OK: Adobe Lightroom...

...is simply an extraordinary piece of software on any number of levels: possibly more so than any other software I've purchased in a long time.

(Disclaimer: a lot of that hyperbole is due to the fact that I've been running Open Source/Free as in Beer software -- currently Ubuntu Linux -- for a good ten years and I simply don't buy a lot of software. But, whatever...)

Two core issues have presented themselves in the last several months.

1) I've been shooting an overwhelming number of photos at any given event -- on the order of several thousand for a Saturday's pair of Vashon Island Soccer matches, for example.

2) I had one of my two years-old mainline photo processing computers (Intel P4, 2 GB ram -- actually it was the root hard drive, a 250 GB Seagate, that fried) die as a direct result of the wind storm/power outages we had in late November.

So it became clear that something was trying to tell me it was past time to bite the bullet, get out the credit cards, purchase some contemporary computer hardware and finally make the move to Adobe Lightroom, with Photoshop CS5 available in the background for the really heavy lifting.

Long story short: I now have two Intel Core I5's, each with 8 GB ram and middling-good gaming level NVidia video running Windows 7 Professional 64 bit.

And Adobe Lightroom 3, and Adobe Photoshop CS5 on each.

Lightroom is amazing.

Fundamentally it's a DBMS: a database management system.

The focus (hahaha) is on cataloging photos. Lots of photos.

I've just gotten started using Lightroom and so far I've got over 4,500 photos pulled into the generic Catalog "All Photos" for the two instances I'm running.

These are keyworded as they're pulled in off a file server box out on my home network, and can then be grouped and categorized by keywords, meta-data, date shot, time shot, camera body shot with, lens shot with, ISO used, f-stop used, etc etc etc...

Once categorized photos can be pulled into a Collection -- which in my case is a single event -- at which point I can start to actually "develop" the individual photos in (wait for it) the Develop module.

Except that entire groups of photos (or an entire Collection, if needed) can be "developed" using the same settings such that often the only photo-by-photo adjustments I find myself doing are to rotate slightly, and crop.

When happy, I export to whatever the specific end-use is: jpegs 600 pixels wide to go up on FinchHaven.com, for example.

Except that all of this done non-destructively, such that all the original Canon RAW images back on the file server are untouched.

All Lightroom is doing, really, is recording an (apparently) unlimited list of state-changes (white balance, exposure compensation, hue, saturation, luminance, rotation, cropping) without doing anything to the original images until they're exported.

Only then does some actual new image come into existence.

And all the work done to get to that end point is recorded step-by-step and is completely reversable, such that creating an image for my web site, or outputting an image to the printer for a reprint as part of an order are completely decoupled one from the other, and yet the labor put into sort of one end point is both permanently retained, and yet completely segregated.

Hard to get your head around the idea until you've done a few things with Lightroom, but extremely powerful.

More later...

Tried something a little...

...different for the Vashon High School Cross Country meet on Thursday, October 7, 2010.



I wanted to shoot something other than the finish line, something other than winners (one) and losers (many).

The Vashon High School XC course is laid out on the Vashon School District campus: the start is over at the High School, goes off into some woods on the east side of the campus, comes back onto the Chautauqua Elementary School playground along the edge of the woods, goes across the Chautauqua playfield, onto the jogging track that goes around the McMurray Middle School playfield, back over to the High School, and starts another lap. Two laps total; I think it's something around 2.5 miles.

I knew of a really neat spot on the edge of the Chautauqua playfield where the runners would be skirting the woods and then climbing a very short hill to come up onto the playfield, which continues on gently uphill to the jogging track.

Heavy woods in the background, bushes and roots and stuff to run around, up the incline which is infrequently mowed grass, and onto the playfield which is mowed.

Anyhoo, the idea was to shoot with a very slow shutter speed (1/15th, finally 1/30th second) and pan with the runners as they ran across my field of view and climbed the short hill up onto the playfield.

I was using my EOS 1D Mark IV and the 70-200mm f2.8L zoom, no extender, in AI Servo Autofocus mode and High Speed Continuous Shooting mode, which should approach 10 frames per second if it's not obsessing too much about maintaining focus.

I shot 881 frames total, of which only 196 (!) were even acceptable enough to make the first cut, and ended up using only 77 (!!).

In post-processing I used the Lasso Tool to select those areas of the face and jersey that were in focus and applied a little Unsharp Mask to the selection to sharpen the features I wanted to emphasize.

All-in-all I'm pretty happy with how they came out.

There is an immediate answer...

...to the weird lighting in the Vashon High School gym issue.

That issue was the apparent fact that at a shutter speed of 250th sec and up it's quite possible to capture the changing light output/light color as the metal halide gym lights cycle on-and-off-and-on at 120 hz or 120 times a second.

