Looking back to help you go forwards

It's time for the typical reflective look at the year and a look to the future. For me it's been a year of many changes, I was taking time over the Christmas break 2007 when I was pointed in the direction of Mark Briggs' Journalism 2.0 a PDF, information about the internet in a 2.0 type world. The page I found it on was www.kcnn.org/resources/journalism_20_pdfs/, you can also find information about the book on Mark's blog.
This holiday period was also the first time that I bought music on the back of hearing it as backing music to a bloggers videos. Feist's album The Reminder and Frou Frou's Details were the start, later in the year Everyday Jones after the video from David Tejada - thanks for opening my ears aswell as my eyes.

The Journalism 2.0 book seemed to connect with something in my brain and I then went on a google fest to get more information on blogging, rss and other such topics. It wasn't until June that this blog came into being, but it's been an interesting few months since it has.

I've been working to improve my own photo skills and that's meant diversions in the directions of some great photo oriented blogs and some that aren't photo related. Thanks to all the bloggers who've provided great free content to help me learn. Strange input came from Garth Carr's Presentation Zen and also a font blog!

I discovered that my photo club Imagez had suddenly turned in to a place with loads of great photographers who were all creative, and were producing stunning images. As a club Imagez had gone on a three year recruitment drive by offering photography courses for the same cost as membership of the club. Club members got the option to go on the courses free, course attendees were welcome to join the club for free. A fantastic approach, arguably marketing the same thing differently to different people. However when it comes to competitions I'm still trying to work out how to improve my pictures.

I also became a flickr user and was keen to see how people are using the medium to share their work. One Icelandic photographer with a passion for night time landscapes in Iceland was the start, then like many others Miss Aniela and finally the story of Aaron and Rosie. I managed to catch up with a photographer I'd met some years ago through flickr too. Thanks Peter for the stunning shot of Agnes that became my new computer wallpaper.

In my own work I've felt that I've reached a milestone, with some nice sales of several images. Not enough to give up work and become a full time photographer, but an option for a new lens or two [the curse of the amateur; more gear = better pictures]. I also started to realise that a lot of what I was missing in my pictures was related to widening my horizons. I wrote a post in the summer about this and my trial with the Canon EF 20mm f/2.8 USM lens. End result was some great pre-planned photos whilst on holiday - almost a first for me to really research a location and see how other people had shot it. Thank you to all the flickr users who posted images with the Sandymouth tag.

I also had several great opportunities to share my little knowledge of photography and Canon's EOS cameras, and I got a really good buzz from these activities. I must have finally got the point that sharing my knowledge with others was the important thing for me.

Canon and Nikon both had something new in DSLR - VIDEO and in Canon's EOS 5D Mark II Full 1920 x 1080 High Definition video. Vincent Laforet caused a whole lot of head scratching at Canon, boy did that cause some trouble for the internet providers as suddenly thousands of photographers wanted to see high definition video on the web. Where do you host that kind of stuff, and how do stills photographer struggling to get on the ball with digital and all it's new delights suddenly get video thrown at them too.

Fast forward to late November and in a point of being particularly out of steam mentally I hit on a post on Chase Jarvis' site where he shared a great 80 minutes long video of himself, David 'the Strobist' Hobby and David Nightingale from Cromasia. The three of them summed it up in a panel presentation and Q&A session that had been held at Gulf Photo Plus earlier in 2008. In short, if you share for the reason of sharing to help others then it will have it's own rewards and they are not all monetary. Chase gets free hiking boots!


And so to 2009...
more blogging - time to contribute my bit to the world, see you there

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Twas the night before the night before Christmas eve

Sometimes you can just wing it and leave things to the last minute, sometimes you can't. Having been shopping for Christmas presents this afternoon I can tell you that quite a lot of folks are waiting a lot later to get their presents. Me, i'm still looking for the inspiration to move from a lack of ideas as to what to buy the family, to a bunch of wrapped presents in the next 36 hours...

At least I can rest assured that the strobist has helped us all out with some simply holiday lighting tips - reposted from last year. I take this one step further, and use E-TTL to manage the flashes, put them both in group A and shoot plenty. It worked last year just fine with the flashes stood on their little plastic stands balanced on the side of book cases or the top of the TV.

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This recession it's biting harder

Scary news for motor sport fans, and world rally fans in particular; Suzuki and now Subaru have pulled out of the WRC for 2009. All this follows on the heels of the Honda team exit from F1. I'm wondering where to get my motorsport fix in 2009 already. I'm looking to have a go at the Honda sponsored four stroke powerboat races for something different to photograph.

On a more practical note for me, and I'm sure many others, my employers have elected to delay our annual pay increase that's due in January. Now it'll be reviewed again in April to see if we get one, and from what I hear the company is struggling with a new kind of "no profit and some losses" account that used to be called the P&L account. Strange when the parent company overseas has recently talked about a pile of money it's holding back for when the recovery starts; a kind of business kick start fund. All the while the utility companies are looking at my small pile of cash and thinking it would be better added to their larger pile of cash.

So how to get out of the bleak state of mind and economy. Digital photography is free once you've bought the camera. More product photography skills when new products need pictures after the recession might not be a bad idea, and the practice could take your mind off all the doomongers on tv.

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Christmas, a time for children

Anyone else notice that it's Christmas time again. I'm no scrooge and bah humbug merchant, but as December rolls round the concern for what can I get people for Christmas and how much will it all cost comes to mind. It seems that for some the option of a portrait of the kids is also an idea, usually the request comes on the back of a set of school pictures from November where the results didn't meet the expectations. One thing I've noticed in recent months is a trend - almost a complete conversion - to a more lifestyle type of photos in schools. Gone are the typical sit here, look this way, smile... next type of shots. In are white backgrounds, lying on the floor, socks off commercial portraiture. Of course when there's more than one sibbling then it gets more difficult.

So the request came, can you shoot the three kids as the school photo didn't make the grade. Seizing the opportunity to work for free and practise some of the strobist techniques from that seminar a few weeks ago, life couldn't be better. On balance knocking over a speedlite that is stood on the floor already is a safer option than the big octobanks I've used in previous times. For this set up the key is getting three expressions looking good on three children whilst all of them are looking to the camera; parents like to see their kids faces. So that often means simple light that covers a multitude of places and positions.

Here a single shoot through umbrella was used high and camera left about 45 degrees. A white nylon 'shower curtain material' background was set up behind the children and then a Speedlite set on the floor pointing at the white wall behind the shower curtain. Taking the test shot told me that there was no chance of using the ambient to get the background white and have a shutter speed fast enough to freeze kids! So forgoing the ambient and relying on two battery powered flashes we started. Camera on manual, flashes in E-TTL, 580EX on the camera. Flash in brolly set as channel A, 420 behind the curtain as C. ETTL told to control A:B C, making C +2EV using the settings.

Strobism and auto flash - don't tell David Hobby.

