Weblog
September 30th, 2007
Unfortunately, I’m not as fortunate as wedding photographer Cliff Mautner who recently had the chance to use the upcoming Nikon D3. His first impressions are glowing to say the least. I mean, just look at how many exclamation points he put in the title of his post!
Cliff’s brief review of the Nikon D3 makes the camera sound very promising. Wouldn’t it be nice to wake up to one of these under the Christmas tree?
March 29th, 2007
Finally. It took more than a month, but we finally have an Internet connection here at the apartment. No more procrastinating on emails for me!
And that means that I have spent the last little while indulging in some reading of a few of my oft-visited sites. Here’s a roundup of a few things I’ve found:
First, a couple articles from John Harrington has a couple of worthwhile articles to be found at his photo business blog. First of note is this article on the importance of valuing your own work. As photographers, we work hard and invest a lot of time and money to create images. We should be compensated properly for that (and no, 50 cents or a byline is not sufficient compensation).
On a related note, he also has an article on the value of post-production work that details the time and investment made in making those captured images look that much better.
Continuing on the photo business theme, Dan Heller has written an article that is a good starting point for negotiating prices for your photos which focuses on establishing the rights both the photographer and the client has to use the images.
On a non-business-related theme, this page gives some interesting trivia about the resolution of eyes and just how many megapixels would equal if they happened to be made of digital sensors.
And lastly, I’ll throw in a little travel article here to balance out the travel and photography sides of this site. gadling.com has an article about five ways not to get ripped off while travelling. Most of it is common sense stuff, but a lot of people seem to forget some of them anyway.
Regarding the point that you should keep your personal gadgets hidden, I met girl in Thailand who had an interesting solution to this difficulty: she had covered her camera in stickers that had gradually started to wear off. The thing looked like a piece of junk, but it was actually a decent little digital camera. If you can bear to do that to your equipment, that’s one way to keep your gear hidden in plain view.
July 10th, 2006
For most of my time in Bangkok, I’ve been lamenting the less-than-perfect weather and lighting conditions. Two days ago, however, the clouds dissipated and blue skies dominated the air above. Shocked at this fortuitous development, I grabbed a camera, stuffed it into my smaller bag and took it hunting.
I headed towards the vast open park of Sanam Luang that happened to be surrounded by tents where Buddhist monks and worshippers were performing rituals and, well, watching TV. The festive atmosphere extended into the park where more worshippers could be found circling what looked like a temporary shrine. But of more interest to me on was the large number of people flying kites in the windy air.
Adults and kids craned their heads to the skies where dozens of kites danced in the blue skies. Vendors had kites staked down so the ground was covered in colourful streamers. Families sat on mats on the grass and happily watched the ballet above them. It was a great scene.
I didn’t hesitate to bring out my camera. But when I raised it to my eye, composed my first shot, then hit the shutter, I heard a click. That’s all fine and good, but really I should have heard two clicks. The first is the mirror flipping up, the second should have been the mirror flipping back down.
Ever since shooting the water fights of Songkran, the Thai New Year festival, this camera hasn’t been itself. This issue with the mirror sticking up has happened before. Once it has flipped up, I can press the shutter again and it will flip back down (with no image recorded of course). And after a couple times, functionality went back to normal. I could take pictures without a problem. It was like it just needed to warm up.
But no amount of warming up could get my camera going under the kites. It was over thirty degrees out after all. I clicked and clicked, but it just wouldn’t do what it was told. Disheartened I returned to my room, dropped off my defective gear and went to the Internet cafe to search for camera repair shops here in Bangkok.
The next day, the plan was to go out to the shop and see about putting things right inside my camera. The one thing I was worried about was that the shop might be closed – they didn’t list hours on their site and it was, after all, a Sunday. But, I thought I might get lucky. Wrong. Not only was it a Sunday, but I found out later that it was also a national holiday here – there was no chance it was going to be open.
I eventually found my way back to my room where, undaunted by an irritating previous 24 hours, I willed the skies to stay blue. I summoned all the kite fliers back to the park. And with my other camera (yes folks, take a backup!) I headed back to the park where I had a lovely time shooting everyone who once again had their heads happily craned to the skies.
June 20th, 2006
Though consumers can’t expect to see this kind of resolution in their cameras anytime soon, the new 111 megapixel sensor developed by DALSA Semiconductor lets the imagination run wild for photo enthusiasts. It’s the first digital photo sensor to break the 100 million pixel barrier and will ultimately be used for mapping the motions and locations of celestial objects.
