F-Stopping

Considering Buying an iMac for Photography?

2010-11-20T09:01:00.006-05:00

The new Apple iMacs look incredible. You can even get a quad core 27" one now. That beautiful screen and fast CPU with multiple cores is perfect for photography... right? Well, yes, but at some point, you'll probably wish you had sunk a little extra investment in a Mac Pro.

The Problem
I bought a 24" 3.06GHz dual core iMac in late 2008 when I was shooting with a Canon 40D in full 10MPx RAW mode. The iMac handled it perfectly - it was awesome. Aperture 2 had no problem with those RAWs, and my nearly empty hard drive zipped along. I figured that two cores running at 3.06GHz should be enough for years ago come... But things started slowing down quickly, and there was little I could do about it.

In late 2009, I upgraded my camera to a Canon 5D Mark II. I now had 21MPx of RAW goodness, but of course that came with a price - slower processing and twice as much hard drive usage. I quickly filled up my iMac's "measly" 500GB drive, and since you can't upgrade the hard drive in an iMac, I had to go external. I bought a Drobo RAID enclosure and a couple of drives to start me out. The Drobo's great and offers data protection, but the housing alone is $300, and the file transfer speed went from 100MB/sec internal to 25MB/sec external. Believe me, you notice that your RAW files are coming across Firewire or USB, and it hurts.

In early 2009, Aperture 3 came out with brushes and other new features that I had been waiting for, but they too, came with a price - performance. I started waiting for brush strokes to catch up with my mouse, and got used to seeing the "Apple beachball". More RAM probably would have helped, but I was already maxed out at 4GB. By now, my Drobo had three drives instead of two. Needless to say, I was quickly outgrowing my iMac.

What made matters worse, because of my RAM situation, I had to close every app when running Aperture to eek out any little bit of performance I could. I would have had *no* problem shelling out $500 for 8GB of RAM at that point, but it wasn't an option - the box would have said "sorry buddy, I'm full".

The Solution.
When the 2010 Mac Pros came out, I went for it and got a 6-core 3.33GHz Mac Pro with 12GB of RAM and an extra slot for 16GB if I need it. If I wanna sell my car, I could go up to 32GB (it's too expensive now, but will come down by the time I "need" it). It's amazing. Since Aperture doesn't use all of the cores, it's not *that* much faster than the best performance I ever saw on the iMac, it's just that it *never* slows down and I can do anything else on the computer at the same time without ever seeing the spinning beachball. I've run two VMs along-side Aperture with no problem. I think you get the point. I'm now a little more future proof than before. There's plenty of hardware to spare, so by the time Aperture 4 or the 5D Mark II comes out, it shouldn't phase this machine a bit.

Also, with 5 available hard drive bays, I was able to turn off my Drobo and get back to 100MB/sec drive access. I even now have the option getting 2X, 3X, 4X, or 5X that performance by RAIDing the drives internally. Or, I could go nuts and get solid state drives which run up to 285MB/sec (as compared to a really fast spinning hard drive at 100MB/sec). All of these options come with different price tags, but they're only getting cheaper, and they're always available. I currently have 2TB of internal storage with plenty of room to grow. I can also upgrade my graphics card, monitor/display, and even add on components someday like Intel Light Peak and USB3 PCI cards. I can add on things that I don't even know about yet.

I also have the choice of displays with a Mac Pro. Many photographers are frustrated that Apple chose glossy for their displays instead of matte. Glossy screens basically become a mirror when you're viewing a dark scene or if your computer room is brightly lit. I just bought my Dell 27" U2711 and love it.

Don't Worry If You're Not A Nut
All of this craziness is because I refused to shoot JPG mode. If I had, the 2008 iMac would still be great. Someone out there is loving their new 24" iMac they just bought on eBay and questions why anyone would have sold it. If you're a sensible person, then just be happy with your JPGs, but if you're like me, and want the fully quality of RAW mode photography, then give some serious consideration to a Mac Pro over an iMac. I believe that I'll still be using this computer (with various upgrades) 4-5 years out, where I couldn't stand the iMac anymore after 2 years. The extra price of a Mac Pro becomes worth it when you realize how much longer you'll be using it.

If you shoot RAW mode and don't want to scream at your computer in a couple of years, then consider a Mac Pro over an iMac. You can still buy brand new 2009 model Mac Pros for cheap. Consider this one - an 8-core 2.26GHz for $2500, or this one - a 4-core 2.66GHZ for $1899.

If you're a serious photographer and you can convince yourself to go for it, I'm sure you'll be glad you bought the (more) future-proof Mac Pro over the sexy, but what-you-see-is-what-you-get iMac.

ETTL in the Studio

2010-11-10T21:37:00.005-05:00

Strobist info:
-----------------
* Key: 580EX II and 430EX II in a Westcott 28" Softbox above, camera right
* 430EX II in Morris 15x18" Softbox, camera left

Background:
* Savage 107" Seamless Charcoal Paper

In my past studio work, I'd use an Alien Bee B800 and several old Nikon speedlights triggered optically and by Pocket Wizards - all in full manual mode. This gives total control, but requires a lot more setup and tinkering. If the subject will stay still, you're set, but if you meter for the subject to be three feet from the key light and they move back a foot, they've just underexposed themselves a little bit. If they move closer by a foot, the difference is even more obvious, and you might clip some highlights.

This is where ETTL (Canon's fully automatic flash metering) really helps out. Here, I used a 580EX II on-camera to trigger three remote flashes - a 580EX and two 430EX II's. The remote 580ex and one of the 430ex's were in my softbox, camera right in group "A" and the other 430EX was in group B.

With ETTL, I can set the ratio of the two groups (A:B) in-camera - their power isn't determined until a split second before the shot. As I press the shutter, the on-camera 580EX quickly sends out coded pulses of light that tell each of the remote flash groups to send out a pulse of light at a known power. The camera quickly meters those pulses, then figures out how bright each flash needs to be. It then sends out another message to the flashes telling them how much power to use, and to fire at the same time. This all happens immediately before the shot - just about too fast to notice.

The drawback of ETTL is that two back-to-back shots might have slightly different exposures, but in the case of shooting children, the benefits outweigh it. If the kid moves forward, the flashes will fire with less power. If the kid moves back, the flashes fire with more. If the kid moves toward one light or the other, each light compensates accordingly.

In this shot, I used A:B mode on the flash with a ratio of 4:1 - the fill flash was 2 stops weaker (1/4 as bright) as key, just to fill in the shadows a little bit. Total flash exposure compensation was +2/3eV, which, sure enough, meant darkening it 2/3 stops in post-processing (but that's okay, because it actually reduces ISO noise to darken a photo). I was impressed at how well ETTL did. The on-camera flash was told not to contribute to the shot - just to master the remote slave flashes.

You may be wondering why I used two flashes in the key softbox - I've never done that before, and I didn't plan on it this time. It was a quick hack at the last second, because the 580EX II key light wasn't recharging as fast as I wanted, so I ball-bungeed a 430EX II next to it. With two flashes, each didn't have to work as hard, so recharging was faster.

Why I Shoot RAW (shoot-to-the-right edition)

2010-10-05T22:38:00.007-04:00

Because horribly overexposed shots like this:

Are still usable, so long as you don't clip any important highlights. You still have the option to drag the exposure slider in Aperture or Lightroom down by three stops to end up with this:

In fact, this'll actually produce a cleaner image than if you expose it properly at the same ISO, since the highlights receive more bits in the RAWs than the shadows. Without RAW, the photo would have been stuck as is. Just make sure to turn on the "flashies" (highlight clipping) option in your camera. This'll blink black and white every place in the photo where you've shot it too bright to fix. As long as you don't see the flashies on anything important, you should be fine.

If you find yourself constantly darkening photos in post-processing, then you're doing it right.

Slowly Getting Organized in Apple Aperture 3

2010-09-27T22:19:00.010-04:00

view the final photo

My Aperture 3 library has grown into a giant bin for photos to go and never be seen again. Organizing would take so much time, that I just figured that I'd get to it someday. The library now contains around 60,000 photos and shows no signs that it'll magically clean itself up, so I've started to move in that direction with some simple steps.

Goals

1. Tack on only a small bit of time at the end of my current workflow
2. Start geo-tagging photos "good enough" - within 1/2 mile of where they were shot
3. Create more logical projects/albums broken down into shooting locations
4. Tag photos with at least very general terms, being more specific with those I'm exporting to Flickr

Implementation

Find a photo to share

From time-to-time, I'll randomly browse my collection using the "Projects" view, looking for a photo to share.

Create a new album

When I find a project containing photos I'd like to share, I open the project, (which was most likely a single compact flash card import), then select all photos from the same shooting location. Assuming I want to keep these photos in their current project, I create a new album (Command-L for new album, or Command-N for new project), give it a name, and check the "Move selected items to a new album".

Geo-tag photos (think "good enough")

In the new album, make sure all photos are selected (Command-A). Then from the Metadata menu, select "Assign Location".

Search for the location in the modal window. If you find the exact match, use it. If not, you can click on one of the "Google Results", move and resize the blue circle, then give that location a name that will be available to you later on.

Assign General Keywords

Again, make sure all photos in the album are selected (Command-A). Open the "Batch Change" tool from the Metadata menu, or with the shortcut Command-Shift-B.

Make sure "Append" is selected so that we won't lose any existing tags. Check the box next to "Keywords", then enter some very basic tags that apply to all images in the album such as the location name, city, state, and anything else you can think of. Click "OK" to apply those keywords to all photos in the album.

Here, I'm adding the tags "Florida", "Kennedy Space Center", "NASA", and "Orlando".

If you care to specify more tags for other groups of photos, just select the subset of photos you'd like to add tags to, then follow these steps again. As long as you have "Append" selected, you won't delete any existing tags, just add new ones.

Create a general caption for all photos

Flickr recognizes Aperture's "Caption" field as the description under a photo. I generally use this to give the name and location of where the photo was shot.

Select all photos in the album again (Command-A). Open the Batch Change tool again (Command-Shift-B), check the box next to "Caption", and the radio button next to "Replace". I will also add the location's city and state in this step. Click "OK" to apply this description to all photos in the album. Here, I'm setting the value to "Kennedy Space Center, Orlando, Florida" to all photos in the album. I might replace or add to the description for individual photos later, but this is good enough for now.

Exporting to Flickr

Before I export an individual photo to Flickr, I select the "Metadata" tab for that photo (seen at the top of this post), set the version name to what I'd like it to be displayed as in Flickr, add tags that are more specific to this photo, and consider adding to, or replacing the caption, which shows up as the description under the photo in Flickr.

