bpTT's 'Energy for Life' Photography Exhibition: a Digital Disaster

bpTT: making digital look bad

bpTT's 'Energy for Life' Photography Competition & Exhibition: giving Digital a bad name

I applaud bpTT for encouraging a photography exhibition, and for taking the exhibition around the country. I also loved the great pictures by the photographers, who impressed me with their creativity, and their imagination. Unfortunately, from a technical standpoint, these were the worst prints I have ever viewed at any exhibition. I need no more convincing that Trinidadians have never seen exhibition quality prints before, thus resulting in prints which fall far short of standards that should be part of any national competition. I was also dismayed by the poor quality of the prints from film as well, of which most looked like they were scanned on photocopying machines rather than anything remotely resembling a film scanner.

Here is my list of DOs and DON'Ts for digital photographers pertaining to this competition assembled in no particular order:

DO KEEP THE HORIZON STRAIGHT, unless for deliberate artistic effect, of which I saw none.

DO USE YOUR CAMERA HISTOGRAM to prevent burned out highlights. Burned out highlights in digital pictures are unrecoverable. They show up as big blobs of white in your photograph, and they illustrate to viewers your technical incompetence. Better yet, some newer cameras have RGB histograms which will show channel clipping: a feature not available in simpler luminance-only histograms.

DO USE A TRIPOD for any enlargement over 8x10". Fully half of all the soft pictures we saw were due to camera movement.

DO PHOTOSHOP ADJUSTMENTS IN 16-BIT MODE ONLY, then downsample to 8-bit mode just before printing. 16-bit mode adjustments help to ameliorate pixelation and posterization that occurs when you start ramping up your 'saturation' slider, and other Photoshop adjustments. Yes, I know you all do that. Posterization in an image occurs when a region of an image with a continuous gradation of tone is replaced with several regions of fewer tones, resulting in an abrupt change from one tone to another. Pixelation also occurs. Posterization is determined by the size of the file and the bit-depth of the file, as well as how many destructive adjustments you apply to a file. Applying filter effects, hue, saturation etc. adjustments directly to a file irrevocably alters the file data. It is better to apply those adjustments to your image as a separate adjustment layer. Smaller bit-depth files are not capable of sampling continuous variations in tone, as they are constrained by the number of bits per colour channel.

DO USE THE HIGHEST RESOLUTION SETTING OF YOUR CAMERA. Sometimes I wonder whether digital photographers are retarded. Many of them spend thousands of dollars for their multi-megapixel cameras, and then shoot medium / low resolution jpeg files. Well, they might as well use a cell-phone camera and be done with it. That's like buying a Ferrari to drive down a highway at 35 miles per hour. What is even more ludicrous is that digital photographers seem to think that they can shoot low resolution jpeg files, and then produce 16x20" prints from them. Retarded.

DO USE THE BEST LENS YOU CAN AFFORD. We cannot count how many Trinidadians on Flickr, and undoubtedly for this competition, make a big deal about their 10 megapixel what's it, and then proceed to take pictures with an 18-55mm consumer zoom. Stick a cheap lens on your megapixel wonder-cam and you'll produce prints no better than your granny's Fisher-Price digicam. As was demonstrated in some pictures, including those of the prize-winning fare, was the presence of lens chromatic aberrations. Chromatic lens aberrations occur in cheaper lenses (and in sometimes expensive lenses) where the different frequencies of visible light do not all come to focus at one point. This becomes most apparent in areas of high contrast, for example, a hand silhouetted against the sun. The hand will appear all black, and chromatic aberration will appear as a purple fringe around the hand. Additionally, cheaper camera sensors may lack, or may have a poorly implemented anti-aliasing filter to remove, or reduce, such aberrations at the level of the sensor. All camera sensors are comprised of an array of microlenses which may themselves introduce distortion and chromatic aberrations, especially when wide-angle lenses are attached to the camera. Many manufacturers utilize software solutions to alleviate these problems with varying success. Always read camera reviews carefully to see if these problems are mentioned for a particular camera. Happily, sensor aberrations and moire effects are largely of little significance in later generation digicams.

DO CHECK YOUR FOCUS. We cannot believe we have to tell people this. But if your picture is out of focus, blurred, fuzzy, or soft we don't CARE how wonderful you think the subject is, we don't want to see it. DO NOT SUBMIT TECHNICALLY FLAWED PICTURES TO AN EXHIBITION. Needless to say, the fact that the judges selected technically poor photographs, and then had them enlarged, is an indictment on their ability to judge prints. It is wise practise to always view images at actual pixel resolution (100%) to detect focus problems before printing.

DON'T TRY TO BEND THE LAWS OF PHYSICS. It's a fact of life. A 6MP digicam picture starts to fall apart at anything above an 12x18" enlargement. At anything above this size, printing resolution falls below 150 dots per inch, which is not really acceptable for viewing, unless viewers are a couple feet away or more. How do you think your 16x20" enlargement is going to look up-close? Remember that at an exhibition of this type viewers are allowed to get very close to view your picture. At these distances, pixelation and digital horrors become very apparent. In fact the only people who can, with confidence, allow viewers to come up-close and view huge enlargements of landscape pictures are those guys over at 'Trinidad Dreamscape' who use very big view cameras, or people who use 16 megapixel cameras and up. Moreover, you should be wary of digital photographers who proclaim that they can enlarge their 8MP images to enormous sizes which look 'tack-sharp' from 1mm away. They are either liars or, unfortunately, among those who have never seen a high resolution print before. Although I am a great proponent of digital cameras, I am not dumb enough to imply that digital cameras can come close to large format camera output.

