Recently in How-to Category

Most people are surprised when they hear that I have no education in photography.  I went to college for music and then somehow ended up here.  In the modern age of digital cameras, you learn by shooting.  Take some pictures, look at them, repeat.  There's also plenty of reading to do on the net and in books, but experimentation (just a fancy word for messing around) is the key.

Personally I get fascinated by other people's pictures.  I don't actually spend too much time looking at other people's work, mostly because it makes me frustrated and cranky.  But often I get this urge to figure out how they did it.  For me, this is the best way to learn about light. Find photographers you admire and try to emulate their work.  Not so that you can mimic them perfectly, but so you can take their tricks and add them to your arsenal and make them your own. As the famous quote from Picasso said, "Bad artists copy. Great artists steal."

This might be a good time to mention that while in this essay I'm talking about other photographers, it's also a time honored tradition to steal from painters as well.  The only problem I've found with this is that painters often take liberties with the direction, quality, and quantity of light.  They're using their eyes and imaginations to see, you've got to use a camera which isn't quite as good at it.  Ok, back to the show already in progress.

There are two big giveaways for light.  Eyes and shadows.  If you can see the eyes of the subject, often you can tell exactly what kind of light setup the photographer was using.  Pick up one of the magazines when you're in line at the grocery store and get real close and look at the covergirl's eyes.  Most of the time you can see a light or two or three in the reflection. And moreover, you can see the relative size of them and often you get enough information to tell exactly what they used.  Ribs on an umbrella, or tell-tale signature of a ringlight; which brings me to shadows.  Always look at the shadows in an image because they can tell you the direction that the light came from and whether the source was hard or soft.

Put this all together with some experimenting and a good friend who is willing to sit and be shot while you kerfutz stuff and you'll be learning right and left in no time flat.

I do all of this all the time, ask anyone who ever spends any time with me, and you can see the results in my work. The object here isn't to do exactly what they do, but rather figure out HOW they do what they do so you know how to get that look when you want it. Here are a few examples to get you going... 

Harder spot with ringlight fill like Dan Winters:


One big light and simple background à la Greenfield-Sanders:

Two light pin-up like Seliger did for the Vanity Fair series:


You get the point...

I wanted a small canvas background to use for portraits, but I didn't want to spend a fortune for a pre-made one.  Plus DYI experiments are always fun.  So I called my trusty photographer friend Meg Watcher and we dove in with both feet.

Ingredients:
- 50" wide, primed canvas from the local art store.  We went with 2 yards each, but next time I'm going to go a bit longer by a foot or so.

- 2 Quarts of flat latex paint. The trick here is to go for one lighter and one darker to give your canvas some contrast other than the white and one paint color. Obviously gray or near gray is the way most people go, but there's nothing to say against pushing it cooler or warmer.

- Paint rollers/pan/plastic to keep stuff clean.
- Sandpaper
- Time.

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Step One
Use the roller to paint the canvas with color #1.  I went with the lighter color first, but I think either would do.  Don't do a good job and cover the canvas well.  The point is to make a distressed, old looking, random background. Then go do something else for a few hours while that dries.

Step Two
Next paint over with the second paint.  Obviously with a different pattern of coverage. You should se some of the first color, as well as a little of the blank canvas coming through from underneath.  When you're through let this dry overnight.  It's got to be really dry for the next step.

Step Three
Take some sandpaper, I went with a 150 grade, and lightly sand over the now dried paint to 'wear' the surface a bit. You're trying to make it grittier and to remove some of the shine that even flat pain will have. This stage, like the others really, is to taste.  Everyone will be looking for a different effect here.  

I stopped here, but it was only my first try.  We've got plenty of paint, so I think I'm going to get some more canvas and try again.  Part of me wants to put more paint on this one.  Basically use it as my starting point and go back to step 1. I'm not entirely sure it would work and I kinda like the way it ended up, so I think I'll just try on a new one and leave this one alone.

Oh and Step Four
But a 4' long 1" dowel and staple it to one end of the canvas.  This keeps it hanging flat and well as giving you something to wrap it up around without bending and messing it up.

The results can be seen in some of the portraits I've been doing lately.  I think this one of George is pretty indicative. All in we spent about $50.  Could be less if you've got paint lying around. Again, this is experiment #1, but might be a fun project for some of you.

