Our local photographic club recently held a “STRAIGHT pictures“ evening. Fear not, it was nothing to do with sexual orientation. On the face of it, it sounded simple enough: a photograph straight from the camera with no Photoshop/Lightroom trickery.

Clear? No, of course not. 🙂

The idea was to get back to the days of real film – back to the 60s, said the brief – but then the questions started. I’m not at all sure I have the answer but here’s a few observations/thoughts.

Everything out of a film camera goes through some processing before you get to see any result. Print film, be it colour or monochrome, creates a negative on celluloid which must first be developed [read processed] before being printed onto paper through an enlarger. To do that job properly, a colour print should have its White Balance assessed and adjusted using filters. Monochrome prints could be printed on low or high contrast papers giving some adjustment of the final image. There are choices to be made. The nearest to “straight out of camera” is probably colour positive slide film, e.g. Fuji Velvia or Kodachrome, that is simply developed before being projected to reveal the image recorded by the camera.

There is a bit of a complication introduced by the physics of DSLR technology. Whereas an image recorded on celluloid film in an SLR is as sharp as your focus and lens quality will allow, most DSLRs soften the image making a bit of post-process sharpening necessary. This is due, at least in part, to the anti-aliasing filter used in front of the receiver in most DSLRs. The digital receiver itself, being a grid of receptors each sensitive to one of three different colours, also contributes to softness – the dots for all colours do not align. So, to level the playing field with film a degree of sharpening is required.

Sticking with print film equivalence, DSLRs capture a digital negative, a RAW file, internally which must also be processed before you can see anything at all. What you see on the back screen of the camera is an internally generated JPEG but to create it the camera’s software has to use some settings which specify attributes like contrast, colour saturation etc. Some minimal post-processing has happened internally to make the result visible. It’s the digital equivalent of developing. Since that is necessary to see anything, it would have to be thought of as straight out of the camera.

So, our digital straight out of camera photos were allowed to be sharpened and, perhaps curiously, “creatively” cropped. Perhaps that is to allow folks with a 35mm format camera to replicate something from a panoramic camera? [Or maybe there wasn’t that much thought involved.] Filling that remit, here’s a recent shot of the autumn woodland near our house.

Having adjusted aperture to select depth of field, shutter speed to stop camera shake, and ISO to suit, over and above a straightforward point and <click>, it is possible to get a bit creative, a.k.a. arty. A popular fashionable technique is so-called ICM [Intentional Camera Movement]. This involves someone spending £1000+ on a pin sharp pro-grade lens such as a Canon L-series, then deliberately moving the camera during a relatively long exposure, say 1/10th sec, to completely negate the pin sharpness of the expensive lens and produce a deliberately blurred image. Go figure! Much as I enjoy taking the piss, it can produce some very pleasing results and Carol is pretty accomplished at it. She helped me, as a complete ICM novice, with this shot which is more or less the same shot as above but using ICM.

The ICM technique works equally well on film and on digital receivers. It’s still a single photograph done entirely in camera and does, I’d say, fulfil the straight out of camera brief.

Now we get tricky. Back in 2003 I had a much loved Canon EOS 3 35mm SLR film camera. It allowed for multiple exposures on a single frame of celluloid. Not being naturally arty, I couldn’t see the point until we were on a Greek Island Wanderer holiday. One of our travelling companions was interested in multiples so I had a go with a violently flapping Greek flag aboard ship. This is a 3-shot multiple exposure I took in 2003 on Fuji Velvia slide film. Each shot had to be underexposed by 1.66 stops to get the overall exposure on a single frame roughly correct. I was a convert in certain situations – this conveyed much more of the dynamism of a flapping flag without really being blurred. [Careful, down Mr. Arty. It’s an elderly shot scanned on basic equipment so not great but the idea is there.] Not all film SLRs allowed for multiple exposures but it is/was sometimes possible to disengage the film advance mechanism while re-cocking the shutter so it could be forced.

Again, this was all done in camera with no post-processing trickery so it would be valid, in my book.

Early DSLRs didn’t support multiple exposures. Many now do but not all provide the same combination flexibilities to the photographer. The playing field, as they say irritatingly, is not level. There was but one way to combine multiple shots on film, as above; the result is the average of all the shots, hence the need to adjust the exposure. With the increased computing power within a DSLR, some now allow you to combine images in different ways. First of all, you can still do the average combination but you don’t have to calculate the exposure adjustment, technology does that for you. Some provide additional combination mechanisms, such as preserving/favouring darker areas or preserving/favouring lighter areas. Here’s my woodland scene again, this time as three exposures blended together favouring dark areas. All automatic in my Canon 7D mkII.

