You seem to think using a big aperture is magic and lets you see through the bars. What actually happens is they use a long focal length and shoot between the bars. Using a shallow depth of field doesn’t add information, it reduces it.
I still think spending huge amounts of money so you can make most of the picture blurry is a pretty sucky reason to buy a DSLR. When I get a DSLR, it will so I can get more information in the picture and I can shoot in available light without a flash.
shrug Depends on how you shoot, what you shoot, etc. I pay a premium for this ability, and that’s one of the main reasons I hate shooting compact point-and-shoots: too much depth of field.
I was mainly responding to posts 95 and 96. I had already responded to what Treis who appears to think the main reason to have a DSLR is to take pictures that are mostly blurry.
Apparently some people think that using a clone tool is a form of fraud.
The whole discussion got started because I think people who can’t afford $700 and up for a camera should still be able to take a picture with a blurred background if they are willing to spend some time on the computer.
BTW, you don’t need to spend big bucks to do photo-editing. You can download GIMP for free. I even use Picasa for some simple retouching.
…I’m still not sure of your point. GIMP is part of my workflow, and Picasa was too until I adopted Lightroom six months ago.
Posts 95 and 96 look remarkably unspectacular: what is it that you exactly disagree with? 'Neither post say using a clone tool is fraud: in fact it is a strawman for you to bring it up. It is easier to get “blur” done in camera than it is to do it in post. I do it without thinking about it in the seconds it takes to compose my shot. You can’t clone in information that isn’t there: this is hardly controversial stuff.
I have chosen to use a DSLR because for a professional photographer on a small to medium budget there really isn’t a better option out there. None of the options that you have bought up are practical solutions for a working photographer and they won’t be until they can do everything as reliably as a DSLR for the same price or cheaper. My camera is a workhorse: its a Beast.
Last night I shot 300 photographs for an event. In post I culled it down to 165 keepers, colour corrected, cropped, sharpened and noise reduced the images before converting from RAW into JPEG and uploading it for the client. This took me just over two hours on my old computer: on a faster system I could have done it in an hour. This was all done in Lightroom: the last thing I want to add to my workflow is something that would require another software programme and take more time. I think this is what has provoked the response you have gotten in this thread: its one thing to say “simply add blur in post”, but in the professional world photographers really don’t have the time.
The OP started the thread to comment on the quality of ‘throwaway’ cameras in cellphones. It also seemed like a fertile subject.
Now, about the GIMP…and suggestions on a tutorial? Every time I’ve used it out of necessity, it’s felt like bamboo shoots under the fingernails. The UI designer should be shot… But only after some additional trauma.
The shooting thru the fences point is all about optics. Circle of confusion is the property.
It’s not avoiding having the fence or cage bar in front of you or narrowing the angle of view to sidestep the fence bars. It’s an optical property that allows you to make it disappear even if it’s in your framed field of view.
Here’s a pretty good, though very simplified, illustration.
I have been using LR for years now and could not live without it. I have left Photoshop for its intended use: graphic design (not something I do often, I must say).
Some types of “blur” cannot be faked in Photoshop (maybe you could if you are willing to put dozens of hours into it). A photographer would know this, and that’s how we can spot a “fake” when we see it. The person doing it would not notice in some cases that it looks fake.
Thanks, I was about to start chasing a link to debunk the “shot through the fence” nonsense. I have shot caged animals with no fence visible using a similar lens (Nikon 1.4 50mm).
I frankly found Mighy Girl’s comment about Photojournalists quite offensive. I took it as implying I was engaged in fraud, otherwise the comment was a non sequitur.
Since the whole OP is about what you can accomplish with low end equipment, specifically a camera phone. Comments by people who have high end cameras denigrating people who can’t afford them is pretty offensive. Yes you can do that easily on your DSLR. That doesn’t give you the right to treat people who can’t afford a DSLR as morons for trying to achieve a similar effect in software.
My, what ridiculous interpretations of other people’s comments you’ve come up with. Does your back hurt from the contortions?
That’s what I was thinking, too. I was merely fighting ignorance. My emotional involvement in this thread is minimal.
There are many brands of decaf that taste just as good…
I try to do as much work as possible in Lightroom, but when a photo really needs to be “finished” and very carefully fine-tuned, I go into Photoshop. While Photoshop is often used for graphic design, it really is intended for photography. Adobe Illustrator, being a vector-based application, is what you want for designing logos, non-photo illustrations, that sort of thing.
