Can I plug my Photography?

[Paleo Pete]

Thanks Bill. My father was too, very amateur, but wouldn't let me touch a camera...he and a friend developed their own B&W in the 60's, I watched a few times but was never allowed to touch anything. So I learned much later on..

[km6xz]

My favorite is the same as Juan's, the Wood Storks in Fog

I suppose these span some time since I notice a difference in post processing. Most of the macros were not over sharpened, and did not have the halos the bird shots did. Some like the Woodpeckers in portrait orientation has a pretty wide edge halo that will detract from a large print. The amount of sharpening is not causing that but the radius being too large. If you back off on the radius a bit the detail sharpness will still be there but without the edge halos. I suspect your editing monitor might be too bright, since most of the shots are giving up almost a stop of high tones but whites are still close to white.
The macros look steady enough to appear tripod mounted but you mention these are hand held. They are sharp without much motion blur but some of the field birds do have motion blur, particularly seen with beaks against solid sky. Upping shutter a bit should take care of that.
I shoot with another brand but we have a community of both pro and amateur shooters you are welcome to drop by, Nikonians.org, with 385,000 paid members and many unpaid members. I am a moderator and handle a lot of questions and diagnostics. I primarily shoot portraiture, studio, club/event, architecture and landscape, mostly with a D800 but have other bodies and a lot of fast primes and 2.8 zooms. The group has a lot of pro wildlife and macro shooters, neither of which are my specialties.
Good luck with the sales and your really good shooting.

[Paleo Pete]

km6xz - Thanks for the comments. Glad to see someone else on here who knows a little about photography. I've been at it for 30 years, but I know far from everything...

Most of my shots have very little sharpening, I don't like the pixellated look they get if over sharpened. I do set in camera sharpening, and it seems to do fairly well. Can't remember but I think it's set to medium. I use Irfan View for all my editing, and it doesn't have a setting to adjust the radius, just the amount of sharpening, and I probably use it on one out of twenty shots or less. I also do the least editing I can get by with, I'm pretty much what you see is what you get. Usually I crop, increase the contrast slightly and that's it. Probably half my shots got nothing but cropped. What you see is what came off the camera. I also shoot JPEG, tried RAW for about 1500 shots, didn't like it at all and went back to JPEG.

The macro work I do pretty much rules out tripod most of the time. Insects won't sit still while I set it up, and many of the tiny flowers are too low and a tripod can't get there. So I use whatever means I can to brace the camera while I shoot, and cross my fingers. Depending on the macro rig, sometimes I use my hand on the ground and rest the lens on a finger, sometimes I use my knee as a brace. Or a fence post...stump...and sometimes I put a mini tripod on it and use that as a handle.

Shooting birds I have to take whatever shutter speed I can get. I rarely shoot wider than f8 aperture, since the bird lens I've been using (Vivitar 200mm M42) seems to start getting decreased sharpness if I go to f5.6, it's noticeable enough I avoid going wider than f8. At f8 it gets excellent results. So if I have enough light, I can get speeds of 1/500 or faster, and in some cases, like a couple of the Snowy Egret shots, I was able to shoot f11 and still get 1/750. Usually it's more like 1/250 or so.

The difference you see in processing might be the difference in cameras, or maybe you're seeing a few that did get a bit of sharpening...The older shots were taken with a Pentax K-x, which I think was set slightly different, the newer ones are from a Pentax K30. Over time I've also gotten more picky about less processing if possible. The K30 has been great, but now the 200mm lens I was using is no working so until I can afford another one I'm fighting with a 135mmm that I've never been happy with. I have to get really close to get anything at all...which is one of the reasons I want to start getting a few sales...

Anyway thanks for the comments. I've been a member on Pentax Forums for several years and get some great tips there too. Camera Enthusiast forums as as well but they don't seem to be getting a lot of traffic.. pretty good forum though, and oriented toward photography in general, not Pentax specific, which is one of the reasons I like it.

