My Review

Originally submitted at Adorama

Solid Lens with Sharp Results

By Chris Biele from Oroville, WA on 6/22/2010

 

5out of 5

Pros: Works In 'A' Mode, Smooth Operation, Solid build, Tweak That Focal Plane

Cons: Loose Lock Knobs

Best Uses: Product shots, Food photography, Creative Portraiture

I bought this lens, against all logic and reason, to use as a creative portrait lens. Some may have chosen the 85mm, but I prefer the 45mm as it's closer to 50mm, my favorite length for capturing environmental portraits.

With the price of this lens being so high, I figure I'll have to do about 20 portrait sessions before I can even think about making any profit from it, but at least I'll learn a lot!

By skewing your focal plane you can completely change how the viewer sees your subject. People can be made to look miniature in their surroundings or you can focus the viewer's attention to one particular area of the the frame by making it the only area in focus.

The build quality of this lens is superb with a smooth aperture ring and a buttery smooth focus ring. That said, however, the lock knobs on the opposite sides of the tilt and shift knobs feel slightly loose and they don't do a good job of locking the lens in place.

Overall great quality and I'm looking forward to some great portrait and food sessions.

Tilted portrait w/ fp angled across face

Tags: Made with Product

(legalese)

My Review of Nikon D300S DX Digital D-SLR Camera, 12.3 Megapixel, Interchangeable Lens, Nikon U.S.A. Limited Warranty

Originally submitted at Adorama

Nikon D300S DX Digital D-SLR Camera, 12.3 Megapixel, Interchangeable Lens, Nikon U.S.A. Limited Warranty

Nikon D300S DX Digital D-SLR Camera, 12.3 Megapixel, Interchangeable Lens, Nikon U.S.A. Limited Warranty

Great camera with loads of features

By Chris Biele from Oroville, WA on 6/22/2010

 

5out of 5

Pros: Fast / Accurate Auto-Focus, Solid Build, Fast Shutter Speed, Easy To Use, High ISO Performance, Large Clear LCD, Good Image Quality, Highly Configurable, Quiet

Cons: No Manual Movie Mode, No One Hand ISO Adjust

Best Uses: Indoors/Low Light, Sports/Action, Weddings/Events

Describe Yourself: Semi-pro Photographer

I recently upgraded my camera from the Pentax K10d to this Nikon D300s and I am just as happy as I thought I would be. The Pentax had many pro features, but the Nikon feels and reacts more like a pro body.

Above all, I am extremely happy with the overall feel and speed of the D300s. I have only found a few situations in low light where the focusing struggled, but by changing the focussing mode from spot to dynamic I cured that problem. I love the dynamic 3D tracking. Another great feature is the three programmable buttons, although it would be nice to be able to adjust ISO by holding a button and turning a dial. I could do this with the Pentax and find it very difficult to press the Nikon's ISO button with my left hand without taking my eye from the viewfinder.

The LCD display is large and clear and the menus are logical and easy to read. The Info button really helps as well while finding your way around each menu item. I really recommend setting one of your function buttons to My Menu as well, as this will bring up the first item in your My Menu. My first item is the ISO menu for manually adjusting ISO and activating or deactivating auto ISO.

The LiveView and Movie features are not as good as I thought they would be. LiveView is good for holding the camera over your head to compose shots and for zooming in to manual focus, but you loose the image while using auto focus. I thought I could get around this by putting the camera in tripod mode for Contrast Detect AF, but I found they call it "tripod" mode for a reason, since it won't focus to save your life unless it's on a tripod.

The Movie feature is disappointing because there is no way to manually adjust your exposure while recording. Trying to record a subject with a very bright background resulted in an underexposed image. I hope this will be changed in a firmware upgrade.

Overall, extremely happy and really looking forward to working with this camera.

Tags: Made with Product

(legalese)

One Flash, Multiple Frames

I've dabbled in HDR a few times. One of my first posts on this blog was about HDR using RAW images from my Canon PowerShot point and shoot camera. I knew a lot less back then, but I certainly had the photography bug. The resulting image of that experiment, admittedly, looks like ass, but I took that experience and moved on 'poco a poco'. Now, if you look at my Flickr stream you will see a couple examples of my finer HDR work.