You can’t do dark blending on a film camera, though, and there’s some serious computer-based post-processing going on, albeit in the camera. I’d rule that out. Nice effect, though, which looks a bit like an oil painting. [No, it isn’t the Photoshop oil painting filter.]

Going out into the arty left field, you can combine multiple exposures with the ICM technique. Again with considerable guidance from the Master, Grasshopper tried it and really liked the result. Photographing woodlands may never be the same again. Oh help! 😀

As far as a straight photograph is concerned: ICM, OK; ICM with multiple shots blended using dark mode, definitely not OK.

Whilst nothing has been done in Photoshop, there is an increasing amount of Photoshop-equivalent trickery built into modern digital camera on-board processors. The latest Olympus OM-D EM-1 mkII will automatically advance the focus point minutely (step interval may be specified) and focus stack the resultant multiple images to get an increased depth of field. Such a focus-stacking technique – combining the sharp part of many images – all within the software, makes macro wildlife photography very interesting. It’s definitely not in the spirit of  straight out of camera, though.

I can’t show you a focus stacked image ‘cos I haven’t got an Olympus OM-D EM-1 mk II … yet. 😉

If, following all the recent GDPR shenanigans, there are any readers actually still left out there, I have finally managed to muster the time to put together albums on our travel page for our 2017 Antipodean adventure, pausing our outward journey in Hong Kong en route. If you have the inclination, you’ll find these new entries on the Travel page:

• 2017 Hong Kong
• 2017 Australia
• 2017 New Zealand

Speaking of GDPR, I didn’t want to be left out and the nice folks at WordPress have released helpful updates to assist, so we now have our very own Privacy Policy complete with Cookies mumbo jumbo. What a lot of fun that was. 😉

Now, don’t say I don’t do anything for you.

My, how time flies. It doesn’t seem it but it was back in 2013 that I signed up with Crashplan for a cloud storage account to backup our data. Multiple people in one household banging away with multiple digital cameras generates a lot of data, some of which is worth protecting, and my original regime of writing out optical storage media, starting with CDs and going on to DVDs (though not Blu-ray), had become less than viable. We’d got a little over 200Gb of data between us.

The initial upload of data would, given the very limited speeds possible on our archaic copper wire telecoms infrastructure, have taken about 4 months, so I also signed up for a fibre optic broadband service. Welcome to the modern world – well, almost. My service is still not blazingly fast ‘cos there’s still over ½ mile of archaic copper wire between me and the cabinet – I get about 1Mb upload – but my initial upload now got done in one month.

Everything then went swimmingly. The Crashplan software seemed reasonably well designed and we continued uploading incremental amounts of data as our photographic collection grew. (We do discard the rubbish, as we did in the days of real film, unlike some folks.)

Six months ago the rug got pulled out from under our feet; the gentlefolk at Crashplan announced that “they were withdrawing from the home/consumer backup market”. Sod! [Just look at the management bullshit on that page.]

The Crashplan bullshit also announced, though, that “they had partnered with Carbonite” to which their home customer base was invited to switch. [See the same Crashplan page above.]

Now, I’d have thought that “partnering with” would include a painless data migration path, the data that I had initially spent a whole calendar month @ 24hrs a day uploading. Wrong. The extent of the partnering appeared to be limited to a 50% reduction in cost for the first year. Crashplan home customers would now have to spend almost another 2 months (our data volume has, of course, increased in 5 years) uploading their precious data to the cloud, in the form of Carbonite, yet again.

Well, thanks for nothing to the dishonourable bastards at Crashplan. Personally, I wouldn’t even offer you a blindfold.

Actually, at one point I calculated that it could have taken me the whole of that first year to upload the data again. That’s because Carbonite originally throttled the upload bandwidth to 1Gb/day after the first 200Gb. Look, you don’t need a paid-for service with modest amounts of data; you can accumulate at least 30Gb with free services like Google Sync, Dropbox and MS OneDrive. The paid-for solution space IS large amounts of data. However, they may have seen sense because I now read that they Caronite has supposedly removed that throttling. So, as you were and back to 2 months uploading, then.

I suppose, just out of desperation, I did sign up for the first year at Carbonite. Having done so I swiftly became disheartened, though. The straw that broke my particular camels back was noticing, and I fail to understand why, that with constant uploading to The Cloud, any streaming of TV programs on catch-up slowed to the point where buffering and stuttering was frequent – the programs became unwatchable. I measured my download speed and my usual 15+Mb download had slowed to ~3.5Mb. Now why does something that I thought was just uploading knacker download speeds to that extent? I wasn’t prepared for 2 months worth of that so I cancelled my automatic renewal and uninstalled the Carbonite client software.