I'm still in the stone age when it comes to exporting to Flickr. I haven't looked for exporting plugins, and I hate Aperture's Flickr export, so I just manually export to my desktop, then upload using Flickr's tool. This works for me, since I usually like to set the photo order, and only upload 5 at a time anyway. Flickr will pick up all of the tags, captions, and GPS locations set in Aperture. This makes it easy to find photos in your library that are on Flickr. There might be a Flickr setting that I'm not aware of, but for now, I open each photo on the site and click "Add this photo to your map!". The popup window will already have the location you set in Aperture, so just click "OK" to make it public.

Keeping Flickr sets organized

I'll write more on this topic later, but I've recently started using the 3rd-party tool called SuprSetr to automatically manage my sets by keyword and other metadata. If I have a big album like my shots of Kennedy Space Center that I know I'll be uploading from often, I find SuprSetr very time-saving. I create a Flickr set in the tool named "Kennedy Space Center", and tell the tool to automatically add all photos that have the tag "Kennedy Space Center" into this set. Every time I run the tool and select "Refresh all sets", every photo with this tag will be added to the set, and reordered by interestingness, descending.

Future Goals
I'm looking for ways to keep track of what I've exported to Flickr. I haven't decided if I want to create a Flickr album or maintain a custom metadata field with tags such as "Flickr" or "Blog".
Conclusion
The steps above might sound time-consuming, but once you get used to the key shortcuts and have done it a few times, it really only takes a minute or so. Even if I'm only exporting one photo from a shoot to Flickr, I'll bring a couple dozen to several hundred closer to being organized with these simple batch steps. I can always add more detailed tags or GPS coordinates if I want to, but these very coarse brushstrokes really do make a huge difference in my library. If I see a photo in Flickr that I'd like to find in my library, I can use the name of the photo, its tags, or drill down through my map using the "Places" tool.

During this process, if I have time, I'll see if there are any photos that I can delete from my library. I'll let them stick around in the Aperture trash for a while in case I change my mind later.

If you're using Aperture, give these steps a try - it's a very powerful organizational tool - all you have to do is find a simple way to fit it into your routine.

Apple Aperture Exporting on a Hexacore Mac Pro

2010-08-28T23:41:00.005-04:00

I recently upgraded from a 2008 Apple iMac to a 6-core 3.33GHz Mac Pro. The iMac is an awesome computer with a beautiful screen, and I never complained about its speed (3.06GHz dual core) until I bought a Canon 5D Mark ii DSLR. The 21mpx RAW files and stunning HD video took its toll on my hard drive and processor.

In the week that I've had the Mac Pro, I've been nothing but pleased with how great this machine is. Along with that, however, is the painful realization that most software has yet to take advantage of all twelve of those logical cores. Aperture is *much* faster than it was on my old machine, but I'd expect to see more parallelization of bulk tasks such as importing.

Importing isn't ideal, but I just noticed that exporting is! Here's a screenshot from iStat of an 80-file export, successfully using my machine's full potential.

I won't hold my breath for better use of the cores in other areas of the app right now, but I will definitely enjoy knowing that exporting will be nearly as fast as it can be.

Noise Ninja - Why don't I use this more often?

2010-08-24T22:28:00.005-04:00

I purchased Noise Ninja several months ago, but never spent much time with it. I dusted it off tonight, and now I'm wondering why it doesn't have a fixed spot in my photography workflow.

I need to read up on the science and techniques of noise removal to understand better how to use Noise Ninja, but after 5 minutes of basically just using their automatic settings, I was able to clean up this ISO6400 shot from earlier this year.

Click the following to see the difference (open in new windows)

Original:

After Noise Ninja:

Further From The Truth

2010-06-04T19:20:00.003-04:00

View on Black

Canon 5d Mark II, 70-200mm f/2.8L IS

Fun With Strobes And A Cooperative Subject

2010-05-17T23:39:00.006-04:00

view on Flickr

Shot with Canon 5D Mark ii, 135mm f/2L

Strobist Info:
-----------------
* single 430EX ii, above, camera right into 15x18" soft box, using Canon ETTL

Strobe was triggered via 580EX ii on-camera, and supported by Manfrotto 9' light stand and Photoflex LiteDisk Holder

Why I Love Shooting in RAW Mode

2010-02-11T00:57:00.003-05:00

... because after two minutes in Apple Aperture 3, this:

...becomes this:

Finding Sales on Canon and Nikon Gear Just Got Easier

2010-02-03T22:08:00.002-05:00

Canon version, Nikon version

I find that you can get some great prices on used camera gear on Amazon, but it's usually a single item or two priced well-below the rest that's only briefly available, so I thought I'd do something about it. I spent the past three weeks working on my cloud-based, Amazon price-checking engine. It scours Amazon hourly, checking for changes in new, used, and refurbished inventory and prices.

There's no limit to what it can track, but because I had to start somewhere, I just stood up its first two manifestations - Twitter feeds for each Canon and Nikon camera gear.

The bot currently tracks over 1,500 products hourly for each their list, new, used, refurbished, and collectible prices and availability. Adding new products to the database is still a manual step, but only requires a single click per product with a custom GreaseMonkey script. As I find the time, product imports will also be automated, and even personalized.

The two Twitter feeds are at:
http://twitter.com/EFGlass_com
http://twitter.com/NKGlass_com

Please follow them on Twitter, and tweet any suggestions or other feedback to either of the feeds.

The companion lens-buying guide for Canon is online here, with a Nikon one in the works:
http://www.efglass.com/

Significant changes in price and inventory are sent through a list of notifiers - any one of those that decides to handle that update will queue up and send out its notifications. Currently, there are two sets of notifications - three (used, new, refurbished) for each Nikon and Canon, which are sent to their respective Twitter feeds with as much info as I can fit in to Twitter's 140 character limit, complete, of course, with a link to Amazon where you can grab that single used lens that's $50 cheaper than the rest.

Since this runs in the cloud, all processing is forked off into different tasks, and has a non-relational BigTable database, the only throttle I have to worry about is my contract with Amazon, which allows me to send out one batch of ten requests per second, or 36,000 products checked every hour. If Amazon wasn't throttling me, Google would allow me process those 36,000 in 3 minutes, and I'm confident the system could handle it.

Of course there are different strategies to handle many more products, but 36,000 should buy me a couple month's time to implement those work-arounds.

These Twitter feeds are only the beginning. I have a notebook full of ideas for directions to take this project. I've spent three weeks with my head in the cloud, and it's only getting more and more fun by the day.

More to come.

EFGlass.com - Know Canon Your Glass, See What It Can Do.

2010-01-14T04:08:00.003-05:00

I could spend all weekend reading about camera equipment, but I always found most of the lens listing sites out there a little lacking in areas, so I spent the past three days putting together this initial version of EFGlass.com. It's not that complex right now, but believe me, I have plenty planned for future releases.

As it is, you can see Canon's full lens line-up with some basic information about each lens, a link back to its specifications page on Canon's website, a link to Amazon so you can check its current price, and one to a Flickr group pool, where you can see what people are using shooting with each it.

I'll post major site updates to this blog, and welcome any suggestions or comments - please email me, or call and leave me a voice message using the widget on the right side of this page.

"Just My Luck" - Lensbaby Video With Plastic Optic on Canon 5D Mark II

2010-01-05T01:04:00.007-05:00

(View on Flickr in high res)

I'm not one for New Year's resolutions, but I have been meaning to spend more time tinkering with my Canon 5D Mark II's video capabilities. When my car wouldn't start in the bitter cold* this morning, I decided to take the opportunity to shoot some clips with my new Lensbaby Composer and plastic optic lens system.

First, if it's not yet obvious, I'm no video-processing guru. In fact, this short clip took exactly three times as long as it should have to put together - about two and a half hours in all. It's the most complex video work I've done with iMovie 09, and I'm just now starting to see why advanced users complain about its lack of features and move to Final Cut Studio. You can probably accomplish most of what you need with iMovie, but you may have to jump through hoops to do it. Luckily, it's very easy and powerful for general purposes.

This was shot with a single camera from three different shots:
1. stationary shot with the camera on the seat
2. dashboard shot of the flashing lights
3. death scene with the sun flares

The stationary shot was the longest, so I detached its audio and used it throughout the whole video. I tinkered with iMovie's precision editor to achieve realistic transitions between the different clips. You can nudge around +/- 0.1 second in either direction, and if you're as neurotic as I am, you end up spending quite a good bit of time nudging.

I must say that I'm now hooked on the Lensbaby Composer. Its optics really give you creative freedom. A significant portion of a normal lens' cost goes into its ability to reduce flare. Sometimes, like in the death scene here, flare is beautiful, and boy can you achieve it with the Lensbaby plastic optic! For the dashboard scene, I wanted to draw attention to the flashing lights, so I bent the lens to keep the lower right corner of the video mostly in focus while blurring the rest to hell.

I imagine I'll be flooding my Flickr stream with a tad too many Lensbaby shots over the next few months...

* I consider 21 degrees Fahrenheit to be bitter cold... your milage may vary...

Canon Picture Styles

2009-12-30T21:35:00.003-05:00

Like it or not, this image effectively came straight out of my camera, using a custom picture style.

I shoot entirely in RAW mode, so I never bothered to look into these JPG presets. However, after seeing how far you could push these presets in-camera in this post at Canon 5D Tips, I thought I'd try messing with Canon's Picture Style Editor a bit to see what I could come up with.

The author of the 5D Tips blog post wasn't kidding - the software is very difficult to use. I have no idea what I did to achieve the above image, but it's cool enough that I'm going to keep tinkering to see what else I can come up with. Adobe Lightroom can't use these picture styles, so I had to export my JPG in Canon's DPP. And, since I'd rather swallow a handful of white-hot thumbtacks than use DPP, I think I'll just switch to RAW+JPG for the times when I'm tinkering with picture styles for crazy effects like the one above.

The Canon 40D and 5D Mark II only allow 3 custom picture styles, so I'm going to take only my favorite presets with me. I can always resort to DPP in post-processing, so it's not critical that I have my picture styles with me, but it'll be cool to see how well the effects work with the shots in-camera. Also, I'm no wizard with video processing, so it'll be a nice shortcut to apply these effects to video in-camera as well.

Overall, if you shoot RAW, nothing much is gained here but a little fun while shooting.

Drobo BeyondRAID Enclosures - Making Hard Drive Death Less Painful

2009-12-14T21:52:00.000-05:00

Data Robotics Drobo 4-Bay USB 2.0/FireWire 800 SATA Storage Array

My Canon 40D turned me into a digital pack rat with its 10 megapixel RAW files, slowly filling up my 500GB hard drive up over the course of a year and a half. Every few weeks, I'd burn my recent photos on two sets of DVD-Rs, put them in different boxes, and rest assured that my data was reasonably safe. It was a problem, but a manageable one.

That backup strategy wasn't ready for my upgrade to a Canon 5D Mark ii a few months ago. I now have 21 megapixel RAW files that weigh in around 27MB each, and 1080P video at 300MB per minute. Not only that, but the camera can shoot in damned-near darkness, so I'm shooting in locations that were previously inaccessible. Most outings with the camera would end in a filled 16GB CF card. It didn't take too long to find myself 100 DVDs behind in my backup routine.