The sensor is approximately four inches by four inches, so no amount of cramming will get it into today’s DSLRs. Besides, the power of the computer you would need to process the images is well beyond most people’s means. I think my powerbook might choke to death if I tried to manipulate a 10,560 x 10,560 pixel image in PhotoShop.
June 15th, 2006
Six photographers in California are poised to set two new world records: the world’s largest photograph and the world’s largest camera. Constructed using an air hangar, this gargantuan pinhole camera will be used to produce a panoramic image of the landscape on the outside of the hangar.
The photographers are using a nearly 31-by-111 foot piece of white fabric covered in 20 gallons of light-sensitive emulsion as the “negative.”
I’m genuinely curious to see how the photo will look when completed. It will take ten days for the exposure to be completed, so the results will surely be unique for more than just their size.
June 11th, 2006
A lot of new buyers of Digital SLRs are surprised to learn that the sensor on their camera can become the home to irritating dust particles that will pollute images.
If moving from a film SLR to digital, people sometimes wonder why they never had to clean their film camera with such regularity. The simple reason is because with each new photo, you are working with a new ’sensor’ as the film advances. Combine this with the fact that there is no static electricity roaming around the film plane and you generally don’t have to worry about dust showing up in photos.
Owners of compact digital cameras may be similarly irked by the dust problem inherent to DSLRs. But what these potentially-perplexed new DSLR owners forget is that there is little chance for dust to enter the compact, sealed up digital cameras. With the ability to switch lenses comes the potential for the sensor to be exposed to the dusty outside world.
Happily, there are ways of managing your sensor’s exposure to dust and methods of cleaning it when you do have the problem. Michelle Jones’s article on dust management will help you shoot spotless images.
June 8th, 2006
I don’t plan on making a habit of announcing too many new cameras on this blog, but this one caught my eye. The Olympus Stylus 720 SW stands out mainly because it’s waterproof to ten feet and has and it’s shock resistant (supposedly it can withstand drops from up to five feet).
This has mostly caught my eye due to my recent experience at the world’s largest water fight: The Thai New Year festival of Songkran. It would have been such a relief to not worry about every bucket of water thrown in my direction as I was shooting the incredibly fun water fights on the streets of Chiang Mai. Both my cameras managed to weather the storms, but not without causing me a fair amount of stress in the meantime. To have been able to walk into the middle of the fray and shoot with impunity would surely have made for some good shots.
But even without a water proof camera, I think I did okay. See for yourself and check out my photos of the Songkran water fights.
June 8th, 2006
The Luminous Landscape has a brief, but good article about taking control of the auto settings in Adobe Camera Raw.
I use this trick myself. While I sometimes use the automatic settings as a starting point for processing my images, I find it helpful to begin the process with the image as it appeared in the camera. Once you have changed your defaults so that no adjustments are initially made, it is a quick press of Command/Control + U and you can see the automatic conversion. Going the other way involves a few more button presses.
And like Michael Reichmann notes in the article, it is often the case that the automatic adjustments flatten bracketed exposures into separate images that all look the same. It’s much simpler to view these images initially in their original state than it is to have to uncheck all the boxes that have been adjusted by the auto processing.
June 6th, 2006
Sony today announced its first contribution to the DSLR battle with the DSLR-A100. The camera boasts a 10 megapixel sensor, image stabilization built into the body, sensor dust reduction and hardware-based dynamic range optimization.
Digital Photography Review has a hands on preview of the new offering with a detailed feature set and photos of the camera’s parts.
Digital Camera Resource Page also has a detailed preview with full images of the camera and their account of using the camera.
June 5th, 2006
Photographyblog.com has a roundup of their picks for the best cameras in each consumer class that’s worth a look if your planning on doing some shopping.
The Small Object has a step-by-step guide on how to measure and cut a matte. A good do-it-yourself guide for photographers and artists.
World War I Color Photos is an interesting collection of very early colour photography. From the site: “Although color photography was around prior to 1903, the Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis, patented the process in 1903 and developed the first color film in 1907. The French army was the primary source of color photos during the course of World War One.”
And lastly, something ridiculous: a Flickr set of squirrels with cameras. No these aren’t just run-of-the-mill photos of cute backyard rodents, these critters appear to be amateur shutterbugs.
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