Herb Segars Photography Blog

I spend way too much time on computers and if I can find ways to spend less time, I try and utilize them. I use a program named ImageFolio to handle my image files in the Stock Photography section of my website. Whenever I add new photos, I have to reindex the photo database. I also need to reindex on a regular basis to update the “most visited” photos. This reindexing is done through a cgi script. As I add more photos, the cgi script takes longer and longer to run. I asked my web host to increase the cgi script timeout. Their maximum time is 90 seconds. My script could not finish within that time and it would wreak havoc on my index. I went to great lengths to find a solution to my problem. My web host could not increase the timeout so I was stuck. This wasn’t the only problem that I had with the short timeout. When I publish a new category to my Stock Photography program, the program can create automatic thumbnails for the new category. The timeout would not allow the program to complete and there would not be a thumbnail. To solve this, I manually uploaded a thumbnail each time I created a new category. Not a big deal but it took some of the precious extra time that I do have. Just a quick note before I move on. If you are interested in a program like ImageFolio, they have a lite version that is free. You can find it at ImageFolio Lite. I use it for my family website and my friend uses it on her website. It is a nice photo program.

I purchased a program called Macro Express. It is a great program but it took some time for me to write a macro that would reindex my stock photo site one category at a time. I would log into the admin area of the stock photography program and let the macro run. As long as each macro didn’t take longer than 60 seconds, everything was okay but it took a half hour or longer to run through each category. I also had to remember to add new categories into the macro as I created them. Needless to say, this was a real pain in the butt. I knew that there was only one solution and that was to move to a new hosting company. This isn’t the easiest thing to do because I had to find a company that had a longer timeout and then I thought about moving my site from my old host to my new one. My old hosting company didn’t make site backups easy to create and there are a lot of things on my site that are not on my PC. My photos are uploaded independently using a program named iBulc so they are on my hard drive but not in the folder with my website files. I keep copies of the photos that I upload in folders but I am sure that they are all there. I have the high resolution originals but I don’t want to recreate all the images again.

Okay, so I went out looking for a new hosing company and finding one is a task all to itself. I read reviews of many different hosts and really tried to narrow the list. I thought about the criteria that drew me to my present hosting company – good support, reliable uptime and a user forum where I could get help from fellow users. In the time that I was with my old host, the user forum disappeared. I wondered why this happened. Was it a pain for the hosting company or were users having problems and airing them on the forum? I don’t know that answer. I read about a lot of companies and I wasn’t sure what to believe. I finally used a method that I use when I purchase things on the web. I try to find sites where buyers post their comments about a product. A great example of this is my favorite site for buying computer products – NewEgg.com. When you look for a product, you can read real user reviews of their experience with the item. I find that kind of information invaluable.

As I narrowed my list of hosting companies, I looked for user forums and read a lot of the comments – both good and bad. I found one that rose above the rest on my list and I decided to send them an email about their cgi timeout. I received a reply that their cgi timeout was 300 seconds or 333% more than my current host. I wasn’t sure that 300 seconds would be enough but I was willing to give it a try. The company offered a 45 day refund policy if I wasn’t satisfied. They also offer to transfer your site from your current host to their servers. I thought that this sounded pretty good. Additionally, they offer unlimited disk space, unlimited bandwidth and with their $7.95 per month plan, unlimited domains. If you have three domains, you could keep them all under the same plan for $7.95 a month. This sounded great so I signed up.

Not long after I signed up, I received an email from one of their transfer people for me to supply them with login information to my site. I did and they sent me an email back that they would let me know when everything was transferred. I even received an email that evening that due to the large size of my site and the transfer rate, they were going to let the transfer run overnight and contact me in the morning. Sure enough, the next morning there was an email that the transfer was complete. It also said that I should try out the site before changing my servers to point to the new hosting company. I couldn’t figure out how I could try this with all my links pointing to my old web host’s servers. The new companies tech people were quick with an answer. They told me how to edit the Hosts file on my computer so that whenever I went to any page on my site, I would be actually viewing the pages on the new hosts servers. This would only work on the computer on which I changed the Hosts file. This was terrific. I tried all my pages and they all worked great. My blog was intact as were all my photo pages. The first thing that I did was try and reindex my photo gallery. It completed well within the five minute time frame.

