Flickr meet, April 25 April 27, 2008
Posted by tcbp in : Photography , 1 comment so farThe Rochester Flickr group had a get-together on the roof of one of the member’s apartment building Friday night. It was good timing as the Rochester Red Wings were playing and there are fireworks after the game. Rather small turnout for whatever reason, but it was still a fun time and a nice location too.
The Red Wings lost but the fireworks were still pretty good.
-
- Watching the game.
-
- Fireworks after the game.
software updated
Posted by tcbp in : Blog Admin , add a commentUpdated to Wordpress 2.5.1 today. Uneventful as usual.
New line of “DGO” bags coming in the future April 22, 2008
Posted by tcbp in : News & Rumors , add a comment
My friend Dan has been working on developing a line of bags for the past month or so. At the moment there are several types of bags he’s working on: messenger, camera and some kind of neoprene “quick draw” camera bag as he calls it.
I don’t know the details on what exactly will eventually be available or how much they’ll cost but I expect prices to be reasonable and bags to be available in all manner of shouty colors. I’ll let you know more about when and what as I find out and I hope to be able to put up some detailed reviews of these bags once he’s ready to start getting them out there. All I can tell you now is he’s got some interesting ideas, he’s using great materials, and he’s already got more people wanting bags than he has made to date.
Image stabilization through rapid fire
Posted by tcbp in : Photography , 1 comment so farIf you’re like me, and you don’t own a lens with Image Stabilization, Vibration Reduction or Optical Stabilization (I think I covered all the names out there) and your camera body doesn’t have any anti-shake features built in, you may sometimes find yourself in a tough situation. You’ve already maxed your ISO or don’t want to push it any further, and you’re in a location where you can’t physically or legally set up a tripod or grind your camera in to something hard to steady it. What do you do?
Having developed the habit of walking around with lenses that nobody in their right mind would consider walk-around lenses like my 90mm TS-E or 100mm macro lenses, I’ve had to come up with some interesting solutions to the hand-shake problem. I use a tripod whenever I can, unless I’m lazy (it happens). The next best thing to a tripod is rubbing the paint off your camera by mushing it in to something steady, like a big tree or the side of a building. Your friend’s head is probably not going to work in this case, unfortunately.
When all those options fail, the best hope for sharp pictures left is to take a lot of them. While that probably seems obvious in a way, the reasoning behind it and method, I think, aren’t as intuitive. The reason I say that is the method that works the best is turning on your motor drive and letting your camera blast away as fast as it will go.
My camera can fire at 8.5fps (so they say) so I set it for this maximum speed and prepare myself. Use your best hand-holding technique and body posture and steady yourself. As soon as you’re ready, roll your finger in to the shutter button as gently as you can. I usually let my camera fire for about a second (7-10 frames usually go by) and release the shutter button by rolling my finger off of it.
What I usually find is that the first and last shots are garbage; but somewhere in the middle, after the shake from pushing the button and before the often inevitable shake from anticipating the release of the shutter button, there is at least one sharp frame. As a result, using the motor drive works better than just firing a whole bunch of separate shots because you can just focus on staying still while shooting rather than pushing the shutter button. If you shoot JPG (shame on you) or RAW (compressed, losslessly of course) it’s quite easy to identify the sharpest frame: it’s the one with the largest file size. Hopefully you haven’t drifted so far off course that your composition has suffered; a common side effect of exhaustion, cold, or really strange shooting angles.
I figure it’s best to show some examples of this in practice. Some of these turned out better than others, as you’ll see:
100% view, 100mm lens, 1.3x sensor crop, 1/60th second hand held
The image above isn’t pushing this technique too far. Following the old rule of thumb, you want to shoot at 1/focal length as your shutter speed. Since many people consider the crop of their sensor in determining that you’d want to shoot at the reciprocal of your focal length times the FOV crop. In either case that means I should shoot at 1/100 or roughly 1/130 respectively. Instead this was shot at 1/60th hand-held on a rather cold day. Since this was the first shot in the sequence I probably could have gotten away with acceptable results without the motor drive, but whenever I’m in questionable territory I let it run anyway.
100% view, 90mm lens, 1.3x sensor crop, 1/30th second hand held
For this shot I believe I was leaning against the wall, and relying on the motor drive, to ensure a sharp shot. In spite of the shallow DOF the area in focus is sharp.
100% view, 90mm lens, 1.3x crop, 1/15th second hand held
Finally, pushing the concept entirely too far, this was shot kneeling on the ground aiming up at the ceiling with the camera balancing on my face and hands. I believe some of this softness is due to poor focus. The light was low, I was at a large aperture and although I had the lens tilted to try to get the plane of focus to fall on the ceiling, it was very hard to judge in the low lighting.