In comes Drobo - a multiple unit hard drive enclosure all of the benefits of traditional RAID, but without the rigidity. The Drobo houses up to four SATA drives, spreading your data across them to protect against any one of them from failing. It doesn't care if your drives are the same size or vendor, and, you can replace drives at any time with one of equal or bigger size. You can also start with two drives, and work your way up to four, if you like. The biggest drive in the cluster is used for redundancy, so if you had four 500GB drives, your total usable disk space is about 1.5GB.

Unlike RAID, the unit is data-aware, continually checking for errors. If any are detected, the green light will flash yellow next to the affected drive. If the drive is on the verge of dying, the light turns red. At this point, you can remove and replace the failing drive without turning it off, and while still using it, if you like. The Drobo takes care of assimilating the new drive into the cluster, spreading the data across it to protect from any future drive failure, completely transparent to your machine.

I still plan on continuing to burn my data to DVD-R, but have become a little more lax since buying the Drobo. To safeguard against accidental deletions, complete hardware failure, or theft, I signed up to BackBlaze.com unlimited data offsite backup. For $50/year, Backblaze's software automatically encrypts and uploads all of my data to their servers, even keeping a couple of weeks of incremental backups so that I can rollback some data to a few days ago, if needed.

I now sleep just a tad better at night.

While you're at it, I recommend you get started with two of these 1.5TB Seagate drives. If you have an extra 500GB drive laying around the house, throw it in the mix as well - it can't hurt, you can upgrade it later.

Phillies' Clay Condrey - Action Pitching Sequence

2009-10-07T23:25:00.001-04:00

I shot this at a Phillies game with my Canon 40D, 70-200mm f/2.8L IS back on May 8, 2009. This was a composite of 6 shots of 20 taken in high speed mode SRAW, then stitched together in Photoshop.

For reference, here's how far back we were sitting:

With the 1.6X crop factor of the Canon 40D and 200mm, you get in pretty close to the action.

X-Rite ColorChecker Passport Color Calibration System

2009-10-05T23:02:00.000-04:00

I just received the new X-Rite ColorChecker Passport color calibration and white balance system after growing weary of eyeballing my photos' white balance for some time now.

I recently calibrated my monitor with the Pantone huey MEU101 monitor calibrator, but still spent too much time trying to find the white balance and tint to give accurate and pleasing skin tones.

So, I broke down and ordered the ColorChecker Passport. It's $100, which is a lot, and since I've only spent a couple of hours with it, I'm not yet aware of all of the ways I can use it. But, in this two hours, I was able to find out some amazing stuff... Like... My color thus far... is awful.

The first thing I did with the ColorChecker was to take it outside and shoot it at arms' length:

This is the shot exactly as it came out of my 5d Mark II and 35mm f/1.4L, with no modifications.

I then adjusted the white balance by keying off of the neutral landscape grey square, which gave me this:

This is as far as I thought I'd have to go to get true colors. I figured, get the white balance, and use the rest of the color squares to help eyeball up my greens, blues, etc. Well, this is just the beginning. This is where I realized how little I knew about color management.

Apparently every copy of a camera and lens - and thus, combination - have different color signatures. The software can analyze a test shot containing the ColorChecker Passport, locate it within the frame, then determine the camera's response to the known colors within that environment. Doing this couldn't be easier. From Adobe Lightroom, you just export your test image through their exporter, then give the profile a name such as "Outdoors, 35mm f/1.4L before sunset". After the export is complete, you restart Lightroom, and the color profile is available for you to use for the rest of that photo shoot. The color profiles are available for use in Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop.

The results were less than subtle:

Open the three test images in separate browser tabs and flip through them. You'll notice a purplish hue in my original photo, corrected in the white balanced one. The difference between the second and third shots is mainly in the blues, purples, and greens - color responses you can't correct for with standard white balance cards.

**
If you found this review helpful, please support this blog by using any of the links to purchase your gear.
**

How We Roll

2009-09-13T01:10:00.001-04:00

(View my studio site)

We might have had a little too much fun tonight.

Strobist Info:
-----------------
* Key: Alien Bees B800 studio strobe shot into Alien Bees large foldable softbox with grid, camera right.
* Fill: Nikon SB-28 speedlight shot into Westcott 43" Shoot-Through Umbrella, camera left, 1 to 1.5 stops below key, triggered by Pocket Wizard wireless flash trigger.
* Background lighting: Canon 430EX triggered by Pocket wizard, Nikon SB-26 triggered by built-in optical trigger, both at about 1.5 stops below key, pointed into white back. I used the velcro compartment separators from my camera bag as gobos on the two background flashes

Background: Savage 107" Super White Seamless Background Paper

Floor: Two sheets of white tile board, the front one overlapping the back one, which overlaps the paper.

White Paper Background/Tile Board Studio Setup

2009-09-01T19:48:00.001-04:00

Here's a studio portrait I shot of my daughter this weekend. I recently purchased some white tile board for my studio flooring as described by Zack Arias - this was my first attempt with it. Aside from the pretty reflections under my daughter, it also helps preserve my paper background and saves some photoshopping out of creases and folds due to our walking on it.

Here's my studio (basement) when I setup the white background:

If you click the image, you'll see that I have just about every bit of equipment labeled.

Strobist Info:
-----------------
* Key: Alien Bees B800 studio strobe shot into Alien Bees large foldable softbox with grid, camera right.
* Fill: Nikon SB-28 speedlight shot into Westcott 43" Shoot-Through Umbrella, camera left, 1 to 1.5 stops below key, triggered by Pocket Wizard wireless flash trigger.
* Background lighting: Canon 430EX triggered by Pocket wizard, Nikon SB-26 triggered by built-in optical trigger, both at about 1.5 stops below key, pointed into white back. I used the velcro compartment separators from my camera bag as gobos on the two background flashes

Background: Savage 107" Super White Seamless Background Paper

Floor: Two sheets of white tile board, the front one overlapping the back one, which overlaps the paper.

Jupiter, Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto

2009-08-14T00:10:00.000-04:00

** No telescope used **

This is a composite of 10 shots taken of Jupiter (Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto), with my 500mm f/8 mirror lens and Canon 40D at ISO1600, f/8 (fixed), 1/6 second, showing the major four moons of Jupiter. There are at least 63 moons in all.

To avoid any vibrations in the camera, I used a tripod (w/ ballhead), cable shutter release, and mirror lock-up.

I manually focused in live view at 10X, which was tough because every touch of the lens would wobble the subject all over the place. This is such a tight zoom at 500mm that you can actually see Jupiter moving across the LCD screen. I'd then turn off live view mode, wait a few seconds to let the vibrations stop, then fire the shutter with the cable release. This just flips the mirror up, which causes a tiny amount of vibrations. I waited another couple of seconds, then fired off another cable release shutter click to take the photo.

After ten shots, I cropped the photos as close to the same spot in each photo, then stacked them all together in Lynkeos.

This is screenshot from Stellarium, showing the expected positions of the four moons at the time I took this shot.

Better to Burn Out

2009-07-24T14:08:00.000-04:00

(This is the sun, not the moon)

View On Black

Shot while trying to capture a sunspot - I'm going to need a neutral density filter or welding glass for any luck - this was f/32, 1/8000, ISO100.

International Space Station (ISS) - Without Telescope

2009-07-07T00:34:00.000-04:00

This might not look like much, but it's a view of the International Space Station pieced together from 19 photos taken without a telescope. I used my 500mm f/8 (fixed) catadioptric mirror lens, shooting at f/8, ISO800, 1/1500. Thanks to fyngyrz for the exposure info. It's important to realize that this is a sunlit - very bright - object, so we need the quick exposure.

The ISS travels at an average speed of 17,209 mph, completing 15.7 orbits a day. The orbit is very predictable, and using the charts at Heavens-Above, you can find out exactly when it will show up in your night sky. I was prepared for tonight's passing, having already manually focused on the moon with 10X live view, keeping the camera on tripod and pointed WSW, where tonight's transit would begin.

I found it very difficult tracking it with such a tight telephoto, keeping one eye outside the camera to help get it in my viewfinder. Once I narrowed it down, I led it by a full frame, parked the camera in the tripod's ballhead, and snapped away for the two seconds it would stay in frame before switching views to keep up. I took the cleanest shots at its peak of 57 degrees above the horizon.

I wasn't sure I had a single useable capture as I walked back from the shoot, but once I looked on the computer, I almost couldn't believe what I was seeing. A 10 megapixel photo will take up about 4 full monitors worth of screen real estate. When viewed at that full resolution, the ISS is much smaller than a fly - a little speck with three blobs - the space station and its two big solar panel arrays.

I took about 90 shots of the space station tonight, throwing away all but the best 20, then stacking (combining) them together in Lynkeos. Stacking several images of the same shot helps remove the random noise due to atmospheric distortion. After enlarging and correcting the white balance, this is the final result. Take a look at one of the raw shots to see what I mean - and keep in mind that I'm zoomed in at an effective 800mm (500mm x 1.6 crop factor) and the crop of just the space station.

Here's a tight crop of one of the unprocessed images to show what a difference the image stacking makes:

Equipment:
Canon 40D, Phoenix 500mm f/8 Mirror Lens
Bogen/Manfrotto 190XPROB Tripod Legs, 322RC2 Grip Action Ballhead

Check the Diagonal

2009-05-26T00:04:00.000-04:00

While waiting for my doctor, I snapped this with my iPhone. It was a translucent piece of plastic over an x-ray viewing screen - I imagine to gauge different shades of gray.

Taken with my iPhone.

International Space Station (ISS) - Into Earth's Shadow

2009-05-25T23:28:00.000-04:00

I frequently monitor Heavens Above to see if there's any upcoming satellite passes worth seeing. Tonight was one of the brighter showings of the International Space Station (ISS), with apparent magnitude -2.3, just dimmer than the maximum brightness of Jupiter. It started in the west-northwest, rising to 69 degrees in the south sky.

For whatever reason, I was waiting with my camera pointed too far to the east, trying to get a shot of the satellite rising over some houses. Right as I was scratching my head trying to find the thing, I finally saw (don't ask me how I originally missed it) the Big Dipper, which points me to the North Star (since I'm a star-gazing newbie).

Brief aside: the North Star is the center of this previous star trail shot I took last year.

Just as I realize I'm pointed in the wrong direction, I see the space station moving quickly across the sky. I was able to swing around and capture it as it faded into the Earth's shadow. In this shot, the ISS is moving downward as it fades into darkness.

Shot with:
Canon 40D, 10-22mm
Bogen 190XPROB Tripod Legs, 322RC2 Grip Action Ballhead.

Purple

2009-05-25T23:20:00.000-04:00

The iPhone camera isn't the best, but it's great in a pinch for random shots you might find interesting while walking about.

