On the 8th Dec, The Guardian ran a story about a chuch photographer getting stopped under terrorism powers:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/dec/08/police-search-photographer-terrorism-powers

On the 9th Dec, The Independent wrote about Police searching a photographer using anti-terror laws:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/police-search-photographer-using-antiterrorism-laws-1836683.html

And at the end of last month, there was a BBC photographer who spoke on UK television about his run in with the law:

I’ve heard reports of friends who still live in London about how photographer is getting harder and harder in London, but it’s starting to make major news for the first time (at least, the first time I’ve heard it). I hate reading articles like this. Street photographer can be a wonderfully artistic, rewarding and noble pursuit… but given the latest trend it would not surprise me at all to see photography completely “banned” in large sections of London. Now, part of me understands the intent of those laws – but they’re v poorly thought through. There at a dozen different arguments showing why they’ll be either completely ineffective or pointless (e.g. you can’t stop digital cameras with 21x zooms, terrorists aren’t the ones using tripods and L lenses, etc etc).

As for me, in the couple of times I’ve been back to the UK since I left a few years back, I’ve not been stopped. I did take some of my favourite street photography there however. A couple of examples:

Trafalgar Square, London  2006. Nikon D200 + 18-200mm zoom

South Bank, London 2006. Nikon D200 + 18-200mm zoom

Outside the National Portrait Gallery, London  2006. Nikon D200 + 18-200mm zoom

Despite not getting stopped in London, I do have an amusing tale about how I managed to get pulled over by two army vehicles and a dozen soldiers with assault rifles while photographing in Singapore, but that’s for another time (to skip to the end though, I survived without any scars and also without any pictures).

Although I don’t live in London / UK anymore, I’ll be following with interest to see how this develops. It’ll also be interesting to hear from any photographers living there to see if the sorts of stories above are isolated incidents or becoming more frequent.

Of course, there is an additional twist of irony to all this in that despite the UK’s clampdown on street photography, it remains one of the most recorded countries in the world. It’s estimated that there are more than 4 million CCTV cameras in the UK, one for every dozen or so people (dubious maths apparently provide this number – but it’s mighty impressive nonetheless).

Capture NX is Nikon’s flagship software product for RAW conversion and image processing, built on technology from their collaboration agreement with Nik Software (www.niksoftware.com). Capture NX replaces previous versions of Nikon Capture which while, generally regarded as the best RAW converter for Nikon’s proprietary NEF / RAW format, was also considered to be inflexible and slow.

So when Nikon released Capture NX, they promised it would contain a host of features that would make it far more advanced (and ease to use) for advanced image processing. The innovation they made the biggest noise about was U Point technology which promised to make advanced, selective editing of colours, brightness, contrast, etc far easier to the average user.

Following its announcement and availability for download, I immediately started using Capture NX and from day one until now, it has remained the first application I reach for when beginning my post processing work for Nikon files. Given I was using Photoshop CS2 as the primary raw converter / editor for NEF files until then, I think that says quite a lot about how much I liked the software.

The rest of this entry will give a quick round up of the general features / benefits of Capture NX, or rather – the ones that were significant to me (Note – this doesn’t cover the benefits of shooting RAW in the first place – I will prob do another entry for that later).

RAW Conversion.
When talking about Capture NX, I think this is the place to start – as the actual quality of the conversion is an often overlooked item. For quite some time I was using Photoshop CS2 to process Nikon NEF files and the first step I would always take was to modify the colour balance. There was something about the colours in Photoshop that never quite looked right when I’d convert an image and I found myself constantly referring back to the original image on the camera’s LCD Screen to use as a reference when processing. I know this issue did not just affect me – I had heard many mention it. Anyway, that changed with Capture NX – the colours following conversion look identical to the original that sits in your camear. I’ve attached an example below of a NEF file processed with both Photoshop CS2 (default settings) and Nikon Capture NX (default settings). No modifications were done following opening the image.

