Sony HX5V

It always happens.

You set off somewhere, on a strict timeline, having carefully calculated the time required to be there at your appointment, a time which allows you do some final checking before you leave and maximise your productivity before leaving.

This method is also known as Setting Off at The Last Minute.

Because you know it is going to be a fast trip, with no opportunity to stop along the way, you pack all your expensive camera equipment and put in the boot of your vehicle. After all, there will be no time to stop. Will there? And you leave.

And it happens.

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As many of you know, I have been involved with Perfectly Clear for some years now, following it through its development, as an alpha and beta tester. I have been given this role, I suspect, for my ability to…break… computers (well ,drive them to their limits and beyond).

Late last year, they sent me V1.0.3, and I threw it at one of my Sony A900 files. My computer promptly had a seizure and sulked for an hour or so. So I sent an event log in and waited for results. They came back quickly, having ascertained that it was an issue with how CS address the memory code.

A couple of weeks ago, I built a new machine for pure image editing, one which does not have to share this function with all the other software on my existing machine ( Office ‘07, Dragon Naturally,Lightroom, Skype ( a system hog if ever there was one while running), iTunes etc, etc). Lately I have been moving into creating files which often exceed 2Gb, and my trusty PC was having a fit..or at least sending me out for a leisurely coffee..

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Kia ora tatou:

I know I have banged on about tripods ad nauseam, but I feel it is time to visit this again, having been at a workshop where the $80 tripods which are a chiropractor’s best friend were present. A good tripod is indispensable for a photographer.End of story.

If there is one piece of equipment which is absolutely indispensable to a landscape photographer, it has to be the tripod. Put simply, any landscape photographer worth his salt has a really good tripod … or two. Whenever I am teaching landscape photography workshops, it never ceases to amaze me how little emphasis would-be photographer’s give to the selection of their tripod. They spend an amazing amount of money on the best cameras, the best lenses and high-quality filters, then spend a pittance on the tripod. Buying a cheap tripod is, quite simply, false economy. And here is why.

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Sony A900, ISO 100, 1/80 @f8, Zeiss ZA 24-70 @ 48mm

Working in a darkroom for 20 years can make you a little sensitive to black and white. I suppose all that time shuffling paper in trays of developer, smelling fixer, and inhaling selenium toner fumes, not to mention hanging out with Richard Poole, can lead to a certain constriction of the vision and a strengthening of the opinion. Or, put another way, to being old school and proud of it.

I don’t do darkroom any more. About seven years ago, after 20 years of sloshing chemistry and living in a dark space, my body finally told me it had had enough. This is not unusual. If you do this long enough, sooner or later your body is going to rebel at being in proximity to all those nasty chemicals. Mine certainly did, and the symptoms were a combination of swollen joints and a decidedly hung-over feeling. So I gave it away. Anyway, whatever darkroom nutters may say, it’s infinitely more civilised to sit there with a glass of wine and press the print key. So be it.

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Sony Vaio VGN-AW37GY

Kia ora tatou:

ASP stirred the pot a week or so back  in suggesting that the Sony Vaio laptop ( hereafter referred to as the BBB-Big Black Box) I took to Africa may have found its way under a Namibian dune, because I hadn’t said anything further. Well it hasn’t, and I probably need to a do a review of that as well. Frankly I  have never reviewed a computer before. I read reviews, but have never written one. It would appear that time has come. but first some ground rules.

1. This will get techy at times, but frankly  I am more interested in how it performs and whether it will support rather than hinder me. So this is an end-user review. People who need to know stuff like hyperthreading ability and on-board cache won’t find any of that stuff here. Go Google….
2. I use a PC but I have spent time with Macs. I like both. Neither operating system is perfect.  I tend to push my computers really hard and I have found that Mac’s can get just as slow as a PC. So I use Windows-based machines, because there is enough under-the-hood control fo me to be able to keep them at peak efficiency for me. I prefer using a PC because they are (bang for your buck) more affordable.I know many pros prefer Mac but I have yet to see the advantage. Mac fanbois, feel free to weigh in below (some evidence would be great!).  and since this is the Paragraph of Contention, may I add here that I have been a fan of Vista since its inception, and especially since SP2. It just works, and it does not clog up like XP, requiring a full reinstall every year or so. I love the interface for one thing.Finding files in a desktop with 8 Hard drives and a total of 6 TB of storage is not easy, but Vista makes that a breeze. Of course there will be some amazingly useful plugin which makes XP friendly and justifies continuing to keep the corpse alive…. Feel free to share in the comments section.

There it is. Let us move on.

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woman crossing road, Bo Kaap

ETTR-new thoughts

Kia ora tatou:

in all my workshops which deal with camera craft and postproduction, I’ve taught the technique of ETTR, or expose to the right. In the process I’ve made a number of assumptions which I assumed were correct, but now I’m beginning to rethink those and I want to share those thoughts with you. This, of course, assumes that you are shooting Raw rather than JPEG. Before I get there, I want to revisit the whole question of how you go about setting exposures for each of the two methods.

