Canon EOS 1D Mark IV

Also note that I’m not a sports shooter, I’m mainly a nature and wildlife photographer. If you want to read about how this camera fairs for sports photography, take a look at Rob Galbraith’s great review of the auto focus system on the 1D Mark IV, after you’ve read/listened to this.

Note too that I shot [...]]]> Prefer to listen? There’s an audio player at the bottom of the post.

Canon EOS 1D Mark IV

Also note that I’m not a sports shooter, I’m mainly a nature and wildlife photographer. If you want to read about how this camera fairs for sports photography, take a look at Rob Galbraith’s great review of the auto focus system on the 1D Mark IV, after you’ve read/listened to this.

Note too that I shot on my Snow Monkeys Workshop with firmware v1.0.4 in the camera, and upgraded to firmware v1.0.6 the night before I flew to Hokkaido for that 10 day workshop. v1.0.6 supposedly improved the AF, and I personally think I noticed some improvement, though it was still a little off on a number of occasions. Let me go into some detail on this first.

When I was in Nagano shooting the snow monkeys, a number of us perched ourselves on rocks near the river to try and shoot monkeys as they jumped across the stepping stones to cross the river. I shot maybe 30 frames, as a number of monkeys jumped across the rocks, and all but one were useless. At first, I tried AI Servo focusing, and tried to lock in on the Macaque as it approached the edge of the river, and while tracking it with the auto-focus, shot a series of frames as it jumped across the river. This wasn’t working, so I tried selecting the center focus point, with focus point expansion as necessary turned on, and this didn’t really help either. Eventually, I changed my strategy and focused on the last rock before the shore, and just waited for the monkeys. With that method of focusing, I was finally able to get one shot with the monkey’s face sharp, although I clipped the top of his head.

Here’s the resulting shot, which was the only one that I got anything like what I wanted.

Leaping Snow Monkey

Granted though, had I not been with my workshop, I would have spent more time trying this, and I’m confident that I would have gotten something better, even by trying different AF custom settings. I shot all of my images with custom function III-4 to 1 – “Continuous AF track priority”, because I read in the manual that this works best when you have automatic expansion of focus points turned on, which I do. There’s also a new guide to setting the AF custom functions and ISO settings out (linked from this page), in which it says that option 1, the “Continous AF track priority” setting can help with fast moving subjects, and also that option 0, “Main focus point priority”, will jump to a subject closer than the one you are initially focused on, if something else moves in front of your initial subject. For the monkey shots, I think option 0 would probably have been better, because the monkey is in front of the water. The main problem when I was using the AF in AI Servo mode is that the water kept grabbing the auto-focus, even though I started off tracking the monkey.

After my Hokkaido trip about 12 days after the Snow Monkey workshop, Rob Galbraith released a great review of the auto focus system on the 1D Mark IV in which I noticed that Rob leaves Custom Function III-4 set to 0, which is “Main focus point priority”. I imagine this is better for sports, and I will at least try option 0, “Main focus point priority”, but quite often, I want to stay locked on my subject, even if something moves in front of them.

Although my experience with the higher contrast water stealing focus from the jumping monkeys had me a little unhappy with the autofocus’ “intelligence”, I have to say that when I was in Hokkaido, now with the firmware upgraded to v1.0.6, I was much more happy with the ability of the auto-focus in AI Servo mode to stick with the subject, once I was locked in to it. In the below image (not a great shot, I know), I purposefully lowered the camera while tracking a group of Whooper Swans flying out of the Akan International Crane Center, to see if the AI Servo would continue to lock on and track them. It did a great job of this.

Swans Flying Away

I was also impressed with the ability of the focus to lock-on to a subject such as sparrows in a narrow strip on the snow, and then track them accurately as they took flight, as in the below photograph.

Sparrow Flight

These guys are relatively predictable, but very fast as they take flight, and the AI Servo focusing on the 1D Mark IV did a great job of sticking with them, even as I moved away from my original point of focus, when the birds were in the snow looking for left-over seeds. This is something that has had my 1Ds Mark III’s focus system searching in the past.

NOTE/APOLOGY — I realized after producing this episode that the above image of the sparrows was shot with my 1Ds Mark III, and not the 1D Mark IV. I guess the 1Ds Mark III auto-focus either got better, or I got better at this sort of shot, but either way, it did handle this much better this year, despite that not being the case in previous years. Sorry about the incorrect information given here.

The new AI Servo Custom Function Guide here, says that if you track a subject with AI Servo for 0.5 seconds before you start to make exposures, the accuracy of the auto-focus increases. I think this might have also been part of my problem with the monkeys jumping shots. Most of the time, I would see the monkey at the last minute, and try to snatch focus as they got to the first stepping stone. In Hokkaido, again with the new firmware mind, once I locked into something, the AI Servo stayed locked in most of the time. Tracking a bird flying around in the sky was very easy, although my 1Ds Mark III also does a pretty good job of this, because there’s little else in the frame to cause problems.

Soaring White Tailed Eagle

Even as the eagles dived down and went through a crowd of red-crowned cranes, to steal their fish, the AI Servo stuck with the eagles. There were so many cranes this year that I didn’t get a clear shot of the eagles within the cranes, but I was very impressed with the ability of the 1D Mark IV to track the subject in this situation. Again, this was probably because I had custom function III – 4, set to 1 – “Continuous AF track priority”.

Other times that the auto-focus was unfaltering, was when the subject flew in front of the sun. This has typically been a little difficult, sometimes causing my 1Ds Mark III and 5D Mark II to start searching for focus, but it happened very rarely with the 1D Mark IV. In the below image, we can see three cranes passing right in front of the sun, and the auto-focus handled it without issues.

Cranes at Sunset

Crop Factor

This is the first crop factor camera that I’ve owned in over four years, since I bought my 5D, and sold my 20D. The Canon EOS 1D Mark IV has an APS-H sensor, which results in a 1.3X crop factor. This isn’t as large as the 1.6X crop factor that my old 20D which had, but it still took a little getting used to again. A number of times I found myself reaching for the 300mm f2.8 and having to drop down to the 70-200mm F2.8 lens, because the 300/2.8 was a little too long, with a 390mm effective focal length. Once I got used to it though, I did like the additional reach that the 1.3X crop factor gives me, and most of the time for eagles etc. I just used the 300mm F2.8 L lens without the 1.4X Extender (Teleconverter) which gives me 420mm with the 300/2.8 on a full frame sensor camera like the 1Ds Mark III or 5D Mark II. I also enjoyed getting an effective focal length of 780mm from the 600mm F4 L lens too, when shooting down the river from the Otowa Bridge in the town of Tsurui, for shots of the red-crowned cranes in the mist, like below. Unfortunately, there was no frost of the trees this year, but still, a little mist rose from the river as the sun started to warm the surface of the water.

Crane's Roost at Dawn

Eagles at Sunrise over Russia

One situation where I did have a slightly lower hit rate with the auto-focus, was when shooting some eagles on a piece of stray ice floe (left). Here, a few of the shots jumped back to the sunlit ripples on the sea, because they were higher contrast than the almost totally silhouetted Steller’s Sea Eagles. This may well have been caused by a focusing error on my part though, as it was difficult to see through the viewfinder looking into the morning sun with an effective focal length of 390mm.

I don’t mean to harp on about the auto-focus, but because Canon seemed to make this a focus of their marketing for the 1D Mark IV, I was expecting quite a lot of the new system. I bought my 1Ds Mark III just over two years ago, with high hopes that the 45 focus points and a few more years of R&D were going to provide me with a usable AI Servo focusing system that would be able to handle more than just birds flying across a clear sky. It turned out though that I always ended up going back to the center focus point, and quite often even returning to One Shot focusing as opposed to AI Servo for pretty much all other situations.

When I bought the 5D Mark II, I actually didn’t find the 9 focus point system much worse than the 45 point 1Ds3 system, because of the way I ended up always using my 1Ds Mark III. The 5D2 tracks birds across a clear sky about as good as the 1Ds Mark III does too.

Overall Very Happy

Once I upgraded to the 1.0.6 firmware, I really didn’t have much to complain about with the 1D Mark IV auto-focus. I do have some flying eagle shots that are not quite as sharp as I’d like them to be, even with nice fast shutter speeds, but I also have many incredibly sharp shots too, so I really need to shoot a little more with this camera and maybe do some controlled tests, before I start to shout about problems with the camera and/or its auto-focus. Right now, in general, I’m feeling pretty happy with the camera.

