Digital Cameras - a New Look

I thought I knew a lot about digital cameras. I have been taking digital photos for years, and even teaching Photoshop and Photoshop Elements, which process digital pictures. But I am learning some limitations of digital cameras while taking the Digital Darkroom course from Ron Lacey. I never realized how limited my pictures were before.

I have been using a Canon G1 and then a Canon G6, and while these cameras will take pretty good snapshots, they are far from detailed landscape cameras. The lens is the limitation. They have zoom lenses, and that is nice. But the f stop range is only adequate for simpler photos. I have had occasion, in the course I am taking, to want to view photos in a zoomed in condition - say 100 to 300%. And I have found that my pictures do not have a great range of focus. While the photo, for the most part, is in focus there are portions of my shots which always seem to be out of focus. And frankly, I am getting tired of that.

Ron takes pictures with multiple cameras and lenses, including a Canon D40 and a Canon 5D (the top of the line). And the detail in his pictures is amazing. Now I know what detail can look like. And by comparison, my photos are sorely lacking.

In the old days, when I used SLR film cameras (35 mm) I would get excellent range of focus. My best lens had a capability of f1.4 to f16, and at the higher f stops everything was in focus. The problem I had with film cameras was the cost of processing the film and the prints. I just could not afford what I wanted. So when the transition came to digital cameras, I eagerly converted - buying my first Canon G1. And I found I loved the developing cost = one software package (Photoshop Elements) for an all you can develop price. Great.

But now I am beginning to realize that sheer volume of megapixels is not the total answer. My G6 can take photos with 7 megapixels of info in the shot. So my color variation is very good. However, I am discovering that the clarity of my images is limited by the range of the f stop on my camera: f2 to f8. I am also discovering that my older age is a limit. My hands tend to be a tad unsteady when I snap the shots. It also does not help that digital cameras seem to have a longer "keep it steady" time built in as part of capturing the shot.

Ok, this sounds like a bitch session. But really it is just part of my internal process in deciding what kind of digital camera to buy next. I had thought that I wanted the small Canon G9. It is lightweight, portable and has a 12 megapixel photo capture. It also has an image stabilization (is) function, and that is a minimum requirement for my next camera. I had thought the "is" would be enough, but now I am beginning to wonder about the lens capability. I will have to see what I do next. More research, probably.

Digital Darkroom

I am taking an online course from LVSonline.com, called Digital Darkroom with Photoshop. I have taught Photoshop in the past, and thought I was fairly up to speed on how to do things. But I am learning tons from a guy named Ron Lacey, a photographer who lives in Canada. In the first three lessons Ron has shown us how to use Adobe Camera Raw software that is the front end preprocessor for Photoshop CS3. I never realized how powerful ACR can be. It has an amazing number of built in tools to correct photos before the photo is opened in Photoshop.

I am also struck by how many people have been living with "dull" photos that come from their digital cameras. Wow, if only they knew how to brighten them up. Here is a photo taken by one of my classmates during a balloon festival in Iowa.



After I make some adjustments in Photoshop, the image is brightened considerably.



If only they knew how, it would be so easy. Perhaps our instructor will get to that later. I hope so.

Root Canal Anyone?

I had a root canal yesterday. It was an upper rear tooth (#14), and the sucker had four humongous roots. Each one of them had to be reamed out thoroughly. I am a little sore today, and perhaps I will survive. We will see.

I had a previous root canal on the right side last spring, and outside of my panic at having the rubber dam installed blocking off my ability to breathe through my mouth, I was fine. The recovery was no problem. The rubber dam thing was some kind of fear of suffocation. You might not understand unless you are like me with tons of allergies and your nose blocked most of the time. Translation: I rarely breathe through my nose. So when someone blocks my mouth under a rubber dam, I tend to panic. Last time they had to give me 1/2 of some kind of pill and wait 30 minutes for the pill to take effect and calm me down.

So this time I elected for the nitrous oxide, which my wife had for one of her root canals. She said she was so relaxed, she almost slept through the procedure. That sounded good to me, so I tried it. I soon found out that this was the wrong approach for me.

