Common Sense – Page 2 – The Common Sense Photographer

White Balance And The Mostly Ignored Tint Slider

Posted on July 30, 2020July 30, 2020 by Jim Roberts

Setting the white balance of an image is more than just if it needs to be warmed up or cooled down. The image may also have a green to magenta tint to it. Watch a Youtube video of someone processing an image. If it’s not a moody night image then the presenter will almost invariably say the image needs to be warmed up a bit. This is especially true if the image has a human in it. For some reason cameras seem to prefer a slight cyan coloration to skin.

Changing the white balance of an image (in raw format please) is straight forward. Find the white balance eyedropper in your image editing weapon of choice and click on an area that should be a neutral gray. The image is evaluated and a change to the Temperature/Kelvin slider is adjusted to remove an incorrect color balance. You can also just pick from the drop down to tell it what kind of balance you want. Daylight, Tungsten or a number of other choiced based on the camera you used.

While most adjustments seemed to be made to the color temperature of an image you also need to be aware of the tint of the image. And what you say is the tint? The tint is for adjusting the green to magenta color cast of the image.

You probably don’t pay a lot of attention to the Tint Slider but it does change when white balance is adjusted and anytime you might want to reduce a green or purple cast to you image. One example would be if someone was sitting next to a large green plant there may be a green cast on their face.

The following image was shot off a bridge where the light was rather interesting. It was shot mid-morning at 10:24 am so the sun was getting pretty high in the sky. Not a golden hour shot at all. I have my Fujifilm X-T2 camera set to auto white balance so it was interesting to see what white balance it used.

Here is the white balance as dictated by the camera.

You will notice that the camera gave this a tint of 14.7. The scale for tint is -50 to +50 with the minus side going towards green and the plus side going towards magenta.

And with the white balance set to daylight.

You can see that there is a purplish color cast with the as shot balance and you will notice that tint is 14.7 which is moving the tint towards the magenta. When we adjust to daylight the tint goes down to 2.1 and we don’t have the shadows being rather purple.

There is nothing wrong with adjusting the white balance Kelvin slider to warm or cool your images to what pleases your eye, just remember you can also adjust the tint for the same reasons.

Capturing Neowise (with nothing but our wits and our series 7 de-atomizers)

Posted on July 21, 2020July 21, 2020 by Jim Roberts

Everyone seems to have gotten great images of the comet Neowise, everyone but me. From others images it looked like it was very bright and high in the sky and that anyone with a point and shoot could have gotten a good image of it. Not so much. So the question is how much persistence do you put into getting a shot. I had a number of challenges that I had to overcome to get an image.

You may have to click on the image to see all the stars that are in this shot along with Neowise. When I exposed this image I could not even see Polaris (the Big Dipper). Has a lot to do with the street lamps in my area. That and that due east (this shot was facing northwest) is a sports complex with about 15 baseball fields all lit up for some summer night games.

I shot this on my Fuji X-T2 with the XF 10-24mm F4 R OIS lens open to F4 and an 8 second exposure. ISO was 3200. I used a compass to get to the proper orientation for the shot. The time stamp on the camera was 9:35pm so it was about 45 to 50 minutes after sunset.

It can be really easy to get flustered and miss shots when things are not perfect. If we could only take pictures of the comet in the studio. So it take a focus (pun not intended) to keep after the shot until you get it. I may just go out tonight and see if I can get a better image with a different lens. I could have used my XF 16-55mm F2.8 R lens (above was shot at 17.5mm) and see what the extra stop affords me. Same image would be 4 seconds at 3200 ISO or 8 seconds at 1600 ISO. Of course there is alway the chance that the clouds here in Florida will move in and obscure the sky.

Moral of the story is to be persistent. Use you knowledge of your camera and photography. And learn a thing or two along the way to getting an image.

Note in passing: the XF 10-24mm F4 R OIS is on sale at Amazon (at the time of this article for $300 off which is a really good price. Not sure how long that will last.

Working Hard On An Image, Persian Shield (Strobilanthes dyeriana)

Posted on July 15, 2020July 15, 2020 by Jim Roberts

The wife has been adding plants to the back yard. One is this Persian Shield (Strobilanthes dyeriana) which has striking purple colors. I’ve been fighting with images of this plant for two days trying to get an image I like.

I think I finally found an image which I am happy with although I just went out with a different lens to try some other views of the plant. I think I’ll wait until tomorrow to process the new images. This image was shot on the Fujifilm X-T2 and the XF 80mm F2.8 Macro. Sometimes you have to work then rework images to get what you want. And sometimes it’s best if you leave it for a bit then come back to it. Sometimes you just need to say no.

One Sun

Posted on October 15, 2017 by Jim Roberts

I think it was Joe Glyda that instilled in me the fact (which should have been obvious) that there is only one Sun. Trying to make you lighting too complicated can leave you with images that visually don’t make a lot of sense. Things like shadows going in two directions just isn’t natural. I’ve been paring back my lighting to just a basic one light setup. Recently I saw a video by Daniel Norton that made lighting as simple as it can get. One strobe light and one small reflector that came with the light, one sun.