Nikon NEF RAW image converted using Photoshop CS2

Nikon NEF RAW image converted using Nikon Capture NX

The difference should be pretty clear (particularly when you click on the image to see a larger version). The orange from Capture NX is much more, well, orange. And the colours on my dog’s with Capture NX is much lifelike. While it is certainly possible, through colour balance / tone adjustment, to get the colours from CS2 the same as Capture NX, I generally considered that step to b quite a pain and am glad when it can be avoided.

FYI, some people have also spoken about resolution / noise differences between RAW converters in general, but I’ve not found there to be very different between these two applications.

U Point’s
Ok so this is the technology that Nikon was making a big fuss about upon Capture NX’s launch. A different approach to Dodge / Burn / Saturation brushes (predominant in CS2), you might ask what’s wrong with the normal approach. Well I guess that the main issue is that when you use brushes to selectively edit an image, you’re making changes that you can’t modify them after you perform them, they take plenty of practice, etc. So what Capture NX does is take a different approach through U Point’s. These are small modifiers that you can drag onto an image and then use sliders to modify their Brightness / Saturation / Contrast / Hue / Colour Balance / etc. They apply a “circle of influence” around the area where they are placed, meaning they’ll look for pixels of similar colour, etc and apply the changes to them.

So as an example, say you want to brighten someone’s face – all need to do is drag a U Point onto the face area, drag the brightness slider up and the face is more visible. Easier to do than dodging? Maybe / maybe not – but certainly a lot easier to see what you’ve done, go back and change, move the affected area around and so forth.

As an example, I show the process of using U Point’s (click on image to see a larger version).

Take the following original image.

It’s hard to tell but when I took this, I was convinced there was a great image in the data waiting to be seen. I realized the foreground colour was too harsh and distracts the eye from seeing the real subject.

There’d be a number of ways to reduce the saturation of the foreground in Photoshop CS2, but with Capture NX, you just need to drag a control point onto one of the blue areas of the image. Once there, you can apply changes (like desaturating the foreground) to like minded pixels. To see what pixels you’re selection is going to change, you need to select “Show selection”. Then the following image is revealed:

This image shows what parts of the image are going to be modified. Parts of the image in white means that changes will be applied to those areas. Parts in black mean they won’t be applied. And obviously all the shades of gray in between suggest the varying strength of application. OK so see the window to the top right? That’s a modifier. Just increase brightness and contrast and hit OK.

And voila – this image results – a funky abstract of a woman climbing up the stairs (and one of my favourite shots from 2006):

The image took a few minutes of fine tuning but the above step was less than 30 seconds.

Non destructive editing
So non destructive editing is something I mentioned above – and we know through layers, it can be done in photoshop as well. The problem I have with photoshop is that the files get up to 100MB in size which is pretty horrendous. For Capture NX, every change you perform is automatically non destructive (no need for layers). The biggest difference however is that when you save files, the file sizes are on the order of 10MB to 15MB (I’m talking about 10MB as a starting image size in the first place). This means I can now store all my images in this saved state – rather than with Photoshop where I selectively choose only a few to store in PSD format.

Camera settings
One thing I always thought was a shame with CS2 was the fact that it does not copy over camera settings. So you have modes like Vivid, Vivid+, custom settings, etc – In CS2, these are all ignored. In Capture NX not only are they used, you can also change them which becomes a great tool for learning about your camera.

OK – so that’s a quick whirlwind introduction. As you can probably see – even those four items are a fairly compelling case for looking in Capture NX if you shoot in Nikon RAW.

Issues

Before considering Capture NX, there are of course downsides to consider. These were:

• Memory hog (even more than photoshop). Peronsally I wouldn’t enjoy running this with anything less than 2 GB RAM (1GB is ok if you’re not doing much else with your PC at the time)
• Inconsistent GUI (User Interface), which requires you to click OK with the mouse sometimes, and other times allows you to use the Enter key or mouse
• Crashes every now and then. Probably 1 in every 20 photos – something like that
• U Points aren’t as effective as dodging / burning when very complex or very heavy selective editing is required
• Only can be used for Nikon formats (although JPG / TIFF supported also)
• Some actions are slower than photoshop (e.g. zooming / resizing can be sometimes)

For me however, the positives definitely outweighed the few downsides and slightly clunky UI. It can’t do everything by any means – but I use it for processing 90% of my NEF images and the use of U Points (and not having to fine tune colour as much) cuts down my processing time by about half I would estimate. The images that fall into that other 10%, which were too complex for U Points to handle, I would still use Capture NX for first to convert from RAW and apply levels / contrast, then save as JPG to be further modified in CS2. So it was, as a minimum, my RAW converter for all images.

