NVMUG eNews 4/21/2001
Last updated 4/25/2001
Bill Amos’ Digital Photography Presentation and
Warren Walker’s Photo Editing
Our attendance has grown, and it was a great pair of presentations plus additional photo editing demonstrated by Barry Hayes. Next month’s program has not been decided yet, so if you would like to volunteer please let Midge know at nvmug@mac.com
1. Digital Photography by Bill Amos
Bill Amos is a biologist and a biophotographer. A nature photographer is generally an opportunist who takes pictures of nature as he or she sees it.
A biophotographer knows the subject he or she is after, and goes out to photograph it. A biophotographer has to be a bit of a gadgeteer because if the equipment doesn't exist to get the picture that is needed, he or she has to invent it.
Bill is a recent convert to digital photography. He has taken 35 mm pictures for years. Digital photography was developed around 1963 in black and white. We have known how to make color photographs using three images, red, green, and blue, taken through appropriate filters, since 1860. Modern color film uses a different approach with organic dyes, but digital photography is based upon these three RGB images. Each CCD has equal numbers of red, green, and blue pixels.
As a boy in the 1930s Bill used afocal photography when taking pictures through a microscope with a simple box camera placed on top of the microscope's eyepiece. Afocal photography is photography in which the camera lens itself plays no role and serves only as a transparent window. Years later he encouraged his students in a parasitology course to take pictures the same way with Instamatics. Afocal photography is possible because when you look through a microscope, binoculars, or a telescope, your eyes are focused at infinity. A fixed focus camera is also focused at infinity, hence the supplementary optics are the ones to forms the image, not the camera lens.
Bill uses a Nikon 950, like Warren Walker's. (Midge uses a Nikon 990 in their business because the 950 loads memory cards from the bottom which requires taking the camera off of the tripod to change memory cards.) Bill classifies digital cameras into several levels. The prices are coming down, but currently the approximate levels are:
$150 to 400 mostly fixed focus cameras, like the $149 Agfa which is good enough for 640 x 480 images.
$400 to about $700, moderate consumer level, up to 2.11 million pixels, good enough for 8 x 10 inch prints.
$800 to $1200, the "prosumer" level, from 2.11 to 3.34 million pixels good for 11 x 14 inch prints, and
the professional level that ranges from $2500 to $5000 (up to 5 million pixels). There is an extreme professional level around $25,000 and up, with 16 million pixels.
By comparison, Kodachrome transparency film used in a 35 mm camera has the chemical equivalent of about 60 million pixels. Color negative film used commonly in point-and-shoot and throw-away cameras has somewhat fewer, but still more than the most advanced digicams.
Memory cards come in different sizes and prices. An 8 meg card costs about $30 to $40 dollars. The number of pictures you can take on one card depends upon the number of pixels you set for each picture (size and resolution). /p>
Bill likes the Nikon Cool Pix 950 or 990 because the lens body rotates, so that the lens can point one way while the LCD viewing panel points another way. This can be useful, for example, when you put the camera on a microscope. He also likes the Nikon because its lenses zoom and focus internally without an external moving lens barrel. Supplementary Nikon wide angle and telephoto lenses take advantage of this complete internal focus, and thus can be smaller and cost less. Also, the Nikon 950 - 990 has a threaded lens mount, so he can fix experimental external optics by gluing them to step-up rings that screw into the lens mount.
However, Bill emphasized that the techniques he would show us will work with the simplest digital camera. Take a simple digicam with a fixed focus lens, and an ordinary magnifying glass and you can get amazing results.
It is possible to use any sort of magnifying optic. Bill took an old enlarger lens, mounted it backward for technical reasons, and had a powerful magnifier to attach to the Coolpix 950. Bill also took a photographer's loupe, epoxyed it into a camera lens mounting ring, and fills the screen with a three millimeter object. An old one half inch video camera lens that he was going to throw away contained a whole bundle of marvelous optics. It gave him an 8 x tele magnifier which can fill the screen with an image as small as the hinge on his eyeglasses. He also is able to join the camera with a spotting scope for extreme telephotography.
Taking pictures of greatly magnified objects, magnifies any camera movement, so you need to use a tripod or an electronic flash.
He has other external gadgets, such a pistol grip that he made, and a device for taking panorama pictures. He has a magnifier with a hood that he attaches to the camera's two inch LCD screen for outdoor pictures in bright light, and a cable release to reduce camera movement when taking pictures (many digicams do not have a built-in cable release socket).
His Nikon can take time exposures as long as 8 seconds to take pictures at night, and you can set the "film speed" you want to use for the picture.
