Flags in the mist

When do we need Long Exposure Noise Reduction?

Roger Clark had some comments about Canon cameras and Long Exposure Noise Reduction. He basically wonders if we really need it most of the time. And he suggests that you can just take a series of separate dark frame exposures at different temperatures and just keep those to manually subtract from the image in Photoshop. The noise map apparently doesn’t change very quickly.

Why do we even think about using Long Exposure Noise Reduction (LENR) or as it is more generally known dark frame subtraction? Sensors heat up as they are used, if we are talking a typical short exposure, maybe 1/100th of a second, the sensor doesn’t heat up very much. But once the exposure lengths get into the multi-minute range that sensor will get hotter. And a hot sensor is a noisy one.

Astrophotographers actually cool their sensors down, sometimes to very low levels–hundreds of degrees below zero–to hold down noise. That option isn’t open to us. But taking a dark frame image essentially maps the noise generated by the sensor and you can have the camera automatically subtract that from the image. Hopefully this reduces the overall noise in the image. The dark frame file, captured separately by shooting a shot with the lens cap on, can be subtracted later in post production.

The problem with letting the camera do the subtraction, is that it doubles the duration of exposures and seems to me it may heat up the sensor even more since you are keeping it on twice as long. That also uses up the battery faster.

Doing some exploration on the web, and this pertains to Canon DSLRs mainly, there is some info on the matter. Canon suggests on their European site:

The long exposure noise reduction performs a dark field subtraction – in other words, it calculates the fixed pattern noise and then removes it from the image you have just shot. In practice, it’s not worth turning on unless you are planning on taking images with an exposure time of more than 2 to 3 minutes.

Andy Frazier a well known night photographer and Nocturnes member suggests an even longer duration, 5 or 6 minutes. And DPReview has reported no benefits on the Canon 40D with or without LENR for 30 second exposures. Joe Reifer has some tests on the Canon 5D where he suggests you have a problems around 8 minutes or so. And that noise becomes a problem on older Nikons around 3 minutes. But the 5D is older technology now, superseded by lower noise sensors and Nikons too have better sensors. Joe Reifer has some comments about the Nikon D200 here.

So from all this I’d say that we probably don’t need to worry too much about sensor noise on shots less than 4 or 5 minutes on newer Canons and probably something like that on newer Nikons. And possibly for even longer exposures. This would depend on the age of your camera, older models could be noisier. If you need to know where the break is you should do some tests on your own system. Any of you using other brands may want to think about using Google to see what noise characteristics your model is.

Not using LENR will certainly speed up operations at night and let me capture twice as many shots.

After Sunset

How I do a night shoot

OK I decide to head out for a night shoot, I gather all the equipment together. But I generally keep it all in my truck. I watch the sky anxiously as sunset approaches. I want a clear to lightly cloudy sky. Too many clouds spoils the photo, but I sometimes head out hoping for the best. I have almost always, pre-scouted the place where I will be shooting but sometimes not, especially on the more distant locations.

The descriptions are for a sunset shoot but of course apply to a sunrise shoot as well. The sequence would be reversed, you need to get out on site an hour before sunrise and the beginning shutter speeds will be long and get shorter as the sun gets near the horizon. Being there an hour before sunrise can mean getting  up at 3 or 4 AM.

Having a Canon DSLR and never having used a different brand my terminology is going to be influenced by what I know. If you use a different camera brand you’ll have to dig into your manual for the equivalent instructions. It should be obvious what I am talking about if you are familiar with your camera, and shame on you if you are not.

When I get to the location I set up the camera on my tripod with a remote attached. I mostly use an ultrawide lens, the one I am using now is a Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8 lens. I used a Sigma 15-30mm before that one. While I am fond of ultrawides there is no reason you can’t use any lens if it is reasonably fast. The perfect location is a site with water between you and the sunset/sunrise. The foreground should be interesting to you. Sometimes I use a grassy plains instead of water. The water works very well since it will pick up colors and reflect them.

For this type of shoot you don’t want much moon in the sky, so either a moonless night or before or after moonrise/moonset at best. A first or last quarter moon is OK since those will not overwhelm the rest of the image. The moon getting close to full will blast so much light into the scene that you won’t be able to capture much of anything else with out some trickery.

I set up a chair and wait for the sun, if the sunset itself is good I’ll shoot some sunset shots while waiting for the sun to slip below the horizon. Once the sun goes under the horizon I get going. If your camera has live view and you can use that for focusing, then you may want to try to use it for critical focusing.

My initial conditions are usually:

• f/5.6 to 6.3
• Aperture Priority mode
• ISO 100 or 200
• shooting in raw
• camera set to long exposure noise reduction

I then start firing off shots and look at the histogram after each of these. I want the histogram off the left edge of the frame and preferably out approaching the center of the frame. This is easier when you are shooting near the sunset but calls for longer and longer exposures later on. If the histogram looks good I’ll just fire off occasional shots every minute or two.