Drop in Image Size

The slight drop in resolution to 16 mega-pixels from 21MP in the 1Ds3 and 5D2 is noticable. Although the image quality from the 1D Mark IV is excellent, when you want to zoom in to really see the detail, it’s a little bit disappointing. This is something that I expected of course. The images are roughly 76% the size of my full frame sensor cameras. Is this going to be a problem for me? I doubt it. I do like the detail I can get in large prints, but 16MP is still a very respectable image size. I’m looking forward to printing out some of my new images on fine art paper, to really see how they fair, but I’m not expecting to be disappointed.

High ISO Capabilities

The 1D Mark IV has standard selectable ISOs from 100 to 12,800, and these are expandable downwards to ISO 50, and upwards to include ISOs 25,600, 51,200 and 102,400! I haven’t had time to do any really controlled tests yet, but from some quick shots in my living room, which was very messy with the contents of the 1D Mark IV box emptied out, and therefore I can’t get permission to use the shots here to illustrate this, I can tell you that 25,600 and 51,200 is very usable. At a pinch, if it was a toss-up between getting a shot, and not getting anything, I’d even go to ISO 102,400, but the noise is pretty bad at this highest ISO. The first two though really are acceptable and would probably clean up pretty nicely with some noise reduction work. They aren’t bad straight out of the camera!

Other Nice Touches

There are a few other nice touches that have been added to the Canon EOS 1D Mark IV that I would like to touch on before we finish.

Focus Point Auto-Selection by Orientation

Firstly, the 1D Mark IV allows you to set a preset focus point per camera orientation, with the Custom Function III – 16, “Select different AF points” selected. With this on, you can preselect a focus point for three different orientations, and the camera will automatically switch to those focus points as you change the camera orientation. So you can have one focus point selected when using the camera horizontally, or in landscape mode, and have another focus point automatically selected when you rotate it to the left, with the grip at the top, and then another focus point selected when you rotate the camera to the right, with the grip at the bottom.

Spot AF

Another nice addition is Spot AF, which is selected as on option under Custom Function  III-6. This allows you to reduce the size of the focus point to enable more accurate selection of the subjects eyes etc. The only problem with this for me at the moment is that I already map my AF Stop button to another function. The AF Stop buttons are the little rubberized buttons near the front of Canon’s super-telephoto lenses, such as the 300mm F2.8 and the 600mm F4 lenses, and I already map this button to toggle between One Shot and AI Servo focusing modes. I did find myself using this button much less with the new improved focusing capabilities of the 1D4, so if I continue to be happy with the focusing, I might be able to map my AF Stop button to the Spot AF feature in the future instead.

Illuminated Focus Points in AI Servo Mode

You can now also see which focus point is being used in the AI Servo focusing mode. This is something that I hated about my 1Ds Mark III, and one of the reasons why I found AI Servo so difficult to use, especially in conditions such as when photographing a bird on water, when the camera would almost always focus on the higher contrast light on the ripples in the water, without me knowing. Note that this illuminated focus point functionality only works when you have manually selected a focus point, and then started to track your subject. As they move across the frame, or you reposition the camera, the focus point moves too, and is illuminated as it does so, to enable you to ensure that you are still focusing on the right part of the subject. I’m really looking forward to trying this in portraiture as well. If I can focus on the eye with the center or manually selected focus point, then the camera continues to track the eye as I recompose, and then focus on it with AI Servo focusing, that would be impressive, not to mention incredibly useful.

High Resolution LCD

One thing that really bugs me about my 1Ds Mark III is the crappy LCD resolution. Granted, since getting my first chance to use LiveView with the 1Ds3, I started to use it to fine tune focusing for still-life and landscape work pretty quickly. When 230,000 dots is all you have, you can certainly use it, but it was far from clear. You basically could tell that you had achieved optimal focus only as you went past it. If the image on the LCD starts to get soft again, you know you’ve gone too far, and you pull back a little. The 5D Mark II though came with a nice sharp 920,000 dot LCD, and that changed the game for me. Now I was able to adjust and confirm sharp focus on the LCD so much faster in LiveView, and the 1D Mark IV has the same resolution. 920,000 glorious dots to help us see what we’ve shot incredible clearly. This is not just useful in LiveView of course. When you check an image that you have already shot for sharpness by zooming in on the LCD, you also benefit from having four times more resolution.

Video

You can’t ignore the fact that this is the first pro-body from Canon with video. The 1Ds Mark III does not have video, and the fact that the 5D Mark II did meant that it soon became my camera of choice over the 1Ds Mark III, when ruggedness and weatherproofing was not going to be important. I do love being able to stick an L lens on my 1 series bodies, and just stand out in the rain with them without having to worry about and mollycoddle my gear, and this is certainly one other reason why I have invested in the 1D Mark IV as well, my second pro body, but video and the much higher resolution LCD on the 5D meant that it’s seen much more use over the last year than my 1Ds Mark III, which is a shame, when you think that it cost me four times more to buy the 1Ds3.

I haven’t touched on the 1D Mark IV’s video capabilities today though, because I haven’t use it in the field yet. I did shoot some video in Hokkaido over the last few weeks, but it was with the 5D Mark II. When I’ve had a chance to play with the video on the 1D Mark IV, I’ll let you know.

Conclusion

As I said above, I’m generally very happy with my new Canon EOS 1D Mark IV camera. It’s living up to my expectations and then some. I’ll be even happier when I see more totally crisp, sharp shots coming out of it, but I still had a very high percentage of sharp images from my first few weeks, so I’m happy enough for now. I’ll be sure to shout up if this ceases to be the case in the coming weeks, so stay tuned!

Note that you can see all images shot with this Camera in my gallery. This list of images is dynamic, and so will pick up more shots as I add them to my gallery.

Rob Galbraith’s review of the Canon EOS 1D Mark IV from a sports shooters perspective is here: http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/multi_page.asp?cid=7-10048-10484

I’m not sure why I can’t find this on the Canon Web site, but here is a link to that AI Servo Custom Function Guide: http://lightingmods.blogspot.com/2010/02/exclusive-canon-eos-1dmarkiv-custom.html

Download the Enhanced Podcast M4A files directly.

Click a thumbnail to view the images from this post with limited shooting info. Once the image has opened, you can navigate back and forth by clicking the image.

Huh?

As 2009 draws to an end, I’m once again going to look back at the year, and see how I did against the want-to-do list that I set for myself for this year, and talk a little about what I plan to do in 2010. Note that I called it a want-to-do list, because I have resigned myself to the fact that there are things that I will just not have time to do. I like to aim pretty high though, and at least succeed in some areas, even if I don’t achieve everything that I’d like to do. As long as I accomplish some of the stuff, or redirect my energies somewhere that I can live with, then I’m happy.

The first thing on my list from 2009 was to plan the 2010 Hokkaido Workshop as soon [...]]]> Prefer to listen? There’s an audio player at the bottom of the post.

Huh?

As 2009 draws to an end, I’m once again going to look back at the year, and see how I did against the want-to-do list that I set for myself for this year, and talk a little about what I plan to do in 2010. Note that I called it a want-to-do list, because I have resigned myself to the fact that there are things that I will just not have time to do. I like to aim pretty high though, and at least succeed in some areas, even if I don’t achieve everything that I’d like to do. As long as I accomplish some of the stuff, or redirect my energies somewhere that I can live with, then I’m happy.

The first thing on my list from 2009 was to plan the 2010 Hokkaido Workshop as soon as possible on my return from the February 2009 trip and start to work on some real advertising.

Well, I certainly did get to the planning quickly. I also added the Snow Monkeys as an optional excursion, and I found that with releasing information about the trips early enough, I was able to achieve enough bookings in the first few months for me not to worry about paid advertising as such. By October the workshop was fully booked, so I’m very happy about the way the workshops are working out, especially in the current economy.

Next, I’d said that I wanted to find a venue for a show of my work, either paid for by me, or sponsored. My third goal was that I wanted to do a book that would accompany the show. Neither of these happened. I did look into both, but the gallery that I had in mind wouldn’t allow you to sell a book or prints at the show, and I ran out of time and motivation on this as I put my energies into the production of the fine art folios that I released a few weeks ago. Definitely not off my radar though, as I move into 2010.

Next was that I wanted to offer a few loose page fine art print portfolios of my work. This of course was accomplished, as I just said, I released the first three fine art folios a few weeks ago. You can check those out at www.fineartfolios.jp, or linked from the top page at www.martinbaileyphotography.com. They took a lot of work to plan and produce though, and with it taking basically a full day to produce a three folio set, it’s something that will continue to take time as I sell these. It was a great project though, and it’s amazing to see my work in such a high quality presentation. There’ll be more to come in 2010 as well.

