Velvia Look with Digital
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Hey guys –
This is an email I wrote a while back to another professional flyfishing photographer and guide who is making the transition to digital and wanted some advice on getting his shots to more closely resemble Fuji Velvia. He asked for it again to pass on and it made me think others may find it helpful, so I decided to share it here. All the information pertains to the Nikon D70, but it is probably useful for other cameras as well. I have deleted references to my correspondent.
“Don’t worry about the questions; I’ve learned a lot from your site myself. I usually will leave my WB set to AUTO unless I have a good reason not to, but I’ve heard of several people who will use Cloudy or Shady all the time. The deal is, WB is the setting most easily changed in Photoshop and that alone is a major incentive to go digital. When you open up a RAW image in Photoshop, you are given the opportunity to change the image’s temperature in degrees Kelvin. That’s WB. With a JPEG, you can make a certain number of changes to the overall color tone of the image, but never as many as if you had shot the shot in RAW. That’s a major reason to go with RAW right there, and in fact it is the reason that I myself process in RAW now that I have a computer capable of handling those larger files (we use an Apple iBook).
One thing to explore though is the ‘PRE’ set white balance. This is an immensely helpful setting in very colorful environments. Basically you set the WB to PRE, then, while holding the WB button down, you aim the camera at something that is white or close to it and take a shot. It won’t record an image, but if the camera was able to get a lock on what you are telling it is ‘white’, it will flash ‘Good’ in the LCD on the top of the camera. Until you roll to another WB setting, the camera will now adjust all pictures so that the object you aimed at is white. I’ve used this to good effect in, for instance, an aquarium environment, where everything was a shade of blue, and in the Great Smoky Mountains, where everything is a shade of green. It basically helps you avoid having all your colors tinged to that environmental color and is a big help generally.
Now, as for the fill flash blowing out. On the back of your camera when you review images, you have probably noticed that you can push your arrow selector horizontally and bring up different image data. One of those screens is the Histogram, and it looks like a Yellow chart of some sort. What that chart is is a graphed display of every pixel in the image. On the left are the dark pixels and on the right are the light pixels. If you make a shot that overexposes, you will have a tall bar all the way on the right, indicating tons of white pixels. Ditto the left of the histogram if you underexpose. This is a good way to review your actual exposures when you are outside and can’t get that shot back on a computer to look at. What you think may be overexposing in the viewfinder might be or might not be, depending on how close the lighter areas are to that far right line. Because digital pixels can record only from 0 to 255 as a numerical point (with the numbers corresponding to points on the spectrum, I understand,) the critical thing is to avoid those ‘255’ pixels, because that’s where the image goes white and you no longer have any data. That’s called clipping and it’s a real problem; enough so that these cameras also have a ‘clipping’ display where you will see your image with areas flashing black and white that contain only white pixels. Too many of those, and you’ve definitely overexposed.
I use my camera with the focus selector point enabled so I can move around my focal points in the viewfinder using that little knob on the back. I don’t let the camera do this for me. Set Custom Setting Number 3 to ‘Dynamic’ to get this efect. Then, I use the Custom Setting number 15 to turn the AE-L/AF-L button on the back into ONLY an Auto-exposure Lock (AE-L). Your camera already has an AF-L button built in, simply depress the shutter release partway and let it lock, then hold it to keep the autofocus locked on your subject. This way, I can select the focal point I want the camera to compose around (say, left on the cross in the viewfinder), then point my ‘hotspot’ at a *medium* toned part of my image and hit and hold the AE-L button. Now my exposure is locked to give me what I want, and I can recompose while continuing to hold the AE-L button by moving the little hotspot over to the right, say, and pushing the shutter release. That will make an image that has been *metered* off the left cross hotspot while focused on the right hot spot. This can go on as far as you want; you can meter your feet and then shoot the sky if you want to intentionally overexpose. I really find this technique to kick in on shiny fish which are blowing out (clipping their highlights).
I find the key to these cameras to be having enough familiarity that you can bang out some quick shots while making rough guesses about the shot you want; then processing later. If you have time and a tripod, you can set up the White Balance and the perfect ISO, and get everything twiddled in how you like it. In the field, especially when shooting with a live fish on hand, you basically need a rough-and-dirty acceptable image that will let you fine tune in Photoshop later. I focus on *gathering as much data as possible* by shooting in RAW and bracketing where needed (with these cameras you can bracket all kinds of ways, including the old fashioned way and with exposure compensation). I always leave the SB-600 on the camera and let it pour out the light I need, because I really trust that system. I set ISO 200 in daylight, auto WB, and I use the exposure and focus locks as I described to dial in the shots I need. With digital, it goes without saying that you can waste as much film as you need to get that one good shot, however over time I think you’ll get to a comfort zone with the various auto elements and choose those that work for you so that you are shooting *better* than you ever could with film. Immediate feedback is just such a good teacher that it will make you a better photographer on the fly, even for someone like you who is already very accomplished, because you constantly know if you guessed right or not.
Last thing for now: I would look seriously at the SB-600 over the 800. It is lighter, which is going to be important, meters exactly the same, can pour out just as much light in close, and (very importantly) it recycles faster. The 800 will give you the ability to flash further out than the SB-600’s 90 feet or so, but not that much more (I think it can get to like 105), and how often are we hitting something that far away with light? The SB-800 is basically heavier so that it can be used as a command station for Nikon’s elaborate wireless flash apparatus. You can control something like one SB-800 and three SB-600s at once if the SB-800 is mounted on camera. However, this is really an architectural photographer’s trick, and for us, the most important thing is weight and recycle time. (Battery life is nice too). I can get about 500 images using variable amounts of flash out of one set of SB-600 batteries (it takes 4 AAs). Ken Rockwell also has a page on this, and he is an excellent user of flash. Another site to check out is Thom Hogan’s – this is the former editor of Backpacker’s personal camera site.
Hope all this is worth reading,
Zach”
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