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 GN56 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.
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 50EUR 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.