Ceiling-Bounced Fill Flash

2009-05-03T22:28:00.000-04:00

View On Black

40D, Sigma 30mm f/1.4, 430EX flash

The window to the left provided most of the light here, but with harsh shadows on the right. I could either blow out the left side to bring the right in a little bit, deal with dark shadows on the right, or use a flash. The first two options are compromises - the latter, if done subtly, can still look like it wasn't used at all.

To pull this off, I used my camera-mounted 430EX flash, bouncing it off of the ceiling to the right, set at -1.5eV.

The flash was very dim compared to the sunlight, so it didn't affect a majority of the scene, but was just strong enough to brighten up the shadows a bit. At 0eV, the flash would probably have lit up the right side of her face to match the left, but that's just flat, boring lighting. I was able to keep the scene looking more natural by effectively taking the flash off-camera and increasing its size by bouncing.

Here's a test shot without flash to demonstrate how harsh the shadows are:

Until Further Notice

2009-04-28T00:58:00.000-04:00

View On Black

Canon 40D, 70-200mm f/2.8 IS

Crazy Booth!

2009-04-11T23:52:00.001-04:00

I just finished post-processing photos from my first "crazy booth" photo shot. We hosted a party tonight, so I set up the lighting gear and invited my guests into the studio. The only rule was that everyone had to act silly and that they *should* wear or use one of the props I made available.

If you're a strobist, I'd highly recommend giving this a try next time you're hosting a party. Set up your lights ahead of time, making sure to get everything just right. You can get away with a single flash, but make sure to use a shoot-through or reflective umbrella, and keep it around front, 45 degrees from center and a little overhead.

I shot against my seamless 107" charcoal paper background, with three lights:

1. Key light
Alien Bees B800 - above, camera right with large soft box (32"x40") and grid, fired with built-in optical trigger

2. Fill light
Nikon SB-28, 2 stops below key, camera left into 43" reflective umbrella, fired by Pocket Wizard wireless tranceivers.

3. Background light
Nikon SB-26 through Honl 1/4" Grid, pointed down towards background from 7ft, fired with built-in optical trigger

You can see one of my test shots in my previous post, here.

Keep the subjects far enough from the paper that they're not casting shadows on it. I light lighting the background with a grid or snoot, aiming it right behind the subjects. This gives the shot a natural vignette that you can amplify in post-processing very easily. Make sure to keep the lights off to the sides enough for some good depth, and to help prevent reflection in your subjects' glasses. I like keeping my fill like 1.5-2 stops darker than my key - this fills in the shadows while preserving depth and preventing the lighting from being too flat.

One other note is that my basement studio has light green walls which would be a nightmare if they reflected back onto the subjects. To prevent this, I use a grid on my large soft box and a reflective umbrella to keep most of the light hitting the subject and the edges of the background.

Any Resemblance To a Gang Sign Was Completely Unintentional

2009-04-11T15:47:00.001-04:00

I set up a crazy booth for a party. The rules were simple - you have to be goofy, and you *should* wear or use one of the props we made available. Here's one of my test shots to get my lighting just right. Normally I delete these, but I just couldn't get rid of this one :).

That's a Sekonic L-358 flash meter around my neck, which I use to test my lights. The added RT-32 transmitter chip inside triggers the Pocket Wizards for me.

Shot against Savage seamless 107" charcoal paper background

With Canon 40D, 17-55mm f/2.8 IS, Bogen 190XPROB tripod legs, Bogen 322RC2 grip action ballhead, and 10-second timer.

Strobist Info:
-----------------
* Key: Alien Bees B800 - above, camera right with large soft box (32"x40") and grid, fired with built-in optical trigger
* Fill: Nikon SB-28, 2 stops below key, camera right into 43" reflective umbrella, fired by Pocket Wizard wireless tranceivers.
* Background: Nikon SB-26 through Honl 1/4" grid, pointed up towards background, fired with built-in optical trigger

April Fool's Day - The Day the Internets are Useless.

2009-04-01T12:35:00.000-04:00

Flickr Scout is a great tool for those obsessed with finding out how many of their photos have made it on Explore, but today they'll tell you that (basically) all of your photos have. It's cute and all, but annoying.

Every year, each site tries to outdo themselves from last year that it's getting harder to figure out what's real, and what's a goof.

Sites like ThinkGeek are still funny, because it's clear that Squeez Bacon is a joke, but if you're one of the few that still surfs Slashdot, good luck. Same with Digg. I prefer to opt-out of the internets (as much as I can) each year on this day. It's just too heartbreaking when you realize that article about nanobots or cold fusion were jokes! :)

If you're interested, here's what they're telling have been on Explore, lol:

1. Nevermind, 2. Dew Drop Lens, 3. DMU, 4. Yeah dude, I rock!, 5. Dew Droplet Refraction, 6. White Background: Setup, 7. Star Trails, 8. Strobist Lighting Setup for Kaitlyn Shots,

9. Comet C/2007 N3 (Lulin) - 67 Image Stack: f/2.8, ISO3200, 2 seconds, 100mm, 10. Self Portrait: Background Paper Test, 11. There Are Four Lights, 12. Any moment now, 13. It's full of... stars...., 14. Northern Lights in Pennsylvania?, 15. Bah Humbug - A Strobist Christmas, 16. Eclipses,

17. Comet C/2007 N3 (Lulin), 18. Brian, 19. , 20. 1950, 21. Ashlyn Rose, 22. Thriller!, 23. Valley Forge, 24. Self Portrait,

25. Sunset over Lincoln Memorial, 26. Lake, 27. Self Portrait: Background Paper Test 2 - Gray -> Purple, 28. Setup for Kaitlyn's 3 Month Photo Shoot, 29. Orion's Belt, 30. eye., 31. Epic, 32. Moments Before The Glass Broke,

33. The Night Sky, 34. Bound, 35. It Didn't Have to End Like This, 36. Tree at Night, 37. Cat's Eye, 38. Sunset Sycamores, 39. Heavy Water, 40. Glass Ceiling,

41. Crescent Moon Sunset, 42. Into a Thousand Pieces, 43. Ice Crystals on Windshield, 44. It's Coming Down, 45. 520–570nm, 46. Strobist Setup: Strobist Sandals Photo Shoot, 47. Apple Orchard Setup, 48. Winni the Pooch - 1,

49. Fighting The River, 50. I Think I Can Make It Across, 51. Alone Down Here, 52. Sydney, 53. No Second Chances, 54. California Sky, 55. Don't Stop Looking Back, 56. Gary Fong LightSphere II Cloud Diffuser with Universal Mount,

57. Waning Crescent, 58. Santa's Firetruck, 59. Spot, 60. puke, 61. Grain, 62. Comet C/2007 N3 (Lulin) - 48 Image Stack: f/2.0, ISO3200, 2 seconds, 50mm, 63. Angelina, 64. Party,

65. Splinter, 66. Radial Symmetry, 67. Over The Rock, 68. Matthew, 69. Ashlyn, 70. Timmy, 71. Snow Cones, 72. Sunrise from Haleakala, Maui

Freak Hail Storm = Fun With Camera

2009-03-31T18:05:00.001-04:00

The other night, we had a pretty cool freak hail storm. I don't remember seeing hail this bad before - of course my first reaction was to get my camera and go have some fun!

I'm sure the neighbors enjoyed watching me and my expensive-looking camera gear get pelted with chicklet-sized hailstones.

Here's how the storm rolled in - pretty awesome clouds.

And this was the aftermath.

Shot with Canon 40D, 70-200mm f/2.8 IS, 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5, 430EX

Fighting The River

2009-03-24T21:50:00.001-04:00

View On Black

Another shot (previous) from the DCNR Lake Nockamixon dam release.

Twice a year, the DCNR opens up the dam at Lake Nockamixon for kayakers to enjoy. I shot about 700 photos in the two hours that we were there.

This was the first chance I had at putting my new 70-200mm f/2.8L IS to work outside. It sure didn't disappoint. The autofocusing was quick, the image stabilization was excellent, and the clarity is clearly top-notch. This was also the first time I tried the mode-2 image stabilization, designed for panning. It only stabilizes the vertical axis so I didn't have to fight it as the kayakers moved downstream past me.

Canon 40D, 70-200mm f/2.8L IS
ISO200, f/5.6, 1/1500, 200mm

Heavy Water

2009-03-23T23:42:00.001-04:00

View On Black

One of the day's kayakers at one of the more turbulent sections of the creek that we could get to.

Twice a year, the DCNR opens up the dam at Lake Nockamixon for kayakers to enjoy. I shot about 700 photos in the two hours that we were there.

This was the first chance I had at putting my new 70-200mm f/2.8L IS to work outside. It sure didn't disappoint. The autofocusing was quick, the image stabilization was excellent, and the clarity is clearly top-notch. This was also the first time I tried the mode-2 image stabilization, designed for panning. It only stabilizes the vertical axis so I didn't have to fight it as the kayakers moved downstream past me.

Canon 40D, 70-200mm f/2.8L IS
ISO200, f/5.6, 1/1500, 200mm

You Wouldn't Believe Me If I Told You

2009-03-09T23:20:00.001-04:00

I've been meaning to take a blurry silhouette/alien shot like this for some time. While waiting for our table at a local hibachi restaurant, I caught this trio setting at the backlit bar.

I'm really enjoying the Sigma 30mm f/1.4. There's so many more shots you can attempt when you can shoot in such low light.

Sigma 30mm f/1.4, ISO3200, f/1.8, 1/45

Lulin

2009-02-25T00:43:00.001-05:00

Comet Lulin: 100mm, f/2.8, ISO3200, 6 seconds

I had planned on calling it quits with Comet Lulin after a few successful attempts (one, two, three), but knowing that in a couple of weeks that this thing will effectively gone forever and that it's just about at its brightest and highest in the sky for me... I had to get one more round of shooting in.

Finding this was no picnic. The goal was to shoot it at 100mm, so I first focused that lens as near to infinity as I could, picking a lit target about 1/4 mile away. I then carefully swapped the lens for my Sigma 30mm f/1.4, making sure to not adjust the 100mm's focus.

It took about 10 minutes of blind shooting to find and center the comet - it's very tiny at 30mm. I then carefully swapped lenses again, back to the 100mm. I needed to make a couple more adjustments to get it just right. Then, I attached my cable shutter release and sat inside behind my sliding glass door, shooting one 6-second shot after another, about 60 in all.

This shot here is a crop from one of those shots with a little bit of post-processing. I plan on spending some time in the next couple of days stacking the images (fully described here) to remove as much noise as possible. I'm optimistic with this set since the comet was much higher in the sky and further from the light pollution.

I'm already impressed with the length of the tail in this shot. More comet goodness should be on the way.