Ease Paris Portrait Shoot

Another goal for 2009 was that I wanted to do more paid portrait work. I also noted that this may be preceded by putting together a nice web page to promote the portraiture work. Well, I kind of half achieved this. I did a bit of paid portrait work this year, but not as much as I wanted to. What I did do though, was complete some very important preparation. In addition to the few paid jobs that I did, I hired an outdoor studio and had four families that helped me pay the studio rental fees come by and we did four consecutive portrait shoots. As we leave 2009, I now have a whole bunch of great shots in my portfolio, and a signed model release for each of the people in the photos, and will be putting together a portraiture site, or a section of my main site at least, that will be specifically to showcase my portrait work, and I intend to include package pricing details etc. This and some other marketing that I have still to figure out will hopefully help me to build on this side of my business in 2010.

The next goal up, although kind of laughable in some respects was that I wanted to read more. I told you that had picked up a number of great photography books in 2008 that I still hadn’t read. Well, again, I kind of half achieved this. I definitely read more than 2008, but not as much as I’d like to have, and I ended up adding a whole bunch of books to my collection in 2009 as well. Some of the new books got read before my 2008 books, but I was happy with that decision. The desire to read the book is important to me, especially as I’m a slow reader, so it really takes a lot of effort for me to read a book cover to cover. Once I start a book though, I do like to get through it while I can still remember what I’d just read, and so I made a little more time for reading in 2009. I did find it nice to just sit with a book on the odd evening, and I intend to continue to try to make time for reading in 2010.

Towards the end of 2008 I’d picked up the Adobe CS4 Design Premium Suite, and one of my goals was to get up to speed on all of the applications in that. This is pretty much done to the level I’d hoped. I learn by doing projects, and so I made it my goal to totally revamp my Workshops Web site using Dreamweaver. It was a pig of a program to get used to by the way. I’d used an old version in the late 90’s, but none of what I’d learned helped. I ended up signing up for an account at Lynda.com and went through a few tutorials to help me to learn Dreamweaver. I then went on to do my fine art folios Web site and the new top page at www.martinbaileyphotography.com with Dreamweaver though, and am now finally happy with my Dreamweaver knowledge.

I’d also learned Illustrator back in college here in Japan between 1995 and 97, but Illustrator has also changed so much that I felt I had to relearn most of it. Again, Lynda.com came in handy, and I used Illustrator to design the folder for my folios, and I redid my kneeling photographer logo in Illustrator as I needed to send the die-press company some quality graphics. This was all an education. I learned a certain amount of InDesign, which I used to produce the PDF that I put together to show you my Printing Test Results, which I released with episodes 192 and 193.

There are still a few programs in the CS4 Web Design Premium suite that I haven’t had a project to force me to learn them yet, but I’m feeling pretty good now at the end of 2009, and happy that I bought a suite, instead of just Photoshop.

Another goal that I set for myself in 2009 was to do more social networking. I’ve still not uploaded all of my best work to Flickr, and I still don’t comment on peoples’ work as much as I need to, but I’ve definitely done more there this year. I actually redirected a lot of my Social Networking time to Twitter and Facebook more than Flickr. I set up a fan page for Martin Bailey Photography, and at the end of 2009 have around 360 people that have registered with the page. There are also just under 1,600 following me on Twitter now, and I have made a lot of new friends on Flickr as well, so I certainly feel as though I’m starting to get to grips with Social Networking now. By the way, links to my Flickr, Facebook and Twitter accounts are all on my blog and Web site if you haven’t hooked up already.

My ninth goal for 2009 was that I wanted to make sure that I always have time each week to continue to do this Podcast. Well, I’m still here, so I guess I achieved this goal. I am still very much enjoying doing this Podcast too, although it is a big chunk out of my free time each week. As I’ve mentioned before though, doing this Podcast not only helps me to get my name and my images out there, but it also keeps me in check, and I am sure that I myself have become a better photographer through doing this, and I get to meet all of you listeners either in the forum or on Facebook, Flickr or Twitter etc. and you really do all make it worthwhile, so thanks very much for continuing to listen. I’m really grateful for the community that we have built around this Podcast and forum. You’re a great bunch, and I certainly intend to be saying something similar to this at the same time next year.

For my tenth goal for 2009, I said that most important thing for me was that I must continue to feel that my photography is progressing. I said that our newest work should be our best and even if I don’t get to photograph as often as I’d like, I want the photography that I do to be quality work that I’m happy with. Well, in my own humble opinion I feel that I have achieved this goal. Of course, this is subjective and you might think that my photos are crap, but personally, I think that I have continued to grow as a photographer in 2009. I most certainly haven’t shot as much as I’d have liked, but this year I’m not going to be beating myself up, because I’m happy with most of the reasons for this.

Firstly, as we’ve seen, I’ve either partially or fully achieved 8 out of my 10 goals for 2009. In addition to these goals, I also started a blog, which takes up a fair amount of extra time each week, though I’d like to be able to do more in the future. I now release the transcript for every Podcast episode along with the audio each week, and I have released the transcript for some of my more difficult to grasp archived episodes as well.

I was not happy about the amount of times that I wanted to get out shooting, but couldn’t because of problems with my Web sites. We’ve had a pretty horrible year when you look at the number of times the web sites have been down. I actually spent my entire Sunday this week moving everything to a totally new provider though. I’ve had all of the audio from the Podcast being served by GoDaddy for a few months now, and as of yesterday, all of my other Web sites are now being served up by the Media Temple Grid-Service. Both of which I’m very happy with, as you might be able to tell, because it’s the first time I’ve told anyone the name of the providers. I’ve been too unhappy with my provider so far to tell you who they were. I’m really hoping that both of these companies continue to impress me, as I’ve really not enjoyed messing you listeners around either, with the sites being down etc. I’m pretty confident that things are going to get better now though. Let’s hope that these are not famous last words.

I do intend to do a best 10 pics from 2009 episode this year too, probably next week now, so that will be the first episode of the 2010. I hope you’ll agree when we look back at my selection of images for the year, but generally I feel as though I have refined my eye through this year. I have been more selective in what I shoot, and I feel that I’ve captured the things that I have shot with a higher quality than previous years. Of course, I’m still happy with much of my previous work, but as I said when I discussed my last 2009 goal, I really do think that your last year’s work should be your best. If it isn’t there’s almost certainly something wrong.

Also, I am a big believer in working a location, not just once, but many times. My wife has asked in the past, “Why do you return to the same location time and again?” The answer is that you learn how to shoot, or how not to shoot a location or particular subject more each time you photograph it. Of course, weather conditions and the condition of the subject will always effect what you get at a given time, and there is no guarantee that you are going to get better shots every year, but in general, learning the idiosyncrasies of a location or subject will help you to bring out the best of it in your photographs. Of course, it’s important to find new locations and subjects to shoot too, but with the little time I’ve had this year, it’s often a safe bet to go back to somewhere that you know, and try to improve on your previous attempts. I save finding new spots for when I have more time, which isn’t that often at the moment unfortunately.

Pylon Sunrise - Looking Ahead

Anyway, let’s start to look at my goals for 2010. There is a possibility of big changes in 2010, but for now here’re my slightly conservative 2010 goals.

1. Once again, the first big job of is to plan the 2011 Hokkaido Workshops as soon as possible in 2010. I’m even thinking that I’d like to at least get the schedule down, and book some of the smaller hotels before we even make the 2010 trip, just to make sure that I can get enough rooms etc.
2. Add three more fine art folios in 2010. My current three fine art folios are just a start. I have ideas for a lot more, and want to release at least one more every four months or so. This will depend on sales of the first three though.
3. Build that portraiture site. As I said earlier, I have laid a lot of foundations to really start to seek more portraiture work, so I want to build the site and work on that side of my business in 2010.
4. Learn Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 and do more video. I bought Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 recently, and need to really learn the ins and outs of video editing. I don’t intend to go video crazy right now, but I definitely want to do more than I am now, and edit it nicely into say promotional videos for my workshops or just by adding short video clips into slideshows.
5. Watch at least one Kelby Training Video per month. I signed up for Kelby Training a few months ago, and I’m finding myself over at Kelby Training a little more often than Lynda.com now, because the content is more photography centric, but both are excellent resources, and the one I go to at a given time depends on what I want to learn.
6. Copyright all of my best shots. I have around 2,000 images that I consider to be my best work, and I fully intend to copyright these online in 2010. Rest assured, when I get around to this, there’ll be a Podcast on it!
7. Blog more — at least two none Podcast blog posts per month. This will depend on time, but I’d really like to do at least a couple more blog posts each month that are not just the Podcast transcript and images.
8. Once again, I do want to find that venue for a show of my work. I seriously want to do an exhibition, and will hopefully be able to raise the priority of setting this up in 2010 and just make it happen. An accompanying book would be nice, but I can also consider just making sure I have some folios in stock, or sample folios to show people to take orders to be fulfilled later.
9. I’d like to introduce at least one more workshop, in addition to my Snow Monkey and Hokkaido workshop. At a minimum, I want to work on some weekend workshops around Tokyo, but I have lots of other ideas too. Let’s see how this one pans out.
10. Continue to grow! Some of these are almost givens, so I’m going to group them together. I’m going to continue the Podcast, and try to get at least one more sponsor, hopefully two more. I want to reach at least 5,000 followers on Twitter and 3,000 fans on Facebook. And of course, I need to feel as though I’m a better photographer by the end of 2010 than I am at the end of 2009.

