Tolerance for noise

It took a while to find a picture situation which fulfilled the criteria of daylight indoors and a combination of sharp detail and a textureless area. The idea was to take a series of identical photographs changing the ISO setting from one to the next using all the ISO camera settings. Using a tripod I came up with the following images.








P508: f5.6 @ 1/3  ISO 100 37mm



P508 : enlarged image

I decided to enlarge a section of the first image shot at ISO100 as a starting point for comparison with alter images taken at higher ISOs. Looking at the various later images, I could not see signs of noise until the ISO rose to 800 onwards... 





P509: f9 @ 1/3  ISO 200 35mm



P510: f7.1 @ 1/10  ISO 400  35mm



P511: f8 @ 1/15  ISO 800  35mm


Graininess starts to show..



P512:  f11 @ 1/15  ISO 1600  35mm




 

P513:  f16 @ 1/15  ISO 3200  35mm




P513 : enlarged image 

Here the noise is very apparent in the enlarged image, particularly in the straw hat / wood grain area  and white wall; coloured speckles being most apparent....some of the 'gold' speckling on the hatband though is the natural play of light on the slightly shiny material.





P513:  image taken without in camera noise reduction

Thought that it would be interesting to compare the last image taken at the highest ISO sensitivity with a second image taken using the same settings but with the in camera noise reduction disabled to see the extent of noise and how it appeared. You can see the noise is more obvious in the close up; variations of green and red speckles on the dark hatband  and white fabric.They are also very obvious on the plain textureless wall behind the hat.

Interestingly, this exercise while showing how noise increases with higher sensitivity settings does show me how difficult it is to differentiate noise from bona fide texture sometimes.













Sensor linear capture

This exercise was all about simulating a linear image. I took an image and converted it to 16 bits per channel ( interestingly, I found that I could not do this in Photoshop Elements 10 and eventually achieved the conversion using Adobe CS4 ). Then following instructions I made a gamma correction curve  to match the curve selected for the exercise which resulted in a much darker image ( see below ). As expected the histograms for the two images i.e. original and altered version do differ. In the darkened version the histogram shows how squashed up the tones are towards the left hand side.




P500: f4 @ 1/160 ISO 160 11mm



Histogram for P500

Linear  image for P501 



P501 

Histogram for P501

Linear image for P502 

The linear image for P502 shows the strong curve required to get back as near as possible to the original image ( P500 ) ...the reverse of the curve for P501.

P502



Histogram for P502

Compared to original ...



Histogram for P500

While not exactly the same these histograms  P502 and P 500 ) are very similar.

Deutsche Borse Photography Prize 2013

I went to see the shortlist for this prize last week at the Photographer's Gallery. I was then pleased to see that OCA will be doing a study trip to see these shortlisted works in June which I shall aim to join since I felt the shortlist such that I'd like to revisit it and discuss the entries with other students.

There are four candidates for the prize and their appearance on the shortlist immediately triggers the thought - what constitutes contemporary photography ? Three candidates  are artists who use photography as part of their work; one, Chris Killip  is a documentary photographer  with a body of work stretching back over a number of decades.

Chris Killip

Black and white images of working class life produced in the north of England in the 1980s. Killip is being nominated for his show at Le Bal in Paris which he called 'What Happened/ Great Britain 1970 -90 . This body of work proposed to show the Thatcher years through the eyes of a camera lens. Reading a little about Killip in the exhibition's catalogue indicates that he very much sees himself as an artist. Where other social documentary photographers of the 70s were concerned the photography was used to drive forward the politics but in Gerry Badger's piece in the catalogue for Killip, 'the photography was an end in itself, although not exclusively so.
I really appreciated these photographs for their composition and strong emotional driving force. Black and white photography is not an area of photography that  I have explored as a photographer but  looking at these images really whets the appetite for Part three of this course.


Christina De Middel   'The Afronauts and other works'

This is an imaginative  reconstruction  of the 1960s Zambian space programme comprising photographs, drawings and re-photographed letters originally presented in a self published book but in this case displayed over a number of walls in the gallery. I really enjoyed this work on an initial superficial level. Having looked at the catalogue now and read the articles below, I want to go back and take a second longer look to try to understand what it is that strikes a chord here with me.


Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin  'War Primer II'

This is a re-examination of Bertolt Brecht's War Primer ( 1955) which repositions it within a contemporary dialogue about war and its representation. The original photographic images are overlaid with more recent photographs from later arenas of war such as Iraq and Afghanistan. It was published as a book and what we see here are pages from the book which presents very powerful juxtapositioned images  on a small scale..


Mishka Henner

Photographs taken from Google Street View which explore the subject of sex workers in urban and rural environments. Having have seen other work taken from Google street View by such as Michael Wolff, I have to admit that I found this  piece of work uninspiring ( uninspiring from the point of view of composition and emotional  standpoint rather than the questions they trigger ) do not make contact with me  emotionally or intellectually ...I found myself at the end of the piece of work rather distanced from the work rather than engaged with what Henner was portraying or asking of his audience.

