Made The Paper

The Columbian reported on Green Mountain School's Shadow Day. 

Since I couldn't stand and watch a bunch of kids playing without joining in, and since I didn't understand the rules to many of the various games that they were playing, I began shooting a basketball at one of the hoops.

At their age, the children in Jamey and Arthur's class don't tend to think of the basketball hoop as something within the realm of their interaction. They are just too high up. However, once I began doing it, a few of them thought to give it a go.

Before long most of them were making shots with some regularity, despite being only barely able to toss a ball that high. Their natural ability struck me as rather impressive. I coached them a bit on technique, but mostly just gave encouragement. The kids really lit up and had a blast. 

One of the other parents took a picture and that was submitted to the Columbian, who felt it worth publishing in their "Community" section.

You can see the picture they posted in their archive:

http://www.columbian.com/article/20090211/COMMUNITY03/702119998/-1/ARCHIVES

And You Thought the Previous Post was Long and Tedious

The following is basically an argument for turning off the flash and turning up the ISO for indoor photography.  Unless you are really bored, you should take that advice for what it's worth, quit reading this post and resume doing the important things in your life.

Grumpy, thanks for providing me with a realistic image with which to work. If I didn't acknowledge the realities of indoor flash-photography, my readers might rightly accuse me of oversimplifying the challenges of color correction.

This is absolutely NOT a criticism of your photography skills. I have succumbed to the use of flash photography on many occasions. Often one is not in the mood to tinker with camera settings and disabling the flash is often one of the more inconvenient or impossible settings to achieve in a camera. 

Instead, this post is about raising awareness about the control one can exert on the color of the lighting in a photograph. It's about the idea that a high ISO setting in indoor environments, and spending some time using Picasa can help people easily reduce noticeably "off-white" lighting in their photography.

Now I'm 'bout to get Henry Higgins on you. Only my pedantic tirade will be about lighting, not speech.

Last warning: the following is boring. Leave now or risk falling asleep on your keyboard.

No sooner had I pressed "publish" on my previous articulation on the ease of color-correction in Picasa, than the Grumpy one publishes an array of photographs that appear designed to disprove my thesis.

Case in point:

Here we see a photograph with no fewer than three distinct light sources. Areas where the light sources blend are present as well, and pretty much rule out the possibility of whole-picture color-correction.

I will diagram it:

I have highlighted three different color regions by surrounding them with a different colored line.

The fourth color region is the orange-colored background, which I felt was too large to draw a border around.

Through tinkering, I have reached the conclusion that the reason for the pink hue in this photo is that the camera was white balanced to sunlight (true white light), and the camera's flash is slightly to the pink side of white. Thus every picture where the flash is the dominant light source will have a pink tint. (I'm sure that Grumpy's fancy new camera has the smarts to know when the flash is on and automatically white-balance for that. Now he just needs to remember to bring it along. ;) I kid.)

• In the foreground, which I've circled with a bluish line is the area where the flash dominates. 
  
• The near background has some flash-influence, especially on lighter colored items. I've circled these with a mint-colored line.
  
• Far in the upper right background, circled in yellow is a window to the outside. Using Picasa's Neutral Color Picker in this region yields no change in the tint of the picture. This is how I reached the conclusion that the camera's white-balance was configured for sunlight.
  
• The rest of the background is distinctly orange-colored, which is clearly the result of incandescent lighting in the room.

So, now we understand the competing light-sources in the picture and it should be obvious why we couldn't just use Picasa's Neutral Color Picker to balance the color for the whole photo. Picasa assumes that only one light source is at play in the entire picture. 

Perhaps someday an algorithm will be created to white-balance automatically by region, but that's a fairly complex problem, so for now color-conscious photographers have to make everyone go outside for a portrait, or they turn off their flash. In this way, a single source of light can be achieved and subsequently "corrected" if the camera's white-balance setting was incorrect for the type of light in the portrait.

In the above picture, the color can be corrected for the foreground by using the Neutral Color Picker on the tablecloth near the bottom left corner of the photo. 

Better yet, you can choose to use Picasa's Auto Color button and it will do almost the same thing, but a little better.

In general, the Auto Color feature does a better job of finding a neutral color to correct by than I do. 

Generally, what it appears to do is line up the red, green and blue in the histogram so that they overlap as much as possible. Picasa doesn't give you the ability to slide the colors around manually, which is entirely sensible considering the difficulty involved in that.