Shutter times will get longer and longer and will eventually reach the 30 second mark. When this happens it is time to change to manual mode(M) and increase the shutter duration to the bulb setting(B). Bulb as I mentioned holds the shutter open as long as the shutter button is activated. Either with a finger (bad idea) or the remote shutter trigger.

I’ll start at 30 seconds and watch the histogram. You will have to guess at increasing shutter speeds, if 30 seconds produces a shot with the histogram peak all the way to the left try 1 minute or 2 minutes. I find that after a certain point the shutter speeds will stabilize often around 5 or 6 minutes. But dark nights will mean longer exposures, I have used up to 15 minute exposures. Watch the battery indicator it will start going down quickly. The small flashlight can be used to check camera settings.

At the 30 second point on Canon DSLR the long exposure noise reduction kicks in. The camera will make the exposure that you set, it will then make another equally long exposure with the shutter shut. It then subtracts the second exposure which recorded shutter noise from the first exposure. This is called dark frame subtraction.

The practical result of this is that exposures have now become twice as long. A five minute exposure is now ten minutes. A 12 minute exposure is now 24 minutes and now you will appreciate the chair rather than sitting on the rock with the snakes. Keep an eye on that battery indicator.

At this point I usually look for interesting foregrounds, trees hanging over the water, docks or whatever you can find. A boat going by can leaving interesting ripples. Move the tripod around to try different spots. You can use the big flash light to try some light painting.

That is basically the process. Like most digital photography it is less than half of what is needed to produce a high quality art photo. The rest of the work will be done in front of your computer running Photoshop or whatever you use. Look at the image at the top of this post. I assure you it did not come out of the camera looking that way. If you believe that a photo is made in the camera then this type of photography is not for you.

Long exposure shots will almost always need serious noise reduction. You will also use curves to adjust the tones and give you a nice dark velvety sky. If you succeed in getting a good histogram with the peak near the center, you will not be happy when you look at the image for the first time. It will need serious post processing to look like a night shot. But the extra data you captured will hold the noise down and produce a much better end result.

I’ll be doing a post on star trails and urban night work in the near future. And one on moonlight photography. And I will do some posts on post processing these images. Keep tuned to this channel.

Update: take a look at this post for more thoughts about long exposure noise:

Amusement park ride

What do you need?

Lets take a look at what gear you need to do night photography in dark environments. I say dark environments because there is actually another type of night photography: urban and industrial night photography where there may be a lot more ambient light. Like the shot above. I’ll talk about that sort of work in another post. This post is about gear for long exposures, at least 10 seconds up to many minutes.

Safety First

John D Moore has pointed out that we need to first think about safety while engaging in any sort of photography but especially night photography in unfamiliar areas. He has an excellent PDF file available on this subject which you should read.

Gary Crabbe recently took a dive off a 40 foot cliff at midnight and woke up four hours later  much worse for the experience. So be like a boy scout–prepared. Try to look around where you plan to shoot during the day to get an idea of the hazards and the lay of the land. Carry a flashlight when moving around and use it.

Equipment

My basic night photography outfit consists of:

• A sturdy Tripod
• A remote release and/or intervalometer
• At least two flashlights one small and one larger more powerful light
• Gels and Strobe(s)/Flashes (if you will be doing light painting)
• A timer, watch(with light) or intervalometer
• Extra Batteries
• Something to sit in–ie a folding canvas chair
• A microfiber lens cloth

Tripods:

Lets look at tripods. You really must have a sturdy tripod, and that means a heavy tripod unless you can pay for one made out of the exotic materials like Carbon Fiber. A lightweight flimsy tripod is worthless and can dump your $1000 camera and $700 lens on the pavement. Carbon Fiber tripods can cost twice as much and don’t seem to me to save that much in weight for the extra cost. But a flimsy tripod will not hold the camera steady for 10 or 20 minute exposures.

A cheaper alternative is Amvona who sells Hong Kong knock offs of Bogen tripods. I got mine from them when they were selling on eBay. It is a copy of the discontinued Bogen 3021 (which was selling for over $200 at the time, I paid $40) and is steady as a rock and very well made. The one problem I had was the feet fell off so I ended up gluing the feet to the legs and have had no trouble since then. You should check eBay to see if they are still selling there.

If you buy an Amvona I would not buy the tripod head from them, especially not the pistol grip looking one. I cannot comment on the newer ones they now have. The quick release failed, on my copy of that, and dropped my 350D and Sigma 15-30mm five feet onto a rock ledge.

Make sure you get a set of legs long enough for your height. legs that only open to 58 inches will not be much use if you are six foot two. The tripod needs to be able to support the weight of the camera and the heaviest lens, I think you want one the supports 9 or 10 pounds minimum.

