PHOTOGRAPHY BLOG

Usually I will have a vision popping up suddenly. Then I will think about how to visualise the vision with the limited resources. You may check up my past work.

Sometimes I used drawing paper with paint on it as backdrop. Thanks to the DC technology, I can use the common house lighting with no serious color temp. problem.

To produce a set of outstanding pictures, the concept is utmost important…. without a theme, it is purely a capture of the nature beauty of the model…. Frankly it could be quite boring to take such standard studio shots for an amateur photographer.

See full article.

In April 2006, I’d been enjoying a day out in Malham, one of the many picturesque villages in the Yorkshire Dales. For anyone who doesn’t know Malham, the village is surrounded by some of the England’s finest limestone scenery. I’d made quite a few images in Malham but was finished a little earlier than planned so I thought I would drive around and see some more of the local sites. Whist exploring I saw a sign for Scalebar Force so I stopped the car and went to have a look. The waterfall captivated me from the first minute I saw it. It’s quite a high waterfall around 40 feet and has 6 steps, which change the flow and direction of the water. It’s in a small wooded ravine and getting down to the lower level involved a tricky scramble down a muddy bank.

Unfortunately, It was a very sunny day not really conducive to photographing a waterfall. The sun’s reflections were bouncing off the water and the surrounding rocks making it almost impossible to get a successful image. I decided to take a few shots to try an establish a great composition that I could come back and capture on another day. Once I felt I’d I found that view I decided to head back home thinking about the image that one day I’d make….. full article.

There is lots of confusion about image noise. The noise that is produced by image sensors when used at high ISO (amplified output).

Bottom line is, that nature sets the limits of the performance of sensors that use the same basic technology. And all current sensors do. Meaning, that they will all produce noise. Small differences can be established by using amplifying technology that produces little noise. And again all cameras do, some a little better than others.

So what makes that there are larger differences in noise performance between camera models? Well, one comes from the sensor/pixel size, because larger pixels capture more photons/light and need less amplification. A 12m pixel full frame sensor (like the D3) will produce less noise than a 12m pixel cropped (smaller) sensor (like the D300).

But the biggest difference comes from …….. noise reduction and not from the sensor or some wonderful new technology. This is nothing new and noise reduction was first widely used in digital compact cameras which use very tiny sensors. These cameras and their small sensors produced so much noise that noise reduction was necessary to get decent output even at lower ISO. No wonder that strong noise reduction is used in all modern compacts. Fuji was the first to introduce clever noise reduction in compacts that didn’t damage the image data too much.

For DSLR’s very little to no noise reduction was used in the earlier models. But when the megapixel race started and the pixel sizes began to shrink, it became necessary to use more noise reduction at higher ISO, but still very moderate compared to compacts.

So what has Nikon actually done with the D300 …. see full article.