So there you have it. I might not achieve all of these, but you never know, I might knock a few out of the stadium as well.

What are you planning for 2010? Either comment below or in the forum.

Also, as this will be the last episode of 2009, I’d like to wish you all a very Happy New Year, and thank you for listening through 2009.

On a finishing note, I just wanted to let you know that I was the guest on Scott Bourne’s Photofocus Podcast released on the 25th of December, so check that out if you haven’t already. You can listen to the audio and read the show-notes in the blog post, or subscribe and download through iTunes, if you don’t already. Scott and I chatted for an hour and answered lots of great photography questions, so do check that out.

I was a guest on Scott Bourne’s Photofocus Podcast: http://photofocus.com/2009/12/25/photofocus-podcast-episode-25/

Music from Music Alley: http://www.musicalley.com/

Download the Enhanced Podcast M4A files directly.

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Colour Collaboration

First let’s look at one of the resulting images from this shoot, which is image number 2417. I love this image. It was one of those “hair [...]]]> Prefer to listen? There’s an audio player at the bottom of the post.

Colour Collaboration

First let’s look at one of the resulting images from this shoot, which is image number 2417. I love this image. It was one of those “hair on the back of my head standing up because I’m making something beautiful here” moments. I have been so busy with other stuff recently, that I didn’t have time to have more than a quick glance through these images on the day that I shot them, but when I came back to the set on Sunday, three weeks later, my hair was standing up again just looking at these.

Anyway, as I say, I was aware at the time I was shooting this, that it was not the obvious angle to shoot these trees from. In fact, I have shot here at this time of the year for three years in a row now, and never noticed this angle before, so it has not been obvious, even to me, until this time. I have shot the yellow tree a lot. It’s my favourite tree here. This year though, it was not as beautiful as it has been for the first two years. I don’t know if they pruned it down, or if it was just more grandiose in previous years, but it just didn’t have the same presence this year. Feeling like I was standing in front of an old friend, I even called out to the tree, announcing that I was back, and thanking it for the great photos from previous years. I only shot a few frames of the tree from the same angle this year though, because it didn’t look at good, and I was not going to make as good a picture as the ones I already have.

As I walked away though, I felt somewhat saddened, and really wanted to make something of the beautiful yellow leaves, so I started to do what I’d spoken about a number of times, and that’s to look back. We can often think of a scene in a certain way, and especially, once you have what you think is the best photograph that the scene can offer, we walk away. I do though often look back at a subject as I move on, just to make sure that I’m not missing something, and this year, I did that for a little bit longer than I might usually do, and I ended up spotting an angle where there were a number of different coloured trees in a line. The moment I saw it, I knew there was a shot there, so I dropped my tripod down with my 300mm F2.8 lens on it, and started to line up a shot. I raised the tripod a little, and then lowered it a little, so that all of the leaves lined up just right.

I was pretty far away, so to really edit out as much of the surrounding as necessary, I also used the 1.4X extender, so this image was shot at a focal length of 420mm. So, in addition to looking, and finding the right angle to get this shot, I had adjusted the height of my camera on the tripod, and the focal length. The next thing I did was rendered the beautiful red, green and orange leaves in the foreground out of focus, by using a very shallow depth-of-field. When using the 1.4X extender with the 300mm F2.8 lens, you lose one stop, so F4 is my widest aperture, and that is what I shot this image at. I would bet a three digit amount that the majority of people that saw me shooting here and tried to shoot the same angle ended up stopping down the aperture, trying to get all of the leaves in the frame sharp. I didn’t shoot anything smaller than F4, because I knew that this look is what I wanted.

Shortly after I finished shooting this scene, I walked along a little further, and placed my tripod down to shoot the wider scene, mainly to show you what I was working with, and as I did, some of the guys that had been queuing behind me for my spot, ran past, obviously having seen something that interested them. I turned to see what it was, and the sun was shining through the larger surrounding trees, just highlighting another orange and red leaved tree maybe 100 meters or so away. My wife looked at me and asked if I wanted to go over, and I said no, and on recalling this realized that there’s another element in the making of this picture. I had shot this scene in the shade, which really helps to control the colours.

I’ve also shot the yellow tree in direct sunlight, and it’s nice, but as I’ve mentioned before, nice sunny days don’t always make for the best photographs. I’d actually prefer to shoot in the shade or on an overcast day and even in the rain, as opposed to bright sunlight. If you go to my online gallery and take a look through my albums, or use the Cooliris viewer to look back through my image collection, you’ll quickly see that there are very few images that include a blue sky. There is the odd one, but really, most of the time a blue sky doesn’t excite me, and even if I’m out on a clear day, I rarely include the sky in the shot if it’s a clear blue one.

So, to recap, I worked the angle, the height from which I shot, the amount of the scene that I include with the focal length, the depth of the focus (depth-of-field) with my aperture, and the quality of the light hitting the leaves was controlled by the time of day of my visit. I should note that the weather forecast for this day was sunny in the morning, and overcast in the afternoon. I arrived after lunch. All of the elements that I’m talking about here are totally adjustable, and very personal to how we as photographers choose to make our images.

To hopefully help to impress on you what sort of a scene I’d carved this image from, below is a photograph of the wider scene. You can see here though that it’s just a regular park, albeit a very beautiful one at this time of year. You can probably appreciate though that the first photograph we looked at my not have been obvious at all, to the many people that come here at this time of year to photograph these trees. The above photo is of the trees to the extreme right of this image.

Location

As another example of making an image rather than taking it, let’s look at another photograph that I made this year, to introduce a few more concepts. The image is number 2256. You may recognize this image from earlier episodes, but the point I wanted to make here, is that I ensured that the sea that we can see softly illuminated here looks like that because I checked when the full moon was going to rise at this location, before planning a trip out to this spot. It’s a beautiful place, but to me, there’d be little point in coming here to photograph this Shinto Gate unless the moon was going to light up the sea in this way.

Ooarai Torii (Shinto Gate)

Also, you might remember that I photographed this same gate a few years ago as well, and the images, although OK, were not as nice, in my opinion, as this one. The reason for that is because I now have a much better handle on long exposures. This image was made with a 4 minutes exposure, which really renders that sea so much more beautifully than the 30 second to one minute exposures that I’d used previously. So here, my point is, doing your homework while planning a trip, to give yourself a chance of getting the conditions you are after is important. Also, don’t just consider how you frame and compose your images, but bear in mind the visual effect that the length of the exposure gives you, as well as the depth-of-field etc that are controlled by the aperture.

Finally, I wanted to talk about one other option for making pictures, instead of taking them, and that is post processing. I clearly recall standing on the beach at Hamamatsu with my wife, and she was telling me that I was wasting my time photographing there. Let’s take a look at the image that I did not post to my gallery first, to give you some background.

Nakatajima Sakyuu (Original)

Here you can see a pretty drab scene, although you can get an inkling of what I was trying to do, if you notice that I was again using a long exposure, to enable us to see the effect the waves have as they draw back out, around the log in the foreground. I was being persistent here though, as although I was in this area to meet with the company that I had do the die-pressing for my new folios, I had brought all my camera gear, and was determined not to leave the area without at least one photograph to also show for my four hour drive.

Despite the apparent drabness of the scene though, as I shot this, I had a clear picture of what I was going to do with this shot in my mind. I knew that I was going to convert this to black and white, probably in Nik Software’s Silver Effex Pro, as we’ll see shortly. My main objective moved from capturing something immediately beautiful, because it simply wasn’t there, to capturing a base image I could use to make something more special in post processing.

You’ll see that the sky in the original is very pale and featureless, but note that it is not blown out. I do this by default, but if say, I had blown out the sky, because it’s just a large blank patch of white, which I sometimes do with more contrasty scenes if there are more important foreground elements that need to be correctly exposed, then I would not have been able to rescue any detail in the clouds.