I was also interested to read the four articles listed on the OCA website which show how opinions can be polarised.

Adrian Searle in The Guardian :   http://goo.g/Xz4TH

Searle believes Killip should win.

Brad Feuerhelm  1000 words :  http://goo.gl/mYY0V

Feuerhelm favours  War Primer 2 and Afronauts

Richard Dorment in The Telegraph :  http://goo.gl/KtMgL

Dorment feels War Primer II deserves recognition.

Sean O'Hagan in The Guardian :  http://goo.gl/XWBzD

O'Hagan favours War Primer II as well!

I shall come back to this posting at a later stage to add further reflections after a re visit to the exhibition and some followup reading as i think he does highlight a key debate..

Assignment 1 : Reflection

Looking at the assessment criteria for this course now that I have completed Assignment 1, I have come to a number of conclusions:

Demonstration of Technical and Visual Skills materials, techniques, observational skills, visual awareness, design and compositional skills. 

This area was the weakest area of my work when I completed the Art of Photography ( 21 out of 40 marks ) and one that I need to focus on more. Looking at this assignment, I feel the technical challenge that the presented itself, primarily lighting, was one that I struggled with and maybe took me away from the creative side of the assignment. Researching and using different techniques to deal with the cloudy bright weather was only partially successful and left me making more adjustments at the processing stage than maybe I would have wished. It was a fine line re how much saturation to apply to give the sense of place that I was seeing with the naked eye. I did find that I was instinctively applying what I'd learnt through completing the exercises while carrying out the assignment though ( e.g. histograms ) but it is still obvious to me that I need to work harder on improving my technical skills.

I think that the final outcome does demonstrate observational skills and visual awareness. In terms of design and compositional skills, some images show better compositional skill at the outset when the original image was taken where others needed to be cropped to improve the composition. The question is whether both approaches are equally valid in terms of demonstrating good compositional skill.

Quality of outcome content, application of knowledge, presentation of work in a coherent manner, discernment, conceptualisation of thoughts, communication of ideas.

If I am honest, I am not sure about the content of the images as I am not sure quite was is meant here. However, I do feel that I made a good stab at explaining what I intended to do and how the workflow went.


Demonstration of Creativity imagination, experimentation, invention, development of a personal voice.

Not my most creative work is the best way to sum this assignment up and in this respects I feel a little disappointed in the outcome of this work. Hindsight is a great thing but at this stage I feel that I would have been better engaging the folk that work around Camber Dock and portraying this human element rather than the more abstract aspect that I eventually opted for. A much earlier start to the day would have conjured up more action that would have infused the images. 


Context reflection, research, critical thinking ( learning log)

The research that I carried out was very much limited to the technical side of the assignment. I do need to carry out more photographic research before and during assignments. Interestingly, having seen the Deutsche Borse Photography Prize 2013 shortlist, in particular Chris Killip's work, I feel that I'd would have been better bringing out the human interest aspect of Camber Dock.

Assignment one : Workflow

Camber Dock

I thought quite a while about what subject to focus on for this assignment and opted to explore Camber Dock in Portsmouth which I felt offered a range of subjects from working fishing boats, leisure craft and a well known fish market all bound by residential buildings.

1 Preparation
I researched the Camber Dock area e.g. opening times of the Fish Market that I wanted to visit. Given the consistent weather forecasts indicating cold, cloudy weather, I also checked out on the internet what techniques fellow photographers were using to overcome dull or at best cloudy / bright weather  to see whether there were any tips I could pick up on. This led me to taking the tripod on every site shoot so that I could use as wide aperture as I needed avoiding camera shake and a circular polariser. Other checks covered the battery level and storage capacity of the memory card being used. Also decided to re calibrate my computer monitor and printer in readiness for printing the final selection of images.

2 Site visits

An initial and brief visit to primarily walk the area ( as the weather was not very good that day ) made me think that a straightforward landscape approach for outside images could likely produce  pedestrian / picture postcard views. Looking at the theme from a different angle I decided that action shots and images that captured the range of colour,texture and pattern that constantly drew my eye as I walked around the dock might work better.

3 Capture images
I completed two site visits and combined the images taken on both days. This was worth doing since the weather was different on both days giving a different perspective for the images. I tried  different approaches e.g. bracketing to see how the images  might be improved on site. Inevitably images were deleted on site but given the light difficulties I did have to bring the majority taken back home since it proved too difficult to see the impact of the changes on the camera display screen.

4 Technical edit

The technical edit reduced the images down to 156 images.  At this stage, I started to think what I really need from software to allow me to easily make value judgements and how best to organise the material. In the past I have created my own filing system of folders and subfolders and this simple approach has worked well so far. Experimenting with Photoshop came unstuck due to some kind of corruption of software but up to the point of becoming aware of the software problems I was not convinced that that approach provided me with an improved approach re-organisation within the workflow. That said, it is early days and I feel the need to persevere with getting to grips with the 'Organiser' side of things once I have sorted the software problem. My fall-back position looked to be using Windows Photo Gallery to grade the photos at the first selection stage.

