Holy Crop! The Cropist’s Badlands Workshops for 2012 are Announced

Mark these two dates down on your 2012 Calendar!

May 19-23. 2012
December 1-5, 2012

Fleeting Glimpse Images is pleased to announce two Badlands Photography Workshops for our 2012 workshop series. Based on our sold-out workshops from 2011 we are expecting good demand for the coming year.  The workshop format will vary slightly from last year and we are hoping to pull off a couple of new twists for the 2012 offering.  We will pass along those details as soon as we lock them down.

Early Sign-up Discounts!

Save $50.00 by signing up no later than 2/29/2012 for the May workshop and no later than 8/31/2012 for the December workshop.  After that the price goes back to $645.00. See our website for full details.  Full information about the 2012 Badlands Photography Workshop series can be found at http://badlands.rikkflohr.com.

Reserve your place today!

Rikk Flohr © 2012

Crop Circles: Part One

…from a topic suggested by Mark Sirota

The Crop You Forgot You Made

Every picture is a crop but likely not in the way you might be thinking. We all make viewfinder framing decisions where ever we decide to point our lens.  We slice out the rest of the world for that rectangular vision we desire. What we likely knew, but have forgotten, is that our camera, specifically our sensor is performing a crop of all the light gathered by our lens.

Lenses are round. They cast circular images. But our digital sensors, like sheets and rolls of film before them, only capture rectangular images. Shutters (talking in-lens shutters) could be round or rectangular but ultimately, modern cameras take a rectangular image to the emulsion or the memory card.  Our digital files, slides and negatives all reside in a rectangular format.

Math Time

Lenses: Focusable area of a standard 35MM format lens is roughly 1520 MM² at minimum to cover the shutter/sensor. The image circle of lenses varies slightly so this is an inexact number.

Sensors: Full Frame are 864 MM²

Cropping: The cropping which occurs in taking the rectangular ‘meat’ out of the lens’ image circle is about 44%. Only 56% of the focused image by the lens actually falls through the shutter and onto the sensor.

In the example I’ve mocked up above, you can see how the sensor effectively crops off much of the image circle. And, in this case, most of that lopped off detail is meaningless.  Nonetheless, we have lost part of the image rendered by our optics. There isn’t much we can do to get it back either.

“What is the point of all this, Rikk?” you might be asking yourself. We are, after all, stuck in a raster world where image formats are defined by an array of pixels that is always rectangular. It turns out, thanks to Mark Sirota’s pointing me to an interesting web community there is a small but determined band of circular croppers out there. Originally I dismissed Mark’s suggestion as being simply a group of matte-ers – sticking a rectangle with a hole on top of every image. But, as I thought about the origin of all our images being circular, it became less peripheral to me and I decided to take this topic on.

In Part 2 of this Crop Circles Series, we are going to dive deeper into this rogue group of croppers. Part 3 is going to talk about compositional considerations for the ‘circular crop’.

Stay tuned.

Rikk Flohr © 2012

Holy Crop! Lightroom 4–First Public Beta Peek

On January 10th, Adobe announced the long-anticipated public beta for its Lightroom 4 program upgrade.

But what is in it for the Cropist?

After the wealth of new cropping features and augments brought to us by Lightroom 3, I decided to dive through the new features in the Public Beta for Lightroom 4 and see what was here to excite the cropist in us all.  While there is much in Lightroom 4 that is new and exciting to the photographer at-large, the Cropist finds very little in the way of new cropping tools or functionality.

1. The maximum value of the aspect ratio has been increased to 9999.999 to allow for greater precision and to enable the entering of screen resolutions as aspect ratios.  Numbers larger than 20 entered into this dialog will result in a decimal shift to reinforce the concept of aspect ratio vs. physical size.

(i.e. entering 1920×1080 will result in a 19.2×10.8 value in the crop panel)

2. New Crop Ratio Choices in the Aspect Pull-down.  These reflect ratios common to video and represent Lightroom’s further venturing into the video arena.  Both the aspect ratio and the screen ratio are shown as hints.

That is about it for the crop features… No new or custom crop overlays like we were hoping for… No crop presets … no additional aspect ratios held beyond the five in our most recently used list…

Well, there is this other new thing…

I wouldn’t really call this a crop feature but it is a camera framing guide of sorts. In the Library Module, Loupe view mode, there is a feature which allows you to overlay a PNG file onto your image.  Either in tethered capture or perusing previously captured images, you can now overlay a series of guides, like a magazine cover perhaps, to view your framing.

Imagine you are shooting a magazine cover and you want to show the art director each shot as they come off the camera in the context of the cover design. You can create a PNG file with transparency that will overlay your shot previewing the potential layout as you shoot-provided you are in a tethered environment.  It lops off parts of the image that are outside the bounds of the Layout Overlay’s aspect ratio and puts the PNG file on top of your image.  The Layout Overlay is located on the View>Layout Overlay> menu.

Here is an excellent video from John Beardsworth

Video

That’s it so far for crop tools in Lightroom 4. Last time they delivered a couple of treats between public beta and final release. Let’s hope cropping gets another look.

For a more complete break down of what is in the new version of Lightroom, check out my link here.

These are the links to the public beta pages:
Public Beta Site: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/lightroom4/
Forum: http://forums.adobe.com/community/labs/lightroom4/

Rikk Flohr © 2012