Questions And Answers

Matate Arch in Devils Garden, Escalante by Wayne Pinkston Via Flickr: Website, Instagram, Facebook This is Metate Arch in Escalante, Utah. Royce Bair masterminded this composition. Thanks Royce! There is Low Level Lighting (LLL) behind the arch with an LED light panel turned down very low. See www.lowlevellighting.org This is a single exposure tanken at 20 mm, f 2.0, 8 sec., and ISO 10,000. For more images like this please take a look at Wayne Pinkston Photography . Thanks for all the kind support! Hope you enjoy! A big thank you to the wonderful Flickr family. It's a pleasure to post here.

Arches Within Arches by Wayne Pinkston Via Flickr: Website, Instagram, Facebook Arch in Northern New Mexico For more images like this please take a look at Wayne Pinkston Photography . Thanks for all the kind support over the last year, it is much appreciated! A big thank you to the wonderful Flickr family!

Racing the Clouds by Wayne Pinkston Via Flickr: This is an image of Cyclops Arch in the Alabama Hills of California (eastern part of Ca. adjacent to the Sierra Nevada Mtns.). I arrived and got a couple of unlighted shots, and this one decent lighted shot before clouds rolled in and obscured the beautiful sky. There is a thick layer of clouds just above the frame, but I was able to salvage this one shot. I ended coming back the next night. One good thing is that cloudy skies = a good nights sleep! This is a single exposure. Canon 6D camera, Nikon 14-24 mm lens, f 2.8, 30 sec., ISO 6400. Thanks for taking the time to look. Hope you enjoy! Please join me at: Website Facebook Instagram Blog

Questions and Answers

About how to start a web site:

Question: My question is do you have any advice on website set up, online stock image banks, etc.? I see that someone can order one of your prints in a variety of sizes,etc.  Do you physically print them and mount them?  Maybe I don't know enough to even know what are the right  questions to ask.  regardless and advice would be appreciated 

Answer: I use SmugMug to host my personal website. I previously used Photium to host my website, but it was more trouble, and they did not promote the website in searches as well as Smugmug. SmugMug also makes it easier to upload or delete photos. 

https://www.smugmug.com https://www.smugmug.com/plans

I pay them about $150 USD a year to host my website, If I remember correctly. You can get a more robust Business site for about $300 a year. With that package they will design custom packages for mailing to your customers, etc., very fancy. With SmugMug, the setup is pretty easy.There are some You Tube Videos that show you how to do  it. You can customize your website quite a bit.There are other vendors that allow even more customization of your site, but the process gets more complex.I wanted a site that simple and clean, and not too distracting or difficult to navigate. I looked for a host that make selling photos simple, and most importantly, I wanted a host that did a good job of getting your web site noticed in searches on Google, etc. i did some reading, and it seemed that Smug Mug was one of the best at that.You pick a vendor to print your photos. I picked Bay Photo, which is the vendor I use to print my personal photos. There are excellent, one of the best. When someone buys a photo on the site, SmugMug sends the file to Bay Photo and Bay Photo prints it and sends it directly to the customer. It is “hands free” for you. You determine the price of your photos like this:  If Bay Photo charges $10 for a large print, then you determine the markup. For example you can chose 200% and the price of the photo would be $20, and you would get $10, or whatever after taxes. You could choose a 100% markup for a paper print and a 50% markup for a metal print, or whatever you want to do.Hope this helps, Cheers, Wayne