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[km6xz]

Hi Billy,
Shooting JPG might seem easier but it does really limit your options. Since there is heavy compression, a lot of data is lost, but tolerable is printed or displaced without modifications. If there are any changes to the file, saving it requires additional compression. But this time the data is 8 bit but the first camera rendering was 12-14 bit. One of the key advantages of RAW is that the original data is left intact and for each display medium and size can be rendered with a first generation JPG for display. The multiple compression is what caused the halo of 6-8 pixels width in the images I was commenting on. Digital photography is just like film, there are two parts that have to be done well or else all is for naught. If you shot film and did not process yourself, you had a lab make a great many adjustments or corrections but you might have not seen the actions taken to get the print to look as it did. So many assumed that film was "more natural" because that critical second step was hidden from view. For those who did their own developing, the importance of the skill and judgement in processing was clearly in their face.
Digital has an analog of commercial labs, the built in-rendering of raw data to create a jpg. But the camera is making a lot of assumptions that most photographers would rather have a say in, which they can do in RAW. Your camera has the SONY 16mpx sensor which has incredibly low read noise, the only the only better is the D800, 36mpx. My main spare camera has the same sensor, the D7000 and it is one of the lowest artifact sensors ever made for DSLRs. So even more than typical cameras, you are giving up more dynamic range, and shadow recovery by shooting and editing jpg's.
Talk about shadow recovery, and DR, you will get 2.5-3 stops more DR and protection from high tone blowout beyond what your histogram displays since it is displaying the rear monitor jpg rendered version of the file, instead of the RAW data rendered with a high bit width like a quality rendering engine does, in TIFF or Digital Negative format from Adobe.
One advantage of such low read noise, the camera until about 3200 ISO has a linear ISO<>noise factor so shooting a scene that needs more shutter speed, like birds in flight, you can intentionally under-expose by a couple stops to get your speed up a the same number of stops and end up with the same noise as if shooting for correct exposure that required slowing down the shutter, and accepting motion blur. If shooting RAW, boosting the exposure, with simple numerical amplification of the brightness, by a couple stops results in an image with the same color depth, and noise as exposing with the two stops slower shutter, but without the motion blur. The Pentax engineers have played with the RAW processing however so there is full time noise reduction that can't be defeated in the K5 and K30 so high ISO ends up with quite a bit of detail loss. The SNR takes a jump up around ISO 3200, which makes small prints look less noisy but large prints have noticeable detail loss. Shooting at 100 ISO is where that camera shines.
Although the camera is pretty good in guessing the scene conditions, it is not as accurate as your own perception and working with a color corrected and calibrated monitor working with RAW.
Here is an example of a shot with 6 stops underexposure, which with film or most cameras would be simply deleted. It was in a dark club and the flash did not go off(I inadvertently set it to Remote when turning it on).
The second photo is the same file but pushed 5.5 stops in post.

That was with a D800 but your K30 can do almost as much recovery of color and luminescence. I have done the same with the D7000 which has the same sensor as yours, but without the non-defeatable NR.

If you wanted to up your shutter speed while staying below 3200 ISO, you could open your aperture a but since your DOF will be deeper with the crop sensor than 35mm by a stop so that would pick up shutter speed, and you have the option of increasing shutter a couple stops if shooting RAW, and boosting in post processing. Some editing software handles this a lot better than those indented for casual use. The lowest cost, easiest to use is Adobe Lightroom , much cheaper than the very powerful but less photographer friendly Photoshop CS6. A free rendering program that is really good for RAW is RAW Therapee, open software. It has some great features but its great flexibility means a little steeper learning curve. A very good free layer based image editing program that is similar to Photoshop(it is different in its layering concept so an experienced PS user would have more trouble adopting to it than someone who is new to pixel level editing. That is "The GIMP" which available for all the popular operating systems and the number one pixel level editing suite for Linux users. GIMP - The GNU Image Manipulation Program

Talk to your friends on the forum about the advantages of shooting RAW for images that benefit from more detail, color depth and more flexible file manipulation. Post processing is always needed, even if you just let the camera make its best guesses. Read up on Ansel Adams and his great landscapes were as much or more the result of his creativity mastery of the developing process.
Good luck with the sales and your craft, you obviously have the eye for it.

