Note - Please direct all feedback and discussion of these articles at the discussion thread.

Today I shall embark on a journey to write one technical article and post it to this thread every week. The purpose is to give our fellow forummers a place to start off with their quest for photography knowledge, and perhaps to draw in people who are keen to learn photography as an art. As this is only the very first installment, I can only hope I will have the inspiration and motivation to keep this up.

Let's start with the basics. Who is a photographer? This question is a wide one, and there are many answers to it. In the context of this series of articles, and by my personal perception, a photographer is one who has intention, planning, preparation, experience and equipment to make photographs - photographs that express his intentions and personal perception of things. A photographer is an artist, just as a painter is. A photographer manipulates visual tools to achieve his artistic goal.

What makes a photograph? A photograph is a capture of the four dimensions into a single point. An ideal photograph captures one moment that tells the entire story. If you want to shoot many moments to tell the story, you're better off as a video director. A photograph also ideally shows the personality of the photographer, and how he looks at his life uniquely through his personal experience of life. A photograph is the photographer's expression of life.


Fish Market, Shenzhen China

But why a series of technical articles on photography if the emphasis here is the artform of photography? Because every artist has to learn the tools he has at his disposal before he can manipulate them to the ends of his vision and inspiration, just as a painter has to learn the various media, how watercolour is mixed differently from oil or pencil. With this in mind, I will try to leave my readers with something to think about, and hopefully to practice on at the end of each article.

So, with this narrowed down definition, several types of photographers may not be interested in following my planned series of articles. The first type is a person who owns five cameras and twenty lenses, but takes less than five pictures a week - because this person is a gear collector. The next type is a person who uses his equipment to analyse its output by comparing resolution, noise, colour rendition, but takes less than five pictures a week of what is outside his house - this person is a "measurebator". One more type is the person who uses his equipment to take pictures _without_ intention or purpose of expressing anything, for the sake of capturing what has happened - this is a reporter (arguably a documentarist can be called a reporter too, but a documentarist has purpose and intention in photographing events).

But if you wish to use photography as a way to express yourself, to discover how something on the surface which is so literal can be used for artistic expression, I hope you will find my efforts to inspire you to be worthwhile. I have no concrete plans yet, but I hope to cover the basic visual tools of exposure, focal distance, focal length and colour balance. Later on I hope to follow up with how to make the most of compact cameras, and perhaps some basic post-processing techniques too.

Having said all this, I am in no way proclaiming myself to be a good photographer. I, like many others, am merely striving through the ups and downs we experience as people who attempt to follow the path walked by many great photographers. I am also by no means claiming that all that I have written is correct, absolute truth or universal law. This series my personal expression and opinions, which I hope will set you thinking about your photography.

This will be all for my series opener. I hope I will follow through with this plan. For some thoughts, ask yourself before each capture you make this week - what do I intend to achieve with this image? - and then ask yourself when you review - how close is what I had captured to what I had intended to capture? If there's a gap, between your intentions and your results, start thinking about how you can close that gap.

Note: Please don't reply to this thread - I hope to keep all the articles together so that it will be easy to reference/read through later on. If you want to flame, please start new thread. Thank you!

This post has been edited by richx: Jul 20 2016, 03:35 PM

In this installment, I will attempt to discuss exposure. I would generally regard exposure as _the_ one single most important technical aspect of photography. Without proper exposure, there would be no colours, no focus, no perspective and angle, no composition, no bokeh. Nothing. The term exposure came from way back when people would be concerned about how long to expose your light sensitive-material (film) to light coming in from the lens, since the film has to be mounted in a light-tight box. As humans, we are generally oblivious to the existence of exposure, because our eyes and brain are so well-designed that they provide you with automatic exposure, with automatic gain control at that! While there's no good way to measure the entire sensitivity range of the human eye, the sensitivity range of film and sensors are generally very limited. Too much light, and everything turns white - too little light, everything turns black.

What is exposure? Today, we can simplify exposure as being the total amount of light captured by the light-sensitive material. What factors influence exposure? Remember this - this is the Holy Trinity of exposure - Aperture, Shutter and Sensitivity. These three factors work together to ensure the right amount of light falls onto the sensor to create an image.