Shooting a JPEG file, as most of you know, is very similar to shooting slide film. Those of us have made the transition from film to digital will understand how important it is to be careful in your exposure of slide film. The same thing applies to a JPEG. When you expose a JPEG, you need to think of it as slide film, that is that the critical part of the exposure is correct exposure of the highlights. The aim here should be to place the highlights exactly where you want them to be. If you want them to be right but with fine texture, it’s important to ensure that you don’t overexpose or “cook” them. Remember that when you press the shutter, you are effectively creating the finished file, according to the camera settings you have chosen. This is important to remember: you make your choices (exposure, contrast, saturation, tone, white balance) and you live with the consequences. Postproduction on a JPEG usually does not have the flexibility of working on a raw file. Add in the fact that a JPEG can only deliver an eight bit file compared to the 16 bits of a raw file, and the only real reason for shooting a JPEG is convenience.

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Dune 45, Sossuvlei

Kia Ora tatou:

A Number of you have rung or e-mailed me since I got back, wanting to know how I got on with the Sony in Africa. I’ve been thinking about that, and decided it’s probably time to write some sort of gear review.

I don’t do gear reviews easily. Certainly not the ones that go into every intricate detail of how the camera functions, that make really boring photographs of household objects on a white background, and then tell you how good the camera is or not. Frankly, I’m not that interested in the intricacies of the custom menus. I’m a photographer. I use a camera to make pictures, and I measure the success of the machine in question in two key areas: how intuitive  and reliable it is to use in the field, and the quality of the finished file. Make me happy on both those accounts and I’m a loyal supporter.

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Kia ora tatou:

While I was mucking around in the menus, trying to avoid having to RTFM, I came a cross a couple that could be useful.

The first is C-RAW, which gives a 12 Mp file whenever you use it. Might be really useful the next time I shoot a wedding…..

The other is APS-C mode. I had the opportunity to use it yesterday in Pretoria. My good friend, Reg Botha, took me to a game park nearby, which sprawls across around 4 000 ha of the high veldt. Now the last time I shot ( rephrase: photographed) animals was 3 years ago in the Kruger, so I was well and truly out of practice.

But the animals were not.

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For as long as I’ve been involved with photography, I’ve subscribed to the edict (and taught it) that you should have a filter on the front of the lens.

Until now.

After a conversation with a camera technician in South Africa, I’m rethinking the whole thing. I’m coming to the conclusion that they aren’t necessarily a good thing.

For those of us who came up through film, there were lots of good reasons for using filters. If we shot black-and-white, then we used a UV filter to cut down the amount of ultraviolet light reaching our film,  therefore giving it a better spectral response. If we shot film, then we probably went out and bought a skylight filter, to reduce the amount of blue light reaching our colour film. Here in New Zealand, with its excessively high amount of ultraviolet light (especially since the ozone hole came into being), there was no question of the necessity for these. But do we need to continue with this practice when all but a few of us use digital cameras?

Another reason for using filters like this on the front of our cameras was to protect the soft coating on the front lens element from scratching and from excessive cleaning. The theory was that filters could be thrown away when they got scratched and that it was cheaper to replace a filter than to replace the front element of the lens. Conventional wisdom also said that in using one of these filters we would be protecting our lenses from damage if we dropped it. And so for years we all dutifully bought filters for the front of our lenses. But, with coatings much harder and durable, is there a need to do so any more? (more…)

Kia ora tatou:

I guess it is every photographer’s nightmare; you’re a stranger in a strange land, dependent on your equipment, and your key asset (CAMERA!) fails  on you. What do you do? 

I was to find out. 

Canon advertise the 1Ds Mk III as having a shutter cycle life of around 300,000. Certainly, with the price you pay for one (New Zealand $12,000) you’d expect that to be the case. Here, even the 5D MkII at less than half the price offers 200,000 shutter cycles! The big 1-series Canon is supposed to be bullet-proof, built like a tank and able to deflect AK-47 rounds.  (more…)

Kia ora tatou:

I know I bang on a lot about the need to take care of your data.

Well, I am at it again. This tale of woe came to me last night from Richard, who has had disaster strike. May I respectfully request you read it, then take action.

Or share your own techniques….

Greetings and a very good evening to you all…

I would like to share a wee story of woe with you…not because I am looking for sympathy – though all sympathies are of course gratefully accepted – but because I think there is an important message to share with you.

I am the worlds best at giving advice that I never heed myself….

I often tell people about the need to back their data up – and particularly their precious images.

About a year ago I bought an external hard drive. In fact it was not long after Dave Wethey came and spoke to us at a club meeting and extolled the virtues of making multiple copies of data etc. (more…)

I’m sure I’ve blogged about this somewhere else, but it’s probably time to revisit it.

I was catching up with a friend earlier this week, who does most of his photography off a laptop, and the conversation turned to the vexing question of backing up the Lightroom catalogue. He asked me how I did it, and when he realised my approach was somewhat more complex than his (it seems simple to me!), it struck me I should talk about it. So here is how I do it.

