These are mostly diving pictures so far, but more will come later. It takes quite a bit of time to post them from here. Not the fastest of Internet uplinks.
Anyhow: we are now packing up and heading for the airport to go back to Virginia tonight. Then, tomorrow, we will be leaving our house yet again and going down to Richmond to visit friends for Thanksgiving. Lots of travel, but the next time will be much easier – no wet dive gear to deal with…
While down here in Cabo, I have been using my new Canon PowerShot G9. And if you read my previous posts, you’ll remember that I had a heck of a time getting it to play nice-nice with Lightroom. I got an meail that notified me of some updates to both Lightroom and Photoshop CS3 surrounding a new version of Camera RAW – version 4.3.
This makes all life great. Really. Well, for those of us using a new camera released since version 4.2 came out it certainly helps. I dropped all the calibration settings that I did and imported the pictures with the default settings that came with Lightroom 1.3 [the updated version which has the new ACR 4.3 included] and lo-and-behold. Magic. Sure, Lightroom does its usual thing of optimizing [which I may re-do the calibrations with the new ACR], but all in all, it’s a wonderfull difference.
Now that it works as it should, processing the underwater pictures should be much easier. Oh – and I’ll let you know when some get posted…
We are in Cabo San Lucas. Life is relaxing. Of course, it wasn’t relaxing all week…
There were some hiccups while trying to find the dive shop. We actually missed our first dive due to construction and our inability to find our way around. However, we were able to find a place to call from and got detailed directions from the owner and signed up for the afternoon dive instead. Along the way, we were suckered into the time share schpeil. Yeah, we got a free breakfast, but sheesh! The sales pitch was painful. Ah, well. Live and learn.
Finally, we got to the dive shop and found that it was a hole in the wall. Literally. Talk about tiny. We even had to jump into the boat from the sand of the beach. I guess I’m spoiled. I like the Cozumel way of doing things. So – we dove 3 days and decided to call it quits. There was not enough visibilty or things to photograph and the water got real cold down deep. We decided that 6 dives was enough and that some relaxation time was what we really wanted. Tomorrow will be a sit-by-the-pool day. I might even have an umbrella drink.
Oh – and my dive computer died early in the 4th dive. Nice. I’m back to gages and tables now. I hope it was just batteries and when I can find some new ones, everything will be fine… I hope. If not, well… we won’t be diving for a while due to having to save up for some new equipment.
We have taken a good amount of pictures, but nowhere near what I usually do. I will post them here as soon as I can.
Two days and I’ll be in Mexico. We are really excited about the trip and it couldn’t come at a better time. I REALLY need a vacation. I need to get my mind off of work and come back with a fresh attitude.
What I’m really looking forward to is the opportunity to take some underwater pictures with my new camera setup, but also to have no responsibilities except for choosing a place to eat. It’s been far too long since I had a real relaxing vacation – one where I can sit on a beach with an umbrella drink in my hand and not worry about what time it is or if I have to write a document when I get up in the morning… I’ll just have to remember to get up and go diving. That’s not hard.
Now that it’s cold outside and has dropped below freezing a couple of times and even been a few flurries in the wee hours of the moring up here, I feel that it’s time to “winterize” the site. Notice the nice, snowy banner… That was near our old house. I can’t wait for real snow!
Well, it’s now the weekend and I’m happy work is done with for a while. Next week will be very short and then we’ll fly out to Mexico!
Certainly it does when it comes with an insurance package…
I just joined PPA – Professional Photographers of America. It’s an opportunity to get me more exposure to the business side of the business… as well as some good networking, education, and other discounts and such. Since the business is just begining to grow [after all, we’ve only done a couple of weddings and some church events so far] I felt it was time to make it official. Of course, I joined at the associate level which doesn’t put me in the referral database. I’m not sure I’m ready for that yet. I want to get through the rest of the year and all of the vacations/holidays coming up and then maybe we’ll start marketing and promoting the business.
I guess I’ll have to hire an accountant then… maybe even get some legal advice.
Having finally found the “correct” camera calibration, I’ve now reimported my entire library back into Lightroom and have begun processing again. I’ve now posted some of the remaining pictures from Curaçao which have been waiting since last year. Maybe, by the time it’s time to leave for this year’s dive trip, I’ll have last year’s pictures posted. I have one more directory to finish, and I’m goinig to try to do it in the next hour or so. Those will be the pictures of the town of Willemstad, which is quite colorful.
Now that I feel I’m not fighting Lightroom, maybe I can process the remaining 3000 pictures sitting in my “working” documents.
2012-01-08 23:30:18
Last week, I received my Ikelite case for the Canon G9. This case is brand new. So new, in fact, that I am probably one of the first people to get one. I bet that even the underwater photography product reviewers got theirs no faster than I. It was released on October 17th and in my hands in the afternoon of the 19th. That’s what I call fast.
