Just returned from an assign­ment today, so this one’s fresh off my cam­era, the flash units hav­ing barely cooled down. I was hired to take some pic­tures of folks from the NUI Maynooth Rugby Club together with the trophy from the Heineken Cup.

The prob­lem: The shoot had to be fast (the university’s pres­id­ent only had 20 minutes for the gig and 15 odd group pic­tures had to be taken), the pic­tures obvi­ously had to be really “nice”, but worst of all: The weather. No, it was not rain­ing — to the con­trary — the one-​in-​a-​million thing happened… 100% pure 3pm-​sunshine. Great, since the shoot was to take place on the rugby pitch (to get the NUIM post-​padding in).

So there I had it: pho­to­graph people in plain sun­shine. While sun­shine is really pretty for land­scapes, it’s not ideal at all for people. Extremely harsh shad­ows on people’s faces and a great deal of squint­ing are the main issues. There’s not much you can do about the squint­ing, apart from turn­ing them as much as pos­sible from the sun. But the harsh shad­ows can be alle­vi­ated with some extra gear.

That meant to charge my flash gun bat­ter­ies to the max, pack two tri­pods and a reflector. Steffi was kind enough to woman the reflector (which made the squint­ing worse, but I needed all the fill light I could get). The two flash guns I have were moun­ted on the tri­pods, set to 100% power (their are GN 56 and 58) and wire­less trig­ger­ing. Unfor­tu­nately I don’t have radio trig­gers, so I had to go the much less reli­able route of optical trig­ger­ing. Yeah, in bright sun­shine. Thank­fully, the flashes did sur­pris­ingly well and they had a trig­ger­ing rate of I’d say over 80%. Again, not great, but it had to do.

The setup was the fol­low­ing: I placed the people so that the sun is about 60° to their right; the flash guns and reflector (1m fold-​up golden reflector) where set to come in at the same angle from their left, about 2m away from them, as close as pos­sible without get­ting them in the shots. To get the sky as dark as pos­sible I used a polar­ising fil­ter, which also allowed me to use a fairly large aper­ture. But with aper­ture and expos­ure time fixed (I set it to the shortest pos­sible value to reduce the ambi­ent light impact on the pic­ture) I brought the ISO up until the image was well exposed. Although the flash units were work­ing at their highest set­ting, I still had to bring the ISO up to 1250. Yes, that makes the images a bit more noisy than what I would have liked, but there was not much I could do about that.

I think the end res­ult came out quite nice, I hope the uni will be happy with it. It cer­tainly cost me a few gray hairs…

This is just to make small dis­cov­ery pub­lic (I didn’t find this any­where else). When cre­at­ing books in iPhoto, you can fine tune and edit lay­outs by using com­bin­a­tions of mod­i­fier and arrow keys!

This is great news, you see, because I always used to use trial ver­sions of Aper­ture to be able to cus­tom­ise the lay­out — and gran­ted, you are much more flex­ible this way. But, while there are no more trial ver­sions of Aper­ture, this now be be done (to some extend) in iPhoto:

First: Select the box you want to edit (it will be high­lighted in blue).

Then: Press com­mand + arrow keys to move the object around. Com­mand + option + arrow keys will res­ize the box. If you add in the shift key, the step size will be much lar­ger.

See this quick video demon­stra­tion below:

Why would you wil­fully ruin the war­ranty of a lens? Well, if you’re mad into pan­or­amic pho­to­graphy, that’s just the thing to do.

I’ve stuck for a good while with the Peleng 8mm, but have now upgraded to the Sigma 10mm F2.8 fisheye as I was fed up with remov­ing the lens flares in my images. The 10mm is a very good and still rel­at­ively afford­able lens com­pared to the Peleng (a good bit sharper and vir­tu­ally immune to lens flares). Sadly, it has a fixed lens hood (as it is designed for crop sensors). That means, although the lens pro­duces an image circle that is almost ideal for pan­or­amic pho­to­graphy (on a full frame sensor), the built-​in lens hood blocks cru­cial parts of the image circle — in par­tic­u­lar the areas that, with the cam­era in por­trait mode, cap­ture the ver­tical up– and down areas of the image.

So, some gen­tle­man from Ger­many by the name of Tobias Vollmer has made a small side busi­ness out of pro­fes­sion­ally shav­ing those pesky lens hoods (there are sev­eral lenses that have this “issue”). Here’s his web­site. For a very reas­on­able 50 EUR he’ll do the job — includ­ing the prom­ise that if he acci­dent­ally ruins the lens, he’ll replace it. And, what shall I say, he did a very good job, with a very quick turn around time (less than two weeks, and that’s ship­ping to and from Ire­land). You can see the before and after above.