An old friend came over this afternoon for some portraits. She just yesterday successfully defended her dissertation, so now I have to call her Dr Pillsbury.  It's all very intimidating, but huge congratulations go her way and I've very proud of my friend.

Anyway, while kerfutzing with the results, I thought it was about time to talk about some of my problems. Or rather, bring up some of the walls I find myself pushing against in my work and to start a discussion of how to overcome or at the very least difuse them.

My main problem lately is that I don't like how digital renders highlights, and this is especially true when I'm shooting simple single light portraits like the one below. The image on the left is the mostly untouched RAW file, and on the right, my finished image. So now, let's walk through this step by step as I did.

First I say, the original shot is overexposed, or at least it looks like it on her forehead. However using the eyedropper you can check and see that it's no blown-out.  In fact none of the channels are above 80% or so (I'll use lightroom percentages instead of exact photoshop numbers just for simplicity).  One could argue that the problem is my light, or more specifially that I need a fill on the other side so that the range isn't as wide for the sensor. But that's not really the problem.  I've got plenty of detail in the shadows for my liking and again, the highlights aren't blown. But somehow they look like crap.

The one thing that I constantly miss about film is the fact that it fights back. The same thing was true of analog tape in my recording days, try to push too much level onto it and it pushed back, effectively compressing the signal.  Film does the same thing in highlights, regular negative film is pretty hard to get to blow-out. What you get is a compression of the highlights that leads to a much more pleasing, much more smooth transition. In digital, even when not blown, I find myself adding in a curves layer with a mask to try to give skin some contrast instead of it not being just a big block of almost solid color as it is on her forehead in the first image.

What I want is something like the image on the right. The kind of light you see people like Annie Leibovitz getting in her Vanity Fair portraits.  It's smooth and contrasty, but not harsh.  I think that this would be much easier to obtain in the film days, but I know Annie shoots digital now, so it must be possible.  So far what I've come up with and need to experiment more with, is the idea of underexposing and bring it up. Now I know that it's counter to every rule about exposing to the right and then pulling back that you've ever read, but somehow my skintones don't look as much like shit when I under and pull up.  Essentially this is what that Highlight Tone Priority stuff does on these new Canon cameras.  Lately I've been shooting with that on for just that reason, but shut it off today because the shadow noise was bothering me and to me the images look more crunchy and 'digital' with it on. Loosing a lot of that Canon CMOS smoothness.  I've got to do more experimenting to really bear this out.

Today however, I had the raw files I had and you've got to work with what you got.  So I started by using an adjustment brush in Lightroom with an exposure -1 stop or so.  I used this to paint in the blown-out looking (but not really blown out) sections on her face, in an attempt to bring them back in line with the rest.  I then added another adjustment brush with a +.25 exposure to add a little light to her eyes.  Even still, the whole thing had that flat look, so I pulled up the 'fill light' slider a bit and the main exposure down a half stop or so and moved the contrast up a tad.  What I ended up with it is basically what's on the right.  There was some hair and minor curves work in Photoshop, but the heavy lifting was in Lightroom, which I've been doing more with lately in an attempt to tie my hands a little bit and not do as much post.  I find that the adjustment brushes are sometimes hard to control and not nearly as responsive as brushes in photoshop, and I'm on a really fast machine.

Any thoughts or experience that should come to bear would be appreciated.
And here's the final image bigger.

Earlier this week I had a couple of days of shoots for a magazine article. 3 people over two days in three very different settings.  Day one was two people in midtown Manhattan, and then a third on day two in White Plains. Due to the time between the shoots on Monday and the travel on Tuesday, I wanted to travel as light as possible.  So in the end, Meg and I went on these shoots with just a couple of speedlights for lighting.  Those, plus a travel stand, 32" softlighter, 36" reflector/diffuser, and the IR controller, all fit very nicely into the backpack Meg carried.  Much smaller and lighter than the AcuteB setup would have been. Maybe McNally's book from last week also fed into my decision, but I wanted to see what I could do with the little guys.  To be honest, I'm pretty impressed.

