To Be Sharp or To Be Blurry, which is it to be?

One of the many things to consider when composing your picture is deciding on what part of your subject/scene/composition you want as sharp as possible.

A Tilt/shift lens

Technical Camera with full movements

The Theory

With the exception of the Lytro camera there is only one Plane of Sharpness that will be in focus and, unless you use a tilt/shift lens (assuming you’re using DSLR or other non-technical camera), the plane of sharpness will always be parallel to the focal plane of the camera (we’ll ignore LensBaby lenses for now).

There will be zones before and after the plane of sharpness where the sharpness is acceptable. Depth of Field (DoF) is the distance between the beginning and end of acceptable sharpness – This also depends on the amount of enlargement you intend to use on the image. The impression of  greater DoF comes from small enlargement  compared to a larger image size when viewed from a normal distance for the size of display/print.

You need to do a combination of things to guarantee sharpness in your shots, namely;

• use a rock solid camera support, which could be a tripod (for portability) or
• any support you can put the camera on such as a “bean bag” to cradle the camera on a solid surface.
• Ensure there is no subject movement.

Tripods are just three legs with a top to hold them together and provide a camera connection.

Some do’s and don’ts of tripod usage are:

• Try and avoid extending the center pole as this negates the ‘solidness’ of the three legs on the tripod.
• Use a ball type for the tripod head. Pan and tilt are really best for movie cameras.
• Use a remote shutter release – wireless preferred or connected cable type.

  

  There is only one plane of focus.

• When no remote shutter release is available use  the camera’s self timer. Some cameras have a “shutter delay” menu setting that delays firing the shutter until a small time after the mirror rises to absorb mirror slap vibrations.
• Use the mirror lock up function, if available, which may be manually operated (count about 3 seconds before using shutter release for vibrations to cease) or, as noted before, you may be able to program a delay after shutter release is pressed and the mirror is raised before the shutter operates, some cameras refer to this function as Exposure Delay Mode.

• For lenses with with Vibration Reduction (VR) or Image Stabalization (IR) test to see if this needs to be OFF when when camera is not hand held.
• If your VR or IS system has two modes then one of them is for when you are in a moving vehicle. Learn which is for what situation.

• 

  Zone of Acceptable Sharpnes is called Depth of Field

  Regardless of the quality of the VR/IS system it is of no use when your shutter speed is faster than 1/300 to 1/500 sec. You will need to experiment, but turn it off when the shutter speed is faster than the threshold speed you have determined. Otherwise you may find the VR/IS system degrades the sharpness!

• Unless other composition reasons demand it use an aperture that is two/three stops down from wide open. This reduces to a minimum any lens aberrations that exist.  And in any case for small sensor sizes, (this means anything including or smaller than FX size (24x36mm /1×1.5”) as diffraction becomes apparent at smaller apertures.

• It’s axiomatic to say, but use a good quality lens in the first place.
• Select the lowest ISO the camera has (often called it’s native ISO) – when using a camera support the resulting slow shutter speed should not pose a problem unless your subject is moving.
• If your camera supports Live Mode and you can zoom in on the image, use this feature to check focus or take a test shot and using Zoom on the image in Playback mode to check focus and DoF is what you want.
• Post Shooting – if your image edit program supports luminance sharpening use that in preference to RGB layer sharpening.

Hand Holding

If a camera support is not available or viable for the shot then the following tips should give you a greater percentage of sharp shots.

The ratio of acceptable sharpness in front and behind plane of cus

Use the fastest shutter speed with the aperture that reduces aberrations (generally one or two stops down from wide open), unless you are looking for a blurred foreground/background to make the subject stand out.

As a Rule of Thumb, the minimum (slowest) shutter speed that you can use is dictated by the focal length of the lens you are using. Note the focal length you are using and the shutter speed is its reciprocal.  For example, 300mm focal length means a minimum shutter speed of 1/300 sec, 150mm == 1/150 sec.  If the calculated shutter speed is not available use the next fastest one.  This assumes a stationary subject. For moving subjects use the reciprocal of the lens and adjust according to the table of speeds below.

Of course if you have a very fast ISO set you will be able to use faster speeds.

