Photography etc.

My Canon 100mm USM Macro lens was dropped and the aperture got sticky. Sometimes it would close as required just before the exposure but mostly it wouldn’t. I sent it to Canon to get an estimate for the repair, paid around $60 just for that, and was told eventually the repair would cost $350 plus. The total, therefore, would have ended somewhere about half a thousand dollars, pretty close to what you would have to pay for a brand new grey market lens. So I took my lens back and put it on the shelf for the future and in the meantime used my other lens, Tamron 90mm macro. That was a year ago. This time around, I felt the future has arrived when my Tamron made a screeching sound at an extreme close-up and the camera informed me it has lost communication with lens. That looked like a serious warning of things to expect. It made me to get my Canon 100mm from the shelf and  contact Canon once again. Canon, however expressed its regret and told me they don’t repair this particular lens anymore. Pretty bad. I googled camera repair shops in Los Angeles and stumbled on the Authorized Camera Repair in Koreatown. When I drove there the shop looked more like a photo studio than a camera repair shop but when the owner told me it would cost only $10 for the estimate I thought what a heck. I called the shop a few days later and was told the lens is repairable just that  they need to purchase  a new electronic mechanism to replace the broken one inside the lens. The price would be $169. As I hesitated for a split second what would the repair cost on top of the new mechanism, the man said “Total.” And that includes the ten bucks for the estimate. That’s it guys and girls! Three days later, i.e. yesterday, I got my fixed lens. I just tried it out this morning and it works like charm. Thanks Authorized Camera Repair! Recommended.
To locate them: lacamerarepair.com

Recording a video clip is quite easy and straightforward. Turn on your lights, adjust aperture and exposure in your video camera, place an object onto the turntable and off you go. Thirty or so seconds later you have an HD video… pretty useless for anything but watching it on your TV. The “tiny” movie comes as a humongous file in a strange proprietary format not used by anyone anywhere, not seriously editable with the software that came with your camera or with any other software for that matter. To use it on internet you have to convert it into some widespread format, crop it, resize it to whatever your purpose is, reduce digital noise, remove ambient sound recorded by your camera, adjust its brightness, contrast, color saturation, and sharpness, etc. Where do you start? That was a huge problem for us when we started doing video and there was no one around to give us a hand. We had to figure everything out ourselves.
Again, budget constraints played a considerable role as they always do in our case. We are not quite sure about that, for we’ve never tried to acquire an expensive video processing software package, but I guess buying things like Adobe After Effects (about $500, as seen on internet) can make your life a lot easier. Alias, our budget was only $100, so instead we started looking for freeware or shareware that could do what we needed. It took about a week to collect everything, that includes scanning different forums, downloading free trials, etc. One of the first our discoveries was AVS Video Converter 6. This wonderful program can convert practically any video format (and there are hundreds of them out there) into any other.  It also allows some editing, like cropping and a dozen of different adjustments but these are rather rudimentary, or at least not quite on par with serious video editors. It cost us less than $50 to buy a copy and convert our first video from something called “BDAV MPEG-2 Transport Stream container file” format (file extension .m2ts) that our recorder uses into ubiquitous AVI, or, to be precise,  into “Archos AV500/700;4-series;5-series; Internet Media Tablet – MPEG4, 1800 kbps, Original” file. The conversion runs very smoothly and you can convert any number of files in a batch at once.
So we have a nice AVI file but still there is a distance to cover before we arrive to the video sample shown in the previous post.  Next step is to crop it to a desirable size, get rid of the sound of the turntable motor and people talking in the background, remove digital noise, adjust brightness, contrast, and saturation, and tweak its sharpness. For this, we use a free application we had found in the public domain called Virtual Dub, very simple to use and rich in options. You can save your settings here and load them the next time you open the program for another editing session, which is very handy as most of the videos taken in studio environment are pretty much similar. Once the video is edited, we save it in the same AVI format, native to Virtual Dub but, alias it comes out uncompressed, which means that a 30 second long video takes about a gigabyte of space on your drive. A file this size doesn’t travel well on the internet, it would take ages to upload to any website and, most likely, the website would just refuse to accept it. It means that the video file has to be significantly reduced in size and come out in a format that the customer needs. Some will take AVI but others will ask for and Adobe flash format, one of the Microsoft media formats or Mac, or whatever. Back to the AVS Video Converter and five minutes later the video is ready for delivery. Or is it? Well maybe. Some customers will be content if your cropped video approximately matches the desired width and height but others might be very strict regarding those dimensions. Although it is possible to crop very precisely in Virtual Dub, it’s a bit tiresome and time consuming. You could spend a few extra minutes to crop exactly one video file but it becomes a problem when you deal with hundreds of them, day after day. Towards that end, we found a shareware called VidCrop. Produced and sold by GeoVid for about $60 (single license) it lets you perform very precise crops without losing any of your video quality.
I hope this will help you some, if you are looking for affordable ways to create product video for internet.