Let’s now take a look at the resulting image which is number 2294 (below). The black and white conversion enabled me to add contrast, and make those wave breakers in the sea to become more of a focal point. It’s not easy to see in the Web version, but in a larger print, these concrete formations actually add quite a bit to the shot. Most of all though, using some strategically placed control points in Silver Effex Pro, darkened down certain parts of the sky and beach, and helped to rescue something from what at first glance could easily have been a very uninspiring shot.

Nakatajima Sakyuu

Again though, I want to stress that ensuring I got the water drawing out in the image, with that long exposure, and ensuring that I captured detail in the sky were critical for the success of this image. I am certainly not saying that you can rescue any old crappy image in post processing. My point is that to make an image, you can also sometimes pre-visualize what you will do in post processing, and make your field work more of a gathering process, than a finishing process. I do like to nail a shot in camera, but sometimes, we have to make the best of the situation, and I think this is a relatively good example of that.

Of course, there are times when you will totally make the shot, by using models, and props, and totally controlling the light. I will soon be sharing the details of a portrait shoot that I did a couple of months ago where I rented a studio and controlled all the light with three strobe until and umbrellas, and even had some volunteer models come along to help me build my portraiture portfolio. These are times when making an image takes on a different meaning, but we’ll get into that at another time.

For now, let’s just remember that all of your compositional tricks, as well as carefully selecting the angle and height from which you shoot, the focal length, the shutter speeds and the depth-of-field are all things that you control, and that can make, or break, a photograph. Keep tabs on everything that affects the results, including the quality of the light, the time of day, and the location of the sun, or the moon, if they are important to you in the realization of the images that you intend to “make”.

This post was also prompted by a recent blog post by Rick Sammon; “On Making Pictures”: http://rickrawrulessammon.blogspot.com/2009/12/on-making-pictures.html

Music from Music Alley: http://www.musicalley.com/

Download the Enhanced Podcast M4A files directly.

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Photography Fundamentals – Next Steps

Having covered a lot of basic ideas in Episodes 216 and 217, if you are now getting used to using your camera, and you want to take it a little further, some of what we’ll cover today might [...]]]> Prefer to listen? There’s an audio player at the bottom of the post.

Photography Fundamentals – Next Steps

Having covered a lot of basic ideas in Episodes 216 and 217, if you are now getting used to using your camera, and you want to take it a little further, some of what we’ll cover today might help. It’s not going to be comprehensive of course, as I don’t know where you are in your photography today, and the line between intermediate and advance photography is pretty fuzzy. Here are a few ideas though that might help you to get a little better if you are not thinking about these things currently.

Take Control of the Flash
If your camera has an automatic flash, learn how to turn it off. There are two main reasons that you would want to turn it off. The first is because when you are at a ball game and you see all of those flashes going off around the stadium, they’re a waste of time. Even powerful flash or strobe units have a limit to how far the light can travel, so when your subject is more than twenty or thirty feet away, turn the flash off. The other reason that you may want to turn your flash off, is because in some situation the subject won’t look very good when lit by flash on the camera. If all you are trying to do is photograph family members at a party, and you aren’t worried about making good photographs, leave it on and forget about it.

If you really do need the flash, and want it to look natural, you’ll need to put the camera in Aperture Priority mode, and use very subtle flash that is known as fill light, to pop some light into the shadow areas of your subject. Ideally, you’d want to get the flash off the camera, but this starts to get a bit complicated. I’ve also covered shooting with one or more flashes off the camera in other episodes, which you can listen to if you are at that stage in your photography. For now, just remember to be aware that flash can sometimes hurt images more than it helps them, so learn how to turn it flash off.

Red Tulips

Learn to See and Use Light

As you get better at photography, you will start to become more discerning about the light with which you shoot. Some people take this too far and only shoot in the first and last hours of the day, which are often called the Golden Hours. The light around mid-day is usually very contrasty and non-flattering, but there are various things that modify light in ways that can make it still useful for us photographers. Image 2263 for example, was shot at 2:30 in the afternoon of a clear day, but the light was being filtered through trees, and so only directly hitting a small number of the tulips. Even in the city, light reflecting off a building or down an alley can give great lighting conditions to capitalize on at any time of day. You just need to be aware of light, and experiment.

Of course, for landscape photography, getting out early, and staying late will definitely help your shots in most cases. It takes a lot of dedication, and is not easy, but ensuring that you are at the right place before dawn for example will usually give you much better shots than someone who does not make that effort. Use an online tool or an iPhone app like MagicHour to tell you when the sun and moon will rise and fall, as well as the point on the horizon that they’ll do so. This will help you to prepare and be at the right place at the right time to get not only the sunrise, but the great light just before and after it.

Learn Good Focusing Techniques
A common problem that people run into as they progress from beginner to more advanced photographers is soft images due to poor focusing techniques. At first, everything looks great, because generally beginners tend to photograph with deep depth-of-field (see my Depth-of-Field Explained article if you don’t know what that is). People also tend to be less critical about sharpness at first I’ve found. As you are drawn into photography more and more though, and decide to get some new lenses with wider apertures that result in shallow depth-of-field when used wide open, it can be much easier to see problems in your images resulting from poor focusing techniques.

Learn how to hold your camera steady, keeping the elbows tucked in and space your feet at shoulder width is a good place to start. Sometimes, you might want to put one foot slightly out in front, and one out to the back more, though still with your feet at shoulder width. This helps to reduce the action of rocking backwards and forwards as you breathe.

Using a tripod whenever possible is also recommended, as it will help you to focus your images better and get sharper images. You’ll want to get a good tripod, that gets the camera’s viewfinder up to your eye level without you having to stoop over. You can buy a cheap one, but it will not work, and you’ll have to buy a better one later, but it’s completely up to you. It’s important to get a tripod that you don’t have to stoop to use though, otherwise you won’t enjoy using it and that in turn will result in you not using it. I should also say as well that I do stress that I am only suggesting you use a tripod when you can. When it gets in the way, and makes more sense to hand hold, don’t use it. My general use is use the tripod unless there’s a good reason not too.

Snow Monkey Profile

If your subject has eyes, or even something that looks like eyes, focus on them. An example here might be image #2236, of a snow monkey. Here you can see that I have used a very shallow depth-of-field, but made sure that I focused on the monkey’s left eye. We are naturally drawn to eyes in an image, and if they are not sharp, the image feels very awkward to view, so getting them sharp is very important. As we touched on in episode 217, you’ll most often want compose your image with the persons head off-center, and this means that you will have to either manually focus or use one of the peripheral focus points on your camera. If you are using a very shallow depth-of-field, don’t use the focus and recompose method. I used to do this, but quite often would get focus errors with very shallow depth-of-field shots. This is because your lens focuses along a plane that is parallel to the film or digital sensor, so when you tilt the camera down or across after focusing, the plane of focus moves backwards. I found it really difficult to grasp this until I saw a diagram in an article on the visual-vacations.com Web site, in an article called “Why Focus-Recompose Sucks“. I’ll put a link in the show-notes so if you are having trouble visualizing this, check out that post.

Use LiveView to Tweak Focus
Most cameras these days have LiveView, which is a function that allows you to turn on the camera’s LCD and see what you are about to photograph on the screen. When shooting landscapes or still life images for example, you can use LiveView to get the focus spot on. This works best when using a tripod, as it’s not easy to do handheld. When you have decided on your composition though, move the little square on the LCD to the element in your scene that is to be in sharpest focus. Then hit the zoom button on the back of your camera, and most will zoom in to 5X and 10X magnification. You can then use the manual focus ring on your lens to fine tune the focus while looking at the image in LiveView.

Note that if you take your finger off the shutter button while you do this, unless you switch your lens to manual focus, when you half-press the shutter button again the auto-focus will likely move the focus, undoing your tweaks. If you keep the shutter button half pressed while you tweak focus this won’t be a problem. You can also move the focus mechanism to the back focus button, but that is a slightly more advanced technique, and I have covered it before, so we’ll not get into that today.

Look at Other People’s Work
Few people improve in a vacuum. You learn so much from looking at other peoples’ work, so try to search out other photographers work as much as you can. Study their images, and try to figure out how they made the images. This doesn’t even have to be a genre that you are really interested in yourself. There’s always something to learn from other people’s work. If you find someone that you really like, you can try to emulate their style as a learning process. I don’t suggest that you steal their style, but rather you learn from it, and improve your own photography by figuring out what they did.

