WRP D2 Battery Case
This simple battery case is designed just to hold the D2 family batteries with no end cap attached. There is a simple belt loop to attach the case to your belt or fanny pack.
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WRP Compact Flash Card Wallet
You have quite an investment in CompactFlash Cards. You also depend on them to be able to capture images. Keep them safe, find them fast and easy to access with DigitalPro’s CompactFlash Wallet. Made from obnoxious bright green 1000 Codura so it can’t be lost at the bottom of your camera bag or left on the car seat, the DP wallet comes in a 6 or 9 card version. Designed by Moose for his work, you’ll find they’re the best CF wallets on the market!
An important part of the wallet design has to do with the way I operate. When I have filled a card with images and I replace it, it want to keep it separate from the unshot cards. The system I use is shot cards I turn around so I see the back of the card. Unshot cards I can read the label (and so the size of the cards). To make this system work, I have to be able to see the cards which is why our wallet has the pocket design it has.
- Fabric: Red 1000d cordura
- Mesh inside pockets-2″ wide by 1 1/2″ high
- Nylon lace gear loop/clip cord
- Velcro closure
- 6 flash card version open is 6 1/8″ wide by 7 1/4″ high, closed 6 1/8″ wide by 2 1/2″ high
- 9 flash card version open is 6 1/8″ wide by 10 7/8″ high, closed 6 1/8″ wide by 3′” high
Photographing Alaska’s Coastal Grizzly Bear
Reprint from Nov ’99 BT Journal
Note: You should not take the information here and then go find a grizzly bear to photograph. This information is provided so when you go with a guide such as myself, you are photographically prepared to capture the image.
Alaska has a number of big mammal species that I want to get to know better (and photograph) with the Grizzly Bear definitely at the top of that list. While science categorizes grizzlies into just a couple of species, with my limited exposure to them, I like to think of the grizzly a little differently than science does. This B News article is about the group of Alaskan Grizzlies that I think of as the coastal grizzly. These are the grizzlies that make their home in the coastal stretches along the Alaskan Range, the west side of Cook Inlet.
Now by no means am I going to pass myself off as a Grizzly Bear expert, having thousands of hours of observation time under my belt. What I have to offer you are insights that I’ve gathered after a couple of weeks of daily observation and photography of coastal grizzly bears. I was amongst two dozen individual Grizzly Bears and at times just feet away from them. I went on my adventure with all sorts of thoughts, stories and myths about grizzlies in my head, many the same ones you might have. But the experiences I had dashed the myths surrounding these magnificent creatures. It’s my hope to enlighten you about these gentle giants, enticing you to come to Alaska and experience for yourself the coastal grizzlies!
The “myth” I went to Alaska with that I think a lot of others have is that getting physically close to a grizzly is like courting death. When another photographer told me that his headshot of a grizzly was taken with an 80-200f2.8 lens, I was in awe, thinking that getting that close was living on the edge to say the least. Photographing grizzlies in socially uptight locales like Brooks Camp or McNeil River where there are lots of grizzlies in a small space, getting physically close is probably not a wise thing to do. There are too many “bear things” going on that we humans just can’t see or know about all the time. But in situations where grizzlies are doing grizzly things in wide open spaces without other “bear pressures”, getting physically close is not life threatening. In fact, being just a few feet from an 800lb sow and three cubs is one of the most exciting wildlife experiences this old photographer has ever done in his life!
Like all articles I’ve written where I’ve stressed understanding basic biology, photographing grizzlies more than any other species, depends on basic biological knowledge. Much of what I have to share with you I first read in biological reports, having the biology lessons reinforced by personal observation. I had a 900lb male griz run at me from more than one hundred yards out. He ended up passing by me still in a run by less than ten feet (yes, I was shooting the entire time). Being able to experience and distinguish that bear’s behavior as running and not charging was personally and photographically rewarding! But it’s that kind of basic biological understandings I’m stressing folks have so they experience the rewards of Grizzly Bear photography. (Please understand that photographers are seemingly killed each year by grizzly attacks, yet most of the time the fatalities are because of the photographer’s ignorance and not grizzly aggression.)
Coastal grizzlies have two main foraging strategies, grazing and fishing. Both of these strategies offer great bear viewing and photography. Understanding what you’re seeing and being able to capture the best possible photograph relies directly, in my opinion, on your knowledge of what you’re seeing in the viewfinder. Let this be the start of your bear lessons.
