Racing Horses at a Nadaam Festival
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Category Archives: photography
Woman in Traditional Mongolian Attire: and a truth (or two) about ISO and noise
This was a challenging image for me to create. The scene occurred in a poorly lighted, poorly staged school auditorium. And at the time, my understanding of how camera’s work was still quite imperfect. A fundamental misapprehension I was laboring under was regarding ISO. No need here to lumber through all the incomplete and inaccurate information I subjected myself to. Instead, let’s take a quick dive into the subject.
First this: ISO is both an acronym and a word. In that way, it is akin to the word-acronym ASAP. I-S-O stands for International Organization for Standardization. According to this organization, the correct pronunciation of ISO is eye-soh, not eye-ess-oh. On that authority, (there is no higher), Barbra and I treat ISO as a word, pronounce it eye-soh, and since despite its capitalization it isn’t a proper noun, we play it in Scrabble. Similarly, during my entire enlistment in the United States Navy, I don’t think I ever heard anyone pronounce ASAP spelled out as A-S-A-P. Instead, ASAP was treated as a word, pronounced A-sap, and was used to mean something like “five minutes ago.” As in, “Petty Officer Donachy! Where is the report I asked you to type up? I need it A-sap!” Thus eye-so and A-sap it is, at least in our house.
Second, allow me to suggest this: It is a wise policy to take with a grain of salt manufacturers’ and marketers’ claims regarding the high ISO levels their cameras and “handle.” I suppose it comes down to what is meant by the word “handle,” but a general truth is that the higher the ISO value, the greater the risk for noise in your images. Noise… graininess, strange lines, aberrant coloration.
If you take a picture in fairly decent light, and you get the exposure right, and you don’t do much retouching, you might get away with a fairly high ISO setting. Since ISO sensitivity varies from camera to camera, I won’t provide an exact number here. “High” means whatever “high” means for each camera. Don’t think too much about specific numbers. It’s the concept here that matters.
Problems associated with high ISO settings will begin to manifest themselves when you a) significantly retouch an image, or; b) attempt to make a large print. Noise will appear as you attempt to darken an overly bright sky, lighten shadows, or sharpen subjects. As a serious photographer, once you begin to notice noise you will start looking for it. You won’t be able to help yourself. That’s good. Because magazine editors, gallerists, clients and others you hope to build relationships with will be looking for it too.
Not advice, but an observation: If you strive to keep ISO settings low, you will find that you have more flexibility in retouching and enlarging images. These days, shooting primarily with a D850, I find myself carefully considering making any image where I have to push the ISO past about 400. If I could make all my images at ISO values of 100 or less, I would. In most cases, I will sacrifice depth of field and shutter speed rather than push the ISO past 800.
Of course, there are times when there isn’t much choice in the matter. I have images of bears and owls that were captured in very low light. In order to maintain shutter speed and avoid motion blur, I had to go with a fairly high ISO. No real choice.
The above photograph? No flash, shutter speed 1250, aperture 2.8, ISO 4000. Were I making this image now, I’d reduce the shutter speed which in turn would allow me to reduce the ISO. Reduced shutter speed might also have given me room to increase the depth of field by closing the aperture a bit. The picture probably looks pretty good on a phone, a tablet or a small computer… but beyond that, I’m limited in what I can do with it.
As always, comments and questions are welcome.
Yolan Am (Lammergeier Valley): a disappearing ice field in Mongolia’s Gobi Desert
Our brief time in Yolan Am, a narrow gorge in the northern Gobi Desert, was a highlight of our two years in Mongolia. We encountered a number of Siberian Ibex there – the Eurasian wild Mountain Goat, the males of which sport massive, backward curving horns -, a Central Asian Pit Viper, raptors including eagles and Lammergeiers, Red-billed Choughs, Chukars and other birds, Mongolian Pikas, gerbils and other wildlife. We stayed in a nearby ger, a yurt-like home common in the Mongolian countryside, and kept our energy up on traditional Mongolian fare (goat meat and mutton are commonly featured).
The Yolan Am Ice Field, which formerly became several meters thick over the course of each winter and remained throughout the year, now becomes a small stream by early fall. If you get the opportunity, by all means go. The entire Gobi Desert region is fascinating. And things are changing. Quickly.
Daurian Partridges
I’d been shooting for about four years when I took the above photograph. Still not sure what I wanted to photograph, our Lightroom catalogue was becoming populated with images of wildlife, portraits, landscapes, fishing, food, family events and so forth. But no doubt about it, birds have always held a fascination – and, though I didn’t know it at the time, would become my pathway forward.
It may be that for most of us a general approach is the most logical entry into a new endeavor. But based on my own experiences as well as observations of others, it seems that it is not until we specialize that rapid growth begins. So the angler eventually finds her way into fly-fishing, and not just fly-fishing broadly, but a specific type of fly-fishing. A cook becomes a chef when he undertakes to master a specific culinary repertoire. And so on. The interesting thing is that as one specializes, broader skills and knowledge are acquired and sharpened. So that even catching bluegills or frying an egg is performed with greater proficiency… while simultaneously a leap into a new kind of fishing or cooking, launched for a base of expertise, is also made easier.
A generalized approach feels comfortable, particularly at the start of a journey. The broadness, the lack of pressure to get one thing right, feels safe. But if one truly wishes to master a vocation, it is sound advice to not linger overly long with as a generalist. Specialize. Pick an area and dive deep. Take what is in front of you. Doable. For a couple of years, the best angling available to me was carp fishing. Not my first choice of fish, but I lived within a short bicycle ride of a fine river with a good population of the cyprinids, and so I threw myself into it… and saw my skills in virtually all areas of angling improve. Surely this is the way it is with most things – photography, culinary arts, writing, art… Begin the journey with a broad approach, but with eyes open for a narrowing path.