Ooarai Torii (Shinto Gate)

Share and Get Feedback
This can be a bit of a daunting prospect, but as you start to build a library of images, it can be very helpful to get feedback from others on your work. Probably the best way to do this is to join a Web site or community like Flickr. We also have a great community at Martin Bailey Photography, and a special Web site for members to showcase and share their own images at www.mbpgalleries.com. If you drop your images in the Critique Me album for example, we this tells others that you want feedback on your image, and if you know the MBP Community, you’ll know that this is good quality feedback from friendly often very experienced photographers.

Your Own Web Site
You can get a Web hosting account for just a few dollars a month now, many with enough disk space and bandwidth to build a great photography related Web site and more. Building your own photography Gallery in tools like Lightroom is now very easy, and there are lots of gallery tools out there that you can use to put a photography web site together either for free, or for a nominal fee. I really like to have my own gallery, but do keep in mind that the Internet is so vast and so many people are sharing great photography, that it is very difficult to stand out and attract viewers. Even if your work is outstanding, people will rarely just find your site without you doing something to attract them, and pay attention to SEO or Search Engine Optimization. Even if you get Google to trawl your site and list you, people won’t find your images if you are listed on page 10. Without a lot of SEO work though, realistically, you’re better off trying to attract people to your site in other ways, and sometimes Social Networking will help for example.

Social Networking
You’ll find a lot of photographers on Facebook and Twitter, as well as Flickr and other sites. Again, the Forum at Martin Bailey Photography is an incredibly good resource and community. I don’t just say this because it’s my site. I have peeked into other forum based photography communities over the years and really couldn’t get along in any of them until my own started to grow thanks to the popularity of the Podcast. The people are sharing and generous, and don’t talk down to beginners, even if you ask what you think are pretty basic questions. If you aren’t already a member, do come along to www.martinbaileyphotography.com and click on the Forum link and make yourself a member. It’s totally free of course, so you have nothing to lose, and I really do think it’s one of the best places on the Web to hang out and talk about photography.

There is a great community of photographers on Facebook and Twitter though as I say though, so do tap into these resources, as well. Not just to make contacts and bring everyone back to your own site of course. I find that it helps to build you as a photographer to immerse yourself in photography related dialog on such sites. As I said in episode 217 though, please don’t get so bogged down in Social Networking or reading up on the technical side of photography that you don’t get out and actually do it. You have to keep shooting. It’s the best way to improve, and should be augmented by this other stuff, not second to it.

Finding your Genre
Finding your genre of photography is something that can take people years. It was probably a desire to photograph a certain type of subject that made you go out and buy a camera in the first place, so start by photographing that. If you get bored of that, just shoot a lot of whatever catches your eye, until you find something that really excites you. My photography really started in the mountains and hills in the Peak District in England. I had some years after coming to Japan when although I was shooting, I didn’t really knowing what I wanted to photograph. Then I went to college, and working in a bar in the evenings to pay for college, I didn’t really have the time or money for photography, but once I was able to really get back into the saddle, I quickly gravitated back to nature, landscapes and wildlife photography.

Sticking to one genre is probably the best way to make a name for yourself, but really, shoot anything and everything that excites you, until you find yourself shooting one thing so much that you don’t have time for the others. Natural selection will help as you’ll find yourself prioritizing your time to shoot on something you like the most. I’m often told that I am wasting chances living here in Japan by not concentrating on the Japanese cultures, temples and shrines etc. but as I mentioned earlier, I love nature and would much prefer to spend my time getting out into the places of natural beauty. I also like photographing people, so I’m making time for portraiture as well these days. Do whatever gets your creative juices flowing.

Kaede Sumie

Developing a Style
Developing a photographic style that people can recognize you by is a tough one. Being consistent will definitely help though. For my own work, I have been noted as being a “clean” photographer, as in, my images are crisp, clear representations of nature. An example might be image number 2409, in which I photographed some bright orange autumn leaves with a misty background, and very shallow depth-of-field. I don’t do much post processing on my images, but I do take pride on capturing beautiful subjects at just the right moment, and people have started to recognize this. I don’t of course have a monopoly on shallow depth-of-field, but because I use it extensively in much of my work, it is becoming a bit of a signature trait as well. The reason that I’m becoming known for these things is because I’m consistent. I certainly intend to continue this as I improve further, and as more people view my work, I’m hoping that being recognized in this way continues.

I don’t really have an definitive advice here other than to dabble with lots of styles, and find something that you like. Like finding your genre, you should gravitate towards something naturally. If you try to force it, you’ll probably end up emulating someone else, so just keep on shooting, and see what you lean towards and try to focus on that.

Workshops
As you develop your skills a great way to take your photography to the next level is to attend workshops. These can be anything from a Saturday afternoon with a pro that your local camera store has arranged, to a multi-day on-location photography tour and workshop. The latter can cost quite a bit, depending on the photographer and the location, so do select the photographer whose workshop you attend carefully. I suggest that you look for workshops with photographers that you admire and if possible that shoot in your chosen field or at least in a genre that you are interested in developing your skills in.

Do try to find some testimonials from people that have attended the photographer’s previous workshops. With the economic downturn and money from stock photography sales down, there are more photographers than ever doing workshops. Many are experienced photographers simply shifting their focus, and doing a great job. Some though are not so experienced and simply trying to make some easy money, so do check them out before you sign-up.

Shadow Dancing

Some workshops are more classroom-based where you’ll maybe photograph a model as a group, while receiving advice from the instructor, and then you may also spend some time in a classroom, learning some tricks and techniques around the digital work-flow. Others like I say are location-based, like my Snow Monkey and Hokkaido workshops, where the location itself is a large part of the attraction, but still, while you’re there, you have access to a professional that can help you maximize your time at that location, and teach you all sorts of other stuff at the same time. You can expect to come away from location-based workshops with an experienced photographer with lots of new skills, as well as lots of great pictures.

And that’s about it for today. I hope this gives you some pointers on the sort of things to do or keep in mind as you get more and more hooked on photography.

See the earlier Fundamentals episodes and transcripts here:

Part #1: http://blog.martinbaileyphotography.com/2009/11/11/podcast-216-photography-fundamentals-for-the-beginner-part-1/

Part#2: http://blog.martinbaileyphotography.com/2009/11/16/podcast-217-photography-fundamentals-for-the-beginner-part-2/

Why Focus-Recompose Sucks: http://visual-vacations.com/Photography/focus-recompose_sucks.htm

Music from Music Alley: http://www.musicalley.com/

Download the Enhanced Podcast M4A files directly.

Click a thumbnail to view the images from this post with limited shooting info. Once the image has opened, you can navigate back and forth by clicking the image.

Once again, the quality of the entries for this assignment was outstanding. Thanks to everyone that participated! As has now become the custom, I’ve got three great back-stories from the winning photographers to share with you today.

Let’s start with the third place winner and that is Marcus Bain with image m14607 (below), entitled “Calm after the storm.” Marcus was placed in the August assignment too, and the next two winners were winners have also been placed a number of times already, so we are certainly seeing some consistency here.

Calm after the storm (© Marcus Bain)

Last month I tried to rewrite the back-stories so that I could tell them myself, but I’m going to [...]]]> Prefer to listen? There’s an audio player at the bottom of the post.

Once again, the quality of the entries for this assignment was outstanding. Thanks to everyone that participated! As has now become the custom, I’ve got three great back-stories from the winning photographers to share with you today.

Let’s start with the third place winner and that is Marcus Bain with image m14607 (below), entitled “Calm after the storm.” Marcus was placed in the August assignment too, and the next two winners were winners have also been placed a number of times already, so we are certainly seeing some consistency here.

Calm after the storm (© Marcus Bain)

Last month I tried to rewrite the back-stories so that I could tell them myself, but I’m going to revert to third person today, and just read out the original stories for you. This will take a little more following on your part, but I think this will be better. Anyway, here goes with Marcus’ back-story for Calm after the Storm.

Shot with my Canon EF 17-40mm f/4.0 L USM locked as close to 31.25mm as humanly possible, for a true 50mm experience on my Canon 350D. I have a lensbaby but wanted to see what 50mm really looked like.

This is a shot of Chigasaki’s famous “Southern Beach”, named after the JPop super-group, “Southern All Stars (サザンオールスターズ Sazan Ōrusutaazu). Shot just hours after the passing of typhoon Melor, which manage to reach Super Typhoon strength (cat 5) earlier in its life, but passed around the back of Tokyo as a tropical storm. Sorry, I’m a surfer and I get kind of obsessed about the weather.