Subject @ 15m	Subject Speed (km)	straight on ↕	Oblique 	Lateral  
Pedestrians	3   6	1/20	1/40	1/60
Foot races	32	1/100	1/250	1/400
Swimming	6 10	1/250	1/400	1/800
High Diving	80	1/300	1/400	1/500
Bicycle racing	40	1/150	1/400	1/1000
Trotting horse	8 16	1/80	1/150	1/250
Racing horse	40 48	1/150	1/300	1/900
Train	60	1/150	1/300	1/500
Fast train	90-120	1/300	1/600	1/900
fair weather waves	8 20	1/200	1/400	1/600
Waves in gale	100 160	1/600	1/800	1/1000
Slow cars	8 16	1/50	1/100	1/150
Racing cars	130 320	1/500	1/1000	1/2000

• What if you have set the optimal aperture but with the current level of light and ISO you cannot use a suitable shutter speed? Increase the ISO until you get the shutter and aperture values you need.
• Try using Continuous Shooting mode (set to 3 shot burst), you may find that the middle frames of the triplet will be the sharpest.
• Wrap the camera strap around your forearm or around head to provide extra steadiness.
• Lean on something solid, which may include a person.

If you have your bean bag support that can be placed on a railing or post to support the camera

But the most important thing is to practice any and all these tips and techniques before you really need to use them.  When you do need to shoot The Great Shot you won’t have to worry about blurry or un-sharp shots.

Why Are F/Stop Numbers Backward?

Photographers are always going on about “What f/stop did you give it?”  This may also be expressed as: f-number,  focal ratio, f-ratio, or relative aperture.  What are they talking about?

Following on from the previous post about the Color Temperature and why it seems to be a paradox.  Another bit of paradoxical photography terminology is the numbering of f/stops (Aperture).  Many beginners (and not a few professionals) have a hard time reconciling that a small f/stop actually means a wide aperture and vice versa, that the big f/stop numbers mean a smaller aperture size (hole).

All is revealed when you discover that the f/stop number is the ratio result of  focal length of lens / aperture size (Diameter).  Eg.  a 100mm focal length has it’s stop (aperture) set to a size of 20mm – that means the f/stop number is 5,  but if the aperture size was just 4mm then the f/stop number is 25!  (I used easy numbers to avoid fractions of a ratio).

Definition of Focal Ratio as a graphic

The numbers you see/use are calculated so that a doubling or halving of light passing through the aperture (iris) occurs as you move “one full stop” in the appropriate direction.  In other words the relationship of the area of the aperture opening to allow light through is the determining factor in exposure.  So different focal lengths will need different aperture areas (sizes) to pass through the same amount of light in a given unit of time.

Standard apertures (f/Stops)

But this doesn’t mean that if you have set f/16 then f/8 would be twice the light amount let through.  It actually turns out that the ratio number that halves the light is 11.  Oh no!  f/8 would actually be 2 stops increase which means 4 times the light is allowed to pass.  How can this be?  Easy.  Since it is the diameter of the aperture you are using you are really making use of the area of the aperture, which historically has always been a circle but could be a square or triangle or some other shape.  If you double the diameter you have actually increased the area the aperture circle encloses by 4 times!  So what is one stop (bigger in area) than f/16, turns out that it is f/12 but for other historical reasons f/11 has been used.  The ratio numbers are a little wobbly when you do the maths but it all works out in the end.

If you have heard of a T-Stop that is an f/stop corrected for transmission loss and is typically only applicable in cinematography so that different camera lens will pass exactly the same amount of light rather than the rather loose arrangement that f/stops with still image lenses have been built with.

Looking for something special for your your art collection?  Go to Mosaic Images Photography for a collection of different fine art photography and mixed media pictures.  You can also download for you screen saver, digital picture frame, TV or smartphone too!

Color Temperature for Light. A Paradox?

It may sound weird but “white” light is purely a construct of our vision system.  The following relates to light emitting objects, light absorbing objects work on a different principle.  We now know that there is no frequency of the electromagnetic spectrum that is the color “white”.  So how can we “see” white light (apart from after too many rums)?  After centuries of puzzling about this and numerous hypothesises that showed promise but foundered on the shoals of proof it took Sir Isaac Newton to concisely explain what was going on with the visible part of the spectrum.  He was not the first to use a prism to “split” a beam of sunlight (white) into its component frequencies but he did finally take a hypothesis and turned it into a theory where the experimental results have never been contradicted.

Prism Splitting White Light into Component Frequencies

Culturally we are raised from our earliest age that hot (thermometer temperature) things are red/yellow/orange while cold has been shown to us in the hues of blue/cyan.  Backed up by the fact that various normal physical effects folor this color scheme, such as fire and ice producing these colors.  When film makers had use of color film stock they quickly discovered that the feel of a film could be perceived by the overall color given to that film and, of course, still image photographers followed suit in their images too.  And, of course, painters started making use of these color perceptions from well before the discovery of photography.  The next time you watch a movie take note of the overall color cast and how it makes you feel about the temperature of the scene.