This came well ahead of time, since for a while, we were worried that the case wouldn’t come. The Canon case, which is much smaller and has less features, will not be released until Nov. 15th… and we leave on our trip on Nov. 14th. That wouldn’t work. So, for a while, I was nervous since I had no idea when I would actually get the case. But, I have it now, so all is good and I’m completely psyched up for our dive trip now.
I have to say that this will be unlike any underwater photography experience I’ve had to date. Previously, I carried only a pocket camera and a relatively similar sized case. Now, however, this case and external strobe is… well, HUGE. It is not, of course, that large in comparison to other Ikelite cases [especially since those are geared for D-SLR cameras], but it’s not a pocket camera case even though the G9 is a pocket camera. I’ll have to post a picture of me holding it since it’s rather larger than anything I’ve used so far. The stobe is nice and powerful [I got the DS-51, which is the bottom of the line, but it still works great – better than I expected] but having it mounted so far up will take some getting used to.
Be warned: some technical information follows…
So – in the previous posting, you learned:
The good new is that I have found a solution that will help me keep the pictures as they should appear… I think.
I have been reading about how to make the renderings of ACR or Lightroom match the regular output of what the JPG image looks like straight out of the camera, and I found a technique using an X-Rite ColorChecker and Thomas Fors‘ script. The gist of it is this: you take a picture of the color card in daylight-balanced light [two lights at 45 degree angles from the card on either side] at multiple exposures to ensure that you get it right. Then, you take that RAW file, open it in Photoshop, select four points on the image, and run the script. The script does some things – I have no clue what, except that it takes a long time – and then outputs a chart of what your camera calibration settings in the different color bands should be; e.g. Red Hue -16, Red Saturation 56 or other such values. You then open a regular RAW image [not the color chart] taken with that same camera and either in ACR or Lightroom, go to the Camera Calibration section and enter the values it spits out. Then, save it as the default for that camera and it will make those same adjustments to each RAW image taken by that camera. We have three, so we took three calibration shots with each camera and chose our favorite exposre.
Now – even this isn’t “right”, but it’s closer than ACR gets and it looks much more intense. I will be spending some time making minor adjustments, but I will be comparing the looks from Canon’s native software and Lighroom to make sure that I’m getting what I see when I look through the lens.
As a sample, this is what the script recommended for my 5D:
For the G9, the settings were quite different:
That’s quite different if you were to see what these settings do to the image. The results were that the RAW processed for the G9 did not look horrid anymore, but still was not quite right. It will definitely take some tweaking and a little more work. I just want our pictures to look their best.
And, phew! What a lot of work!
First: the good news. I just got a notice from B&H that the underwater case for my new G9 has shipped! I was not expecting this until next week. The case was to be released by Ikelite on the 17th [today], so I expected shipping lag time, but it seems that the case will be here on Friday. I gotta test it out! It will be the finest piece of underwater photography gear that I’ve ever owned.
Now, the bad news… I downloaded the RAW files from the new Canon G9 [which will be taken underwater on our vacation] and opened them in Adobe Lightroom. Much to my horror, I watched the pictures change from nice to HORRID!
This is a thing that happens when you import pictures into Lightroom – it runs Adobe Camera RAW [henceforth refered to as ACR] to process RAW files, and ACR has some defaults that it uses. So when you import RAW images into Lightroom [this doesn’t happen with JPG files], you see the thumbnail picture as it appeared in your camera’s LCD. Then, when it has a chance to fully process the picture and generate its own thumbnail, the picture “shifts” to the preferences specified in the ACR profile for the supported camera. This happens with both the 5D and the XTi, but the G9 is currently “unsupported” in ACR and Lightroom 1.2. This means that the software doesn’t have a statistical baseline for guessing what the proper defaults should be. The minor changes in images from the big cameras have so far been minor and have caused us some minor inconveniences, but the changes “guessed” at for the G9 have changed the pictures beyone recognition. I was going to have to revert to using the Canon software programs to perform all image extractions, but there is some good news.
I discovered a site that talked of using a color chart and a Photoshop script to calibrate ACR and Lightroom to not just the model of your camera, but your specific camera and any chromatic deviations that its senor might exhibit. This may mean that I can keep using Lightroom and make sure that it does not change my photos to look different than they were captured. I will post more of this tomorrow with links and such, as I’m getting tired and want to sleep now.
One thing I did learn, however, is that the CR2, NEF, and even DNG formats [basically all RAW file formats] are all a slightly modified version of TIFF. Interesting, yes? Oh – and I learned another thing: there is a science behind color management in the digital world – and I have had only the faintest glimpse and am seriously intimidated. Wow. My brain hurts.
::: jeffphillips.org ::: 