The Grazers
Grizzly Bears emerge from their winter dens hungry. They have been living off their fat reserves for many months as they slept and they emerge in a mode to replace the fat they lost plus more. But they typically have at least forty-five days to wait until the first big salmon runs begin. While they might find carrion like a winter moose kill or washed up seal or possibly whale carcass, it’s not enough to sustain one grizzly let alone a whole population of grizzlies and their hungers for long. And if we’re talking about a sow nursing spring or second year cubs, there is an even more pressing need for immediate food. The grizzly has evolved amazingly to succeed through the eons not on these seemingly bare pickings but by foraging on the sedges of the sloughs and coastline until the salmon run (and still eating sedges after the runs have started). What boggles my mind is these gentle giants become giants on grass!
The sea of green sedges, covering many coastal beachhead stretches attracts bears from all over the region. The lush, new growth of these grasses, believe it or not, sustains the coastal grizzly (or as the locals call them, brown bears where as the interior bears they call grizzlies). In fact, they are even able to start putting on fat from this forage. At one of my favorite locales to photograph griz, Silver Salmon Creek, the grizzlies are like cattle on the flats, grazing on the grass as a treasured delicacy!
The spring light bathes the ocean of grass as the bears come out of the trees to graze. The scene is seemingly tranquil to us humans with the bears spaced out over the landscape, feeding. But there is an unspoken law of the land where the bears live, and survive by, that needs to be understood by us humans before we go further on in this story.
There is a hierarchy on the fields of sedge much the same as on the stream or slope. It can be summed up basically as the largest has the right of way. But there are a few caveats to this basic “king of the hill” structure that you, the bear observer and photographer, need to understand. While the biggest griz is most likely a large male or boar, there are times when it could be a female or sow. And when a sow shows up with cubs, even the biggest boars give them space. So a female with cubs sometimes supercedes the largest in size. The pecking order basically goes from the largest to the smallest with size typically being directly related to age, the older the bigger. And you know what they say about age, the older the wiser. I think this truly relates to the grizzly.
I bet you’ve heard the warning, “never get between a sow and her cubs.” This is generally a very good rule to go by. But getting in between them is not a guaranteed death sentence. I have a good friend who has been in this situation many times, and still walks to tell the tales. The little caveat to this myth is, if you’re between the sow and cubs and the cubs bawl, communicating that they feel threatened, the sow will crash through anything in the way to reach her cubs and make them feel safe. If you’re in the way, well, you’ll be flattened. But if the cubs go about their business and never bawl or express that they feel threatened, the sow will go about her business.
And there are times when you’re so close to a family group that the cubs will come right up to you. Cubs are naturally curious about the world around them, just as they are when they become full size bears. You need to understand that this curiosity is how bears survive, learning and finding new food sources amongst other things. When those cubs walk up to you, you need to avoid panicking! You must keep your wits about you, trying to keep from being placed between the curious cubs and their mom. You must keep the cubs from feeling menaced even though they approached you! Moving away from the cubs while talking to them softly as you move is what has been suggested to me as the best course of action when in this situation.
The sedges is one of the best places to first see and photograph spring cubs, which are without a doubt, the cutest and most entertaining creatures on this earth! Photographing the cubs takes a quick hand and sense of humor I think. A quick hand is necessary because cubs are busy little bundles of fur, bouncing about while learning about their world. The cubs that I got to watch were characters! One time while I was fly fishing, a sow with two cubs walked by on the creek bank. (I was fishing in the main channel of the creek.) The family was walking by, watching me while looking for salmon. The family led by the sow crossed a small creek flowing into the one I was fishing. The sow walked across first, followed by the first cub and then the second. As the second cub reached the center of the creek, a salmon must have hit it in the foot because that little cub jumped into the air, bawled and then flew the rest of the distance across the creek to the safety of its mother’s side! Oh, I wish I had a camera that moment! I was laughing so hard I lost the salmon I had on my line!
Typically it’s the dominant male cub that’s the most active it seems, off exploring a squirrel’s hole, playing with a salmon carcass or bouncing off the side of mom. That’s why I say you need to be quick at hand and have a sense of humor. Being quick, you’ll be able to follow the action. Having a sense of humor, you’ll be able to anticipate the action, sort of. While we camped in Denali Nat’l Park on another trip this year, we had to sleep in our vehicle one night and not in our tents because we were told that two cubs had taken a liking to bouncing off the sides of tents. They weren’t hurting anything, just bouncing off tents like they were trampolines!