Firstly I don’t back up to DVD. I’ve given up on that, and here’s why. I run around 40 GB of memory cards, and I’ve known days where I have used the lot. So call me trigger-happy! I’ll admit it; some days I see things that excite me so much I want to shoot them, and often there are so many potential possibilities I shoot them all. Often I will shoot round the subject, varying my composition subtly. I can always throw it away later. So backing up to DVD, each with a capacity of around 3 1/2 GB is just not an option, unless I win the lottery, when I can afford to buy a warehouse to store them! Filing them for later retrieval is going to be a nightmare, especially given the read/write speeds of most DVD players. Blu-Ray is an option, but the price of the drives and disks makes it frankly uneconomical. Bang for your buck, hard drives deliver faster access, speed and more capacity. At least that’s the way I see it.

I use Adobe Lightroom as my primary cataloguing software. It has got so damn good (for the money it’s amazing value) that I pretty much don’t bother with anything hours. Don’t get me wrong; I’ve tried the opposition, but frankly at this point they don’t measure up. And I include Adobe Bridge. Essentially it’s a file browser with a hotline to PhotoShop. Lightroom on the other hand is a database with  processing stuff built on top. At the front-end, the downloading end, it makes downloading so easy that I’m happy to stay with it. What’s more it keeps getting better. So here is my process. (more…)

Kia ora tatou:

Time for some techy stuff. I will get over it after this post…for a while.

1. If you want to do HDR ( the flavour technique of the moment), then have a look at this article. Probably the most clearly-explained description I have come across in a long time.
2. All hard drives fail, sooner or later. That is a fact. If you would like to know how long it is until the drives in your PC do, thereby giving you time to do something about it, then get Hard Drive Sentinel. At $US 35, it is cheap insurance.
3. If size matters to you, then you might  need a Seitz 6×17 Digital Panoramic Camera. its 160 megapxel sensor will generate a 921 MB TIFF! Its native file size is 44×96 inches. Huge. So is the price. Read more here.
4.  If you want to do mega-panorama on the cheap ( ish), then have a look at this option to generate gigapixel images with a PHD camera ( push here, Dum#@).
5. Generating passwords ( and remembering them) is a discomfort in the gluteus. There are options. Firefox users can use the Sxipper extension. There are dedicated apps, such as Keepass. Or you can write them on a piece of paper…..On a lighter note, here is a list of passwords you should never, ever, use!
6. Want to do ultraviolet photography on the cheap? Look here.
7. Defrag your hard disks regularly? Of course you do. Windows” built-in app is slow and inefficient. Try this piece of freeware. And do it often.
8. And for clearing out all the rubbish on your PC, try ATF Cleaner.

Nga mihi

Not so long ago I decided to begin downloading my files and converting them to the Adobe DNG format. There’s a reason for this. Allow me to explain.

My working method involves doing all the downloading, cataloguing, sorting and editing in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. Once I’ve sorted out the files I want to work with, I usually right click and open them in Photoshop CS 4. Once I’ve done all I have to do, I close the file and then Lightroom adds it to its catalogue. This means that I can keep track of all the variations of a particular file that I make.

It’s important to state here the fundamental difference between Lightroom and Photoshop. Photoshop is, has been, and always will be primarily an image editing program. Bridge is little more than a browser. While it allows you to sort and keyword, its functionality in this area is quite rudimentary compared to Lightroom.

Lightroom, on the other hand, is a powerful database with image-editing built on top. Its power lies in its ability to organise, catalogue and keep track of all your files. While its development module is very functional, it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles or subtleties of its big brother. If you only do rudimentary development to your files, then Lightroom is probably all you need. If you don’t shoot many pictures but tend to make massive, long and complex edits, then Photoshop is probably the game for you. If you both shoot huge amounts of images, and tend to indulge in long and complex edits (as I do), then I’m sorry to say: you need both!

Back to why I’ve converted to shooting in DNG. (more…)

Updated 18/12/2008

Kia ora tatou:

A number of you may remember a post where I drew attention to the fact that I had been challenged to pick up my film camera again.

The results were exciting and opened me to old/new possibilities in picture-making. I will restate that: it opened me to revisiting old school technologies and incorporating them into a new way of working. Can I try that again: it offered the opportunity to take old-school technologies and use old methodologies to make…O, forget it.

When I walked away from film some 3 years ago, I never thought I would return, and all that knowledge gathered over a 15-year stretch with fil would become redundant. For  some reason, I held on to my EOS 1vHS. Back then I could have got a reasonable amount for the camera. Today a camera (hardly-used) which cost me $4.5k to buy is worth, at best, $300 to trade. All that time it has sat there, forlorn and forgotten, in my gear safe. In the last few weeks, however, it has had more work than my 1DS Mk III.

And I am loving it (are you reading this, Doc? Stop sniggering). (more…)