Aperture is the size of the opening of the lens. This is defined as a ratio to the focal length of the lens, expressed usually as F/number. For example, a lens might tell you its maximum aperture is F/3.5. This means the maximum diameter of the lens opening is 3.5x smaller (1/3.5) that of its focal length. Hence, the smaller the F/number, the larger the aperture opening, the more light passes through. Shutter speed determines how long the sensor/film is exposed to the incoming light from the lens. Under broad daylight, only a very short amount of time is needed, but this stretches as the sun goes down. Obviously, the faster the shutter speed, the less light gets to come in. Most cameras have a shutter speed range starting from 1/2000-th of a second to 5-seconds or so. Capture media sensitivity, be it film or digital sensor, is the last exposure parameter. This measurement is typically noted as an ISO-number. Old-school people will remember the ASA-number, which, if I'm not wrong, is exactly the same as ISO with a different number. Film typically starts from ISO50 up to ISO1600 for colour, and up to ISO3200 for monochrome. Digital sensors also share a similar range. The higher the ISO number, the more sensitive the media is to light.

In the old days, cameras didn't have light meters built-in, what more auto-exposure systems. You had to learn your film, and learn the different lighting situations with different exposures to estimate. If you could afford the time, you would take out a light meter to measure the amount of light on the scene and calculate the proper exposure on paper. As the age of automation sets in, automatic shutter speed systems became commonplace, and later on, fully automatic exposure systems. These systems use the lightmeter in the camera to measure the scene and figure out what aperture and shutter speed settings to use in order to expose the film properly. Back then, sensitivity of the film had to be decided upon before the photography takes place (by loading up the film).

So today, almost all cameras you buy give you auto-exposure. For the cameras that are targeted at photography enthusiasts, what is known as the PASM modes are available to control exposure. P (programme) mode full controls the exposure. A (aperture, sometimes labelled as Av) mode allows the photographer to decide upon the aperture, and the camera will figure out the shutter speed. S (shutter, sometimes labelled as Tv for time value) is the opposite, letting the photographer use a fixed shutter speed. M (manual) mode allows photographers full control, frequently with the in-built light meter to aid the photographer's decisions.

However, the camera doesn't always know what to do with the scene, especially if it features a very wide range of brightness. In P/A/S modes, the photographer can circumvent the camera's decisions somewhat by using exposure compensation feature. This is button/function is frequently labelled as EV+/-. Dialing in +1.0EV (read as "one stop")would cause the camera to expose the scene in twice the brightness it would otherwise do, so allowing the photographer to add in some intelligence into the camera's auto-exposure. A large part of learning how to get your camera to expose properly is to learn how the camera meters a scene, and deciding if you need to expose more or expose less, using the exposure compensation feature.


Shaman, Shenzhen China

Which begs the question - what is a proper exposure? Or what is the right exposure for a particular scene. Technically speaking, the perfect exposure would take place when everything in your scene appears in perfect detail - no shadow detail becomes pure black, and no light source, light reflection, specular highlight or otherwise bright objects turn full white (technically called clipped shadows or highlights). However, no sensor known sensor today can possibly capture that kind of range, so frequently the photographer has to decide if the capture should retain more details in the shadows, or more details in the highlights. Compromise has to be made - if you want to retain shadow details, you will lose highlight details and the scene might turn grossly overexposed.

As a general guide, I would say it's good practice to keep your main subject perfectly exposed, showing all the detail it has. There's little point in maintaining details in your background if your main subject is totally devoid of visual information (well, of course there's always silhouette shots, but that's for another time). Exposure can be manipulated for various artistic purposes. Most decent cameras can also capture several varied exposures of one scene, using a function commonly called "exposure bracketing" - where the camera would take one capture of what it thinks is the right exposure, followed by one overexposed and one underexposed capture. Of course, you can set the steps of overexposure and underexposure to perform - usually +/-0.7EV (read as "two-thirds of a stop") is a good guideline to start with.

I will follow up with more exposure-related information in a later article.

So, is your exposure depicting your subject the way you imagined it? Would a slightly underexposed or overexposed capture of the same subject work better? Can you gain from using exposure bracketing?

This post has been edited by richx: Jul 20 2016, 03:36 PM

First of all, my apologies to the readers of this column who have been eagerly waiting for an update for me. Work's caught up to me and I was pretty much uninspired, unmotivated or otherwise plain uninterested to sit down to write something here. Now that a major part of the work is done, and a family vacation is beckoning this weekend, it should be a good time to write part three.