First shoot was outside in a shaded courtyard. Cool skylight was coming down from between the tall buildings so fill wasn't too much of an issue.  So I had Meg shoot the 580EX through the diffuser to the subjects right hand side to give the shots a little drama.  Now, I know this is no big deal, but for a guy like me who usually uses available light or a single big source to mimic sunlight, I was 'getting fancy'.  This worked well, though we did have to fiddle a bit with the FEC to get the output of the flash at the right level, a stop or so above the ambient.

Later that afternoon we shot subject number two in his office.  I was told that the office was nice.  It really wasn't.  Not terrible, but certainly not interesting from a photo perspective, and quite dark with a very warm wood tone to everything.  So we did setup the 580EX on the stand inside the softlighter as a key, with Meg off to the side again with the 550EX shooting through the diffuser as a kicker.  I was pleasantly surprised to have the 580 talk to the camera from even inside the softlighter (it was the only way we could get it to setup)  I guess the fabric was thin enough to let the IR beam in.  Getting the ratio between the two lights too some more fiddling.  On the Canon system, you can control the ratio between the two lights on different channels from 8:1 all the way to 1:8.  In the end though, I found it much easier to just have Meg manually bump the light up or down from the flash itself using exposure compensation.

The third shoot was in a very modern office with some bright orange textured walls and frosted glass.  Using a similar setup to the last, we used one light on the stand with Meg coming in from the side or back. This setting however, was more conducive to photos, so I was probably most happy with this third set of pictures.  The orange wall made a nice backdrop, and the indirect window light in his office made for some nice classic shots.

All in all, I think I'm sold on the speedlights. There are limits of course.  If you need a lot of light or a bigger source, then you're talking the big guns.  If I were outside and want to shoot into a 60" softlighter for example, then I'll bring the AcuteB.  But for this kind on thing inside where you can control the ambient, and shoot at iso 400 or 800 so that you don't need too much power from the flashes, it's ideal.  Color temp is an issue.  So I think I'm going to look into buying a set of gels like they use on strobist all the time.  I'm not totally psyched by how they attach, the whole thing sounds a bit kludgy and messy to me, but I'll learn to deal.  I was also impressed with the STE2 Speedlight controller.  We didn't have too much trouble with the flashes not firing.  It's not ideal outside in wide-open spaces in direct sunlight, but if you're in shadow with line-of-sight or inside where the beam can bounce around a bit, it's pretty perfect.  I was looking at those new pocket wizards (on backorder at B&H) which do TTL. Basically, the same thing we did, except via radio instead of IR.  But I'm not sure I need them right now.  On the rare occasion that I'm out in sun with speedlights, I can just use my current wizards and manually set the flash power.

Also of interest is the fact that when I came home and started messing with the files, I found myself doing less processing. Or more precisely, I did my normal stuff and then backed off a lot on the opacity.  Not sure if it was because of the more dramatic lighting on-site or what, but it's an interesting development for me.  We'll see where it leads.

I just finished reading Joe McNally's book "The Hot Shoe Diaries" which was recently put out in paperback, well, more like trade paperback.  For those of you who don't know, Joe is a big-dog. A monster photographer who shoots and has shot for just about everybody. He's also completely obsessed with speedlites.

Now a few notes about the book before I continue.  If you're interested in expanding your knowledge of using speedlites to their fullest extent, and like to read about how other photographers think about tackling challenging shoots, then it's a great book to read.  If you're a big speedlite guy already and have read everything on the wonderful Strobist website by David Hobby, then you probably know most of what Joe is going to say.  Also, it's a little too brand crazy for me.  I know he shoots Nikon and uses Lumadyne gear, but you don't have to talk about everything by it's model number.   You don't have to say "I used a Lastolite Tri-fold to fill" every time.  Honestly, just say 'gold reflector' please.  Seriously, the book might as well say "Paid for by Nikon" in large friendly letters on the cover.  That's not to take away from the content, which is great, but rather a style thing.  Maybe it's because I'm a Canon guy.

Ok, now that that is out of the way. The one major thing I took away from the book is that Joe likes to get his pictures 'in the camera', and he does. If he's got to setup 47 speedlites inside and around an Air Force transport plane, well, that's what he's gonna do. On environmental portraits, he'll setup 2-3 speedlites on the subject, and then another in the tree to the left with a warming filter and then a 4th zoomed in to 200mm with a cooling filter coming from the window across the street to rim light the girl. Many times he mentions that this is so he doesn't have to sit in front of a computer all day. He's a 'now' guy, he want's to get it right at the shoot and not have to 'fix' it later in photoshop. Maybe it's because he used to shoot film where you HAD to get it right in the camera. Either way, it's certainly a valid way to go and his results are first-class, but it got me thinking that I couldn't be more different on the now-later scale.

