A few years ago, I was really keen on slide photography but didn't do much with them other than put them into a folder. I have been wanting to digitise them for ages, but kept putting it off, primarily due to the cost of the various provider who offer the service - basically between £100 and £200 for 100-300 photos dependent on quality and provider etc.

Recently though, I was looking through some old family photos (40-50 years old) - in truth these were not great quality slides, have been sitting in a cupboard for decades, but looking at them it's the memory I want to digitise more than the resolution.

Looking online I discovered that a modern DSLR and a macro lens (in my case a Canon 80D and a Sigma 105mm macro) combined with a light box (which I got for less than £40 off Amazon) can give pretty good results... rather than photograph the image via a projector you are photographing the slide itself... the camera resolution is good enough to let you do this, and the light box provides the back lighting.

The results have been really good, especially those which had been taken outside, but I think that's more a reflection of the slide than this technique.

I'm going to start digitising my more recent slides over the coming months and will try to post some results here.

I was asked recently what the numbers fixed on a lens next to the focus ring mean (the 22, 11, 0, 11, 22 in the diagram below).



It explains what is in focus for a given aperture. So, using the lens above:
At f2.8 (or a really wide aperture), you are limited to things which are basically at 1.5m. That means anything away from 1.5m will appear blurred (or have the bokeh effect)
At f11, anything from about 1.3m to 2m will be in focus, and everything else will be blurred
At f22, it extends to a range of 1.1m to 2.7m.

Not all lenses have this, but it can be useful for portraits and still life to work out what you want in focus.

It's also an exponential scale, in that the area behind the focus point extends quicker than the area in front as you go for a more narrow aperture.

It can also help a bit for landscapes as a friend of mine once explained to me - the natural tendency when taking a landscape is to use auto focus and put the focus out to infinity. However, if you use something like f16 and manually focus on something a little closer, the depth of field range I've described above will include infinity. Hey presto - you've just made an area a bit closer to you a bit more in focus without losing anything in the distance.

When post-processing I sense there is a certain pressure to focus on a particular width v height ratio on the final image. My advice is, where possible, to treat the photo on its merits and if you are printing/framing it, make the frame fit the photo rather than the other way around.

That said, I am finding very wide (panoramic) is appealing to me more and more for landscapes; I've even printed recently into a large frame 3 panoramic images one above another which I'm delighted with. I also tend to like the 5x4 ratio (more portrait layout than landscape).. I'm not sure why - it just seems to work, and I have this in mind when I am framing the photo.

Where this can breakdown unfortunately is portraits, especially when you are asked for a photo for framing. Let's say you've taken a family portrait and you have cropped it nicely to print onto 6x4" (photo snaps in old money). A relative then wants to print it for 7x5"... you should be okay if there is enough space around the edges, so hopefully no cropping. However, when you are then asked for an image to frame in a 10x8" frame with a 0.5" border all the way around all hell breaks loose - you can't crop it as it will ruin the image... the only trick really is to always take the photo with enough space around the sides so that you can crop to your relatives' desire.

Over the coming weeks I am going to write a number of entries about digital darkroom workflow. Everyone has their own method, and sometimes reading what others do can help you improve your own.

I have used Adobe Photoshop CS4 for a long time, and decided that it was time to update my workflow a bit. Rather than updating Photoshop itself though, I have discovered the joys of Lightroom 6, which I use for most my editing now, with CS4 used for any heavy lifting.

I didn't think I would say this, but it has really improved the speed I can get through photo editing. There's a big ol' backlog I must admit but over the coming months I hope to really get through some of it.

I shoot RAW almost exclusively and it surprises me that a number of photographers prefer to use JPEG for weddings and parties.

Let me explain the difference:
- When light enters a camera which will form your photograph it is picked up by a load of sensors on your camera. The human eye is more sensitive to green than red or blue and as a result for each four pixels you usually have 2 green pixels, 1 red and 1 blue. The CCD (camera sensor) picks up a voltage across each of these pixels and that is recorded internally as a RAW file (it's the raw data and each camera manufacturer has their own file format although there are standards for it now)
- Unless you know how to interpret that image, it's not much use so the camera can automatically convert it to JPEG. In order to do that, it makes some assumptions which can be configured by the photographer such as white balance (colour is very different under different light - more of that another time), exposure, contrast and sharpness. You then get an image which is useful (for one thing it's what appears on the viewfinder/playback of the camera) and can be viewed immediately on your computer and stored/printed/emailed etc.

In theory the JPEG is ideal as it gives you what you want in a format you can use. There's two huge catches though:
- It assumes you've got those settings right - as soon as you edit the contrast, brightness, white balance, colour tone (eg. make the image a little less red) you are losing quality as you are modifying an already modified image
- JPEG is a "lossy" file format. What this means is that to create a JPEG image some of the information is compressed and therefore lossed a bit (ie. lossy). TIFF files are not lossy and recommended for editing - more for another day

I nearly always shoot in RAW and then use the RAW editor to make any minor tweaks (white balance, exposure and contrast are the main ones I look at). It's also particularly useful for under-exposed photos. I took a photo a while ago of a snow leopard and one image turned out to be badly under-exposed [see left]. Luckily I shot it as RAW because I was able to increase the exposure and ended up with what's on the right.... much better!!! As comparison I tried editing the file as if it was a JPEG (ie. taking the RAW file and converting to JPEG using the camera settings) and was able to improve on the image on the left somewhat. However, all the background leaves were unrecoverable and the eyes lost a load of detail. Although perhaps not the best example, I feel this does illustrate the benefit of RAW.






I do often find myself doing commissions where clients take the photos "unedited". Even then, I generally shoot RAW and run all the photos through a customised tool which converts them to JPEG and tweaks based on what I normally find works best (bit more contrast, and a slight reduction in red levels). It does mean it takes a bit longer, but it means if I want to go back and edit a photo a bit more I can do it without losing the quality. More importantly if for some reason there's a photo that would have been great had it not been underexposed I've got a better chance of recovering it (as my snow leopard friend would agree).