I’ve also pre­pared two com­par­ison shots to show you the effect of the shav­ing. So, while you get a 180° field of view with the lens before the shave, this only holds true for the diag­onal of the image. After the shave, the 180° area is a good deal lar­ger, but — most cru­cially — includes the zenith and nadir (ver­tical up and down). With the lens shaved, I can again get a full 360×180° pano with as little as 4 shots. Yay!

Also, since the lens is a 10mm lens I get a slightly lar­ger final out­put size, and, as I said, the per-​pixel qual­ity is much bet­ter as the lens is just much sharper everywhere.

On the week­end I got asked by a good friend if I could help digit­ising some large format art­works.

I knew the rough basics of repro­duc­tion pho­to­graphy, so I jumped right into it. Look­ing for a light­ing that is as even as pos­sible, the simplest setup is typ­ic­ally two light sources 45° to the left and right of the camera’s view­ing axis. Of course, since you want the light­ing to be homo­gen­ous, you’d want to use two identical light sources and a per­fectly sym­met­ric setup.

The cam­era itself should be posi­tioned centred and com­pletely par­al­lel to the sub­ject. Since what you are try­ing to pho­to­graph is typ­ic­ally flat, it doesn’t really mat­ter what focal length you use. Hence, if pos­sible, use your best lens at the focal length that it is best at. Close the aper­ture to the best trade-​off between over­all sharp­ness and edge-​to-​edge sharp­ness. If the aper­ture is too large (that’s usu­ally below ƒ/​4) you might get soft corners; if in turn it is too small (usu­ally above ƒ/​11), the over­all image will suf­fer from dif­frac­tion soft­ness.

Here’s an image of the setup that I used, which involved two flash units that I triggered wire­lessly. Since the con­trol /​trig­ger flash pro­duces light in itself (and thus ruins the even­ness) I used a bit of alu­minium foil to block it from shin­ing dir­ectly onto the art­work.

PS: Yes, these are nap­pies sup­port­ing one of the flash units. I only have one bean bag ;-)

Here’s a post which is designed to save me a couple of emails per month, so please bear with me.

I often get asked (usu­ally by people who saw my pan­or­amic pho­to­graphy tutorial videos) if they can use a “reg­u­lar” 8mm or 10mm wide angle lens instead of an 8mm or 10mm fisheye lens (on a cam­era with a 1.5x crop sensor is used) to pro­duce full 360×180° pan­or­a­mas.

The answer is: Of course you can, but you will need to take more images to cover the entire sphere. With both fisheye lenses, you can get away with as little as 4 images to cover everything — with the non-​fisheyes you need a bare min­imum of 12, but more like 16 shots to have cap­tured everything.

Without want­ing to get tech­nical, this has to do with the field of view that both lens types offer (due to the dif­fer­ent pro­jec­tions): The fisheye typ­ic­ally shows you much more than the wide angle since, grossly sim­pli­fied, the fisheye “squeezes” things the more you move away from the cen­ter, whereas the wide angle lens tends to “stretch” things. In terms of num­bers, both fisheyes give you a 180° field of view around the diag­onal. The wide angle lenses in turn only give you 110 – 120°…

Click on the image above to see a quick visual com­par­ison between the dif­fer­ent lenses /​images they pro­duce. Pay par­tic­u­lar atten­tion to what is included and what is not included in the extreme corners.

Lenses used: Peleng 8mm ƒ/3.5 fisheye and Sigma 10mm ƒ/2.8 fisheye on a 1.5x crop sensor, and a Sigma 12-​24mm on full frame sensor (to sim­u­late 8mm/​10mm on crop).

I’d like to quickly report a great cus­tomer ser­vice exper­i­ence.

About 4 years ago, I got myself a PANTONE huey to colour-​calibrate my mon­it­ors. This is par­tic­u­larly import­ant for pho­to­graph­ers as it ensures that your mon­itor accur­ately repro­duces col­ours. It comes in two ver­sion, the reg­u­lar one, and the PRO ver­sion.

Now sadly there was a bit of an issue with mine, and some­times the cal­ib­ra­tion would res­ult in a slightly pink­ish mon­itor image. Only some­times how­ever, and it was rel­at­ively easy to detect. Any­way, I read on some forum that you can write to PANTONE about it, and so I did, about a week ago.

Today UPS dropped off a brand new huey from them… No ques­tions asked, and they even upgraded me to the PRO ver­sion (which costs a good bit more than the reg­u­lar ver­sion I ori­gin­ally pur­chased) for free — not sure if this was a mis­take or inten­tional.

In any case, that’s what I call decent cus­tomer ser­vice, and because they made me so happy, I’m writ­ing about it here.