When I'm at a shoot, mostly what I'm trying to get is good raw material. As you can see in the before/after photos of Phil from a couple days ago, It didn't really matter to me that Phil was a stop or two darker than the background.  Or that the background was probably a stop hotter than I would have liked. As long as I could finagle with the RAW file to export one version with the background pulled back and another with Phil pulled up and then mask the two together, then I'm fine. Mixed light temperatures, no problem. As long as there is luminance data and nothing important blown out, I can work with it.  Now that's not to say that I wouldn't like to have it be better right out of the camera, everyone would.  But what I am saying is that I wouldn't take the 5 or 10 minutes of my time in the middle of the shoot to setup multiple lights with correction gels and stands and line of sight to make the TTL signals work and everything else, just to make it easier for me later after the shoot.  I worry too much about losing Phil's attention and altering the flow of the shoot. 

Maybe it's because I tend to take (I hope) really intimate portraits. I want my subjects to let their guard down so I can capture something special. In fact today I got an email from a reader asking how I do just that. I told him it takes time, sometimes a lot of it. It's talking and shooting and about the energy between the two of you. It's a dance, and it takes time to earn your partners trust. That 5 minutes, hell, even a 10 second lens change, is sometimes enough to set me back with the subject.

Plus he carries like 6 speedlights and a truck-full of diffusers and silks and c-stands with him.  To me that's kinda defeating the idea of a 3"x2"x7" battery powered speedlite. Having my assistant shoot a speedlite though a diffuser is fancy lighting for me on location most of the time.

It may also have to do with the fact that I don't mind sitting in front of the computer editing. I have much more control and none of the time pressure. I can go out, spend my time at the shoot interacting with the subject and then return home with the booty in the form of 3GB or so of RAW data that I then get to play with.  Also I'm usually not handing my clients a whole slew of images.  I select what I think are the best and those get the attention.  Maybe 5 out of 200, and I may take 2 hours or more playing with that single image to mold it into what I wanted it to be. I also will try to do 3-4 different setups in the 20 minutes I've got with the subject. I'm not sure that would be possible with these fancy setups, unless you had 48 lights and had them all setup from the get-go.  Damn, I think he actually DOES have 48 lights.

All of this said, I learned a lot in the book. It certainly makes me want to play with my speedlites more. I think some playtime is in order.  Maybe just maybe, I'd be better off if I were a little more towards the center of the scale than I am now.

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Addendum: 
Just found this Canon/Nikon TTL system comparison.  Might be handy for some people:  http://www.planetneil.com/tangents/2009/03/25/ttl-flash-canon-and-nikon/

When you say "portrait lens" to a photographer, usually they're talking about so-called 'longer' lenses. That is, lenses whose focal length is generally in the 85-130mm range (on 35mm cameras at least).  You'll read about how longer lenses flatten perspective and are generally more flattering to the subject.  On the other end of the spectrum they'll say that wide angle lenses are not to be used for portraiture because they distort or at least exaggerate people's features.  Making big noses bigger and that kind of thing.

The thing is, most of this is either misleading or wrong.  It's really all a matter of distances, not focal length which causes these effects. Focal length comes into play because it effects your field of view, that's the amount of the scene left to right you capture with it, usually represented by an angle.

So for our discussion, let's imagine that your 5 feet from a friend of yours. To really visualize it,  go get a friend and a decent range wide to telephoto zoom lens and try it.  Being 5 feet away from them, your perspective of them is about as normal as can be.  They're 3 dimensional without looking distorted. If you had a 50mm lens on your camera and took a picture, you'd get pretty much what you're seeing right now. That's why they call 50mm lenses 'normal'. It would probably be a pretty boring waist to head portrait.