When photographing the bears grazing, getting a tack sharp image can be a challenge. For one thing, they are tearing at the sedges like pulling out weeds, more than biting the sedges off at the roots like typical grazers. This action means their heads are constantly in motion. When you focus on the eye, as you should, the jaws and their powerful muscles are right below and in motion. Just after they tear the grass they have a mouthful of sedge, which they seem to then grind slightly in their jaws before swallowing. This causes their facial muscles to tremble as they chew. Photographing the bears while they’re eating and capturing a sharp image on a sunny morn or afternoon is a no brainer, but in typical low light situations in Alaska, this can be a real difficult scenario.
This is the reason I bought the 400f2.8 AFS. Being able to work in lower light is a whole lot easier with f2.8 not necessarily because of a faster shutter speed because as in the scenario I just described, in low light there isn’t a faster speed fast enough to stop the action. No, rather the “fast” lens permits me to be quick to follow the action as the lens can focus in the lower light and I can see more in the viewfinder. I did note though that in some situations with some of the bears with a near even coat, no lights or darks but all the same shade of color, in lower light situations, the F5 sometimes had a hard time finding focus. The lack of contrast was the problem.
When photographing the grazing bears, first you want to check the wind direction. Not that you have to make any adjustments, but you want to be aware of it because of the bears incredible smelling ability. We watched one bear perhaps half a mile away, down wind of us, run the entire half mile to a salmon carcass lying fifty yards in front of us. There is no way the bear could see the carcass, just us standing there, but it smelled the carcass at that distance and came running (honest, I showered that day!).
The grizzly bear depends on their noses to tell them when other bears, potentially bigger and badder bears are in the area. They use their noses to find food as well as provide them with ideas of where and where not to look. Watching their noses and being aware of the wind, you can have some idea what they are doing and know when to worry about your own back. When shooting bears, I always keep checking behind me every few minutes. I’m not worried about some surprise attack harming me. However, I want to stay aware of a situation where I might all of a sudden be between bears that aren’t happy to see each other or a sow just emerging from the forest with her cubs, wanting to fight the big boar that I’m photographing. By shooting with the wind on your back when facing a bear, you can rely on their nose to help tell you when other bears are coming.
The Fisherman
I’m sure you’ve all seen the image of the grizzly either at McNeil River or Brooks Camp where the griz is standing in a waterfall, catching leaping salmon. This is definitely the most commonly thought of way how grizzlies catch salmon. But if you ask any Alaskan what other waterfalls in Alaska where this occurs, you might hear a list that’s mighty short. While it’s the most commonly photographed, catching salmon at waterfalls appears to be the least common way that grizzlies fish.
The more common method of fishing for grizzlies is simply along the many thousands of creeks, which salmon migrate up each summer to perpetuate their kind. Salmon can be so thick that they are crammed side by side, tail to head in a creek! The run I saw come in from the ocean this September was a dark cloud in the water, tails and jaws teaming, squirming, fighting and pushing to get upstream. For the fisherman and grizzly alike, this is a sight before eyes!
When it comes to catching the salmon, the grizzlies can use any one of a hundred tactics to catch a salmon. You won’t know the tactic the bears you’re watching will use until they actually start fishing. They might just jump in, sending salmon and water flying! They might stand on the side of the stream and snare a salmon as it goes by with the delicate touch of the claw of their paw. They might have a favorite rock or small island in the middle of the creek they prefer to stand on like Snoopy on his doghouse, hunched over waiting for a salmon they can grab. They might take a plunge and “swim” about with their heads underwater, looking for salmon to snatch. They might run through the shallows of a creek, chasing salmon in hopes of pinning one under their paw. I even saw one bear in a deep portion of a creek, wade in and fish like a ballerina, nose just above the water line as it felt for salmon with it hind legs. Another tried the same thing, but used its front legs to pin a salmon in its own grasp.
Like I said, there are a lot of different ways that the grizzly bears on these creeks have evolved to catch salmon. A lot of times, they are methods taught to youngsters by their mother and passed down generation to generation. Even fishing sites, holes, times and strategies are passed on by the sow to the cubs! So it only follows that if you want to photograph grizzlies fishing, you’ve got to find salmon!
The same basic rule of the largest gets their way applies to the fishing holes as well. The best holes are garnered by the biggest and baddest except for the exceptions as mentioned earlier. The difference here is the bears tend to get fuller faster, and so go sleep off their meal, allowing other bears to come and make use of the great hole until the big boys wake up and want to feed some more. Finding the great holes where bears like to hang out is really easy, just look at the tracks in the mud. You’ll see where the big boys like to be as their big tracks are really easy to see!
