  If your name is Denise, and I call you Britney, do words mean anything?

Bring back William Safire.


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LIGHTROOM PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENT - PART 2

With my new memory installed, importing into Lightroom is also much improved.  Pulling in 4BG cards used to take about 25 minutes or so.  Now, when Lightroom wants to grab all the remaining memory, the picture looks like this.  Bottom line, it now takes 15 minutes to download.  If you need to mess around with viewing and editing while downloading, the download will take longer.

Almost 40% faster download?  I'll take it.

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MAJOR IMPROVEMENT IN PERFORMANCE

I have been going through the PERFORMANCE BLUES lately.  My machine was grinding to a slow slog as it tried to use PHOTOSHOP, BRIDGE, LIGHTROOM and a couple of browsers at the same time.  Shame on me for trying to do that with only 6GB of RAM.   And I thought 6GB was a lot.

I caucused with folks at the APPLE GENIUS BAR and they showed that I needed to monitor FREE MEMORY in ACTIVITY MONITOR.  I barely had any Free Memory showing (green area), which is key to performance.  All it took was Firefox getting stuck on one FLASH webpage and it could bring the machine to its knees.  I added 8GB and now with a total of 14GB, I am a happier camper.   Windows folks will have a similar feature in Control Panel or similar "under the hood" utility.

Moral of the story: Max out your Memory in your machine if you use PHOTOSHOP, BRIDGE, LIGHTROOM or Apple Aperture if you don't want to waste time.

Here are the Halloween Cats, the latest from the EYES Gallery.  Enjoy.
JA

ADOBE LIGHTROOM 4 BETA Announced

Adobe announced a few days ago that there is a new BETA for LIGHTROOM 4.
According to Adobe, here are some of the new features:


New Features in Lightroom 4 Beta
- Highlight and shadow recovery brings out all the detail that your camera captures in dark shadows and bright highlights.


- Photo book creation with easy-to-use elegant templates.


- Location-based organization lets you find and group images by location, assign locations to images, and display data from GPS-enabled cameras.


- White balance brush to refine and adjust white balance in specific areas of your images.


- Additional local editing controls let you adjust noise reduction and remove moiré in targeted areas of your images.


- Extended video support for organizing, viewing, and making adjustments and edits to video clips.


- Easy video publishing lets you edit and share video clips on Facebook and Flickr®.


- Soft proofing to preview how an image will look when printed with color-managed printers.


- Email directly from Lightroom using the email account of your choice.

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Collapse of the Point & Shoot Market?

INDUSTRY INNOVATION NEEDED for iPhone

Read today that the Smart phones are killing the Point & Shoot Market.  Glad I didn't invest.

We need better housings than bags to shoot underwater.  We also need good, simple, $20 rubber grips to use the iPhone single handed on land as a camera.  The iPhone is really difficult to handle one-handed as a "real camera."  $150 Iron Maiden attachments with lenses exist but are overkill.
JA

LIGHTROOM - Getting Tone Curve Sliders back

Light most Adobe products, LIGHTROOM works in "strange and wonderous ways."  This best tool we have for organizing photos is sometimes a "challenge" when editing.  Another case in point is using Tone Curve to edit contrast in a photo.  Tone Curve acts somewhat like Curves in Photoshop.  I discovered a feature the other night that I did not know existed.  Nor did Adobe give an informative way out without combing the depths of the Help Jungle.

When editing a photo using Tone Curve, the slider controls look like this. The default mode.

During a session the other night, I was presented with the following view without consciously doing anything to change the view.  The sliders DISAPPEARED.

I was not a happy.  There is NOTHING obvious to suggest a toggle command or "go back."

When I did a mouse-over on the Linear ICON, this informative message shows:  "Click to stop editing Point Curve."   I did not know that I had started! It should say "return to Slider Mode."  Photographers are clearly not used in Adobe testing, just programmers.

The way to get out of this mode is simple but not obvious: Click the icon at the bottom right and you will be toggled back to "Slider" mode.

By the way, using the Point Curve mode is not bad at all.  It is very much like Photoshop in that you can add points to the line and bend the curve to change contrast.  Here I added two points and shifted their positions to adjust the tones to my liking.  See more on curves here.

Click here to see the Great White Sharks and the rest of the underwater galleries.

HOW TO SHOOT GREAT WHITE SHARKS – PART 1

Being able to swim with big animals is one of the great pleasures of being a Diver.  Humpback Whales, Whale Sharks, Scalloped Hammerhead Sharks, Manta Rays, Sea Lions, Sea Turtles and Manatees are all a thrill to dive with.   Obviously, the Great White Shark presents some challenges since they are the apex predator.

GUADALUPE ISLAND 

is one of several reliable locations around the globe where you can predictably and safely dive with Great White Sharks.  A population of about 120 sharks visit the island from about July to year end.  Diving operations end around November.  The sharks migrate to Hawaii and other locations during the rest of the year.   Surprisingly, there is much more to shoot there. 

