DPP: Exercise 10: White Balance

The purpose of this exercise is to examine the effects of the camera's white balance settings under several lighting conditions.  The first set was shot in ares pictured above, the afternoon sun off to the right, the camera pointed at the area in direct sunlight in the red circle.  The arrow points to a shaded spot just out of frame where a second series was taken.

DPP: Exercise 9: Scene Dynamic Range

This exercise is a continuation of the last, but requiring five scenes in a variety of settings and ranges.  Here is the first.  I will add more as the week progresses.   The image was captured in P mode with matrix metering and wide-area auto-focus.  The camera was then set to spot metering and single focus, and meter readings taken at each of the spots indicated with an exposure setting.  The image shows a middling dynamic range, with 3.3 stops between the darkest and lightest elements.

DPP: Exercise 8: Your Camera's Dynamic Range

The previous two exercises looked into perhaps the biggest issues in digital capture:  highlight clipping and noise.  These correspond to the camera's extremes of the tonal palette, the light and the dark, and it is this range that is examined here.

The brief calls for shooting a scene with a range of contrast in bright daylight .  It also calls for a white card, but this was omitted since the scene had a couple of reasonable sized white patches (the bar on the No Entry sign and the painted curb).

The scene was shot in AP, multi-metering mode, with no noise reduction.  Extreme brightness required using exposure compensation to dial down 1EV.   Playback showed some clipping on the white curb, but as the previous exercise indicated the camera overcompensated in its display of highlight clipping, I thought this exposure would be adequate and not show any clipping once imported into LR.

DPP: Exercise 7: Tolerance for Noise

The brief for this exercise calls for a series of captures at the camera's full range of ISO settings with the intention of demonstrating noise.  Noise may be the result of insufficient photons striking the sensor and may occur when shooting under low light, with long shutter speeds, or high ISO settings.  The result is the speckling effect seen in the right image in the pair above, showing captures at 80 (l) and 6400 (r) ISO.

DPP: Exercise 6: Highlight Clipping

The purpose of this exercise is to demonstrate the process of highlight clipping.  This happens when at least part of an image is overexposed to such an extent that visual details are lost in what appears to be a bright light, or bright spot.  It may also be said of such an image that it is "blown out," that is detail is blown away by bright light.

The brief calls for finding the exposure settings at which highlight clipping first appears in a contrasty scene (some light and dark elements), then shooting one image one-step higher, followed by three images each one step lower than the preceding.

Simple as it seems, I am having some difficulty.  What my Sony RX100 and Lightroom tell me are not the same.

This is a rather poor capture from my iPad, but it serves the purpose as it shows the camera reading a large area of highlight clipping on the left near a window.  This flashes black in camera.  Note that the histograms show minimal clipping in blue.  Also note that this is not a live view available while shooting, but viewable only after capture.

DPP: Exercise 5: Linear Capture

The purpose of this exercise is to demonstrate the interpretive ability of the camera’s software by looking at what the sensor captures and comparing it to what software renders.

To do this we are asked to take any JPEG or TIFF and first convert it to 16 bits per channel using Photoshop.  I did a bit of googling to find out how to do this in Lightroom before posting to the OCA Photography forum for clarification.  It turns out LR processes in 16 bit and exports JPEG at 8-bit.  JPEG bit depth cannot be adjusted (so far as I can tell), but TIFF can be set at 8 or 16.  So for the purpose of this exercise I exported a 16-bit TIFF.  This is the image, a souvenir collection from a student who went to Mecca for Hajj.

Assignment 2: Elements of Design

Introduction

The brief for this assignment was to shoot a series of 10-15 thematically based images incorporating elements of image design.  For reasons of convenience and personal interest, I chose to shoot city scenes in Satwa, a residential area for South Asian and Philippine laborers.  The neighborhood is sandwiched between two tonier areas of town, Jumeirah Beach and Sheikh Zayed Road.

