S3is - Postscript: raw 2019

Looking through my S3is images left me curious about one thing -  I wondered whether, using my current post processing techniques I could produce images 1400 pixels high of acceptable quality for viewing on screen. It isn't that I want to use the S3is now. I have cameras with much better ergonomics, larger screens, more customisable, better image stabilisation, better sensors etc. But on the photography forums I frequent there are, unsurprisingly, a lot of discussions about kit, what kit you need to get good image quality for various types of subject matter. One of the criteria I see quite often is along the lines of having to have good enough kit to produce prints a metre or more wide. That is far beyond my needs. I don't print much and when I do it is rarely more than 300 mm on the long side. And the vast majority of my photos are prepared for viewing on screen at 1400 pixels high, on a calibrated monitor, in subdued light.

Why 1400 pixels? It fits nicely on to my current screen. Perhaps it will be too small when I get a 4K screen but I'll worry about that when it happens. But why not have a lot more pixels so people can blow it up and look at the fine details? Two reasons. The way I go about my photography, especially with my small sensor cameras, there often isn't much detail worth looking at beyond what you can see taking a close look at 1400 pixels high. And, even if there is, I want to be in control of the look of the image, and that includes the sharpening. For my invertebrates especially, and sometimes for flowers too, fine detail matters. If an image is resized it can destroy the fine detail, so I prepare my images, and do the sharpening, for them to be best viewed as is, at the size they are posted. Of course if someone doesn't have a screen as large as mine (2560 x 1440) then unfortunately they will have to look at a resized and hence degraded version if they want to see the whole image. That is a pity, but you have to draw the line somewhere, and the line I draw is that it looks good on my screen. Selfish? I suppose so. But you have to choose a particular size, so it is always going to be wrong for some people, so I might as well choose the size that works best for me.

And the calibrated monitor, and subdued light? One of the things I discovered when I started using a calibrated monitor was that I could see more, finer detail, more subtle textures and finer colour gradation than before, and textures and colours are very important for botanical images for my viewing enjoyment. And viewing in subdued light helps with this too.

So, I want to produce images 1400 pixels high. How good a piece of kit do I need to do this? Could I do it to my satisfaction with this old camera with only 6 megapixels and a sensor the size of a smart phone sensor, with a bit of cropping along the way? I thought it quite possible, because my go to camera for invertebrates is a small sensor camera (a Panasonic FZ330) with a sensor only fractionally larger than that of the S3is, and I sometimes crop quite hard and produce images 1400 pixels high. But it does have twice as many pixels as the S3is and a more recent and so presumably better sensor. And I shoot raw and use some heavyweight processing, using DXO PhotoLab, then Silkypix Developer Pro and then Lightroom for invertebrates, using the best parts of each (for my purposes and preferences).

I decided to do a practical test. This is one of the common features of my photographic journey. Right from the start I have been doing practical exercises to try to understand how things work, and how well they would work, or not, for what I want to achieve, and sometimes just out of interest, as with this one. Most of the images on my Flickr account are arranged by year, and each year I have a collection called "Photo Technics", with an average of around 75 albums per year in them over the past four years (13 in January alone this year). This is where I put the photographic evidence from my practical tests. And these tests are why my Flickr photostream can look so odd sometimes with large blocks of almost identical images. A much better entry point for my Flickr account is my collections.

A good test would have been photographing invertebrates, but there are none around at the moment that I can find. (Much of the country is covered in snow just at the moment.) However, I have been doing exercises with botanical subjects in our garden over the past month and so have been looking closely at images of the same dozen or so subjects, so I would have a decent feel for how well or otherwise the S3is did with those same subjects.

So, I fitted a Canon 500D on to the S3is and spent a short time in a rather cold garden, working hand-held as usual, shooting some familiar botanical scenes. One thing I did first was to install the CHDK utility on the S3is so it could capture raw as well as JPEG. There are periodic discussions on the forums as to whether there is any benefit in using raw rather than JPEG, especially when using small sensor cameras. My thinking for some time has been that there is a benefit for what I do, although it does depend on the techniques I use. We shall see a lot later in the story why it is that I am now using mainly JPEG for my botanical imaging, but that is a long way ahead. Suffice it to say that I have an open mind about raw vs JPEG; raw works for me, for some of what I do, but it doesn't work for some other people, for anything that they do. In this case I decided to shoot raw + JPEG and compare the results.

The JPEG settings were those I used back in 2007-9, with contrast, Sharpness, Saturation and Green turned down as described in this post, so as to improve the colours and give some extra flexibility for processing the out of the camera JPEGs. While capturing the images I used manual white balance and set it from time to time using the large grey patch on a ColorChecker Passport. I used aperture priority with exposure compensation of -2/3 stop to protect the colours in brighter areas.