Part 3: The Various Metering Modes in Your Camera

The very first cameras were nothing more than a box, a piece of light-sensitive material mounted at one end, and a lens on the other end. There was no metering, and hence no exposure automation. You had to learn your way about the film you use by trial and error (which I can assure you is a labourious and painful process), and later on with a chart of suggested exposures. Then the lightmeter was invented and you could do some maths and calculate what exposure to use, and bracket from there.

While lightmeters were a seperate tool to carry around when taking photographs, some dude somewhere decided to integrate a basic light meter into the camera body. This meter consists of a single electronic device that reads the amount of light falling on the focusing screen. Due to the natural light reception pattern of this device, the center-weighted metering system was born (much like the pattern when you shine an LED on a nearby wall, you see concentrated light in the middle, and some light off the sides).

With this integrated into the camera, manufacturers would use an indicator in the viewfinder to let the photographer know if the currently set exposure is too bright or too dark by the meter's reading. There was still no exposure automation. Since many designs of that era involved having the aperture mechanically controlled by a ring on the lens, and the shutter on the camera's body, some smart dude decided to combine the meter's readings with automatic shutter speed settings that would guess a shutter speed value to use, while the aperture setting on the lens remains unchanged. This was the birth of Aperture Priority Exposure (labelled as Av or just plain A on your camera's dials).

It was only later on that manufacturers re-designed their lenses and bodies to allow the camera body some form of control over the aperture setting used in the lens that fully automatic exposure became a reality. It was then that photography took on the world in mass numbers. Shutter Priority Exposure (labelled Tv or S) also became available due to this innovation.

Because of the center-weighted metering's behaviour, it was particularly good with portrait photography (just keep your subjects face right in the middle when you set your exposure), but it wasn't good enough for demanding situations. Many professional photographers still "know" the exposure from experience, and still carry a dedicated lightmeter with a narrow-angle (a.k.a. spotmeter) metering function. This allows photographers to check the various light levels of different portions of the scene to make sure everything is exposed within the capture media's dynamic range/exposure latitude as best as possible. It wasn't long before top-end camera bodies integrated this spotmetering function into their camera bodies - the technical complications of which were higher than the basic center-weighted metering system.


Country Life, Kuching Malaysia

The average metering system measures light evenly across the entire focusing screen and decides on exposure from there. This system is largely unreliable and hence has been discontinued from most systems. The "matrix" or "multi-segment" or "evaluative" metering system employs multiple sensors to read light across the entire frame. The multiple sensors allow the exposure system to single out one or two excessively bright points (like specular highlights/reflections) from the scene and not factor that into the metering calculations, hence preventing the underexposure that would otherwise occur with the older average metering system. The number of light sensors in this "matrix" metering system doesn't really indicate its performance as the calculating algorithm is far more important. Some modern camera makers claim that their metering algorithm check against massive databases of different scene exposures and uses that as a guideline, but I think that's just a lot of marketing talk.

More recent innovations in metering include Nikon's Colour metering system, where the metering sensors actually read the Red, Green and Blue values separately. This is an important step to good digital capture because each pixel site stores only Red, Green or Blue information - and with colour-based metering, you can prevent clipping of an entire colour channel for the sake of proper exposure of everything else. Once a colour channel is clipped, the entire region in the image will just appear as one great flat swath of colour - not particularly attractive. Hence, the camera will typically underexpose to save that one channel - this underexposure is easy to correct with simple processing, while leaving the choice of how much colour to clip to the photographer.

Nikon, interestingly, now lets you choose the size of the centre-weighted metering system's central portion. I have not experimented with this, and have no idea what its implications are to my photography. Canon also has a half-baked metering system called "partial". It really is partial - neither here nor there, stuck in between center-weighted and spotmetering. This was developed to try (unsuccesfully) to substitute for the lack of a true spotmeter that many professionals need. Other camera manufacturers usually have the plain "evaluative" (called "ESP" on Olympus systems), "center-weighted" and on higher-end models, "spot" metering options in a straight-forward way.

(The recent Olympus prosumer digicams, interestingly, have a movable spot metering option that lets you base the exposure off a large number of points in the scene, which you can scroll around with the 4-way controller and click on to set - the camera will try to get all the points into the exposure well - I found this to be particularly useful for spot-on landscapes.)