Consider the following, as-shot:



ISO 12,800, 400th second at f5.0, Auto White Balance.

Not bad, really, and maybe some snapshot-shooters would be satisfied, but to me it's way, way too cool and bluish.

(I've been researching the detailed EXIF data for Canon EOS 1D Mark IV RAW files, and I have yet to figure out just exactly how Canon encodes the white balance data for a photo shot on "Auto White Balance". It's got to be in there somewhere, but currently I'm thinking it's not expressed in degrees Kelvin but rather in an RGGB quadruplet, which I have yet to find/decypher).

Merely doing the RAW conversion with the White Balance set to Fluorescent (approximately 4000 degrees K) improves the photo quite a bit:



except that now it's too yellow-y and the skin tones are too flat.

So, clicking on "More settings" brings up the "Additional Settings" (!) dialog, where we can fiddle with all sort of stuff.

We've got a Blue B9 ... B3 ... 0 ... A3 ... A9 Amber slider, a Green G9 ... 0 ... M9 Magenta slider, and a "Color Tone" drop-down -- which is actually Reddish skin tone -4 ... 0/as-shot ... +4 Yellowish skin tone range -- to play with.

Remember since we're talking about light, we're talking Additive Color here.

Take a look at the Additive Color wheel and green is opposite magenta (which is the combination of red and blue) while blue is opposite yellow ("amber" here) -- yellow being red and green combined.

Which is why our pairings here are "blue" to "amber" and "green" to "magenta".

Why "skin tone" rather than a "red" to "cyan" pairing? I'd guess that a lot of real-world photography has a greater need of fiddling with skin tone rather than fiddling with colors ranging from red to cyan. Also, "skin tone" is a specific adjustment in the Canon EOS Picture Style system, which is what we're really doing here: making micro-adjustments to Canon RAW files before we convert them to tiffs.

Anyhoo, when I pull over the Blue to B5, and dropped down the Skin Tone to -4 Reddish, I get something that I like better, at least, than any other setting.

The floor particularly has lost a little yellow, the skin tones look a little more alive, the green of the uniforms seems to have a little more pop, and we're good to go.

(Note that despite all the sliders and pull-down dialogs this all ends up being really subjective, and also implies a calibrated monitor, which I have).



Here's the finished product:



So to correct the weird lighting issues from the volleyball match I shot in the Vashon High School gym I ended up fiddling with the Blue-Amber slider particularly, added in a touch of Magenta on a couple, and pulled up or down the Skin Tone a taste on a few.

And they came out OK, at least as OK as I was willing to spend time with them.

The real test will be photographing the next VHS volleyball match this coming Friday.

Well, that may have answered...

...that question.

The question being, why the hell do photos shot in the Vashon High School gym come out with such wildly different color renditions between two photos shot within fractions of a second from one another?

Example #1 (you'll need to click on the image to see the full details);


And Example #2:



Obviously these two photos were shot within a fraction of a second from one another.

And yes, (Spoiler Alert!) they were shot on Auto White Balance, which may turn out to be half the problem.

But only half.

So while the color cast in photo Number One looks pretty much OK, Number Two (particularly look at the color of the back wall) has a distinctly orangey-pinky cast to it.

W, as they say, TF?

I haven't moved; the gym hasn't moved; so why the hell is the color cast so different (and this is a relatively mild example) between the two photos?

Now, it's a standing joke that the halide lights in the Vashon High School gym are appallingly bad anyway: they're literally different colors, such that you can stand out on the gym floor and almost see no two light of the same visible color.

This is due to age and maintenance, I'd bet: when the individual bulbs have needed replacement I'm sure that no thought whatsoever was given to buying a metal-halide bulb identical to those already installed. Let's get the cheapest, and be done with it.

Add in age (halide lights change color as they get older) and you've got lighting that pretty much sucks.

But why would two photos shot within moments of one another, pointed at identical parts of the gym, have such different color casts?

Turns out the real culprit is alternating current, and the way halide (and fluourescent) lights work.

Halide (and fluorescent) lights are actually cycling on and off at 120 hertz or 120 times per second -- at least those with older non-electronic ballasts -- which I'm sure is what the VHS gym lights are.

Way too fast for the human optic system to see, but not too fast for a camera taking ten shots per second at an exposure of 250th second per.

So apparently what I'm catching here is the actual change in light output/color output of the lights as they cycle on and off at 120 hz.

OK: fine.

What to do about it?

Slowing the shutter speed down to, say, a 60th or a 30th of a second might do it, but that's not going to work for shooting sports.

So I think the strategy is to register a Custom White Balance in my EOS 1D Mark IV and 5D Mark II, and not have the camera think that it's doing it correctly when it's looking at light that's constantly flickering and thinking it's got a valid reading for Auto White Balance.