Mums. – XT2 Fujifilm X-T2 Fujinon XF50-140mm F2.i R LM OIS WR ISO 200 1/200sec at F14 71mm

I placed the light on camera left and high flr about a 45 degree angle down to the flowers. Then it was just a matter of getting the lights power and the aperature correct. Not a lot of post processing needed to get the affect of sunlight on the flowers. I used a small black v flat at an angle behind. Simple lighting is the best.

Shot with Fujifilm X-T2 and Fujinon XF50-140mm F2.i R LM OIS WR at Amazon

Feather (The megapixel conundrum part two)

Posted on August 20, 2017 by Jim Roberts

Feather Fujifilm X-T2 XF 60mm R Macro ISO 332 1/125 sec at f / 5.6

And then there are some images that just surprise you with the detail you can get by having the Fujifilm X-T2 24mp sensor. I shot this image with available light out on the patio yesterday. First glance was not exciting. I then converted to black and white by applying the ACROS+G Filter in Lightroom Camera Profile. I used a bit of Nik by Google Color Effect Pro 4 (it still works for me and so I will still use it). There is detail in them there megapixels! Click for a full sized jpeg at 4.3mp.

Cloud Valley (The megapixel conundrum)

Posted on August 19, 2017 by Jim Roberts

Cloud Valley – Fujifilm X-T2 XF16-55mmF2.8 R LM WR at 20mm ISO 200 F8 1/400sec

We’ve been having some intense afternoon and evening cloud buildups. Something to do with living in Florida and it being summer I think. So I shot this as a pano of 5 frames that were overlapped quite a bit and ended up with a 47mb raw (really an Adobe dng file). Problem is why go to all that trouble for display on screens with a low resolution. I did an export to jpeg at 2400 pixels wide and it is reduced to 1mp. The image on this page is only 960 pixels wide so it just only 11% the size of the original image. Not sure if I this image would be a candidate for a large print so I wonder why we get so impressed with large pixel counts. You can see this image in its full size by clicking on the image.

Full Is Not The Only Time To Shoot The Moon

Posted on March 2, 2017 by Jim Roberts

Shooting the big full moon is a common pastime for some photographers. Easy enough to do. Set you ISO to native (100 or 200 depending), F8 to F11 on aperture and start at 125th second. Helps to have have a relatively long focal length at least 200mm on an APS-C or 300mm on a full frame. Nothing to it. The issue I find (although I do have a lot of full moon pictures) is that the full moon tends to be a little flat. It’s kind of like taking a picture with the flash on the camera. No definition.

Last night just after sunset we has a Waxing Crescent moon that was only 7% illuminated.

Moon Waxing Crescent ISO 800 F6.4 1/125 Second. 335mm.

I did have to adjust up the exposure as there just isn’t as much light reflecting off a moon at 7% compared to a full moon at 100% With the sun glancing off the edge of the moon you can get definition in the craters on the edge. And with less light overall you can also pick up a star or too. BTW what white balance do you use for your moon shots? Daylight of course. The light is coming from the biggest daylight source that we know.

Shot with the Fujifilm X-T2 and the Fujinon XF100-400mmF4.5-5.6 R LM OIS WR

Common Sense Approach To Learning Photography

Posted on January 21, 2017 by Jim Roberts

There is a really big bunch of instructions out on the internet about learning photography. From free 2 minute videos to subscription education. In fact there is so much stuff if you watched it all you probably would not have time to actually take any photographs but boy would you know about photography. I catch myself every once a while thinking that with all the video’s I watch that anytime I put camera to eye I ought to come out with perfect images suitable for framing and have admiring throngs patting me on the back for a job well done.

Yeah, it just doesn’t roll like that. So I set about thinking how I could use my own equipment to learn photography. And I think this is one of the great things about digital photography, you can shoot and shoot without burning through expensive film and developing. I came up with several things that I could do to prove what others were trying to teach but in concrete ways.

First step was to allow myself to take images that weren’t just “art projects”, to make images that proved a point and also provided examples of how my equipment (in this case my Fujifilm cameras and Lenses) actually performed. So I have some suggestions for you on how to improve your skills, get a real feel for what your camera can do, and maybe even learn a little something.

To take the pressure off yourself I might suggest that your learning and testing be put in its own Lightroom catalog. Someplace where mistakes and experiments can live without the worry about being good.

So here is some tests that I recently did. First was a series of tests to evaluate how well I was getting the focus on my camera. I took a series of images where I marked down where the focal point of the image was and then verified that it was indeed the focus point. When doing testing you always want to make sure that there is only one thing being varied for each shot. So I locked down the Fujifilm X-T2 with the XF 16-55mm F2.8 R LM WR lens on the a tripod, set the ISO to 200, the aperture to f/8, and let the shutter speed go to 1/5th second¹. I used the focus joystick to move around the image to put either Spot’s eyes (well sunglasses) his mouth or my friend the ducks eyes into focus.

This gave me a good feeling that the camera and lens is capable of getting good focus if I let it do it job.