Nonetheless, as a photography geek, I think it would be nice to have a tool for tinkering with the color levels.

I have had that before, and Paint.NET has that ability. But for whatever reason (training perhaps?) I am only marginally successful at using those tools.

Photo Editing Technique - True Neutral Lighting and Getting the Most Detail

Several times I have fallen victim to leaving my camera on the wrong color setting and having the resulting picture look off-color as a result. This will be a tutorial on how to correct color in Picasa 3 and also how to manually adjust the contrast to get the most satisfying and realistic color and light balance.

Here is a photo of a snowy landscape I took in the early morning. The camera white balance was set for indoor lighting, which caused this natural light to appear blue:

Notice the histogram in the bottom-right corner; the blue, yellow and red are occupying different areas, which means there is very little true white in the picture. Especially odd in a picture so full of snow and clouds.

To fix this, click on the eye-dropper button under the label Neutral Color Picker, then click on a spot in your picture that you know should look pure white, or pure gray. I've provided suggestions off the tips of the two arrows. 

If you have picked a good white spot, your picture will look much closer to true white as in the following:

Notice the Histogram now shows the colors overlapping much more. This shows the histogram agreeing with the obvious: I've made the picture more "neutral" gray.

Still, the picture seems too dim and hazy as compared with my sensation of it with my own eyesight. So, I'd like to see it a bit lighter, clearer and perhaps a touch bluer, as the morning light often is.

I'll begin by trying to make the most of the brightness range, shown in the histogram by how well the pixels fill the total width of the histogram. At present, my pixels are bunched pretty tightly in the middle of the histogram, which means most of my picture is just medium brightness. For a picture that is more satisfying to look at, you will have some pixels near the bright end and some near the dark end of the histogram. To accomplish this, we'll use Picasa's Highlights and Shadows sliders. 

Move the sliders to try to get the pixels to fill the empty areas on the right and left sides of the histogram, but be careful not to lose too many pixels off the edge, or you will cause pure black or pure white, which is equivalent to losing detail in your photograph. 

Here you can see how much I used the sliders and what it did to the picture and the histogram.

You could stop there and have a pretty realistic representation of the light conditions. 

I am going to take it one more step though, and see if I can bring some of the blue morning light back. To do this, I'm just going to slightly add to the color saturation.

By increasing the saturation just a bit, you bring out some of the color that was actually recorded and just make it more prominent in the photograph. The arrow is pointing out that the white in the foreground is still white, unlike the original, which had the entire photo tinted blue.

This strikes me as fairly realistically conveying what the morning air looked like to my eye. 

Perhaps I've added too much blue because of a weakness for hypersaturation. 

But since the viewer can't be there to smell the cold crisp morning air, she might forgive me for trying a little too hard to make the image look crisp and cool.

My Paint.NET Project

After getting the kids going, I thought it would be smart to get some good quality skills that I could then use to give them room to aspire to. So I looked up a tutorial on how to make glassy-looking orbs and gave it a whirl.
Here are the first two products:

Arthur's Paint.NET Project

Over the past two days I managed to get the kids worked up about Paint.NET.
I think it started with Shadow Day, in which I was allowed to "shadow" the boys as they went through their school day. 

During the afternoon stint, I was able to sit with Arthur as he participated in combining simple geometric shapes into a larger outlined shape.
At the same time, Jamey has developed an interest, for other reasons, in drawing certain creatures, which I won't say anything about, since he will undoubtedly want to debut them at the proper moment.

In any case, they were both ripe for exposure to Paint.NET, which I promptly exposed them to, and much to their delight.
Here is a photograph of Arthur's work. Jamey's, I feel sure, will be forthcoming, perhaps on The ES of J.

Porch Light

We won't be accused of moving too quickly on this issue, but we finally installed a porch light that works. We are very happy with it. It has a motion-sensor, a timed shutoff, three bright LED bulbs, a small solar panel and a battery pack. All for just $99.99 at Lowe's.

It took 3 sunny days to charge the batteries, but tonight I was greeted with cheerful, autonomously activated white light when I came home from work.

For those of you who may have visited us and may have come or gone during the night, you will have experienced something more akin to falling into an inkwell than traversing a welcoming porch. No more. Now, through the wonders of modern technology, you will be bathed in LED luminosity every time you approach.