Most tripods in this class will have leg spikes that can be extended to dig into the ground if you are on soil and not pavement. And some will have a hook at the end of the center post, that you can hang a weight from, to make them even more rigid. The extra weight would mostly be of use in windy conditions or if you had the tripod set up in an unstable position.

Tripod heads:

I’m not going to say much about heads. A good one is better than a cheap one. But they can get very pricey. I have an Acratech head and very much like it but my wife was taken aback when I wanted a $275 tripod head for Christmas. Really Right Stuff also makes excellent heads. I’m sure new users are saying you paid how much for a ballhead!? But a good one will help your photography and will lock the camera in an immovable position thru these long exposures. Manfrotto-Bogen make fairly good heads that cost a lot less. the Acratech and RRS are mid-priced heads not expensive ones, hard tho that may be to believe.

Remote releases, intervalometers and timers

To shoot one of these long exposure shots you need to lock down the shutter for the length of the exposure. You put the camera in Manual mode(M) and select Bulb (B) as the exposure duration. B holds the shutter open as long as the button is held in by your finger or by a locking remote control. You cannot hold the shutter button down for long periods without jarring the camera so some sort of remote control is needed.

You can get a remote release either as a wired version or a wireless radio type that has a receiver that plugs into the camera and a transmitter that you can trigger from a distance. There are infra-red triggers but you need to be in front of the camera to use them and they are reportedly of doubtful reliability. You can buy a remote from your camera manufacturer or use a third party version. Those seem to work well enough and are a fraction of the cost. Be sure to get a locking remote because your finger will get mighty tired holding that button down.

You can even make a remote. That link is for the Canon XXX series (350D, 400D ect.) but you can probably use Google to find a version for your camera body. The eBay remotes are so cheap that it hardy seems to make sense to make one. I’m not going to put up a link for those since it would probably go bad in a short time. One word of warning, Canon XXXD series cameras do not use the same plug on remotes as the XXD (30D, 40D ect). So be sure to get one that works on your model.

If you have a plain remote you will need some way to watch the time; either a watch with a light or some other timer. People are using small kitchen timers with a light. You can pick up one for less than $15.

The best way to do this is to buy an intervalometer, that is a remote that has a built in timer. You can set a single time or even set a series of shots with a duration and interval that you set. Again manufacturer and third party versions are available. Most intervalometers work as remote releases too so you won’t need both.

Flashlights, strobes and gels

I carry a couple of flashlights with me. A small led light for looking at the camera settings. And a bigger three cell led with 150 lumen output that is so bright you cannot look at the light. That is for light painting. The gels are to change the color of the light. We will get to light painting in another post. The big light is also good for picking your path in the dark.

Flashes or strobes can be used for light painting too.

Batteries and chairs

Your camera will eat batteries in very short times when you are doing long exposures. The camera uses power to hold the shutter open and I’d guess that my cameras have 60-90 minutes of shutter time in a fresh battery. That somewhat depends on the camera temperature. But 60 minutes means that 6 10 minute exposures will drain your battery. So carry extras. It is discouraging to have the light change from OK to absolutely wonderful and have your battery die.

The chair is somewhere to plant your body in while you wait for those 10 minutes to creep by (actually 20 minutes). I carry one of those ubiquitous folding canvas chairs that can be had for $12 or so.

Lastly carry a lens cloth and keep an eye on your lens. Night conditions are often damp conditions and your lens can fog up. And it’s no fun to get home and find a lot of photos that look like they were taken thru a shower curtain.

Well I see my word count is up over 1200 and I promised to keep these posts reasonably short so we will talk about actually taking night shots next time.

Glowing wave

What is Night Photography?

Right now I would have to say that night photography is my favorite form of photography.

Just when does night photography happen? Personally I say it is from right before sunrise, maybe up to an hour before. That is when the above shot was taken. The sun is still below the horizon but you can see, with the camera and long exposures, the light and colors from the sun.

Night waves

Or you can do it right after sunset for an hour or so, like the shot above. The sun is just below the horizon and is still lighting the sky and clouds and injecting warm colors into the image. You can see the orange color in the water.

Night Sky

And of course you have the time in between these two periods for more night photography of the dark sky with the stars and moon. As above. The color in this image comes from the city of Gainesville which is about 25 miles away.

Let me point out that the camera is seeing what you cannot see with your eyes. The sky was not glowing yellow and orange when I was out at Watermelon Pond taking the shot above. It was as black as the inside of a sack with the faintest hint of a glow on the horizon. But multi-minute exposures show us sights that are denied to us otherwise.

Resources

Some of the resources available on the web for night shooting are.

• The Nocturnes. I would guess that this is the premier site for night photography. Be sure to look at their galleries and resources
• Gorillasite is a site by Andy Frazier. Andy is one of the Nocturnes, who are centered in Northern California.
• Harold Davis’ site and blog. Harold Davis is the author of several books including at least one on night work. He has a blog too and does more than night shots. He has some videos on the web about night shooting and does seminars. He is also in the Frisco area.