Another thing I decided to do for myself it to look at depth of field as related to aperture. Using the same setup I shot a number of images all with the same focus point on spots sunglasses and varied the F-stop from F/2.8 to F/16. This gives me a concrete example of how much is in focus in an image at different F-stops. Note: this is only for one lens (XF 16-55) set to 55mm but it gives you an idea of a starting point. Depth of field is not just affected by f-stop but is also affected by the width of your lens. You need to experiment more than I did here.

The third experiment I did was testing how my image was affected by exposure compensation. The following images were taking with the exposure compensation set from minus 2 to + 2 stops. The middle image being the one with no compensation.

These are just a few examples of the kinds of testing you can do to get to know your camera and maybe just maybe learn a few things. There are many more experiments you can do when you take off the pressure to make every image count. I would also like to thank Spot and Duck for hanging with me even when they fell off the stage and on to the floor.

Images shot with Fujifilm X-T2
Fujinon XF 16-55mm F2.8 R LM WR

¹I used natural light for all the images as it was available and did not add to the complexity of the shots by trying to use flash.

On The Level

Posted on January 2, 2017 by Jim Roberts

Digital cameras have all sort of things to assist you in making images. Automagical stuff like focus assistance and white balance determination. Informational stuff like current shutter speed, aperture, and ISO. The information you can display while you are looking thru the viewfinder or at the LCD screen can be very helpful, and sometimes it can actually distract from your image making.

Most of the Fujifilm X series cameras have all sorts of things you can put on the screen before and after you have taken a shot. One of the things that I came to rely on is the Electronic Level¹. It was the first thing I turned on when I got the X-T1 and also the X-T2. The Level as well as a rule of thirds, ninths,twelve grids can be turned on by check boxes on the Display Custom Setting menu on the Tools -> Screen Setting -> Disp. Custom Setting menu.

Screen Setting Display Custom Setting under the Tool menu

When the Electronic Level check box is checked there is a line across the view screen that shows as white when not level and green when level. Get the line level and you image will come out level, not needing any post processing adjustments to the frame.

And the other day I turned it off. The reason I no longer use it is that it becomes distracting when shooting. If, like I was, you are looking at the line to make sure its green you are no longer looking at the image. Getting the line to go greens may mean that the image that the camera is capturing is not the image you saw in you minds eye. Subtle shifts may introduce distractions along the edges or as I tended to do, move the fram up or down missing important details. As a photographer you are responsible for the entire image not just that it is straight. So I’m getting used to taking the energy I was using making sure the camera is straight to making sure the image I capture is the image I wanted.

I am finding that I am not usually off by more than a degree or two. Of course there are some situation where you don’t even want a level image. Then the level just gets in your way.

Eat – Fujifilm X-T2 XF 16-55mm f/2.8 ISO 200 f/2.8 1/2200 second at 54.1mm

One of my personal projects is shooting clouds. If I don’t have any references in my image to the ground, buildings, trees or the what not, I really don’t care what is level.

Conjunction – Fujifilm X-T2 XF 16-55mm f/2.8 ISO 200 F11 1/1500 second at 48.5mm

I would also suggest ignoring the grid layouts as you should concentrate on the image and not necessarily if it matched the rule of thirds or any other distracting rules. Actually I would suggest you work at getting images that look balanced to you without any aids then use post production to see how close you are to the “RULES”.

If you are doing landscapes (or any other image type for that matter) on a tripod by all means turn on the electronic level and get your self all set up to make the best picture you
can. You can alway turn off the display if it starts to bother you.

Images shot with Fujifilm X-T2
Fujinon XF 16-55mm F2.8 R LM WR

¹Other manufactures have different names for the level. Nikon calls it the “Virtual Horizon”.

When Things Go Wrong

Posted on December 22, 2016 by Jim Roberts

Learned a valuable lesson yesterday. I was shooting interiors the other day, experimenting with a single flash along with a slow shutter speed to pick up some ambient light. When I was done with the experiments I was able to put away all the gear I had out to take the shots.

Because I was primarily using flash, I was in manual mode ISO 400 F10 1/60second. While I put away all the lighting gear I did not reset the camera to the standard aperture settings. So when I came across this unusual recreational vehicle in a parking lot I was so excited to capture images that I didn’t check my camera settings and ended up with way over exposed images. I have only the photographer to blame. I may have to fire him.

By the way this is a 1986 (I think) Vixen 21TD camper. It is complete with bathroom, kitchen, and a BMW turbo diesel motor. It was from a small Michigan company that only lasted 3 years. Interesting vehicle, so blown out that the only way I could even try to save it was to turn it to black and white.

Still kicking myself over this one. Moral of story, reset your camera to your standard setting after every time you use something different in the settings. Don’t wait. Or alway shoot in manual mode so you know you need to set the aperture, ISO, and shutter speed with each image shot.

So if anyone has a Vixen they would like photographed please contact me. I can do the job right (I hope).

Images shot with Fujifilm X-T2
Fujinon XF 16-55mm F2.8 R LM WR