I knew that indoors the flash should work, there's enough white walls to bounce the flash signals off and sure enough it all worked fine. I could try and shoot plenty of pics to get the expressions I wanted the parents wanted. In the end I didn't do too bad and only at the last minute before delivering the prints did I decide to photoshop the head of the little girl from one picture on to a group of three shot where the two boys were better.

the results


including one of my faves


Strangely today I've been to my sons nursery nativity and shot video - should be enough video now to last me until the next Christmas play. Just when you think editing is slow with EOS-1Ds Mark III RAW images, along comes video. There's a reason Apple demonstrates on massive MAC Pro computers with multiple processors, buckets of RAM and stripey raided hard disks; that reason is video editing.

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Photo competitions

I've not been having much success in recent photo competitions and I'm wondering if it's my interpretation of the topics or the pictures themselves; could be the judges?

For a competition entitled / themed: food I entered two cat pictures, this one of the lioness licking her lips whilst cleaning the remnants of last nights meal of the bone held in her paws. The picture was well printed and framed in a suitable mount. Not even a sniff of a commended.

Then my second entry is one of my top selling pictures of the year so far. I take it from the fact that I could license it recently for a handsome sum of money that it was a good technically competent picture. Heck maybe it's all down to artistic impression or interpretation.
This is not intended to be a whinge, but I am beginning to wonder if I'm losing a sense of objectiveness about my pictures. I know they are ok technically but I'm wondering if the typical amateur trait of entering the pictures you like (sentimental value, personal faves) rather than the ones that are well shot and fit the brief is the key here. Could also be a hint of laziness, it is too easy to pull a nice shot from the archive and make a well produced entry, but another thing to conceive a shot to fit the project or task at hand. It is at the least food for thought for me.

My brain could also be a bit confused with all the thoughts of strobism and Pocket Wizards that's currently uppermost. It seems like the recent VAT drops in the UK was the kick to the dealers to reprice stuff and factor in that the good old English pound doesn't buy as many dollars as it used to so the price goes up with the combination of the VAT cut and the exchange rate change. I know there's the alternatives like the "poverty wizards" but I'm always one for doing the thing right or not at all, and if that means some validated expenditure only my wallet suffers.

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Look out there's a strobist about

Yesterday was strobist day in London. My chance to finally meet David Hobby and around forty other photographers for a seminar about small off camera flash lighting. Unfortunately it turned out not to be the mega picture opportunity I'd hoped for but I did learn some really good things about how close you can and indeed may need to be with umbrellas, plus the value of gobos in pictures.

David's style is that of an amazing storyteller and entertainer, from the shorts & t-shirt wearing (it was 2 degrees celsius) to the story of flash being just a way to fix problems with photos it all adds up to quite a show. I must say I thought we'd see a bit more practical stuff but actually the shooting part was fairly limited; we must have asked too many questions and eaten all the time up with talk instead of demonstration. Not helped when the venue staff wanted to get us out on time!

Should you go to a strobist seminar? Yes, this small flash lighting is the best thing since digital cameras. It's accessible for all photographers, portable and usable in a wealth of photographic situations. You need to want to think about pictures much more creatively. It's worth reading his lighting 101 and also maybe the light science and magic book.

Is David a good presenter? Yes, he's entertaining he knows his stuff and he can teach something to all levels of photographers.

Would I go again? Maybe, i'd prefer to have the chance to shoot with him, maybe on a group shoot or similar.

Do I need loads of expensive equipment? Not yet, but when you add the cost up then three or more Speedlite flashes, some stands, some radio triggers, some umbrellas, some grids/honeycombs, grips, clamps, bungees will cost a reasonable chunk. But as David says you already bought the real expensive bit the camera and the lens.

What camera is best for strobist work? Pretty much anything that has a way to trigger off camera flashes and has a full manual mode where you can control the shutter speed, aperture and ISO settings.

So there you have it strobist in a nutshell, in my view worth the money, and the opportunity to spend some time with other like minded photographers is always good in what can be a solitary profession or passion.

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Finnish Independence Day

Today is a national holiday in Finland as they celebrate Finnish Independence Day. 6th December was the date in 1917 that Finland declared independence from the Russian empire. It was not until 1919 that the Finns first celebrated their independence day.

In the early days of independence the Finns had a solemn approach to independence, though more recently the festivities have got a little more lively with a lot of blue and white themed gifts and cakes.

For me it's a day to remember my great friends the founders of J&J Rally Tours, my own very special rally tour guide operators, who have helped me to experience the highly enjoyable Neste Rally Finland for the last eight years and also teach me a little about the Finnish approach to life and nature. The language still evades me though.

It's time to break out the Koskenkorva and enjoy a few shots, you don't know what you're missing until it's your time to go and find the bottle of Koskenkorva that's been waiting for you in the woodshed. A quick shot and take some wood back to stoke up the sauna, a traditional Finnish experience best enjoyed with good friends and good spirits.

One of my personal favourite pictures of this year was this early morning shot of the sunrise on the lake that I posted on the post back in August when I was last in this great country.

Long ago one of my Finnish colleagues explained the word sisu as meaning spirit or guts, but I realise that for many Finns it's actually a complete mindset. To me sisu is a word that encapsulates the Finnish spirt. It's similar to the who dare wins approach but more about getting things to work or happen regardless, almost in spite of, how many obstacles are put in the way.

Time for a true Finnish story...

A Swedish archeologist starts to dig in the ground, and after digging to a depth of 10 metres he finds copper and concludes that the Swedes had a fixed line telephone service 20 years ago.
A Norwegian archeologist hears about the Swedish discovery and starts to dig, at 20 mters he finds shreds of glass and determines that 40 years ago Norwegians had a fibre optic based telephone system.
The Finnish archeologist hears about the news from Norway and Sweden and starts digging, but at 150 metres underground he's not found any indication of copper or glass and so concludes that before any other civilisation the Finns had implemented a mobile telephony system that didn't need copper wires or fibre optic cables!

So from me to all my friends, colleagues and readers in Finland, Happy Finnish Independence Day.

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Is it a bird.... is it a plane?

No it's the Canon EOS 5d Mark II flying.

It's been a long time since a camera has captured the imagination like the EOS 5D Mark II. I'm constantly surprised at the lengths people go to with videos of their cats and I'm getting a little tired of only seeing videos shot at night. So today I found this incredible daylight footage from the EOS 5D Mark II.

This is shot with the camera in a model helicopter by aerialpan on youtube.



Quite amazing to see the parts with the fish-eye lens, you can see the skids of the helicopter in the frame. Brings home the message of full frame I guess.

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three more sleeps...

Three more sleeps and it'll be Sunday, then I can go and sit in a class room at ULU to enjoy the up close and personal Strobist show. I got one of the 40 places on David Hobby's quick trip to London to help us learn to light better. Maybe to call David the bringer of light is a bit much, but he certainly knows how to get it in to the important places - pictures. If you see a guy walking around London in shorts in the rain wind and other rough weather we have and he's carrying lots of camera bags that'll most likely be the strobist himself.

