Cameras and photography

This page gives advice on the different sorts of cameras available for mountain photography (SLR, compact, digital).  I also explain how to digitally manipulate photos, create montages and colour print from digital.
Camera types

Going digital - how many mega pixels?

photography tips - montages

Digital tricks

printing from digital, scanning and ICC profiles

 

 

Digital cameras to scale - Sony mini digital, Sigma 12-24 mm lens, Canon 10D with 24-70f2.8, Canon A70

Camera types
I've tried three types of cameras over the years, each has its pros and cons.

Film Cameras

 

Digital Cameras

I've been "fully digital" since June 2003 and haven't looked back.
35mm compact. 

A zoom compact is better than a fixed focal length.  The only disadvantage of a compact is that you're totally reliant on batteries.  A flash is essential, especially if you want to take pictures of someone with loads of snow about.  Generally speaking, the auto exposure copes well with snow.  Keeping the camera down you shirt helps to stop the batteries freezing but it does get a bit sweaty down there.  On the summit of the Alallinhorn I got 3 pictures before the batteries froze, once down to the Mitelalin in worked fine again.  The reason I don't use a compact any more is the strap broke and its now in Davey Jones' locker at Swanage.

 Tiny digital 

My first foray into digital photography was  a tiny (about half the size of a Mars bar) 1.3Mpixel Sony digital camera (since been improved to 2 Mpixel).  Its great for snap shots and easily fits in a pocket.  It'll print 6x4 no problem.  So far so good, however, I still take a SLR for any decent shots as the lens isn't good enough to capture really fine detail on a mountainside.  If the weather's crap then I just take the digital camera, you never know, the weather guessers might get it wrong and some photo opportunities arise, in which case the tiny digital camera is always there.  It works OK in harsh conditions like Scottish winter in a padded pouch clipped to my rucksack waist belt and hasn't been too bothered about getting damp.  I suspect that camera phones will soon reach this standard.
Disposable. 

After losing the compact I switched to a disposable (with a flash).  These take reasonable pictures, or so I thought at the time, and it doesn't really matter if you lose or break them.  Because they're so light they're remarkably robust, I dropped one and it slid merrily for 200' into the bottom of a corrie.  I retrieved it a few hours later and it was still intact and working.  After an Alpine trip we were reviewing pictures.  Clive took his on a 35 mm compact with slide film, mine were on a disposable.  There's a world of difference in quality when you see the two identical pictures side by side.

 Digital SLR. 

Unfortunately, after 20 years of hard use, my OM2 packed up.  I  replaced it with a Canon EOS 10D digital SLR.  The picture quality is outstanding, the auto focus is mind numbingly quick, and you really have to try hard to upset the evaluative metering.  The big downside of it, other than the cost, is the weight and bulk. 

I've bought a Sigma 24-70 mm f2.8 lens which weighs more than the camera and is rather bulky, this is the price you pay for that extra stop. The camera body itself is bulkier but no heavier than my Olympus.   It is possible to fit the camera to a harness inside a top loader carry case and still climb VS routes, however, I soon gave up with this and just take the tiny Sony digital on rock climbs now. 

The smaller sensor of this camera means you get a 1.6x focal length multiplication factor, great for telephoto but not so good for wide angle.  My "standard" lens now is the new Sigma 12-24 mm f4.5-5.6.  A superb lump of glass.  Image quality is excellent but care is needed to keep the film plane vertical to stop the verticals flying off at strange angles.  Used correctly there is minimal distortion.  The slow aperture is not a problem as you can comfortably hand hold at 1/20s or less.  I find that with large areas of sky I get best results with outdoor shots by under-exposing by 1 stop, if the shot does turn out with under-exposure (rare) then I can simply pull it back in Photoshop.

If anyone has any doubts about the quality of digital images, I can assure them that the 10D surpasses 35mm transparency in terms of resolution, colour saturation and range, not to mention ease of use and speed of results.  36 shots per film - forget it, I can get 200 hi-res images on a single 512MB card, plus I can do black and white and infra-red without changing film stock.  Looking at some scanned slides in detail, as soon as the ISO goes above 100 then there's loads of noise on the scanned files, the 10D produces superb noise free shots at ISO 100 - 400.
35mm SLR. 

After the disposable I switched to my now ancient Olympus OM2.  It's bulkier and heavier than a compact but  smaller (although not any lighter) than a modern SLR.  Picture quality is outstanding and when the batteries gave up the ghost half way up a route, I just guessed the exposure and used the mechanical shutter back up.  I used this all the time with Fujichrome 100 and scanned the slides in with a Minolta slide scanner.  Post processing was with Photoshop.  I always used slide film as its better than negatives and nowadays everyone's got a PC so you can scan the slides in, burn them on to a CD and hand out the CD to people. Also, slides scan a lot faster than negatives.   Alas, my two film SLRs are no more...