One of the things that impressed me about the new hosting company was their quick response to any questions or concerns that I had. I want to set up my reindexing in a cron job. When I asked my old hosting company about doing this, they pretty much told me that I was on my own. The new company is really trying to help me get this done. Every question that I have asked them has been answered within a matter of hours – not days. All right, who is the new hosting company? They are HostGator.

I believe that I am going to be very happy where I am. I am not trying to talk anyone into moving their site to HostGator. I am only writing this to tell you what a pleasant experience it was making the change. If you do have an interest in moving to another host, visit the HostGator forums and read what others have to say.

The other day, I went outside and found a praying mantis clinging to the siding of my house. I grabbed by trusty Nikon D300 and a Nikon 60mm f2.8 macro lens and my Benbo tripod. The praying mantis was in a weird spot and it was hard to get the tripod set up correctly. I ended up lying on the ground and the tripod was more of a monopod than a tripod. I started taking photos and then I remembered something that I saw on Lynda.com. It was about shallow depth of field and how to use the “Auto Align Layers” and “Auto Blend Layers” in Photoshop CS4 to increase the depth of field. When I am shooting macro, shallow depth of field is always a problem. I had my lens opening on f29 and was using the on-camera flash with a shutter speed of 1/60th second. My plan was to take a series of photos of the praying mantis and to change the focus point in each photo and then to see how I could combine them in Photoshop.

In the first photo, I had the head of the praying mantis and one of the legs in focus.

In the next photo, the back of the praying mantis and a portion of the left leg was in focus.

In the last photo the back of the praying mantis and the left middle leg are in focus. In Adobe Bridge, I left clicked on the first photo, then held down the “Shift” key and clicked on the third photo, selecting them all.

From the top menu, I chose:

“Tools”, “Photoshop”, “Load Files into Photoshop Layers”. This would take the three photos and load them into separate layers in one Photoshop file.

Once in Photoshop CS4, I saw the three photos in the Layers box. I did not do anything to these raw files before starting this exercise except to open them up in Adobe Camera Raw and use the “Clarity” slider on each of them. Other than that one action, they are just as I shot them in the camera. I needed to work with all three layers so with the first layer selected, I held down the “Shift” key and clicked on the third layer – selecting all three. The layers box now looked like this:

I went to the top menu bar and chose “Edit”, “Auto Align Layers”.

I was presented with another choice box:

I chose the default “Auto” selection and clicked “OK”. The program did its thing and I ended up with the following:

You can see that I moved the camera between shots but Photoshop CS4 did a great job of aligning the layers. The next process would be to “Auto Blend Layers” and Photoshop would create layer masks to hide the out-of-focus parts of the image and show the in-focus parts of the image.

Back to the “Edit” menu and I chose “Auto Blend Layers”. I was presented with another choice box:

I chose “Stack Images” since I was shooting a panorama and I left the “Seamless Tones and Colors” box checked. Again, Photoshop CS4 did its thing and you can see in the “Layers” box that layer masks were created to mask out the out-of-focus areas.

Here is a layer mask of the middle layer. You can see it by holding down the “Alt” button (“Cmd” button on a Mac) and left clicking on the layer mask.

Now for the final result:

Now this isn’t the best photo that I have ever taken and I wish that the white area in the lower left was not there. It is actually a white molding on the corner of the house but you can see by looking at the first three photos that the final result is miles better than any of the three by themselves. 

I have included a Quicktime movie to show you everything that I explained above. Please use the controls at the bottom of the image to view the movie. If you cannot see the movie, please update Quicktime. The movie doesn’t seem to work with older versions of Quicktime. Click here to update.

I hope that you find this tutorial interesting.