That said, most photos are fine just going through a Lightroom workflow, and that’s the software I recommend for cataloging/organization and basic image manipulation.
The original comment was about bars, not a chain link fence. The links are only about a millimeter wide, so with the aperture is wide open and only a couple of inches from the fence, so there is enough parallax so that the sensor can see around the link. You will notice that the fence is only erased in the first set at a couple of inches. At arms length is just a fuzzy fence, but not invisible because there isn’t enough parallax. For actual bars you are talking about 12 millimeters and up. You can’t make them disappear, but you can shoot between them if you get close enough and use a long focal length. I actually read some professional advice and they said long focal length, maximum aperture and get on the far side of the cage from the animal and get close to the cage as possible.
Same principle.
I HAVE made cage bars disappear using this same method. Come over and I’ll show you the slides.
Next time I take my DSLR to the zoo, I’ll post some examples of this fantastic optical property that works on cage bars as well as chain link fences. My current personal examples are on film from some years back.
I am not against image manipulation. I use it all the time. But, some things are just better done in camera. Some cameras don’t allow that much control.
If you have a problem with that, you are reading way too much into my posts.
From the OP:
Yes. I agree.
The tangent this thread has taken is also interesting.
Here is the current tutorial here:
http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/
Unless you have a lot of experience with other photo-editing tools I don’t suggest starting with GIMP. Frankly Google Picasa is good enough for most of my photo-editing needs. You can get rid of red eye or remove zits and crows feet, it is good enough. The pictures that need more than that are a very small percentage.
The next level up is Photoshop Elements. You can get a good price on it when you shop for a OEM version of some of the previous editions. Frankly the version of Elements I use is ancient, but it does what I need.
BTW, I checked on the latest version of Elements and it has a Guided Edit Depth of Field Effect.
http://tv.adobe.com/watch/learn-photoshop-elements-10/guided-edit-depth-of-field-effect/
As far as I can tell, it just holds your hand while you do the same things I do, but if you have never done it, then it could be very handy.
For some things, DOF real or artificial, doesn’t help much. For instance, when I shoot a sunset, there are often power lines in the picture. A clone or blur, can be handy for those.
Yeah, I have the newest version of ACDSee and I have Photoshop CS4. (PC)
For the price, ACDSee does most of what I need. I rarely need to go to PS. Not enough to make me want to shell out the extra money for a CS5 upgrade.
I used to use Illustrator a lot when I was in the image bureau business. And Quark. (MAC)
I’ve used Elements on a student’s laptop (PC) to show them some basics and I think it’s a great program. Again, some of the CS5 features probably would rarely get used by a casual hobbyist, maybe even not by most pros.
You Lightroom users, are you on MAC?
Probably don’t want to hijack to a MAC vs PC discussion again. (I’ve used both, like both, depends on the job, ya know? YMMV)
You shouldn’t have to go to the Zoo to do that. I have chairs in my house that have bars in the back that should work fine for a test. If not there is probably a fence in your neighborhood that will work. Just set the camera up on a tripod and cycle through the f-stops and see what happens. You might even find a rod that can stand in for bars of a cage and see what happens. The less variables you introduce into the experiment the better. Measure the width of the bar(s) so we can compare it to the aperture recorded in the jpeg file.
I’m pretty confident in my argument from trigonometry. You can’t disappear an object unless it narrower than the aperture of the camera. Otherwise you can blur the object, but you can’t make it disappear. Even if the aperture is wider, then it will only disappear at a limited range of distances.
A 300mm f/4.0 lens (fairly common lens for many serious SLR users in the days of film) would have an aperture diameter of 75mm. The actual physical size of the aperture. A 300/2.8 (if one were lucky enough to have one) would be a little over 100mm wide. A 200 at f/6.3 (which is what many DSLR kit lenses are at max focal length) would be about 30mm wide. A 300mm with an f-stop of 6.3 (assuming kit lenses for DSLRs again) would be about 47mm wide.
The smaller cameras use shorter and slower lenses. The Nikon CoolPix S9100 lens at its longest focal length and wide open aperture is 81mm f/5.9 which makes the actual opening 13.7mm wide.
Everything I can find on the iPhone4 says its lens is 3.85mm f/2.8, which would make the maximum physical aperture size 1.375mm. (I could easily be wrong here)
I’m genuinely curious here, no snark intended, what does your math say the largest size of cage bar that could be disappeared for each?
FTR, these iPhone pics are awesome.
scroll down for the sample pics