During RAW conversion and post-processing I just tell BreezeBrowser "This is what color the light is, period" instead of whatever the camera thought it was at the instant a particular photo was shot.

I think.

At least that's the Plan of the Moment(tm).

File and workflow management...

...have become the major new issues now that I'm shooting with my new Canon EOS 1D Mark IV, and in fact for major sports events, shooting with both the 1D M4 and with my EOS 5D Mark II as well.

For field sports the 1D M4 has the 70-200mm f2.8.L zoom, often with the Extender EF 1.4 II for an effective focal length range of 98-280mm, while the 5D M2 has the 24-70mm f2.8L zoom for closeups.

Setups for both cameras is as identical as I can get it regarding ISO, White Balance, Exposure Mode, Metering Mode, and Focusing Mode and focus point.

Since I'm shooting in Continuous Shooting mode while the game is underway the 1D M4 is taking something less than 10 shots per second, while the 5D M4 is taking something less than 4 per second.

I'm shooting in M-RAW on the 1D M4 which is spec'ed at "9.0 mB 3672x2448" and in S-RAW-1 on the 5D M4, which is spec'ed at "9.9 mB 3861x2574".

Despite the fact that Canon says both of these produce files roughly in the 9.0-10.0 mB range, most of the RAW files I get seem to end up somewhere north of 15 mB each.

Go figure.

So I shot 2,341 photos in a Saturday of Vashon Island Soccer Club games.

(As a matter of policy I shoot *everyone* -- not just the "star" players -- on any team I photograph).

That comes out to 38.26 gB (that's gigabytes, folks) of photos as they came off the Compact Flash cards and onto a hard drive.

So my old method:

1) move Canon RAW files from CF card to hard drive on a Ubuntu Linux box,
2) burn to DVD,
3) copy off the DVD onto the hard drive on one of the two Win XP boxes I use for post-processing,
4) post-process on the Win XP box,
5) generate jpegs and web pages back on the Ubuntu Linux box that contains the local copy of my web site,
6) archive the DVD

has become:

1) move Canon RAW files from CF card to hard drive on a Ubuntu Linux box I'm now using as a file server,
2) review and tag acceptable RAW files over the network from a Win XP box,
3) move the tagged files to a new directory on the file server,
4) post-process the tagged RAW files over the network from a Win XP box,
5) generate jpegs and web pages on the Linux box that houses my web site,
6) delete unused RAW files that never made the cut, and
7) burn the tagged RAW files and the tiffs produced by post-processing onto a DVD for off-line archiving

It's taken a little thinking and fiddling to get this down and streamlined, but so far it seems to be working.

And it may be more separate steps, listed out like this, but in actual practice doing RAW conversion and post-processing using two instances of BreezeBrowser running on each of two Win XP boxes means I'm really able to keep things moving.

And one major advantage is that I'm no longer even keeping photos that never make the cut, which I did in the old method.

Although I'm paying only about $0.66 per DVD/c-shell case for storage, I don't need to keep something I've only looked at once and will never look at again...

Well, I've really...

...gone and done it now.

Ordered and received a new Canon EOS 1D Mark IV.

"Wow! You must be selling a lot of photos to be able to afford something like that!"

uhh.. no.

Or, well, business is OK, particularly considering the economy, but basically I have no hope whatsoever that the 1DM4 will ever pay for itself -- maybe -- I just hope I can do OK enough to keep on top of the credit card payments.

:-/

What has happened is that since I quit working for the Vashon School District last October and got into photography full-time I've been shooting a lot of sports, and shooting more and more in Continuous Shooting (oldtimers would call it "motor-drive") Drive Mode.

Shot a *lot* of basketball, lacrosse, baseball and soccer last winter and spring.

And what I kept seeing over and over again is, in it's simplest, the fact that four frames per second* (which is what my EOS 5D Mark II can do) is just not fast enough to shoot sports.

I mean, you get good photos, but when I'm doing RAW conversion I keep seeing that the one or two shots that I might have got in between the ones I *did* get would have been the ones I really wanted.

Not the shooter's arm coming up for the shot, or the basketball gone and on it's way to the basket, but the one or two shots where the ball is just coming off the shooter's fingertips.

Not the lacrosse stick back over the shoulder, or the lacrosse stick out at full extension toward the goal, but the one or two shots where the lacrosse ball is just coming out of the pouch.

Not the soccer ball several feet up over the player's head, but the one or two shots where the soccer ball is sitting right on his forehead as the player heads the ball.

You get the idea.

Now, granted that motor-drive mode is just a crap-shoot anyway: you press the shutter, the camera starts recording images at a (relatively) set interval, and hopefully one or two of them will be taken at The Moment(tm).

You'd think that four frames per second would be enough, but sports is really fast.

