One of the only good reasons to have a digital camera with high resolution (5 megapixels and above) is so that you can digitally zoom in on an area of the image and not have that zoomed in portion become all choppy or noisy. The lower the resolution of the original, the worse the magnified area will be. Realize, too, that with most digital cameras, you can choose low, medium, or high resolution. Best to use the highest setting if you think you’ll want to enlarge or edit the images later on.

I made this original image of the bee and flowers with a Canon Digital Rebel XT DSLR equipped with a Canon 28 - 135 mm zoom, fully extended (135 mm). I was about 16 inches from the bee, and a bit frustrated that I could not get a more magnified image. I’d have preferred to get a much closer original shot of the bee since nothing takes the place of a high quality original image. This is the Holy Grail of photography–always do as much work as you can through the lens, because your ability to sharpen, saturate, or recompose an image becomes much more difficult after you’ve captured the image!

Now, getting macro shots of still flower petals is one thing, but a moving bee is a bit difficult to shoot! Even if I were able to zoom in much more, I’d be trying to follow the fast-moving bee all over the place, trying to recompose the scene while attempting to keep the rascal in focus. From this respect, its a better choice to pull back and shoot the wider scene with the intent of cropping/zooming a bit later on.

The caveat here is that you need two things to do this:

1. A hi-res original image and
2. Photo editing software

The Canon Rebel XT is an 8 megapixel camera, so it’s got enough resolution. I used Adobe Photoshop CS2 to crop and magnify the image. Oh, and one last thing–how many shots do you think I took before I got a keeper? Would you believe twenty-six? Sometimes a photographer gets lucky, but skill and persistence usually have a bigger payoff!

I shot this image in a thrift shop. A very photogenic couple was testing out a sofa and I was hunting for people portraits for a book I’ve since written. I told them they looked great together and asked if I could photograph them for the book (it always helps the creative process if you carry your camera everywhere!). They gladly agreed and I came away with a great shot and an introduction to the band “Sunsplit,” in which the couple play.

Notes on the Photo:

1. Paul Simon was wrong–everything does NOT look worse in black and white! In fact, things often look better. For one thing, you don’t have to worry about white balance. The lighting in this store was a combination of frontlit windowlight (daylight) and fluorescent. In color, such lighting would pose a problem. Also, B/W gives an unreal, abstract quality to just about everything.

2. I used a Canon Digital Rebel XT with a 28-135mm auto focus lens. One great thing about a DSLR is that if the light is dim (as it was here), you can up the light sensitivity to 1600 ISO. Sure, things become grainy (or noisy) if you try to enlarge the photo much, but sometimes you just have to play the cards you’re dealt. Evoking a feeling with your photograph is often much more important than it’s technical excellence.

3. Model release necessary? If you’re going to publish the photo and/or attempt to make money from it. An exception being a news item showing people in a public space.

What’s Octoberfest without a pig roast? The woman ahead of me in the meat line was snapping a cell phone shot of her dinner, so I just shot her hand shooting her subject! Its kind of trendy to selectively desaturate a color image these days, and I get caught up in it too. Read on and I’ll tell you how I did it!

The original is just not a great looking photo, is it? Composition-wise, I liked it, but it has its problems. I shot it on the spur of the moment and didn’t have much time to set my controls (Canon Rebel XT with Canon 28-135 mm lens). I figured I could salvage it somehow in Adobe’s Photoshop.

The original was obviously in color, but had an overall bluish tone due to shadows, so I warmed up the image to make it appear daylight-normal. This isn’t necessary if you’re just going to desaturate the image (turn it into black and white), but my intent was to keep the cell phone’s display in color. Since I conceptualized this as my final product, I wanted the display to look natural. As far as a roast pig can appear natural….

Get rid of blue overcast with Photoshop CS:

I used Image->Adjustments->Photo Filter->Warming Filter 85 to about 25% Density on the slider.

Isolate the cell phone image:

Next, I used the magnetic lasso. There are 3 types of lassos–the magnetic one sort of follows the borders automatically, if there’s sufficient contrast. Select the phone’s display by drawing lines around it with the mouse.

Desaturate the rest of the scene:

Right click your mouse to Select Inverse (this lets you keep the lassoed part untouched, while you work on the rest of the image. The majority of the image can then be desaturated (Image->Adjustments->Desaturate).

Brighten up the dull-looking image:

Use the Brightness slider (Image->Adjustments->Brightness/Contrast) to do this. Maybe touch up the contrast a bit too.

Remove bracelet:

I usually don’t alter my images, but her bracelet just distracted from the cell phone. It also appeared that the hand was wearing a surgical glove! All real possibilities as an end product, but I just didn’t want it there. So I used the Clone Stamp tool to stamp over it. Blending the area with the surrounding hand area is much easier in BW than it is in color. With color, you have more subtle hues to deal with.

Sharpen the image a bit:

If you choose to sharpen an image, you always do so as your final step. I like to use Gaussian Blur (Filter->Sharpen->Smart Sharpen->Gaussian Blur) to fake a sharp image if my original is a bit fuzzy.

Summary:

You can easily get carried away with Photoshop, as there are so many ways to mess with your image. The thing I like about photography is using the camera to capture the image I see; I generally don’t use it as a basis for creating something new. I just don’t want all that “after-capture” flexibility; I need limits. Worse case scenario, you can spend the rest of your life making countless variations of the same image! I once asked a painter “How do you know when your painting is finished?” (go ahead, try and draw or paint something, you’ll see what I mean). She said, “Paintings are never finished–they’re abandoned!” It can be exhausting, knowing when to stop.

You can actually add sepia toning in the camera if you like. Here’s the original. I think the sepia gives it a bit more oomph. (As an aside, Nikon DSLRs for some reason only shoot sepia images when put in “monochrome” mode. If you want black and white, you have to “desaturate” the image in a photo editing program.)

The statue was about two stories above the ground so I needed a long zoom to get up to it. I shot at a fairly high f-stop (16) to get good depth of field. As the Tamron has no image stabilization, I had to brace the camera on something solid (shutter speed was probably 1/30 second). Funny thing about image stabilization–many people think it enables you to shoot sharp images all the time. Not so! It simply allows you to shoot at one or two shutter speed settings slower than you would normally be able to when hand holding the camera.

For example, most people can effectively hand hold a 200 mm zoom at a shutter speed of about 1/200 second. You risk blurring the image if you use a lower shutter speed. Image stabilization might allow you to hand hold the same shot at slower speeds, say 1/125 or even 1/60 of a second.