Archive for March, 2007
Mark Austin photo
Sat Mar 31st - 1:07am
I can't tell you how much of an honour it was that Mark Austin's father Alasdair chose a photo that I took of Mark to give to the newspapers.
The photo was taken in December 2005 at the Tain Royal Academy end-of-year seniors dance. I thought Mark's many friends may want a digital copy of the photo so here it is. Click this little version to view/save the larger version. Sorry it isn't the hi-res file but it's a decent size for doing little prints, posting on Bebo etc.
Golspie F.C. league champions poster
Tue Mar 27th - 7:19am
Last year's football league and cup posters proved very popular so I've made one for Golspie who were crowned this season's champions of the North Caledonian League after defeating Bunillidh at the weekend.
The posters feature the team photo along with action from the match, goal celebration shots, and pictures taken during the award presentations. Size is an impressive 19 inches by 13 inches, presented on premium gloss photo paper which is very durable and high quality.
For individual orders the price is £14 including postage and packing, but if someone from Golspie F.C. can organise a bulk order then I'll do them for £12 each with no postage charge.
Superman photo game
Mon Mar 26th - 4:01pm
This little web-based game must be quite old because it was promoting the Superman Returns movie but it's great fun: Stop Press! (Thanks to Rich Obrey for posting the link over on Sports Shooter.)
Product shot set-ups
Mon Mar 26th - 7:00am
Here are the set-ups for the two product shots of the 285HV.
The lighting in the first one was simple enough, just a direct flash to light the subject and a snooted flash to throw a splash of light onto the background. The direct flash was gelled with a CTO (orange) and the camera's white balance was set to 3000K to make the background flash go dark blue.
Click the image to see it on Flickr with notes:
The levitation photo was more complicated to set-up but the lighting was simple. Obviously the subject had to be held up in some way, and in this case it was suspended from a background support with white thread. The thread was then removed in Photoshop.
Again, click the image to see it on Flickr with notes:
I'm *this* close to figuring out how to do the levitation photo without needing to use Photoshop. As soon as I can figure out the technique I'll do a product shot for the new toy that just joined my gear bag…
Two lights and three black belts
Sat Mar 24th - 12:17am
The only thing I knew about this picture of three young Kempo black belts was that it would require some kind of lighting effect. I didn't know for sure if there was going to be one person or three people, their ages or their heights, but I did know that I'd be doing the picture in a school gymnasium or somewhere close to it, so it would need lighting to give it a bit of punch.
Having been in this particular gym once before I thought I remembered there being climbing bars on all the walls, so I had planned to set-up the shot in a nearby corridor with a brick wall as a background. Luckily when I arrived at the gym I found that there was in fact one brick wall that I could use, although there was some chalk graffiti that I needed to clean off first.
The lighting set-up was as simple as it looks: My new Vivitar 285HV with a CTO (orange) gel on a light stand pointing at the wall, and a Canon 550EX fired into a silver brolly about eight feet high and six feet from the subjects, to camera left. Both flashes on manual power settings and fired by Pocket Wizards.
I had arrived early so I had about half an hour to set-up and do test shots, then I marked the floor with tape to show where the light stands should go and moved them out of the way until it was time to do the picture.
We quickly ran through a variety of 'safe' poses before trying the arms-folded one for a bit of attitude. That was the pose I had envisioned all along for a group of three, and the final image is exactly what I had planned the day before, so you see: Some shoots do go according to plan!
Here's a wide view of the lighting set-up:
Levitating product shot
Thu Mar 22nd - 10:55pm
The great thing about David Hobby's Strobist blog is that David shows you how to do all sorts of clever things using small flashes and simple set-ups. The bad thing is that there isn't much left for the rest of us to write about!
David's tutorial on how to photograph a light bulb also explained how to make an object appear to float in mid-air. Easy when you know how, but effective. There's an easier way though, just as effective and with some advantages, and that's the technique I used for the following 'levitation' photograph
One advantage of this technique is that you could have the product reflected in a shiny floor, which would not be possible with the light bulb technique. For this shot I didn't want a reflection but I did want a shadow, which is something else that you couldn't do with the light bulb technique. See if you can figure out how it was done and I'll post the explanation along with the one for the other product shot posted this morning. Remember, it's very simple and, truth be told, quite dull, so don't over-think it and come up with some crazy complicated solution.
Vivitar 285HV
Thu Mar 22nd - 4:59am
There are many joys in using the high-end Canon gear but flash is NOT one of them. You pay a fortune for evaluative metering and wireless operation but in the end you'll stick the flash on manual and use third-party triggers for anything that matters because infra red can't be trusted.