Once bitten, twice shy. I no longer wanted to rely upon some distant CEO’s whim so I needed another solution.

Optical media still being a pain in the derrière given the data volumes, even with the possibility of Blu-ray, I settled on a 2-bay NAS [Network Attached Storage] device, set up as RAID-1, plugged into my router. This I could make accessible to all our machines. Admittedly my new solution would not address the offsite backup requirement. IT professionals know that, as well as locally available backups for swift restoration, for which we have external hard drives, one should also have an offsite backup to protect against dire disasters such as your business premises/house burning down but if our house burns down we’ve got much bigger problems than salvaging a few digital images. That aside, being RAID-1 (twin copies in the NAS), three things would need to fail more or less simultaneously to lose anything, both drives in the NAS and the source laptop/desktop concerned.

The Cloud is an appealingly neat solution but we really need better access speeds to make it properly viable. The UK, having been hamstrung for too long by its BT copper wire infrastructure, still has areas of the country where even basic fibre optic broadband is not available and copper wire download speeds limited to a few meagre Mb are the norm. We also need companies providing the services to be honourable enough not to suddenly decide to screw their customers by changing their business model.

So, a lingering 2-fingered salute to Crashplan. You do not deserve business.

Cash ISA (or NISA) savings accounts are a benefit to the consumer, right? This is because the interest on them is tax free, right? Well, yes, but …

In just opening two new ISA accounts, I’ve bumped into another example of what I’ve known for some years. For the most part, it isn’t the consumer that benefits.

I have transferred two existing Cash ISA accounts from one savings provider, let’s call it A Bank, to another provider, let’s call it B Bank, to benefit from a higher rate. My new ISA rate with B Bank, on a 2-year fixed account, is 1.67% which is considerably better than A Bank’s current rate offering.

But wait, I noticed that I could open a regular 2-year fixed savings account with B Bank and get 2.09%. Think about that for a moment.

A basic rate tax-payer would pay tax at 20% on the interest from 2.09%, i.e. would lose (to the government) 0.418%, making the net gain exactly equivalent to the 2-year fixed rate ISA of 1.67%.

So, who benefits? Not the saver who pockets precisely the same amount of interest. Not the government because they’ve lost their 0.418% in tax.

No, the winner in this tale is the bank, which pockets the difference between what they would have paid had you opened a regular 2-year fixed savings account and the reduced amount that they actually pay you now that you’ve opened a 2-year fixed ISA account instead.

There are a few further wrinkles. Well, there would be, wouldn’t there?

For a higher rate taxpayer, the ISA is still beneficial because they’d be paying more tax [what, 40% these days?] on the interest from a regular savings account. So, the richer buggers are better off to the tune of half their tax on the interest.

For a basic rate taxpayer, though, things could actually be worse. We are now allowed to earn some interest on savings tax free; I think the tax free interest amount is £3000. If all your earned interest does not exceed that amount, a basic rate taxpayer is actually losing money from the ISA because they would not have paid interest on the higher yielding regular savings account. Bother!

The ONLY benefit of an ISA in this last situation is that you are spared the pain of declaring it on a UK tax return form. If you don’t earn the limit in interest, the Cash ISA/NISA is actually detrimental.

Someone is being screwed. Quelle surprise!

I’d been debating about lenses to take with me on a wildlife trip to parts foreign, Namibia, in this case. If my subjects were to be wildlife only, the choice would be very straightforward; all I would need would be my super-duper  Canon 100-400 mkII L series lens. With its close-focus distance of 0.9m, it does for close-ups of insects, too. The debate comes in with any landscape work, which we also have thrown into the mix.

Going from wide angle to the 100mmm starting point of my long zoom lens is less than straightforward with an APS-C cropped sensor camera. Canon, makes some lovely L-series lenses for a full frame camera but they really only have consumer lenses covering that range on a cropped sensor camera. I started out thinking I’d make do with our Canon 17-55mm F2.8 lens and ignore the gap up to 100mm. Then I remembered my Sigma 18-300mm F3.5-6.3 “travel” lens. I was expecting the image quality to be lower but I thought I’d do a test. I set up a shot and took it on both lenses, each set at their 55mm focal length.

To my surprise, the Sigma 18-300 seemed to be both sharper and clearer (maybe it has more contrast) than the Canon. Right, decision made: not only is my travel lens sharper but it’s also a little lighter and covers a much greater range overlapping with my primary lens. The weight could prove critical ‘cos we’re limited to an 8kg carry-on limit.

Then I started wondering about a comparison between my long Canon professional lenses, the 100-400 mentioned above and my Canon L-series 300mm F4 prime lens. Now I was in for a real shock.