Photographing the fishing bear takes more skill than that of the grazing bear. The reason is the action that’s occurring, the bear actively in one form or another, trying to catch a fish. You’re also going to have to deal with the water, where all this action is going on. For example, on an overcast day, which is my favorite light to photograph the bears, the water can look rather drab to say the least. And when the griz has that squirmy salmon in its jaw, you’d best have a lot of light for a fast shutter speed to get the eye sharp!
The one technique you ought to be really good at when photographing the fishing bear is panning. They are on the move it seems quite a lot. You’ve got to be able to pan and fire to capture the really killer images of the bears in action. I would also strongly suggest you have an 80-200f2.8 or similar focal length-f/stop combo hanging on a second body on your shoulder. There are times that they are so close you’ll need this focal length to capture the action.
A Thought on Bear Light
The Grizzly Bear got its name because the first ones seen by white man had a “grizzled” look about them. I wouldn’t say no two look alike, but they are as different in pelt color as a photographer might desire. And it would seem everyone has his or her favorites. I personally like the slightly darker ones with the grizzled tinge to their coat. But you can have them as dark as sin or so light that they look almost white with every shade and combo in between that your imagination can conjure up. And depending on the pelt, different lighting can make a real difference.
Photographically, I think overcast days in general is the best light for bears the majority of the time. This permits one to take advantage of the natural color contrast inherent in the coat of the griz. All the subtleties can be captured by film, which is the real trick here. As always, I dial in +1/3 stop to brighten up the scene and then go about shooting as normal. The griz has a small eye and in a lighter pelted individual, it’s a whole lot easier to see that eye, which is very important so the viewer of the image can make contact. But with darker individuals, those little dark beady eyes can get lost without some sort of directional light striking them. But don’t think for a moment that if the sun comes out, I wouldn’t photograph the bears.
When the sun is out, you just have to work the bears and the situation to make the most of it. For example, a dark colored bear in the fresh green of spring, on a full sunlit day can be a little contrasty. The same bear in the same grasses but in fall when they have turned tan can be real contrasty. You either look for a lighter colored griz to photograph, hope for a cloud to come by to diffuse the sun, or realize that your film might not be able to hold all the detail. One saving grace is that these bears are in Alaska where the morning and evening light lasts for such a long time. This is one creature that truly looks its best in the light of these times of day.
One of the cool things about the griz is being able to photograph it side or back lit. Their hairs just tend to naturally glow when lit either of these ways, making all sorts of other photographic possibilities possible. You just have to remember that with dark individual bears when lit this way, it will be hard to see their small dark eyes. And seeing the eyes is very important to the success of your image!
Now by no means would I walk up to a griz that I hadn’t photographed before and just start firing away! Sharon and I spent hours watching grizzlies in Denali for example, learning their individual behavior and characteristics, watching outside pressures and waiting for them to get close on their own terms before I started to photograph them. I also talked with another photographer who I greatly trust and learned from his experiences as well before taking on these gentle giants. Understanding their basic biology not only kept me safe and permitted the bears to do their thing, but also helped capture the images I desired. You can do the same thing with the same rewards by following these words of advice I’ve offered here.
I found photographing coastal grizzly bears to be one of the greatest challenges I’ve faced as a photographer. Capturing great images of the bear eating, running or foraging isn’t the challenge. Capturing the size, power, strength of the bear and the grandeur of the grizzly bear’s home is the monumental challenge. When you spend any time in its home and walk its path, you get an insight into this creature that I generally don’t see in photographs of the griz. After getting over the “wow” factor (and that takes along time when you’re so close to these magnificent creatures) and getting down to communicating, this challenge kept me awake at night. That challenge will keep me thinking all winter until I venture to Alaska again, to photograph the coastal grizzly bear!
Want to get in on the challenge? Where I photograph these coastal grizzly bears is open to anyone wanting to take up the challenge! You can’t drive there, but must fly in by a small plane and land on a beach. The folks at Silver Salmon Creek Lodge are there waiting when you land to share their incredible slice of Alaska with you. David Corey, the owner and host, is a native with a big smile and desire to share this piece of Alaska with you. Arne, photographer and bear guide expert, will get you safely so close to these bears, you will come back a changed person. You can contact the folks at Silver Salmon Creek Lodge at 907.262.4839. I hope to see you there!
Base Camp Bosque update
[swf]http://www.moosepeterson.com/swf_imgs/gsc3540 lab.swf, 585, 444 [/swf]
Wildlife Photographers Base Camp is heading to Bosque del Apache Dec 07-11, 2009. The great news is our dear friend and killer photographer Kevin Dobler (also part of our DLWS staff) is joining us as co-leader. Kevin has been to Bosque and shot with me there many times. Hot dang, we’re going to have fun now! Our very rewarding, hard hitting, tiring and incredibly educational wildlife photographer business course is going to one of my favorite places and using it as the backdrop for launching the photographic careers of others.