One thing I had yet to try was actually compositing an image out of multiple frames rather than using tone mapping. So, last month when I saw this funky abandoned structure in Tarifa I thought I would give it a go. It turned out to be easier and more fun than I had expected, but I couldn't have done it without one cool little trick. Keep reading to find out what that trick was.

Compositing vs. HDR

Now, some of you might be wondering "What is compositing?" Well, composite literally means to be made up of various elements. So compositing is the process of taking more than one picture and making one image out of the bits you want. But, how does this differ from HDR? Well, HDR uses something called tone mapping which 'maps' one set of colors to another. This allows you to choose between a wider set of color ranges to compensate for too-bright or too-dark regions in your scene. This means you can expose for both your sky and your foreground and get some really amazing colors.

When making an HDR image, you typically have a static scene, or else you get weird ghosting artifacts. When making a composite image it doesn't really matter, because you get to choose which parts of the frame get included. In my original pictures (19 used for this image) the pop of my flash can be seen at least six times, and yours truly appears more than once as well. And although some of the better HDR programs can compensate for this, I wouldn't have had as much control over the finer details without being able to mask areas like I was able to here.

How I Did It

I stumbled upon this scene while scrambling to catch the last of the sunset on our overnight

trip to Tarifa. Tarifa is the southern most tip of Continental Europe and juts right out there into the Atlantic, pointing towards Morocco. It's only 10 miles from the Moroccan coast and about 18 miles from Tangier, as the crow flies. It's also where they hold the kite surfing and wind surfing world championships. To say it's windy is an understatement, but luckily it wasn't windy on this winter day.

As you can see, the weather was hardly conducive to taking sunset pictures, so when we came across this monstrosity I thought "What the hell!" I promptly set up my tripod and

took some shots, exposing to the right while preserving my highlights. Here's an example of what I was getting with that straightforward approach with a before, straight out of the camera (only cropped), and after (processed in Aperture and Viveza).

I admit the sky certainly looked a lot better 5 minutes later when I took my composite images, but other than that I can see that the structure i

s lacking in detail. The diffused light doesn't really give me the detail I'm after. This was when I remembered my strobe. I knew I wasn't packing all that crap around for nothing! As Joe McNally says, your gear doesn't do you any good sitting back in the studio. I promptly pulled out my hot shoe flash, whacked on a radio trigger and called in my support. I had Ellie (my wife) press the shutter while I walked around aiming my strobe at certain areas on the structure. I tried getting some bursts a bit farther back, but I soon reached the distance limit of the Cactus V2s'.

The Trick to Making Great Composites Really Quickly

Here's a screen grab of the 19 images I used to make the composite. I opened all of them as 16 bit TIFFs, then copied each one and pasted them all into one single file one at a time.

As you can see, there's a bit of detail in each image, but none of them make a very good pic on

their own. So this is where one little trick can save you a lot of time. All I needed to do was set the blend layer of every layer (except bottom layer) to Lighter Color. Magically, all the lighter areas of all the layers were exposed. Then I went through each layer, created a mask and eliminated the areas I didn't want to show, such as myself, my flash and the areas where the clouds overlapped. Once I had my composite made I selected all layers and pressed Shift+Alt+Cmd+E (Replace Cmd with Control on Windows) to create one new layer from all the others. After saving I discarded all the previous layers and was left with one nice manageable layer. Also, deleting all the other layers dramatically reduced my file size which saved more than a few RPMs on my scratch disk.

From here I was able to create my typical adjustment layer masks to make local changes to the sky and the structure. A quick trip into Viveza and a final stop at Noise Ninja and I was now ready to save back into Aperture for the final touches.

I really like how this turned out and it almost seems a bit richer in tone than your average HDR. I think that's because I wasn't really messing with compensating for my shadows and highlights, I was just adding in touches of light where I wanted them on my subject.

What Would I Change?

If I were to go out and do something like this again, the first thing I would do is make sure to pop my flash in EVERY possible area within the frame. The bottom left corner in this image could have done with at least a bit of light, but I didn't realize this as I was looking through my pics on the back of the LCD. The other thing I would have done is fired my strobe through an umbrella. I did have the flash set to wide zoom, but I would have liked a lot more falloff at the edges of my beam of light which would have avoided some of the hot spots.

What do you think? Have you ever tried a composite image? Share in the comments, I'd love to see what everyone else is doing.