He showed us one of his pictures published in National Graphic in 1990. It was a mite less than half the size of a pin head which kept going in and out of a hole. He was using his 35 mm Nikon F3 SLR then, and he took 100 pictures out in the rain. Only one was good. If he had been using a digital camera, he would have known when he had the good picture, and could have stopped then.(He would also have been certain that he had the picture when he stopped.) He has done other National Geographic articles, one of which was about the natural history of our local Wheeler Mountain (1980).
There were technical difficulties in getting a TV to display Bill's images. Richard Lubot went home and brought back a heavy TV set to resolve the problem. Bill waited while Warren talked about photo editing, and then showed his pictures when Richard came back.
Bill became aware of photo editing with a picture he took of a single spider in a lava dome. He did not notice it when he took the picture, but there was a single strand of spider web making a line across the picture. The National Geographic editor took the line out.
Simple photo editing software comes with the Nikon camera, as does the software to put the images on the screen, save them, and print them.
Bill held his camera to his spotting scope and pointed it out the window across the street to the Rite Aid sign. You could easily have seen a sparrow in a nest in the hole in the R if there had been one there.
He showed us the zoom built into the camera, focusing on an inch or so of a six inch rule. With the telephoto and a supplementary lens he can zoom down to 7 or 8 mm, about as big as the head of a fly. With a supplementary screw-in loupe, he can fill the frame with a 3mm object.
Bill has been having fun with a infrared filter, setting his camera to black and white, and taking pictures by the heat emitted from the objects. He showed us some of these that were on his camera's memory card. He also showed us several pictures of flowers, some magnified views inside the flower, including one showing just the pollen clusters.
Bill said to use a filter in front of the camera lens, even if it is only an ultra violet filter or plain glass, to protect the camera's lens. Bill carries his Nikon 950 camera in a leather case made in Canada. Warren has a Jansport case that fits his camera. Both are superior to the simple case that accompanies the Nikon Coolpix 950 and 990.
Bill used to carry his 35 mm camera with 30 to 60 pounds of equipment (additional lenses, flash units, etc.). With his digital camera and his smaller, lighter, inexpensive home made accessory equipment the total is only about four pounds. Remember, most of this stuff works with less expensive fixed focus digital cameras.
He encouraged owners of digicams to experiment as widely as possible.
Bill provided a descriptive list of eleven web sites with digital
photography information, and his own Optimal Camera Design For Creative Projects. To see them click on Links to see the descriptions and URLs for the web sites, and on
2. Digital Photo Editing by Warren Walker
Warren brought in his Macintosh G4 to show us photo editing in PhotoShop using capabilities found in most photo editing programs. (GraphicConverter has some of them. I’m not sure which capabilities it does have, and cannot wait to find out.)
He began with a picture of Geof that was sideways. He rotated it so it was right side up.
He said one problem with many pictures is a low contrast range, so you may want to adjust the contrast. The brightness slide, and contrast slide change the picture uniformly. Warren demonstrated using the brightness slide to make the picture lighter or darker, and the contrast slide to increase the pictures contrast.
Make your adjustments on a copy, and save the original just in case. (You might also want to save copies often.) PhotoShop has an adjustment level you can use to make changes which you can then change later.
The next step up is to adjust using levels, and a histogram showing the tonal range. In PhotoShop it is found under Levels Adjust. You can use sliders to adjust the gray scale, and the red, green, and blue scales. Warren demonstrated dragging to adjust the ends of the scale on the histogram. You can change the mid range with a middle slider. There is also an auto adjust button.
I wish I could describe for you the results of his adjustments, but I found it very difficult to take notes of what is said, what is done, and observe the changes. Hopefully, you can use these notes as a guide to experiment with whatever photo editing tool you have.
A higher step up is to adjust curves. A graph with a straight line shows the input on one axis and the output on the other. Use the eye dropper tool to sample (pick up) a particular hue. Option click to show where it is in the picture. Command click to lock it as an anchor. With these anchor points, you can adjust a portion of the image. Warren moved the line in the graph to change the image by changing the output in relation to the input.
Warren showed adjusting the color balance using the Red, Green, Blue sliders. The blue slider adjusts from yellow to blue. The Green slider adjusts from magenta to green, and the red slider adjusts from cyan to red.
A hue saturation adjustment is used to correct for washed out colors.
If the image needs major adjustments, you probably cannot get a quality outcome. Make minor adjustments.
Warren showed us an image of Midge, sideways of course, that he had deliberately taken using the camera set for sunlight and taking the picture under indoor lights. After straightening the picture, Warren cropped and enlarged it. Asked if he could change the hair color, he said that it could be done, then enlarged the image of a few strands of hair to show how difficult it would be to do.