Many of the Nocturnes use a technique called light painting. That use a flash or other light to paint a building or other object while the rest of the shot remains dark. I have tinkered with it, but not to my satisfaction yet. I finally bought a very bright 150 lumen flash light that I’m going to use to play with this more. But right now I’m doing more of the straight type of night shots.

In the next post on this series I will go into just what hardware I use to do night photography and just how I go about setting up a shot.

Rainstorm

Taking a look at the different systems

The two biggest companies in the business of making Digital Single Lens Reflex (DSLR) cameras are Canon and Nikon. Between them they control something around 85% of the market. The smaller actors are Sony, Pentax and Olympus and the tiny actors are Sigma and Fuji.

Not only are Canon and Nikon the companies with the biggest market share but they are the two companies that have been making DSLR bodies the longest. They have more lenses and accessories available for their equipment than any of the rest. Pentax was a very important company in the Film SLR market. They introduced the first popular SLR camera many years ago. But they failed to get involved in the change to digital until recently. Olympus made film SLR cameras but also is a late comer to the digital world and they also made a very foolish decision when they move to digital. They have locked themselves into a smaller sensor size than the other companies. The use the 4/3rds system which is a half sized sensor.

Sony has made sensors for the Nikon bodies for years but has recently decided to jump into the DSLR market themselves. The top of the line Sony is getting very good reviews.

Lenses

Let’s take a look at what is available in the lens market for the various brands. This will include the manufacturers own lenses and the main third party lens manufacturer’s offerings (Sigma, Tamron and Tokina).

This is not an exhaustively researched table and could well be off a bit.

Canon and Nikon are more or less tied but the others lag far behind. Canon produces about 5 or 6 new lenses a year and they have much more money and a larger staff than the smaller companies. How many years would it take for Pentax or Sony to catch up with Canon and Nikon at the rate of 4 or 5 lenses a year.

Flashes

Looking at available flashes, flashes that fully support the camera electronics and exposure control:

We see the same story. Nikon does a little better than Canon, but all of the others are left in the dust. Again this is a quick reference table from the manufacturer’s websites and B&H. So errors are possible. Sony hotshoes use the old Minolta style that is incompatible with almost all other flashes.

Macros come in different focal lengths, generally running from 50mm to 200mm. The shorter lenses are lighter and cheaper but have a short 1:1 focus distance which makes doing bugs difficult since they fly off. Longer lenses are expensive and heavy but have a longer focus distance. Looking at some popular lenses, let’s see what the availability is for different brands.

Only the manufacturers own lenses are counted. Sony, Pentax and Olympus only have short macros. One of the Canon lenses is a super macro.

Another common lens used by bird photographers especially is  a 300mm lens. These come in two apertures f/4 which is cheaper and lighter and f/2.8 heavier and a lot pricier. Again looking at what the manufacturers offer:

Again Nikon and Canon have the better selection and prices as low of much lower than the other three. The Canon and Nikon lenses have Image Stabilization the others do not.

I just randomly spot checked some of the more popular lenses. I didn’t try to look at consumer grade lenses, I’m sure they all have plenty of 70-300mm and 18-200mm type junk lenses.

Image Stabilization

This is the last subject I’ll look at in my biased overview. Canon and Nikon have both settled on in-the-lens stabilization. The other three have in-the-body stabilization. While at first glance it might seem to be better to have stabilization in the body, that does not turn out to be true for lenses where you really need stabilization.

The reason for that is that the body stabilization can only work on short lenses because these systems work by moving the image sensor to compensate for lens movement. The longer the lens the longer the distance the sensor has to move and once you get beyond 100mm or so the sensor cannot move far enough to compensate for lens movement.

The in lens system works by moving elements inside the lens. Thus each lens is optimized for it’s focal length. Canon has an explanation here. Bob Atkins has a general overview here.

Another benefit of the lens stabilization is that you can see the stabilized image in the viewfinder, not the case with the in-body IS. Of course Canon and Nikon have a big investment in IS lenses so that comes into the calculation too.

The truth of the matter is that you don’t really need IS on short lenses. Most people can handhold a 18mm lens down to 1/20th of a second or so. But those long lenses are heavy and hard to hold and they really need IS.

So What?

So what does this mean? When you buy into a DSLR system you are not just buying a camera body. For example, I have one good camera body and one old one. Say they are worth $1400, more or less, right now. I have 6 lenses, a 1.4X extender and some extension tubes. Total value around $4000. (Darn my wife better not read this). So switching to a new body would be fairly painful, but replacing all those lenses  would be impossible. And unlike a lot of other photographers I do not have a lot invested in dedicated flash units. So a serious photographer can easily have four to six times the cost of the bodies he has, tied up in other gear.

