The Digital Negative

The Digital Negative by Jeff Schewe, published by Peachpit Press, ISBN: 13 978-0-321-83957-2.

I have just read this book to try to get a better understanding of digital photography.  Schewe is a photographer who has also been working with the boffins at Adobe since the early 1990’s to help develop RAW, Photoshop and more recently Lightroom for photographers from a photographer’s point-of-view.  His books are therefore as close as you can get to finding a first class knowledgable author.  He has published two books ‘The Digital Negative’ and “The Digital Print’ the later I have just began to read.

The Digital Print briefly covers the basic background of how the digital image is made in the camera but drills in to the featured and functions in both RAW and Lightroom that you will use to process your RAW file in to a presentable photo.  This includes a recommended and sensible workflow, background information from the Adobe engineers explaining why certain features work the way they do.  Chapters 4 and 5 a dedicated to Photoshop for advanced editing beyond the capabilities of RAW and Lightroom for those images worth the extra effort.  Chapter 6 covers the recommended workflow from importing pictures from the camera, storing, backing-up, making copies, cataloguing on to developing.  This book does not however cover printing as this is a topic for his second publication.

This is a good book to read, I learned a few new features in Lightroom that I was unaware of and also instructed me in the use of RAW that I am unfamiliar with as I have only used Lightroom so far.  Lightroom was was developed with a lot of the features from RAW and both will talk to one another but changes made in one will alter the other’s parameters and this is a useful thing to be aware of if you use both RAW and Lightroom.  If you want a better understanding of Lightroom, RAW and Photoshop this ids the book to read.  This is not however a detailed book for Photoshop it covers the topics that most photographers need but doesn’t look at all the magic tricks possible in Photoshop.  This is a book intended to help the modern photographer become confident and proficient developing digital photographs to a point that they can print or advance to higher levels of editing using Photoshop and plug-ins.  Not too technically challenging and easy to read and fairly easy to understand without an engineering degree.

A very good book that I would recommend.

Exercise – Shinny surfaces

In this exercise, I took on the challenge of photographing a highly polished metal surface. As you can see the subject I have chosen to use also presents an additional challenge as it is curved and rounded so as to increase the size of the reflective family of angles that the camera will see.

The problem that presents itself to photographers when taking photos of reflective objects is that by their very nature the object is likely to give unwanted reflections of perhaps the studio, camera, lights and even the photographer. If this first image was for a paying client then it would be totally unacceptable.

The solution is to block the reflection of the studio, etc. from the butter dish by using a lighting tent. These can be purchased or a home made light tent can be easily made using tracing paper rolled in to a cone with the narrow top end around the lens of the camera and the bottom wide end around the subject and just out of view from the cameras view. Now we have am image with fewer objectionable reflections, but we can still see the camera’s lens and there is an objectionable reflection from where the tracing paper meets together.

I recomposed moving the butter dish cover and adding a spoon to block the reflection of the lens. (If this was a professional shoot a knife would have been a more appropriate prop; but I couldn’t find anything suitable; so as this is an exercise the spoon will do just as well.) I then turned the tracing paper until the shadow of the join was over the length of the spoon and thus disappeared. But there is still a reflection of a shadow created by the black tripod appearing as a faint silhouette in the reflection.

By simply taping some tracing paper around the leg of the tripod that was creating the shadow I was able to solve the problem and finally I have an expectable image of my shinny butter dish. I only cropped the image in Lightroom and made no other adjustments.

For lighting I used a speedlight in a soft-box set on a light stand opposite the camera above and behind the subject. I set the speedlight to 1/1 power, TTL controlled using a TT5 Pocket Wizards on the speedlight and TT1 Pocket Wizards on my camera. I set the to ISO-400 using 105mm f2.8 macro lens. My first image was at 1/10sec f/22. All the other images made in the tent where all at 1/8sec, f/22.

My Nikon D800e

I am returning to “serious” photography after 30 years absence.