Now if you wanted a photo of just their head and shoulders you have two options, either you can zoom your camera up to 85mm or so, or you can 'zoom with your feet' and get closer with the 50mm focal length.  If you did both of these you'd see that they look different from each other. But that's not because of the focal length, but rather because you got closer with the 50mm to get the same framing. In fact, if you took your original waist up shot from the last paragraph and cropped it to the same framing as the zoomed in 85mm shot you'd see that they're identical.  

So if you want take a head and shoulders shot zoomed out to 28mm or so, you'll notice that you have to get REALLY close to the subject to fill the frame. It's this closeness that causes the distortion of close-up wide-angle portraits.  You can even see this without a camera; Just cover one eye and get a few inches from your friend's face, it'll look distorted, just like the 28mm lens.

Ok Bill, so what's your point?  Well it's just that any lens can be a portrait lens where the person looks normal and not distorted. It really just depends on how much of their surroundings that you want to include in the picture. Go back to 5 feet away from your friend, look through your camera and zoom in and out and see how the framing changes.  Maybe the wood paneling behind and that flower pot next to them are really interesting elements in the composition. If so, maybe shooting wide-angle works, or maybe it's all distracting and so you zoom in and shoot something tighter.  Maybe somewhere in between.  The point is that it's not about one focal length being 'better' for portraits. They all can be, it's really up to you.

Personally I love more environmental wide-angle portraits.  I like seeing and working with the space the subject is in.  I think it makes portraits more interesting. You can tell this by looking at my work as well as my lens compliment. 28mm, 35mm, 50mm primes.   I recently bought an 85mm traditional 'portrait' lens and when I take pictures with it I feel like it's speaking a different language than me.  It obviously got potential as it's painfully sharp, and all the way open at f/1.2 the depth of field is awesomely narrow.  It's just going to take a little getting used to, but working outside your comfort zone is always a good exercise.  So if you like long lenses, go walk around with something wide this weekend, or the other way around. Either way you'll probably come up with something different than your norm.

So I waited at my place all day for UPS to deliver the two fans that will complete my machine and let me close up the side and make all of the wires pretty, but alas it was on a truck for delivery from 4am this morning and yet at 8PM they claimed they couldn't deliver due to the weather.  Sounds like a "Dog ate my homework" to me.

Anyway. In The Girl Next Door one of the characters says "Make sure the juice is worth the squeeze".  I did get a chance to actually USE the computer since the last post and so far so yummy. Seriously, it's delightful. For example, in photoshop (which launches in half the time), if you were using a healing brush to remove a hair across someones face, on my old machine the computer would take a second or so to calculate before refreshing.  Now it's instantaneous. When I lift the pen off the tablet, it's done.  Super.  It's like drawing on paper instead of a computer, it's become that much more transparent. The same goes for most of the filters that I use, much improvement. I plan to do some real shooting tomorrow, so we'll see how it holds up with that kind of abuse. So far I'm very happy with the upgrade. Definitely worth the squeeze.

Here's the result from a raw file I took a couple weeks ago:

Sorry for the lack of posts the past few days.  I, along with my lovely assistant HA, spent them doing computer stuff and getting my new i7 machine built. I thought I'd share a couple of photos and some observations of the process for those that are interested.

I'm still installing everything and testing and whatnot, but at first glance, this thing is FAST. I've overclocked the processor from it's nominal speed of 2.66GHz up to 3.6GHz. So basically it's faster than the $1000 high-end processor at stock speeds. I could go higher, in fact it seemed stable at 3.8 and even 4.0, but I decided I'd rather back off and give it some room to breathe. I ran prime95 for a while on it and with all 8 cores (4 real cores, each split in 2 by hyper-threading) the temperatures max out a little below 80 degrees.  That's hot, but absolute worst case scenario and there were no crashes or blue screens or anything like that.  And this is with 12GB of ram installed.  Had to reseat the heatsink and reapply thermal paste a couple of times to get the right amount and the right placement, as this is still a black art, people come up with completely contradictory advise on the online forums at anandtech.com and others.

With the case all closed up, the fan on the power supply really speeds up to try to deal with the heat buildup. It's a small case and I'm installing 2 more fans when they come tomorrow. One 92mm to push air into the front and over the hard drives, and another 120mm in the back to expel the air by the cpu cooler.  Also, I think I can lower the CPU voltage a bit and still keep it stable.  I'll play with that this week.