http://waynepinkstonphoto.com

Eggshells and Cracked Eggs by Wayne Pinkston Via Flickr: Website, Instagram, Facebook Blend (Focus Stack) Nikon 810A, f 2.8, 20 sec., 17 mm, Nikon 14-24 mm lens Cracked Eggs and Eggshells. This is taken in the Bisti Badlands in an area know as the "Cracked Eggs" or the "Alien Egg Factory". This was done in a workshop during the May New Moon. It is about a 1.5 mile hike from the parking lot. The badlands are a mesmerizing place at night with a very otherworldly feel. In this photo I was trying to capture a close view of a "cracked" egg along with the Milky Way. There is a close focus on the "eggshell" and a far focus on the sky. I am giving a Landscape Astrophotography Workshop in the New Mexico Badlands in July, two 3 day workshops, July 8-10 and July 11-13. If interested please contact me through my website. We will cover Landscape Astrophotography with classic night landscapes and then add people/figures into the compositions. Thanks for all the kind support over the last year, it is much appreciated! A big thank you to the wonderful Flickr family!

Bisti Badlands by Wayne Pinkston Via Flickr: Website Instagram Facebook The badlands of New Mexico are a fabulously sculpted and otherworldly place. There is Low Level Lighting (LLL) with LED Light Panels, dimmed very low to near starlight intensity and left on for the entire exposure. The idea is to add subtle lighting to accent detail. Royce Bair and myself have created a public service website, www.lowlevellighting.org, to explain Low Level Lighting. For more images like this please take a look at my website here . Thanks for all the kind support! Hope you enjoy! A big thank you to the wonderful Flickr family. Cheers, Wayne

Thoughts about Contrast

My background is the profession of Radiology. The making of radiographs, Magnetic Resonance scans (MRI), CAT scans, Ultrasounds, etc. share a great deal with the technology of digital photographs. All are digital images, and the issues of getting quality images and good signal to noise is very similar. More signal is good, more noise is bad. More sharpness is good. Sharpness is primarily due to spacial resolution and contrast resolution.  There is one area where the emphasis is different. In MRI scanning and CT scanning we emphasize two things to make good images, spacial resolution and contrast resolution (in radiology we commonly say soft tissue resolution). Both combine to create the perception of sharpness. The spacial resolution is important in Radiology, as long as you have enough, but the size of the pixels is vastly different. For years in CT scanning and MRI scanning we used a matrix of 512 X 512 pixels, as that was all the machine were capable of. It finally advanced to 1024 X 1024 pixels and is slowly moving upwards. This gives a ONE Megapixel image!!! It is less spacial resolution than the earliest Digital Cameras!  

So how could you see or diagnose anything at such low resolutions? Well, it turns out that contrast resolution, or the ability to get contrast differences between normal and abnormal tissues was at least as important, if not more important than spacial resolution. For years most of the research went into getting better soft tissue differentation (contrast resolution) rather than spacial resolution. It was more important. 

In photography we talk a lot more about sharpness, and we usually mean spacial resolution. There is little talk about contrast resolution. Well, contrast resolution does matter. Some lens have significantly more contrast than others, but it is sometimes hard to even find this data. The perception is that they are sharper lens.

How does contrast matter in Nightscapes? Well, the sky at night has tremendous contrast between the dark sky and bright stars. Also, the contrast in the sky is typically increased even further in processing. This creates the Perception of great sharpness. So does the sky need sharpening in post processing? I would argue that the answer is no. Sharpening often makes the stars look “crispy” and harsh. In addition increasing the sharpness in Photoshop or other programs increases the noise in the image. This degrades the image. If anything, it is better to do some noise reduction and decrease the noise and perhaps soften the sky. 

The darker foregrounds are completely different.They usually have more noise and very low contrast (except for the illuminated areas). I typically select the foreground and do generous noise reduction here, and then use the Unsharp Mask in Photoshop to Increase Local Contrast. This is a bit different than regular sharpening. If you use a very high radius of 50-60, and a low amount of 10-20 (threshold of 0), you will increase local contrast and increase the Perception of sharpness, without increasing the perception of noise.