If you missed to get a place, then you could catch the man himself at the flash center in London on Monday 8th December. Though most likely it could be interesting place to be, I really think you may get to meet Drew Gardner too.

I'll try and get some pictures up next week.

Engage random song generator, Typically Tropical - Barbados

Ladies and gentlemen this is Captain Tobias Willcock
Welcoming you aboard Coconut Airways Flight 372 to Bridgetown Barbados London Strobist town.
We will be flying at a height 32.000 feet and at an air speed of approximately 600 miles per hour the speed of light.
Refreshments will be served after take-off.
Kindly fasten you safety belts and refrain from smoking strobing until the aircraft is airborne.

Woh
I'm going to Barbados London
woh
backa to the palm trees.
Woh
I'm going to see my girl friend the Strobist
Woh
in the sunny Caribean sea London city.

As you can probably tell i'm better leaving a career in music and songwriting to a few more talented souls.

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Cool thoughts on organisation

Once again blogger seems to have thrown me off on a few minutes of blog reading. I landed on the Loving.Living.Small blog and found a neat article about organising things in a small home office, thought it would also work in families with kids. Sure there's a his 'n hers and theirs calendar, but a set of pegs, maybe on the fridge, would be another way to get things in a simple place.

Making use of something as mundane as some clothes pegs and a marker pen you could organise the week with things to do, bills to pay, shopping to get. Maybe some less mundane fridge magnet pegs or clips could be the ideal family version.

With only a handful of days to get all the remaining stuff done before Christmas I'm sure we can all do with some helpful organisation tips.

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Christmas is coming - break out the badgers

weebls stuff - a grand diversion from some time ago - has the old but excellent advent calendar. If you can't wait you can click all the way through the days.

weebls stuff was something I was first sent prior to a trip to Kenya on safari. Weebl and Bob did probably the most excellent Kenya cartoon ever and boy is it catchy (drives you insane).

Then after the Kenya original, the live version, the Lapland variant and finally the Norwegian reply to Kenya.

So how about the badgers... here they started dancing, playing football for Euro 2004 and finally dressed in Santa wear.

Badgers Badgers Badgers Badgers Badass Badgers Badgers Badgers Badgers

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Chase Jarvis, David Hobby and David Nightingale spill the web secret

If you don't stop by Chase Jarvis blog regularly then maybe you should. He's a cool photographer but of late he's mixed it with philosophy and now one of the coolest videos I've seen in a long time. Ok the video quality is not great, but think of it more as an audio podcast and just listen to 80 minutes of Chase, David Hobby (the strobist himself) and David Nightingale (Chromasia) discussing life as a "blogtographer" and where they think the world is going for sharing the ideas out. You could call this video the web marketing 101 text book, but I think it's more the web community text book.

Thanks you guys this is just what I need to hear.

The visitors will read this in 30 posts time when it'll be everywhere else - at least I got it whilst it was still warm.

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I hate telemarketing from carphone warehouse and AOL

Today Carphone Warehouse / AOL called me at my home offering me services I didn't want and requested a heap of personal details from me. Unsurprisingly I didn't give them any details, but I did give them a little lesson in making their day a lot worse. After spending some time talking to "Lynne" who claimed to be calling from a London office of AOL she committed the sin of customer cold calling - she called me a liar, claiming that her experience in the communications industry supported her claim that "no one else will beat this deal", at this point the blood boils and it's time for some efforts to waste their time just like they are wasting mine.

My approach, ask for the registered address of the company doing the calling and the company they are calling on behalf of. Tell them that this is so you have the correct details to lodge a complaint with the relevant authorities.

Second ask for the name and operator number or employee number of the person calling. If they refuse; ask to speak to their supervisor.
They want information from you to sell you a product, you should know who is selling the product and what the product is. I also like to know the companies who follow this practice of cold calls in the evening when all I want is a cup of tea.

So by now the operator is so far off their script that they realise that it's time to speak to their manager or supervisor. Tonight I got put through to "Adam" who after some questioning from me said he was in South Africa, and informed me that even though he was paid monthly for his work he didn't know the name of the company he was working for or the business they were involved in. In fact after a further five minutes of requesting information on the name of the company he was representing and the registered office address of the company he decided to end the call.

So Mr Carphone Warehouse / AOL I don't want your broadband deal, you have no products that I have ever owned yet you think that you can sell me a better deal than the ones I currently have. Strange that when you consider that none of the deals on your website match the requirements I have for a broadband supplier.

What's more strange is that the Carphone warehouse or AOL is not on the list of registered companies with the telephone preference service - a service designed to protect against breaches of customer requests not to receive telephone marketing. However if you register with TPS then it's illegal for a company to call you for marketing purposes unless you have given them permission to do so.

Some useful links maybe:
Information Commissioner's Office
Ofcom
You can always refer to section 21 of the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003 for more guidance. You can also ask for companies to remove you from their lists under these regulations.

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Standard model release form for free

Free stuff always sounds good, legal stuff for free is usually not worth having as lawyers like money as much as photographers, but thanks to a post on the British Journal of Photography blog I now have a sound legal framework model release and I don't have a legal bill.

You can get your own free download of the form from www.contractstore.com a fine repository of business legal forms. Most cost money, but for a short period the model release is currently free. You might find the photographers terms of business form valuable too though that will cost you.

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Want to shoot wildlife then get a Canon

The Natual History Museum is sponsoring the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition, I was reading some news on the BBC website earlier and they listed the winners of the 2008 competition. It's worth a look as there's some stunning images here, but along with each image is a description of the cameras used. I was surprised to see that of the top five images four were shot with Canon cameras an EOS Rebel XT (EOS 450D in Europe), EOS 400D, EOS 40D and EOS-1Ds Mark II.

I was also pleasantly surprised to see the use of some real world lenses in use, EF-S 10-22mm for the winner, EF 300mm f/4L IS + 1.4x extender for the young wildlife photographer of the year winner and 100mm macro and the ideal wildlife lens the EF 500mm f/4L IS USM.

You can see the images in an exhibition near you in the coming yyear as it tours the UK and other countries. If you like wildlife photography it's got to be almost essential viewing. Find out when and where on the Natural History Museum site here.

Want more? The Guardian newpaper has a gallery of some of the highly commended entries and here three of the five images were taken with Canon cameras. I was wondering if the image of the called Sandpiper congregation, by Arthur Morris, USA is the same Arthur Morris as the www.birdsasart.com one?

At least 2009 competition entries start in January so plenty of time to shoot your cat with a Canon...

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I wonder where it leads to...?

It's been an interesting few weeks since my last post. Life is crazy busy and seems to be on a spiral of ever more busy for the near future - certainly to the end of the year. So it's nice to view a few pictures of old, and maybe apply some new things to them. You may not be able to teach an old dog new tricks, but you can give an old photo an interesting new presentation with some new photoshop techniques.