The first thing I discovered when I got back indoors and loaded the images on to my PC was that DXO PhotoLab does not know about the S3is. That meant I could not use PRIME noise reduction. That was a blow. Small sensors can be a bit noisy even at base ISO in good light. I typically underexpose my images, as I did for this exercise, to protect highlights, and I go in for a fair amount of shadow lifting. This reveals noise, which is why the excellent PRIME noise reduction is especially useful with my small sensor cameras. Also, the noise gets worse as the ISO increases, and I almost always use my FZ330 at base ISO 100. I can do this because I use flash for invertebrates. However, I didn't have the S3is set up for flash, and in any case I don't use flash for botanical subjects. But unfortunately the light levels were fairly low so even though I was using f/4 rather than the more light-demanding f/8 that I use for invertebrates, I had to use ISO 200, and even then the shutter speeds came out at no faster than 1/160 sec and down to 1/40 sec, which is getting a bit slow for hand-held close-ups. At least there was not much of a breeze.

I couldn't use PhotoLab on the S3is raw files, and I don't use Silkypix for botanical subjects, so I did all the processing in Lightroom. Now things get personal. What one can get out of an image, raw or JPEG, depends on the tools one has available and one's skills and experience in using them. And what one wants to get out of an image is a very personal affair, as is one's perception of and tolerance for things like noise, wrong colours and sharpening halos. So I can only describe how it felt to me.

For the most part, compared to processing an out of the camera JPEG image, the raw files seemed easier to get to a place that I found more or less satisfactory. The colours seemed to fall into place quite easily. Some colours in some of the JPEGs, seemed stubbornly not quite right despite my attempts to adjust them with white balance and individual colour adjustments. I think on balance the colours of the raw versions turned out more like the real thing, but it wasn't clear cut.

Another thing that was difficult to pin down but which felt real enough to me was that the raw versions seemed to have more "dimensionality" than the JPEG versions, which seemed a bit flat in comparison. I suppose this would have been (assuming it wasn't my imagination or eyesight) something to do with overall contrast and/or local contrast, or the tone curve. (I tried altering the tone curve on the JPEGs but I didn't get anywhere with that.) Quite possibly with better post processing I could have got the JPEG versions to be more like the raw versions that I preferred, however I didn't need to do anything special to get the effect with the raw versions and that in itself was advantageous.

There was one thing which was clear cut. In the following JPEG version of one of the scenes there is an area in the bottom left that is I believe irretrievably blown.

The same area in the raw version below is fine.

So was the S3is able to produce 1400 pixel high images that I would be comfortable with? Well, the results varied, which is hardly surprising given the shooting conditions, but I think most of them would be just about good enough for my purposes, especially if did some local noise adjustment on some of the backgrounds (something that I have to do from time to time with FZ330 images). Here, below, are the rest of the raw versions, 1400 pixels high. (If you would like to look at the JPEG versions they are paired with the raw versions in this album at Flickr.)

In terms of this test the landscape orientation images are the most challenging, as the vertical dimension is at most 2112 pixels. The one that was most cropped in this dimension was 1817 pixels high when cropped, with two others being in the mid 1800s. In the context of a 1400 pixel high output I think this small sensor camera has probably done about as well as could be expected. Perhaps a bit better than some might expect.

Click on an image to see the 1400 pixel high version

S3is – Other subjects

So that was what I photographed with my S3is, with a few exceptions. Here are some (possibly most) of those exceptions. As you can see, no people, only one place (Westonbirt Arboretum), no street scenes, no architecture, only one still life (a paperweight), no landscapes, no birds, no cats, no dogs, just one mammal. And in over ten years, apart from some common birds, that hasn’t changed much. I have a rather limited repertoire.

Click on an mage to see a larger version

S3is – Water droplets

Here is another subject area that has fallen by the wayside for quite a while now. Water droplets – enhancing a subject, or sometimes being the subject, individually or collectively as a “droplet landscape”.  

Here are some of them. I probably used the Canon 500D or Raynox 150 for most of these, but I might have used the Raynox 250 for the single droplet image.I can’t believe there simply haven’t been any scenes like this in recent years. I must have stopped looking. Looking back at these S3is images is turning out to be a bit of an eye-opener for me.

Click on an image to see a larger version

S3is – Plants

My other main subjects were botanical scenes, most often flowers, almost all of them in our garden. A lot of the scenes were relatively large and for them I could use the camera without a close-up lens. Some however were too small for that. The Raynox 250 and the less powerful Raynox 150 were both too powerful except for a very few tiny flowers and so at some point in this period I bought a Canon 500D close-up lens. On the S3is this let me go from scenes more than 300mm wide down to scenes around 40mm wide, with a working distance of around 500mm. I could gain focus with a working distance of anywhere between around 500 mm and 300 mm, and coupled with the lower magnification this makes it much easier to use than the Raynox 150 or, even more so, the Raynox 250.

Like the Raynox 150 and 250 the Canon 500D is an "achromatic close-up lens" (“achromat”). Achromats are made of two or more pieces of glass. This constrasts with "close-up filters" which are made of single pieces of glass. Close-up filters tend to suffer from sometimes quite severe problems of chromatic aberration and blurriness, especially away from the centre of the image. Achromats are much better on both counts, although they do vary, some in my experience being significantly better than others. I have found the Raynox 150, Raynox 250 and Canon 500D to perform well and for 10 years or so they were the mainstay of my close-up and macro photography even though I experimented with other approaches like macro lenses, extension tubes, teleconverters and reversed lenses. But when I was using the S3is that was all several years in the future.