I set up a couple of tests using a tape measure to compare image size. My limiting factor was the Minimum Focus Distance of the 300 mm prime: 1.5m. Both other lenses the 100-400 L series and the could be set to 300mm focal length and could focus at that same distance. Click, click, click.  Here’s a composite of my results.

Three different images but all of a ruler at 1.5m distance, taken on lenses all apparently set to 300mm focal length. All three images are clearly different sizes but they should all be the same, right? So what’s going on?

What’s going on is known as focus breathing, a bizarre name for a symptom whereby a lens’s actual focal length varies at different focus points. In essence, it gets weaker at closer focus distances.

The top image is, if you will, the default – it’s the Canon 300mm prime lens and shows a little more than 9cms of the ruler.

The middle image is taken with the C anon 100-400mm lens set at the same 300mm focal length (I checked using the EXIF data). It shows almost 12cms of ruler, 33% more. The 100-400 is known to “suffer” from noticeable focus breathing so I was expecting some difference.

What blew me away, though, was the third image, the result from the Sigma 18-300mm lens set at 300mm. It’s showing a whopping 19cms of ruler, fully double the amount of the 300mm prime benchmark.

In other words, the image from the 300mm prime lens is a thumping great four times the size of the image from the 18-300 lens. Yikes! Now THAT’s what I call focus breathing.

The travel lens is still good; I’m glad I know what’s going on, though.

Compare and contrast, both journeys being of similar distance (45mls vs 65kms).

1. England: parking at LB station, £7.90 – off peak travel card to Kew Gardens, £21.00;
2. Spain: parking at Xeraco station, FREE – return ticket to Valencia, ~8.50€.

This was my first visit to Kew Gardens since childhood. I must say that, despite the costs, a trip on the train, three trains actually, was fun, especially as we didn’t end up waiting for too long on  cold, windy platforms. We were also lucky enough to be meeting friends with membership cards so they could sign us in to Kew for nothing. Very nice.

[Aside: Just for the record, I do find £7.90 an exorbitant parking charge at our local station. If we are ever to encourage people out of their cars and onto public transport, we have to stop making it so expensive.]

Lurking around the external gardens at Kew in early February is probably not the most appealing of pastimes. The reason for our visit was twofold, though. Firstly, there was a display of orchids in one of the glasshouses; secondly there was a display of photographs, also indoors, of entries into the Garden Photographer Of The Year competition. Yes, there’s WPOTY (Wildlife), LPOTY (Landscape) and GPOTY. What a lot of POTYs. 🙂

Unusually, I went armed with my camera. Remembering trouble at The Eden Project when lenses were changed inside the tropical biome, I picked one lens and stuck with it: a 100mm macro. Having recently had my camera fixed, yet again, and the flash now functioning, I thought I’d try using flash to try and make the backgrounds fade into darkness. This turned out to be largely successful. Without my trying to identify these subjects (I know one is an Hibiscus), here’s a few of my favourite shots from the day.

I don’t often use flash and it didn’t fire on the first shot – the droplets would’ve sparkled more with it – but I like the line-up. I got it going eventually but the line-ups weren’t as appealing. 😉

At one point there were very long flower garlands hanging vertically from the ceiling/roof. Shot straight, they looked a little less than interesting so I tried a rakish angle and superimposing it on some post-processing motion blur courtesy of Photoshop Elements. Better – well, I think so.

Meanwhile, Carol, who has become keen on in-camera multiple exposures when it comes to the creative, was having a play with that technique. It’s a bit hit and miss – some work out and others don’t – but this one appeals to both of us.

‘T was a good day and provided something to do with a camera in the depths of winter.

After a week or so, customer Skywalker eventually heard back from Mr Stormtrooper representing the empire, i.e. advice@jaguarlandrover.com. He had been good to his word and had “further information” for me. I could, of course, have guessed pretty much what the bottom line of the “further information” would be but it’s good to have ones suspicions confirmed.

… in regards to the heavy duty towing kit not being available on the 180 SE Tech, I have spoken with our production team and they have confirmed that a business decision was made not to make this model variation available.

Quelle surprise!

Well, I’d guessed that some of these decisions might be somewhat arbitrary and here we have it in black and white. To paraphrase: “we know how to rip out the 5+2 seating and put in a full sized spare wheel but we refuse to do it on 2 out of 4 model variations.”

Clearly Land Rover is now firmly positioned in the Chelsea Tractor market for ferrying Satan’s Little Disciples to and from school. Why else would you want a 7-seater with no luggage capacity?

This has definitely been an f…ing experience – both fascinating and frustrating. [Well, what on earth did you think I meant?]

There is not going to be an Episode VII.