 

My first effort is an old shot that I made many years ago with a PowerShot S30 digital camera, some 3.2 megapixels of great camera in the days of microdrives, 128MB CF cards and such things. What i've done is to crop the image to the presentation you see, then make duplicate layers of it. For the first I then worked with the channel mixer to give me some contrasty black and white of the reeds and the lake surface - almost like a lith film look. Secondly I punched the blue reflection of the sky with a little of the Scott Kelby 7-point photoshop LAB mode trick. The some judicious blending and here you have an unrepeatable alternative view of what was once a landscape image of some plants on the edge of a lake.

Then for something rather different and using a technique found in a post on the dpreview.com EOS-1D forums. Here the original image has been duped to a new layer and then the photoshop reduce noise filter used with full strength, and zero details preserevd and zero details sharpened. You run this filter 3 or maybe 4 times in succession then sharpen with an unsharp mask using a mid-range 100 amount and 200 radius and say 7-15 threshold. Then I blended the newly adjusted layer in using a hard light and lowered the opacity a bit. A bit more masked levels and a vignette completed the results. Here's the original so called straight image.

I quite like this pictorial look. Art it isn't but I'm really keen to see how it looks in print. I also think the opening image could use a bit of this painterly technique to bring it up from the mere record shot category.

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Preparing for a digital slide competition

My local camera club has been asked to put together it's best images to enter in the regions photo competition. It's a chance for each club in the area to showcase their ability and also to see how they stack up against others. For this year we need digital images that will be projected instead of prints or slides. The standards say 1024 x 768 pixels maximum resolution, JPEG images, sRGB colour profile. Trouble is that makes for a small image with few pixels. Scaling images down for projection is something that needs a bit more than just resize in Photoshop.

Resize in Photoshop will get an image the right size, but when you downsize an image a lot then you also lose detail and sharpness. You also hide noise so it's not all bad.

The next tough part is the contrast, most projectors have quite a high contrast ratio and also a tough approach to shadow detail. A lot of grey and black areas in images tend to be rendered dark grey. In terms of highlights there's also a good chance that your images will blow out the highlights when projected too. It's a bit like putting quite a steep S curve on your images in Photoshop. You can see the effect your self on your images by applying an S-curve and moving the ends of the curve up and down the vertical axes. Something like this one below is an idea of a particularly bad condition projector.

Here I made the input level of 0 give me 20 on the output and the input level of 255 give me 240 on the output as the starting points to cover the restricted range of black and white the projector displays.

So create a curve adjustment layer over your image and call it Projector. It's important that this is a layer since you will need it to be the top layer of any work you do to the file, effectively giving you a preview of how the image may project. From there I often duplicate the background and then use the shadow highlight tool to recover an image to look good with the Projector curve over the top. Turn off the Projector curve layer from time to time to see how the image is looking.

The next part is sharpening, it's important to sharpen the image again compared to what sharpening you may have done on a full resolution image. Remember downsizing the resolution will weaken the sharpening you may have applied before. So now look at the image at 100% on your monitor and sharpen with the unsharp mask some more. Typically amount of 70, radius 0.8 and threshold of 2 is a good place to start but you'll need to adapt this for different images. I also like to do this and then use the fade unsharp mask and select luminosity to try and avoid sharpening colours just edges.

Now let's hope that none of my camera club colleagues read this before the submission deadline

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Apple broke my Windows computer!

Today I have suffered at the hands of Apple on my Windows machine. Something was a bit odd when Adobe Photoshop CS3 started complaining about a licensing issue and needing to re-install. Then Photoshop CS (CS1) randomly wouldn't save a file and locked up big time when trying to browse to another drive.

Strange how it all worked fine yesterday, before I installed the new iTunes update from Apple

Today I've uninstalled iTunes, MobileMe, ipod drivers, apple update, bonjour and now Photoshop loves me enough to remember it's licensed so I can get on with pictures. Then my old and venerable Nero pointed out another issue with the DVD burner that it fixed and required another reboot.

Apple your products are quite nice in general - and I happily use both PC and MAC almost every day - but this is simply sloppy to wipe out your good buddies at Adobe and a heap of my time. Oh and uninstalling Bonjour didn't take the service out either, I needed to rename / delete the C:\Program Files\Bonjour folder.

Dear Steve.Jobs@apple.com,
I suggest you think carefully about your desires to make us all have iTunes and Safari on our Windows PC when all we wanted was QuickTime. Keep pulling stunts like this and you will hurt QuickTime itself.

Some stuff that I found helpful on the road to system repair - thank you kind souls.

• ZDNET
• Forensic Photoshop

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Big cats are back

It's been a great day, I've been to the local Whipsnade Wild Animal Park or zoo for short. I took a limited number of pictures, around eight rolls of film worth, some 250+ shots; hello storage another 5GB to swallow. Even though the lions were doing what they do best, resting, there were some nice pictures to be had and the usual technique of putting the lens up to the glass with a big lens hood on the front lets you shoot as if there is no glass there. Quite a strange thing when the lions are chewing over the bones of some meat and they happen to be around 3 metres away.

Duly refreshed from the day to the zoo I remembered that the TV guide had said Big Cat live was due back TV on BBC1 from Sunday. If you have access to this then watch it for i'm sure you'll find something interesting. I found the website is already active on the BBC page and you can see the scale of the production - as you'd think it's a bit more than a few presenters a film crew or two and some sound engineers. Check out the number of tentss they have at the base camp for this production... http://www.bbc.co.uk/bigcat/video/ and follow the Camp Report 1 - camp tour video.

They have a lion kill on webcam to watch - possibly the first ever capture of this on a webcam. I'm getting the feeling that the TV coverage will be as impressive as ever and make me want to go back to the Masai Mara in Kenya again soon myself.

Ah well back to sorting out the zoo pictures and some imagination for now.


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Post processing

I just found a few more pictures in my archives from earlier this year and posted them in my flickr account, so they can surely be called post processed - about six months post! This cheetah was taken at the Cheetah Rock exhibit at Whipsnade Wild Animal Park (Zoo) when the glass was still immaculately clean. I've been back since and whilst it's still quite clean I think they should start to issue the animals with buckets, squeegees and ladders just to let everyone get this kind of result.

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The great migration

What would a good photographer do right now?

The line above can be found in the Authors@Google talk given by Joe McNally, it's well worth sitting through the hour and ten minutes of stories, though that quote comes in around the hour mark. Joe's approach, I'll do my reshoot now.
You can find the talk here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Av6gCq_awQ

The photo industry has been hit with some strange things this last few weeks - movies coming to digital SLR cameras for one. But tomorrow morning the 2008 edition of photokina opens in the German city of Cologne. The movers, shakers, camera makers and image takers converge for an absolute gear head and imaging extravaganza. You have to big up a show that's so big it takes two years for the industry to recover enough energy to put it on again. It's been few short years since the first digital cameras that the public could buy were shown in photokina, this year Canon's booth in hall 3 will be surely packed with the faithful wanting to touch the EOS 5D Mark II. Is this the start of the great migration to hybrid camera devices? Certainly it's looking like a change is coming and with it the need to build new learning. We don't all need to be video editors, but already many of the press photographers are being asked to 'shoot some video for the website' alongside their still images. Will Adobe suprise and delight with a new CS4 that handles video and still in one application? Will Vincent Laforet or Canon get to show us the video that half the photoworld seems to be talking about?