So after having spent the winter and spring constantly fretting about the shots I *should* have gotten but didn't, I finally decided to jump into the issue with both feet.

So, we'll soon see: fall sports (Vashon High School football, girls' soccer, volleyball, boys' tennis) starts in about two weeks.

Also to be seen: whether or not Canon has solved the significant AI Servo auto-focus issues that plagued the Canon EOS 1D Mark III.

Stay tuned! It should be an interesting fall...



* All references to frames per second for the 5D Mk II and the 1D Mk IV are using a UDMA 6 Compact Flash card -- Sandisk "Extreme Pro" 16GB compact flash cards, in fact

Seems I should have...

...done more night photography at the Vashon Island Strawberry Festival this year.


These are from Friday night at Ober Park, the Tom Bean Blues band.


Canon EOS 5D Mark II; Canon 70-200mm f2.8L zoom lens at 70mm; Auto-focus one shot; single-center focus point; ISO 6400; Aperture Value exposure; f3.2 at 200th second; Metering Mode center-weighted average; Auto white balance as shot, but RAW conversion with Tungsten white balance.

Version 1.6.2 of Versus TV's...

..."Official Tour de France iPhone Application" was released overnight before Stage 12.

All it's done is to reformat Tracking -> Breakaways from a map to a list.

None of the other bugs and deficiences I've discussed, below, have been touched.

And -- wait for it! -- the Breakaways "upgrade" is seriously b0rked.

(Is that the sound of me *not* being surprised?)

Basically, as the Peleton advances through the Stage, the Breakaways list never updates -- which is pretty much the only reason you'd have to ever look at such a thing.

Here's some iPhone screenshots (hold down Home and Lock simultaneously) of the last minutes of Stage 12:



Note that I'm not saying that *this* screenshot is correct: in fact it's not correct: it's just the first screenshot I saved when I thought I wanted to start documenting what was going on.

What is *relatively* correct (like being kinda pregnant?) here is that we're on Stage 12, we're probably 200 of 209 kilometers into the stage, and the total elapsed on-course time is probably 4:46:49 - four hours, forty-six minutes, forty-nine seconds into the Stage.

(The official time for the entire Stage 12 was 4:58:46 - so here we're about 12 minutes from the end).

Note the gaps (which are not, at this point, accurate): the Peleton is +02:39 back of the lead breakaway, Breakaway 3 is +01:29 back, Breakaway 2 is +00:35 back of the leading pack of four riders.



Now we're at 4:57:53 -- less than one minute to go!

What's wrong with this picture is that Break 2 is still +00:35 back, and the front breakaway still contains the same four riders.

None of that is true in the least.



Now we're at 5:00:36 into Stage 12 -- the Stage is over, and we've clearly got a winner, second, and third places.

What's wrong with this picture is that Break 3 is still +0:45 back even though there was no such thing at this point.

And even more wrong than that is poor Alberto Contador: here he's shown being back in the Peleton -- which is still mysteriously +02:39 back -- alongside Andy Schleck, except that Alberto Contador finished second overall for Stage 12 at +00:00 -- tied with Oliver Rodriquez, the Stage winner.

Andy Schleck? He actually finished the stage +00:10 back, in fourth.

Even more bizarre is that Mark Cavendish is shown *ahead* of both Contador and Schleck in Breakway 3 -- even though the Stage 12 results show him 159th at +12:39 behind for the Stage.

Finally, just for some sort of good measure, here's the top of the Breakaways screen at 5:01:05:



So the "Official Tour de France iPhone Application" shows we're at almost three minutes after the end of Stage 12 and the Breakaways screen is for all practical purposes showing exactly what it did almost 15 minutes earlier.

What's the point of my bothering about this?

The point is that Versus TV (have I said this before?) and Participant Sports rushed out an iPhone app for the 2010 Tour de France that was defective to begin with, wildly overpriced, and essentially without any user support whatsoever, this despite its Facebook page, which even at this very moment the Apple App Store is identifying as "Official Tour de France LIVE Support"!

Thanks to Apple's No Refund policy on App Store purchases, all the buyers are essentially screwed.

And despite the fact that I have repeatedly posted Problem reports out of my iPhone:

The version 1.6.2 "upgrade" is broken.

The only thing this "upgrade" does is reformat Tracking -> Breakaways into a list -- that never updates.

I took extensive screenshots at the Stage 12 end to permanently document this continuing fraud.

See my latest post in Discussion forum on app's "Official" Facebook page.

Since Apple makes money on every sale of this fraudulent app it's very clear why you folks are doing nothing about this ongoing travesty.

Fair notice: screenshots and an entire archive of the Facebook pages are being kept for future reference.

not only have I heard nothing from Apple, but I'm sure I never will.