It’s been a year or so since we delved into the realm of macro video.  The stimuli were, first, some interest in jewelry videos from our customers who, seeing more and more of such stuff popping up on Internet, started asking if we were planning to provide this service, and, second, a Canon EOS T1i 15.1 MP digital camera we unexpectedly got hold of. Having no prior experience in video, we were a bit reluctant to enter a completely new sphere of imaging. Although using a DSLR and expensive photographic macro lenses for video sounded like a good deal, the first results were quite disappointing. Even with the smallest apertures, the DOF of macro lenses is narrow, meaning that a considerable part of the subject will be blurry. To get around that obstacle, in photography we either focus on the most important element of the subject or use focus stacking technique when several photos of the subject, each focused on a different part, get sandwiched with special software to obtain one image with sharp focus across. Obviously, neither makes sense with a moving (or rather rotating) subject in video. In theory, focusing on the most important element and getting the automatic focusing system in the camera to follow that element around could be possible but our T1i wouldn’t do that. Once you focused it, it would just stick to that point. Sill, the videos we were making at the time found some interest among our customers who would buy them and use on the web but wished the quality could be improved somehow.
Eventually, we gave up the T1i as a tool for macro videos and started looking into dedicated video cameras. Just to try out the possibilities before we make any serious investment, we acquired a simple video recorder – Aiptek Action-HD GVS 1080P – for the price of around $150. It was a small device, very handy for decent quality general filming but not really suited for jewelry macro. With it, you could get pretty close to the subject, somewhere around an inch, but the magnification was not enough for really tiny items and if you tried to zoom in, it wouldn‘t focus. After some experimentation, we managed to obtain quite decent videos by positioning the recorder several feet away from the subject and zooming-in to the maximum. The distance, however, prevented getting as sharp and detailed videos as our customers would have expected. The high definition of the recorder did help with the detail but only to a certain extent. In addition, the recorder is almost full automatic without manual iris or exposure control so you are left to depend on the lighting available and have to apply heavy corrections during the post-processing faze, which also tends to kill pixels. It was obvious that as a permanent solution this type of camera wasn’t good.
At that point we started talking to people who have been able to produce nice sharp macro videos but they used expensive equipment beyond our reach. We needed something on a budget yet rendering quality videos. After some scouting on the internet and comparing different recorders within $1,000 price range we settled on a Panasonic model that cost something like $800 but, unfortunately, was discontinued. So we went to a shop and tried out, hands-on, other Panasonic models similar to the one that had been discontinued. Eventually, we narrowed it down to the just released HDC-TM80, paid $650, set up lights, and turned the recorder on. This time it was totally different experience. The little device is choke-full of features and manual controls, although even in fully automatic mode it shines. It has built-in 16 GB memory and its zoom is 42x. Basically, there is nothing about this recorder that we would not love or feel lacking. Here is one of our first videos produced with HDC-TM80:

Try.