Anyway, in the morning the wind was averaging around 90kph and gusting up to 120kph. What this means is that the sand dunes should have some rippling and detailing on them from the wind. After lunch the wind dropped to almost nothing, and I rushed off to get some shots of the sand, and whatever else I could discover. Being locked at 50mm had me scurrying about all over the place. Meanwhile the 70-200mm crowd were shooting from the walkway. Getting this shot was a very physical experience for me. While moving about I found this dune and saw the cloud, quickly composed the shot, squatted down a little to line up the distant clouds on the horizon along the top of the dune for a little detailing, and click, click, click. Shot about 10 frames of this scene, playing with composition and making sure I had at least 1 good shot of what I saw.

In photoshop I used ‘Nik Software’s Silver Efex Pro’ for the b/w conversion and adding grain/noise/contrast etc. For this shot I went as far as isolating the dune, sky and cloud for different amounts of grain, noise & contrast. For the sand I was after a more hardcore, intense grain, where as the cloud is almost devoid of grain keeping it soft and puffy. Spent around an hour processing.

Hope that makes sense ! Thanks to everyone for the votes !!

That makes a lot of sense Marcus. Thanks very much for the back-story. For sure, the first thing that struck me when I saw this shot was the alignment of the single long cloud with the sides of the frame. This is well done, especially when we consider that Marcus had restricted himself to the cropped equivalent of 50mm. I should note that we’d actually said that you should ignore the crop factor, and that we wanted to see the EXIF data showing 50mm, neither of which Marcus conformed to, but hey, it’s a great shot, and the idea is to force yourself to work with a fixed focal length, which Marcus did, so let’s overlook these small details.

The next thing that struck me was the very nice black and white conversion. As a Nik Software proponent myself I pretty much knew before I read the back-story that this was a Nik conversion, but Marcus sure took it a step further playing with the grain, even down to giving different areas different treatment.

Finally, knowing that the high winds would produce this wonderful fingerprint pattern on the sand-dunes was a testament to Marcus’ local knowledge, enabling him to get a shot that many would not have thought about. Great work all round Marcus, and congratulations on third place!

Merlin's Bath (© Allen ONeal)

In second place is Allen ONeal, the winner of last month’s assignment, with image m14617, entitled “Merlin’s Bath”. Allen has provided us with a wonderfully written short story as his back-story, so here goes…

It was stormy and very cold that night. I wasn’t sure how cold, but I could just tell it was. I woke up to the wind whipping against the tent walls and my bladder was telling me “It’s time!” but I knew if I got out of the tent, I would regret it. Leaving the warmth of my bag just didn’t sound appealing. So, back to sleep, or at least I’d try.

The moon didn’t help either. It was almost full and directly beaming down on us, intensifying the cold that surrounded our alpine camp. “I bet it looks amazing”, I thought while holding back the urgency to relieve myself. The walls of the tent had stopped flapping at this point. They were simply frozen stiff. I’ll try to sleep some more, maybe get through the night and pee in the morning…

No luck. Up again. The urge was too great to subdue. It’s going to have to happen. There’s no denying it. So on goes the headlamp. “Click” The beam of light immediately shimmers upon the ice that has consumed all condensation inside of the tiny tent. Yep, this 1am pit stop will come at a cost. Down jacket on, boots on, gloves on. Out I go into the frozen abyss.

One step out of the tent and the hairs on the back of my neck stood straight up. My eyes wide open and consumed with amazement and wonder. It was all around me now. I’d never seen anything like it. You see, I usually sleep through the night just fine in the mountains at 10,000 feet. But tonight was different. Something made me get up. Something called to me and it was more than just my full bladder.

Everywhere I looked, dark & wispy clouds were swirling fast, very fast. Around Hengst Peak just above me, weaving through the pine trees on both sides of me, and over Mosquito Lake just a stone’s throw to my left. The moonlight was intense, flickering on and off in various spots as these playful clouds danced through the beams of light coming down. It was like nature’s rock concert light show coming from the heavens above. The clouds truly seemed alive.

Every second or so, the clouds would open up and a new feature of these beautiful alpine surroundings would illuminate with rays of intense moonlight. A boulder here, a fallen tree there, a sparkle on the lake, the tip of Hengst Peak in the distance, all of them illuminated just for a moment each. Then suddenly on my head. As the light struck me, I had a brief but perfectly clear shot of the stars above through these frolicking clouds. It was an amazing view. An incomprehensible amount of stars, gleaming along with the enormous moon. “Thank you clouds for giving me that view!”

Almost as soon as it came, it was gone. They only wanted me to have a glimpse of that breathtaking night sky. But it was so very worth it. Now the clouds were off to continue “spotlighting” the rest of this pristine area by reshuffling and swirling about. Like a deer in headlights, I was frozen. All I could do was let my eyes consume this light show for as long as possible. It was magic of some sort. It must be.

Could this be a dream? Was this show of unusual weather and freezing cold and flickering moonlight all in my head? Although it seemed like a dream, like something out of a Harry Potter movie, it was definitely real. The overwhelming cold and urge from my bladder was proof of that. Even though I must have stared off into that surreal display for quite a while, it was now time to do what I got up to do…

Just a handful of hours before this, we were taking pictures of the sunset light striking Sawtooth Peak off in the far distance. Even at that early point in the evening, there was a sense of energy in the crisp, thin air. Before sunset, the clouds had already begun to amass for the “magic light show” on that autumn night. I had been here a few times before, but this time was different. The energy was different. This time, the magic of this pristine area had decided to come alive and reveal itself. This is where the image “Merlin’s Bath” was captured.

The sound of clicking shutters was all that could be heard that early evening. We were all silent, awed by the beauty of the reflection and the vivid, pink sunlight splashing upon Sawtooth Peak and the clouds overhead. This was a once-in-a-lifetime view and it was nice to share it with great company. After taking many shots, it suddenly came to me. Remembering the October “50mm only” assignment that I’d heard about just the day before, I knew this would be a perfect time. A few clicks and… Got it!

At the moment this image was captured, the lighting couldn’t have been more perfect. With ample cloud cover and direct sunset light on Sawtooth Peak, the dynamic range was just within the cameras ability. Later, all that was needed in Lightroom was a slight ND grad filter and the regular miscellaneous adjustments. It is unusual for me to shoot landscapes at 50mm, but I have to say this has become an instant favorite.

So, the next time you feel an overwhelming urge to go outside, whether it is from your bladder or not, don’t pass it by. It could be the lure of nature’s “magic” waiting for you outside!

Allen, you are insane! That’s probably why you get on so well in this community. J Despite the fact that it seems to have very little to do with the image, thanks very much for the entertaining back-story, and for a wonderful image. It’s great that you recalled the 50mm assignment at the last moment, and captured this while the light was still great.

This could have also won the Everything in Focus assignment too, with that wonderful depth-of-field. Everything from the grasses and rock in the foreground to the Sawtooth Peak in the distance is in crisp focus. It might have won the mirror image assignment too, with the warmly lit peak and the clouds reflected perfectly in the lake. I like the composition, with the foreground rock off to the left side, and the trees along the left edge too, and the way the peak sits slightly above center with the slope of the mountain to the middle ground pretty much ending in the middle, but with the slope heading off out of the frame on the right side. Very nice shot indeed Allen. Congratulations on second place!

So, Dan went all out for this assignment again, and has thrust himself back into first place in the running for the 50mm Sigma lens prize with image m14665, entitled “RGB”. Dan also provided an amazing back-story, with photos to help explain the painstaking experiments he did. Here goes with the back-story.

RGB (© Mr Nikon)

This was a hard assignment. I took the bulk of my pictures on a trip to New Mexico with my 50mm lens but I didn’t find one that really stood out. That was plan “A”. So I figured I should try to create a shot. Here’s my story, it’s a long one.

Plan “B”. My first thought was to buy some fireworks and shoot it at a 3′x3′ pain of tempered glass. I wanted the star burst effect of it hitting and blowing in all directions. Here in Vancouver, BC we can’t buy fireworks until a week before Halloween so I had to wait. I picked up the glass in the meantime. When it came time I discovered they don’t sell Roman Candles any more (10 ball). I got a 90 ball firework and the guy selling them said I just have to take the bottom of it off to get the 9 individual 10 ball Roman candles. I was ready to do the shot but the weather was too crappy so I had to come up with another plan.

Plan “C” was a high speed shot. I had tried it a number of years ago with mixed results. I basically fired the flash manually in the hopes to get the timing right. This time I had an electronic eye to play with. It was the Thursday night before the deadline and I sure felt the time crunch of leaving it to the last minute. I setup a large cardboard box on its side and put black art paper on all the inside surfaces to cut down on any bounce from the flash. I then purchased a number of cheap light bulbs from the dollar store. I cut a hole in one side to put the pellet gun through. Set up my flash in the corner of the box and had the light bulb held down on a block of wood with the electronic eye setup just behind it. The flash was set to its lowest power 1/128th to get the fastest speed. The idea was to have the broken glass break the beam setting off the flash. I want to have a picture with the pellet in the shot but I wasn’t sure of the speed of the eye. I darkened the room, set the camera on a 5 second exposure and pulled the trigger. Sure enough there was a delay with the eye. Here’s one of the shots.