Remember: Apple's No Refund policy means it gets to keep every penny *it* rips-off from the chumps who bought this POS, as does Versus TV and Participant Sports.

Versus TV's Tour de France...

...iPhone app, after Stage 9, with the Tour de France now 45% over.

Still at ver 1.6.1 which is now five days old.

No responses to any purchaser posts on either the Wall or in the Discussion Forums (nor in fact any participation of any kind) at Versus TV's "Official Tour de France iPhone Application" Facebook page in five days.

Just today Versus TV cut the price of it's iPhone app to $10

Meaning (to me, anyway): "screw the early adopters and everyone we've duped so far", and monetize the hell out of the thing before time runs out completely.

This all the while App Store ratings continue to fall: now down to 2.5 stars in 159 ratings of the current version, and 2.5 stars in 429 ratings of all versions.

Via my iPhone, I've again submitted a Problem report through the app's App Store page:

The price cut to $10 proves how relentlessly Versus TV intends to monetize an app that never should have made it out of beta - let alone cost $15 - or now $10

There has been no support (or even participation) on this app's Facebook page from anyone associated with either Versus TV or Participant Sports in five days.

Every single bug and flaw found in the earliest version continues in the "current" 1.6.1 version - which is five days old.

It's clear that Versus TV intends to grab every last dime out of this app - all the while the app's ratings continue to drop - with the fully-complicit cooperation of Apple and the iTunes App Store.

I have been keeping copies of every Problem report I have submitted and have received no response whatsoever.

The courtesy of a reply would be appreciated.

I have yet to hear anything from Versus TV, Participant Sports, or Apple about any of this.

Just wait until they try this again next year!

;-/

The degree of duplicity...

...and complicity in the fraud that is Versus TV's "Official Tour de France iPhone Application" is pretty stunning.

I jumped right in with both feet and purchased the $15 version about a week before the Tour de France was to start.

Right up front I admitted to myself that there was a definite risk here, but Versus TV's coverage of the TDF has always been superlative, so for some completely bizarre reason I thought that level of quality might translate over into an iPhone app.

Ha! Fool me once...

(Realize that I have bought other expensive sports apps: at $32 Soft Pauer's Formula One "F1 2010 Timing App Championship Version" is twice as expensive as the TDF app, but it's an absolute gem, and has been well worth every penny. Of course, Soft Pauer is a software developer, unlike the "developer" of Versus' TDF app).

Anyway...

I've just downloaded, sync'ed and rebooted my iPhone 3G S, iOS 4.0 with version 1.6.1 of the pay version (there's a free version also, ver 1.6.1, that's nothing but but a platform for incessant nags that try to coerce you to upgrade to the pay version).

So, with the Tour de France 30% over, and with it ending in less than 3 weeks, the "Official Tour de France iPhone Application", at version 1.6.1, still has every single one of the bugs and flaws that it had in it a week ago.

Meanwhile, yesterday at the Apple App Store, Versus TV's "Official Tour de France iPhone Application" was rated as the 6th highest-grossing pay iPhone app!

On the "Official Tour de France iPhone Application" Facebook page what was a pretty steady downpour of critical comments on either the Wall or in the Discussions forums has now stopped almost entirely.

People have just given up.

Like all good American consumerist sheeple, we've learned to buy what's presented to us, not to expect much in terms of value, and certainly not to expect anything even vaguely approaching customer support.

As it is, the "developer" of the "Official Tour de France iPhone Application" Participant Sports is not a software developer at all but rather a marketing company:

We provide a full services program that has resulted in enormous success for our clients in developing their property for sponsors, engaging and closing multi-year sponsorship agreements (over $50M in contract value since 2008), and then using online and mobile technology to engage the participants of the sports and activate the sponsorship relationship.

And the "support" from either Versus TV or Participant Sports has ranged from non-existent to utterly laughable.

Get this:

Official Tour de France iPhone Application Tip #1: If you aren't hearing audio on your video stream, your phone is probably in vibrate. You need to turn vibrate off.

Oh. I see. We've had our phones on vibrate all this time but have just been too stupid to notice! That explains everything!

But the larger issue beyond all this is just how something as dreadful as this app (despite 3 new versions, at least that I'm aware of)

1) ever got approved in the first place,

2) remains on sale despite all its obvious problems, and

3) how it got|gets such high ratings (currently 3 stars - 113 ratings for the "current version" - whatever that is)

Apple's iStore app review process is legendary: it takes weeks, and allegedly Apple scrutinizes all sorts of picky issues before it anoints an application as being worthy of the Apple App Store crown.

So how the hell did this particular POS *ever* get approved?

Probably because it was being pushed by a fourth- or fifth-tier cable sports network, Versus TV, who went on about having to make a deadline because the Tour starts, runs, and then is over and done with forever.

