It was a gorgeous day, cooler with a slight overcast making it a good day for photos.  Every trip there reminds me how brutal the conditions were, and how much the soldiers on each side had to take.  Standing shoulder to shoulder at very close range with black powder rifles had to be terrifying.  Seeing what vicious damage the soft lead bullets did to flesh and bone, not to mention the shot and shell, always makes you question, “Could I have stood there, with my comrades?”  The battlefield is incredibly well marked.  After the war, the States and individual units came back to walk that hallowed ground.  My two favorite memorials are actually from the Southern line, in the woods where the troops formed up, before marching across open ground to be destroyed in Pickett’s charge.  

Forward

 The North Carolina memorial captures their men going forward and you can almost feel the bullets flowing past them like a lead rain. 

North Carolina memorial

The Virginia memorial captures the wide range of men who left their occupations as farmers, mechanics, teachers and landowners to fight for the wrong cause. 

This last weekend I got to visit my folks and attend an unusual reunion.  All the classes from 1970-1979 gathered in OK, for a big party.   Because I took my “real” camera, I wound up as the photographer for many of the events.  It was a blast.  One of the things which really distinguished McAlester during this period was an incredible choir, music and theater program—No I did not sing.  The organizers arranged for the choir director to come back and for volunteers to perform at one of the many large churches on Sunday morning.   For some reason, churches really object to shooting with big booming flash units, so I knew I needed to plan for shooting, hand held with a long lens in low light.  So, today we are going to talk about strategies and tools to help, both in shooting and in post processing.

First, let’s talk about your ability to adjust your ISO settings.  ISO is how the camera’s sensitivity to light is measured.  All camera’s have optimal settings where the sensor has the lowest noise profile.  For my D300®, that is at ISO 200.  It is the same thing as the film speed.  A lower number meant that you needed more light, but that the pictures were sharper.  With a digital camera you can change the sensitivity on the fly.  Many camera’s have auto-ISO settings.  I prefer to adjust mine manually.  When shooting indoors, my camera is good up to around ISO 800.  The noise there is visible, but manageable.  Above ISO 1000, it looks very grainy.  The newest Nikon cameras have really broken through with new sensors and they can be used at settings of ISO 3200 or greater.  How much greater? All the way up to ISO 102,400, this is almost like shooting at midnight.

So what is the impact on your pictures?  Less light means your shutter has to stay open longer at a given fstop.  If you are shooting things that don’t move and are on a tripod, that might be ok, but trying to shoot people moving, well it means that they will be fuzzy at best and uselessly blurry at worst.   Fast glass, i.e., f2.8 and better really helps, but that kind of lens get pricey quickly.  Even at ISO 800, I the picture was shot at 1/10 of a second, really too slow to handhold. 

Lightroom 3.x has dramatically improved our ability to get cleaner images.  Nothing yet, although there are algorithms in development, can correct an out of focus picture.   There are still plug-ins available that do this as well, but in the new release of LR, they added a new Noise Reduction module just below the sharpening module.  It has two different sets of sliders, one for Luminance noise—random flecks and the second for Color noise—the banding which can appear around objects. 

From the Adobe Community Lightroom Help Pages at   http://help.adobe.com/en_US/Lightroom/3.0/Using/WS67a9e0c3a11b149632d4213d12864349b1a-7fff.html

Luminance

Reduces luminance noise.

Detail

Controls the luminance noise threshold. Useful for very noisy photos. Higher values preserve more detail but may produce noisier results. Lower values produce cleaner results but may also remove some detail.

Contrast

Controls luminance contrast. Useful for very noisy photos. Higher values preserve contrast but may produce noisy blotches or mottling. Lower values produce smoother results but may also have less contrast.

Color 

Reduces color noise.

Detail

Controls the color noise threshold. Higher values protect thin, detailed color edges but may result in color speckling. Lower values remove color speckles but may result in color bleeding.

There are no right answers to the settings, play with them with the image at 100% until it looks right. It makes a difference as can be seen from these two segments of the image above.  The first has no noise reduction applied:

The same image with NR cranked up to 89 (Yes it goes past 11).  Edges are much crisper. 

To apply this feature, you just need to be in the Develop module and work your way down the menu until you get to “LensCorrection”.    

Just select the check box for “Enable Profile Corrections” and if it has a model for that lens, it will apply the correction. They keep adding new profiles and release them with the updates.