DO CALIBRATE YOUR MONITOR. If you ever plan to print a picture from your digital camera, nothing matters more than having a profiled monitor. If your monitor is not profiled, you can just forget about any print matching what you see on-screen. You cannot profile a monitor by 'guesstimation', or by 'eyeballing' it. You need to buy a colorimeter package available from such sources as 'Spyder', or 'EyeOne'. Budget these items into the purchase of any digicam: you'll only need to buy it once.

DO USE AN APPROPRIATE COLOUR SPACE, AND USE THE 'SOFT-PROOF' FEATURE IN PHOTOSHOP. Colour spaces are a topic unto themselves. Most digital cameras utilize the sRGB colour space by default, and sRGB is the de facto web standard. Adobe RGB (1998) used to be recommended over sRGB, but because of the hassle involved in getting operating systems (read Windows) to manage colour spaces properly, and consumer confusion, Adobe RGB is not used as much as a few years back. Some pros recommend converting the camera's sRGB profile to Pro PhotoRGB just before printing as this profile supports a larger gamut. sRGB's gamut is not so great, but most viewers won't notice any difference. What is important, though, is that the printer supports whatever profile you use, and your understanding that the colour gamut on paper is less, and different, from what you see on-screen. You should use the 'soft-proof' option in Photoshop that matches your output printer and paper to get a fair idea about how the actual print may appear. You may then have to boost saturation etc. in some colours so that the soft-proof looks more closely like the on-screen original image.

DON'T USE A THIRD-PARTY PRINTER SERVICE BUREAU FOR AN IMPORTANT PRINT UNLESS YOU'VE USED THEM BEFORE, AND YOU ARE HAPPY WITH THEIR WORK. I mean, come on people. Really!! I don't know who did the large prints for this exhibition, but judging from the similarity of the potato-bag canvas used, I'd guess it was the same company that did them all. And did them all badly. I have never seen fine art paper that looked like a rug before. Nor have I seen prints with such bad acutance and poor micro-contrast. There are dozens of papers available for prints. My advice: when in doubt, go for 'safe': that is Kodak Endura, or Fuji Crystal Archive Gloss. Also, lean towards printing bureaus who have both Epson professional inkjet printers available as well as Lightjet printers. The folks over at 'Trinidad Dreamscape' have all their prints done on Chromira Lightjet printers which use lasers to activate pigments in the paper, which are then developed in chemistry. They also favour Fuji Crystal Archive SuperGloss paper, or Crane Museo Silver Rag for the Epson when doing black and white prints.

DON'T UNDEREXPOSE AND THEN TRY TO BRIGHTEN SHADOW AREAS IN PHOTOSHOP. It is always best to try to get an accurate exposure at the picture-taking stage. Digital users really have no excuse for poor exposure technique as camera automation and LCDs make bad exposures a thing of the past. However, it may sometimes be unavoidable to underexpose part of a scene. In such cases it may be possible to recover information lost in the shadows using Photoshop's 'shadows slider'. Always be careful when trying to brighten shadows in Photoshop as it may introduce a fair amount of digital noise. Digital noise almost always looks worse than film grain, so be mindful.

DON'T TONE PHOTOGRAPHS UNLESS YOU KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING. I was distressed to see purple people, bronze people, red people depicted in this exhibition. Toning black and white prints seems to be the modus operandi of digital photographers of late. As was discussed by the 'Trinidad Dreamscape' writers for the University of the West Indies Photography Club exhibition, toning prints should only be done if you have a good idea about how it should look in the first place. The only way to do this is to study prints done by experienced photographers, and the effects they achieve by toning. A good place to start is here.

DO FRET OVER YOUR WHITE-BALANCE SETTINGS. Digital cameras offer the unique advantage over film cameras in their ability to adjust for varying lighting conditions in degrees kelvin. If you shoot jpeg, then white balance settings are crucial owing to the fact that the white balance settings cannot be altered by software after the fact. If you shoot in RAW mode you have the added facility of changing the picture white-balance at any time using image editing software (RAW converter). Even so, colour balance shifts do arise if the auto-white balance is off. Sometimes these colour shifts may be difficult to correct in software using the white-balance adjustment control. Consequently, many pros carry a small white card around with them that they use to obtain a custom white-balance reading for a particular scene. On encountering a tricky lighting situation, you can take a picture of the white card and then instruct the camera to import the white-balance data from the white card picture as a custom setting. The camera will use this information to correct all the colours in a scene for a neutral picture.

As with most things that may seem simple at first glance, after the initial cursory inspection is over it usually becomes apparent that that simplicity was perhaps an illusion. Digital image capture is no exception. I hope I have, at the very least, drawn attention to that point.

- August 2007