-CB

Jewelry Shots on a Budget

I got a job out of the blue the other day from my wife's ex-employer to take a few shots of his jewelry shop and a couple products as well. Proof you should never burn any bridges! The amazing thing is that, after taking a few shots of the store front, he handed me €9,000 worth of rubies and diamonds to take home and shoot. I was shitting myself on the way home, constantly checking my bag was zipped and latched.

So, after editing the store front pics (soon to come in another post) I got down to lighting the three pieces of jewelry that cost more than my yearly rent and electricity combined. So, how does one light such an elegant and costly subject? With a piece of paper I rescued from the garbage, of course! I was just going to try this out for experiment's sake, but it ended up working really well, so I went with it.

Use What You Have At Your Disposal

Basically, I took the piece of paper, wrapped it into a cone shape and stuck it down to the desk with a little Blu Tack ® (you really need some of this stuff, really). I also used the Blu Tack ® to make the heart and earrings sit the way I wanted to add some interest. Here's a shot of the jewels in the cone.

The one main disadvantage to working in a cone, is that you either need to have skinny little monkey arms (which I don't) or you need to use something like a Wacom pen to push things around. Luckily I convinced myself I needed an Intuos 4 a few months ago, so that was that problem solved. The pen came in really handy when I had to get the chain adjusted just right. You may think I just laid it down like that and, VIOLA! But, no, I adjusted every link on the chain to get the perfect wave.

Shining A Light On A Heart

Now, the lighting. In retrospect, I would have maybe thrown a little more light in from the front, slightly camera right to fill in those two black holes in the front of the heart and the one dark ruby on the right earring, but all in all I'm happy with the final result. I used two flashes, one on either side and both adjusted for roughly the same light output. It wasn't too scientific, as the two flashes have different power and one was closer than the other. Here you can see the setup with the tripod, the Vivitar 285 on the right coming in low and the Pentax 360 on the left up higher.

I messed around a bit with the position of the lights until I had sufficient glow in the stones. By coming in low with the Viv and high with the pentax I was able to bathe the whole piece in nice soft light which made the piece look as though it was glowing from within. I added a bit of light to the front by setting up a silver reflector to bounce some of the Vivitar's extra light back in. This killed any shadows I had showing up in the front underneath the pieces and also gave the front stones a little more kick. As I said before though, I should have added another light source from front / camera right to knock out those black holes. This is an image showing the reflector at work, and also shows the Haruki Murakami books I used to squish the cone in to make it a bit taller inside. If you like funky crazy books, you can't go far with Haruki Murakami.

Don't Forget The Little Details

Now, the only thing about shooting such a detailed object at such a long focal length is that you really start to lose detail due to a shallow plane of focus. I was shooting at f/16 and the focal plane was really only about one inch. That's all well and good if you're going for some artsy bokeh, but I needed to convey the intricacies of this beautiful piece by showing lots of detail.

This is where focus stacking comes to the rescue. I took five shots, one focused on the front, and then consecutively further back. This got the front, the middle, each earring and the middle of the chain. Then I took those five images, after adjusting my levels and all, into Photoshop to blend the parts of the image which were in focus. And if you want to see how I did that you'll have to tune in next time!

Portraits from the Balcony

I did a quick portrait session for a friend of ours who is finally getting her Feldenkrais website up and running. My wife, Ellie, is doing the design, and after they finished talking shop I whacked this little scene together.

This is actually a place I've been thinking about for a portrait shoot when we moved into our apartment nearly a year ago. I never really had an excuse to shoot anyone here, although the eternally driven Chase Jarvis might say I never had an excuse not to! Anyway, excuses aside, I knew I didn't want to do a typical white background, and Ifat is a very organic and funky person, so I thought the surroundings suited her quite well.

The first thing I did was set up a snooted strobe on the railing from the balcony above, coming in just to the right and above my shooting angle. This gave a nice little pop of light onto the marble wall, which is actually meant to be a fountain, if they would ever turn it on. It helped soften Ifat's shadows from the key lighting and also added shadows to the far side of the steps in the marble wall detail. I had to remove a bit of a blue tinge due to my ungelled snoot and me shooting in daylight. That doesn't make any sense, though, because the flash should be daylight balanced. I dunno, maybe I was shooting in cloudy or something. But you get the point. You can see that blue tinge in this setup shot.