On some cameras, you also have the option for shadow-oriented or highlight-oriented metering settings. Shadow-oriented metering exposes to get the most detail from the darker regions, while having a tendency to clip the highlights. Highlight metering does the opposite, with a high tendency to underexpose in order to save highlight details.

All this said and done, which metering system suits should you use? Most people do just fine with "evaluative", and spot-metering is a whole new level of competency altogether. What's more important is that you shoot extensively in the metering system of your choice, and to learn it as such that it becomes almost innate to you - know when it will underexpose and when it will overexpose, and to dial in exposure compensation even _before_ you take the first shot.

How well do you know your metering system?

This post has been edited by richx: Jul 20 2016, 03:37 PM

Still on the topic of metering, we will go a bit deeper today into the way metering works, and some starter's guide sort of tips on how to improve your metering and exposure. First of all, the topic of metering has always been an elusive one, but from the very early days the metering system had already been calibrated to measure for "18% grey" - apparently by persuasion of Mr. Ansel Adams (for the uninitiated, Mr. Adams was one of the pioneers of photography at the height of its boom and development, responsible for many chemical development formula - many highly-regarded photographers today was once an apprentice of his of some sort or another) himself towards Kodak.

First of all, one must be aware that the light meter in the camera measures only reflected light, that is, light that is reflected off the subject towards the camera lens. The problem with this is that the texture, direction and surface material of your subject can vary, and this will affect the amount of light that is reflected off the surface. Of course, buying a modern hand-held meter with incident metering will solve this problem by allowing one to measure light directly falling on the subject. This doesn't work for all circumstances because not many people want to put aside the budget for a hand-held meter, and not every subject allows a photographer to walk right up to it to put a meter on it to measure incident light.

Back on the topic of 18% grey. When you have a spectrum that goes from white to black, 18% grey is the amount of light density reflected back that falls in the middle between black and white in terms of how the eyes perceive the brightness of it. Note that this does not correspond to the RGB values of 127,127,127 because the human eye's perception of brightness has a feature one can call "dynamic compression". Much like audio perception, the measured brightness of an object does not correspond linearly to the eyes' perception of it. Apparently, Mr. Adams persuaded Kodak to meter on this value because of its similarity to how the human eyes adjusts its perception of brightness to a scene. Digital sensors however, store its range of brightness range differently. The value 127,127,127 is twice as bright as 63,63,63 and half as dark as 255,255,255 - so we can see that there's a skew towards using more storage to record the brighter parts than the darker parts.

So now we know a few things. First of all, there's a mismatch between the way brightness is metered in the camera, and the way brightness is captured by the digital sensor. Secondly, we know that the metering system tries to get the exposure system to make the image as such that when you average all the pixels recorded, you an entire screenful of "18% grey" pixels. So what can you do about it? My suggestion would be to take control over the behaviour of the metering system, and learn to use spot metering (Canon owners of anything less than an EOS-30D will be in trouble when they try).


Dance, Shenzhen China (yes, spot metered)

Now we know that the spot meter is a narrow-angle (~1% to 2%) light meter built into the camera that takes measurement of brightness off only a very small portion of your scene. We also know that the measurement is going to be 18% grey - which means if you point it at a white, well-lit wall, it will turn this wall into 18% grey. So what if you want this wall to turn out white without any further software processing?

Answer: You use exposure compensation!

So, to use spot metering effectively, the photographer must first analyze the scene in frame, and look at the range of bright and dark areas in the scene. Then the photographer should look for a region which he wants to turn out in the photograph as 18% grey brightness. What if you don't have something you intend to be 18% grey in the scene to use as reference? You may easily meter off a brighter or darker area of the scene, as long as you apply a suitable exposure compensation value. Personally, when I meter off a fair person's skin, I typically apply +0.5EV exposure compensation. Once you read the exposure off your area of choice, simply use the AE-L feature on your camera to lock the exposure to the metered value. Digicam users can simple half-press the shutter release button to achieve both focus and exposure lock.

Performing your metering and exposure operations in such a way also requires the photographer to visualize the picture before the capture is made, to think about the scene and its elements. This slowing down and thinking process will help the photographer to make better pictures too ... For further reading, do look up Ansel Adams' Zone System.