I have tried many methods of trying to remove backscatter from underwater photos. Backscatter happens because the underwater strobe(s) cause reflections from suspended particles in the water. The method that I am going to describe today works with photos taken with a black background. First you might ask, how can I get a black background? You can do so by shooting with a very small lens opening and one that is at least two f-stops smaller than what might be required for an available light exposure. In New Jersey, this isn’t hard because light levels are low underwater on a regular basis. The photo that I am using as an example today was taken at a depth of about sixty to seventy feet deep. At that depth on a normal day in New Jersey, you can take a light meter reading using ISO 200 and the meter hardly moves off the stops. What this means to the underwater photographer is that all the light for the photo comes from the strobe(s). This photo was taken with an ISO of 200, a shutter speed of 1/60th of a second and an f-stop of f14. The camera is a Nikon D200 in a Subal housing with (2) Ikelite DS-125 strobes using TTL. The following photo was the original shot with no preprocessing:

What we have here is a bergall (also known as a cunner), a member of the wrasse family checking out a Lion’s mane jellyfish. I have seen bergalls taking bites out of the jellyfish in the past although it is a behavior that I don’t see on a regular basis – mainly because I don’t see lion’s mane jellyfish near the bottom where bergalls hang out. As you can see, there is a lot of backscatter in the photo. I have tried a lot of methods to remove this from photos but this is a brand new method that looks really good. So far, it only works on photos with a black background. Initially, you could open this photo in Adobe Photoshop CS4 and set the black point for the background to be sure that it is a solid black color but in this case, I did not do that. From Adobe Bridge, I right clicked on the photo and choose “Open in Camera Raw”.

I clicked on the “Adjustment Brush” in the top toolbar. It is the fifth icon from the right.

This brings up the “Adjustment Brush” dialog box. My interest was to reduce the exposure on the backscatter.

I chose to move the exposure slider to the left to –4 f-stops of exposure. At the bottom of the “Adjustment Brush” dialog box are the sliders for the adjustment brush. I chose a size of “10” and a feather of “0”. The feather of “0” gave me a hard edged brush so that I wouldn’t feather any of my brush into the main subjects – the bergall and the lion’s mane jellyfish. I left the flow and density at their defaults.

I started to paint around the subjects, making sure that I did not get too close. If you make a mistake, you can go to the adjustment brush dialog box and click on the “erase” button at the top of the box and brush away any areas that you don’t want the –4 stop exposure to affect.

Once the large areas were done, I changed my zoom to 100% and painted out areas that were close to the bergall and the lion’s mane jellyfish. When you change the zoom, the brush changes to accommodate the new view. You can see the sizes of the brush in the two photos above. I did not make any size changes when I zoomed in.

Zooming out to “Fit on Screen”, I checked my brushing by holding my mouse over one of the pins on the screen. In this screen, you can see four pins. Each pin is placed when I start a new adjustment brush. For example, if I started with my original brush using –4 stops underexposure and found that I made a mistake and choose “Erase” to remove a bad area. When I choose “Add” and started painting with the –4 f-stop exposure brush again, a new pin would be seen on the page. It is not a big deal, you just have to know that it happens.

I am holding my mouse over another pin to see what areas it has affected. After spending a few minutes cleaning up more areas, here is the final result:

I have tried many methods of removing backscatter in the past but I am really happy with this one. In some of the other methods that I have used, I have found that when I zoomed in, I would see noise in the main subject but there was no noise in the areas that I fixed. This looked pretty fluky and I knew that it wouldn’t work. The next view is of a 100% crop of the bergall. You can see that it looks really good.

You can see that there is no difference in noise between the fish and the black background. This really worked well for me.

Here is another really great tip when using Adobe Camera Raw 5. Try using the “Clarity” slider on your photos. You will be amazed on how much it helps your pictures. I took some photos that I thought were pretty sharp and used the “Clarity” slider on them and I was amazed at how much better then looked.

Finally, as an observation, Veronica and I attended the Camera Show at the Jacob Javits Center in New York City this weekend. We didn’t think that it was particularly well attended as other years in the past and that could be because of the economy. What we did see is that the majority of clusters of people were found at the software vendors. We saw lots of people at the Adobe area, the OnOne Software area, the Live Books area and the Vertis Fluid Mask area. This tells me that digital photography is exciting people and that the software that supports digital photography excites people even more.

