I have been spending all my editing time with the fashion photography I shot with my brother and sister in Ruidoso, NM.  I feel I need to step away from this project and let it "cool down" for a couple of days and then re-examine the collection with a fresh pair of eyes. Couldn't help but want to share a few today though and came up with this mini series of square black and white photos from each of the four looks I photographed. Hope you enjoy! Sam 

If you live in, or are traveling to Florida and would like to schedule a photo-shoot, I am currently offering portrait services in and around Central Fl. Check out more of my work at www.samgoldphotography.com

I have never been a fan of adding grain to my imagery. I think my obsession with having optimal image quality steered me away from the idea. Recently however, my sister sent me an old photo of our family and seeing it inspired me to experiment with grain in Lightroom. The less than good image quality stemmed from the photo being taken with a disposable film camera at night using the flash which illuminated the people in the photo but not the dark space around us which ended up grainy.  

I did not want to sound like an oaf on this subject and while researching the properties of film grain I found this article (a tough but fun read) which states:

The term “film grain” is often incorrectly used to describe the “fundamental” particles in a chemical-based photographic image. Fundamental image particles are the smallest particles that form an image: (a) silver particles or (b) color dye clouds ... 

Film grain is a repeating noise pattern that is an order of magnitude larger than the fundamental image particles. Film resolution is directly related to the size and distribution of silver particles in an emulsion. The noise pattern tends to obscure detail rather than define detail. The pattern is superimposed over the image, not the source of the image.

A common mistake [made by the author many, many times], is to think that film grain is the image-forming element. Many Kodak and Fuji publications, including much of the popular photographic literature (magazines), commonly make the mistake of referring to fundamental film particles as film grain. This further propagates the imprecise usage of the term.

Although this information may seem archaic, the scientist in me found it to be very interesting because it helped me understand how I should better approach adding digital grain to an image. 

I think the most important thing is that adding grain should be the very last thing you apply to a fully processed image. It helps to think of your edited RAW (or JPEG) file as the "fundamental image particles" (in the digital world it is actually the pixels making up the image) and the grain as a noise artefact being superimposed on top of it. The end result is that you obtain a digital image that has more of a film like rendering to it.

In Lightroom you are able to add grain in the "Effects" module and the adjustment sliders consist of  "Amount", "Size", and "Rougness". When adding grain into the mix, I usually toggle between the "1:1" and "FIT" to look at the changes on a magnified and overall level. This ensures image quality does not deteriorate to the point where you lose fine detail. Size and roughness play a major role in this and amount impacts the overall effects of both. As with all my processing, I just adjust the sliders around until the end result is something I am looking for. In the week of playing around with this process I like Amount:50, Size:20, Roughness:20 for moderate grain and Amount:50, Size:20 Roughness:50 for a more distinct look. Some other things to note are that:

• Grain is more noticeable in the darker areas of a photo, especially the mid-tones (or "clipped"/"faded" blacks).
• Grain is also more evident in out of focus areas.
• Increasing the grain deteriorates image quality especially in subjects with fine detail such as hair or eyelashes.
• It helps to look at film images to help understand what looks natural.
• When noise reduction is not set to 0, the effect of adding grain is diminished. 
• If the image was shot at a high ISO, you probably do not need to add additional grain.

Image Samples

Again, I have only been experimenting with this for a short period of time so the information I presented here should be taken with a grain of salt. Some may think it is silly to strive for a good digital camera with a nice sharp lens only to ruin the output with the addition of grain, but I have definitely had fun playing around with it. I am sure film photographers out there would say "just shoot film". For digital photographers who haven't used the medium however, working grain into your aesthetic can a step in the right direction. Anyone else out there add grain in their post processing workflow?? I'd love to hear your thoughts/tips in the comments section =) Sam

If you live in, or are traveling to Florida and would like to schedule a photo-shoot, I am currently offering portrait services in and around Central Fl. Check out more of my work at www.samgoldphotography.com

Anticipation

Working in the offshore industry means getting to live on a lot of different boats. After getting to a vessel, I usually try to take some time to photograph it and use this blog to showcase my work surroundings (see posts from The Viking, Bjorkhaug, Western Neptune). For some reason I had not been inspired to photograph the current boat I am on (Western Pride) and cannot really describe why because it has been one of my favorites so far. Hopefully this post serves as a bit of redemption. The project that the Pride is currently working on involves conducting a seismic survey off both the Caribbean and Pacific coasts of Colombia. We finished up the Caribbean survey on December 05 and spent the next week in transit to the next prospect. This meant we had to cross through the Panama Canal which was exciting to everyone because A) not many people get to experience this and B) we got to look at something other than never-ending ocean.

Entrance to the first "lock"

At first I was bummed out that we were transiting through at night, but I like the darkness of the resultant photos. It helped that the Canal and its surroundings are heavily lit, however the color cast from sodium-vapor lighting made it impossible to process anything in color. This lighting is especially unflattering on skin tones even after white balancing RAW files. A whole lot of my work lately has been processed with clipped blacks (ie. the darkest areas in the photo are actually grey), but that did not really work here and it was refreshing to use the whole spectrum in this series. Most of the photos here were taken with the OM Zuiko 50mm f/1.8 and a generic focal reducer (reviewed here), but the last three were taken with the MZD 45mm f/1.8.

