Archive for August, 2008
Tip: Ambidextrous off-camera lighting
Sat Aug 2nd - 3:56pm
Cameras are designed for right-handed people. This is fine is you want to hold the camera with one hand while holding a light with the other hand, like this:
But it's a problem if you want to hold the flash to your right. This is essential to avoid your lighting becoming repetitive, and so you don't end up designing your compositions around where your flash will be held. There are a few ways to get that corded flash over to your right but I think this is the technique most of us use as it allows you to rest the camera on your shoulder for extra support:
There is another way to do it though. Believe it or not you can actually hold the camera in your left hand and operate it quite comfortably that way. When you look at this next picture you may well think it would take ages to get accustomed to it, but try it and you'll be surprised how natural it feels:
There are two ways you can hold the camera. You can see above that I was holding the lens with my thumb and index finger, and pressing the shutter button with my middle finger. This next picture shows how you can press the shutter button with your index finger while holding the grip with your thumb and other fingers:
However you do it, your thumb takes the weight of the camera and lens. Here's a close-up of the holding-the-lens technique:
And here's the holding-the-grip technique:
I got this idea from wildlife photographer Charlie Phillips. He holds the camera with his left hand for a different reason, but it occurred to me that it would be useful for giving me more control over my light positioning. I tried it, found it surprisingly easy, and now it's another technique to pull out the bag whenever necessary.
Awesome camera saves rubbish photographer
Fri Aug 1st - 5:04pm
I'm on my second 1D Mk3 now. The first one was proving to be too hit-and-miss with focus so I swapped it. The new one is actually an older serial number but so far, so good, so fingers crossed.
The incredible high-ISO performance proved itself again today with a shot that I made a real mess of, but was then able to rescue. I was doing this picture of a swimming lesson and, genius that I'm not, I decided to try it without flash. I had intended to shoot at 1/50s f/5.6 ISO 1600 but at some point I absent-mindedly changed the aperture to f/8. And to make matters worse, having metered for the general scene, I failed to realise that the place where I was going to do the picture was in fact a lot darker. Oh and to compound the problem even more I didn't check the LCD screen while doing the shot. So as the kids swam away afterwards and I finally checked the pictures, this is what I saw:
Can you imagine trying to recover an ISO 1600 image that is so under-exposed?
Well thanks to the Mk3 it was an easy save. Cranked the exposure on the raw file and added a bit of fake fill light. Job done. Almost. The instructors' purple shirts did get quite grainy so I applied some selective noise reduction, but apart from that the noise was fine and this is how the picture ended up:
The noise was certainly there, no doubt about that, but this ISO 1600 image from the Mk3, pushed about two stops, was comparable to a properly exposed ISO 800 image on the 1Ds or an ISO 1250 image on the 1D. Like most photo cock-ups this one was entirely down to the idiot behind the camera, but it's nice to know that the camera has got your back when you do make a mistake.
Here's a 100% crop from of the original image:
And here's the same crop from the finished version. Noise reduction was applied to the purple shirt but not to the skin or water.
