Marin Headlands, Wide-Angle + Exposure Calibration Question

[DisgustipatedinCA]

Hi, everyone. I haven't posted in the photography forum in recent months--mostly work-related. It's nice to have a little free time to shoot again. Anyway, over the weekend I got a new lens, a Canon EF-S 10-22 wide angle. I've been wanting this lens for a long time now, and I couldn't be happier with its performance on my first outing with it.

My oldest son and I hiked the Marin Headlands on Sunday. The weather was beautiful--about 60 degrees and nearly windless (sorry, northeasterners).

Here are a few pictures from the hike. I would greatly appreciate any constructive criticism, especially where exposure is concerned. I run side-by-side monitors, and they've somehow become miscalibrated with one another. I shoot RAW and use Lightroom for post-processing. Since my two monitors show the same image with different apparent brightness, I had to choose one as a baseline reference. After looking at some of the final jpegs on my wife's laptop, I think I may be underexposing. A good example is the seated picture of my son, below. It's exposed properly on one of my monitors, but looks way too dark on my wife's laptop. His shins and the stone he's sitting on look far too dark on her laptop, but I can see details in the shadows on my pc. Does it look too dark to you, or is it ok?



Looking east-southeast. Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco in the far background.


My maiden attempt at HDR photography. This was hand-held (another nice thing about an ultra-wide-angle lens), using exposure bracketing with 3 frames at -2/0/+2 stops and Photomatix software. Taken from inside an abandoned WW2-era military installation. Mt. Tamalpais can be seen in the background.


Tennessee Beach


Tennessee Beach, with special guest star Hexagonal Lens Flare


This is the one I was using as a reference for the exposure question. Are his shins and the stone too underexposed, or are they ok?




Rodeo Beach, San Francisco in the background.


Rodeo Beach, Marin Headlands

[NV Whino]

1. They do look a little dark, but

everything else looks great. The nice thing about shooting raw is the detail is there and you can bring it up in a photo processing program.

[DisgustipatedinCA]

4. that's one of the reasons I love RAW

I can increase exposure on all of these and re-export to jpeg...not a very expensive mistake overall. Thanks for your comments.

[alfredo]

2. Nice images. If the stone and his shins were the focus of the image, I'd

say yes, but if your focus is his head, torso, and the halo of clouds, then I'd say no. It's a tough image because if you want to frame him with the clouds, you have to deal with shadows.


BTW, you should send the second image to http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/ . He is collecting images of a specific theme: "The View From Your Window." Include location and time. Send it to his e-mail address. there should always be part of the window frame in the image.

[DisgustipatedinCA]

5. thank you, Alfredo

The Andrew Sullivan thing is intriguing. I never knew he dealt in photography. As for the shadows, I don't want to see much in there, just something other than complete black--the barest of details would be fine. It is a fairly contrasty picture though. Thanks for your help with this.

[alfredo]

9. I see detail in the seat, but not enough to distract me from the object

of the image.


If you do send it in and it is displayed, let us know.

[apaflo]

8. Monitor calibration

You really shouldn't adjust image brightness (exposure) according to the brightness of how it is seen on a monitor. There is no choice with an image that has no white in it, but if there is any white at all the image editor or raw converter that you work with can tell you *precisely* how white it is.

However, image contrast (gamma curves) almost has to be set by making a judgment based on a monitor display. The same is true of color hue and saturation. Hence the need for a correctly adjusted monitor.

The best way to deal with all of that is to use a hardware calibration device. That is because it requires setting a gamma curve for each of the RGB channels on the monitor, and it is far too complex to adjust just by eye. The big difference one would notice if a monitor is off is color changes between two monitors. (I use a "steelblue" background on my monitors, and if one of the two get out of whack it is usually very obvious just from the change in background color alone.)

But a quick check on just the contrast and brightness of a monitor can be done very easily, and adjustments aren't too awful difficult. It requires some type of a greyscale image with different steps of brightness on it. Lots of web sites provide them, but most of those are way too course to be used for adjustments. If it just has 24 or so steps from black to white, each step at the ends of the scale will be course (if the last two don't show up as distinct, the monitor is way off).

Here's one that I have on my web page. Both ends have finer steps to allow finer adjustment, and there are no middle steps taking up space.



That can be downloaded and made larger if it helps.

Ideally what should be seen looking at that would be the two darkest and the two brightest steps are indistinguishable, or at least so very close that it is really really hard. That pretty much assures that black is really black and white is really white too. Most monitors can probably be adjusted so that only 3 or at most 4 of the darkest and brightest are all the same.

I have some really good NEC Multisync monitors, and they are adjusted to have the three darkest steps black and the three brightest steps white. My Toshiba laptop has the 4 darkest steps black and the 3 brightest steps white, so it has slightly more contrast.

[WannaJumpMyScooter]

3. possible alternate crop

for this one... I would lose the people on the beach, they don't add anything and make it darker, like this

[DisgustipatedinCA]

6. wow...that's a pretty interesting look

You're probably right about the people on the beach...no real need to show scale in this picture. I'm not sure about the posterization, but then again, I've already confessed I'm having gamma issues with the monitor, so I'm probably not seeing it the same way you are. Anyway, thanks much for the help. Now I just need to find a way to get 2 monitors looking the same and have them zeroed in so they match with what everyone else sees.

[Tindalos]

7. They look fine on my computer

but I haven't calibrated the monitor yet and I suspect it's a bit off.


--------------------------