Archive for August 9th, 2008

09 Aug 2008 F-Stops Explained By Penmachine
Author: Gail |  Category: Linkage, Other Photogs, Photography  | One Comment

back in business

I’ve been talking a lot about f-stops lately, it seems, to people who own point-and-shoot digicams and wonder what all the numbers on my DSLR and lenses mean. Since my own photography knowledge isn’t derived from a classroom but a mental mashup of books, conversations with photographers, the internet, and a variety of other sources, I really don’t know if I’m synthesizing my learning into a coherent explanation of what that f/x really means.

Today, like an answer dropped right out of the sky, my RSS Reader served up a comprehensive post by Vancouver’s Derek K. Miller (Penmachine) which does the job quite nicely:

August 7, 2008: Camera Works: what are f-stops and why do they matter to the pictures you take?

If you’re allergic to math, don’t worry — the words will do the trick.

Thanks, Derek, I can stop stammering now.

09 Aug 2008 More Morocco
Author: Gail |  Category: Africa, Photography  | 2 Comments

prayers

Earlier this evening I was at Sicilian Sidewalk Cafe (yes, again — J.A. and I were both there just two nights ago) for a farewell to M.K., and I happened to be sitting beside a few francophones. I’ve been hearing so much French lately, it suddenly occurred to me that I’ve uploaded only a tiny fraction of my photos from Morocco! And by a tiny fraction, I mean out of a library of 1,427 images my photo set in Flickr only held a paltry 34 photos.

Browsing my image library for Morocco (Nov ‘07), I see I shot only the last third or so (maybe even only the last quarter) in RAW format because I didn’t want to use up my SD cards too quickly and be forced to erase shots from the beginning. After processing a few of the photos now, I see how much of a difference RAW format makes to the end result — something I’d dismissed in the fairly recent past because I hadn’t really spotted the difference before — and now it’s persuading me to shoot RAW again. I’ll need to get another external drive quite soon, though, if I shoot RAW full-time (every RAW image file is 10MBs+ each, from my 6MP Pentax K100D).

My biggest complaint before was that the results versus shooting in JPEG weren’t enough of an improvement to warrant the increased processing time, but after reviewing these Morocco pictures edited from RAW files I’m going to have to take that all back. I’ll give some examples later, but for now just take my word for it! I would say the edited images from RAW are crisper and cleaner, but as with anything, Your Mileage May Vary.

See the photo above in a larger size: View On Black

A few more processed photos below. Click on any to view them in Flickr with tags, descriptions, etc.

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