I met a fellow who took some of my underwater photography courses many years ago and he was telling me how well he was doing with his photography and I was elated. He did tell me that he was struggling with the computer end of digital photography. I can tell all of you this. If you are going to embrace digital photography, you are going to have to master the computer end of it. I believe that there will be mediocre photographers who are great with the computer that will produce images that are better than better photographers who are not proficient with computers. That’s not the way that it used to be but I am afraid that that is the way of the future. Don’t be afraid of technology, use it to make yourself better.

I purchased Adobe Photoshop CS4 before it was released and received an e-mail that the program was available for download this past week. I was excited to try it as I have recently updated my computer to Vista 64. Photoshop CS4 comes with a 64-bit version that is supposed to take advantage of computer RAM (I have 8 gb in my desktop) and also takes advantage of certain video cards (I also have one of those). The first thing that I found was that none of my plug-ins worked in the 64-bit version of Photoshop CS4. That was disappointing so if your plug-ins are things that you use a lot, you may want to choose the default setup of Photoshop and allow it to load both the 64-bit version  (assuming that you have a 64-bit Vista system) and the 32-bit version. It gives you the option to only load the 64-bit version by unchecking the 32-bit version box at the beginning of the installation. I understand that some plug-ins still have issues with the 32-bit version so again, if you need those plug-ins, you might want to keep Photoshop CS3 on your computer until the plug-ins are updated.

Today, I am going to visit one of the new tools in Adobe Camera Raw 5 that really impressed me. Before I start I want to make a point about Adobe Camera Raw (ACR). You can open up jpegs and tiff files in ACR, not just raw files. To see the advantage of opening tiffs and jpegs in ACR, see this page in my Digital Photography section on my web site.

My dive buddy, Beth Dalzell, of Brick, NJ took a photo of me with her point-and-shoot camera in an Ikelite housing. I really like the photo but the floatation arms that I use and my housing were overexposed. To open the jpeg in ACR, right click on the photo in Adobe Bridge and choose “Open in Camera Raw”.

I wanted to reduce the exposure on the two floatation arms and on the housing itself. To do this, I used the the adjustment brush. You can open the brush by clicking on it. It is the fifth tool from the left. You can also choose it by using the “k” key.

Once the brush is selected, the adjustment brush box opens on the right side of the panel. There are sliders for exposure, brightness, contrast, saturation, clarity, sharpness and color. There are also sliders to adjust the brush settings. I choose to reduce the exposure by 1 f-stop so I slid the exposure slider to the left to –1.00.

I changed the size of the brush by using the “[ or ]” keys. The left “[“ makes the brush smaller and the right “]” makes the brush larger. I brushed over both white floatation arms and then over the housing itself.

You can see the the exposure was reduced only on the areas that I brushed and I accomplished what I wanted to do.

Here is a look at the photo before I lowered the exposure on the floats and the housing:

I was able to see before and after by unchecking the “Preview” box to see the before view.

And I rechecked the “Preview” box to see the what it looked like when I was done.

The great thing about using Adobe Camera Raw is that when I was finished, I clicked on the “Done” box and my jpeg was saved with the settings that I applied. These settings are reversible. When I was writing this, I forgot to capture one of the views with the arms and housing were too bright. I reset all the settings in ACR by clicking the “Clear All” button at the bottom of the Adjustment brush box and everything was back to the way it was when I started. Pretty cool.

There are also some other new settings in ACR 5 like a graduated filter tool that I will visit at another time.

One last note about the 64-bit version of Adobe Photoshop CS4. It sure seems to run much faster than CS3 did. I have not processed a lot of photos on it yet but I think that it will really speed up my work flow.