The key light was a DIY beauty dish sitting just an inch or two out of the frame to the left. You can see it here in the setup shot, which is exactly where I left it for the final image. This strobe was gelled with a 3/4 strength CTO gel which adds some color to the skin tone, and Joe McNally swears by it. I have tried the CTO thing before with so/so results, but I really like it here. Thanks Joe.

So, the image looked pretty good straight from camera, but I still took it into PS and jazzed it up. I ran a Vivesa filter to brighten the foliage and up the contrast in a few areas. Then I did some local burning on her jeans and top to make the shadows stand out a but more. I fixed up one of the tiles, removed some stray leaves and removed an undesirable shadow from her face with the healing brush tool. Using a selective color mask I removed a cyan tinge from the white marble.

From there, I saved back into Aperture, added a vignette and sharpened for web. And here we are now! So, I hope you liked what you saw and I'll see you next time.

Food in the Studio

I have finally started a bit of a push on my stock photography catalogue. This is something I have always wanted to do, but was just a bit daunted by the whole process of uploading and, above all, getting my pics accepted. It's not that my pics totally suck, rather I used to do just a little too much in the land of levels which led to a whole host of little baddies, like posterization.

Here is an image which was denied for that very reason. Posterization is when you get blocky pixels in a typically dark area. This is due to not having enough detail to bring out the colors or shadow transition you desire. You can see, if you look closely around the belly, that the shadowy bits are quite blocky, and the only way to fix this is to go back to the original and be more careful when trying to recover some of that detail.

Baby on the Horizon

So, I've gone back over that image and will be trying to upload again. Hopefully my eye is a bit better for these things now.

One of the areas I'll be focussing on now is food, because it never gets tired of you taking its picture and it's tasty! Thanks to The Strobist I have learned a whole ton about studio lighting and the whole process is going a lot easier than I thought. Here is a glass full of pomegranate seeds I did the other day.

When I go online and see some people's stock catalogues I crap myself thinking about how far behind them I am, but then I remind myself they all started somewhere. If I don't kick myself in the ass and get going now I'll never do it.

On Assignment - Lindsay Parfitt

I went on assignment with my American buddy Chadd yesterday to take some pictures of Lindsay Parfitt for the Sur in English. Lindsay is the wife of Rick, rhythm guitarist and singer for Status Quo. We were lucky enough to get to meet Rick as well as Lindsay in their beautiful house in Alhaurin el Grande. Chadd is doing a story on Lindsay for a piece about having babies and living abroad (they have twins), but he spent most of his time talking to Rick about music. HA! Go chadd.

Anyway, when we arrived, Rick seemed a little weary of what were really there for, but once he found we were so chill and just wanted to go with the flow he soon opened up. We ended up doing the shoot in their cinema room in the basement with all (or most of anyway) of his gold records hanging on the wall. I shot a few of Lindsay in front of the records, a few of the two of them by the bar, then wrapped up with a quick one of Chadd for posterity.

I was going all out with the beauty dish and a bare strobe on the records for the portrait of Lindsay and showing them to her as I went. Then I did one no flash so she could see the difference and she says to me, "Oh, I actually like that one more!" So this is what we got, and I think she's right. Sometimes you have to just leave the strobes out and go with what works best, in this case the natural sunlight coming from a door camera left. The door really acted as a huge soft box and bounced off the gold from the records to make a warm picture.

Then we moved to the bar. Rick wanted a cool picture of himself and his wife in a relaxed setting. Here I did use the beauty dish, as the door was now about 15 feet further away from this setup. Beauty dish was camera left, up high and I had a strobe stashed under the bar shooting up and back towards the green plant. I dragged the shutter just enough to get the warm glow from the bar.

All in all it was a good session and I learned a few things, such as, don't be to petty to listen to your client. Lindsay called the good shot and it made me realize I just may have been "over lighting" the scene. Happy days.

Expose to the Right, Don't Trust your Luminance Histogram

So, I just read this great post on Luminous Landscape about noise and posterization and why you should expose to the right. I decided to test this out with a sunset shot, which is where I usually tend to get posterization with even the lightest hand in post. I wasn't surprised to find that I could do much more with my colors, since I used to encounter problems when exposing my sunsets to the left to "saturate" the sky. I was surprised to find how little you can actually trust your luminance histogram.

Why expose to the right? You should really read the link the the Luminous Landscape post, because they explain it much better than I do, but it goes a little something like this.