The new Canon 580EXII offers weather-sealing (shamefully long-overdue) and improved metering, but it will retail for around £400. On the other hand, Vivitar recently relaunched the 285HV. It uses decades-old thyristor technology for metering, you can pick one up brand new for £80, and most importantly IT WORKS. My first one arrived this week…
There are reliable workarounds for the quirks of Canon flash metering. I know them all, I use them all, and I resent them all. Nikon flashes have good automatic metering, off-brand flashes have good automatic metering, even the cheapest point-and-shoot cameras and disposables have good automatic metering. Canon has really let photographers down with their unreliable and inconsistent flash metering, and it's especially bad when you consider that Canon flashes are some of the most expensive units on the market.
Here's how you get a good exposure with the Vivitar 285HV: Stick it on your camera, select the appropriate colour-coded setting for your ISO and aperture, and take the picture. Done. Your images will be consistently well-exposed. Use bounce flash and they get better. Use the flash off the camera and they get better again. Wherever you put the flash, whatever you point it at, it gives you a correct auto-exposure, even when photographing objects that are mostly black or white which is the biggest challenge a flash will ever face.
Update: Originally there were some sample images here, including a few snapshots of my parents but it turns out that they don't want any photos of themselves on the Internet. I don't have time at the moment to re-write the post and prepare new samples so for now I've just removed them all. Sorry, I'll try to post some different ones when I get chance.
But the bottom line is: If you use Canon flashes then take this as my encouragement to put them away and get yourself a real flash. If you're thinking of buying a Canon flash soon then save yourself a lot of money and buy a 285HV at a fraction of the price. It has a manual mode so it will be just as useful for creative work, but with the added bonus of a good auto mode for fast work and fun shots.
As an aside, my picture of the 285HV at the top of this post is a fairly standard set-up for a product shot but I don't recall seeing any online tutorials explaining how the effect is achieved. It's not Photoshop, it's a lighting effect, and it's really simple so when I get time over the next couple of days I'll explain how to do it and post some behind-the-scenes shots.
The mother of all zooms!
Tue Mar 20th - 9:14am
I thought the longest production lens was the Canon 1200mm f/5.6 but I learned today that Nikon once made a 1200-1700mm zoom! Surprisingly it matched the f/5.6 at the 'short' end, and even at the long end it only dropped to f/8. Manual focus unfortunately. I found out about it from an advert by a guy who's selling one and he didn't want the link passed around, but here's a page with some more info:
The guy who wrote that page comments about it being the most expensive lens for 35mm SLRs, but if I'm not mistaken the Canon prime retailed at $80,000 while the Nikon zoom retailed at $75,000. The second-hand zoom is going for $40,000 and amazingly the seller also owns the Canon prime!
Of course both lenses pale in comparison to the Carl Zeiss 1700mm f/4 which was recently built to order, reportedly for a specialist wildlife photographer in Qatar, with the price tag rumoured to be somewhere around a million dollars.
Anti-war protest
Sat Mar 17th - 9:44pm
It would take acres of text to explain the background to today's adventure so let's skip all of that and start at 2:30pm with me sitting in an Inverness hotel sorting through photos of a small anti-war protest that had just finished.
With a 90-minute deadline imposed by the bus timetable, I picked out 10 photos, captioned them and sent them on their merry way to the BBC, only to find that the hotel's wireless connection was running slow. When the e-mail finally finished sending I got an error message from Gmail saying that it was too large. The sent messages list showed that it had gone but the final photo had been removed, so I sent that separately and legged it to catch the early bus home.
As I got on the bus I had a nagging feeling that the first e-mail wouldn't have actually gone, so I got off the bus and headed back to the hotel. Sure enough when I went back online there was a failure notice. I sent the photos again in two e-mails, five pics each. Back to the bus station and away home.
There was an e-mail waiting for me when I got home saying that the single image had got through okay but none of the others had. There was already a brief report up on the BBC Scotland site (here) with the one picture that had got through, and I think it's the best human-interest picture so it all worked out well in the end.
This is the picture that was used:
This is the one I had expected to be used but looking at it now the one with the kid was the clear choice. I was going for dramatic lighting with this one but it just looks like a bad flash snapshot…
Here's the rest of the set:
Hi-def video stills
Wed Mar 14th - 7:15pm
Ever thought of swapping your still camera for an HD video camera and grabbing frames? Kirk Mastin has posted some frames from a hi-def Canon XH A1 and the quality is really quite impressive. Note that the frames on Kirk's site are only 1600 pixels wide but the XH A1 can capture at 1920×1080 pixels.