The equipment we use for filming jewelry videos:

Panasonic HDC-TM80 digital recorder.
Sturdy Induro tripod with a pistol-grip head.
2 batteries of  Tricolor Lights with 5 daylight-adjusted tubes each.
A small no-name battery-powered photography turntable that does full circle in about 30 seconds.
A small mirror.
A  collapsible translucent white reflector/diffuser to block reflections from the back in the mirror.

I guess dragonflies like my skills (or just me) and fly over for portraits. This is not really macro photography, in the sense that you use a dedicated macro lens and get close to your subject. Both photos are casual and were taken from a rather long distance with my Canon EF 70-300 mm lens, which becomes something of a 450 mm on the long end with Canon 50D. I have tried the lens for jewelry but it’s not practical. To fill the frame, the object has to be at least the size of a wristwatch because the lens wouldn’t focus if you get closer. A ring would be too small. A stud earring – forget it.

Depth of field (DOF) is a field of infinite struggle and misery in jewelry photography. Traditionally, the only tool to overcome this limitation was tilt-shift lenses (mostly, albeit not exclusively, used with large format cameras with bellows). Digital camera owners, eventually, have come up with a similar setup using tilt-shift adapters as it is nicely described here by  Mr. Alex Koloskov. But these are serious studio devices neither very suitable nor easily affordable for the rest of us. Enter the computers, and the focus stacking method has been developed (also covered very well by Mr. Koloskov here) when several photos taken with different focus point get sandwiched into one in Photoshop or numerous other software applications out there. The result is very sleek. The advance against the shallow DOF has not stopped here, however. Not long ago, GigaPan Systems introduced an interesting device they call GigaPan Epic (for compact cameras) and then GigaPan Epic Pro (for DSLRs) that automates the process of shooting tens or even hundreds of frames and stacking them together. The result is a gigapixel  image of exceptional sharpness across entire photo. We haven’t had a chance to put our hands on the thing, supposedly derived from NASA robotic imaging  technology, although we would love to.

GigaPan Epic Pro

GigaPan Epic

For more images and details visit GigaPan Systems.

Last weekend, we were asked by our client, the jewelry design firm Foreli, to take a few casual shots of the catwalk at a bridal dress show at Marriot downtown Los Angeles. The firm has provided jewelry for the show and wanted to have some images for their own blog. We went there with a Canon D50, Canon 70-300mm zoom, and a Sigma EF-500 DG Super flash. We also had a monopod just in case but in the end didn’t use it. The catwalk was very short so the models threw harsh shadows on the backdrop, which, in turn, was of some abominable color that had nothing to do with white dresses, and the jewelry wasn‘t that prominent from the distance. But… at least we showed up.

Manual exposure
Although automatic exposure, when the camera chooses how much light has to pass onto its sensor, is quite reliable in general photography, it’s pretty much useless when we photograph jewelry. Most likely your background will be white and the camera will try to compensate that by making entire photo way darker, in fact – too dark. A black background will similarly throw the camera into opposite direction – the subject will be overexposed loosing precious detail. Shiny metallic surfaces and the glitter of stones will confuse the camera even more making automatic exposure impossible. Therefore, whatever type of camera you will decide to use, the ability to set exposure manually is a must. All DSLRs come with that ability.

Remote Switch and Tripod
Camera shaking is never desirable in photography but in jewelry (and macro overall) photography it becomes an issue of critical importance. The slightest vibration during (sometimes quite long) exposure gets amplified by a macro lens immensely and will totally ruin the image. Thus simple things like a sturdy tripod and a remote switch to release the shutter are essential. Any kind of remote trigger will do, it can be a cord or a wireless. For tripod, the heavier the better. But it also means that your camera has to be equipped to take on both accessories. A great many of small compact cameras will have neither a tripod nor remote switch socket and even some (typically, lower priced) DSLRs will not have both.

