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.

Here’s another weee trick that I came up with a couple of years back (but I’m sure other people must have dis­covered this too).

I stated earlier that it’s usu­ally great fun to use wide angle lenses to pho­to­graph your little ones. It requires you to get in really close (oth­er­wise the kid would be lost in the image) which in turn gives a great sense of “par­ti­cip­a­tion” or “imme­di­acy” poten­tially lead­ing to some cap­tiv­at­ing shots.

But there’s a prob­lem: The corners of the image get stretched the more wide angle you go. This can lead to some rather unap­peal­ing dis­tor­tions the fur­ther your sub­ject (or parts of your sub­ject) is away from the image centre. Have a look at this image for instance, which is the uned­ited ver­sion of the pic­ture shown above. Yuk!

That said, fret not, there is a fix: The fisheye /​bar­rel dis­tor­tion. In LightRoom/​Camera RAW just go to the lens cor­rec­tion sec­tion and play with some neg­at­ive val­ues in the “Dis­tor­tion” field (in the manual tab). For instance, in the image at the top, I used –60 — and I think it looks much bet­ter than the ori­ginal! If you didn’t shoot raw, you can still do this in Pho­toshop using the built-​in Lens Cor­rec­tion plu­gin, or, altern­at­ively, fiddle with the “Spher­ize” effect (or whatever it is called in your photo edit­ing soft­ware).

As always, there are some down­sides, mainly two. Fist, you lose some of the wide-​angled-​ness (again, com­pare the above shot with the ori­ginal), and it’s a ques­tion of taste whether the arti­fi­cially intro­duced dis­tor­tion is accept­able (this is not very obvi­ous here, but it will be much more notice­able when you have straight lines in the image).

Here’s part 5 (of 5, but there’ll be at least one more soon) of my little pan­or­amic pho­to­graphy tutorial series. I’m show­ing two tech­niques how to edit the ver­tical down view, or “nadir”. You mostly need this to remove the tri­pod from your image, or when you have some unwanted lens flare in the image (espe­cially when using the Peleng).

Here’s a trick that I heard about a couple of years back and that I use every now and then.

Have you ever had a nice “keeper” image but that was ever so slightly out of focus? If you took it without using a flash and if there are some eyes in the image, here’s what you could try.

To make the image appear a bit sharper (this is going to be really dodgy…) add a small white dot just above each pupil of the main subject’s eyes, imit­at­ing what you would see if you had used a flash in the image. In Light­Room for instance, use the local adjust­ments tool, choose a very small brush size and set the expos­ure to +3EV. Then zoom all the way into the eyes and try hard to make out the reflec­tion of the per­son with the cam­era. Then add a bright dot right there.

The reason for that is that you’re try­ing to loc­ate a com­mon reflec­tion in both eyes in order to make your hack look more real­istic (care­ful, our brains are extremely good at detect­ing any manip­u­la­tions in the face, and in par­tic­u­lar the eyes).

Clearly, this hack only really works if you’re not aware of it. So if you look at Sophie’s image real close, you will see that it is not 100% in focus — but only because you just read this post ;-)