Apparently I have weak nostrils. The doctor placed the breathing apparatus over my nose for the gas after he laid me back in his operating chair. The thing was a heavy plastic nose piece with tubes running into it. Since the doctor wanted me to tilt my head to the right, the gas apparatus slid down toward the right side of my nose (gravity at work). This forced my left nostril into a nearly closed position, leaving my right nostril the only vehicle for the nitrous oxide and that other thing we frail people need: oxygen (aka air). I tried to endure it thinking that the gas would make me woozy and I would not give a damn. The problem was that I wanted to keep on living.

So I fought that mask for an hour and a half; most of the time a hairs breadth away from the panic of not being able to breathe. I felt like I was underwater and trying to breathe through one nostril with one of those reed tubes you find on the side of ponds/lakes. I have seen it done in the movies where people breathe through the reed and their mouths. But I have never seen the reed trick using only one nostril.

After 90 minutes of near panic, I finally asked the doctor to take the gas nose piece off. It was a relief to be able to breathe again. By this time my left nostril was totally closed, but my right continued to work overtime to supply me with office air. Thirty minutes later the doc was done with my tooth. All in all, not one of my better root canals.

If any of you all have one, I hope yours goes better.

Post Holiday Storage - Ugh

I like the holiday season. It looks very festive with all the Christmas lights and wreaths on all the houses. I put mine up this year, at the encouragement of my wife. I installed cup hanger hooks many years ago for hanging lights on the fascia of the house. It makes it easy to hang the string of lights, and even easier to take them down. I jury-rigged some duct tape at the end of an extension pole so the tape forms a little crook. Now all I have to do is use the pole to lift the lights off the hooks and lower the string of lights one hook at a time. And I don't have to climb any ladders to take them down. I do live in a single story house, so I can get away with lowering everything from the ground.

The major problem is always storing the decorations. We live in a retirement community where the people are intended to play golf and drive their golf carts. People are assumed to have rid themselves of all worldly possessions except for golf clubs before they move here. There was no intention to allow people to store anything in the house. Yes we have closets for clothes, but we have no basements, and the only area for storage of large things like boxes is in a crawl space over the garage. Crawl means very little clearance. No standing up. Sitting or hands and knees only. And the only way to reach some of the area is to crawl over and then under the air conditioning tubes that carry the hot/cold fluid from the external heat exchangers to the blower units. The first tube runs parallel to the crawl space floor around 6 inches off the floor. So I crawl over that one. The next air conditioning tube was hung around 14 inches over the floor, so I have to lie on my belly and scoot under that (assuming I have already lifted the boxes over the tube and placed them to the side).

Anyway, it is a pain. I have to use a 15 foot step ladder to get up into the crawl apace. So all boxes are carried up one at a time on the ladder. I had to rig up a pulley on one of the rafters years ago so I could haul up book boxes. So I use the pulley now for heavy stuff.

Well, all is stored now for another year. I will wait until next holiday season to see if I hang lights again.

Photoshop Elements Tutorials

My new Photoshop Elements tutorials are now up on my web site. I have over 20 tutorials, and they are divided according to the skill level of the user. Hopefully this will help someone out there with their Photoshop Elements program. The tutorials are aimed at helping people clean up their digital pictures that they have captured with their digital cameras (or scanned into the computer).

There really is a lack of tutorials online for Photoshop Elements where you don't have to sign up for a course or a book or some "special" offer. My tutorials are all free to use for your personal learning. Enjoy. In time, I will be adding more to the site.

And for you Photoshop users, most of this will be easy to replicate with your program, if you want to give it a try. You might even discover some new uses for masks. That's right. Photoshop Elements adjustment layers and clipping capability can be used to create masking techniques similar to Photoshop.

For those of you that are yearning for lessons in Photoshop (the full up program), take a look at the myjanee.com site. We will start teaching some new courses in January 2008, and by my calendar that's this month. Watch for coming announcements.