Tethered shooting
If your needs for jewelry photography extend beyond shooting an occasional piece, you should look for a way to connect your digital camera to a computer so that you could see the photo you’ve just taken right away on the screen. The tiny camera viewfinder doesn’t give you enough information what’s going on with the final image, if there is anything to adjust in light, position, etc. Downloading images from your camera or card to the computer after you finish shooting your items and only then examining them on the screen tends to make the whole process quite cumbersome and slow. We will not discuss the computer part here, any computer will do, but you will need special software for such tethered shooting and your camera has to have an ability for it. Again, as far as I know, all DSLRs are equipped for tethered picture taking.

Hot shoe for strobe control
Even if you will be using constant lights for your setup, there are times when you need an external flash, either on-camera or a studio strobe. Therefore, your camera has to have a hot shoe either to attach the flash or a remote trigger for strobes. Unfortunately, many compact cameras lack such a shoe.

RAW file format support
And finally the last thing that comes to my mind, in terms of the necessity, is the ability of the camera to save images in raw format. Raw is an equivalent of film negative. Opened with special software on the computer such file allows you a lot of flexibility in processing your image. Approximately  3 stops of exposure either way, color cast, contrast, saturation, these and other things you can adjust in your image prior to moving it to Photoshop for fine retouching. Although most high-end compact cameras have this feature, it’s not available in less expensive models.

This kind of exhausts camera related issues and establishes the strong position of DSLR in jewelry photography. If you have one, you are quite well equipped to start. On the other hand, all that has been said here, of course, is a simplification to a certain extent and exceptions will be galore on almost anything. It’s possible to take a really good jewelry photo with a compact camera, without tripod or tethering it to the computer, but that will demand much more effort and can be really time consuming.

White Balance, or WB for short.
When we take a picture, the tiny electronic brain of a digital camera has to decide whether the color in the photo matches the true color of the object out there. For that, it generally assumes that the picture is being taken on a clear sunny day when what’s white looks white and all other colors line up accordingly, correctly hued and properly saturated. But let’s say, it’s sunset time and the whole world around is cast in reddish light. For an image whose goal is to capture the ambiance this might be a blessing, but if you need to honestly record the color of the dress on a model, you are in trouble. With that in mind, almost all digital cameras, both compact and DSLR, will let you chose among several lighting conditions and set the camera to either daylight, shade, a cloudy day, tungsten electrical lights, flash, etc.  In most cases, this will work fine. However, when the color of an object has to be captured precisely, those built-in lighting approximations will be too crude and that’s almost always the case in jewelry photography. Thus, to photograph jewelry, you need a camera that will allow you to set the White Balance for your particular light at that particular moment. We will get back to this later, for now it will suffice to say that any DSLR has that feature. It is also true that, to a certain extent, WB could be adjusted later, during the post-processing of an image.

Manual Focus and Viewfinder
In an ideal world, the camera would read your mind and focus precisely where you would like it to focus under all circumstances. The automatic focus built in every digital camera is very good. When it works. However, when you photograph jewelry, especially stand alone precious stones, you never know if it’s going to work or not and many times the lens will be hunting for focus in vain or it will pick up a wrong point to focus on.  If there are any sparks or if there is not enough light, the AF (short for auto focus) will refuse to work. Alias, jewelry is almost always sparkling and at the smallest apertures (because of the shallow DOF) there is almost always not enough light. Therefore we need to focus manually. Most, if not all, compact cameras are very difficult or impossible altogether to focus precisely without automatic focusing system. A tenth of a millimeter can mean a huge difference when the object is tiny. The macro lenses used with DSLRs all have a large focusing ring and are very easy to focus by hand. Obviously, you will also need a very good view of what you are focusing at so any camera used for jewelry must have a through-the-lens viewfinder. The display you see on the back of a compact camera is not suitable for manual focusing.