Canon 40D, Canon 100mm f/2.8 Macro, Bogen 190XPROB Legs, 322RC2 Grip Action Ballhead

1950

2009-02-23T20:24:00.001-05:00

You find the coolest stuff in forgotten places.

Please view on black.

Stargazing

2009-02-21T12:15:00.001-05:00

Please view this large, on black

I went out driving last night, trying to escape the light pollution of my neighborhood so I could shoot more stacks of Comet Lulin. My last attempt (here and here).

What I found was basic:
1. You can't escape this much light pollution by driving 30 minutes
2. When you drive 30 minutes away from home, it takes roughly 30 minutes to get back.
3. The sky moves fast. Before ya know it, your front yard view is in your back yard.

There's no comet in this shot, but if you'd like to see how I shot the thing so far, check my blog post.

Shot with Canon 40D and the *very* fast Sigma 30mm f/1.4.

Comet C/2007 N3 (Lulin) - 67 Image Stack: f/2.8, ISO3200, 2 seconds

2009-02-18T23:41:00.001-05:00

This shot was the product of 67 individual 2-second photos at ISO3200, f/2.8 of Comet C/2007 N3, aka "Comet Lulin."

This comet's green color comes from a type of carbon and cyanogen, a poisonous gas. View this shot to get an idea of how insignificant this comet is in the context of the whole night sky. If you look closely, you can see the faint tail of the comet extending to the lower-left.

Equipment used: Canon 40D , Canon 100mm f/2.8 Macro Lens, Bogen/Manfrotto 190XPROB Tripod Legs, Bogen/Manfrotto 322RC2 Grip Action Ballhead

I shot these in the early morning hours of February 18, 2009, from 12:15AM to 12:25AM EST from my deck, (an hour north of Philadelphia, PA), with a horribly light-polluted sky. Weather-permitting (and it's not looking cooperative over the next few days), I'm planning on finding a darker area to shoot this comet once more, with hopefully even better results.

This wasn't a very well-planned event. I never head about the comet until a couple hours prior from fyngyrz's post. To find out when it would be visible here, I used this interactive sky chart to get my bearings as to where I'm looking, and this page to find out where the comet currently was (look for the downloadable PDFs). 3AM would have been a better time to take this, with the comet higher in the sky and further away from the horizon's light pollution, but this camera gear doesn't pay for itself - I had to wake up at 5:30AM.

Now, from what little I know about astrophotography, it's important to take your shot quickly to avoid star trails - within a second or two. You'd be surprised how quickly those starts move across the sky. To take shots this quickly, you have two options: a very high ISO, and a very wide aperture. Ideally, you go with both. Now, as with anything in photography, there's tradeoffs with both of these options.

With the high ISO, you're introducing a lot of grain. My Canon 40D goes up to ISO1600 with a "pushed" ISO3200. By "pushed", it's really just ISO1600 that's boosted in-camera one stop brighter. Pushing introduces a lot more noise than would be present at the already-high ISO1600.

With the wide aperture, you're more likely to get chromatic aberration (CA). Ideally, I'd like to use my f/1.4 50mm wide open. However, due to the CA that's introduced at that aperture, I get very distinct bands of purple fringing around every star, ruining the shot. I find that this CA drops significantly at f/1.6, almost going away at f/2.0.

So where did I end up with these options? Well, I took to series of shots - one with my 50mm f/1.4, and one with my 100mm f/2.8 macro. With the 50mm, I tried f/2.0 to reduce the CA, and with the 100mm, I used its widest aperture of f/2.8.

Each of the individual shots of this comet are (necessarily) terrible. The grain makes them almost a waste of time to look at. There are several types of noise introduced by the shot including: high ISO, sensor heat, and atmospheric - each of these degrade the image. However, these noises are random. The underlying image that I'm shooting isn't. It's possible to remove the noise with a process called "image stacking."

Basically, image stacking involves layering several photos of the same subject on top of each other, varying the transparency of each photo through the stack, with the most transparent being at the top. You blend the photos together with a subtraction algorithm so that anything that doesn't exist in the other photos -- the random noise -- is ignored. It's a tedious process, but well worth the time, because you're getting what would otherwise be an impossible shot.

To image stack for the comet in this series, I took 67 individual photos, each at ISO3200, f/2.8, and 2 seconds. I then used Apple Aperture to crop them down to the size you see here. I was as careful as I could be to line up the crops with each other - remember, the earth is spinning fast enough that within 20 minutes, the comet will move out of frame! Lining these up took a considerable amount of mind-numbing time. After cropping, I brightened them up a half stop, then exported them all as JPGs.

I then used the image-stacking software called Lynkeos to automatically line up the photos better, then stack them together. I could have done this manually with Photoshop, but was more than happy that Lynkeos did a fairly decent job on its own. I exported from Lynkeos to TIFF format, then post-processed with Photoshop and Aperture to get the most out of the shot that I could.

I plan on stacking the shots from my 50mm in the next couple of days. It'll be interesting to see how that extra stop of light makes a difference. Unfortunately, the comet will be much smaller due to the wider focal length.

iPhone Photo of the Day, 2/18/2009: Lines

2009-02-18T21:20:00.000-05:00

I was trying to get away without any post-processing outside of the iPhone, but ended up bumping up the contrast and exposure in Flickr.

Fun With the iPhone Camera

2009-02-17T21:04:00.001-05:00

After reading Chase Jarvis' post, 5 Tips for Making Great iPhone Photos," I thought I'd give it a shot. I bought the two apps he suggested, Camera Bag ($2.99) and Pano ($2.99), and so far haven't been disappointed.

Camera Bag gives you a bunch of presets to transform your iPhone into one of several types of historical cameras. This shot here was given the "Lolo" preset (apparently a knock-off of the old Loma toy cameras, though I'm not that familiar with them). I'm also a fan of the "Helga," which tries to make your shots look like they were taken with a Holga camera.

Pano is a very powerful photo stitching app, allowing you to stitch together up to six photos, side-by-side. The rightmost sliver of the photo is laid semi-transparently on the left side to help you line up the next shot. The exposure blending and seam-joining is top-notch. I'll post a shot when I come across something interesting to shoot.

One great thing about being able to shoot and post-process your shots in-camera is that you can then upload them to your Flickr account with such apps as Darkslide, or using Flickr's email upload service.

It's weird when you get excited about degrading the quality of your $300 iPhone photos to look like old camera snapshots, but hey, it's made me interested in using the thing. I'm looking forward to posting more on-the-go shots with my new toy.

Into a Thousands Pieces

2009-02-17T00:00:00.000-05:00

Shot from outside the Camden Adventure Aquarium.

Canon 40D, Canon 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5

Harris' Law

2009-02-05T07:21:00.000-05:00

Harris' Law states:
At some point, all humanity in an online community is lost, and the goal becomes to inflict as much psychological suffering as possible on another person.

Due to some in-fighting, the Flickr group DeleteMe Uncensored imploded the other day. I'm not sure what the fighting was specifically about, but the way it ended was - in true DMU style - hilarious. One of the admins made everyone an admin. Of course, then came the free-for-all of several of these new admins racing to ban everyone else in a sort of online riot.

Shot with Canon 40D, 50mm f/1.4

Spot

2009-02-02T22:19:00.000-05:00

Shot at the Adventure Aquarium, Camden NJ. There's a bunch of this stuff on the wall towards the end of the exhibits.

Low light handheld shot at f/2.0, ISO3200, 1/25sec

Canon 40D, Sigma 30mm f/1.4

Made the Front Page of Explore

2009-02-01T19:34:00.001-05:00

This is pretty cool - I've made Flickr Explore several times now, but this is the first time that I've made their front page. Since then, the shot has been getting faves every few minutes, and has gotten as high as #1 on Flickr Explore for 1/31/2009. Very cool.

I know, I know, all this proves is that I satisfied some random "interestingness" algorithm, but it's still cool. Lots of real people are clicking through and marking it as favorites, so it's not entirely artificial.

When the photo was on the front page, it's amazing how much traffic it was getting.

Nevermind

2009-01-31T22:30:00.001-05:00

Wall art, shot at the Adventure Aquarium, Camden NJ.

Canon 40D, Sigma 30mm f/1.4

There Are Four Lights

2009-01-29T23:29:00.000-05:00

Handheld at ISO 3200, f/2.0, 1/30sec

Shot with Canon 40D, and new Sigma 30mm f/1.4

While Driving...

2009-01-28T22:49:00.000-05:00

It's been too cold for me to get out and walk around recently, but that doesn't stop me from taking my camera with me while driving. Lazy? Sure. I'll get out and start shooting again soon - I won't be happy with drive-by for very long...

Both shot with Canon 40D and my new Sigma 30mm f/1.4. It's a great lens to take out past dark - f/1.4 picks up a lot of light.

Apple iPhoto 09's Face Detection and Recognition

2009-01-27T22:03:00.000-05:00

Click here for a larger view on my Flickr stream.

I'm just getting started with Apple iPhoto 09. I'll post a detailed review later, but for now, I had to show off my first glimpse at its face detection and recognition. I imported all of my photos from Aperture to iPhoto as JPGs.

I had the option to share previews between the two apps so that when I update a photo in Aperture, its preview is shared with iPhoto - however, I'm running out of disk space as it is, and have been considering separating out my photo browsing from post-processing. The extra time required to go back and modify a photo, then replace the copy in iPhoto should be worth it in the long run.

So, for this screenshot, I clicked on a photo that I was in, found a box that was already drawn around my face, then clicked the arrow under it. It presented me with about 20 photos, most of which had me in them. After selecting them, it showed me a bunch more - apparently having a better idea of what I look like.

So far, so good - this is going to be fun!

It's Full of... stars...

2009-01-25T15:19:00.000-05:00

Note: View large to see how many stars you never really get to see with your eyes.

I took this New Years Eve, 45 minutes before midnight, (despite the oops-I-forgot-to-set-my-camera-clock-back EXIF data). I thought about taking a photo as the ball dropped... but I'm just not that moved by our time system rolling over one of its digits :)

Now solstices... well now, that's a completely different matter all together!

I can't decide if it's upsetting how few stars we can see with the naked eye, or how many more we can see when we use a camera.

This was my first real test of my new tripod. It's real windy, but my tripod didn't budge. I hung a twenty pound sandbag from it, just in case. If there's any movement in this photo, it's my deck, not the tripod :)

One note about the photo - I heavily adjusted the white balance to compensate for all the yellow put out by the artificial lights. This makes just about everything look better - more natural - except the stars. They're all skewed more towards blue than they actually are. Some of those actually appear reddish, some white, some blue.

Equipment:
----------------
* Canon 40D
* Canon 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 Lens
* Bogen/Manfrotto 190XPROB Tripod Legs
* Bogen/Manfrotto 322RC2 Grip Action Ballhead
* Impact Saddle Sandbag (27 lb Capacity)

Shooting the Haas TL-15 CNC Lathe

2009-01-19T22:47:00.000-05:00

Winters are tough for photographers. When it's too cold to go outside, you end up pointing your camera at just about everything in the house. So naturally, when asked to shoot a giant computer-controlled lathe in a machine shop, of course I jumped at the opportunity.