OK that’s about it – hope that was useful. I’ll be covering similar software I use for Canon soon and also discussion of workflow in general.

For those interested, you can download a trial of Capture NX here:

The Interaction

I think the first thing to bear in mind is that like many subjects, the first thing you need to do to take good photos of animals is to understand them a little. I think we’ve all seen ourselves or at least someone else begging and pleading with a pooch to look their way or do something funny, but unless the right stimulus is presented, the dog will rarely suddenly spring into obedient service.

So some things which I often do when taking pictures of mine or someone else’s dog is to:

• First train them a little. Not a lot but maybe just a couple of minutes of a little bit of sit / down, leash walking if possible. I do this without the camera anywhere near me – just to get acquainted. This also gets the dog used to the idea that they should expect commands from you, and you get to see how they respond and to what tone of voice
• Reward good behaviour for obeying a command. Don’t get the dog too excited or it ends up taking too long to calm down. Rewarding comes from “good dog” and a short ruffle, etc. Stuff like that
• Toys. Playing a few minutes first is also a good way to interact – and gives the added benefit of understanding what the dog’s favourite toys are, something you’ll probably need earlier

So that’s the first five minutes of any dog shoot for me.

Next basically comes observation. Before trying to get the dog to do anything, I just watch it. Seeing what it does, moving around and following with the camera. If it starts doing something interesting, I take a picture – if not I just keep watching. In the past I’ve gotten some of my best photos in this early stages of shoots just by hanging around and watching.

Once getting some ideas from how the dog moves, its personality, etc – I then start taking photos while interacting with it. Getting it to do things, pose, etc. This often needs the owners help and I usually use to a combination of commands (sit, etc) with the promise of rewards if the dogs needs it (resorting to placing tennis balls or treats on my head if necessary).

The final stage for me is after the shoot has finished. If the dog is tired it’ll usually start relaxing, laying down, etc. This is usually something worth hanging around for – again, some great pictures can be gotten this way.

So that is a brief overview of my interaction with the subject. Of course, the above doesn’t work that well if you don’t like dogs very much – but then photography is full of those little challenges :).

In terms of some of the technical considerations like framing, composition, etc. I’ll turn to some examples of different types of shots or processing I like to do.

Focusing on the eyes
Much like when taking human portraits, the eyes of a dog should typically be the focal point in a photograph. You can take that a step further if you have a macro lens or something that at least allows closer focusing and focus almost entirely on the eye. Unlike human eyes, a dog’s eye has a large amount of black in it which makes it very easy to get interesting reflections. Here’s a shot using close up framing which I really liked:

Nikon D70, taken in 2005

Nikon D200, 2006

I like both shots but the second has the added example of having the owners in the reflection.

Frame differently
Unusual and creative portraits can sometimes work particularly well when you don’t necessarily follow the standard rules of framing. Try different things like not including the nose in the picture, or just the eyes and ears. Or half the face. Even better when you make use of the rest of the frame to include an interesting background that might have relevance to the dog, its owners or the house where it stays. An example where all these things worked out for me is here:

Nikon D70, 2005

In this picture, I’m actually using only one hand to hold the camera. The second is being used to balance a tennis ball on my head.

Action Shots
These I haven’t done as much with but what I will say is that action shots of dogs typically fail because the photographer doesn’t take into account the fact that we stand significantly higher than do dogs and shooting down from a higher vantage point often provides very messy pictures where the subject is not isolated from their background. So getting into the right position (particularly at the same eye level as the dog) is always something to consider – even lower if possible. Picture in your mind a shot of a dog jumping to catch a frisby for example. It doesn’t take much imagination to know that a picture would potentially look much better if the photographer was lying under the dog shooting upwards for the catch, than if the photographer was close by shooting down towards the ground. Unfortunately I don’t have many great shots of this kind, although one of my favourites I’ve taken is:

Nikon D200, 2006

I had the wrong lens on the camera at the time (a 60mm f/2.8) macro but it turned out to be good enough to get the shot I wanted.