Cheers, Wayne

2015

Question and Answers

Using the Nikon 14-24 f/2.8  vs.  Rokinon-Bower 24 f/1.4 

Question: Wayne, do you shoot with the 24mm because there is less distortion when you stitch the images together? I'm just curious why the rokinon 24 vs say the Nikon 14-24 at 14mm , which is a wonderful lens. I understand the rokinon has a larger aperture but at 24 mm, max exposure time is reduced. Obviously you knocked this image out of the ballpark - would love to know a bit more about the lens choices for panoramas. Thanks and keep up the fantastic work.

Answer: Well, first of all, at 24 mm my version of the 24/1.4 is remarkably sharp, even at f/1.4. It is sharper and has less coma than the Nikon 14-24 at f/2.8. The Nikon is a wonderful lens, and is my most used and versatile lens, but if I am shooting at 24 mm then the 24/1.4 is better. Second, it lets in more light. I can push the histogram more to the right. There is some danger in overexposing the stars, and I was concerned about that, but it worked out. I actually took the pano at several settings and chose the best one. By pushing the histogram more to the right, I get much more detail in the foreground, and that was the goal. For example, some photographers have argued that if you shoot the same photo with an ISO of 6400 and 12,800, all other settings being equal, the 12,800 will actually have less noise in the darker foreground areas than the 6400 photo. The histogram is pushed to the right, the foreground looks lighter, asnd there is less noise there. This is because the dark pixels in the dark left side of the each have less information than the lighter pixels in the right side of the histogram. Less information in each dark pixel equals more noise in the image. The more you push the histogram to the right, the more information you have in each pixel and relatively less noise. Of course you have to avoid overexposing the sky. Overexposure is rarely a problem in night photography, lol. Anyway there are some people that advocate shooting at higher ISOs for that reason. There are discussions on the internet about it. Hope this helps! More light into the camera is good, especially when you are working at the limits of the cameras sensor!

Where's Waldo? (aka Where's Wally?) by Wayne Pinkston Via Flickr: This is Double Arch in Arches National Park, Utah. Do remember the picture game "Where's Waldo"? You had to find Waldo in a crowded photo. Anyway, in this photo it's "Where's Eric" (sorry Eric, you volunteered!). There is a figure in the photo with a headlamp, posed to give some scale to the photo. The arch is huge. Since Eric is in front of the arch and closer to the camera, he is actually magnified a bit, and the arch minimized a bit. Nikon 810A Camera, Nikon 14-24 mm lens, 20 mm, f 2.8, 30 sec., ISO 8000. I just discovered it's Where's Wally in most of the world, and Where's Waldo in the USA and Canada. Thanks Oscar for the info! The figure in the photo is Eric Gail you can see his excellent gallery here: www.flickr.com/photos/dot21studios Eric kindly volunteered to pose in the photo. Thanks Eric. BTW, I need another Model Release! LOL Thanks for taking the time to look. Hope you enjoy! Big thanks to the wonderful Flickr family out there. Please join me at: Website Facebook Instagram Blog

Peek-A-Boo by Wayne Pinkston Via Flickr: Website, Instagram, Facebook This is a panorama of several photos taken with a 12 mm f/2.8 fisheye lens. I’ve included 2 photos. The first photo is the image after the distortion was corrected in Photoshop. The second image is before the correction. Note the angled horizon in the second image. The camera and lens were pretty severely angled to get the entire opening in the image. There is Low Level Lighting (LLL) with 2 Goal Zero Micro Lanterns. One is behind me to my left and one is down the ravine to get some light on the more distant walls. Both are turned to low and are covered with a handkerchief to further diffuse and lower the light. The Goal Zero Mini has a very nice neutral to slightly warm light colour temperature. 12 mm, f/2.8, 25 sec., ISO 8000. I actually like the one with the crooked horizon a little better, but someone will complain, lol. This recess is somewhat like a cave or alcove and somewhat like a small canyon, not sure what to call it. Maybe a cave-yon? 😂 The Milky Way lines up beautifully at certain times of the year making this a great spot. This is in the Navajo Nation and you need a Navajo guide to go there.