I've got three hard drives in there right now. A little WD Velociraptor as a boot drive and a couple of Seagate 1.5TB drives in a raid 1 array for storage. All of them are mounted in elastic bands as you can see in the photo.  The Antec Solo case I used comes with the bands stock, the only one I know of. It's a silent pc dorky person trick to keep the drive vibrations from amplifying through the case.

Last night and today I moved my images from my old arrays to the new one by mounting one drive of each of the old arrays in my eSATA dock.  Very handy and relatively quick (still took hours, it is a TRILLION bytes afterall.  That's 1,000,000,000,000 bytes).  I had a bit of a scare when one of the drives died while transferring.  Just locked up and won't do much but click now. Luckily I had the other drive from the raid pair, and was able to get everything off of that one. Both were the 1TB seagate drives which have a firmware issue.  Looking up there serial numbers on the Seagate site showed that they both have the problem.  I had no idea, very scary timebomb.  This is to say, "Go back up your images, right now!"

So now it's time to use it for a while and see how it drives.  By the way, anyone who was thinking of building their own machine based on my previous posts and just got scared reading this, I was overclocking and doing fancy things to squeeze performance out of the system. A stock system would have none of that craziness and would still be very fast. More to come.
 

Look at any review of the latest digital camera and you'll see at least a page or two of 100% crops of noise at different ISO speeds, and endless comparisons with 23 other cameras.  At this point I think it's fair to say that the engineers have successfully slayed the noise dragon. Both Canon and Nikon have full-frame cameras that are comfortable at 6400 and higher (notice I say "comfortable", that's actually usable and not just in special circumstances.)

One side note I'd like to make about those noise comparisons before I go on. They're not at all real world.  Usually they'll shoot the same scene on a tripod with the same lighting. All very scientific and objective, but most people are not sports shooters who need fast shutter speeds and so up their ISO when they've got decent light. Most people are like me and up the ISO when they don't have enough light and thus high-iso noise is accentuated buy dark tones and shadow. That's why I said 6400 is comfortable.  Ok, done with my mini-rant, now on with the show.

My old 5D was for a long time the leader in the noise race, then the Nikon 12MP cameras came out and upped the ante, then the 5DII came out with similar noise but twice the dots, etc.  The thing is, the noise we're dealing with now is leaps and bounds better than on film at the equivalent speeds.  Last year I was walking around with my sister carrying my Leica filled with a roll of Portra 800 and when I got home and scanned it, I was very surprised how much grain there was. Here's an example to the right, and that's a 50% crop (here's a link to the whole image in a post from last year).  I'd say it's the equivalent of at least 3200 or even 6400 on my current digital.  That's at least a two to three stop advantage.

Yes that's 35mm, and medium format and large format are better when it comes to grain.  I've shot the Ilford 3200 speed film on my Hasselblad when traveling and loved it.  The grain however was definitely there.  Medium format film compared to 35mm digital, I'd give the edge to digital.  Don't even try to talk about 4x5, what was the last time anyone shot anything over 400 speed film.  I'll agree large format is amazing, but it couldn't be further from 35mm digital in workflow or convenience.

You could also argue the differences between digital noise and film grain.  Sure, I'll agree that as a general rule of thumb I'd rather have film grain.  But noise has been getting better looking, and as resolution goes up, it gets smaller relative to the pixels.  Which is something that people who compare the relative noise of the D3 with the 5DII rarely mention.

Here's the kicker though: Lately I've been adding grain to my images, especially ones shot at 100-400 ISO.  That's right, I'll open the image up in 32bit Photoshop (yuck!) and create a layer of medium gray and run the Alien Skin Exposure plug-in to add film grain to it (I choose the 120 size grain).  Then I change the blending mode to overlay and opacity to taste. Now, you might ask, "Why in God's name would you want to ADD fake film grain to a clean digital image!?".  Well to answer that, I'm going to have to take you on a quick little ride down my memory lane.

I went to school for music and not visual arts and did a lot of production work where I soaked up just about everything I could get my hands on about digital audio.  I could write for days about how different aspects of the digital/analog battle in audio correlates to the digital/film battle in photography, but for the moment we'll keep it to one facet, and that's dither.