Bosque is an amazing place, filled with thousands of Sandhill Cranes and Snow Geese. Birds is by far the main photographic target of our week. We will limit this Base Camp to just six campers, a 400mm lens or longer required. Look forward to shooting with you and sharing with you what I think is the greatest profession on the planet! We have two openings left, give us a call, now’s the time!
Nik That Idea
Nik Software Videos
Nik’s Tonal Contrast (Color Efex Pro 3.0)
I’m here in my office looking at this 20×30 print of Snow Geese exploding in flight in front of a New Mexico thunderhead. The white birds against the dark black sky are very dramatic. It’s an older image printed from a scanned 35mm but I’ve loved the image and print for years. That is until April of this year. Now the print drives me nuts and as I write, a new print is being made. What was wrong with the old print? Me!
Long, long, long ago, I spent every non-shooting moment in the darkroom either at school or at a friend’s house. The magic of seeing an image appear in the developer so hooked me that I just had to keep seeing it over and over again. It was magic! When I “grew up,” printing was delegated to a lab for simple economics, space economics, so a part of that magic of photography I so enjoyed had disappeared. That is until April when I was introduced properly to the excitement of the digital darkroom. Yeah, I had heard many expound the glories of the digital darkroom, but personally I had never seen any prints that really grabbed my attention that came from a digital darkroom. Nor had I seen a master take an already prefect image and turn it into a print that was a mastery of the heart. When I did in April it changed me, which brings me back to that print of the Snow Geese.
I’ve had images enlarged to 4×7 feet taken by Coolpix cameras that looked just fine, most folks never knowing the image came from a small 1MB file. My office has a number of 20×30 prints from the D1, which look great but no matter the camera or scanner, they all have that “digital” look. Even my Snow Geese image that was an original 35mm but printed from a scan has that look. What is that look? Noise, artifacts, little things that once you’ve been shown them stick out like a sore thumb. Many have asked why I don’t have a gallery and the main reason in the past has been that the quality I use to get in the darkroom I wasn’t seeing in the enlargements I had made (I’m really picky about my prints).
Then came the pied piper of the digital darkroom, Vincent Versace, who quickly showed me and began to teach me just what I had been missing. I hinted towards this in the last issue of the Journal but in the three months since that article, my skills and passion for the digital darkroom have grown leaps and bounds. They’ve grown so much that my favorite print of the Snow Geese had to go because all I could see were all the defects (which are now all gone). Getting that print quality I had from a tray from the digital darkroom involves many steps, much more than I can devote space to in many issues of the BTJ. But one of the keys to making a beautiful print from the digital darkroom comes from a software program we explore at our Digital Landscape Workshop Series.
If you want great prints from your digital darkroom, but haven’t been able to obtain them, I can NIK that problem. Nik Software makes a suite of software plug-ins for Photoshop that you cannot live without, NIK Dfine, NIK Color Efex and Sharpener Pro! Let me explain how these plug-ins have brought the magic of the darkroom back to me by producing prints I want to sell in my gallery!
Before We Begin
First and foremost, I need everyone to be on the same page. I’m working with a photograph already taken right, right from the start! Nothing has changed there, nothing will. To quote my good friend, I’m not fixing broken pixels, but bending those I’ve captured. What I’m doing is using the tools in Photoshop to maximize the quality I’ve already captured to create the perfect print. I’m figuratively and literally removing the artifacts of my favorite medium, digital, in order to print the quality I demand of my images. I’m doing this while recapturing the fun of the darkroom in the digital space. While these same techniques will help you if you have to crop your image or use curves to fix exposure problems, you won’t get the same image quality compared to capturing the photo right, right from the start! It’s still the person behind the camera that counts!
NIK Dfine
The very first step in making a gorgeous print and I mean literally the very first step is NIK Dfine. What is NIK Dfine? NIK Dfine & Dfine Selective are two plug-ins that literally clean up digital’s act. By a process I won’t even profess to begin to understand (the math behind Dfine is amazing!), with a click or two Dfine cleans up what digital leaves behind. But like any tool in photography, you cannot blanketly just say “globally fix this” by using one setting on every image and obtain the best results every time. Like everything else in photography, you’ve got to become a knowledgeable craftsman to make the most of Dfine. (Now don’t you go on to some other article because you don’t think this applies to you or that this might be over your head. You just sit right down and read all of this. No matter if you’re a conventional or digital photographer, this can make a vast difference in your photography!)
