Deliberate underexposure with Nikon DSLRs

Nikon has been killing it with its DSLR sensors in recent years in terms of how much detail can be pulled out of the shadows, and Deci Gallen has a great piece on a creative way of shooting that exploits that capability.

As photographers, we strive for correct exposure but the ability of modern Nikon cameras to find details in shadows opens up a debate as to what correct exposure actually is. More and more, I find myself technically exposing wrong with post-processing in mind.

As a wedding photographer, my wife and I often find ourselves shooting portraits when the sun is highest in the sky: conditions generally considered to be unfavorable in portraiture. In the past these situations were addressed with fill flash, reflectors or frantically searching for open shade. The current range of Nikons gives us another option – creative underexposure.

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Having the ability to draw details from shadows so cleanly has changed not only how we shoot and post-process, but also the equipment we need to take certain kinds of shots.

Our flash triggers have been mostly redundant for 2 years now and our flashguns only really come out on the dance floor. We don’t use reflectors at all. The extra couple of minutes spent in post is negated by the time saved setting up equipment while shooting — allowing us to spot and shoot scenes quickly, taking advantage of beautiful but often fleeting lighting conditions.

Check out the piece to see some examples of what's possible.

I had skipped some generations of Nikon DSLRs and found myself picking mine up less and less given the weight of a fully loaded body, but I just picked up a D750 recently and it has won back my mindshare from other cameras like my iPhone.

The D750 isn't in their pro line of DSLRs, with their built in vertical grips and magnesium body construction, but that means it's much lighter. I love that it has integrated WiFi so I can quickly get pictures from my DSLR to my iPhone. It's something Nikon should've added years ago and that all modern DSLRs should have as a default feature, and I doubt I'll ever buy another camera that doesn't mark that checkbox.

And yes, the shadow recovery is fantastic. I've pushed shadows in RAW photos out of the D750 up to 4 stops, and I've heard that 5 stops is possible. Even before reading Gallen's article I'd been shooting as he recommends, usually with exposure compensation of -0.3 to -0.7 turned on by default. To me, it's far more convenient to shoot this way and bring shadows up in Lightroom than to shoot two or three photos at different exposures and blend them using Photoshop or something like HDRSoft's Photomatix Pro. Call it the lazy man's HDR.

Wanderers

Wanderers is a very short film about what it might be like when humans move into outer space, and “The locations depicted in the film are digital recreations of actual places in the Solar System, built from real photos and map data where available.” It's like a highly condensed version of Interstellar, without the expository dialogue, though I think at one point if you squint or possess a 5K iMac display you can see Matthew McConaughey floating around Saturn.

For more information and stills gallery, please turn to: www.erikwernquist.com/wanderers (Just in case my website runs slow, here is a link to an imgur album version of the gallery: http://imgur.com/a/Ur5dP) Wanderers is a vision of humanity's expansion into the Solar System, based on scientific ideas and concepts of what our future in space might look like, if it ever happens. The locations depicted in the film are digital recreations of actual places in the Solar System, built from real photos and map data where available. Without any apparent story, other than what you may fill in by yourself, the idea of the film is primarily to show a glimpse of the fantastic and beautiful nature that surrounds us on our neighboring worlds - and above all, how it might appear to us if we were there. CREDITS: VISUALS - Erik Wernquist - erik@erikwernquist.com MUSIC - Cristian Sandquist - cristiansandquist@mac.com WORDS AND VOICE - Carl Sagan COLOR GRADE - Caj Müller/Beckholmen Film - caj@beckholmenfilm.se LIVE ACTION PHOTOGRAPHY - Mikael Hall/Vidiotism - mikael@vidiotism.com LIVE ACTION PERFORMANCE - Anna Nerman, Camilla Hammarström, Hanna Mellin VOCALIST - Nina Fylkegård - nina@ladystardust.se THANK YOU - Johan Persson, Calle Herdenberg, Micke Lindgren, Satrio J. Studt, Tomas Axelsson, Christian Lundqvist, Micke Lindell, Sigfrid Söderberg, Fredrik Strage, Johan Antoni, Henrik Johansson, Michael Uvnäs, Hanna Mellin THIS FILM WAS MADE WITH USE OF PHOTOS AND TEXTURES FROM: NASA/JPL, NASA/CICLOPS, NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio, ESA, John Van Vliet, Björn Jonsson (and many others, of which I unfortunately do not know the names)

Giving Tuesday

Just in time for Giving Tuesday, GiveWell has updated its list of top charities:

Our top charities are (in alphabetical order):

We have recommended all four of these charities in the past.

We have also included four additional organizations on our top charities page as standout charities. They are (in alphabetical order):

In the case of ICCIDD, GAIN-USI, and DMI, we expect to learn substantially more in the coming years (both through further investigation and through further progress by the organizations); we see a strong possibility that these will become top-tier recommended charities in the future, and we can see reasons that impact-minded donors could choose to support them today.