Your histogram shows you how much light you have in your dark, mid and light tones. Anything on the left side of the histogram is black, anything on the right is white and anything in between is red, green, blue and a mix thereof. What I didn't know until I read that post is that an image with the histogram peak sitting to the left has less detail compared to one sitting to the right due to the way your camera's sensor records light. The shadows get roughly 1/16th of the available data space compared to the highlights. That, therefore, means if you make your image a little brighter instead of a little darker you'll have more headroom when you start pushing your pixels in post, and less noise to boot. You just need to be very careful not to go too far to the right, or you clip your highlights and then you just loose all detail to the point of no return.

This is where you need to be very weary of what your luminance histogram is telling you! Yes, expose to the right and keep an eye on that right hand slope, but if you don't know what it's really saying you may be clipping one of your RGB channels.

The image at the top of this post is a perfect example of when you need to keep an eye on your channels. Basically, in a sunset image you have a dark blue sky and some glowing orange highlights. This puts your blue channel somewhere near the bottom of the histogram, your green near the middle and the red all the way up at the top. If you just look at the luminance histogram, which is an average of your RGB histograms, you could be clipping your reds and still think you have some room to spare. I thought I had at least another 2/3 of a stop I could have gone to the right, but when I loaded this into Aperture I found my red channel highlights went right up against the wall. Luckily, shooting in RAW gave me the capability of reeling those highlights in. If I would have gone that extra 2/3 stop, though, I would have had some really obvious red clipping in form of a big orange spot at the hottest part of the picture.

Before I go, just let me say that exposing to the right works especially well with higher ISOs to avoid excessive noise and in images with color detail in the shadows which you might want to recover. It's not something you always need to do though. You camera's auto exposure probably does a good enough job in most cases where you can trust what your meter is telling you, but if you ever find you're getting really blotchy or noisy pictures, just give this a try.

My First Big Expo

This weekend was the Mother, Baby and Toddler Show in Estepona, at which Ellie launched her new business, www.ecobebes.eu. Just so you know, we have so many nappies in our house now it's not even funny, HA! And, by the way, her launch went very well. There weren't as many people as were expected, but it was good for Ellie as she was able to spend a lot of time explaining "the new" cloth diapering to each individual.

As Ellie was going, we decided I should look into exhibiting some of my maternity and baby shots as well. I got the entire corridor at the main entrance for 150€ and was able to get my name out there for the first time. Everything was a bit last minute for me, and I would have liked to have had flyers, but in the end I was able to make some good contacts and set up a few potential portrait sessions.

Here's a couple of the pics I displayed and what the corridor looked like...

I'M FREE!!!

Today was my last day at work, and tomorrow is my first day at work. That might not make sense, but it will in a minute. Just hold that thought.


When Ellie spurred me on to get the job at the Marbella Apple store I was a little apprehensive. My Spanish was so/so. I knew a few cool tricks with the Mac, but honestly didn't even know how to change the memory in a MacBook. Pitifully, I didn't even know how to reinstall a system, or even start from the install disk for that matter! These things had never occurred to me as necessary or interesting, but that didn't matter to the man who hired me. He was looking for someone passionate and interested in Apple. I was hired, and I jumped in head first. Before long I was learning everything from the most basic diagnostics to how to solve kernel panics and replace components. My job was getting interesting and I was learning and growing.

I met some really interesting people in the following months, some of whom I have become friends with, and some I will collaborate with on future ventures. The most interesting characters I met in my two and a half years at Benotac were the ones who make their living from what they see in their viewfinder. Every week some photographer would come into the store asking me about some program, or a memory upgrade, or to invest in a new workstation, but for every question they asked me I would fire back two more. What did they shoot, how did they do it or if they'd seen 'x' photographer's work. It became clear to me that, although I really loved (and still do love) the Apple scene, my real passion was for creating images. Apple computers and the Mac OS are fun and a joy to work with, but holding a camera in my hands inspires me to seek new boundaries. It's not that I want people to see what I see, but to see what I can shape though my lens using light, reflectors, depth, aperture, shutter speed, angles, point of view and texture.

Taking pictures has become my new mission. Work can be anything you make of it. Taking the fucking rubbish out is work. It's what you make of that work and how you present it that matters. I want what I create to matter. I want my work to influence. I want people to see what I do and laugh and smile and think, "That guy has a great job!"

That job starts now.