Since I have gone digital in my photography, I have shot a lot of photos and I am happy to say (with fingers crossed) that I have not lost any photos due to computer problems. I thought that since I am experiencing another non-diving weekend (northeast winds with 3 to 5 foot seas), I would talk about how I manage photos on my computer. I shoot mostly in Raw so I have dedicated one hard drive for Raw photos. They are kept in photos by year. For this year, I have a folder named “Raw 2008″. That folder is broken down into other sub folders. Those folders are “Land 2008″ and “Underwater 2008″. Each of those folders are broken down into sub folders. I have another folder on my “Raw” hard drive and that folder is named “Unprocessed Raw 2008″ which is also broken into sub folders similar to those mentioned above. Any raw file that has not been converted to a Tiff file resides in the “Unprocessed Raw 2008″ folder until all the files in each folder are processed. The finished folder is then moved to the appropriate area in “Raw 2008″. I use Adobe Photoshop CS3 (and soon Photoshop CS4) to do my conversions. After I have converted a file, I assign it a label in Adobe Bridge so I know that the file has been converted. I use a green label for raw files that have been converted to Tiff files. On the rare occasion that I shoot jpegs, I will file them first in the Raw 2008 folder as I consider the jpegs as my originals. I will process the jpegs in Adobe Camera Raw. If you didn’t know that you can do that, please read my write up in the Digital Photography section of my web site. Here is a link to the page.

Raw File Folder List Example 1

 

Raw File Folder List Example 2

 

Birds Folder Example

 

Addonics Mini Storage Tower

The storage tower holds four 3.5″ drives and has a built-in power supply and cooling fan. I bought the version of the tower with the built-in port multiplier so that it connects to my computer tower with a single eSata cable. I currently own two of the mini storage towers and I am really pleased with them. I am using Seagate Sata drives for all the drives in my computer and both mini towers. I like the Seagates and have pretty good success with them. I particularly like the five year warranty on the drives. There hasn’t been a single problem with either of the mini storage towers. My system configuration looks like this:

Tower and Hard Drive Configuration

The 500 gb RAW hard drive backs up to two separate hard drives in the right hand mini storage tower. The Photo 1 TIFF drive backs up to two drives on the left hand mini storage tower and the Photo 2 TIFF drive backs up to two hard drives in the left hand mini storage tower. I back up to each drive on alternating days. On Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday, I back up the RAW drive to RAW 1 in the mini storage tower and backup PHOTO 1 and PHOTO 2 to PHOTO 1A and PHOTO 1B in the mini storage towers. On Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, I back up to the second RAW drive, TIFF PHOTO 1B and TIFF PHOTO 2B. My backup program is SyncbackSE. I use it in a mirror mode so that it mirrors the original drives onto the backup drives. I have set parameters in the program to delete any files on the backup disks that were deleted from the original disks. I set schedules for the programs to run and the program sends an email to me with a report as to what actions were taken. SyncbackSE is inexpensive but it works incredibly well.

I also have a 750 gb main drive in the computer that has my program files and data files on it. I really should split the two so that the data files are on a separate disk but I back up the disks religously. Once a week, I schedule a full backup of the main drive to a second hard drive in the tower. I have four hard drives in the computer tower. I use Acronis True Image Homeedition for the full backup. It is scheduled to run once each week and it sends me an email when the task is complete. I also use it daily to backup my data files and my email files. The reason that I do my full backup to a disk in the tower is that if I need to restore my main drive, I will put in an Acronis boot disk and restore from a drive attached to the computer and not from an external drive although Acronis will restore from an external drive. I just feel better using the drive in the computer tower. So, I am up to eight hard drives but I have more attached. When I went from Vista 32 to Vista 64, I kept my original Vista 32 hard drive and installed it into an external USB enclosure. I am going to keep that for a few months just to be sure that there isn’t anything that I might need from the disk. When I am comfortable that I have everything, I will reformat that disk and use it for another purpose. I normally have the USB enclosure turned off as I don’t see the need to keep it running when I am not accessing the drive. I have another disk that I keep downloads and misc. files that wouldn’t matter too much if I lost them and finally a scratch disk for Photoshop.

I wanted to say one other thing about the Addonics Mini Storage Towers. They come in a lot of different configurations but the one that I use allows you to install one drive at a time. It will run with only one drive or two drives or three drives or all four. This is a plus if you can’t afford or don’t need to add drives right now but feel that you will have to in the future. My last comment is my favorite place to purchase hard drives and computer related equipment is NewEgg. I have used them for years and they have been great. I recommend them highly.