There are two things about digital, be it original capture or scans, that you need to understand to start using NIK Dfine and that’s noise. There are two types of noise we’re working with, Luminance Noise and Chrominance Noise. Right from the Dfine IB comes these definitions of these two types of noise:
Luminance Noise is noise that appears as small, dark spots that often look like film grain. Chrominance Noise is noise that appears as small off-colored spots or specks in the image.
Understanding which noise you’re working with and trying to rid it from your image as well as what other detail you could lose and need to preserve in the process, are key concepts to making gorgeous prints! I can’t stress enough that is not the defining (had to use the pun, sorry) word nor recipe for using Dfine. Every image requires a little different treatment based on the camera you used, the image you captured and how you want the final image to appear. By the time you read this piece, I know I will have learned even more on how to better use these products. That’s kind of the exciting part of the digital darkroom for me right now because like photography, you can learn something new every day!
This is my basic routine I use when working on an image. When I open a Jpeg (viewing images in DigitalPro, select image and depress Ctrl E) in Photoshop, the first thing I do is create a copy of the file (right click on image’s top frame, select Duplicate). I never work on the original, so I close it and begin to work on the duplicate. When working a NEF file, I first go into Nikon Capture and do the Advanced RAW processing, then save the file, 16bit, TIFF format RGB and then open in PS. I then call up Dfine (Filter > Dfine 1.0) which brings up the Dfine user interface. Next I select the Mode 5 for previewing the image within the Dfine UI (right above the photo and click on the five thumbnail image preview). I start by working with Luminance Noise. You could just use the settings under Luminance in Dfine and come away with clean results, but you can do better! The amazing thing about the folks at NIK is they didn’t settle to make Dfine just some blanket fix, oh no! When you get Dfine and before you use it for the first time, you need to go to their website and buy the individual camera profiles, in my case I got the profile for the D1H. Now you’re cooking!
The individual camera profiles help you optimize noise reduction for your specific camera. Once loaded on your computer, you simply click on Load Profile >Load from Disk and then find the file under the Photoshop directory. When you select Luminance Noise, the last option in the option menu is the profile for your camera (camera profiles are organized by ISO range, select the range that fits the image at hand). With that selected the camera profile control feature is launched. The camera profile controller manages the range of noise reduction for the camera selected. This is based on the manner in which the selected camera captures and processes an image (very important), varying image structures and detail and the relationship of those details and color in the image.
In the five image mode, you take the eyedroppers, select sections of the image where you want to maximize noise reduction and then with the sliders, affect a change. With a calibrated monitor you can actually see the noise reduction right on the monitor. This very powerful tool for maximizing your print quality has just begun. This is just the first step of maximizing your image quality.
Next on the Dfine user interface is Chrominance Noise & Artifacts. This dialog box provides you with four more options to maximize your noise reduction. You’ll find one option is Protected Reduction. I tend to use this option the most, using the slider to dial in what is the most appropriate for the image I’m working on. Now neither of these two incredibly useful tools can be just blanketly applied as quickly as I just implied in my description. I learned this the hard way luckily in the very beginning.
Working with a Greater Prairie Chicken photo (BTJ vol 8-2, pg 8), I first did a simple sharpening (using Sharpener Pro!). I instantly saw how sharp the eye of the bird in flight should be. I Ctrl Z that and went to Dfine and did a global Luminance and Chrominance correction. I instantly could see how I reduced the noise and artifacts, especially in the out of focus background, but the eye of the chicken in flight was no longer sharp. That can happen when you do global anything in Photoshop and Dfine is no exception. How do you clean up the noise and artifacts while maintaining detail?
There are a number of ways, the way I did it in this instance was to very carefully select the two chickens using Magnetic Lasso Tool (L), inverse selection (Select > Inverse) and then call up Dfine to clean up everything but the two chickens. When the Dfine UI comes up, you’ll see what you’ve selected and in the case of the two prairie chickens, I saw the whole image except the two chickens were missing. Only the transparent checkered background was present where they would be in the photo. The resulting print is spectacular, but it took time and knowledge of the product to put it all together.
I use Dfine on every image, including not only Jpegs, but also NEFs (yes, I’m shooting those now and with the D2H I will be using the Raw w/Jpeg feature almost exclusively) and those images I submit to clients. Dfine is the first thing I do to any image before doing anything else. It radically improves a photo in cleaning up those pieces of the digital image that are a natural part of the digital process. If you’re in the business of selling digital images, I don’t know how you can submit images without first taking the time to clean them up. This is just the start of how the Nik Software suite can improve your images!