I spent three days shooting at different times, including late morning, mid-afternoon, and twilight.  In the Part Two course notes, author Michael Freeman suggests shooting (or processing) in black-and-white in order that color not distract from the elements to be practiced.  As I followed this suggestion with the exercises, I thought it best to complete the assignment as I began.  

All images were shot in auto mode on a Nikon D5100 with a Nikkor 18-55mm.  Post-processing was done in Lightroom.

Exercise 20: Pattern and Rhythm

Freeman's course notes are unclear regarding pattern and rhythm.  He writes:

The difference between them is that rhythm is to do with movement across a picture (or more properly, the movement of the eye through a picture) while pattern is essentially static and has to do with area.

Got it?  Me, either.

Exercise 19: Real and Implied Triangles

The brief here was quite simple:  create two sets of triangles, real and implied.  Freeman distinguishes the former from the later by the presence of "clearly visible edges," meaning an implied triangle has three points, rather than three intersecting edges.

For this exercise I went no further than my neighborhood, shooting in the streets bordering Sheikh Zayed Road, and afterwards in my kitchen and spare bedroom.

Exercise 18: Implied Lines

Two important things to bear in mind are that the eye follows a line, and that it also tries to construct a line from appropriate suggestions as a clear line provides a natural path for the eye, which moves along it.

Perhaps this is not the most elegant sentence Freeman has ever written, but the meaning seems clear.  The mind constructs meaning through pattern and uniformity, which it seeks and even builds when it can't be clearly found.  As producers of images, photographers can help viewers see by being aware of lines - explicit or implied - when composing.

Exercise 17: Curves

Freeman notes that curves are a kind of diagonal.  They suggest movement and draw the eye into the image.  The photo above is a panorama (unfortunately the stitch is too obvious) of Khawr an Najd, a bay in Musandam, Oman, where Mutsumi and I spent a night camping this past weekend.  The image features several curves, including the circular body of water, and the mountains on either side rolling down into it.  (For more photos from this location, see Exercise 16: Diagonal Lines.)

For this exercise we were to shoot at least four images demonstrating curves or circles.  I think the photos speak for themselves.  

Exercise 16: Diagonal Lines

This past weekend Mutsumi and I went for a camping trip to Musandam, the tip of the peninsula sticking into the Strait of Hormuz.  Our timing was off.  Not only were daytime temperatures still uncomfortably hot, but the Sultan of Oman decided to have his own camping trip in the same area.  Consequently there were loads of uniformed security and many roads and access points were blocked.  It wasn't a total write off.  We spent one lovely night at Khawr an Najd and I was able to capture a few images for the next two exercises.

Exercise 15: Horizontal and Vertical Lines

Having practiced points, we move on to lines.  The brief is to produce four images each (horizontal and vertical) in which the predominant feature is line, or as Freeman says, in which the content is subordinate to the line.

Freeman asks that we mix it up and not take too many photos of the same kind.  The challenge for me was finding subjects that were not buildings.  Living in a city of high rises, these kinds of lines predominate.

Exercise 14: Multiple Points

One of the basic skills of still-life photography, Michael Freeman writes, "is to be able to group objects together in such a way that they are linked attractively, in a relationship that is active rather than obvious and static. This is essentially a problem of placing several points."

This exercise calls for taking a series of images documenting the creation of a still life.  "The idea," Freeman says, "is to control the composition by rearrangement, not by changing the framing with the camera."

Exercise 13: Positioning a Point

"The point," Michael Freeman writes, "is the most fundamental design element.  In a photograph  for a subject to qualify as a point it has to be small in the frame, and contrast, in some way, with its surroundings.  The most obvious kind of scene in which you can find and use a single point is where the setting, or background, is plain and even, and from which you are at sufficient distance for an object to occupy just a fraction of the space."

This exercise required taking three photos demonstrating points in three classes of position:  center, off-center, close to the edge.