But it's exactly this short shelf-life that makes this all such a travesty: the app's purchasers are being unknowingly dragooned into beta-testing an app that should have never been put up for sale in the first place, all the while the useful lifespan of what they've put out $15 for is dropping by the day.

I've sent in detailed "Report a Problem" narratives from the App Store via my iPhone on an-almost-daily basis, listing specific, repeatable bugs and deficiencies in the "Official Tour de France iPhone Application" and I have yet to receive any response -- that is to say no response whatsoever -- from whomever it is that gets these "Problem" reports. I'm betting that Apple just shit-cans them.

This farce also highlights the completely bogus nature of Apple's App Store ratings process: conservatively, 50% of the ratings are by App Store Fanbois who get off on putting on an app and immediately rushing back to the App Store to post a rave review.

Ratings like "Great app!" "Best app ever!" "I love this app!" sum up the depth and detail of many of the "ratings".

If you're an App Store Fanboi, fifteen seconds of fame times [some really large number] is pretty gratifying.

Probably better than sex, to an Apple App Store Fanboi.

But it doesn't tell anyone anything really useful about how good (or bad) a particular app really is.

Particularly one that costs $15.

Particularly one that costs $15 and that should have never made it out of beta.

Particularly one that costs $15, that should have never made it out of beta, and that will be obsolete on July 26.

I've been involved...

...in quite a quibble with Versus TV about the quality of its $15 iPhone Tour de France app.

The app is breathtakingly lousy, even for free.

But they're charging $15 (non-refundable, of course, at the Apple App Store) and at that price it's consumer fraud at the least.

A few examples follow:

1) at "Reports -> Photos" for example there is a screen of thumbnails of photos that probably are of the TDF, but they're unidentified and have no captions. Even more incredible is that the individual photos are static: you can't swipe left or right to go to the next photo. You have to go back out to the thumbnails, remember where you were, and select the next photo that way. But there's no captions or context or anything: they're just random photos

2) at "Reports -> Twitter" the tweets are all static text, so that hashtags or URLs in the tweet are completely useless. Even more astonishing is the fact that the text of the tweets is completely static also: you can't even Select -> Copy -> Paste anything, so again the hashtags and URLs are worthless

3) at "Tracking -> Map" or "Tracking -> Profile" the current position of the peleton in the day's stage is in real time, whereas Versus TV's "live" (I get up at 5:30 am PDT to watch it) broadcast is wildly time-shifted to fit in endless ads and personal-interest puff-pieces such that the "live" Versus broadcast never matches up with the location of the peleton as its shown on Versus' $15 iPhone app

So I guess this "feature" is for people who are at work not working but trying to follow the TDF...

4) the "Tracking -> Map" or "Tracking -> Profile" displays a white-screen-of-death and locks up if you rotate the iPhone over to landscape mode

5) at "Standings -> Stage results" (or any other subsection of Standings) the data apparently has to re-load itself off Versus' servers each time you access a specific screen - and half the time no data ever loads

6) and then there's just the garden-variety random crashes, where the app suddenly collapses under its own weight and drops me out to a random home screen.

Even *that* happens all-too-frequently for a beta app, let alone an app that's gone through Apple's allegedly-rigorous Apple Store iPhone App Approval Process(tm), let alone an App Store app that's free, let alone an App Store app that costs $15 (that's "fifteen") (did I say non-refundable?) dollars...

Finally, today (Tuesday July 6) shortly after the end of Stage 3, the cake was taken by the fact that suddenly "Tracking -> Map" or "Tracking -> Profile" was showing the peleton well out on Stage 4:

What's wrong with this picture, you might well ask.

Well, Stage 4 doesn't even start until tomorrow, Wednesday July 7.

I wonder if Versus TV's going to bill me for another $15 now that they've added time travel to their #fail crappy iPhone app...

p.s. in all this time I've never received any response whatsoever from @VersusTV on Twitter or on their Facebook page, this despite having made dozens of tweets about their POS...

RAW Conversion: what's in a histogram?

I shoot Canon RAW exclusively. Last time I directly shot any jpegs it was by mistake, and it was a total disaster -- or almost.

But this means that the RAW files need to be converted into something that's human-decypherable: RAW files in-and-of themselves are inherently non-viewable without some sort of intermediate translation applied.

For RAW conversion I use Breeze System's BreezeBrowser Pro: I'm not professional enough to be able to afford the Adobe Tax(tm).

The single element I work with most frequently (which is to say, on every single photo) during RAW conversion is Exposure Compensation -- and this is adjusted by refering to the histogram for each photo before I convert it.

Here's three micro-adjustments made to one photo before conversion (clicky):

The range of Exposure Compensation adjustments ranges from -1.3 Ev to -1.5 Ev in .1 Ev steps.