So buying into a system, where you soon hit a wall when you want to add a new item that you just have to have, can cause real pain. If that item doesn’t exist for your system. I just listed flashes and lenses above but there are many other system accessories. Wireless triggers, remote controls, intervalometers, focus screens, vertical grips, wireless transmitters and the list goes on and on.

I mentioned the Sony non-standard flash above.I know one budding photographer who found herself unable to use studio flashes with her new Sony camera. She had to sell it at a loss and buy a different brand.

Think!

So think long and hard about buying into one of the lesser brands if you have the least idea that you will get serious about photography. Yes some of the cameras are decent, and maybe some of the lenses. But overall the systems are not. If you are sure that you won’t ever want to expand what you have, then buy whatever you fancy.

—UPDATE —

Roger Clark suggested that I should point out that Canon has prime lenses in 200, 300, 400, 500, 600, 800 and maybe 1200mm (rumored to be available if you will pay them to make one) and Nikon has 200, 300, 400, 500 and 600mm primes. Sony, Pentax and Olympus all have no prime lenses longer than 300mm. This is important for bird, wildlife (think of that African safari you always wanted to go on) and sports/action shooters as well as photojournalists. They all want and use long prime lenses.

Canon also has a couple of very fast f/1.2 lenses and you can even occasionally pick up a 50mm f/1.0 (used only, since they are out of production). These are popular with wedding shooters who shoot in dark rooms using available light.

—Another Update—

The final step in buying a camera is to go to a shop that has the models you are looking at and try how they feel in your hands. People often have love at first touch with a certain model. And these cameras are quite different in how they sit in your hands. The lower grade models are on the small sized end and may be too small for someone with big hands. But other models may be too big for someone with small hands. The control layouts are also different. How it feels to you is a major consideration.

White Egret

What is the problem with Point & Shoots?

Point and Shoot cameras (P&S) have a number of defects and many of them can be traced to the small sensor size in the bodies. A DSLR sensor is about the size of a large postage stamp but P&S sensors are the size of a fingernail. Those tiny sensors have just as many pixels squeezed onto them as the larger DSLR sensors have. That means the pixels are tiny and very close together. Sean McHugh explains this in more detail. Roger Clark goes into great technical detail about this issue on his website. Some of the problems caused by these small sensors:

• High apparent noise level and diminished ISO
• Loss of Depth of Field Control
• Decreased dynamic range

The high noise apparent noise (see below for a comment from Roger Clark) level of these small sensors mean that even tho the camera manufacturers may show higher ISO values in the camera controls those high ISO values are unusable.
Depth of Field (DOF) is how photographers control the zone of sharp focus in an image. It is one of most important creative factors that photographer use to control what the viewers see. A photographer can show a person in sharp focus but throw everything behind that person out of focus and thus concentrate the viewer’s attention on the subject and not the background. And because of the physics of small sensors and the lenses that they use on those cameras you are unable to control DOF. Everything in the image will be in focus, period.

(Note on this: see below for a comment from Roger Clark)

You can see this for yourself by playing with this calculator. For example at 55mm and at f/4 a Canon DSLR has a zone of focus of 1.1 feet at a distance of 10 feet. A Nikon Coolpix P90 has an infinite zone of focus. When you use this calculator you need the real focal length of your camera’s lens not the 35mm equivalent. Usually dividing the shown focal length by 8 or 10 will get you in the ball park. So a P&S that show 60mm is probably actually around 6 or 7 mm in reality.

The dynamic range (DR) of an image is how much difference exists between the deepest blacks and the brightest whites that the image will show. DSLR cameras with 14 bit processors will have a distinctly higher DR at low ISO and will maintain higher DR all the way thru their usable ISO range. P&S cameras start of with lower DR at low ISO and this drops rapidly as the ISO is increased.

Other defects

Some other defects of P&S cameras are:

• They limit the user to jpeg files
• They have small memory buffers
• They use a slow focusing mechanism for the lens
• The camera processors are slow
• They have long shutter delays
• They use up batteries quickly

DSLR cameras can use raw format for the image files. These raw files have many advantages. Too many to go into here but they are a vast benefit to serious photographers. Michael Reichmann’s Luminous Landscape has a good article on the subject. There were a few P&S cameras that allowed the use of raw format but manufacturers have mostly eliminated that feature on most of them. The only apparent reason would be to drive people to buy a DSLR to get raw. P&S cameras all capture the image in raw but convert the raw images to jpeg before you can get to the file.

There are actually people who hack the firmware on cameras to add raw capability and I notice there is a list on Yahoo devoted to that subject. I have been a bit perplexed by those hackers since I don’t know what you could do with a P&S raw file. Raw files are not images, they are the actual data that the camera sensor captured. A raw file converter takes that file and converts it to a real image. But no commercial converter software will take any of those P&S raw files.

A memory buffer is where the camera stores the file until it is fully written to the flash card. DSLR can often hold 20 or more images in a buffer but P&S are lucky to hold a couple of files.

