Archive for July, 2008
First few days with Canon 1D Mk3
Sat Jul 19th - 2:30am
I've been using the 1D Mk3 for a few days now and there are some features that are obvious highlights. For starters the new battery technology is extraordinary. It took 2 hours to give the battery a full first charge on Wednesday afternoon, and since then the camera has shot a football match, an accident scene, a portrait for a news item, and an entire wedding. That's a total of 1,824 frames plus lots of time using the review screen, and still the battery meter is showing 26%.
(Update: Add another 686 frames from another football match, some news pics, and a couple of gala girls playing with the camera's crazy high-speed 10fps mode. The battery is still showing 7% charge.)
Secondly the ISO performance is going to make life a lot easier. Here's an ISO 800 frame from yesterday's wedding that was under-exposed by approximately one stop due to bouncing the flash off the high, dark-coloured ceiling. But I shot it in raw, pushed it one stop, and added a bit of fill light. With my previous cameras that would have produced an image that needed extra work to do selective noise reduction in the shadow areas, but with the Mk3 the noise isn't even noticeable.
Incidentally the news profile pics that I mentioned, which were done for an item in Friday's Press & Journal, have since been licensed by two national newspapers. That nice income boost means that after only three days the Mk3 is already 1/4 of the way towards paying for itself.
First few hours with Canon 1D Mk3
Thu Jul 17th - 1:55am
I'm now the happy (but broke) owner of a lovely new Canon 1D Mk3. I've been thinking of getting one for a while but with a wedding coming up on Friday I decided to take the plunge. I only had a few hours to practice with it today, just some test shots around the house and then off to photograph Tain Thistle vs Ross-shire Club. Favourite pic from the match:
Of course one of the main features of the Mk3 is its high-ISO performance and it's even better than I expected. This tree picture was shot at ISO 3200 and the blacks are immaculate, perfectly useable straight out of the camera.
Eurodam maiden voyage
Mon Jul 14th - 10:27pm
Here's a spooky picture of Holland America's new cruise ship, Eurodam, visiting Invergordon during her maiden voyage. This is a 4-frame HDR.
Update: This photo ran nice and large on the BBC web site.
Tip: Saturation on a sunny day
Sun Jul 6th - 11:23pm
This is obvious when you think about it, but it's one of those things that nobody ever tells you. How do you get bright and saturated colours on a sunny day without people squinting at the sun?
Here's an example of the problem. The easy way to avoid having people squint is to shoot in to the sun. But unless you're using some creative lighting, that means cranking up the exposure and you end up with the sky blown out and everything else looking a bit pale, like this:
If you shoot with the sun behind you then the people in the photo will be squinting. But there's an easy solution: Shoot from a low angle. This gets you saturated colours, a properly exposed sky, and because the people are looking down at you they won't have the sun in their eyes. Like this:
Here's another example. This was the first photo I used this technique for. It was an unusual choice to do a photo of badminton players outside but time constraints made it the sensible option, and the weather was so nice that it would have been a shame to have the sky blown out. At first I set the group up with the sun behind them, and I was going to under-expose the ambient and light them with flash. But then the penny dropped and I thought of shooting with the sun behind me, but from a low angle. They still squinted a bit because I didn't go low enough, but I learned how this technique could work. And then the photo ran in black & white!
