Paul Durham - Online Photography Journal

Preparing for an Assignment

pddurham — Sun, 04 Sep 2011 13:48:04 +0000

I will be traveling into Haiti again later this month and thought I’d post a quick article on preparing for an assignment in a country ravaged by an earthquake, disease and poverty. I will be accompanying the folks at http://www.haitihope.net to chronicle their work

First, you need to be mentally prepared – be that through spiritual conditioning or however you yourself do that. You will see much that is troubling and that will effect you emotionally. Keep the big picture in focus.

Second – inspect and prepare your equipment weeks in advance. You may find that something needs to be repaired or ordered. I found that the glass cover on the LCD of one of my SLRs had cracked and I had to order a part to make a repair. This preparation also includes your bags and support equipment (e.g. rain gear and waterproof bags). Avoid the mistake to grab and go.

Third go through every item and prepare it for the trip. Take some test photos before you leave.

batteries and memory cards

clean your camera inside and out

flash and batteries

filters and accessories

small parts – you don’t ant to be in a desert and regret bringing your tripod adapter plate.

Time spent early on planning and prepping your equipment pays huge dividends later on.

Heading for Haiti

pddurham — Sat, 02 Apr 2011 15:04:42 +0000

I’ll be heading into Haiti for a third time in early May. We’ll be spending two weeks on the ground working with Dale and Pam Hipp of Vine Abiding Ministries. Watch my web site for a gallery of new images shortly thereafter.

Assignment HAITI

pddurham — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 21:32:11 +0000

I was fortunate to be able to accompany a relief team into Haiti in October. We delivered a 40′ container of supplies, more than 1000 boxes of food, clothing, and medical items. Much of the supplies went to villages in the mountains and out in the Santo Desert. Go to http://haitihope.net/ to learn more.

The site will soon be updated with a gallery posted at http://haitihope.net/gallery3.html

HOPE and HEALING for HAITI – call for aid

pddurham — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 18:25:35 +0000

Please take a moment and visit www.haitihope.net and consider donating to the aid of thousands of people left homeless by the recent earthquake. Yours truly is volunteering to help with donations on the local level.

Going RETRO – Part 3 21″ Viewsonic Graphic Series G810 Review

pddurham — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 14:35:04 +0000

Have put my retro 21″ Viewsonic Graphic Series G810 monitor through its paces. The color, brightness and contrast accuracy is unmatched. Once calibrated, the color of the prints coming out of my Epson 1400 with OEM inks is a perfect match. The monitor is a bit “soft”and I have to watch the sharpening action in Photoshop so as to avoid oversharpening. I have developed a quick 2- monitor setup where I do some light sharpening on the Viewsonic and then move the image over to an LCD monitor to see how it views on that type of monitor. So far, so good. If you get a chance to snatch up a big CRT, do so. Most recently made computers support a 2-monitor setup. Your work area will get crowded but you’ll really enjoy the color accuracy that a CRT provides and you can also toss away those “prints too dark” blues goodbye.

Epson 1400 Printing Profiles

pddurham — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 14:26:17 +0000

It’s been a while since the last posting. I have been working for several months fine tuning the Epson 1400s. I have one set up for B&W printing using MIS Inks with an Ultratone (UT14) archival ink setup. I have found excellent results using Epson’s Radiant White Watercolor Paper . This paper was not originally developed for the 1400, but it works beautifully with the Ultratone inkset. I have developed a quite simple workflow using the Epson printer interface, with the key setting being “print preview” so as to obtain the best contrast and density match to my monitor. Keep it simple and make it fun!

I continue to use Epson’s OEM Claria inks on the color side, but will soon be switching to a bulk ink setup using MIS inks. The Claria ink is absolutely vivid and I have sold several prints right from the home printer. Dense color perfectly matched to the monitor.

Going RETRO – Part 2

pddurham — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 19:59:35 +0000

Just got the 21″ Viewsonic Graphic Series G810 up and running. What a horse! I wonder how the Fedex driver muscled it up the porch steps. First impressions:

My eyes have grown accustomed to the incredibly crisp detail of my Dell LCD, so while I immediately missed that I can already appreciate the better brightness and contrast control of the CRT. After calibrating the Viewsonic I found that almost all of the images that were previously edited on the LCD display are coming up very dark on the CRT. Hmmm, dark on the CRT, dark from the printer, seems that the idea that LCD monitors show too bright (even when calibrated) might be the answer. Lost is the shadow detail and gradation which showed up well on the LCD, but they are now lost to the eye, just like with the prints.