DSLR cameras use a lens focus method that depends on the camera having a mirror, called phase detection, P&S cameras have no mirror and are stuck with a much slower method called contrast detection.

DSLR cameras use a fast processor, sometimes involving dual processors that are much more powerful that the microbrains used in P&S cameras. And of course they can make use of the much greater amount of memory in the camera.

All the points above are the cause of one of the major points of irritation on P&S cameras. The very long period of time that elapses between the time the shutter button is pressed and the camera actually takes a photograph. On some of the worst examples this can be one full second. And by the time the camera actually makes a photograph that special thing that junior was doing is only a memory. This is called shutter lag.

The shutter lag on DSLR bodies is usually around 0.05 seconds or so. Pressing the shutter button most of the time fires the shutter instantly. This comes from the fast focusing lens, the fast processor and for multiple shots the big buffer. Current DSLR cameras can shoot somewhere between three and ten shots every second. And keep that up until 20 or more shots have been captured. Something between a half of a second and one and a half seconds to capture five shots. A P&S takes between six seconds and 25 seconds to capture 5 shots.

And last thing I’ll mention is the incredible way P&S cameras eat batteries. A DSLR will be able to take thousands of shots on one battery charge. The batteries last for days or weeks depending on how many shots you take. My sons Canon G series camera uses the same type of battery as my Canon 40D and he is using the battery charger all the time. The 40D body is much larger than the G and the lenses are vastly larger and heavier and move faster but the batteries last much longer.  I doubt he can get 200 shots on a charge. And that camera is no different than other point and shoots in that respect. I don’t know why it is, perhaps running the LCD kills the battery. But they go fast.

Should most users move to DSLRs?

In my opinion and despite all the advantages of a DSLR, I think the answer is no. DSLRs are darned hard to use, the manuals are thick and you cannot ignore what is in them. Manufacturers add all sorts of ‘shooting modes’ to the lower end DSLRs to try to pretend that these are super P&S cameras but they are not. And many people who buy them expecting that they can continue their point and shoot practices are soon unhappy with their new and expensive DSLR.

I often hear complaints by new DSLR owners that their cameras are producing ‘bad’ images. Well the images are fine but the DSLR user has to understand how to make good images, he has to do a lot more thinking and has to understand photographic technique. Plus most DSLR images need post processing, you have to learn how to use Photoshop Elements or even Photoshop (there are a lot of other software packages out there) to make great photographs.

And obvious solution to the problem of people wanting something better than a P&S and the complexity of DSLRs would be a automated camera with a large aps-c sized sensors and LCD focusing. People have been calling for this type of camera for years. But no manufacturer will make one. It is a mystery, perhaps DSLR manufacturers do not want to introduce a model that would compete with their DSLRs. But there are camera companies that do not make DSLRs or if they do sell darned few of them. Why don’t they produce such a model?

If you are serious about being a better photographer, then of course a DSLR is the only way to go in their price range right now. But be prepared to work hard to master the camera, read the manual, buy a book or two and shoot a few 1000 shots before you begin to get a good feel for using the camera. Having a background in film SLR cameras will make the switch easier but it will still be difficult.

Next up: comparing DSLR systems

—UPDATE—

Roger Clark has this comment:

“The correct way to put this is that the small sensors actually have LESS noise
at all levels, from shadows to highlights.  The problem is that the small pixels collect so little light that they have very LOW SIGNAL.  The factor that we see in images is not absolute noise but signal-to-noise ratio.  So the small pixel cameras have low signal-to-noise ratio at all levels from shadows to highlights compared to the larger pixel DSLRs.”

use that link to his site above to get a much fuller discussion of this.

Woman Fisher

Buying a more capable camera

If you are using a point and shoot (P&S) camera by which I mean any camera that uses the LCD panel on the back as the primary method of focusing and composing, and are feeling constrained then this post is for you. Cameras that you might come across fall into several types:

Camera types:

• Point and Shoot
• Digital Single Lens Reflex (DSLR)
• Digital rangefinders (RF)
• Medium Format Digital (MF)

There are actually large format, viewfinder type digitals available but I assume no one reading this has a hundred thousand or so to buy a camera with. The prices of these cameras runs from $100 or less for P&S, $500 to $8000 for DSLR, $1000 to $7000 for Digital RF and somewhere over $15000 for a MF Digital body without a lens.There are still film cameras out in the wild and they can be found in each of the types above. And there are vendors that sell used cameras in good condition. You can pick up a DSLR for $300 or so from them.

My primary experience is with P&S and DSLR so I’m not going to talk about the rest of the types. I have owned a series of P&S cameras starting with a Canon A40 and ending at a Canon A95. Prior to owning those cameras I had owned a number of film SLR cameras, Exacta and Minolta bodies. I had a darkroom set up and did my own B&W prints and tinkered with a color system.