Notice that the histogram is greatly similar across all three adjustments, but with a slight and significant difference.

Essentially the histogram represents a graph depicting 255 steps across the range of values within the photo from 0 == black to 254 == white. The taller the vertical bar for a particular value, the more pixels within the image at that value point. Bars at the two ends represent data that is out-of-range and theoretically lost to the image.

(I say theoretically because it is possible to "pull down" the bars at either extremes and redistribute data back into the low or high end of the histogram using the slider.

I'm not sure if the formerly "lost" data in the RAW image is actually recovered or if just an illusion of data recovery takes place, but as the end bars are pulled down the histogram across the usable range plumps-up, so I'm happy).

Most theoretical discussions of histograms talk about lovely symmetrical bell-curves shaped along a standard normal distribution.

That's lovely and all, but I almost never see anything like that in reality.

In fact, the three shown here are more "normal" than most I see in that they've got at least a semblance of a standard normal distribution bell curve in them -- kinda fattish in the middle, and tapering off toward each end. There are little spikey-guys at each end as well. Pretty typical, all in all.

Part of RAW conversion is doing a lot of it, learning to recognize what you've got to work with in a given photo, and making the best of that.

Anyway the three histograms shown have been adjusted by .1 Ev steps from -1.3 to -1.5 Ev -- and if you look not even too closely you can see that -1.4 Ev has the plumpest center section of the three.

(Further reductions or increases in Ev flattened-out the histogram pretty radically -- take my word for it -- see the "as-shot" histogram down below in the postscript).

So here's the image right before I clicked "OK" and "Convert" (clicky):

And here's the finished photo, after cropping and pulling up the low (black) end of the Levels by +5 (clicky):

Not necessarily the greatest Sports Photo of all Time, but a good example of Our Friend the Histogram(tm) in action.

p.s.:

1) Purists will wonder why I'm having to pull down the Exposure Compensation by -1.4 Ev in the first place.

Good question.

I shot this particular photo a little after sundown when I had just reset the EOS 5D Mark II's ISO from 1600 to 6400 in anticipation of the ongoing transition from fading daylight to full lighting by the field lights.

The original photo was pretty over-exposed. Here's the as-shot histogram:

The histogram's as flat as a pancake, and all the data's run off the right (white) end. So by pulling down the Exposure Compensation I pull the data back toward the center of the histogram, and Compensate for the bad Exposure.

Cool, huh?

A little later (probably at half time) I would also switch the White Balance from Daylight to Fluorescent, which seems to be the best compromise for the color of the field lights at Vashon High School stadium.

2) The sharp-eyed will note that I'm saving as an 8-bit tiff.

The immediate project here was to produce tiffs for conversion to jpegs to put up on my web site. 8-bit depth is fine for something that's going to end up as a 600-pixel wide jpeg for web display.

Actually, if I was to get an order for a reprint off of this image, I'd go right back to the original RAW file and start from zero...

It is absolutely astonishing...

...how fantastic the output of the human optical system is, compared to the output of even a moderately high-end digital camera.

If you were to walk into the Chautauqua gym for a basketball game, the lighting would look perfectly fine to your eye: whites are white, skin is skin, everything's in it's proper color.

But to (even) a Canon EOS 5D Mark II, it's dark, and the lighting (some sort of halide lights) is some *really* weird color.

All of the following were shot at ISO 6400, manual exposure of 250th second at f5.6: my standard "indoor sports" setup. Working from past experience at the VHS gym, white balance was set to 4000K or "fluorescent".

Example 1: RAW converted with a white balance "As-shot fluorescent" (4000K) and with an exposure compensation of +1.6 which yields a nice, fat, well-centered histogram with just a tiny spike of data off the right end, which I don't care about since it's blown highlights that don't even end up in the cropped image:

This is just *way* too pinky-rosey-yellowy, or something. It's just not right.

Example 2: RAW converted with a manually-set white balance of "Color Temp" at 3300K (this after some experimentation) and with an exposure compensation of +1.6 also...

This one's better, but still too yellow to my eye, and the actual colors in that gym (the key, the back wall) are just not what I remember them to be.

Example 3: RAW converted, again, with a manually-set white balance of "Color Temp" at 3300K and with an exposure compensation of +1.6, but now color corrected in the tiff within Photoshop, this by manually selecting an area of white jersey in shadow (aka "faux" 18% gray) and clicking to define "white" for this image specifically

To my eye it's this last photo that's "correct", or maybe "more" or "most" correct. The whites finally look really white and all the other colors (the gray-green of the key is a good example, the wall in the background, the flesh tones in the shooter's left arm) are reasonably close to spot-on.

And the human optic system does all this correction on the fly, in real time, with out having to be told, and without us even thinking (or, for that matter, knowing) about it.