5 First selection 

At this stage I had to decide what software to use given the problems I was having with Photoshop's interaction with my hard drive. In the end I opted to not use Photoshop for organising / tagging the images. Using Photo Gallery's system of star rating, I looked  
 for images that drew my eye from the point of view of content e.g. texture, colour, pattern, sense of place etc.  I was probably not critical enough at this stage since the initial selection came to 70 images ( three star ).

6 Second selection

Applying a more critical eye and using Photo Gallery processing software, I now came down to 19 images ( four star ). At this point I decided to give myself a break from looking at the images so that I could come back to the review stage with a fresh eye.

7 Review

Worth standing back for a while as  I found it much easier to choose the final selection of 12 images ( 5 star ).

8 Final selection
Each image was then numbered using my current numbering scheme and given a caption containing technical detail. The final selection is more abstract than reality perhaps...



P488 :f3.5 @ 1/400  ISO 200 +0.3exp.  18mm  Cloudy WB

I liked the angle of this shot  ( P488 ) which emphasises the shape of the boats against the sky. I decided to adjust the saturation for this image to bring out the colour more.



P489: f5.6 @ 1/50  ISO 100 55mm Cloudy WB cropped

In the above image the reflections emphasised by the blue cable caught my eye first. The swan was a bonus given it was on the move at the time.



P490: f4.5 @ 1/320  ISO 100  148mm cropped Cloudy WB

I wanted to capture the swan juxtaposed against the incoming fishing boat which meant taking the shot quickly. The cropping was slight and vertical from the left. I also adjusted the contrast increasing it a little. I’m happy with the result liking the position of bollard, swan and boat …

P491: f4.5 @ 1/80  ISO 100  18mm Cloudy WB

The intention here is to draw the audience from the boat coming in to the catch i.e. the oysters framed within the yellow structure of the boat…a natural frame so to speak. The image came out a little dark so I increase the brightness and saturation a little.



P492: f4 @ 1/125 @ 1/125  ISO 100  28mm Cloudy WB cropped

What attracted me here in P492 was the rich colour of the inside of the boat, the blue working gloves and the crab leg left over from the morning’s work. I did try cropping more closely to bring together the linked images of gloves and crab leg but lost a lot of the rich colour, pattern and shape so drew back to this composition. Saturation was increased a little to enhance the colours.



P493: F14 @ 1/160  ISO 200  55mm AWB cropped

I really like the outcome of this shot i.e. the composition, colour and reflection of the dock pub in the water.



P494: f13 @ 1/25  ISO 400 -0.7exp. 24mm  AWB cropped

I spent some time in the fish market trying all kinds of shots of fish, the working area, the imagery and notices on the walls etc.  to try and convey a sense of place.This lobster was quite splendid and I think tilting the shot works well.



P495: f5.6 @ 1/50  ISO 800  27mm Cloudy WB  cropped

You couldn’t miss this sign as it faced the entrance. Obviously seen better days and somehow the broom leaning against it seemed to emphasise this. There was very much a tension in the indoor fish market between the up to date fresh fish presented in a safe and healthy environment and signs like this one set on the periphery of activity.



P496: f8 @ 1/13  ISO 800 24mm  AWB

Until now I didn’t realise how difficult it actually is to photograph dead fish in a way that hints at the live animal. The eyes always indicate freshness apparently but capturing the beautiful markings took a number of shots from different angles and ISO settings. I increased the contrast slightly when processing this image to enhance the markings.



P497: f8 @ 1/30  ISO 100  37mm  AWB

I chose this image ( P497) because I liked the composition. I turned it round to view it in portrait rather than landscape as I think it works better that way. Contrast, saturation and brightness have all been increased slightly.

P498: F5.6 @ 1/30  ISO 100  31mm Cloudy WB

What drew my eye here were the shells and stones trapped behind this piece of fishing gear plus the rhythmic pattern and contrast of colours. I increased the contrast and brightness a little to enhance the image.

P499: F4 @ 1/160 ISO 100 114mm Cloudy WB

I had to use the telephoto lens here to get close enough to the subject to try and capture the beautiful reflection that I could see from afar. I took the photo at a slight angle as I wanted to achieve an abstract image. Try as I might I could not capture very well the slight tremor in the water which reminded me of impressionism. Again I increased the saturation and contrast to bring out the colour and shape.

9  Backup /archiving
The 12 final images were backed up on an external hard drive as usual.

10 Prints

8 prints were taken. Despite re-calibrating my computer display and printer, the prints were not as good a match in colour as I would have wished.




11 Conclusion

As I worked through this assignment, I wondered how what I chose to to do in terms of the workflow process might differ from what others might do here. I think the key area may be the selection process and how images are tagged for future and retrospective use. I still feel more comfortable with my customary practice of using folders to differentiate the levels of selection rather than grading with say a star based system which I felt somehow slowed things down for me. That said, this may well be the process of learning and getting used to a new approach getting in the way. Once I have sorted the Photoshop software problem, I think I will persevere here for a while longer so that lack of familiarity with the 'Organiser ' side of things does not influence my thinking here as to what to use in the future.