Tomorrow we'll have the answers.

To close i'll go back to the Joe McNally talk and mention the other thoughts Joe has on The great migration; the transfer of photo techniques and knowledge from the front of the brain to the back ofthe brain. Making aperture and shutter speed settings second nature rather than something that has to be studied or left to the camera is one of the keys to great pictures. Do you know how to instinctively use the key controls of your camera - at least shutter speed, apertute, ISO speed and focus are vital if you want to take control of the pictures.

Thanks to Joe I can now go back and read some more of his book The moment it clicks. I think watching Joe talk for an hour is a good way to prepare for reading.

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Is this a turning point in photo history?

Today Canon has announced the new - long awaited - EOS 5D Mark II. Sure it's got pixels, big displays and all the other things, but it also does video; full HD 1080P video at 30fps. So as many stills photographers are posting on the forums that they don't want video, and it's nothing for them; I'm in the group that thinks video is part of the changing face of photography and publishing that's happening in our lifetimes. Many newspapers are struggling or closing, people turn to the web for the latest news or have it fed to them via many methods. In the past they got the news when it hit the mat at breakfast time as a morning paper. The smart papers already have been developing the stories and their online presence and with online comes the option for moving pictures. I also read the bit of the specifications for the EOS 5D Mark II that says 640 x 480 pixels video is also available - nice and web, youtube, streaming friendly.

Just how many professional reportage photographers and journalists will be thinking; Now I don't need two cameras.

With the ability to publish yourself on the web via blogs and the like, then the ability to shoot video of how you do something, or video of what you do is ever more important. Nikon got Chase Jarvis to shoot for their D90 launch, and he makes some cool video for the photographing masses. Strobist, PocketWizard, Bert Stephani and many others all put video online that their readers lap up. I think video as a feature of SLR cameras is part of the industry change in photography and imaging.

You may disagree, and if that's the case then ISO 25,600 does seem like a hell of a feature for shooting in dark caves.

On the downside 21MP images does make for rapid consumption of hard drive space, processing performance and memory cards.

UPDATE: Here's what I'm talking about, Digital SLR User TV have a hands on posted to youtube, in the future they could have shot this with the EOS 5D Mark II.

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Short term memory glitch - photos found

Isn't it amazing, I'm now wading through a serious amount of pictures from August and that means lots of processing as I shoot RAW unless I pick up a camera that's set to JPEG by mistake. As I file my pictures by shoot date when importing the images to the computer I get folders like 2008-08 and 2008-07 in a 2008 master folder. Just a few days ago I clicked in to the 2008-07 folder instead of the 2008-08 one, and I found some more pictures I hadn't looked at almost since I'd shot them - I told you August was mad. What I found was a real nice selection of shots from my trip to Finland and the colours are also Finnish, blue skies and white sails.

My computer system is also struggling under the photo onslaught. The backup system for my pictures has been upgraded again, a new 500GB drive was called for as a backup to the Netgear ReadyNAS. I'm looking for a new monitor as a thunder fly seems to have crawled in to my monitor and died between the top surface of the screen and the LCD panel beneath. I now have a little black speck on my display always and no amount of photoshop is going to move it. Monitor wise I've been pointed to the Hazro 24inch model by a friend, and now I am struggling to find a way to resist.


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Too much cake is bad for your mental health

Damn you blogger, you send me down some crazy blogs of note diversions sometimes. Cake Wrecks; I had to click that, and what did I find...

You've got to see this, and make sure you have sound.

Kind of fits with my current selection of iTunes shuffling music They Might Be Giants and the eponymous They Might Be Giants track from the Flood album.

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A day at the zoo

A week ago today I took the last opportunity for a day out with the family in school summer holidays. Deciding to travel with a light set of camera kit I opted for an EOS 450D and 70-200mm f/4L IS lens. It was quite refreshing not to have a camera bag to carry; SD cards easily fit in my pockets. It was a great day out the weather was a bit overcast, but warm enough to be t-shirt and shorts. I've been to this zoo many times, and have seen most of the exhibits but the kids were keen as ever.

One thing about Whipsnade is they exercise their elephants by taking them for a daily walk around the park, it's quite a surprise to be walking or driving round and find a line of five or six elephants walking along the roadside towards you. On this trip we had gone towards the penguins when we saw that the elephants were out for their walk just nearby, so penguins forgotten we went to check on the elephants. There were five elephants the littlest an eight month old baby and the biggest being it's mother pictured above. It's quite amazing the size range the little 8 month old one just about waist height on the keepers, the big ones had to be dissuaded from taking the bigger branches out of the trees. However this is a special thing since it's my childrens first time to be so close to an elephant, barely 3 metres in front of them and nothing but air between them. They were enthralled and we simply watched and took some pictures for over 20 minutes while the elephants did some pruning of the trees and pushed some fallen logs around. There's something special about these gentle giants, and being close to them is something I always enjoy in a zoo or in the wilds of Kenya.

Sometimes the little monkeys need their picture taken too... this little statue is outside the monkey house and I know from past visits it's a good spot for some pictures with the kids. Three wise monkeys style has been done in a previous trip, here I went for monkey attitude and added a bit of post processing in photoshop. It's using a tip I picked up from Matt Haines who added it in the comments on this basketball players shoot that was on the strobist blog.

I'm a bit backlogged with photos right now, still working on the ones from my summer holiday, some wedding shots, the rest of the zoo trip and a night out shooting in a shopping center with the local camera club. Photoshop and DPP are going to be busy.


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Worldwide photo wallk - Windsor

I was reading the blog of Scott Kelby and his announced world wide photo walk seemed to be a good idea so I choose to join the Windsor UK walk.

It was a good experience, I've been to the place before so have a bit of an idea about the lie of the land yet I still surprised myself with my pictures. Like many of the photographers the start was a bit shaky... too many swans on the river and bits of railings on bridges. But after waiting around to see a rumoured changing of the guard at Windsor Castle I managed to get some nice shots. The changing of the guard was rescheduled for Tuesday!

As this was my first photowalk I was not sure what to expect. In reality it was a group of photographers all out to walk around and make some nice images. I don't think the group was particularly motivated to be supremely helpful to each other, but the walk leader did get round to us all and make sure we all were getting on with some pictures. At the end many of the photographers seemed to be happy that they had shot some good pics. For myself I was also surprised, my best shots came once I'd almost called it quits on photography and started to return to the rendevous point. I still think i'd join another photowalk in the future.

You can find the images from me and the others on the Windsor walk in the flickr pool here.

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Rally Finland 2008 - pt2 rally cars

Neste Oil Rally Finland is a special event, and this time our intrepid team secured VIP hospitality tickets for the Kakaristo special stage on Saturday. With two passes through the 20.09km stage and timing that meant the first pass was just before lunch and the second in the mid afternoon we could enjoy the rally with a bit of style, good food and beer. Kakaristo is a new stage that is using much of the old favourite Ouninpohja, but driven in the reverse direction.