High Key / High Contrast images
I mention this not because I think it’s the right way to shoot photos of dogs, but simply because it’s one of my favourite ways. When the subject’s fur is the right colour, getting them positioned against a white or bright background to have high key / high contrast images can look really effective. I will typically overexpose an image in camera and then during post processing, blow the highlights out completely using levels, while finally adding a lot of contrast as a last step. Some shots that worked well for me of this kind are here:

Nikon D200, 2006

Nikon D200, 2006

Neither of these images were shot in a studio. Just natural lighting on my balcony and in my office, respectively.

Lighting
Again, another case where dog shots follow the same principal as human portraits is with lighting. It’s easy to forget that good lighting can really make a picture, or at least create a very different effect. This accompanying shot, taken at sunrise in my living room,while not one of my best, clearly shows the dramatic impact the lighting has on the subject.

Nikon D200, 2006

Notice the details
This works well when a dog is, well dog tired. Then you get a chance to move around the subject and look for distinguishing features – the paws are always a good bet. Here, the focus is not on the face / eyes but on some other part of the body. A wide aperture is recommended here to make use of shallow depth of field.

In a shoot, I always try to get a shot like this:

Olympus OM-1, 2006

Getting in close, and wide
So ditch the macro lens now but still go in close with a wider angle lens. A UV filter is definitely recommended here unless you want your front element to have nose or lick marks :). Here depth of field requires experimentation – as does the focal point. Normally with portraits you’d choose to focus on the eyes and while I’d typically recommend to continue doing that even in these cases, there might be times when focusing on the closest part – the nose- adds to the character of the shot. In the following shot, I felt the eyes were the best place to focus:

Olympus OM-1, 2006

Obviously this gets even more fun if you have a fisheye.

Environment
Finally, consider changing a dogs environment to create different or creative shots. It doesn’t to mean taking them somewhere dramatic, it might just mean putting some distance between you and the dog, or shooting them in interesting places. Again, try to avoid busy backgrounds and all those usual things. Dogs on stairs I think make great photos and I’ll end with two shots which are definitely among my favourites. These were both shot in my house – and while taking some time to convince my Rotty’s to stay there and stay still – I thought it was worth it in the end.

Nikon D200, 2006

Nikon D200, 2006

Well that pretty much comes to the end of my introductory thoughts. Hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I did taking the shots.

But anyway I’m not debating that issue here… The reason for this post is because through 2006, I was reasonably well known on Pbase for being a Nikon shooter (D200 in particular). Then right at the end of the year I sold up all my gear and lenses (save for a D70 which I still keep) and got a Canon 5D. Since then I’ve been asked by many the reasons why, how the transition has been, would I still recommend the D200, etc. So here’s my summary of the whole C vs N thing.

It’s never easy comparing Nikon and Canon. The two camera companies almost appear to make a deliberate attempt to not compete directly in the various price / feature ranges by staggering each other with adjacent models. I would create the list as follows (in increasing order with respect to both price and capabilities):

-    Nikon D50 / D70s (Entry)
-    Canon 400D (Entry)
-    Nikon D80 ((Entry – Mid)
-    Canon 30D (Mid)
-    Nikon D200 (Mid – Semi Pro)
-    Canon 5D (Pro)
-    Nikon D2Xs (Pro)
-    Canon 1Ds (Pro)

You could divide this into two categories, Entry -> Mid and Mid -> Pro.

Very simply, my take is that I prefer Nikon at the Entry -> Mid range and Canon at the Mid -> Pro range. Nikon typically has better ergonomics (it’s a subjective matter but there are specific things such as ISO levels being displayed in the viewfinder, an integrated on / off button combined with the shutter) and definitely better build quality. Again the latter is partly subjective (I personally find the 400D too small / awkward) but there is plastic feel that Canon cameras have at that range also that is hard to deny.

