Monitor Callibration - how to test if your monitor is properly callibrated?

This is something that I've always struggled with - whenever I read anything about it I get bored senseless and fall asleep! By the time I've woken up the world has moved on and my monitor is still deliriously uncallibrated.

So I thought I'd post on a few photography forums for some help. I asked for short sweet and simple. So far the best has to be: "Get a Spyder". Which leaves me to wonder how an arachnid is going to fix my computer.

No, I'm not that stupid, but I am that facetious. I don't really know what a Spyder is or how it works which is partly what I was hoping to get out of posting in the first place.

In desperation I re-searched for Spyders and screen callibration and came across this dandy article http://www.imaging-resource.com/ARTS/MONCAL/CALIBRATE.HTM on how to check if your screen needs callibration (I'm happy to say that I didn't fall asleep and the world has not moved on and left me behind). I haven't read the link on that page about Spyders (I am weary of a creeping sloth that seems to slither over me when my mouse goes near the link) but I think it might be worth brazening out. I'll let you know if I make it through alive!

Photography Lessons: Aperture and Light

In the last few weeks a handful of friends have asked me to teach them to take decent photographs - maybe I'm nuts but I agreed, and being the good ex-teacher that I am I decided that I should come up with some sort of syllabus and figured that while I'm at it I may as well share my five cents worth with those that care to read it.

So the major thing about photography (apart from those other minor things like the right gear, a decent subject, composition, time, money etc) is light. Light, light, light, light, light. If you don't have light you have a plain black block. If you have too much light you have a plain white block.

Photography is about the artistic representation and the technical manipulation of light. In terms of manipulating light you can manipulate your external light and you can control the way in which your camera responds to that light.

Cameras don't see light the same way human beings do. We can access a huge range of light while a camera's light range is limited. What that means is that at the same time as being able to see very bright things we can also see very dark things. A camera can do one or the other but it typically can't do both at the same time.

So it's up to you, the person behind the lens, to make decisions for the camera about how it should record light.

A typical Sunday morning and all the animals are in the sun spot on the bed. Notice how the light areas have blown out (meaning you can't see detail in the blanket and duvet in the front of the image)? That's what I mean by the camera not being able to record light the same way we see it. We could see the whole scene perfectly - the bright sunlight on the bed and the darker room - but the camera only really records Ninja (our stripey cat) properly.

There are three major controls that your camera has in order to deal with light and they typically work simultaneously . Because I'm not sick, twisted or evil I'm not going to explain all three things together, but look at the three things in three different lessons and then talk in a fourth about how they all work together.

The three controls are aperture, shutter speed and ISO. If you're new to photography and you don't have a Scooby about what those things are, don't worry - we're all in the process of learning different things all the time and while I'm pretty good at photography I wouldn't try and perform knee replacement surgery.

The easiest place to start is aperture. Also referred to as f-stop.

Whenever you take a photograph a mechanism in the lens opens to allow light in.

That mechanism is your aperture or f-stop. If it opens wide then you'll allow in a lot of light. If it opens small you'll allow in very little light.

Unfortunately for people trying to learn this stuff from scratch some brainiac years ago decided that the numbering system we use to describe the size of the apperture should be ass backward! I can only assume it was a Frenchman who came up with that.

So what this means is: a very large open aperture (f-stop) that lets in a lot of light will be described by a small number, for example f2.8

A very small aperture which lets in a teeny amount of light will be described by a large number f32

Go figure, but that's the way it is.

So the first thing that you should do, now that you're armed with this golden McNugget of information is wonder around for a few days with your camera set to AV (which means aperture priority) and see what happens when you change your aperture from a high f-stop (small opening) to a low f-stop (big opening).

Chrissi in the light

I did this of Chris, a dear friend of mine, at a wedding we were both at (she as a guest, me as photographer). We were actually on our way to the loo and I got distracted by the lights which had turned a particular shade of dirty red from the fires (which I think have been in Grabouw and the smoke is coming all the way through here) and figured Chrissi's gorgeous dress would look awesome with that as a backdrop. So it was a slow shutter and freezing her face with the flash. Being in a hurry - to get to the loo before the speeches started - I just left the flash on my other camera, propped the whole thing (5D and 70-200 lens and speedlite) in a tree stump and set it to slave. The flash on my wide angle I just angled back (there was nothing behind me) and off we went. The hardest part was getting the slave to see its master, but it did eventually!

Same Day Different Mood

On the beach again

Dan and I were on the beach again. This time in the mist.

Dan's, "Please, call me Joe" expression (its from an episode of Scrubs . . . and had us smiling like dumbasses for weeks!).

I really struggle to keep my eyes open when the flash goes - majorly light sensitive!

Guess what we saw on the way out. I must've taken about 20 pics of him/her(?) and walked from about 10m away to within a metre and a half. By the time I stopped walking I was right on the edge of my 70-200's focussing limits (so you know just how close I was). He/she let me stay there for quite a while and then, after giving me the evil eye a few times, decided s/he had had about enough of me and winged off into the mist.

A Note

I found this on a scrap of paper in my bedside drawer. I think I wrote it towards the beginning of 2008, but I'm not entirely sure. It's a weird thing when you find something that you've done or written and forgotten about:

Sometimes I wonder about all those secret loves:
these films over things
- dust sheets preserving ancient memories, and dreams;
the porous reality of it all -
the skin flakes
and their dust mites.
And an odd, odd remember-sense
of being alive and beating.

Thought I'd get some T-shirts printed

Minus, of course, the BDBP stuff at the bottom. I've always felt sorry for those lone animals you see when you drive cross country: there's always one sheep, duck, cow, horse, chicken, goat, ostrich, donkey, pig, something, off on their own while the rest of the animals stand around in their groups. Always wondered what that lone sheep, duck, cow, etc was thinking of out there by themselves.

And then this one is specially for Dan (as requested by him). The font is a free font and the little toilet people I copied from something off a stock site - and yep, I redrew them and changed them!