Guadalupe island is about 22 x 6 miles and is mountainous, being composed of two extinct volcanos.   It has a very low population being declared a biosphere reserve. Guadalupe Island has a microclimate that tends to burn off clouds that are around the island.   Visability at Guadalupe, perhaps 190 feet (calculated via boat length and anchor line to 60’) and water temp 64 to 70 degrees F.

Not being reckless or a daredevil by nature, the idea of diving and photographing Great White Sharks from the safety of a strong cage was very appealing.

BOAT SPECIFIC – This article is based on experience on the Nautilus Explorer.  The tips will be most useful for shooting at Guadalupe Island.   The Baja Aggressor and other boats diving these waters appear to offer similar cage logistics.  Other Great White destinations such as Australia or South Africa, will require modifications to the techniques and equipment needed as the animals, local customs, visibility and cage configurations vary.

GETTING THERE:

Fly to San Diego – meet at the Ramada Airport hotel via shuttle bus.  At the hotel, store your equipment and have lunch / dinner (no dinner on the boat this night). Photograph the shore birds at the extensive Marina area.

San Diego to Ensenada Bus Ride

Meet the bus around 7pm ish for the 2-3 hour ride through customs stop in Tijuana to Ensenada.  Board the boat around 11pm in Ensenada for the 20 hour ride to Guadalupe Island, about 200 miles off shore.

SUBMERSIBLE CAGE SAFETY

Theere are two SUBMERSIBLE cages are maybe 15 feet tall, double decker affairs.  Very well constructed out of 2 inch diameter aluminum tubes and strong (steel?) grates on the bottom of the cage.  There are backup SCUBA units to supplement the surface supplied air.  The cages are winched up and down to 40' via lines and there are backup ballast tanks for independent ascents. 

Getting into the cages requires a little, easily learned maneuvering wearing a 40 lb harness.  Divemasters assist entry and use of the Hookah.   Divemasters also control the ascending and descending of the cages and generally ride in a semi exposed position on the top of the cages.

SURFACE CAGES

There are two cages attached to the stern of the boat that do not change position.  They have surface supply and can fit three people.  One is about 7-8 feet deep and the other is about 15’ deep with a semi-exposed entry “tunnel / ladder.”    These are great for testing equipment and settings and getting more action in-between submersible cage dives.  These are really the only place you can attempt Over/ Under shots.  I was not at all comfortable with the idea of doing this with the 15’ Cage. 

SITUATIONAL AWARENESS (SA)

You should have some situational awareness that you need to keep your arms and legs inside the cage for obvious reasons.  These are the “big hungrys” and are not as docile as Reef White Tip Sharks.  Can a shark stick its snout between some of the bars?  The answer is yes, but they are too big to enter the cages.

  

SUBMERSIBLE CAGE ETTIQUETTE

There are two man and four man Submersible cages.   The two man cage is the better to be in from a logistic standpoint.  You will be rotated around and have opportunites in all the cages.  Try to ask the divemasters on the departure night to schedule you with non-photographers or small camera/video folks.   Four photographers in the same cage with big cameras and strobes would not be a comfortable situation.

 When the action gets active, you may be joined by the divemaster from the top.  Using surface supplied air, the lines can get tangled and you may want to use a free hand to hold the regulators to avoid tugging or pulling out of your mouth. 

Situational awareness is needed when moving around the cages.  You don’t want to hit the other divers with your housing or strobes.  On our trip, we found that sharks tended to circle in a clockwise fashion around the cages, so you need to be aware of coiling your hose.  Circle back and turn the opposite direction when the action cools down to be sure you are keeping your lines free and not coiled.

DAILY BEHAVIOR

There are four dives offered each day with the activity and numbers increasing toward the end of the day.  The earliest dive may have one shark from a distance, and the last dive have multiple sharks making close passes.  You never know, this is the ocean and not a zoo but there are trends.  Yes, that is an upside down Sea Lion taunting the shark in the photo below.

 

BEHAVIOR DURING THE WEEK

Over three days, the sharks were window shopping on the first day and more cautious, on day two, they were taking test bites of the cages and ramming the cages on day 3.  You never know, this is the ocean and not a zoo.

LENSES – Get close, but not too close

Get close, then  closer is the U/W photographer’s mantra.  Lens choice is a challenge given the behaviors described above.  Be prepared to change lenses or zoom settings frequently.  On earlier dives and earlier in the morning, you may want to go with longer focal lengths like a 35mm equivalent of a 35mm lens.  On an APS-C size sensor, this is the equivalent of about 22mm on a Canon 10-22 lens or about 54 degrees when using a dome port. 

You will want to vary this if your controls allow depending on the behavior of the sharks.  You may start the day at 22mm and as the sharks get bolder, you may use 15mm in the middle of the day and 10mm at the end of day when they are very close to the cage.  Maybe too close.

I used a Tamron 11-18 at 18mm half the time and a Tokina Fisheye set at 17mm half the time.

Click here for more shots from the trip.

Click here for the Trip Logistics,

In the next post, Part 2, we'll discuss using strobes, "Hail Mary" shots, Going "Up Top," Video Opportunities, Developing the Shot List, Diving Equipment and the Cast of Sharks.

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