Red-billed Chough Portrait: and Do Birds Hold Funerals?
I must’ve been around 13 years old, walking up the Route 322 hill to my summertime job at Martin’s Exxon Plant when I came upon a stunningly bright Indigo Bunting hovering and circling madly back on forth from nearby brush to the shoulder of the road. There on the stony berm, lifeless, was a brown bird of similar size and shape. His mate. The victim of an automobile – most of which, in this man’s opinion, are permitted to travel far too fast for anyone’s safety and sanity… this unending modern obsession with “getting somewhere.” I digress.
It was my first encounter with the deeply rooted connection – emotions – birds can feel for one another. Fearing the frantic male’s behavior would result in him joining his mate as a victim of the traffic whizzing by, I picked her up and placed her in an open area in the brush away from the highway. So that he could mourn more safely.
As years went by I witnessed other examples of similar behavior among various species of birds: crows, magpies, a pair of Narcissus Flycatchers – the one fallen and the one who would not leave his or her mate’s or offspring’s side. A group of Magpies that would not leave an injured member of the flock. A family of Ravens appearing to search for a child that had gone missing.
But the behavior of these Red-billed Choughs was a first for me: not merely a pair of birds bonded through nesting and breeding, but a small flock, gathered on the ground, unwilling to leave a fallen brother or sister. I wish I had thought to make a video record of the event.
On the other side of the rock the chough in the above photograph is perched upon was a jumble of feathers, bony, disembodied feet, blood. The remains of a friend, a loose circle of other choughs pacing solemnly around those remains. I have since wondered what, if anything, the bird in the photo’s perch on the rock, slightly above the others, may have indicated about its status.
Red-billed Choughs at Dusk
I decided to render this as a subtle duotone – a two-colored photograph – by enhancing the red on the one (and only) bill that showed the characteristic coloration of this corvid species. There was very little light when I captured this hand-held image; thus the remaining bills on these otherwise mostly black birds appear in colorless silhouette. Duotones can feel a bit gimmicky, but I like the effect here. What do you think?
I have begun working on a color portrait of one of these fascinating birds and will publish it tomorrow if all goes well.
Untethered
Ice Needles
Bactrian Camels, Gobi Desert, Mongolia (and the question: Should I set my digital camera to RAW or JPEG?)
See the original RAW file below.
There is not a clear date as to when we began to routinely create our images in RAW format. Most (all?) of the instructional material we had studied paid too little attention to this matter, or waffled on it, and so we didn’t appreciate the differences in the two formats.
Now we shoot everything – every image we might ever use other than strictly for ourselves – in RAW. Which is to say that while we sometimes use our phone to make a quick JPEG photo of our very fine kitty-cats Georgie and Kita for Facebook, or to take a field shot of a mushroom or flower we wish to identify, we’ve pretty much given up the idea that a JPEG file will suffice when we want to capture anything more than a quick record. We say that even though we have published photographs from original JPEG files in national magazines. And we say that knowing that at least one friend scored a national magazine cover with a JPEG phone shot.
So, yes, it’s possible to get a very nice capture in JPEG. In fact, oftentimes sports photographers shoot in JPEG – particularly when getting a photo out to a publisher in a timely manner is paramount. In a well-lighted stadium filled with agreeably contrasting colors, there may not be a need to retouch a photograph. Similarly, on a blue-sky mid-day at the beach, there may not be much – or any – advantage to capturing the scene in RAW format over JPEG.
But setting such circumstances aside, one’s odds of making a satisfying image increase if one begins with a RAW file. That same beach in soft morning or evening light or under a sky filled with storm clouds will photograph with more richness and subtlety when captured as a RAW file.
However, shooting in RAW is predicated on having the ability to retouch (process) the original image file in Lightroom or some similar program – and then committing oneself to doing so. Because the drawback to shooting in RAW is that images tend to look flat until they’ve been retouched.
So…
Generally speaking, if one’s objective is to take good – and perhaps sometimes even beautiful – pictures for an audience of family and friends, or simply to make a field record for one’s own use, and to do so with as few complications as possible, set the camera to JPEG, shoot away, and have fun.
If one’s objective is to more consistently create beautiful and even artistic images, set the camera to RAW, and then commit to evaluating and retouching images with editing software. Such software is the digital analog to processing film in a darkroom. Because a RAW image contains much more information than does a JPEG image, the software will provide more control when it comes to adjusting white balance, bringing out detail in shadowed areas, fine tuning color, sharpening details and controlling the amount of noise in an image.
One place the difference between RAW and JPEG most obviously manifests itself is in skies. Generally speaking, there’s not a lot that can be done to a sky in JPEG before noise – graininess, weird colors, strange lines – begins to emerge. RAW provides considerably more latitude before noise emerges… and once you begin to notice noise in images, you can’t stop noticing it.
Which brings me to this concluding observation. Whether one wishes to grow as a writer, musician, fly-fisherman, photographer, chef or in any creative activity, next to studying the accomplishments of others and applying the lessons therein, there is no substitute for mindful, purposeful self-editing. If you shoot in RAW, you will be compelled to edit your work.
Growth will come from that.
After the Dzud (зуд): Camel Skull, Gobi Desert
A dzud (zud, зуд) is a weather-related phenomenon in arid parts of central Asia. It could be heavy snow or ice; or a lack of snow or rain; severe cold; drought. Any widespread weather pattern that prevents livestock from obtaining sufficient food or water. Mass deaths… and economic disaster for the semi-nomadic families who follow their animals – goats, sheep, yaks, camels, horses – from place to place across steppelands, grasslands and desert. Roughly a third of Mongolia’s 3.3 million people live this life – among the world’s last nomadic herdsman.
CutterLight 