NIK Color Efex Pro
This plug-in is incredibly powerful for the photographer who remembers that digital photography is still photography. When you call up Color Efex Pro (Filter > nik Color Efex Pro!), a large drop down menu appears with lots of filter options. There are only two that I have extensive practice with and used so far and are ones you should be aware of, Polarization and Skylight Filter.
Yeah… I said it’s important to get it right, right from the start. This includes using filters on your camera like a polarizer. It is a tool that can dramatically affect the way you communicate! There are two instances though when using the Polarization Filter in Color Efex that is a better option than attaching a filter to the front of a lens. One is when you forget to bring a polarizer with you, and second is when you can’t afford to lose the two stops of light. (Way cool, you can polarize and not lose light. That makes the Color Efex a plus right from the start!)
There I am on a guided float trip in gorgeous Montana with my son. I pull out the 24-102VR attached to a D100 and line up a gorgeous scenic. Then it hits me, I left my polarizer back in the truck, way up river (I had fishing on my mind)! Do I panic? Nope, I just shoot away! Later that day we watched a Bald Eagle, trying to grab trout from the river. It was late in the afternoon and the light levels were getting pretty low. Now, if I had a polarizer I wouldn’t want to use it because the loss of two stops would have made stopping the action pert near impossible. In both cases, I knew I had the tool to make it all work.
Knowing that I had the Color Efex Polarization Filter back in the computer and how it works, I shot accordingly. Again, I was shooting knowing what I wanted and how I was going to get it. Photoshop and these tools do not turn garbage into flowers! The end result was the same, whether I used a polarizer at the time I took the photo or used NIK Color Efex Polarization Filter. A polarizer is designed to remove reflections; it’s physics. Generally I use a polarizer to remove the blue reflection the sky causes on subjects. The NIK Polarization Filter works in the exact same way and in the same manner. This means that if a real polarizer wouldn’t have helped the situation at the time the photo was taken, the NIK Polarization Filter wouldn’t either. The math that the NIK boys have done to make this work truly boggles my mind!
The Color Efex Skylight Filter is one right out of the Moose Play Book. I’ve written countless times on how I use an 81a filter all the time on every lens. There is a psychological and technical reason for its application. The technical reason is much like the use of the polarizer, to remove the blue cast from our image, warming it up. This blue cast in digital is easy to capture with our fixed WB space (soon to be increased with the D2H). It has to do with shooting a scene with a fixed color temperature with a different and higher color temp. The folks at NIK know their photography, which is why they created the Skylight Filter. The Skylight filter doesn’t just arbitrarily “warm up” a scene like using Saturation or some other color balance adjustment in Photoshop. The Skylight Filter works the same as if we could dial in a white balance of 10,000k when we are shooting a scene of 10,000k. Since we can’t dial in such a white balance setting, the Skylight Filter brings the color temperature back so what we saw with our hearts and minds matches how the final image appears.
The way these two filters work is similar to Dfine. You call up the filter in Photoshop that you want to use and a user interface appears. You’ll see the photo you’re working on in the user interface. In the lower left corner is a slider that permits you to adjust the strength of the filter (there is a filter rotation slider in the Polarization Filter UI). It’s really just that simple. Personally, I use the filters as the second to the last step when finishing a photo. (Before you ask, yes, I use the Skylight Filter even though I’ve shot the image with an 81a. Even with an 81a, I often cannot match the WB with the CT.) What’s the last thing you should do? Sharpen.
NIK Sharpener Pro
Sharpening of digital files no matter their origin has been the ruin of many a fine image. It is easy to see in magazines when an image was first sharpened by the photographer and then again by the magazine. Like everything else, you can’t just blanketly sharpen an image. On the other hand, sharpening portions of an image three times isn’t the death of it. It’s the person behind the computer that counts!
I know, you have Unsharp Mask already, so why buy a plug-in to do the same job? I asked the same thing until I knew better because Sharpener Pro! is nothing like Unsharp Mask! The Unsharp Mask in Photoshop is an algorithm that creates the illusion of sharpness, but it neither creates added detail nor color protection. You can see it for yourself. Open an image in PS and depress Ctrl Alt + until all you see is a screen of pixels. Next, call up Unsharp Mask and then click the preview on and off. You instantly will see the illusion of sharpness is a mere contrast change. You could say it’s smoke and mirrors by changing the appearance of a color of pixels rather than actually sharpening those pixels.