:-/

OK: Jumping ahead in time...

...and returning to the motor-drive topic, here's a quick sketch I pulled together from four shots taken at VHS Boys Basketball v Charles Wright on 01/10/2010:

(click on the photo to see all four shots)

Historically I haven't like motor-drive much, probably because of some nonsense photography-purist stuff about wanting to catch The Moment(tm) rather than just letting the camera fire away and accepting whatever it happens to capture.

But motor-drive does work pretty well, at least if you take enough shots, which never seems to be a problem for me :-/

In this sequence there's only one shot missing, that between the third and fourth frames, which showed the shooter landing back on the floor but the ball not yet in the basket.

Timing for the sequence: 19:31:42 to 19:31:43, so roughly one second in duration, which matches the EOS 5D Mark II's advertised frame rate of 3.9 per second.

Again, I've also switched back to AI Servo auto-focus after a brief (and unexplainable) flirtation with AI Focus auto-focus, which just never seemed to do a consistently good job of tracking a moving subject, this despite the fact that it's supposed to switch from One-Shot auto-focus into AI Servo mode auto-magically.

Canon EOS 5D Mark II; 70-200mm f2.8L zoom lens at 70mm; AI Servo auto-focus; ISO 6400; manual exposure at 250th second at f5.6; white balance "Fluorescent" or 4000K.

The motor-drive...

...sequences I shot at VHS Varsity Boys basketball v Cascade Christian on 12/18/09 seem to be coming out pretty well. I can see issues with consistent focusing within a series of shots: for some reason I shot with "AI Focus Auto-Focus" which is supposed to automatically switch from single-shot AF to AI Servo AF as needed.

Since the subjects in basketball are rarely stationary I have to wonder why I did it this way, but you gotta try stuff to see how stuff works.

Last night at VHS Varsity (both girls and boys) basketball v Charles Wright I shot entirely in "AI Servo ("for Moving Subjects") Auto-Focus" and very quick checks of shots while the game was underway seem to show more consistently accurate focusing through a sequence of shots, even when the subject was covering a big distance across the floor.

I'll know more when I get last night's photos burned onto DVD and get a look at them on the computer...

Wrestling...

...as I started to say elsewhere, is an interesting sport to shoot.

There's long periods of relative inactivity that are very subtle isometric battles, and then suddenly there's a burst of real motion as the balance of power shifts.

Combine that with the fact that there's a whole lot going on all at one: at the Rock Island Tournament they start out with three mats going at once, and this year (to kinda move things along..) they did the finals matches on two mats, simultaneously.

My best angle is right on the floor, on my knees (wearing my old volleyball kneepads) just inside the ropes that mark off the aisles from the mats.

So the backgrounds are incredibly busy: I'm shooting straight across the mat with the opposite bleachers in the immediate background.

There's a kind of Bruegel's-Fall-of-Icarus atmosphere about the whole thing: there's this titanic struggle going on out on the mat all the while a whole bunch of people are doing other stuff right beyond, seemingly oblivious to what's going on right in front of them.

Canon EOS 5D Mark II; 70-200mm f2.8L zoom lens at 75mm; image stabilization on; AI Focus auto-focus; ISO 6400; white balance "fluorescent"; hand-held; manual exposure of 250th second at f5.6.

OK: what have...

...I learned?

That I need to shoot a lot more wrestling so I have some better feel as to what is The Real Moment(tm), so I don't shoot so bloody many photos.

I shot over 1,400 photos at Rockbusters wrestling, and over 1,700 at the Rock Island Tournament.

Part of the problem is that wrestling is characterized by relatively long periods of isometric inactivity, punctuated by relatively brief moments of very fast action.

So I have a tendency to start shooting as soon as someone flinches.

Combine that with my general policy of shooting everyone, and not just the stars, and combine that with the fact that the Rockbusters tournament went about six hours long, and the Rock Island Tournament went almost nine hours, and I get an almost-unwieldy number of photos to wade through.

Basically after the RAW files are burned to DVD I load half of them onto one Window$ box, and half onto the second Window$ box I have.

I do the post-processing (RAW conversion with exposure compensation; then rotating, cropping, levels adjustment and saving the resulting file as a tiff) on these two separate Window$ boxes, switching back and forth via a KVM (keyboard-video-mouse) switch, so I can keep the process moving along just about as fast as possible.

But it still takes a while...

:-/

Whew...

...where am I?

Post-processing Rockbusters Wrestling from 12/12/09; waiting in the wings, VHS Wrestling's Rock Island Wrestling Tournament from 12/28/09, as is Girls and Boys Varsity Basketball v Cascade Christian from 12/18/09.

I mean, I love the holidays and all, but they can be a real setback...

:-/