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Based on this allocation, for any donors looking to give as we would, we recommend an allocation of $5 to AMF, $1 to SCI, $1 to GiveDirectly and $.50 to DtWI for every $7.50 given.

It's worth reading through the entire post to understand how they make their decisions and to learn about key principles such as diminishing marginal returns and the funding gap.

Why the suicide epidemic in Utah?

Utah is the number one state for antidepressant use and has disproportionately high rates of suicide. Perry Renshaw, a neuroscientist, believes he knows why.

Utah residents and experts are aware of the paradox, often attributing gun use, low population density and the area's heavy Mormon influence as potential factors. But Renshaw thinks he's identified a more likely cause for the Utah blues: altitude.

Renshaw believes that altitude has an impact on our brain chemistry, specifically that it changes the levels of serotonin and dopamine, two key chemicals in the brain that help regulate our feelings of happiness. America's favorite antidepressants (and party drugs) work by controlling the level of these chemicals in the brain. The air in Utah, one could say, works just like this.

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Utah lies in a region of the country commonly known as the Rockies, the mountain states or even just "out west." To those who analyze violent death data, it's known as the "suicide belt."

According to the National Violent Death Reporting System, a surveillance system run by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Utah and other states in the Rockies consistently have the highest suicide rates in the country aside from Alaska. In the map below, the block of red — states with suicide rates over 14 per 100,000 people — is hard to miss.

Of course, correlation isn't causation, but the article delves into lots of evidence that, at a minimum, is eye-opening and compelling.

Why Neil Gaiman updated Sleeping Beauty

Neil Gaiman does not love Disney's version of the fairy tale Sleeping Beauty.

When I ask Gaiman who his favourite fairy tale character is, he says he fell in love with Red Riding Hood when reading Carter. She was also Charles Dickens's favourite, but in order to interpret Gaiman's taste, you need to know that Carter's take on the tale was "The Company of Wolves", an ornately told story in which the heroine makes a relatively late appearance in a savage, sexual world, not a small child skipping along a path but a daring pubescent girl who strips naked, laughs in the face of danger and sleeps with the wolf – rendering him post–coitally "tender" – in her dead grandmother's bed. 

In fact, as Gaiman explains (becoming, in his own description, "fairy tale nerdy") the bombs inherent in such stories have been defused more often than they have been detonated. For instance, the reason why Disney's Sleeping Beauty doesn't work, he says, is because "it's not a story. It's the opening to a story. The first versions we have of it make more sense but are less kind to human nature. 

"The prince makes it in [to the castle] after a hundred years, tries to wake her up, fails, has sex with her, and leaves. And then, nine months later – still asleep – she gives birth to twins. And they climb up her. One clamps onto her breast and starts sucking. The other clamps onto her finger, and sucks out the poisoned thing in her finger that has put her to sleep. She and the prince and their children go back to the prince's house, and his mother is an evil, cannibalistic ogress who tries to eat the children. The story is really about the nightmare of your mother–in–law being a monster."

Something I hadn't realized (and that most readers probably did not know, as this article knows) is that most stepmothers in fairy tales were mothers in their original versions from the brothers Grimm. It's quite telling of the shifting views of family that the trope was updated across the years.

Their book began as a philological project at the birth of a unified Germany. The Grimms – who also, as part of the same mission, compiled a dictionary – began to collect folk stories. These were not, as has been supposed, the tales of the masses, but stories gathered from among the bourgeoisie. The project was a matter of cultural and national record – it was not intended for children. But it was soon clear that children had become its main readers, and Wilhelm Grimm, the younger of the two brothers and – in Jack Zipes's phrase – "a moral sanitation man", cleaned them up. In what was now the motherland, it wouldn't do for children to see biological mothers as jealous of their own pubescent daughters. And although he wasn't very worried about violence, Grimm was concerned about sex: by 1819 – and certainly in the last edition of 1857 – those same stories had become prudish and pious. "So now," Gaiman says, "a pregnant Rapunzel doesn't say to the witch: 'this is really weird, my belly is swelling and I don't know why' – which is how the witch knows that a prince has been visiting her. Now, she says 'you are so much lighter than the prince when you climb up my hair'. And you go: Oh! I thought you were smart but no, you're a moron."

Fairy tales are among the first stories I remember reading again and again, and given they are among the first stories many children read, their moral influence is probably underrated. After I'd left childhood, I made it a point to seek out the original, darker versions of the fairy tales. Both in their current and original forms, and in their evolution, fairy tales speak to our shifting wish fulfillment as an audience.

Neil Gaiman's updated version of Sleeping Beauty is titled The Sleeper and the Spindle and is only available in physical, not ebook, form from the UK. Gaiman also published an update of the Snow White story in comic book form many years ago. That book was titled Snow, Glass, Apples, and the story (minus the beautiful artwork by Charles Vess) is reprinted online. I had a copy of the comic book, I hope it's one of the books I kept over the years.

If you're also a fan of the genre, it's well worth grabbing Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales.