Photography

2006-10-17

Like many geeks, I’ve been an enthusiastic digital camera owner for some years now who, so far, is not troubled too much by in-depth knowledge of camera’s, lenses and what not. Basically I fiddle with the controls until it looks ok on the screen. Typically I assume a pose that is not really elegant (camera at arms length, chin on the chest and frowning at the minuscule screen). And then I point, click and hope for the best. Sometimes this produces nice results but producing nice results when you want them under difficult light conditions (too much or too little) is quite a challenge. I was editing my Paris photos and did some google searches to figure out how to make more effective use of photoshop. It turns out that the new Google search field in Firefox 2 has gotten a lot smarter. I typed “photos” and google already provided a nice autocomplete list with highly relevant options such as “photoshop curves”, which led me straight to this more than excellent site which I have been reading the entire evening: http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/. The site provides a nice technical introduction to various important concepts such as depth of field, focal length & aperture, various types of histograms and how to interpret them, the working of the level and curves tools in photoshop, etc. The site is organized around tutorials and provides great examples that make it easy to understand the concepts under discussion. I’m now planning to work my way through all of the site.