If you've never been to a Word Rally Championship event before it's important to know that before the cars come through the stage there's several safety vehicles that pass through to make sure the stage is safe for the competitors and spectators. Vehicles includes pickups, rally cars and helicopters all travelling at increased speeds. In the past WRC organisers used to number the cars 000, 00 and 0 to indicate that the cars are coming, now this is gone so you need to be ready and set-up for the sudden arrival of reigning world champion Sebastien Loeb arriving in the Citroen at full speed - no practice passes to get your eye / aim / settings sorted. For the morning stage Kakaristo 1 [SS16] I took a position just past the inside of a 90 degree left.

Kakaristo 1 [SS16]
As described before it's not all simple stuff this rally photography, and I was poorly prepared for the arrival of Sebastien Loeb. ISO was too low and the AF mode was still set to One shot meaning that the metering had locked when the AF locked not when the picture was taken. Quickly I addressed the settings but with only a few minutes between cars you have to wait for the dust to fall, then make the changes. You can also see that there was one of the famous Finnish trees in the middle of my frame - I needed to change my shooting position a little too.

My settings:
I was using the EOS-1D Mark III and EF24-105mm f/4L IS USM lens since it was wide enough to allow me to get the cars in the frame even when they pass only a few metres in front of me. Focus was set to AI Servo, single point AF - usually the center, AF point expansion was turned on for all surrounding 6 points. I used a mix of Av and manual exposure modes - mostly Av. ISO speeds were quite high at ISO 400 or more since being under the trees it was quite dark and with the cars really motoring past quite close to me a high shutter speed was needed even though I was panning with the cars. I also set my Picture Styles to Standard with +2 saturation and +4 sharpening even though I was shooting RAW since this gives nice saturated colours on the cars.

Of the leading cars only Henning Solberg in the Ford missed the junction and had to quickly spin the car round and then make the right hand turn to proceed. This also shows the amount of dust that is typical of dry weather rally Finland stages. You can also see why manual exposure wasn't the answer too; the range of brightness from the junction in full sunlight to the shade under the trees was simply too much for a 1 exposure setting fits all approach.

So with my brain in gear, the camera settings sorted I could concentrate on panning with 100kmh+ cars passing meters in front of me with trees framing them. Sometimes it works sometimes not, but take plenty of pictures since digital film is free and the drivers won't come back to do it again if you miss.


I wasn't happy with my success rates for sharp pictures so upped the ISO to 640 for this shot of Toni Gardemeister in the Suzuki SX4 for a sharper result. I'd reasoned that the cars were not only moving forward but up and down on the surface and I've not mastered the art of panning in two perpendicularly opposed directions at the same time on one picture.

At this point I was thinking time for some different angles, so moved further along the stage to some more open road where the trees would not shade the cars so much. ISO could go down, shutter speed up and the panning could be done with less concern for trees in the way.



By now lunch was calling so time to eat and wait around in the sunshine for Kakaristo 2.

Kakaristo 2 [SS19]

This time I was taking no chances I even took sequences of the course cars coming through the stage to hone the settings. I ended up setting the AF Servo sensitivity to +1 making it more jumpy, but I would have plenty of time to pick up the car in the distance and track it as it comes to me.

After seeing some of the top cars coming through the stage we started to walk along the stage toward the Kakaristo corner where the majority of the spectators were - it was also necessary to go this way to reach the car park. Here we could see the special rally dust on the crowd who'd been standing there all day. Everyone was a uniform shade of grey regardless of the colour of their shirts - it resembled the grey colour of the road too!

Most rally fans are characters, but a few take this to new heights in there 'optimised rally outfits'. For our small group of rally fans it was time for traffic - the queues out of the stage were some of the worst we'd seen in many years. Of course there's many more photos but i'm sure you can see rally cars all over the internet. I'll put some more in my flickr photostream in the coming weeks.

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Rally Finland 2008

Following from my post at the start of the month here's the rest of my trip to Finland now I'm back from summer holidays.


It's my seventh visit to the Finnish Grand Prix as the Neste Oil Rally Finland is sometimes known to the locals. For a nation who enjoy some of the cheapest petrol and best roads in the world (tongue firmly in cheek) it's no surprise that rallying is well supported by both spectators and competitors. The fact that there have only been four non-Scandinavian winners of the rally also point to the unique characteristics of this special rally that all the drivers want to win. Rally Finland is a high speed test of drivers on the limit on gravel road with some of the highest speeds seen all year.



This year my amazing hosts, known to the important few as J&J Rally Tours, enabled me to visit the main rally head quarters in Jyväskylä. Here the cars come back for short periods of running repairs and servicing throughout the day. It's a chance for the many rally fans to see the cars and drivers close-up. Fortunately it rained for a few minutes before the cars came in for the afternoon service making it easier to get a good spot right next to the barrier for those of us hardy enough to brave a little Finnish summer rain.

When the cars come in it gets a bit tough to see them as the mechanics swarm over them fixing and replacing worn parts. I was in front of the the Ford team with Jari Matti Latvala's empty place in front of me, Mikko Hirvonen to the right and Khalid Al Qassimi to the left. In half an hour the mechanics replaced the complete set of dampers on the car, checked the tracking, topped up all the fluids including the driver and co-driver drink bottles, replaced the wheels and tyres, cleaned the windows and replaced the rear valance trim on Mikko Hirvonen's car. I'm sure your local Ford dealer would not charge for thirty minutes labour time to do the same!

Located to the right of the Ford team was the Stobart Ford team, they were the stars of crowd pleasing, as all the drivers and co-drivers came out to the railings to sign autographs and talk with the crowds, the top teams could learn something from this. Stobart's drivers Matthew Wilson and Gigi Galli looked to be relaxed and enjoying their rally. In contrast local hero Mikko Hirvonen just kept in the back of the garage.




On arrival back at the summer cottage, our rally HQ for the weekend, there was a treat in store; crayfish from the lake and some rather good vodka from the freezer to go with it.

The rallying pictures and photo techniques explanation will come in the next post.



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Lakes and trees

Lakes and trees, for me the three words evoke memories of a country I always love to visit - Finland. Maybe the appeal is augmented by the generosity of my great hosts, but I think it's the sheer scale, beauty and space that appeals. Here you can find stillness like few other places I've been to; stillness that lets you hear a duck splashing about on a lake 500m from where you are sitting. The same kind of stillness and peace that it seems is so easily broken just by pressing the shutter on a camera - even before the mirror starts to move.

Ruolahti in the country some two hours drive north of Helsinki is on the shore of Lake Päijänne
Staying in one of the cottages that you can find here: www.lomamokitruolahti.fi

There's lots more to come, don't forget it's the time of the Neste Rally, sometimes called the Finnish Grand Prix, but to many simply the Finnish round of the World Rally Championship so it's time for a visit to one of the key places in rally history - Jyväskylä.