It wasn’t for another 200 odds years after Newton that somebody took understanding of the properties of light to the next level.  Max Planck’s employer had, with the discovery of incandescent electrical lighting,  tasked him to find out what temperature to heat a light filament so that the maximum light output was partnered with a minimum of electrical energy.  After several dead ends. blind alleys and box canyons Planck hit upon the idea that unless an object’s physical temperature was at absolute zero then it was always producing some part of the electromagnetic spectrum.  It’s pretty obvious now (but not then) that the type of energy produced would change as the object’s temperature increased and eventually at some specific temperature (relative to the kind of material of the object) the energy produced would reach the visible part of the spectrum.

Planck’s next leap was to theorize what happens to a “perfect black body” object (for those that need a quick refresher on what a “black body” might look like

Electro Magnetic Spectrum with Visible frequencies highlighted

)  when energy was pushed into it and what energy was radiated from it.  I can only guess that he may have taken a lead from iron/steel manufacturers of the time when pyrometers had not been developed, the iron/steel makers had already twigged that the color of the melt was a very precise way of determining  when it was at the correct temperature for tapping the furnace.

But at what temperature do we start to see any “color”?  As it turns out Lord Kelvin some years prior to Planck had developed his temperature scale (using the same fifference between degrees as Celsius) to measure an object’s energy from absolutely nothing happening (Absolute zero), which in Celsius is -273°C or  −459.67°F) to some super high temperature when the material under investigation would vaporize.  Planck’s experiments showed that a dull red appeared at around 1500K and that an acceptable “white” light from an incandescent filament was around 3200K (5300.3ºF).  Now I don’t know about you but even a cool temperature such as 3200K is pretty darn hot!  And hence the apparent paradox of light temperature, the lower the K temperature the “warmer” the light produced, while the “colder” light is produced as our black body reaches temperatures in K from 5600 (9620.3ºF) and onto to 10,000K (17540ºF) on an overcast day!  And that is damn hot.  If it weren’t for the cultural norms of what is considered a hot and cold color we should be saying that a “blue” day is hot and a red day is cold, if you used Planck’s  color to temperature guide to hot and cold!

So why are we still “seeing” white light regardless of the temperature of the emitting body?  Simple, Newton was the first to show that white light is always a combination of almost equal amounts of light frequencies from the Red, Blue and Green parts of the spectrum.  Our vision system is so good at “balancing” these frequencies that even if there is a small imbalance between the frequencies we perceive it as “white”.  However, tip the scale too far in one frequency direction and you will get a color cast pervading the whole scene.  Theatre lighting designers have know this for years and apart from spot lights, stage lighting is made up of those three colors and when they want “mood” lighting it is easy to adjust the ratio of colors to achieve the desired affect on the scene you are watching.  The other alternative is to “gel” a white light with the desired color (and indeed there are color gel wheels that you can use with a white light (such as a spot light).

Kelvin Color Temps overlaid on human color perception gamut

An example of where our vision system does a marvellous job of “correcting” an imbalance of frequencies is florescent lighting.  Here an examination of the output shows distinct spike in the Red, Green and Blue regions and not much in between.  Originally, the fluorescent materials pumped out more Green than the other two colors.  This doesn’t bother our vision system but it does a digital sensor and unless corrected, either automatically or manually at the time of taking the picture you will get an odd green cast to you shots.  There are other color casts from different light sources and that is why your camera’s White Balance system has so many choices.  Of course for artistic purposes you may want a cast.  The term “White Balance” is used as a historical hangover from early film makers when they would evaluate the light source and figure out, with the aid of filters, how to  “balance” the frequeicies present so that “white” light was produced  by cutting back on the offending frequency that was “out of balance” with the others.

B&W is Still a Strong Contender

We are happy to announce that Patti, Gregory and Roxanne all had pieces judged and hung in the Broward Art Guild’s latest show.  B&W.  Patti was awarded a Judge’s Recognition prize for her work.  See them here.

This show had a very high standard of entry and we are proud to be side by side with the best of the Borward County artists.  B&W photography is not dead.  For the artist it does make you work harder as you try to visualize the finished result in B&W and  tones of grey.  A challenging assignment for all concerned and we are happy to have met that challenge.

Looking for something special for your your art collection?  Go to Mosaic Images Photography for a collection of different fine art photography and mixed media pictures.  You can also download for you screen saver, digital picture frame, TV or smartphone too!