PS: On a side note, the name 18% grey is quite a misnomer, but we're so used to referring to it as such, everyone knows what it means. Recently there's also been some debate on "improved" metering systems that measure to around 12% or 14% grey.

PPS: I've also opened a discussion thread should anyone feel the need to talk about these articles openly. The link is available at the top of the first article. Thanks for keeping this thread clean!

This post has been edited by richx: Jul 20 2016, 03:38 PM

I'm sorry about the 1-month time-gap between this installment and the previous one. I guess it might just become a monthly thing eh? I'm sometimes caught up between work and friends and laziness. After I've more or less finished what I want to about exposure, I didn't quite know what I wanted to write on.

But given some thought, what's the second most important thing after exposure? My personal opinion would be focus. Without focus, your well-exposed image would just be a world of rounded colours and shades and tones. You wouldn't be able to make out what they really are.

Focusing is the ability of the lens system to capture light from one point in space, and transform this light into one sharp dot. The entire physics behind this would be rather complicated, and me, without a physics degree, will not try to explain this without doing some research first. An out-of-focus light from the source will fall on the sensor plane as a round "airy" disc, and the resulting blurred area in the picture is formed by the collection of these discs that blend together to form the out of focused area.

One important concept to understand in regards to focusing is that when you focus on an object, you are not focusing merely on that one subject alone. You are in fact, focusing on the entire plane that the subject is located one.

Imagine the world being divided into a stack of two-dimentional X-Y planes. These planes would stick out from the ground and go right into the sky (yes, standing vertically). Let's say you are standing on the ground, and pointing your camera straight ahead at a tree about 3 meters away. The location of the sensor within the camera, we can call the sensor plane. Once the tree is in focus, the entire plane on which the tree is on will be in focus - note that any two planes in this description must be parallel to each other. The distance between these two planes is known as "focal distance", and is usually marked on the camera lens (for serious SLR lenses at least).


Flowers, Segamat Malaysia

What is outside of this plane of focus would be out of focus, either in front, or at the back of this plane. When the lens aperture is closed down, the lens can render planes next to the focal plane onto the sensor plane with a certain acceptable degree of sharpness. The range with which the lens can render this acceptable-degree-of-sharpness is referred to as Depth of Field (DOF). The relationship between DOF and aperture size makes the Aperture Priority exposure automation the most popular choice, as you gain creative control about the amount of sharpness you get in your final image output.

Okay, this is an abrupt end to my article. I shall work on other focus-related articles for the coming weeks. How about some feedback from my readers eh? (in the feedback thread, please)

This post has been edited by richx: Jul 20 2016, 03:41 PM

After some time, and re-reading what I had written above about focus, I think there's only four topics relating to focus that I have not covered. I shall attempt to explain them here in short bits.

First is hyperfocal distance. This is a concept relating to the depth of field (DOF) concept explained in the previous article. We know that when you set your Aperture small enough (with a large F/number), you will get increased amounts of DOF, hence giving you more front-to-back sharpness. To set your lens at its hyperfocal distance for a given aperture, your set your focus point as such that you will be able to get good sharpness from infinity down to a given distance - note that the focus point is not this given distance where your acceptable sharpness ends, but rather, somewhere in the middle. There are various hyperfocal calculators online one can use, and old lenses have marks on their focusing rings to tell you where it is.

Second is bokeh. Bokeh simply is a fancy name for the rendering quality of areas that are out of focus by a particular lens. Any part of the picture that is not in focus can be looked at for bokeh, but most of the time attention is paid to the highlights and brighter points in the picture. Some lenses have better bokeh, while others have horribly distracting ones. There is no absolutes in bokeh quality - there are simply different flavours.


Stacked, Malacca Malaysia

Third is the most important one, and that is focus on your subject matter. Ideally, your sharpest point of focus should be on your main subject of interest. Sometimes, this doesn't happen due to the focusing system not being able to pick up your subject. This is mostly operator error. Sometimes, the subject is spread out over a distance forwards and away from the camera, so more DOF is required. However, timing is very much more important than absolute focus. A slightly out of focus subject captured in an uncanny timing will be better than a sharp picture of nothing happening.