The model for each lens from each manufacturer has to be built separately.    Here is a link to the current list of supported lenses http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/846/cpsid_84666.html . 

The Nikon lens list includes the most popular models. 

” The beauty of Adobe’s tool is that you need no fancy equipment whatsoever. In fact the only requirements are that you can mount the chart flat (can be as small as 8 1/2″x11″) and that you can provide constant illumination (doesn’t have to be superhomogenous just constant between shots). Larger charts can be print out for little money using labs like costco’s for almost nothing ($9 for a 20×30 nowadays!). Then shoot a minimum of 9 shots of the chart at several focal lengths for a zoom lens at a single aperture (11) in manual mode which you can do handheld without a loss of quality of the profile, it really doesn’t matter. Then load those shots into the lens profile creator app and let it crank away. I’ve done this for a few of my unlisted lenses and the profiles work excellent. I’ve also submitted these profiles to Adobe, but unfortunately, the Lightroom engineers did not yet build in the feature you have access to in the lens correction filter in Photoshop CS5 where you can download the user submitted profiles for a lot of lenses from Adobe. This should be fixed in an upcoming update to Lightroom. For now, you either have to use CS5 to download profiles or profile the lenses yourself, which is easy. Adobe really did a great job on this tool to make it usable for folks without any special equipment. “  http://www.flickr.com/groups/adobe_lightroom/discuss/72157624239647554/

Although it exists in Photoshop CS5, there is not yet a way to share or retrieve profiles others have created online.  It is coming, at least according to Adobe.

We were very fortunate in staying there for 3 nights.  The cruise ships would come in for a few hours and the tourists would flood through the streets and then they would have to ride down the hairpin turns and take the boats back to the ships and get underway.   Of course they make a nice background for the restaurant next door to our hotel.   Everywhere you looked, sculpture and art were out on public display.

Shooting at sunset really requires a tripod, or a wall to get the full range of colors.  It was pretty hazy while we were there and our sunset colors were pretty muted.  I want to apply for the position of official sunset photographer in Santorini. 

The barrel roofed churches provide good structural protection against the many earthquakes that still shake the island.  Often when shooting sunset, just waiting a few minutes can really change the mood of the image as the light changes hue.  Moving a few feet left or right also can help you frame the pictures that you like.  I shot a sequence of 45 pictures in 20 minutes and these two are the ones that spoke to me.   That is an important part of shooting travel shots, always move around, to change the angles and shoot lots of pictures. 

Don’t forget to turn around often.  Sometimes there are great shots where you just walked past.

Well that’s all the light, so the sun will set peacefully on the Aegean Sea.  You don’t have to go that far to capture the light; it’s all around, just take your camera and find it.

During my pre-trip research I had found that there was a Jewish Martyr’s square and an ancient synagogue.  Dr. Francie, one of the wonderful friends I traveled with is Jewish and my father’s family fled Poland just ahead of the Germans, so we both wanted to visit.

Since the 13^th century, through both Christian and Arab occupations, the population in Rhodes had thrived.  Before WWII there were more than 5000 Jews in the city supporting multiple synagogues.  Today there are less than 500 and one remaining historic building.  Down a series of narrow winding arched streets, you come to a simple door to a vanished world. 

 Designated a World Heritage Site and rebuilt through donations, the interior of the building has been gradually restored.  The wall paintings and iron work rebuilt. 

The attached museum lists the names of all the family members who were deported in 1943 and who mostly perished in Auschwitz in 1944. 

 Seeing the artifacts of daily life, the photographs of the families and the documents sentencing them to their deaths,  serve as a potent reminder that this kind of brutality still exists in the world and that we must speak up against it.

The sacred Torah of the synagogue survived the war.  The head rabbi was good friends with the imam of the largest mosque and entrusted him with its safekeeping.  Throughout the war, it was hidden beneath the podium where he pronounced his Friday prayers.

Only 150 people returned to Rhodes after the war.  To return they had to endure further trials and travails.  The caretaker of the synagogue Samuel was 17 when he came home.  His parents, brothers and sisters all gone, his cousins, aunts and uncles and most of his friends perished as well.  Now he serves as a living monument.  He speaks multiple languages and is incredibly warm and engaging as he talks about his journey.

  Look closely at his left arm. 

 The string of numbers crudely tattooed into his flesh should burn in all of us. 

The carved stone in the Martyr’s square is strong but his spirit is far stronger.  

None of us, should ever forget that this could happen to any of us.