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Travel Photography in Burgundy, France & My Intro To Leica

Once in a while I start to miss some of the places I've traveled. My fondest memories are from my trips to Burgundy, France. It's such a beautiful place that allows you to get lost from the busy hectic world. Since I spend most of my time and work in the Philadelphia and New York area, it's a drastic change of scenery.

My first time to Burgundy was during a Leica Akademie trip. I was lucky to be sent to Germany for Leica camera training but even luckier because it was the first time they decided to send the school to France. Best of all, everything is hands on so I had the opportunity to use almost any Leica camera and lens. This was my intro to this camera system that was made famous by Henri Cartier-Bresson, a legend that inspired many photographers. The Leica M is a rangefinder system that involves a very different method and approach to photography. I consider it a great system for fine art photography because I feel it requires a different mind set.

Nothing like visiting foreign countries and being shown around by the people who live there. So many places off the beaten path that the tourist books don't mention. When I said earlier about getting lost from the hectic world I really mean it. I guess it's that feeling of being anonymous to the world, at least that's the feeling I get. Exploring places that inspire gives me the urge to create something from it. It's an urge that I recall from a very young age when I started in the fine arts. Earlier in life I painted and did drawings, now I photograph.

It's interesting when you think about it. The local inhabitants think of their surroundings as normal and the visitor goes crazy taking it all in with inspiration at its peak. I guess much of this is the same when people visit Bucks County, Pennsylvania where I live. Sometimes we take for granted what we have at home because we're too busy and it's familiar.

The first two photos posted here are from the famous vineyard Clos de Vougeout known for it's grand cru wines. Burgundy is awesome for those who love Flemish art, wine, food and beautiful scenery. Lots of tours available at vineyards and museums to help get informed but as mentioned earlier, I like to wander about. Maps are optional but a good idea if you don't speak French to ask for directions.

The third photo shown is from a village that I wish I had the name. One of those situations when you're being toured around and space out when someone mentions the name. Anyway, the village was very low key and quiet with lots of rustic buildings with great character. This photo had it all and I love the lace curtains and the faded cafe signage. Once in a while I actually saw an inhabitant but on the most part it was like a ghost town with a really good bakery.

Maybe this could be a different topic but it goes back to my Leica experiences and personal work that are intertwined. My Leica camera is my most prized piece of camera equipment. I don't use it for any of my commercial work and consider it separate from that world. After 10 years of professional photography I tend to leave the cameras I use for commercial assignments at home during my free time. The commercial world is where I create for my clients, but when I want to go into my personal world my Leica takes me there and brings back those fond memories. It brings out the best of what I desire from this art form.

See more of my travel photography on both of my websites http://www.psbphoto.com/ and http://www.psbphotography.com/. I plan on adding much more but need time to do it.

What Are RAW Files and Why Are They Used?

RAW files are one of the most misunderstood terms used in the photographic industry. I often need to clarify with people when they refer to RAW files because it's often thought as a simple untouched digital file in the form of JPEG or TIFF. It's really much more complex and is a file format all of its own. Actually to make it even more confusing, a RAW is often a proprietary file format that requires special plug-ins or applications to not only view but to open and convert to a more standardized file. We will get into the converting part later but for now we'll keep it simple with the basics. Don't worry I have visuals to show.

Think of RAW as an umbrella term, it mostly covers proprietary files that are custom to specific camera manufacturers. For example, Nikon uses a RAW file called a NEF and Canon uses CRW. Why do they do this and why so many kinds? The simple answer is the lack of an adopted standard which Adobe is trying to help accomplish with the DNG RAW. The idea is for camera manufacturers to stick with working on better cameras and let companies like Adobe do what they do best by coming up with the best applications to work with the DNG files.

Why standardize and what's the difference between DNG and other RAWs such as NEF? Standardizing will help keep things simple. Right now we have many applications that convert RAWs, some can convert just about any existing format, some can only do one kind. Basically you need to do your homework because some are better than others. Another reason to standardize is for archival reasons, not really in the sense of storage purposes but for future readability. RAW formats change over the years and with so many out there, are you sure you can open it 10 years from now? This is where DNG comes in because it's just one format that evolves instead of many. The greatest thing about DNG is that most if not all RAW formats can be changed over to a DNG. This is part of my post-production process. As soon as I download the proprietary RAW files, I right away run them through the Adobe DNG Converter. It's like the best of both worlds where I have the best chances of readable files in the future yet I still save my proprietary files. Some photographers throw out the proprietary files and just keep the DNG files but you should decide based on your own needs and memory space. Does converting change quality? From what I gathered, it's basically repackaging the RAW files for readability and no quality is lost.