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Photo mayhem on a hill

Sometimes a night out with the local camera club can be intriguing, sometimes it's a little slow and in fact an excuse for an extended walk to the pub. This time it was a little more extreme..

Take two models, a hill top location with a church, graveyard and nearby mausoleum, some fast disappearing sun, a group of photographers and some extremely tall shoes. It's quite a recipe.

Thanks to our stars for the night Skarlett Venom and Babys Got a Temper we all got some highly original images, which is really what it's all about. The tales of the search for the lost chinese are best left to the intrepid three who went in search of nutrition in Wycombe after 22:30. For this first photo I even managed to have some success with the 20mm lens. It gave me the space in the photo which seems to be appropriately balancing to the scale of those shoes.

So more pictures, I'm sure by now you will identify the model who is known as Skarlett Venom. But don't be thinking that Babys Got a Temper is just a model she's also a wrestler, martial arts specialist and musician.

Which brings me finally to this picture of Babys Got a Temper. I thought that in the better light earlier there would be a fine rim light on her hair, but once in position it was clear that the light had gone already. So being an enterprising photographer I thought - shoot black and white. So Picture Styles switched to Monochrome and by chance a red filter. The result was a rim light when none was there. I figured it out later that there was enough difference in the edge of the models hair and the main body of it that the red filter turned the edge much lighter for the rim light effect with no rim light in sight. I tried different conversions in DPP software on the RAW file but only the red filter gave me the rim light effect. It was cool to show to others since the LCD preview on my camera showed the rim light effect too, even though none of us could see how it happened at the time.

Some times photographers just strike it lucky with the results, mostly it's not the case.

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Open wide....

The goal of being able to really use wide-angle lenses is now deeply set in my mind, and to further fuel my wide-angle intentions; I'm starting at the obvious point for many gear oriented photographers - more kit needed...!

I have Canon's excellent EF17-40mm f/4L, but I've been looking for something more essentially wide-angle only. My search has lead me down the road of the expensive 14mm, but for now I've stopped short and ended at 20mm with the EF20mm f/2.8. It's an old lens, and covered in angle by my zoom, but I think it will force me to the wide side rather than let me sneak back to normal; that's just so easy with the zoom. This approach of restricting my options is something I 've really benefitted from in the past when I used an EOS 400D and 28mm f/1.8 and 85mm f/1.8 as a great lightweight travel kit.

According to some reviews the EF20mm f/2.8 USM is not the best lens in the book, and indeed Canon's Lens Work III book has MTF charts that support the idea that the L-series 17-40mm is better, but I like the idea of a smaller lighter lens. Accordingly I have secured the use of an EF20mm f/2.8 USM lens for a couple of weeks. Should be interesting to see if it makes me see wide.

Even more important, Canon's Digital Photo Professional application includes lens abberation correction support for the lens. Don't you love it when software actually gives you a real valuable improvement in functionality. With some downtime to come soon, I'm looking to combine the lens with graduated neutral density filters and try my hand at some coastline landscape photography.

Who knows maybe the 20mm is the key to thinking wide for me.


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A new photo opportunity, or is it a printer opportunity?

I was reading Photojojo over lunch today and I came across this great picture challenge, the photo chain letter. Whilst it's a great idea for photography, it would also be a great idea for a photo printer manufacturer. I'm really impressed with this neat idea, if you're in my address book watch out for the email chain letter coming to you soon! 

Can you imagine what Canon, Epson or HP could do with this? They make money every time we hit the print button, so a nice viral campaign to encourage printing would be good for them for sure. Thank you photojojo for a great tip.

I also have to say I've just seen the new Calumet photo magazine - Calumet focus - with the new Hasselblad H3DII-50MP. A heap of resolution, and a heap of money. Maybe the interesting Hasselblad sweetener of trade in your old DSLR with 16 to 21 MP for up to 3,600 pounds off the price is an indicator that Hasselblad is really after Canon, probably the EOS-1Ds products have been hitting the Swedes hard. Strange that a few pages later there's an article featuring fashion and hair photographer Trevor Leighton and his comment that the EOS-1Ds Mark III is working fine for him.

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Will google be able to shoot in the UK?

While there's much in the news about Google and it's streetview service coming to the UK.

I have a thought; the google photographers are supposed to be out and picture taking real soon. I wonder if they will find the UK a great place to take pictures. Sure we have some fantastic sights, but the current attitudes to photographers may make the google photographers think twice about taking the camera out.

Let's not forget that the National Union of Journalists is also facing some pressures of being observed, catalogued and monitored by the police.

Soon we'll all be confined to photography in our own property, but not if it features other people, other companies trademarked items or who knows what...

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Time for backups and a replacement for iVIEW

Thursday night is now backup night and so is Monday night. I've been tweaking the settings on my ReadyNAS NV+ so that I keep a good backup regime going, and now I've decided to have Thursdays instead of Fridays as backup night. You have to love automation though, it's a simple click on a box in the ReadyNAS administration window.

I've been much better with the backup process in recent months, making sure that a twice weekly backup was happening regularly. However my pictures folder is almost the same size as my current backup drive set, so it's a good job storage and USB hard drives from good vendors like LaCie are falling in price faster than I can fill up my ReadyNAS. I sense some more outlay on external USB hard drives is in the near future. Last weekend I somehow managed to walk round a zoo with the family and still come home with 320 RAW images.

Fortunately my current workflow makes it quite effective to cull from this little lot, but I'm on the edge of jumping from being an iVIEW / Expression Media user. To my mind Microsoft haven't got the point of iVIEW yet, and accordingly they haven't made it any better than when they bought the company. Problem is what else... i've discounted Aperture since I use both PC and MAC, and I'm not sure Lightroom is the answer either as I've got files on local hard disk and older ones on network shares but I want to have them all in my catalogue / collection. I fear that a task of synchronising all the keywords to my files is again on my to do list as the hunt for the replacement to iVIEW continues. Hit me with some comments and thoughts on alternatives, I only have a couple of requirements.

• Must be PC & MAC compatible
• Must be able to work with files in multiple drives and network shares
• Needs to be reliable and quick - i'm trusting my last 12 years of digital files to it

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DSLR focus issues real or just a question of depth of field?

I've noticed a trend for entry level cameras to be accused of focus issues. I'm not talking the great EOS-1D Mark III kind of issue, but more the issue of new DSLR users finding the transition from compact cameras is not just a case of better pictures automatically.

Depth of field - friend or foe?
One great benefit of DSLR cameras over their compact brethren is the wider range of depth of field you have at your control; maybe they should write:

Attention: This camera has narrow depth of field

on the LCD screen when you first switch the camera on.

My view is that this in itself is a likely cause for poor focus impressions; you have to have the depth of field cover the required subject. To check out how much or how little depth of field you have then take a look at the Online Depth of Field calculator. With depth of field influenced by the camera sensor size, the distance to the subject, the actual focal length of the lens and the aperture then photographers end up with a big shift in this one critical parameter. Understanding and control of it is essential.

