Hand held snowdrops

[Jim Lloyd]

Converted Nikon d3200

UG1 2mm + BG40 2mm

asa 1600

f/4

1/15 sec

Optomax 35 mm f/3.5 lens

 

Sunlight, windy day, bright with occasional snow showers

 

Hand held, focusing with live view (with difficulty!)

 

(Obviously these are pure white in visible light)

 

 

[Andy Perrin]

Quite good, especially under those conditions. You have a very steady hand!

[Jim Lloyd]

Thanks Andy,

 

I was interested to see how far I could push ASA, and open up aperture in order to be more free with the camera. When I get time I think I will look at this more systematically in order to judge the optimum balance of aperture, ASA and exposure time.

 

Regarding exposure, I am not that sure how to judge what is sufficient. I am used with visible just to look at the white histogram and avoid any over exposure (pile up to the right). With UV it seems that I either get pile up to the left in the green channel, or pile up to the right in the red. I am thinking that probably for UV I have to accept some over saturation in red in order to get sufficient in green? I think Andrea said this in an earlier post, but as this is all new to me I might need to be told things twice. Sorry!

[Andy Perrin]

I never look at the histogram. I just bracket everything and pick the best.

[OlDoinyo]

If you make and use a custom camera white balance setting for your shots, it effectively brings the channel exposures closer together and makes judging overall exposure easier. That way you need not worry about blowing out the "red" channel just to get any signal in the "green" channel.

[Andrea B.]

Jim, that looks good. I like the photo.

 

I would perhaps suggest that you don't oversaturate the false colours, though. That can hide details in a UV photo which has already been wrenched around by the white balance step. Perhaps see how things look in that blue with a saturation set to max 85% ?? Only a suggestion though, not a rule!! The artist's vision always rules.

 

Clark's suggestions about determining a better in-camera WB to use while shooting is a good one.

[nfoto]

My D3200 is set to show b/w. Makes getting a good exposure much easier in the field.

 

I can quite reliably do 1/15 sec hand-held for UV and get sharp images. Usually with a Noflexar 35, but on a few occasions also with my Coastal 60 APO or even the UV-Nikkor 105.

[Cadmium]

Jim, give Bob's in camera white balance a try sometime, what he calls 'scene referred white balance'.

http://www.ultraviol...h__1#entry17050

[Jim Lloyd]

Thanks Andrea - I think you might be right, still trying to settle on a look I like. I am using Lightroom and setting the saturation and vibrance slider at 50. I am not sure what that is in %. It's a lot more than I would use for visible; normally I would set vibrance around 20 and leave saturation near 0 (or even slightly desaturate).

 

I also can't decide at the moment whether I like the Lightroom dehaze function - it does work to remove haze from landscapes, but then I think the haze is a true reflection of the UV behaviour so might be good to keep. I think I just need to experiment a bit.

 

Bjiorn, today I was taking some woodland shots (will post some later) and used the monochrome setting and did find I was able to focus with live view quite well.

 

Steve, Clark, I did try setting a camera WB balance, but couldn't get it to work. I will have another go with the detailed instructions you provided

[Jim Lloyd]

Follow up from previous post:

Letah Woods - very much work in progress (see link below), but I quite like the rawness of it at the moment (including the wandering WB)

The avoidance of "composed" shots is deliberate

Will come back later with another version

 

 

Converted Nikon d3200

UG1 2mm + BG40 2mm

asa 100

f/5.6

typically 8 seconds

Optomax 35 mm f/3.5 lens

 

One example here - others at this link

 

[Cadmium]

Hi Jim, Personally I don't try to do much to UV shots, other than white balance them neutrally.

That pic looks pretty normal to me for UV.

If a program doesn't give me the ability to full frame 'marquee' the whole shot, then I try a gray area, or such...

Unless you have a flower or human painted object in the scene, then you will usually not have much other than gray and black.

[Andy Perrin]

Or plastics! Plastics tend to be fun all across the spectrum.

[Jim Lloyd]

Unless you have a flower or human painted object in the scene, then you will usually not have much other than gray and black.

 

Ah that explains why there are more than 10 times more topics in the flowers section than the landscape section ! :(

[nfoto]

One of the site founders being a botanist also helps ...

[Andrea B.]

One of the site founders being a life-long lover of botany also helps......