 Digital compact. 

With the benefit of 20/20 hindsight - great that isn't it? - the way to go is a digital compact with a x3 optical zoom lens.  My tiny little Sony is OK but has no zoom lens and it doesn't have enough resolution to crop the pictures down in Photoshop afterwards.  The Canon 10D is just too plain big to lug around at all times.  In between sits the zoom lens compacts. 

My wife has got a Canon A70, a great bit of kit with full manual control and 3x zoom.  Unfortunately she's quite possessive of it and won't let me borrow it to go climbing with.
 

How many mega pixels do you need? 

Digital camera quality is measured in megapixels and generally speaking, the more the merrier.  (A mega pixel is 1 million pixels.) But how good is good enough?
A 17” monitor (or a 15" TFT) has 1024 x 768 pixels, so to display a digital picture at full size on your screen you need 1024x768 = 0.8 megapixels.  That’s all!
The reason cameras have more mega pixels is for printing.  To get a good print you need far more pixels (don’t ask me why, its just the way it is, if you don’t believe me try and print a web cam image at A4).  The question is how many more.
For absolutely top notch print reproduction such as used in glossy magazines printed on high quality paper you need 300 pixels (or dots) per inch.  You’ll often see this written as dpi.  300 dpi defines the upper limit, there’s no point going higher.  300 dpi is also the ideal resolution for colour ink jet (or laser) printing.  That said, 300 dpi represents the Rolls Royce standard, for magazine reproduction 225 dpi is perfectly acceptable and for home printing on a decent photo quality printer 200 dpi is also perfectly acceptable. If you want to go higher than 200/225 dpi you ought to be taking into account the quality of the lens as well as the number of megapixels.
These are the number of mega pixels you need to print photo quality at different sizes:

 
  300 dpi 225 dpi 200 dpi
6”x4” (standard photo print size) 2.2 1.2 1.0
7”x5” (large prints) 3.2 1.8 1.4
A4 8.0 4.5 3.6
 

So, even if you want to blow you pictures up to A4 size a 4 megapixel camera is perfectly adequate.  The only other reason for going for more megapixels is that you might want to crop or selectively enlarge part of your picture and then print it.  Quite how many more pixels you need is like asking how long’s a piece of string, but remember, if you enlarge too much you’ll hit problems with lens quality as well as resolution.  Incidentally, ignore all sales patter about “digital zoom”, this is exactly the same as cropping the picture in a photo editor program.  Utterly worthless.  “Optical zoom” is the important feature.  If the salesman says it got 12 times zoom, immediately ask what the optical zoom is and go on this number.
So how does digital compare with film?  Well if you compare with large/medium format cameras it doesn’t, at least not at sensible prices (digital backs for medium format cameras cost >£10 000).  What about 35 mm then?  For a start, you will not get a A4, 300 dpi print from 35 mm film even if you use really slow slide film.  If I scan a 35 mm transparency on my slide scanner (the scanner has a resolution equivalent to 10.8 megapixels) and print it at A4, look closely and you can see the film grain, i.e. the scanner resolution is higher than the film resolution.  Under ideal conditions 35 mm films can have theoretical resolutions up to 100 dots per mm but 50-60 is more realistic for an ISO 100 print film with a normal subject.  This equates to 3.1 megapixels.  So, all other things being equal, most notably lens quality, a 3.1 megapixel digital camera is just as good as a 35 mm film camera.  Anything above 3 megapixels and the digital camera resolution is better than 35 mm film.
When digital cameras first hit the streets, the more mega pixels the better.  That is no longer true as they now all have enough mega pixels.  However, the marketing people keep feeding the myth and Joe Public thinks he knows that more is better, and so the cycle continues.  The truth is that once you go above 5 Mp more pixels can often be worse, despite the fact that you're paying more money.  What you want is bigger pixels, not more pixels.  As the pixel count goes up, the manufacturers keep squeezing more and more pixels onto the same chip.  This keeps their costs down as they don't have to keep designing new camera bodies and lenses.  Unfortunately smaller pixels puts greater pressure on lens resolution (can a compact camera lens resolve to 8 Mp?) and creates problems with blooming and noise.  Smaller pixels mean smaller light gathering areas, amplification can overcome this but at the expense of noise.  Blooming occurs when a pixel whites out (too much light) and the charge overflows onto neighbouring pixels.  The closer the pixels are together (i.e. the smaller they are) the worse the problem.  A 6 Mp digital SLR will ALWAYS produce a better image than a 8 Mp compact type camera simply because the pixels are bigger.
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Photography tips
This is a climbing site not a photography site so I'm not going to explain the basics of photography, I assume you already know this.  What I will go into is some more advanced techniques that you might need out in the hills.