So, as with my later cameras, and until very recently, my botanical images have been captured either with a zoom lens by itself (a fixed lens on a bridge camera, or an interchangeable zoom lens on micro four thirds or APS-C camera), or with the addition of a close-up lens, almost always a Canon 500D for botanical scenes. I have rarely kept notes of whether or not I was using a close-up lens for a particular shot or if I was which close-up lens it was. So for the following examples some would have been captured with the S3is by itself, and some with a Canon 500D attached. I doubt any of them would have used a stronger close-up lens.

A couple of things strike me about these. One is that right from the beginning of my photographic journey I was attracted to scenes where direct sunlight is falling on the subject but not, or not much, on its surroundings. The other is that although I was in a garden with lots of flowers I had discovered that there are other things to photograph like berries, seed pods and foliage. A decade later I am still attracted to pools of sunshine and to berries, seed pods and foliage. As well as flowers of course.

Click on an image to see a larger version

S3is – Invertebrates

Right from the outset I photographed a lot of invertebrates in our garden. I remember how difficult I found it to use the Raynox 250. I almost gave up after a few days because getting anything in focus was so hit and miss. What I didn’t realise, but soon worked out, was that the working distance was critical. If the working distance isn’t within a quite narrow range then you can’t get an in focus image.

By October 2007 I had discovered the Raynox 150, which I think was not as well known then as it is now. It is less powerful than the Raynox 250 and is much easier to use. Used with the S3is it covers scenes from around 75 mm wide to around 17 mm wide, with a longer working distance of a little over 200mm. That range of scene size was more suitable for the mainly medium sized invertebrates I was photographing, with the subject rarely filling the frame. You can also gain focus over a wider range of working distances than with the Raynox 250, which makes focusing easier. And the working distance is longer, which is good when photographing invertebrates which can be a bit jumpy about you getting too near to them. Had I known about it I would have done well to start with the Raynox 150.

One problem I had with invertebrates was that the S3is does not have a hot shoe. At that time I had not discovered the work and techniques of Mark Berkery. I later found out that Mark produced wonderful images of invertebrates using a bridge camera similar to mine (in his case a Panasonic FZ50), with the same close-up lenses. But he used flash a lot of the time, and he used the camera’s built in flash, directing the light to the subject using a snoot. You can see Mark’s snoot arrangement by searching for “Velcro” on the linked page. I tried a couple of methods of diffusing the camera’s built in flash, but with no success, so all the time I used the S3is I used available light. This had two consequences for invertebrates: images that were often not very sharp or detailed; and nasty highlights when working in bright, direct sunlight.

For invertebrates I quickly took to using minimum aperture so as to get as much depth of field as I could. This is controversial. Using such small apertures is widely regarded as unsuitable for the very logical reason that when using very small apertures images lose a lot of sharpness/detail because of diffraction. However, I see it as a trade-off between one sort of sharpness/detail and another. You can either have a relatively thin slice of the subject in focus with fine detail showing, or you can have a deeper slice of the subject in focus with less fine detail but more larger scale detail. My preference is for a deeper slice. I’ll come back to this another time, but here I’ll simply note that using small apertures means that you need more light and/or longer exposures and/or higher ISOs.

Unfortunately, the light levels are often quite low here. In addition, it is a notoriously breezy location. And insects move around, and sometimes you have no choice but to photograph them when they are in motion, or some of their parts such as antennae are moving around. As I didn’t manage to add more light to the scene using flash I ended up using exposures that were too long or ISOs that were too high to get good sharpness/detail. You can improve matters somewhat with good post processing, but I was a beginner at post processing at that time and did not have tools as powerful as I now have to hand.

So the lack of flash gave me problems when I didn’t have enough light. Paradoxically it sometimes gave me problems in bright sunlight too. I find that with invertebrates bright sunlight can produce very high contrast and give images a rather ugly look. Using flash can even out the illumination giving, to my eye, a much more pleasing look.

Still, when the circumstances were more or less suitable I did get some results that I still quite like. Yes, I could do better now in terms of image quality, with better tools and more experience, but there is more to images than image quality. These are of their time, of that time in my life. For me, they are memories, as well as pictures. Here are some that caught my eye.

(By the way, you will notice that few of the animals and plants I post are identified. That is because I have a life-long memory retention and recall problem. I can’t, by and large, recall names, of animals, plants, people, celebrities, football teams, anything … And if I do try, I often get it wrong. So, for the most part, I don’t.)

Click on an image to see a larger version

S3is – Clouds

Looking through my S3is images I realised that I had forgotten how much time I used to spend photographing clouds. For some I simply took photos out of a bedroom window, with lots of different versions of this scene with a wide range of colours and cloud formations.

Click on an image to see a larger version

For others I did the three minute drive to a local cove where I could get down beside the water to photograph the skies ...

… and when I was lucky, a passing ship.

I think all of these were panoramas, shot as separate images and joined together in AutoPano Pro, which I used for panoramas at that time.

I have done hardly any of this for some years. I don’t know why. Looking through the S3is photos made me think that perhaps it is time to do some more.