Don'T Worry Too Much About Noise And Pixel

[THAIPHUKET]

‘Chimping’ and Other Photo-Taking Tips

Tom Bear Like many photographers, Tom Bear thinks a lot about light. Last week, for my birthday, a friend bought me an amazing gift: a private photo lesson, taught by a professional. I know a lot about photography, and I’ve come a long way, but I’m not a pro. Tom Bear, on the other hand, is the ultimate pro; his shots have graced many a magazine cover. And during my afternoon shooting with him, I learned a ton. I thought I’d share with you some of his tips.

The Times’s technology columnist, David Pogue, keeps you on top of the industry in his free, weekly e-mail newsletter.

Sign up | See Sample * Like any good shutterbug, Tom thinks a lot about light. When he’s taking portraits, the subjects are frequently baffled to see him staring at his own fist in front of his face. What he’s doing is gauging the “wrap”—the degree of light falloff from the brightest side to the darkest side. Some degree of wrap is desirable in a portrait (photographically speaking, about 1.5 stops’ worth); you don’t want to shoot in direct sunlight, where you get squinty eyes and deep black unflattering shadows. On the other hand, you don’t want the face to look completely flat, either.

So what do you do if there’s too much shadow on one side of the face? A real photographer would hold up a reflector on that side—if there’s an assistant and fancy equipment handy. But in a pinch, Tom uses snow, a sheet from the hotel room, a piece of paper, somebody wearing a white shirt, or even—on our photo-safari lesson—a MacBook laptop, whose silver aluminum body makes a perfect diffuse reflector. “That’s why photographers use Macs,” he joked.

* Tom says that prints don’t show as much noise and pixels as you see on the computer screen. You might be dissatisfied with the way a photo looks on your computer screen, considering it too “noisy” (has too many color speckles)—but you’ll be surprised at how well it prints. You don’t see that much noise, partly because the ink smooths them out, and partly because people don’t look at prints with their noses pressed right up against them.

* Tom almost always shoots slightly overexposed. You can always tone down the brights in Photoshop later. But if the shot was underexposed, it’s much harder to recover the details that are lost in shadow. “And always overexpose women,” he said. “Overexposing kills wrinkles.”

* He noted that Canon and Nikon, the two rival camera giants, have designed their cameras so that their focus rings and other controls turn in opposite directions. We laughed, wondering what the designers’ conversation must have been.

* Tom suggests being careful to avoid “chimping,” a term I’d never heard before. That’s where you get so excited about looking at the playback of your photos on the camera’s screen that you miss the great shots still available around you. (Why is that “chimping?” Because you’re standing there, looking at your playback like an idiot, going, “Ooh! Ooh! Ooh!”)

* Like me, Tom is enormously disdainful of the emphasis on megapixels that the camera industry has foisted, misleadingly, on consumers. (See my 2007 Times column about the megapixel myth.)

And he told me a great story. A few years back, one of his clients, a stock-photo company, rejected his submissions because they didn’t meet the company’s minimum-resolution requirements. All photos had to be, for example, 10 megapixels or higher.

Tom knew that his five-megapixel photos (or whatever they were) would print perfectly well; he knew that the megapixel myth was at play. But he couldn’t convince the stock agency that its megapixel requirement was based on mythology.

So he took a photo file from a buddy who owned a fancy high-end Canon SLR, pasted in his low-res photo, and dragged it out bigger, so that it filled the full area of the higher-resolution photo. (Why did he start with his buddy’s file? So that the metadata—the invisible information about the photographic settings embedded in every digital photo—would indicate to the stock agency that the picture was taken with that high-end camera.)

Not only was the stock agency fooled, but to this day, many of its customers have used Tom’s phony high-megapixel photos in professional publications. They’ve all been delighted by the quality.

You’re a man after my own heart, Tom. Thanks for a brilliant lesson.

[astral]

Good reading, thanks

[THAIPHUKET]

I apologize for misspelling David Pogue's name in the head line.

[THAIPHUKET]

Using the assumption that 5-6mega pixel are good enough the conclusion would be that cropping e.g. 50% out of a 10 mega pixel image should be good enough too.

This would give tremendous editing freedom. Anyone tried it?