Note: The decision wasn't actually that easy. This still required my leaving the house (remember, it's damned cold out). Had I my own giant computer-controlled lathe, I might have declined, but after 15 minutes of searching, I couldn't find one in my house to shoot, so I happily agreed.

As an engineer, I'm fascinated with machinery, so it was fun just getting a tour of JMT Machine Company. The shop recently acquired this machine, a Haas TL-15 CNC Lathe, and wanted some shots for their website and to hang in their front office. While I'm not exactly sure what I'd do with this thing, that doesn't stop me from wanting one. Unfortunately, I'm a little strapped for cash right now, and have a backlog of camera gear that's ahead of this thing in line.

For this shoot, I decided to make the rather boxy machine a little more interesting by shooting up close with my Canon 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 super wide angle lens. Now, being this close, I was (in retrospect, overly) concerned about getting the back of the machine out of focus. I generally shoot in the 30-55mm range, so I've been burned by too narrow of a depth of field in the past.

So, putting aside all of my ideas on how to shoot this thing creatively and erring on the side of making sure I got a few good snaps before leaving, I decided to be super-conservative and shoot at f/22. In retrospect, this was serious overkill. I should have known my DoF charts better for this lens - but hey, it's a learning experience, right?

If you're not familiar with flash photography, the one major difference between flash and ambient light is that, basically, only the aperture matters. You can't leave the shutter open longer to get more power out of your flash. That's how you get more out of your ambient. If you want to compete with that ambient, your only option is shoot bright and quick, not giving it the chance to burn in. Well, needless to say, f/22 eats flashes. I used a total of four strobes on this thing, spread out and each at 100% power and about eight feet away.

Here's a quick equipment check:
* Nikon SB-26, triggered by a Pocket Wizard radio flash trigger
* Canon 430EX, triggered by Pocket Wizard radio flash trigger
* Alien Bees B800 Flash Unit, triggered optically by the other flashes
* Nikon SB-28, triggered optically by the other flashes

My first thought going into this was to completely overpower the ambient lighting with a quick shutter speed and by cranking up the flash power. Well, as I mentioned, f/22 didn't leave me a whole lot of light to play with, and my first attempts at this were underwhelming at best. The flashes seemed overly artificial. Rather than stress out about that, I decided to try to use the ambient. After all - I was in a cool, grungy machine shop -- why hide it?

As it turned out, the existing light was awesome. Rows of fluorescents overhead and some powerful halogen (?) bulbs lighting up the business end of the machine when the door was open. This gave me some pretty cool color contrast to play with, while using my flashes for nothing more than fill. That suited them, considering how much they were knocked down by my choice of aperture. This gave the shot a more natural feel, adding to the shots.

At this point I had the aperture set, the flashes at the power I needed them, so the only variable left was the shutter speed, and that was all just trial and error. I ended up on four seconds. With my new, trusty, bombproof tripod (Bogen/Manfrotto 190XPROB legs and Bogen/Manfrotto 322RC2 grip action ballhead) and well, the tonnage of that machine, I was guaranteed a pretty still subject.

Overall a positive experience. I walked away with a better understanding of how deep a wide angle lens' depth of field is, how finicky optical flash triggering can be when in a large area (or outdoors), and that I shouldn't immediately dismiss the ambient light. And, the owner sent me home with some of his machined parts to shoot as I find the time.

Other equipment used during the photo shoot:
* Canon 40D
* Canon 17-55mm f/2.8 IS
* Bogen/Manfrotto 7' Pro Stand
* Bogen/Manfrotto 9' Basic Light Stand

Sigma 30mm f/1.4 Low-Light Handheld Test

2009-01-17T23:18:00.001-05:00

Canon 40D, Sigma 30mm f/1.4 -- handheld at ISO3200, f/1.4, 3/10 second.

This shot was taken at night in a dark room with nothing but a small nightlight in the corner. Other than that, the hallway light was on, but only partially lighting the floor and a small amount of the wall behind me. I leaned up against the wall, shot at f/1.4, ISO3200, 3/10 second.

I focused this with Live View, which was tough, because even on the LCD screen, I couldn't see her eye, it was so dark. I had to focus on her ear.

Note that the Canon 40D has a true ISO1600, then pushes it a stop to ISO3200 for use when you absolutely need it. In this situation, I did. I couldn't have handheld for any slower than this - even here I was really pushing it. When shooting with a pushed ISO, you should give extra care to expose the shot properly. Any further brightening of the image will introduce more noise.

I just received my new Sigma 30mm f/1.4 yesterday, so I'm running around shooting in every room in my house with the lights turned off (it's been too cold outside). So far, I really love this lens. It's been a while since I've shot f/1.4, so I'm re-learning how tough it is to focus with it. The 40D's AI Servo focus is definitely helping.

Of course I was very interested in the low-light capabilities of this lens. The main reason I purchased this focal length, however, was so that I could shoot near a traditional 50mm - the lens many film photographers left on their cameras full-time. The Canon 40D and most other digital SLR cameras have sensors smaller than 35mm film, which effectively makes each lens a little more telephoto than they would be traditionally. This sensor is 1.6X smaller than 35mm film, so 30mm becomes 48mm.

If you decide to purchase this lens, make sure you get the correct one for your camera body. Sigma makes this lens for Canon (link), Nikon (link), Pentax (link), Sony (link), and Olympus (link). Those links will take you to B&H Photo, where you have 14 days to return the lens if you're not happy with it. If you haven't used f/1.4 before, you'll be amazed at what you can do with it. Just have patience - wide apertures take practice!

Again, this was shot at:
f/1.4, ISO3200, 0.3 seconds

If you're wondering how dark this room was, here's a couple equivalent exposures you could use if you didn't have ISO3200 and f/1.4:

f/2.8, ISO1600, 2.4 seconds
f/4.0, ISO1600, 4.8 seconds
f/5.6, ISO1600, 9.6 seconds

So, go into a pretty dark room where your camera's reading something like that, and you'll get an idea. Try a handheld shot at 9.6 seconds!

C1/C2/C3 - Custom Modes, Revisited

2009-01-12T21:51:00.001-05:00

Just a brief update to my previous post on setting up the custom modes on my 40D.

Shortly after writing that post, I read one by wedding photographer, Ryan Brenizer on how he's able to post-process a shoot with an average of two seconds per photo. His big secret is that he's an expert at getting his exposure correct. The second was that he shoots all manual mode.

It's interesting that this never occurred to me. I've been futzing around with different metering modes all this time, usually disappointed with the results. At one point, I was sure that my camera meters dark because spot-metering on someone's face would result in a shot two-thirds to one stop dark. I'm pretty sure now that that was due to caucasian skin being about a stop brighter than middle gray. It was exposing properly, I was telling it that this person's face was gray, when it was much lighter than that.

Most of the time, and I'm sure this is the same with you, I'm shooting several shots in the same room, or same basic lighting. I've been letting the camera determine and re-determine the exposure with every half-click of the shutter. It seems so obvious now that that's a bad idea. When I'd shoot 50 shots in the same room with aperture-priority (Av) mode, I had to individually correct the exposure on every shot. Now, thanks to that invaluable tip, I'm able to spend a little up-front time getting the perfect exposure, then finish the rest of the shoot with the same settings. When I get back to the computer, I need a few minutes with the first photo, then copy and paste those corrections to the rest.

Simple, no?

Now, it's just a tad more complicated than that, of course. Unless you're very far from the light sources, you're unlikely to find a room with consistent lighting across the whole space. I need to be wary of that, and when I determine what exposure I'll be shooting at -- say, ISO 1600, f/2.0, 1/60sec -- I might need to take mental notes that on one half of the room nearer to the lamp, I should quickly adjust to, say, f/2.8.

So, to modify my previous post, I re-set my C1 and C2 custom modes to manual exposure, with a couple of starting points that I find myself often shooting. C1 was for indoor, ambient only, so I chose ISO 1600, f/2.0, 1/30sec. C2 was for indoor, with flash, so I set that to two stops darker, and enabled the flash - ISO 1600, f/2.0, 1/125sec.

It wasn't easy changing the custom modes from aperture-priority (Av) to manual (M) - I had to start over, since the shooting mode is determined by what mode you're on when you're saving the profile. I basically had to start over. No worries.

Next time I'm out in a new shooting environment, all I have to do is take some test shots early on to determine the exposure I'll need. I'll start with C1 mode, find the correct exposure, then save it to C1. Then I'll dial in a shot two stops darker for C2. This should make my post-processing go by much quicker. After only one round of shooting with the new modes, I must say I was impressed. I saw a continuity in the lighting of my shots that I'm not used to. Every shot turned out the same, regardless of whether I was pointing at someone wearing a white or black sweater.

Thanks, Ryan, for pointing out the obvious!

Canon 40D's C1, C2, C3 - Custom Modes I wish I had been using all along!

2009-01-05T20:42:00.001-05:00

After spending two weeks drooling over the new Canon 5D Mark II, I started feeling like my 40D was inadequate. Of course it's not, but well, camera envy has its grip on the best of us. Being broke, I decided the best way to upgrade my camera was to pull out the manual and learn all those cool, unnecessary features. I didn't expect that search to get me so giddy!

Many of the newer Canon DSLRs have C1, C2, and some have C3 modes on the mode dial that you can fully customize. I never felt the need to save custom functions - I figured it only applied to a few of the minor features buried in the C.Fn-I through C.Fn-IV menus. Well, that's not the case - it seems that just about every setting on the camera can be mapped into one of these custom mode buckets - even the shooting mode (Av, Tv, M) and the ISO, aperture (in Av or M modes) and shutter speed (in Tv or M modes).

Are you excited yet?

Okay, here's why you should be. You know how you're at a get together and you're flipping back and forth between ambient-only and flash-assisted ambient? Or, when you're shooting fast-action sports one second, and then a portrait of a player as he comes back to the bench the next?

hrm, one more example...

How about you often shoot night shots on a tripod with Live view mode and mirror lock-up, but are tired of switching that setting back and forth every time?

Once you realize how great this feature is, you'll be upset that you only have two or three custom modes to set. You'll have to decide which types of shooting you do the most often, because the goal here is to save all the time that you spend changing the ISO, switching back and forth between Av and Tv modes, and turning on and off the flash. In my case, I take a lot of people shots where I prefer to use ambient, but if I have to, I'll switch to flash. I also like taking my fast lenses outside at night for some real low-light shooting, where I can push every photon as far as possible with this camera.

The following will probably be more info than you'll be interested in reading, but I'm including it because it's something I wish I would have read a year ago. Even if you're not shooting the same types of shots as I am, this should give you an idea of how you can think about these custom shooting modes, and how you can make them work for you.