Panoramas and montages
These two pictures were taken on a 35 mm SLR as two slides.  They were then scanned and joined together in Photoshop Elements.  Each shot was taken using a 50 mm lens and the exposure was identical for the left and right halves.
The next montage was stitched together from multiple slides in Photoshop.  This was the first montage I'd attempted and for various reasons isn't as good as the two above.
The final image was taken on a 35 mm compact (fixed lens).  As you can see, I haven't quite been able to match the colours and lighting between the shots and the lens distortion is noticeable.  This is how not to do it!
How to do montages
1 Use a low distortion camera lens.  A 50 mm lens (on a 35 mm SLR) is fine.  35 mm and 28 mm wide angle lenses give too much distortion at the edges of the pictures and makes merging them a real pain.  (You can use wide angle lenses with high end stitching software such as RealViz Photostitcher as this software is capable of accounting for the lens distortion.)
2 Allow enough overlap between images so that you've got recognisable "landmarks" that overlap and allow you to merge the pictures.
3 Set the exposure to manual and keep it the same for each picture
4 Scan each picture manually without any form of exposure or colour compensation (if using film)
5 Merge the pictures using Photoshop or similar software.  For the montage above (not the two panoramas) this requires a vast amount of memory, you may have to start flattening layers before you've got all the pictures in.
6 Now apply colour and exposure compensation to the merged picture.  Applying compensation to the component pictures is not recommended as its virtually impossible to balance them all to be the same.  This is why you want the same exposure for all pictures. Note I haven't tried Photoshop CS yet which has a colour match function.
7 Trim the picture (tops and bottoms will never line up) and air brush imperfections around the join.  Sorted.
8 For a panorama, two pictures is plenty.  Sure you can do a 360º BUT HOW ARE YOU GOING TO DISPLAY IT?  Monitors are sort of squareish.  Unless you've got a paper roll printer how are you going to print it unless you tape them all together?
9 Stitching software.  There are several packages on the market that can stitch photos into a montage/panorama:
  Photoshop.  Photoshop CS and Elements has a stitching utility built in.  Its pretty basic but can sometimes work.  You can of course do it the slow way with multiple layers and masks if you wish.
  Canon Photo stitcher.  Free with some Canon cameras/scanners.  Normally produces better results than Photoshop but not always.  Best to have Canon and Photoshop and see which one works best in a particular situation.  Note that I have been unable to uninstall the Canon software without corrupting a whole load of device drivers (Windows 2000 PC).  Limited to lens focal lengths >20mm so you can't use it with wide angle shots.
  RealViz Stitcher.  This is the business but its expensive ~£350.  I use the Express version which is somewhat cheaper at ~£80 and this suffices for my purposes.  Excellent at equalising levels and very good at compensating for lens distortion.  Takes a while to learn how to use it fully though.  If you want decent results every time then this is the program you need. 
  See the image above of Hags Glen in Ireland?  That was the best I could do with Canon's and Photoshop's stitching utilities.  Now look what Realviz Stitcher Express could do. 

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Digital tricks
These days everyone's got a PC and a lot of people have access to scanners.  Never ever believe a photograph to be true.
Here's a picture of a cliff down in the Gower.   (Click on the thumbnails for a larger view).  Note the angle of the slab on the left of the picture, (its about 65º).
With no digital trickery you can make the slab look steeper simply by rotating the camera when you take a picture.  Here's Kim climbing the same slab.  It's suddenly gone from easy angled to almost over hanging.
Now the digital trickery.  Note that the rope is above Kim.  In the shot below I've removed the rope from above her, replaced it with a rope below her and added some climbing gear to her harness.  This gear has also been rotated so that it hangs vertically.  It looks like Kim is leading a really desperate route, in fact she's on a top rope on an easy angled slab.
The final shot is of the Knockapeasta-Lackagarrin ridge over in Macgillcuddy's Reeks in Ireland.  The picture I had was shot on colour film on a 35 mm compact camera.  It was uninspiring to say the least.  I put it into Photoshop and converted it to black and white, then played with the lighting and contrast to make it more dramatic.  So far so good, not really cheating, you could do all this in a conventional dark room.  Well, you know how pictures of mountains never look as steep on film as they do in the flesh, the solution is simple, just distort the digital image.  Voilla.  Actually, I don't regard this as cheating, it's merely correcting a lens distortion caused by using a wide angle lens.  The main tip is to think about converting lacklustre colour images into black and white.
Also remember that you don't nee digital technology to cheat.  To make a cliff look steeper simply rotate the camera.  The climbing magazines have been using this trick for years.

 
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Printing from digital, scanning and ICC profiles

Link to scanning, printing and ICC profiles page

 
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