Give this a shot if you have a camera with reasonable frame rate. I imagine if you’ve got at least 5 or 6fps this can work fairly well for you.
100% view, 100mm lens, 1.3x sensor crop, 1/15 second hand held
First frame of burst on on the left, last on the right.
The above image(s) were quickly shot while I was sitting in my chair just a few moments ago as an illustration of how this works. Like the rest of the 100% view images, no sharpening was applied to this. The camera was set for 8.5fps and I fired a four frame burst. At 1/15th second the framerate isn’t really 8.5fps so I think if you’ve got 5 or 6 fps this will still work. This method obviously doesn’t always work, and it’s not without its flaws, but it does come in handy at times.
Here are the sharpened 800 pixel full originals for the first three 100% view crops shown:
Time to find a drum scanner April 15, 2008
Posted by tcbp in : Photography , 1 comment so farI’ve been looking at some older work and found a few film shots that would probably benefit from re-scanning should I decide they’re worth it. The current most likely candidate to get that treatment is a medium format shot from my first attempt at shooting star trails. I’ve always been attached to those shots (probably because they’re my first star trails), and this one from my Yashicamat for whatever reason has always appealed to me. It came out much darker than intended, especially when compared to a similar shot from my 35mm camera that was set up on a tripod next to it had identical film speed and aperture settings. I can only assume it’s either funky reciprocity failure behavior or a sticky aperture knob that didn’t do what I wanted.
Either way, the darkness works, the colors in the star trails are distinct but subtle and the background color in the sky is very warm. Unfortunately a Flextight scanner (848 or 868 model I think) really doesn’t dig in to the shadows well enough without introducing a lot of unwanted noise in this case, so I think a drum scan is the only real option to get this to appear its best.
Back to Mendon Ponds April 14, 2008
Posted by tcbp in : Color Vision, Photography , 1 comment so farSomehow I convinced my friends to join me down to Mendon Ponds yesterday to go for a hike and take some photos. We parked and hiked in a little bit and found some interesting things to shoot, mostly just taking advantage of the nice light from the setting sun. Eventually we decided that it was getting too dark and too chilly to stay there much longer, but I think we were also just running dry creatively for whatever reason.
-
- Reflection
-
- Barn Silhouette
-
- Reeds & Sky
I found the barn silhouette interesting. Not my favorite of the bunch but I thought the sky was intense enough to include. Reflection is, by far, my favorite. I have struggled with the colors though as I’m not sure if the reeds are too yellowish or too reddish or too something. Half the problem is I don’t know if they’re too saturated, the other half is I don’t know if they’re the wrong color. Oh well! I like how their warmth and brightness plays off against the cool darker water.
I like the one so creatively named “reeds & sky” but I’d like it better without that shadow. Unfortunately there was a tree behind me and I just didn’t notice the shadow when I was shooting. If I had I would have recomposed to try to remove it from the frame if I could.
Wandering the Village Gate April 13, 2008
Posted by tcbp in : Photography , add a commentWent to dinner with my friend Joe somewhere at the Village Gate and went upstairs to takes some photos. Unfortunately it seems a lot of the light upstairs disappeared while we were eating, I guess those skylights were doing more than I originally though. Still, it was an interesting space and probably worth exploring again sometime. I only brought my 90mm Tilt-shift in with me so I played around with that a bit.
-
- Light through a screen.
-
- March 12 PAD
Comments on the images can be found by clicking through. All-in-all an interesting little shoot with that lens, got to put its key features to use a bit.
Abandoned BJs April 3, 2008
Posted by tcbp in : Photography , add a commentThe local BJs moved to a new location which is only probably 1/8th of a mile away as the crow flies from its original spot. I have no idea why they moved, but it at least leaves a big empty building which seems to have become a target for graffiti.
-
- Bite Me
-
- Blank Walls = Blank Minds 2
-
- Blank Walls = Blank Minds
-
- Pipes on the Wall
I also stumbled across an interesting looking little junkyard behind the BJs which I think goes quite a ways to a garage on a nearby street. Might wander back there again someday for a better look.
Also, as you can see I’m trying the new Wordpress 2.5 gallery thing. I’m not exactly sure why it’s staggered like that or how it can be fixed to not mess up the arrangement of the pictures. I’ll have to look in to that, but perhaps the thumbnails are too big or something.
Updated to 2.5
Posted by tcbp in : Blog Admin , add a commentJust updated Wordpress to version 2.5 today. Looks good so far but I’m still lost as I wander the dashboard.
Hopefully there won’t be any issues!