Barry Hayes, a photographer who uses photoshop in his work, then offered to show us the 90% adjustment. He used the eye dropper to select a true white. That is not a glare, but a white that has some texture in it. Then he selected a black. Usually in a portrait the very center of the eye works. The you go by the numbers to adjust the Red, Green, and Blue up to the same highlight as the white (in this case 219, and then down to the same shadow as the black (in this case 9). It works 90% of the time.
Phyllis asked why every time she uses an image, it gets worse. She saves the image as JPG. The answer was that every time you expand, then save a jpg image it gets compressed again. Each compression results in some loss of the image. This does not happen with a image saved as a TIFF image. If you use a jpg image, do not save it again, and always use the original jpg as your source.
Question, is there anything you can do to correct the focus of an image. Answer, you can usually make a slight improvement of an out of focus photo by using an unsharp mask, or just use automatic sharpening.
Barry had fun modifying Midge’s picture. Causing someone to say, “And we’re not anywhere near October 31st.
As I said, I couldn’t wait to find out. I learned that GraphicConverter has the ability to separately adjust red, green and blue each with sliders for brightness, contrast, and hue. It has the overall adjustment for color saturation. It also has an adjustment for levels, like the one Warren used. It does not have the curves adjustments, but it does have filters such as for sharpness.
I looked at photographs that I had scanned in and made into desktop images. I had saved some as JPG, and they had been saved more than once. I went back to the original documents and saved them as TIFF. I also used the levels adjustment to improve several of the images. I am sure glad I did not miss the meeting.
3. AppleWorks 6.1
4. HTML 101
After I put up the first version of our NVMUG web site, with considerable help and advice from Warren Walker, Stephen Farber, and Geof Gonter, I decided that I should learn more about HTML I found a ten week course, HTML 101, at
The course started with an easy how to create a basic web page. Lesson 2 was how to modify text, which was not difficult. Lesson 3 only added blockquotes, preformatted text, and rule lines. Lesson 4 covered fonts, colors, and special characters. Lesson 5 covered the three different kinds of lists. Lesson 6 added images. Lesson 7 added links. Lesson 8 added tables. In easy steps and assignments, I had gone from what I knew to what I needed to know.
Lesson 9 was on Frames. I know I can do it because I experimented with the assignment Frames would make it much easier to maintain the NVMUG web page. I have not changed the NVMUG page because without frames you can see all the HTML by going to the View and clicking on Source. This way any member can see exactly what was done on our web site, and use the same elements themselves.
Lesson 10 was on Forms. So far I have only done half the assignment, adding forms to the NVMUG web site to send e-mail information. The other half of the assignment is about getting support for forms from other web sources, some of which are free. We can also get support for forms from out server, SoVerNet. I have not investigated that either.
About.com provides an area where you can upload assignments, or discuss the assignments with other classmates, and the instructor, Jennifer Kyrnin, welcomes e-mail questions or comments. There are references to other sources of information relative to the lessons. I did look up some of the other information, like color tables, but I did not use the other learning tools because my plate was already pretty full with trying to improve our web page.
All of the material was presented so clearly, and in what seemed like little steps, that I was surprised at how much we had covered when I took the test, lesson 11. I did pass, but did not get a near perfect score.
There are a lot of ways to learn HTML, and there are a lot of good resources on the Internet. But, I can recommend HTML 101 as one good way to learn, and it is free.
5. AUGB
Macworld NY
The New Yorker Hotel is offering special room rates for user groups until June 13th. CZ Productions has negotiated a discounted price at the New Yorker Hotel for user group attendees of Macworld NY. If you would like to stay at the New Yorker Hotel -- our location for User Group University, the user group breakfasts and a 10-minute walk to the Jacob Javits center -- call for your room reservation now. Room rates are:
- $129.00 - single occupancy
- $129.00 - double occupancy
- $149.00 - triple occupancy
- $159.00 - Tower Rooms - single occupancy
- $179.00 - Tower Rooms - double occupancy
You MUST call the hotel reservation desk, specify in-house reservations
and ask for the CZ Productions/Macworld room block to get
these rates. Reservations must be made by June 13th. The New Yorker Hotel reservation number is 212-971-0101. Their web site is located at:
O'Reilly Discounts & Special Offers
Apple UG Members Only:
O'Reilly & Associates, premier information source for leading-edge computer technologies and publisher of the best-selling "Missing Manual Series", is offering a 25% DISCOUNT to Apple UG members when purchasing direct from O'Reilly. Offer good Apr 1st 2001 - Jun 30, 2001 (the regular discount is 20%).
Order direct by calling: 800-998-9938. Ask for Customer Service and Provide CS Representative with your UG discount code.