In terms of image quality, although Canon definitely still holds the low noise / high ISO advantage at the low -> mid range, the gap is starting to become eroded by the D50 and now D80. Beyond that, one of main reasons I still favour Nikon at this level is the consumer lenses they’re building. The 18-135 VR and 18-200 VR are lenses that are so useful for general shooters (travel, walkaround, etc) and there is no equivalent that Canon users can put in their bag.

It’s a close call at that low – mid range, but I’d give the edge to Nikon.

As it gets into the very top end, the edge is clearly with Canon. The (v expensive) 1Ds simply has no comparison in the Nikon range if high end studio work is required. It’s not so much Canon being just better, but more that Nikon can’t even compete head to head. Of course, the 1Ds carries a significant price tag with it also so it’s unfair to compare directly with the D2X. Having said that, the D2X does hold itself very well against the sports shooting 1D – and as many people argue it’s dual mode gives them the megapixels for studio work and a high speed crop for fast moving subjects. If a photographer has a need for sometimes of either, it’s a hard camera to beat.

However, the most interesting comparison in my view is the D200 vs 5D. I’ve shot a few thousand shots with the 5D now and love it. The D200 still holds some advantages though:

-    Lower price
-    Better build quality with environmental sealing
-    Better ergonomics (subjective but there are some definite advantages like permanent ISO display in the viewfinder and more accurate colours / brightness in the LCD)
-    Faster (more fps, faster startup, etc)
-    More accurate metering in difficult lighting situations
-    Faster AF and AF lamp
-    1.5x crop for sports / wildlife / etc
-    Built in flash

So quite a few items still. And it’s unsurprising too when you think about it – the Nikon D200 is probably the most decorated camera of 2006.

However, in favour of the 5D is:
-    At least a stop advantage in terms of noise levels at high ISO. Quite honestly, I’ve been amazed at how good the 5D is in this regards. It’s not just the level of noise that’s lower but also the dynamic range and colour that is better retained in high ISO images on the 5D. Images I could only print to A4 on the D20 which I can print to A3.
-    Shallower DOF at the same aperture (so F/4 on the 5D appears to be equivalent to about F/2.8 on the D200 which gives v nice subject isolation)
-    Better lens choice .The quality of glass in Nikon and Canon is in my opinion, about the same. However, it’s the choice available to Canon users that is so good. For example the 24-105 F/4 IS L is a phenomenal lens that I expect to use for 90% + of my shots. There is nothing in the Nikon range that has the same pro-level quality in such a useful focal range. Also Canon has a much wider selection of prime lenses. 35 f/1.4, 24 f/1.4, 85 f/1.2, 50 f/1.2, etc – these are all faster than the equivalent Nikon’s
-    Full Frame… This provides (in theory) some of the low noise benefits but the main benefit is getting primes at the lengths they were intended. So a $400 50/1.4 is exactly that on the 5D – 50mm at a v fast ISO. There is no choice for the D200 at this focal length (the 35 f/2 is the closest as this is about 50mm when you take into account the crop factor but it’s slower and doesn’t have anywhere near as shallow DOF).
-    Although only 2MP difference, a clear difference in resolving power

So ultimately, I think the comparison between Nikon D200 and Canon 5D depends on a) budget available and b) the subjects you’ll be shooting.

When shooting certain types of subjects at ISO 400 or under, there’s not that much difference in the final result.

However I do almost no wildlife / sports / street these days and so the extra AF ability, speed, 1.5x crop and build quality of the D200 doesn’t benefit me as much. Instead I’m doing much more portrait / planned / studio type work and all the benefits of the 5D fall exactly into what I’m after. Above ISO 800, I think there’s no comparison between the two.

So, it’s not unsurprising it’s hard to compare them head to head as they’ve been designed to fill different needs in the market.

I still wholeheartedly recommend and rate the D200, and also think that Canon is giving me a dimension I’ve never had before. Ultimately, it’s me that’s changed rather than the camera’s capabilities and that ultimately is the advice I have – choosing the system which most effectively suits your needs.