The process of analog to digital conversion in audio is much like a A/D converter in a camera.  Most importantly in that the louder or brighter the signal, the more information that is used to capture it.  So in audio that means that really quiet things down near the noise floor tend to flirt between being on or being off. For example, if the scale of loudness, for the sake of our conversation, goes from 1-100 (100 being clipping) then there will be some really really quiet sounds (or overtones and harmonics within other sounds) that sometimes register a 1 and sometimes register a 0.  Basically coming in and out of existence as far as the recording goes.  This shows itself as all kinds of low level distortions and some people say it's audible, blah blah blah.

The point is that recording people decided a long time ago that if you added really quiet noise to the signal, those quiet sounds wouldn't go from on to off, but would rather go from audible to being lost in this very quiet noise floor which sounds much like hiss on an analog tape (remember that stuff?)  The crazy thing is that listening tests showed that adding this noise, or dither, actually made the recordings sound better, even though technically, you were making them less perfect.

So, how does this effect photography.  Well I guess is does in two ways.  The 1 to 1 corresponding  effect would be to add grain to a digital images which has a lot of dark tones which have "blocked up".  That is, that there aren't enough numbers in the data to describe enough levels in the darkest stop of the image right next to black.  By adding grain, you'll make the transitions between those levels less noticeable because the differences will get lost in the randomness of the noise pattern instead of being an obvious line between black and one level above black.  You might be losing ultimate image quality, but you'll end up with a more visually appealing photograph to the viewer.

But after all that explanation, that's not how I've been using the film grain lately.  Mostly I'm using it to hide my mistakes, primarily in skin.  Using the clone tool and healing brushes most of us can handle a few blemishes and wrinkles. But if the need for cloning is extensive or you've got to clone out a big chunk of hair from in front of someone's face, it's not as easy to make it look natural and blend with the skin around it in a believable way.  Film grain to the rescue. By adding the grain you're bringing back some of the texture that too much 25% opacity cloning can smudge, as well as blend different work areas into each other.  Plus, I think that our eyes do find film grain a pleasing artifact.

Here's a 100% example from yesterday's image.  First is the original RAW file, second is hair removed and skin smoothed, and third is the a layer of film grain added.  Pretty cool eh?

More questions from Dwayne, along with my answers, of course...

Question #1 - Do you have a rep? If so why did you feel you needed one and if not why don't you feel you need one?

I don't currently have a rep, but I do have some pots on the fire.  In my opinion a rep is a double-edged sword.  They find you work, but they take a cut.  Then again, you probably would not have had the work if they hadn't gotten if for you.  I also worry a bit about losing control over the direction of my career and the jobs I do, but I think that's just spliting the hairs of my deep nerosyis.  I'm doing ok with the editorial work, but I would like to do more ad work and that's where a rep would help.

Question #2 -  How do you estimate pricing for jobs, corporate and portrait work?

Oh, that's very very tough and I'm terrible at it.  Some people like to use that software, quotepro or something like that.  Living in NYC, the numbers are not always right from my limited exposure with it.  For editorial work, most publications have standard rates that you've got to work within, and personal portraiture is a gray area between how much you want the shoot and how much your time is worth.  Personally, I'd rather shoot people I want to shoot and charge them a little to use the photos rather than have them pay me for real and then I'm tied to making them happy.

Question #3 -  What type of marketing do you do?

Not nearly enough.  My friend Meg printed and sent out hand numbered postcards a couple weeks ago.  I need to be much more like her.  I do however hear mixed messages on whether mailers work.  Some people get so many they just throw them out and say they prefer to be able to just click on a link to a website.  Others want something they can pin up on their wall if they like it. Art buyers offices are like mini-museums in this respect. On top of all this, I've found that people in this industry move around so much that address lists are out of date and 20% of your stuff bounces back.

I guess you could say that my 365 Portraits thing was marketing, though I didn't mean it as such.  You could consider this blog marketing, though most of the people who read it are photographers themselves, so I guess that's a moot point.  Marketing is expensive and I'm a procrastinator, and that's probably a bad combination.  I've also got a weird opinion of my own work. At my worst, I'm almost embarrased to send it out for people to look at.  I don't want to waste their time.  That is a really bad situation.  I need to buck up and be prepared to look like an ass for my art.  I'm working on it.

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By the way, I like this question/answer stuff.  If anyone has any particular questions, feel free to email me at bill at billwadman.com