Maths bit
Consider that with a PowerShot S5 IS at it's wide angle setting of 6mm (36mm equivalent), will give you a range from 2 meters to infinity in focus [f/2.8 aperture and 10m to the subject]. So you move to the EOS 1000D with it's standard 18-55mm IS lens, now set it to 22.5mm (36mm equivalent) and choose the wide open f/3.5 aperture and suddenly 4.5m is the closest point in focus and it runs to infinity. Now add in that the AF on the DSLR cameras usually has a fixed number of points, 3, 7, 9, 19, 45 etc and that in automatic modes the camera takes the one that finds a subject closest to the camera. That edge AF point picking up a fence post only 2 meters from your camera is going to hurt your pictures. The EOS 1000D above would focus at 2m and give you about 1.6m to 2.7m in focus, the PowerShot S5 IS would be 1.1m to 9.2m at f/2.8 and stopping down to the f/3.5 of the EOS camera that becomes 1m to more than 30m in focus. Suddenly out of focus pictures are here and you spent all that money on an SLR for better pictures.

I was talking with some other photographers about their pictures from the F1 test day at Silverstone. They were surprised on several accounts, the cars were louder than expected, the cars were faster than expected, they needed to use higher ISO settings than expected for a bright sunny day and that the cars got harder to get sharp the closer they got to the photographer. These photographers were fortunate in having access to some big lenses 400mm and 500mm and were using EOS-1D Mark III cameras - the tools for the job.

Shutter speed, depth of field and fast cars
Shooting at F/4 and with an F1 car approaching from 50 meters away the depth of field covers a range of less than 3 meters, as the car gets closer, say 20 meters that f/4 aperture now gives you less than half a meter of depth of field. Now add in that the car could be travelling at 150 miles per hour quite easily (67 metres / second) and that means the car will move closer by 0.06 meters during a 1/1000s exposure. As a rough estimate the distance from the front to the back of the drivers crash helmet is say 30 centimeters at least, the chance to get it sharp at 20 meters distance with a 400mm lens at f/4 and 1/1000s shutter speed is quite low, and requires the photographer to be really good at keeping the focus point in the right place all the time. The AF system is also having to judge the AF, the speed of change and people just think it's easy to shoot DSLR cameras.

People and depth of field
Sure we'd all like to have an 85mm f/1.2L lens and EOS 5D, but they are tough to use. Your beautiful model is posed perfectly some 2 meters in front of you it's a tight crop and they are turned slightly so one eye becomes further from the camera than the other. You focus on the front eye and the depth of field wide open is 4 centimeters, you're both rocking slightly and now you struggle to get both eyes in focus. Extreme... yes, but what if you're a new DSLR user with an EOS 450D and a 50mm f/1.8 in the same situation. You may be a bit lucky since you get a whole 11 centimeters of depth of field to play with. Better hope that you choose a single AF point, otherwise your camera might decide that the models jewelery is a better subject than their eye.

Tilt-shift, shake-rattle and roll
In the past I rented a Canon tilt shift lens the TS-E24mm f/3.5L and tried it out without much success. I was trying to explore the tilt and shift, but my selected aperture of f/8 pretty much masked all the results. I've since tried the TS-E90mm f/2.8 and used it at f/2.8 to get a more visible result.

With all the above considered is this the reason for a lot of new DSLR users struggling to get pictures that were a snap with their compact cameras?
Knowing all the above the real benefit of this depth of field range is the chance to apply it selectively. Some pictures look great with narrow bands of focus, some need a bit more and if you've been looked after by the compact camera's big depth of field then DSLR may come as a bit of a shock.

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7-point photoshop starting to pay off

I've been working through the Scott Kelby's 7-point system for photoshop and it's starting to make sense after nine ofthe twenty one practical lessons. Somethings are still not intuitive, but some are making sense so obviously it's time to branch out and try some of my own images. The landscape above is a nice example of the power of the Lab mode technique that Scott advocates. Before processing the image was a little flat and lacking in contrast, and my intended strength of colour wasn't quite there. A little bit of the learnings applied and it's a much better picture. Right now I'm still not sure photoshop gurus will find much new in Scott's book, but if your still wondering how other photographers seem to get nicer images from files than you do it's worth reading and definitely working through.

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Jump start for picture management

Earlier I wrote the article [Taking care of the little things now] on image management inspired by the What the Duck comic strip. I also mentioned that for me picture management was simplified by the use of Chris Breeze excellent Downloader Pro, as the first step of my workflow. But Downloader Pro costs money - not very much, but how about almost the same for free?

Canon's CPN website has a new article by Nick Wilcox-Brown explaining how you can do much of the necessary image management for free using the Canon software EOS Utility, you know the one you only think is good for tethered shooting or is still laying on the disk you tossed in the corner in the rush to get at your new camera. Heck it may even be still in the shrink wrapped manual pack you thought you'd open when it was a rainy day. Go to the pages on CPN, then jump to the page 4 of the article it's the bit you need.

Duly inspired I tried to make EOS Utility work like to sort out pictures like I do with Downloader Pro. My sorted files go in a folder called 4-DVD, it's kind of historical from when I planned to burn all the pictures to DVD. The advent of 1GB CF cards broke that thinking but the name remains. So for me I make a folder for the year as the top level folder, then I have a folder for the month and under that I have folders for the camera I used, a bit like this:

E:\4-DVD\2008\2008-06\EOS 40D

You'll right away notice that the month folder has the year too, this means if I mistakenly drag the month folder out of place with either finder or explorer I know where to put it back. The next part is making the file name more helpful, and for this I use the year, month, original name and a serial number like this

0806IMG_0001_001.CR2

This means that the file name includes the month, I can put it straight back in the right folder if it gets lost, I keep the original filename and for safety sake the _001 at the end is sequential so should cope with the problem of all cameras except EOS-1D models using the IMG prefix as standard. You shoot with an EOS 40D and an EOS 450D and both can make an IMG_0001.CR2 file on the same day, sure they may end up in different camera folders but you'd have a duplicated filename. I also make 3 more folders in the month folder so that it has:

2008-06\01-final
2008-06\02-process
2008-06\03-delete

I go through all the pictures, and move the rubbish stuff - much of it - to the 03-delete folder, kind of a get out of jail free card step before the recycle bin or trash. Then I process all the pictures and the output files from digital photo professional (DPP) go in the 02-process folder. From there photoshop takes over an the finished final files end up in 01-final. If I need to find my final pictures from this year at worst I only need to look in 12 folders.

So can it replace Downloader Pro, well for me not quite since I also have Downloader Pro automatically add metadata to my images. Things I add are copyright information, photographer info, country and location, and often I add other things like animals, zoo, model, macro, blue all the kinds of tags and keyowrds I might need for the group of images. The exact keywords and amount of information varies. Downloader Pro also makes the three working folders 01-final, 02-process and 03-delete for me too using the directory maker feature.

- p4pictures -