The problems with P&S cameras

I had stopped taking photos for well over a decade when I bought my first P&S. I enjoyed those cameras, but by the time I got to the A95 the charm started wearing off. What finally made me decide to make the move to a DSLR was a very frustrating series of shots I took out in the desert at Kodachrome State Park in Utah. My daughter and I spent an hour trying to get a good close up shot of a single flower in the middle of a desolate plain. I could not force the A95 to focus on what I wanted it to focus on. And since we live in Florida I don’t get the opportunity to go the Kodachrome State Park when I would like to.

The Canon A series of cameras is actually very capable for a P&S camera. It has manual controls and Aperture and Shutter priority modes. It theoretically has a manual focus mode but it was worthless. Basically it, just like every other P&S camera cuts the photographer off from full control of the photographic process.

Photographic control

The photographic process amounts to controlling the amount of light that reaches the camera film or sensor in our case. We control that by changing:

• Aperture
• Shutter Speed
• ISO

Aperture is the opening inside the lens, called a diaphragm, that lets light pass thru the lens. The more the diaphragm is open the more light gets to the sensor. Shutter speed is how long the shutter remains open to let light get to the sensor. And I like to think of ISO like the volume control knob on your stereo system. The more your turn that knob the louder the sound gets, but at some point the sound begins to get noisy with hissing and squeals. The more expensive your stereo is, the louder you can play it without distortion.

Briefly speaking point and shoot cameras have a limited aperture control. Often you will see them with a control range of f/2.5 to f/4 or so while a DSLR will generally run from f/2.8 to f/22. That depends on the lens and you may be confused by the f/stop terminology but just note how much wider it is on the DSLR right now.

P&S cameras will often have a limited shutter speed range, maybe from 1 second to 1/1000th a second. DSLR cameras are unlimited on the slow end but have a setting at 30 seconds and normally run up to at least 1/3000th of a second.

And P&S cameras have a very limited ISO range. Many are only usable at ISO 100 or 200 while DSLR cameras are currently usable up to ISO 3200. The P&S may have higher ISO settings shown but they are rarely usable since the images would be terribly noisy.

So that is enough for one post, I’ll continue this with more details on the next post.

Shadows

The Orphan Works Act.

An orphan work is one that has no known copyright owner, or if known the copyright owner cannot be found after a diligent search. There is no doubt that many works fall into this category for a several reasons:

• Many people never bothered to register their copyright before the 1982 change in the law
• Many people didn’t renew their copyright when it expired.
• Copyright law has been increasing the duration of copyright for the last half century. This has been done at the behest of film owners who worry about their early work falling into the public domain. Disney Studios is rumored to be a prime driver behind this. But the result has been to greatly increase the number of works which may have been copyrighted but who’s owners can no longer be found.
• Since 1982, copyright attaches to a work the instant it is created. But very few of these works are ever registered with the copyright office. So unless the work is somehow marked, the copyright owner is unknown.

The US Congress has been making multiple attempts to pass this legislation, pushed by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and other online companies that want to use images without paying anyone for them. Google has 5 million works that they would like to use.

So how does this affect the photographer?

It affect us since posting a work online that is not clearly marked by the name and contact information of the photographer could fall into the orphan works hole at some time in the future. So to prevent this add your email address to your works, I put one in the frame at the bottom of my posted shots.

Email addresses are not ideal, who knows if I’ll be using that same address 20 years from now. But for obvious reasons it isn’t a good idea to brand your physical address on web images. And I could move and change addresses. So the choices are limited.

There are plans for some sort of database of images and other works if the Act is passed. But it escapes me how such a database would be easily searchable for images. Perhaps some digital fingerprinting method. But any such method would have to be flexible enough to compensate for changes that would occur in an image after it is jpeg compressed. Perhaps several times. I cannot see how works that have been formally registered with the US Copyright Office could be searched. If you have a photo of a daisy that you want to use, how do you search the copyright files for that image? Sounds impossible to me at the current time.

Right now we are in a waiting pattern, waiting to see if the US Congress finally yields to the deep pocket powers behind this law. You can contact your representatives and urge them to vote against it. But protect yourself in the mean time.

This series started with this post

Suwanee waves

So Just what is a Copyright?

Copyright is a form of protection provided by the laws of the United States(title 17, U. S. Code) to the authors of “original works of authorship,” including literary, dramatic, musical, artistic, and certain other intellectual works. This protection is available to both published and unpublished works.§

Copyright is actually included as a right in the US Constitution: Article I, Section 8, Clause 8

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

The owner of a copyright is the only one who can legally:

• Reproduce the work
• Make Derivative Works
• Sell or otherwise distribute copies
• Display the work publicly

Who can obtain a Copyright to a particular work?