[BangkokImages]

"* Tom almost always shoots slightly overexposed. You can always tone down the brights in Photoshop later. But if the shot was underexposed, it’s much harder to recover the details that are lost in shadow. “And always overexpose women,” he said. “Overexposing kills wrinkles.”"

This shouldn't be misunderstood. It's CRITICAL not to overexpose 'too far' with a digital camera. While with under exposure the data is still there, and it will suffer more noise if you increase the exposure, with over exposure you just plain lose data. It's like a film positive (slide) that's over exposed, nothing is there.

Every digital camera has 'headroom' built in.. but not much. Some cameras it's less than a quarter of a stop, the best right under one stop. You can use controls with RAW files such as "recover" in Lightroom to recover lost highlights up to this limit. You can't 'recover' anything with a jpeg, and an 8bit jpeg has a lot less data to work with anyway than a RAW file.

Also, skin looks washed out if overexposed.

If I was to guess what 'amount' of overexposure he was talking about, I'd guess 1/8th to 1/4 of a stop maximum.

And there are much better ways to deal with wrinkles..

[pauljones]

Good stuff.

[koknia]

Every shooter has their own work methods. Personally I underexpose a tiny bit, as I would when shooting slide film instead of neg. I find it retains colours better and I can dodge out the darker areas later in Photoshop rather than trying to use highlight recovery to bring back detail.

[BangkokImages]

Every shooter has their own work methods. Personally I underexpose a tiny bit, as I would when shooting slide film instead of neg. I find it retains colours better and I can dodge out the darker areas later in Photoshop rather than trying to use highlight recovery to bring back detail.

This is the conventional wisdom and is what is taught in photography workshops everywhere. In this regard digital is much like shooting slide firm.

And the original statement was also vague. Was he talking 'overexpose' as in a measured standard exposure.. which is what I take it to mean being absent of other explanation, or is he simply talking about using EV to increase exposure if the subject is located where the in-camera metering is underexposing them?

I dunno.. but for sure overexposing in excess of the sensors headroom (1/4-1 stop depending on the camera) WILL result in lost unrecoverable data.

[pauljones]

It's easy enough to peek at the histogram and adjust exposure compensation.

[IanForbes]

I think the pros are very quick at micro-adjusting their cameras, as well as using the camera feature to take multi-shots with different exposures. They also have so much experience in reading the actual lighting by memory. Like so many things it all comes down to practise. That is just one beauty of digital cameras over the old film cameras... you get an instant answer rather than waiting for a developer to expose your film a week later. And, I've lost count of the times that commercial developers ruined a perfectly good roll of slide film.

[BangkokImages]

It's easy enough to peek at the histogram and adjust exposure compensation.

It is. At least in the newer cameras with larger more bright LCD's where you can actually see the thing in sunlight..

The problems come in with all the different interpretations of what they see on the histogram vs. the scene and desired image. The other poster mentioned practice and this couldn't be more true, but you can reduce the amount of practice necessary by understanding how the histogram works and in what circumstances. Very useful tool for sure.

[phuketrichard]

I also underexpouse and very seldom look at the play back until i am back home. Coming from a film background that was not an option and i prefer to focus on getting the shot

I am a street photographer so i don't have the luxury about worrrying about anything or making sure the ligh is right

[pauljones]

It's easy enough to peek at the histogram and adjust exposure compensation.

It is. At least in the newer cameras with larger more bright LCD's where you can actually see the thing in sunlight..

The problems come in with all the different interpretations of what they see on the histogram vs. the scene and desired image. The other poster mentioned practice and this couldn't be more true, but you can reduce the amount of practice necessary by understanding how the histogram works and in what circumstances. Very useful tool for sure.

Also, my LCD can display the overblown highlites.(blinking) That helps allot.

[THAIPHUKET]

I am irritated by the overexposing comments. 1. On test sites like digitalpreview.com

you see most often underexposed sample shots by - 1/3 fstop. Very rarely overexposures, except perhaps pure snow shoots. 2. Not sure if the shot comes out on your screen as well as on mine, because of no calibration, but this shot was underexposed by 1 full f stop http://goo.gl/94k4g

- 3/4fstop http://goo.gl/VasCo

- 1/2fstop http://goo.gl/lwgvF

Tell me what I loose in essential details?

[MRToMRT]

I agree, better to ignore his advice for general shooting (re overexposure). Its easier to pull back details from "underexposures" than try to recover what does not exist