However, lost from the CRT is that edge to edge crispness an LCD gives. But I think that is an acceptable trade-off to ensure that color and light is well managed. Gonna do some black and white printing, stay tuned for the results.

Going RETRO

pddurham — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 21:22:02 +0000

Lately, I have been having some printing problems – the infamous “prints too dark” that often comes with the switch over to an LCD monitor. Even though I regularly calibrate the monitor and tweaked my workflow and printer settings, many of my prints were dark and I had lost much of the shadow detail. An article in the August edition of Shutterbug by David Brooks says that the problem might simply be my using an LCD monitor. It seems that “prints too dark” is a widespread problem for photographers, and the solution may be as simple as switching back to a CRT monitor! OK, I was a good citizen and had recycled all my old CRTs after switching to LCDs, so what was I to do?

Supposedly a number of fairly decent CRTs can still be found on the web. Actually, after a little browsing I found that there are some really great values out there on some large CRTs and I am hoping they hold their price for just long enough that I can snatch up a couple.

There are some good LCD monitors for graphics work/photography use, if you want to pay $1500 or more. I’m going to go retro and will keep you posted about the switch.

As always, thanks for stopping by and please visit my online gallery at heritageresourcephoto.com

HDR and Photomatix – a tool for salvaging flat or cloudy day images

pddurham — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 22:08:07 +0000

OK, so the sun hasn’t shown its face in three days and we’ve had almost 6″ of fine powder snow over the weekend. On Friday morning, it was -21 degrees out in the valley! Well, I thought, maybe these conditions are terrible enough to try some HDR using bracketed .RAW shots of the historic Oakland train station.

As you probably know, many HDR images give an interesting bleached out old photo effect with lots of detail. You’ve probably seen this in some recent movies, Saving Private Ryan being the most famous. In movie film, this is known as “Bleach Bypass”. HDR in Photomatix can give a similar feel and appearance in your work.

I was able to set up my D200 on a tripod using the new Tokina 12-24. The meter reading at ISO 400 showed 1/640 second at f9. I metered in manual mode, although the D200 is capable of auto bracketing. I took a series of .RAW (NEF) shots from f5.6 up to f16 all at 1/640. In Photomatix, I merged three of the shots (f5.6, f9 and f16) using the Tone Mapping function. Here’s the result (with a bit of light burning for effect and a few snowflakes thrown in for free)

original .RAW at f9 converted to .JPG

HDR using Photomatix

Here’s a link to the HDR image at a higher resolution.

Photomatix delivers salvation to those difficult shots, PROVIDED THAT YOU BRACKET! The controls in Photomatix also give you a lot of leeway in your results. In fact, you’ll probably spend days trying all of of the options. If you are a purist, stick with CS3 and wait for good light and weather. Gotta’ have that shot and the weather is bad, or pressed for time on a trip, give Photomatix a try. Again, don’t forget to bracket for good HDR.

Just for grins, I converted the HDR to black and white. Cool beans.

HDR converted to B&W in CS3

HDR – what’s all the buzz about?

pddurham — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 19:48:43 +0000

I’ve been working on some HDR (High Dynamic Range) imaging after noting that the winners of various photo contests that I was tracking had entered some obvious HDR photos. Photoshop CS3 and CS4 have built in HDR functions and there are also several 3rd party software and plug-in packages that give you more control over the final HDR image.

The most common approaches to HDR involve taking three or more bracketed digital photographs and then merging them into a single HDR image. In simple terms, you pack the final image full of pixel data to extend the range of color, light, detail, brightness, contrast and other elements from the original image. Images often look surreal or like a detailed painting. One piece of software, Photomatix, is very popular. More on this in my next post.

Another approach is to take a single image in .RAW and process it into three images as if it were bracketed, i.e. setting each image’s exposure settings at -1, 0, +1. Here’s a comparison of photos after using this approach.

We see a slight improvement in the brightness of the image and in its overall vibrance. However, the same result can be achieved using basic Photoshop techniques. For this image, it’s not worth the extra work to make it HDR. There might be situations where this technique works but this isn’t one. So, we’re off to capture three bracketed .RAW images to merge using Photomatix and CS3. Catch up with us in a few days (it’s pretty dreary on the mountain) and we’ll see what we can come up with.

As always, thanks for stopping by and please visit my online gallery at heritageresourcephoto.com