Finally is the operating principles of autofocus (AF). Digital cameras with fixed lenses operate using data picked up by the main imaging sensor, and uses software algorithms to calculate the required lens movement to provide good focus. How does it know that focus has been achieved? When there is very good contrast in the picture. SLRs use a seperate sensor under the main mirror to do this AF operation, hence the sensors are only at fixed points in the scene - not all over the place like digital cameras. This sensor also works on contrast, and it's important to aim the AF sensors at contrasting lines (like between a white and black stripe). Good light is also important for quick AF operation of course.

One final note, on what is generally known simply as the "rule of thumb". In order to obtain decent sharpness when shooting with your camera in your hands (hand-held), your shutter speed should be 1/equivalent focal length. This means if your digital camera's fixed lens gives you equivalent of 38mm to 115mm zoom, and you're shooting at 38mm focal length, your shutter speed should ideally be 1/40th of a second or faster. This just just a general guideline, and most people can shoot decently sharp with slightly slower-than-recommended shutter speeds.

I shall attempt to elaborate more on these bits when time permits. Cheers!

This post has been edited by richx: Jul 20 2016, 03:44 PM

... 10 years later ...

In the past 10 years, the digital photography market has seen a major upheaval and has experienced the full cycle of growing up into a mainstream activity, where people pick up photography for reasons beyond photography (vanity being a major driver), and then finishing the cycle by being slowly driven into an expert-niche activity driven by disrupters outside of the photography market, namely by smartphone cameras being good enough to be a daily tool. I would name the iPhone 4 as the first phone camera being good enough in doing the basics that you would not need to take out the larger cameras often.

In the past 10 years, the photography technology has also made significant leaps by massively improving sensor and image processor performance. The earlier-mentioned problem of limited dynamic range has pretty much evaporated. Sensors have gained 3-5 EV of dynamic range, and those which did not, gained a processor fast enough to take 3-5 shots and perform in-camera HDR within 1-2 seconds.

In short, the problems of exposure and colour balance is fast becoming a nit-picking discussion. The only two major issues to consider when taking a picture is now limited to focus and composition. Since I've covered the topic of focus earlier, maybe I will just write a little on composition and consider finally closing this series of articles. Well OK if you've gone to art school or design school, you do not need to read about composition - it would have been covered in great detail in your academic course.

Here's a couple of Wikipedia articles that covers some basics of composition in visual arts and makes a good reading if you're just getting started:
Wikipedia: Composition (visual arts)
Wikipedia: Golden spiral

Now okay, you've gotten all that information and ideas loaded into your head. How do you make sense of this and use it to get started to improve your photography composition?


Sipisopiso, Indonesia

The obvious answer is to go out and take lots of pictures! You can keep some of the compositional guidelines in your mind as you shoot, but many cameras are able to display at least the rule of thirds in the live display. Another option is to print a few cards containing the composition guidelines and keep it with you. When you get lost on the scene, it's good to look at it and help you to get started. If you're an old-school person and love the optical viewfinder, you're probably out of luck as the third-party focusing screen makers have closed down, and the camera manufacturers have stopped making optional ones for the newer models. So perhaps it's time to move on

It takes some practice and trying and re-trying to program into your brain to recognize the occurrence of these patterns and how to make the best of what you're given with.

What basic topics of photography should I write about next? Or am I so out of touch that it's all irrelevant now?

This post has been edited by richx: Jul 20 2016, 04:29 PM

reserved for part 8)

A good article, indeed

the next bits never came...

Good article.. but hope TS can continue the thread...

It's from 4 years ago leh. TS dunno hilang mana di.

TS where are u, pls continue

Y i canr view the Pic? Zzz

thanks for reviewing this 4 years old thread
I'm not even in lyn that time

lol this thread was necro'ed 3 times. once after 2 years. then again after 2 years. and a third time after half a year. good job you guys!

what happened to ts? where are the other parts? sorry for necroing. i read the whole thing

Wow, I'm surprised so many people read this stuff. I'm sorry for abandoning what I started - it was a good 6 years ago, no? Actually since then I had retired from active photography and then through some work of fate, I was actually given another SLR of the same brand I used to shoot with.

A very nice article, should read this from the begin till end!

OK I'm back. And I managed to dig up the old photos that used to be featured in these articles, so I've inserted them back - this time hosted by the forum's own server rather than 3rd party service.

The problem is I've been gone so long, even if I wanted to continue writing, I don't know how to be relevant anymore. I'll see if I can think of anything.