Copyright protection subsists from the time the work is created in fixed form. The copyright in the work of authorship immediately becomes the property of the author who created the work. Only the author or those deriving their rights through the author can rightfully claim copyright.§

That means the instant you press that shutter button the Copyright instantly becomes your property unless a few special circumstances are in effect. This has been true for any work created after March of 1989. The exemptions mainly involve working for someone else where your primary job is to take photographs or if you sign a contract before the images are created that gives someone else the right to them. You can license your rights to some of your work either in full or for certain limited usage. A Copyright lasts for the length of the authors life plus 70 years at this time.

I noted the reasons why this right is essentially unenforceable for the average person in the first post on this subject. You can get much greater protection by registering your copyright with the US Copyright Office. Doing this gives you:

• A public record of the copyright
• It is required before you can sue someone for infringement
• If you register within 90 days after publication of the work, you may recover legal fees and the higher damage levels mentioned in the DMCA post are in effect

The downside is that you have to do this every 90 days and it will cost you $45 every time you do it. $180/year, and again this means to me that it makes little sense unless you are making or expect to be making money from your work sometime in the future. You can do the registration either via mail or using the new planned online system. That may be slightly cheaper. The US Copyright Office has a lot of very readable information on this process and has answers for just about any question that you could think about asking. It is a very well done site and you should read some of their material for a better understanding of the process.

As we all have seen from some recent high profile shenanigans copyright law can get very complicated and this is one area where you seriously need a specialized attorney if you get involved in the legal system. They call themselves IP or Intellectual Property attorneys. For more info on that see the PhotoAttorney blog in the sidebar.

Fair Use

So just what is Fair Use? It is not a right, it is a legal defense that someone being sued for infringement may make to the judge. It basically allows people to use a portion of someones work for eductional or editorial use. But it cannot cause the owner of the copyright to lose an opportunity to generate income from his work. There are various legal tests that the judge will apply, but basically it is anything that a judge says it is.  Wikipedia has a very long article on this issue that you may want to read.

Next up is the Orphan Works act that at the time of this writing has not been passed yet. But it is something that we need to prepare for in advance since there are very powerful interests pushing for its passage.

This series started with this post

§ From the Copyright Office’s publications

Suwanee Dawn

The DMCA

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) has certainly received a well deserved bad reputation. This comes from the ham handed use of it by Hollywood and the Recording Companies to persecute people for fairly minor transgressions. But certain aspects of it can help the photographer.

Photographers can use the DMCA in two ways to protect our images:

• First we should mark our work with a copyright notice either as a watermark, or as I do down in the frame of the image. That frame in my case is part of the image when it is posted on the web. For other reasons you should always mark the image with a way to contact you beside the copyright statement. I use one of my email addresses. This should be an email address that you are sure will be around for a long time since it would be difficult to go back and change hundreds of email addresses embedded in photos online.

• The second important use is the DMCA take-down notice which is what you would send to a website administrator when you find your work on their site without your permission. Site owners are mostly immune to copyright infringement suits if the work was placed on their site by one of their users without the owners direct knowledge. If, that is, they promptly respond to DCMA take-down notices. That is the reason why they act when they receive a notice without asking the user to explain or defend their use of the image. They do not want to endanger that immunity defense if it comes to that.

Carol Wright the author of the PhotoAttorney Blog has some details on the legal end of these issues:

Watermarks can be music

Take Down notices

If you use a blog reader I would certainly add the PhotoAttorney blog to your reading list.

Practicalities

Now the important thing to notice about that first link, is that the problem I mentioned in the first article on this subject, the limited amount of money you can recover from infringements, is dealt with of by the DMCA. If you mark your images with a explicit copyright notice, and someone removes that notice, then they can be liable to pay attorney fees (makes those lawyer happy and willing to work for you) and from $2500 to $25000 per violation, no matter what your damages may be. This will be up to a judge.

So adding a copyright notice costs nothing to do, and may end up getting you a nice chunk of change. I dislike watermarks posted on the image but I have to admit that they are probably more effective. Just keep them small and tasteful if you do use them, please. After all we post our work online for people to admire, and a giant watermark ruins that experience. Jim Goldstein has some thoughts about using watermarks.

Take down notices do not have to be elaborate, a simple notice that informs the owner or service provider of the website about a violation is all that is needed. Something like this:

Dear Sir:

I have noticed on (date here) that your site (or insert whatever the publication is) at (insert link/URL) and dated (insert date of publication here) includes a copy of my work: (describe the work or image) that I own the exclusive rights to and infringes my rights under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Copyright Act. This was posted by: (name and other info about the person who posted the material if known). This work originally was published (insert the link/URL to the image). I have not authorized the use of this material.

Please contact me immediately.

Sincerely,

Your name and contact information.

Again let me insert the I am not a lawyer boilerplate. So take this info’s value for what you paid for it.

The next article will be on how to formally register your work with the US Copyright Office. that also adds a lot of protection, but isn’t free nor so simple to do as the above.