[Paleo Pete]

I've heard all about RAW vs JPEG, tried it, didn't like it. There's tons of debates going over it all the time. I almost never shoot higher than ISO400, have alll the noise reduction I can turned off, since I didn't like what it did when I first used it. I just didn't like spending 4 times as long editing pictures every night. After I spend 4 to 6 hours in the field with a camera in my hands, I didn't like spending another 3 hours editing, for the same results. I just didn't see it as being all that much better.

I have a copy of Adobe Print Shop on my desktop, which i packed away in a box right now, does a pretty good job but I almost never used it, Irfan View does everything I need and handles RAW too. Also have GIMP, I've been using it since somewhere around 1998 or so. The newer version has a hell of a learning curve, but is excellent.

Normally I try not to under or over expose, I get good results most of the time with a good exposure. I'm wondering if the issues you mentioned may have been from shots I took before I got the K30 really fine tuned the way I want it. The white outlines in a few may be from a 135mm lens that has a tendency to cause that, I usually don't post them unless it's a really good shot. I also limit the print size of those because I know it will stand out like a sore thumb in a large print.

I don't think you'll ever convince me to go back to RAW, believe me it's been tried...I did give it a good try for around 1500 shots, I found it really annoying to deal with and especially having to sharpen every single shot. Didn't like it at all. Some people love it, I hated spending all night in front of a computer when I would much rather be done with it and pick up a good book...Most of the time I spend no more than 2 minutes on any shot, and generally get good results. Many of the ones posted to FAA got no editing at all, just a crop. Probably 90% of my shots are taken at ISO200, so I get no noise to speak of, and the K30 seems to do a very good job with details and sharpness if I can peg the focus right...that's not always possible with all manual lenses, but you'll never see the ones that are not in focus, they get deleted in seconds...Lately I've been tinkering with ISO100 a bit more, as well as using a 50mm lens a lot more, and will probably be doing it for a while until I can replace the 200mm that went belly up a while back. Since that was my main bird lens, it really sucks, the 135mm means I have to get a lot closer, and I'm not really completely pleased with either of the ones I have, so I've been doing a lot more wide angle lately...

Anyway I appreciate the comments, and I understand what you're trying to get across, I simply didn't like it when I tried it, so I went back to JPEG.

[km6xz]

Hi Billy, I will not try to convince you of the benefits of RAW but you might want to try a highly efficient easy and fast program such as Lightroom before making a judgement of the various options. The software you are using is not going to be as easy, accurate or fast as the photographer oriented programs out there.

The white edges is excess processing by the camera or post. ALL camera generated JPG use sharpening, it is a requirement for the process to compensate for the intentional blurring by a set amount of the optical low pass filter to prevent moire. Sharpening is a mathematical process that returns the captured data resolution to that of the image before passing through the low pass filter. A noticeable improvement in perceived resolution and micro contrast is achieved by selectively applying the sharpening instead of the blanket set level of sharpening the camera applies when rendering JPGs.

Detail is lost due to automatic Noise Reduction you can't turn off in the K30, that even impacts RAW. A few of the Canon cameras has gone to full time NR also which cuts apparent noise but also kills detail.
Your shooting at 100 ISO might require too low of shutter speed for hand held unless in good light, but it increases DR and color. I don't shoot with a tripod much but when I do, it really makes a difference by allowing 50-100 ISO and sharpness that is compromised with hand holding. I shot an event Monday night dropped SS to 1/125 with flash and noticed an unfortunate difference in sharpness compared to 1/250 which is my most common people shutter speed with speed-lights. Mostly using f/4 and ISO 400 to allow more ambient light contribution. For small prints or web use the images were great but not what would be needed for large prints at the native 8000pixel width print. Printing large really shows any slight weakness in technique and processing.

One misunderstanding I hear a lot, about proper exposure, is that a camera over exposes or under exposes. Actually in any wide spectrum light ALL cameras, even very wide DR cameras like the D800 with 14.4 stops of DR, clips on something or loses data in black because any outdoor scene will have 6-8 stops more tone range than your camera in RAW or 8-12 stops more range than jpgs from the same camera. SOMETHING in the scene is over or underexposed.

Good luck and have fun.