Photography Gallery

Silas Scarborough

This site is comprised of a number of different galleries. In some cases, such as the Orchid Conservatory or the Green Animals Topiary Garden, it was easy to segregate the images but others are segregated simply by the photographic technique used to produce them.

Digital Photography

All of the underwater photography was done with a Canon S45 digital camera with 256 MB of memory. I used a Canon WP-DC300 waterproof case and it worked flawlessly. The auto-focus had some difficulty underwater but this may have been due to dust stirred up by the waves. This camera is now of historical interest only and has now been retired but I can report that it gave reliable service for years despite tremendous abuse including surviving dropping it hard enough to split the case.

Because of the good experience with the original digital Canon, I now use a Canon SD1100 IS. The camera is about 1/4 the size of the S45, 32 times as much memory, and twice the resolution at 8 mega-pixels. Plus it was about a third of the price of the original S45. Canon also put a tremendous amount of work into the controls and it's vastly easier to use than the S45. Not bad! (Definitely comparison shop as prices vary wildly from one camera store to another.)

For high-end digital photography, my friends are unanimous in their choice of Canon digital SLR cameras. Without having used one, I can't make a personal recommendation but the quality of the photographs I've seen from them has been superlative.

Traditional Photography

All traditional photographs were shot with a Minolta Maxxum 7000i camera, some with a Sigma 28mm wide-angle and others with a Sigma 80mm-200mm zoom. The macro feature of the Sigma zoom lens was frequently used for flower photography. Other than a haze filter, there was no modification to any photograph at the time that it was exposed. Unfortunately, this camera really doesn't get used anymore as it's too much to carry around but it provided excellent service for many years.

Given that the resolution of higher-end digital cameras is now as good or better than film, I don't see any particular reason to go back to traditional photography. Many manufacturers are building digital cameras that support standard lenses so the distinction between digital and traditional cameras is rapidly disappearing.

The Canon EOS digital cameras, among others, support standard lenses and have resolution higher than can be achieved with standard 35 mm film. They are fairly expensive cameras but really not much more than quality SLR cameras in their day. One by one, the traditional camera manufacturers are shifting to digital and it won't be too much longer before the SLR will be the rarity.

If you're looking for an in-depth comparison of traditional and digital techniques, check out any photography magazine. I prefer digital because the quality is excellent and I don't have time to screw around with film. Beyond that, the differences are largely philosophical.

Everything on these pages has been developed on Apple computers. I've used Apple and Windows systems extensively for many, many years and the latter systems have been grossly unreliable. The implementation of Apple's OS X system has made navigation vastly easier than it was on previous Apple systems and even those were light years ahead of Windows.

I use the following approach to gathering images: I pack an Apple laptop for traveling and it serves as the storage medium for the photographs (among many other things). After spending a day shooting photographs, the camera is connected via USB to the laptop and the images are loaded into the computer. I'll do a preliminary screen with iPhoto as it provides a display that is quite similar to a traditional contact sheet. This makes it fairly painless to review the day's photographs and delete the ones that didn't work. In this way, I know immediately if there are any photographs that I might want to try again and I also have storage capacity that is only limited by the hard drive in the laptop.

Another alternative for storing a large number of images is to travel with a number of spare SD flash cards. As each one fills, swap it out for another one and then load them into your computer when you return home. This approach is a wee bit precarious for me but it will work. There are other alternatives as well for temporary storage of your photographs but going through all of them is beyond the scope of this discussion.

On returning home, I connect the laptop into my home network to which my desktop computers are connected. After the laptop is connected, all of the images collected during the trip are loaded onto the primary desktop machine. When I'm satisfied that the transfer has been successful, I delete the images from the laptop and it's ready to travel again.

Given the power of a MacBook Pro, you can really do pretty much all of your post-processing on one but my preference is to work on a desktop machine with the larger Cinema display. Many professional photographers use Apple's Aperture software but I don't have any personal experience with it so I'll leave that study to you. My preference is to use Adobe's Photoshop but their Creative Suite has become such a behemoth that I may consider switching.

The post-processing step can go in multiple directions. If my intention is to publish to the Web, the image will be modified as necessary and then reduced to a size suitable for a Web page (e.g., 640x480 or 800x600). If my intention is to print the image then I'll keep it at the highest resolution possible such that it can be used for a digital print or the digital source file can be sent to a photo shop to be used to create a traditional negative for subsequent printing.

Modification of a digital image can be a sensitive subject to photographers but my interest is only in what the final image can be made to be. Sometimes the image requires no modification at all while at others the source image is simply the starting point toward something that may be much better.

Photoshop provides many tools for working with the traditional aspects of photography such as exposure, color filtering, etc., and it is extremely powerful in this regard. It also provides the ability to customize the image in various ways but there are much more radical ways to do it and these are achieved through third-party products such as Corel's KPT and Alien Skin's Eye Candy filtering software.

I am not particularly impressed with KPT since Corel acquired the product. It had some incredible powers in previous releases but it's more flash and bluster than anything else these days. Eye Candy is not as radical as KPT but it provides some useful features such as drop shadows, etc. Xaos Paint Alchemy provided some really pretty painterly effects but the product has not been upgraded for years. The Xaos Web site still exists but it's unclear what purpose it serves.

A tip for Web artists: Photoshop has a "Save for Web" function that will greatly reduce the physical size of an image file without a significant compromise to quality. Photoshop is expensive so also consider Graphic Converter as it is professional quality and any Mac user with even a passing interest in digital image processing should have a copy. The license fee is astonishingly low and it is updated frequently by the original author.

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