The standard user interface when applying an Unsharp Mask asks the user to enter Threshold, Radius and Percentage in order to perform the sharpening task. Using the example from the folks at NIK (because I sure don’t want to do the math), if you have an image at 275dpi that you want 3×4 inches for a 75lpi offset printer, what numbers do you use for those three settings? To achieve this you would need to figure out the math equation to arrive at a threshold of 33, percentage of 120% with a radius of 1.61pixels. NIK Sharpener Pro! doesn’t make you jump through such hoops to correctly sharpen an image. How does Sharpener Pro! work?
When you first launch Sharpener Pro! and before you see the UI, Sharpener Pro! does an Autoscan of the image. One of the image inspections that the Autoscan performs is determining the image’s real resolution. What Sharpener Pro! reads is not the dpi in the EXIF file but rather analyzes the actual detail in the image. Factors such as the quality of the CCD and how well you focused and held still are what it’s looking at, not what in a perfect world you should have captured. This is incredibly important to the final output! (It’s really cool to look at the dialog box at the bottom of the Sharpener Pro! UI to see what the real resolution is of an image. I’ve used that feature every so often to compare two images for which one is technically the sharpest.)
The Autoscan feature communicates to the user if the image that it’s being asked to sharpen is good enough to be sharpened. Ouch! I had one photographer email me about this and asked if it was accurate. I told them to make a print and send it to me to see for myself. Sorry to say, the software was quite accurate and the enlargement should never have been made that large and sharpened.
Sharpener Pro! has six different settings that you can change as per your preferences. The change in the settings you make will be reflected in the dialog box at the bottom of the UI based on the info obtained by the Autoscan. Now’s when my knowledge base runs thin because to be quite honest with you, I haven’t learned the “whys” only the “hows” and the outcomes. The first two options are the Image Width and Image Height. These two when you launch Sharpener Pro are set to whatever image size you set your image to in PS. (You set the image size as the second to last thing before finishing an image and then sharpen as the very last step.) I don’t mess with these settings.
Next is the Printer slider. I always set this to 2880×1440 photo. Why, because that’s what I was told by those in the know as being the best setting. Next is Printer Quality, which is always set at average. Why? Again because I was told that was the best. I could find out the answers but since I’m just a simple mountain boy, getting the best without having to learn the math behind it is just fine by me. The last two settings are kind of the same. Eye Distance is set to Large Poster and Personal Profile is Anna. I do understand the reasoning behind Eye Distance and that’s based on proper viewing distance of an image, which is really smart.
When you’ve done all of this, the dialog box at the bottom of the UI will have changed the info to reflect your selections. It’s when the moment of truth about the quality of your image is displayed. If you wonder why your images don’t look as good as you thought or hoped they would, this can be a big part of it. I’ll be the first to admit that looking at an image on a computer monitor, especially one that’s not calibrated, can be real difficult. Judging quality is not the same as putting a loupe up to a slide. Sharpener Pro! though makes the learning curve and great print curve a whole lot less steep!
Do I believe in what I’m saying?
I’ll bet that right now somewhere in the world emergency medical teams are rushing to the home of a BTJ reader because someone can’t believe what Moose just wrote (just kidding). Moose, using Photoshop and writing about a plug-in for it, what is the world coming to? While my attitude towards Photoshop and NEF files have changed my attitude about getting it right, right from the start has not. What has opened my mind is how Photoshop has replaced the enlarger, Poly Contrast filter pack, developers and the rest so what I see with my heart can be outputted to the printed page.
Nik Software suite is a set of tools that can aid us as photographers in being better communicators. We’re using the tools of photography, light, lens and composition to capture the perfect image from the start. We’re then taking this image in a program and with the aid of Dfine, Color Efex and Sharpener Pro! putting our talent, quality and passion onto the page for others to enjoy. All I can say is, if you still don’t think the quality of digital is there yet, I can easily NIK that idea!
Nik Software – www.nikmultimedia.com
Base Camp Bosque
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Wildlife Photographers Base Camp is heading to Bosque del Apache Dec 07-11, 2009. Our very rewarding, hard hitting, tiring and incredibly educational wildlife photographer business course is going to one of my favorite places and using it as the backdrop for launching the photographic careers of others.
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“What is Base Camp” is a common question. It is like nothing else out there. The guys who just finished Base Camp Glacier I think would all tell you there eyes are opened, the minds full and hearts pounding just waiting to get out and put all they’ve learned about being behind the camera, computer and desk to work.
Bosque is an amazing place, filled with thousands of Sandhill Cranes and Snow Geese. Birds is by far the main photographic target of our week. We will limit this Base Camp to just six campers, a 400mm lens or longer required. Look forward to shooting with you and sharing with you what I think is the greatest profession on the planet!