Here's how I set my modes - your milage may vary:

Common Settings

** Settings common to all modes:
- Quality: RAW - if you're using JPG mode, throw out your DSLR and buy a point and shoot
- Red-eye: off - I never use on-camera flash, so I don't care
- Beep: on - I try not using it, but just can't live without it
- Review time: off - I can hit a button if I really wanna chimp
- Shooting mode: Aperture priority (Av). Most photographers use this mode at all times. I won't go into why, but if you're not using it, you should be.
- White balance: AWB (auto) - I don't care about white balance, because I shoot RAW, I change it later anyway
- Highlight alert: enable - insanely helpful feature - you can always darken a photo, but not when you blow out a section of the photo
- Histogram: brightness - just personal preference
- INFO button: shoot. func - I only use this if the camera's on a tripod and it's more convenient than looking through the viewfinder or on the LCD
- (C. Fn I) ISO expansion: on - I only use ISO3200 if I have to, but I like having the option (yes, I know it's the same thing as ISO1600 -1eV)
- (C. Fn II) - Long exp. noise reduction: off - this is annoying - I can see myself using this, but I'll temporarily switch it if so
- (C. Fn II) - High ISO speed noise reduction: off - no thank you
- (C. Fn II) - Highlight tone priority: disable - no thank you
- (C. Fn III) - Mirror lockup: disable - I use this often, but only on tripod - I have this as one of my quick settings
- (C. Fn III) - Lens drive with AF impossible: focus search on - I can deal with this - I'm capable of letting go of the
- (C. Fn III) - Lens AF stop button function: AF stop - I rarely need to cancel AF when I hit the shutter button halfway, but it's there if I need it
- (C. Fn III) - AF point selection method: Multi-controller direct - I love that joystick - it's great to jump right to the AF point you need
- (C. Fn III) - Superimposed display: On - I need this on to see what I'm focusing on
- (C. Fn III) - AF during Live View shooting: Enable - I rarely use this, but keep it available
- (C. Fn III) - Mirror lockup: Disable - I use this often, but only on tripod - I have this as one of my quick settings
- (C. Fn IV) - None of these are interesting enough to mention

[C1]

1. Ambient Only
** This is the mode I'm in more often than not. If there's enough ambient light, I'm using it. I only pull out the flashes if I'm looking for a cool effect, or if they're absolutely necessary.
- Drive: low-speed continuous (3fps). This doesn't kick in immediately since there's three shots per second fired, so if I only want one, I can let go of the shutter button. If, however, I'm in low-enough light that I'm afraid of camera shake, I can keep the shutter down and capture a couple shots of the same scene and keep the best one.
- ISO: 1600 - Mainly because I'm usually in lower light
- Aperture: f/2.0 - I find myself shooting people in low light. Even if the lens I'm using at the time is faster than this, it's a good starting point which will get most of a face in focus close in. Note that I set this aperture when my fast f/1.4 50mm was on the camera. If I'm using a slower lens, it'll just use the fastest aperture it has.
- Metering: Spot. I'm a fan of spot mode when people are in the scene in lower light. I usually meter on someone's blurred out face, the exposure lock, focus, reframe, then shoot
- Exposure compensation: +2/3eV - in spot mode, I like to meter off of a person's face. Caucasian skin is about a stop brighter than middle gray, so I have to adjust for this or get dark shots. I'm playing it safe by not going all the way to +1eV, but if I'm shooting a lighter-skinned person or notice my shots coming bright or dark, I'll adjust. Note that this adjustment goes away after I change metering modes
- (Flash Control) Flash firing: disable - this is one of my favorite on-camera settings, because I can have a flash on camera and turned on, but not use it when this setting is disabled. This way, I can bounce between settings very quickly and not have to turn my flash on and off.
- (C. Fn III) AF-assist beam firing: Disable - In this shooting mode, I'd rather not annoy people with the focus beam. I keep this in my quick settings, in case I need it. Again, it's great to be able to turn this mode off in the camera, so I can have a flash on camera and turned on, and not have it fire a focus beam

[C2]

2. Flash, with ambient dropped two stops
** This is the mode I retreat to if it's too dark for my Custom Mode #1
- Drive: single shot. I'm using a flash here. If I took back-to-back shots with it, everyone in the room will instantly hate me.
- ISO: 1600 - I'm only in this mode because it's too dark for Custom Mode #1, so ISO 1600 is clearly not enough. I will be using a flash in this mode, but rather than rely 100% on flash, I try to get at least some ambient by keeping my ISO high. I'd rather deal with some noise (which is well-controlled on the 40D) than get a shot with zero ambient when I'd really like to have some.
- Aperture: f/2.0 - I was originally going to set this to f/5.6 to get the subject safely in focus, I realized that if it's too dark for Mode #1, I'd be shooting with the same shutter speed as in that mode if I drop the aperture down two stops, then drop the exposure two as well. So, I start this out at f/2 so I can quadruple the shutter speed from Mode #1 by default. I can always override this while shooting. Note that I set this aperture when my fast f/1.4 50mm was on the camera. If I'm using a slower lens, it'll just use the fastest aperture it has.
- Metering Mode: Center-weighted - I figure in this mode, that's appropriate. I'm probably shooting a person standing right in front of me
- Exposure compensation: -2eV - this lets some ambient light fill the background a little darker than the subject, rather than leave black backgrounds, while letting you take a shot four times quicker than in Mode #1
- (Flash control) Flash firing: enable. Again, this is great to set on the camera - I can quickly switch to Mode #1 and not use the flash for a shot or two, then switch back and the flash is still powered up.
- (External flash func. setting) Flash exp. compensation: +2/3eV - I usually find my shots a little dark when using the flash. This might be due to metering on flesh tones that are a little brighter than middle gray. I keep this as a quick setting so I can override it if needed.
- (C. Fn III) AF-assist beam firing: Enable - In this shooting mode, I'm in people's faces with flashes, they can deal with some flash beam to help me focus. I keep this as a quick setting so I can override if needed

[C3]

3. Low light shooting - get as much out of the lighting as you can without flash
** This is the mode to use when I'm trying to shoot where the average shooter gave up already - perhaps 30-60 minutes past sunset
- Drive: high speed continuous. I usually reserve this mode for fast-action sports shooting. However, the point of this mode is that I'm in such low light that I want to take advantage of my low-light shooting hardware. Most likely, I'm shooting around 1/20 of a second or slower, and there may be some serious camera shake. The best way to deal with camera shake is to take several shots, then throw out all but one.
- ISO: 3200 - this is actually a pushed ISO, which means it's ISO 1600, but taken at -1eV, then brightened by a stop. This brightening is a lossy operation, so more grain is introduced. It's a last-resort method of shooting, which is what this mode calls for.
- Aperture: f/1.4 - again, we're trying to get as much light to the sensor as possible while keeping this hand-holdable. Note that I set this aperture when my fast f/1.4 50mm was on the camera. If I'm using a slower lens, it'll just use the fastest aperture it has.
- Metering Mode: Center-weighted. I figure that there might be some high lighting contrast in this frame as there usually is when I shoot at night. I like sodium vapor, neon, and other lights against the setting sun and deep blue night skies. I rarely frame these shots with the bright lights in the center, and I don't mind if these have to get blown out towards the light source, leaving a nice colored halo around them. The shot is nothing if all you see is the lights - they're less important than the rest of the scene, and since I'll rarely keep them in the center of the frame, I've chosen a center-weighted metering mode which will favor the non-well-lit sections of the shot. If I used evaluative metering, I'd have the problem of the few bright lights in the shot keeping the rest of the shot dark, and the rest of the scene is what I'm after.
- Exposure compensation: +2/3eV - I usually find myself brightening the shot by a little bit, so I'm exposing to the right
- Flash Controls I turned off all flash firing, including for auto focusing. The idea of this shooting mode is to not draw a lot of attention to myself while blinding people with the flash.

Conclusion
I just started using these modes, so I'll have to see how well they work for me. So far, so good. It's really exciting being able to change my ISO, flash settings, exposure compensation, aperture, metering mode, and miscellaneous settings with the turn of the dial. I love being able to _quickly_ jump between flash and ambient shooting, then step outside in the dark and be a little less conspicuous, and make the most of the photons. And, as soon as I'm done using the custom settings, I can go right back to Av, Tv, or M modes, which still remember and share these settings among the three modes as well. I'm sure these custom modes are often overlooked, but if you sit down and think about the few common ways you keep shooting, you can save yourself a lot of time when shooting, and of course we all know that in the time you spend fiddling with the dial, you've just missed the moment.

The hardest part of setting this up for yourself might just be in deciding what two or three shooting modes you find yourself using the most. After that, you'll probably get as excited as I am about this - it kind of feels like you're building your ideal camera when tinkering at this level.

Bah Humbug (A Strobist's Christmas)

2008-12-23T23:38:00.000-05:00

Even though more likely to celebrate Isaac Newton's birthday or the recent winter solstice (notice the magazine cover?) than anything around the end of December, I still loves me some Christmas gifts. Here, I'm pretending to read the June 2008 issue of National Geographic for a test of my new Honl 1/8 Speed Grid.

I have to say - grids are really useful - I wish I had used them more in the past. It's really something how much control the grid gives you over a snoot or zoomed-in bare flash.

So, enough about that, here's how I shot this... And, if you're not a strobist, and you're thinking "big deal, there's nothing special about this shot!", go try it out for yourself, then come back to finish this post :)

There's a few things I had to consider here. First, I really love the yellow light that the corner lamp produces. I'm big on tungsten. So, I started by testing what the ambient light gave me. It was clear that if I wanted to see any of the Christmas tree lights, I had to take a long enough shot that the lamp greatly overexposed the whole back corner of the room as well as the right side of my face. That was a big shame - I really wanted both the tungsten lamp and Christmas tree lights together. So I setup a fill flash and turned off the lamp. That seemed to do the trick, but the scene didn't look right.

The solution? Either quickly unplug the lamp after a split second, or... fake out the lamp with a flash. I chose the latter :)

Why? The flashes release all of their light almost instantaneously, but ambient/constant light needs time to burn in. If I remove all ambient light from the scene except for the Christmas tree lights, I can control the ratio of tree lights to the rest of the scene with my shutter speed. The flashes only need the first 1/250 of a second to burn in. After that, I'm controlling the brightness of the tree lights alone.

Okay, so... I removed the bulb and attached a Nikon SB-26 flash with a Light Sphere Cloud on it to the lamp, underneath the lampshade, zoomed at 50mm. This was easy enough with small bungee cords. I used a 1/2 CTO gel on the flash to give it some tungsten color. The SB-26 has an optical slave mode to it, which means that when it sees a flash, it quickly fires off its own flash, so I didn't need to use one of my Pocket Wizards on this flash. I'd let my wide-angled fill light trigger it.