Let’s start with the camera. Although it would be possible to take a decent picture of a bracelet suitable for E-bay with any – even point-and-shoot – camera, this would be a quite daunting task once we tried to photograph a tiny 0.1 carat diamond set in a earring that is called stud. And if that photo needed to be printed as a poster, we would be really stuck. In short, to photograph jewelry, we need a DSLR (stands for digital single lens reflex) camera with interchangeable lenses. There are several reasons, some pretty obvious, some not so.

A point-and-shoot camera

DSLR (Digital Single Lens Reflex). Canon Rebel XTi, 10 megapixel camera that all the samples below were taken with.

90% of jewelry photography is what goes under the name of macro photography, that is when your camera acts as a microscope. The camera has to see much more than it is visible to a naked eye. Most point-and-shooters and regular photographic lenses seriously limit the proximity to the object and wouldn’t focus if you are too close. Some of those cameras and lenses have a “macro” switch allowing to get somewhat closer but even with such a switch most of the times it will be not close enough: you won’t be able to fill the entire frame with the 0.1 carat stud and will end up with a picture with plenty of void around your object.

An uncropped photo of a ring taken with a regular lens, Canon EFS 18-55mm, at the 55mm end.

The same ring shot with a macro lens, Canon EF 100mm

Cropping, that is cutting off all that empty space, is what comes to mind here but, unless you only need a small thumbnail size picture, most likely it will not work, for there will be very little sharp detail in the object and a lot of noise.

Trying to get closer by cropping. This is the EFS 18-55mm image. Notice how little detail there is in diamonds.

Same area from the image taken with the 100mm macro lens. Diamonds are much better now.

I will discuss the choice of macro lenses later. For now it will suffice to repeat that for jewelry photography you need a camera capable to accept an enlarging, or macro, lens.

The depth of field (DOF), the portion of a scene that appears sharp in the image, is another thing that limits the use of point-and-shoot cameras and regular lenses in jewelry photography and calls for a DSLR and a macro lens. The closer we get to the object the narrower becomes the zone in which everything is sharp in the photo. Outside DOF, that is in front of it and beyond, everything becomes blurry. The only remedy here is the size of the aperture in the lens, or f-number as it is usually called. The smaller the aperture (the bigger f-number), the greater is DOF. With that in mind, macro lenses are designed to have small apertures, smaller than it makes sense to have in a regular, non-macro, lens that has to deal with quite large objects.

F-number 11. Notice how blurry the back of the band and even the back of the ruby is. The lens here is Tamron AF 90mm macro.

Same lens just the f-number is 32, that is the aperture is 10 times smaller. DOF is much better now.

For more advanced information about these technical matters, there is a nice site I would recommend – Cambridge in Colour.

Did I mention image noise? I think I did. That is yet another reason to use a DSLR for macro in general and jewelry photography in particular. Once again, I would like to keep this text simple and easy for somebody who is just starting out in jewelry photography, therefore I won’t get into much detail. Think about image noise as film grain that can greatly degrade the quality of your photo. Noise increases for different reasons, like the sensitivity setting in the camera or exposure time, but in the first place the smaller the camera sensor, the more noise it generates. Larger sensors have bigger photosites and that means that these sites will be more sensitive to extremely small amounts of light and produce a distinctive signal, which will end up as a pixel in the final image. If the photosite is less sensitive, the signal it produces will be vague and will take over the clear signals. When the object we photograph is tiny, and that’s almost always the case in jewelry photography, those vague signals can really stand in the way of getting a clean sharp image.

Comparative DSLR and compact camera sensor sizes

Image noise sample

Noise is always present, no matter what camera you will be using. To a certain extent, it can be removed during the post-processing of the image on the computer.

Noise from the sample above quite successfully removed with Topaz Denoise filter

However, when there is too much noise,

Much noisier patch

there is practically nothing that could be done about it.

A failed attempt to denoise the sample above

(To be continued…)

My deliberate attempt to create a bad photo with a Kodak Zx1.

Stormy Weather Last Night In LA