Illuminated

The history of the Canal is amazing and although I haven't read much about it myself, the boat was stirring with factoids for weeks prior to making the commute. History was never a subject that I was any good at so I will spare you, but the important thing is that this structure serves as sort of a foundation for Panama as a country. Also, the physics involved here are amazing and way out my scope of comprehension (I hated that subject more than History). I do know that the small cars in the photo below were attached to four points on the vessel (two on either side) to ensure it was stabilized. Then the vessel went through a series of "locks" and for half the trip we were travelling uphill and after transiting through a lake, we traveled downhill. My favorite part of this experience was of course capturing candid photos of the other members of the crew. I hope you enjoy the rest of the photos here and that they give some insight into this awesome landmark. 

Sodium Vapor

iPhone

Curls

Dinner

Six

Disregarding Sea Level

"DE" not "OF"

Symmetry

Point and Shoot

Offshore bokeh

Holding Everything Together

The Bridge

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Before joining the vessel I am on, I left my phone charger in a hotel room while in transit to the job (I was exhausted from staying up all night trying to get this photo). I felt like kicking myself mainly because I use the VSCOcam app (hereafter, VSCO) heavily on my android phone and almost always edit there before posting to Instagram (@samgoldphotos). I also have the app on my iPad mini but I had only used it a few times before abandoning it completely because the android version was a great deal better. Since I was unable to charge my phone on a regular basis, I grudgingly began to use VSCO on the iPad for photo editing and slowly became accustomed to it. Beggars can't be choosers right?!! 

I heard about the an update to iPad's VSCO app through The Phoblographer and decided to try and download it while offshore. Because of the horrible internet out here, it took about three days, but it was worth the wait. The Phoblographer has provided a very nice article and I do not want to beat a dead horse so here I just wanted to highlight some of the newly added features and give my opinion on some things that would make this app truly amazing. All photos in this entry were taken in various airports which I find are one of the most interesting places to practice street photography.

VSCO 4.0

Like Julius Motal mentioned, when you open VSCO for the first time you will be brought to this screen:

At first I was bummed because I could not figure out how to change the background photo. Being stuck with viewing the same abstract triangular building image for the rest of my days scared me. But then... it changed!!! Awesome, now I am actually excited and looking forward to what they present each week (or whatever the interval may be). One thing that The Phoblographer did not mention was that if you tap on the circle dot icon at the bottom left hand corner of the page a preferences menu appears. This will let you change a host of things, but (in my opinion) most importantly the order of presets!!! I must admit having presets A4-6 removed from A1-3 just because they were purchased at a different time drove me crazy! I am so very grateful for the person at the VSCO headquarters with a slight case of OCD. You can either hold the cross (+) at the end of the preset box and move it up and down OR just hit A-Z and bring a little order to your life.

  

This applies for the toolkit as well. Genius.

Once you import your images into your library, there are several options for viewing by tapping on the gridded square at the top of the interface. 

In the old version of the app, this was your only option:

Now you have three options to choose from and the best thing is that the images are seen in their native aspect ratios (I have never been a fan of the square format):

 On top of all this, you can customize what you see which makes life easier if you are working on editing a series of photos at one time:

After choosing an image from your library to edit you have the option to apply a preset (paintbrush icon) or make global edits (wrench icon). I usually work by applying the preset and then tweaking the output but if you make any global edits first and then apply a preset they will be applied on top. One nice feature is that you can now see how your image will look with multiple presets applied at the same time. You just hit the gridded square icon at the bottom left of the interface after pressing the paintbrush icon.

Another great improvement is that you can see exactly what has been applied to an image by hitting the "history" icon:

This is very nice, but I miss having the option to "go back one step" which the older version had. Here the only option is to revert the image back to its original state (bottom right corner) and if you press and hold the image it will show the original as well - like in Snapseed. Some other changes to the iPad app are the ability to sharpen and add a vignette both of which were not a tool in the previous version.

Additional features I have not used so will refrain from commenting on include: syncing between devices, the newly implemented VSCO journal, and improvements to using the camera. The last thing that I am excited about but have not yet experimented with is the ability to upload your images using your browser and have them show up on your device. This makes perfect sense for those using something other than their phone as their primary camera. I usually shoot raw with my EM5, make slight adjustments in Lightroom (mainly sharpening with a mask), export, and then transfer the JPEGs to my iPad. Now at least the last step will be avoided!

Extra Image Samples   

Conclusions

I have always been a fan of the VSCO platform and the updates to this app for iPad definitely make it a more pleasurable experience. I think it is now even better than the android version on my phone however there are some things that would make this app exceptional. For starters, and my major gripe is that I cannot access my G+ library!!! In order to get to those photos I have to download them to the camera roll first which is inconvenient and unnecessary. I think this is an iPad issue however as I can access the G+ library with all of the apps on my phone, but none of the same apps on the iPad. I suppose the work around is to import them on my phone first and then wait for the devices to sync but it would just be great import directly. Also, I do not think that you can directly transfer an image from VSCO to edit in another app. The image needs to be saved to the camera roll first and the end result is a bunch of versions of the same photo. Another item on my wishlist is the 16:9 aspect ratio as a crop option but as a film photography emulator I understand why this cinematic option is not included. Finally, it would be nice to be able to add a border directly in the app but again, as a marketed film emulator I understand that VSCO is not "that kind of app". Regardless, if you have an iPad, head over over to the app store and give VSCO a shot! I have pretty much purchased/downloaded all the presets available and besides the free ones (which are awesome- especially Hypebeast) I recommend the "Legacy" and "Limited Edition" collections. Most of the photos in this blog were processed using the 02, A5, B2, C2, HB2, LV2, N1, and SE3 presets which have become my favorites. 

Sam D.