I set this "lamp flash" at 1/32 power. This was now the most awkward flash to get to, so I used this as the baseline. The rest of the scene was to be setup using the lamp flash at 1/32 power, 1/2 CTO. After firing off a couple of test shots, I found that this was perfect for ISO 500, f/5.

And now for the fill flash. There's not much to this - I just used a Canon 430EX flash on a light stand at 1/32 power, 35mm zoom, and again with a 1/2 CTO gel on it, behind and camera right. I used a Pocket Wizard to trigger this flash, which then triggered the lamp flash with its optical slave feature.

This was fine and all, but I wanted to make sure that the magazine and I stood out a little. As it was, I just blended into the background. So, to highlight the magazine and me, I set up another light stand above and camera left with a Nikon SB-28, this time 1/8 CTO, triggered by Pocket Wizard. To focus the light on the magazine and me, I used a Honl 1/8 Grid and zoomed the flash to 85mm, using 1/64 power. This produced a very tight flashlight-type light on me. It was perfect. The first attempt left a dark shadow behind my head on the couch, so I raised the light up by the ceiling. This seemed to do the trick.

There were a few small adjustments made to the two light stand flashes to get things just right. I would adjust the power if I was way off, and move the light stands closer or further away for minor adjustments.

All that was left was the tree lights - this was the easiest part. I tried several shutter speeds, and settled on 0.8 seconds. It was somewhat important for me to stay still during it, but remember, I'm almost entirely lit by the strobes, and then basically left in the dark. So, it wasn't likely that there'd be any ghosting in the shot. I used a remote trigger and my Canon 40D's 10 second timer to take each shot. One thing I found funny about this was that each time I'd go back to the camera to chimp, the static electricity I built up would trigger my flashes.

Now that you know how this was shot, it seems obvious that it's not natural. Look how bright the Christmas tree lights are compared to the lamp. Can you imagine what that would look like?

Here's a shot of the setup - click it to see each piece of equipment used.

Happy shooting!

Note: If you're interested, here is a great read on how Ken Geiger shot Stonehenge for the cover of that National Geographic.

Equipment:
---------
* Canon 40D, 17-55mm lens.
* Bogen/Manfrotto 190XPROB tripod with 322RC Ballhead
* Light stands: Bogen/Manfrotto 7 foot pro stand and 9 foot basic stand
* Flashes: Nikon SB-28 and SB-26, Canon 430EX
* Light modifiers: Gary Fong Light Sphere Cloud II and Honl 1/8 Grid.

Are Amateurs Putting the Pros Out of Business?

2008-12-21T14:45:00.000-05:00

Yes. Deal with it, it'll make you a better photographer.

One one hand, it's sad that the amateurs are taking a lot of the pros' business, but don't the people that go to amateurs seem happy enough with what they're getting? Professional photos are usually going to be much better, but isn't it a good thing that there's a market now for people that want a good-enough looking photo? Yes, a crappy DSLR shot and Walmart print is good enough for most people.

Don't complain about it, deal with it. Many - if not most - people are happy enough with imperfect and cheap holiday portraits. Decent family portraits and wedding candids are worth less than they used to be. I think the talented photographers will be survive.

Fighting it it useless - be open to the change and ready to take it on. Yes, there's going to be a lot less family portraits to shoot, since everyone has their own DSLR now, but why fight it? How about those portrait photographers get out and do something new and different?

Boring photography is being infiltrated by amateurs - embrace it.

If you're a professional photographer who is upset about this -- really fired up that your portrait business is drying up because people are buying DSLRs... then maybe it's time you reevaluate what you're doing.

Branch out, take more creative photos... Let the amateurs make you better. Employ some creative off-camera lighting that the amateurs aren't going to attempt anytime soon. Take photos that they can't, or don't know how to. Hold seminars where you take all of these amateurs, and teach them what else is on their dial besides "P" mode.

This new era is a good thing. If you're a photographer and care about your craft, then this will make you better. If this sinks your business, then there's a chance that your heart wasn't in it to begin with.

With all of that said, and in full disclosure (:)), I'm an overly enthusiastic amateur photographer that occasionally takes portraits for friends and family - when I find the time between reading photography blog posts, watching off-camera lighting seminar DVDs, and taking part in the Flickr community.

Making Your Xmas Tree Interesting - Part I, Circular Bokeh

2008-12-08T20:18:00.001-05:00

So, it's freezing out, you're stuck inside, and itching to take a shot. How about pointing the camera at your xmas tree?

I was just that bored the other night, so, I opened the aperture on my 50mm f/1.4 all the way, then focused as close as the lens would allow, then snapped a couple shots of our tree. I got plenty of really pretty, colorful circles. It was nice, but I wanted to mix things up just a little bit. So, I started holding objects in front of the lens, hoping to change the shapes of the bokeh. In this shot here, it was just a single finger. I'm sure I don't understand the optics of why a finger turns up in every bokeh, but it does, so have fun with it!

Of course, throw in some contrast and color during post-processing, and you're set. You've got something that might just make people wonder what they're looking at.

Using the widest aperture will give you the circular bokeh that we're looking for here. At this widest aperture, the aperture blades aren't in use. As soon as you stop down even 1/3 of a stop, they'll come into play, giving you octagonal, heptagonal, hexagonal, or pentagonal, depending on whether you have 8, 7, 6, or 5 blades in your aperture.

And this time of year, there's lights up everywhere! Take your telephoto out with you when you're driving around at night (just be careful!). Shoot your neighbors' outdoor decorations completely out of focus. Remember, for the cleanest circles, you're going to need to use the widest aperture your lens has (the smallest number).

I'd love to see your shots - please post them to the F-Stopping Flickr Group, and tag your shots with:

fstopping

bokeh

lights

xmas

View everyone's tagged photos here.

Happy shooting!!

Chromatic Aberration - Difference between f/1.4 and f/1.6 on Canon 50mm

2008-11-23T17:55:00.000-05:00

I had read that my Canon 50mm f/1.4 lens has noticeable chromatic aberration (CA) when wide open, but was really surprised how bad it was, and how it almost entirely goes away at f/1.6.

I really love this lens - this is a minor problem to deal with, but it's nice to know to expect it.

Below are crops from two out-of-focus shots I took while driving: the first at f/1.4, the second at f/1.6. Notice the purple fringing around most of the lights at f/1.4. This is caused by different wavelengths refracting differently through the glass. I put up a full shot at f/1.4 on Flickr, here.

50mm f/1.4	50mm f/1.6

Rock & Fossil Macro Shoot: Trilobite!

2008-11-18T17:26:00.000-05:00

Check out my Flickr page for this shot, as well as other fossils and rocks shot with this setup.

I recently received a request for permission to use this photo in a non-profit magazine on Mexican biodiversity by the conservation group, Naturalia. This particular trilobite will be featured in an essay about extinction.

SPOILER ALERT: trilobites have recently (around 250 million years ago) become extinct.

So, let's get down to how I shot this.

I placed the sample on a couple of sheets of printer paper. I then taped together a ring of printer paper to surround the sample. I used my Canon ST-E2 infrared transmitter to fire off two Canon 430EX strobes that were placed right up against the ring of paper. The paper acted as a diffuser, which bounced soft light all about inside the ring, reducing shadows on the fossil. All of this light let me use f/22 with my Canon 100mm macro lens, which I hand-held at 1/250sec.

Here's my personal favorite from the shoot:

Dew Drop Lens

2008-05-18T13:33:00.001-04:00

Dew Droplet Lens, originally uploaded by blakophoto.

100mm, f/13, 1/60sec, ISO200, -1/3eV

I woke up this morning to take the dog out, and noticed how pretty the dew was in the grass. So, I put on my slippers and spend 15 minutes crouched over, trying to get this shot.

I've taken dew droplet shots before (here), but this time really wanted to use the drop as a lens, focusing on the background. I had the extra treat of being able to get the sun to shine through, and then out of the droplet.

To get this shot, I propped up my 100mm macro lens on my Canon 40D on an upside-down seed-starting tray that was conveniently nearby. This put the camera about 2 inches from the ground. I really didn't want to lay down, and I don't trust autofocus or my viewfinder to get this right, so I used Live View -- manual focusing with the LCD screen.

I knew I'd heavily crop this, so framing wasn't that important. My Canon 40D's Live View lets me pick a spot in the frame and zoom in 5X and 10X. At 10X on a 3 inch LCD screen, you'll have a pretty good gauge of what's in focus and what's not. What made this a little tricky was that the focus ring was resting on the surface, so focusing would also move the lens. To be sure I'd get the shot, I took about 10, making small adjustments to the focus each time.

I wanted to go as high as I could with the aperture to improve depth of field, and get as much of the grass in focus as possible, even though it wasn't the main subject. I had to balance that with the need to keep the shutter speed fast enough to stop any small breeze or jerk of my hand, since I wasn't using a timer to take the shot.

I decided ISO200, only because I couldn't get to ISO100 - I had enabled "higlight tone priority" a few minutes prior, and forgot that it doesn't let you below 200 for some reason. f/13 gave me 1/60sec, which I was figured would stop any breeze or incidental hand shake. This was somewhere between hand held and tripod mounted, so I could go a little slower than 1/100, but not as slow as 1/2 or so.

Looking Up Trees - Soft Corners at f/3.5

2008-05-14T23:06:00.001-04:00

Looking Up Trees, originally uploaded by blakophoto.

17mm, f/3.5, 1/60sec, ISO100, -1/3eV

I took this while walking around a local park, testing out my new Canon 17-55mm f/2.8 IS lens with my Canon 40D body. I am completely in love with this lens. However, with this shot, I was very disappointed to see soft corners, when I knew from this DoF calculator that the whole frame should be in focus for f/3.5 and the point I focused on. The soft corners are visible at low res, obvious when zoomed in.

My first thoughts were that I had a bad copy of the lens. But, after reading, and evaluating the MTF charts for 18mm, I learned what I should have already known. Even good lenses might have a tough time with corners when wide open.

I found this great review on the lens, comparing it to several other in the focal range. Of note were the
18mm test corner shots at f/2.8 and f/5.6. At f/2.8, the corners are very soft, but at f/5.6, they're very sharp. It's interesting to then compare corner shots of this lens to the non-IS kit lens at 18mm, f/5.6 - what an improvement.

So, if I paid all this cash for the f/2.8 model, but have to use f/5.6 for shots like this, then what did I pay for? Well, it's still great for portraits and to stop motion in a pinch - it's one of the best walking around lenses you can buy for FOVCF bodies.

For portraits, f/2.8 blurs backgrounds well - but not as well as my f/1.4 50mm, and the MTF charts at 50mm heavily favor the f/1.4 50mm. So, if I'm specifically shooting portraits of one or two people, I'll probably reach in the bag for my fast 50. But, this lens will probably spend most of its time out of the bag.