So why do photographers use a RAW format and is it really necessary? It's often an option in the menu settings. You can sometimes photograph with JPEG or TIFF and sometimes a combination along with RAW. I won't get into the differences between the JPEG and TIFF because it's straying off a bit but RAW offers a lot more advantages. A RAW file records a larger range of information such as camera settings, exposure and color. Think of a RAW file as as a negative, it holds more information and is more flexible than other files. The great part is being able to see and read the original camera settings and change them within a certain range. No you can't change shutter speeds and apertures but you can adjust color balance, change exposure and many other neat things. Many of these things can be also adjusted in Photoshop but it's considered best to do as much work as possible on the RAW before it goes to Photoshop.

Now for the RAW processing part. The basic concept is to open the RAW file, process the information, make final adjustments and touch-ups in Photoshop and save the file as a TIFF. Yes TIFF files are good for the final worked imaged, they are highly universal to give clients and don't lose information with compression. The idea is to convert the RAW or RAWs into a finished product that shows your vision. The methods may be very different between photographers but it's the end result we want to present. You will see a difference in file sizes between RAW and TIFF. RAWs are very efficient with saving data and can be for example 25mb, but after processing and saving as a TIFF it can end up being 60mb. Interesting because the RAW is actually holding more info.

Here is a screen shot of Adobe's RAW processor. Lots of controls and overwhelming at first but it becomes easier as you learn. The idea is to start simple and later pick up on other features. The Adobe RAW processor known as ACR comes with Photoshop and is one of the best to use.

This is an interior design project I'll use to show a technique of taking two RAW files with two exposure settings and layering them together. This will create one image with a greater range than what one image can offer. I'll go over some other basics first.

When I open my selected file the screen shot you see here is the overall general layout. The easiest controls to understand and play with are the exposure and contrast sliders. It doesn't stop there, we also have sliders for recovery, fill light, blacks and brightness. Why so many? The idea is control over the entire tonal range. This gives control over isolated areas of the tonal range such as shadow detail or highlight detail.

One of my favorite features is the recovery slider. This is able to bring back highlight details such as windows or bright lights to within range. It's not going to perform magic because the RAW file can only record a certain latitude of exposure but it helps reduce highlight loss and in some cases fixes it entirely.

Other than exposure and contrast, take a look at the temperature and tint sliders. These controls will clean up your colors. The camera will have it's own settings for white balance, this RAW processor being used will default at showing what the camera was set at. You can play around with different presets where you see "White Balance" but they are only estimates that may or may not bring you within good results. Really it all comes down to learning these sliders and eyeing the image up for best balance. As with most things we have tricks and techniques to help reference and make this easier but that's another article in itself.

The last three sliders show saturation, vibrance and clarity. Saturation is great for giving more color pop to the image but be careful with overdoing it. Vibrance is a newer feature that works like saturation but tends to work well with people photos because it doesn't saturate the skin tone as much. Clarity is interesting because it increases mid-tone contrast which is neat because it reduces the loss of highlight and shadow detail that you will often experience with an overall contrast adjustment. Enough of the controls and time to show this example project.

This may be a bit advanced but I'll keep it somewhat simple for the purpose of showing how powerful RAW processing can be. One problem I run into for interior projects are the blown out windows showing pure white with very little detail. This technique I'm showing uses two exposures taken in the camera for the sole purpose of bringing back window detail.

The first interior photo I work on is an overall interior exposure based on the majority of the space. The second image is an underexposed image with the intent of recording the window detail. The range between window exposure and interior exposure are so far off from each other that one single RAW file can't do it. When I'm photographing an interior I always take extra shots that are under and over exposed. The windows often involve a camera exposure many times darker to bring back the extreme detail.

See how different both RAW files are? Of course I adjusted them for what I want and these aren't the default files straight from the camera. I did some adjustments with both RAW files but I didn't have to go far because they were exposed for this purpose. You will notice that the windows have good detail after my adjustments and RAW processing has a good range to pull information from the highlights.

Just a side note, the windows required the recovery slider I mentioned earlier. Also, I added more warmth with the temperature and tint sliders. Window light tends to look cool in most situations so I like to warm things up a bit.

This last image is the final combined image. I call this the master file. Yes, a lot happened in Photoshop to get to this result but the idea of this article is to show what RAW files can do. This is an example of visualizing during the photo shoot, recording the proper exposures to work with and utilizing the great features of RAW files to create a final image beyond the normal one exposure shot. For additional info on how I combined the two RAW exposures, I used layering in Photoshop to insert the window exposure into the overall interior exposure. This image wasn't too difficult to layer and combine but sometimes the task can be frustrating. I will cover layering in a future post because it's another important tool that deserves attention.

Once the image is worked to where I want it, I'll save the master file as a TIFF. I like to save the full 16 bit TIFF just in case I need to go back and adjust the later. The final delivery to the client will be changed to 8 bit because the files are half the size of 16 bit and readable by most photo editing software.

Architectural Photography of Tall City Buildings

Tall buildings are something I don't often get a chance to photograph, so it was a bit interesting when a new client asked for 4 locations in Manhattan. OK here is the catch, they all have to be in horizontal format. Wait I'm not done! The buildings can't be leaning back (keystone) so we can't have converging lines from bottom to top.

After reading the requirements a few times and giving this a moment for thought (banging my head on the wall), I decided it may be possible. Normally I would have said no way but I decided to at least entertain the idea and present my solution. Of course I didn't say it was 100% possible, but with an agreement to proceed I offered to scout each location so I can see the buildings through the viewfinder.

This is what I had in mind and successfully did. I've been thinking about doing panoramic photography for a long time and this was a chance to buy that nice panoramic head for one of my tripods and experiment with stitching.

Panoramic photography with stitching actually requires shooting in a vertical format to reduce distortion issues, so this was good because I could fit the entire building in one shot and that would be the center image. After that I could photograph and overlap images by at least 25% on both sides of the building. When all is done we would have an area of coverage that will fit a horizontal format. To be safe my image total per panoramic was 5 overlapping shots. I try not to go too wide with the lens because of added distortion.

Here is the first photo I did and I'm sure you're wondering about the perspective portion and how I kept the building from leaning back. This was also tricky because none of my architectural lenses could shift enough to correct the image. This came down to two things. First was to get access to a nearby rooftop to about halfway up the building height if possible. Second was Photoshop and working the correction there.

This is time consuming part because on most leveled off panoramas the stitching in Photoshop is rather easy if shot correctly. All perspective control, color and exposure adjustments had to be done before doing any stitching. Once the perspective correction is done you may have some slender looking images to stitch. That's perfectly fine and a good reason to overlap images even more than 25% while shooting. To be safe even 50% overlapping is a good idea. Now is the fun part. In Photoshop I use photomerge which is an automated function. It asks for the files to merge and I keep them in order from left images to right. After a few minutes of calculating and stuff, Photoshop will pop up the results. Guess what? It doesn't always work. Sometimes it does but not that well. Why Because Photoshop looks for items that make sense to merge and sometimes complex images just have issues. So this is the patience part, doing the stitching manually. I add to the canvas area (of the center image) to the final dimensions I want and I carefully combine the images together. Depending on the relationship of the buildings, you may have to distort and rework the vanishing points. Sometimes a lot of touchups are involved to blend the images.

Some tips to remember. Save all of your steps as separate files. This way when you mess up, you can go back many steps and try again. Another idea that helps is to save your layers and use smart objects. Smart objects? Yep, a whole other topic but really neat.

Not all of the building photography required panorama stitching. I managed to get permission for some good vantage points that allowed using a super wide lens. I used the Nikon 14-24mm and it has very little distortion. I also run the RAW files through an application called DXO Optics and it works perfectly for cleaning up any remaining distortion. Just as with the stitching method, I used Photoshop for correcting the perspective.

This is a shot I enjoy because I needed something like this in my architectural photography gallery on my website. I'll be updating soon along with some other shots I did on this project. Perhaps I should think about doing a panoramic gallery page. I'll have to work on more of these first but this is a good start.

It's cold outside. I can't wait till spring!