© Mr Nikon

I couldn’t speed up the eye so I figured I would put 2 bulbs in a row to slow down the pellet. The eye was still too slow.

© Mr Nikon

The next day I came up with a crazy thought, why not fill three clear bulbs with Jell-O. That was sure to slow down the pellet. I have to tell you that filling light bulbs with Jell-O is no easy feat. I took a soldering iron andmelted the bottom off the bulbs then drilled a small hole into the filament. After that I took a large marinating needle and filled each bulb with different coloured Jell-O, red, green and blue. Squirting Jell-O through a needle is a very slow and messy process. It took about 25 minutes to do one bulb. I then hung them upside down on a chunk of wood with the electronic eye between the first and second bulb. Well that didn’t work as you can see.

The setup. You can see the electronic eye just behind the first bulb

© Mr Nikon

Here’s the before shot.

© Mr Nikon

And here’s the after shot.

© Mr Nikon

Now onto plan “D”. I needed a faster trigger and remembered reading about a sound trigger on the net. It was now Saturday and was the last day for the assignment. I found a few schematics that looked promising. One in particular looked easy (http://www.hiviz.com/tools/triggers/triggers2.htm) so I went out to my local electronics store to get the parts. I picked up a small amp, http://www.rpelectronics.com/Default.asp?Main=/English/OnlineCat.asp?Menu=/English/Content/Categories/CatM_95.asp%26Detail=/English/Content/Items/UK151.asp

I grabbed one SCR rated for 400 volts, a project box, 9 volt battery connector, and a switch. On the way home I stopped by the handy dollar store and found a $1 microphone with a 10 foot cord. I also got a few packages of balloons. All I had to do was to put the amp in the box, connect the battery and switch, solder the SCR on and it was good to go.

Setup Diagram © Mr Nikon

© Mr Nikon

© Mr Nikon

I tested it and it worked perfectly. I could adjust the sound level that triggers the flash with the volume knob on the amp. All that was left was to set it all up. I decided to use balloons as it was a lot easier to clean up. I put a black cloth on the wall. Hung the balloons upside-down held there by little black clips and fishing string. To adjust when the flash fires all you have to do is physically move the microphone closer or further away from the noise. The closer, the sooner it fires. I tried a few test shots and was even able to grab the pellet going through the last balloon.

RGB (© Mr Nikon)

For the shot I submitted I put a little bit of water in the balloons to give it the effect I wanted. No pellet in the shot but that’s OK. A very hard assignment but at least now I have a sound trigger for future experiments. Thanks again for all the votes and sorry for the huge post.

And we finish here with the winning image. Dan you are totally insane, again, one of the pre-requisites for really getting on in the MBP community, but in addition, you are awesome! The resulting image is amazing of course, with the red, green and blue balloons bursting with that bit of water spraying out. The timing is perfect! The amount of work you put into this is simply stunning, as are the results.

Thanks for the back-story, for which there is absolutely no need to apologize for the length. I should be apologizing for putting you to so much trouble putting this together and illustrating it with the photos and diagrams. Anyway you came up with another great winning image here. Congratulations Dan.

So, we’ve got one more week left in November as of today, to shoot and get your Panned image assignment entries in. Panning is a lot of fun, though I haven’t made time to get out and shoot myself yet. I’m hoping that will change before the deadline of November 30th, when our entries have to be in. I actually lock the galleries and start the voting system on the 1st of the month, so you will have until the end of the 30th no matter what time-zone you are in. Please do try to get involved. We learn from these assignments as well as it being great fun!

Let’s quickly recap on the actual prizes we’re offering with the support of our sponsors WebSpy. The third place winner will receive every issue of LensWork Extended up until December this year. That’s 29 issues of LensWork extended, which is an incredible prize. Thank very much to the folks at LensWork for arranging such a great prize for us. The second place winner will receive a Lensbaby Composer. Again, this is just amazing, and will open many creative doors for the winner. Then the first place winner will receive an incredible Sigma 50mm F1.4 EX DG HSM Lens! If the winner already has this lens or simply does not want one, though I can’t imagine why not, you can exchange it for a $500 B&H gift voucher. Thanks once again to our sponsors WebSpy for making these prizes available, and for supporting the Martin Bailey Photography Podcast.

Back-stories forum posts: http://www.martinbaileyphotography.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=3221&start=30

Here are the scores and accumulated votes: http://www.martinbaileyphotography.com/scores2009_2.php

Music from Music Alley: http://www.musicalley.com/

Download the Enhanced Podcast M4A files directly.

Click a thumbnail to view the images from this post with limited shooting info. Once the image has opened, you can navigate back and forth by clicking the image.

If you are just tuning in, and didn’t catch the first episode, it’s not essential to listen to these in order, but if you are really just starting out, and looking for some basic tips, we will be building on last week, so it might be better to go back to Episode 216 first.

It turns out that once again, as I prepared for this week, I ended up writing about twice as much as I can fit in one week’s episode. We’re going to finish up the basics series with this, but I’ll [...]]]> Prefer to listen? There’s an audio player at the bottom of the post.

If you are just tuning in, and didn’t catch the first episode, it’s not essential to listen to these in order, but if you are really just starting out, and looking for some basic tips, we will be building on last week, so it might be better to go back to Episode 216 first.

It turns out that once again, as I prepared for this week, I ended up writing about twice as much as I can fit in one week’s episode. We’re going to finish up the basics series with this, but I’ll be releasing a Next Steps episode/post, probably in two weeks time, so stay tuned for that.

The Composition Toolbox
As we know, in art, as with most things, rules are made to be broken. In fact, some of the things that we even call rules, like the “rule of thirds” (that we’ll discuss shortly) aren’t really rules at all. They are guidelines that you can think of as tools to keep in your toolbox, and pull out from time to time while making images. I often find that when I come across a good subject that I want to make a photograph of, I’ll work through a number of compositional possibilities before I move on. Sometimes I know instantly how I want to shoot it, and nail that straight away, but even then, there’s always another angle or another way to frame a subject, so experimenting and working a scene or subject is a great way to improve your photography. So, although this is not a comprehensive list of compositional guidelines, here are few things to keep in mind when shooting, or a few tools for your compositional toolbox.

The Bulls Eye!
OK, so rather than something to do, the first thing I want to tell you is what not to do. Almost always, you’ll want to avoid composing your shot with your subject smack bang in the middle of the frame. Beginners tend to photograph people with their face in the middle of the frame for example, with lots of dead space above their head. This is often the most uninteresting compositional style. Our eye is drawn to the center of the frame and may not escape from there, so we don’t feel involved with the image. Our eyes don’t explore it. The confusing thing is that it will sometimes work, as in I believe it does in image 2366 (below). So don’t totally remove this from your toolbox, but most of the time, avoid the bulls eye composition.

Concentration

The Rule of Thirds

Rule of Thirds Example

The rule of thirds is always a good place to start when deciding how to compose your shot and avoid the “bulls eye” composition. As in the example to the right, imagine you draw a line one third into the frame from the left and right, and from the top and bottom of the image. If you put your main subject or elements of the image along these lines, or at any of the four intersections, your composition will be worlds better than placing the subject in the center of the frame. You can see here how I aligned the equinox flower head along the left vertical third line, and I aligned the multiple flower heads to the right along the top horizontal third line. Also note how I aligned the center of the tree trunk in the background with the left vertical third line. I did this of course in camera, without the help of the lines as we see them here.

Bear in mind too that is an old and proven concept. Artists for centuries have used the rule of thirds as a compositional guide. According to Wikipedia, the rule of thirds appears as early as 1797 as a rule for proportioning scenic paintings.

How you place the elements in your image will change the story you tell. Generally if a person is facing the left, you’ll put them on the right third line, to give them space to look into. This is a safe and comfortable composition. You can create a sense of drama though, by putting them on the left third, so that they are looking or moving out of the frame with little actual space in the image to look into. This is more dramatic, and makes the viewer wonder what the person is looking at. It could make us feel as though the subject were troubled, or deep in thought. With lots of room behind them, we might wonder what they left behind etc.

In landscape photography, the horizon should almost never be along the center of the image, unless you are trying to create a mirror effect or balance the elements of the image in some other way. Again, it will be much safer to put the horizon along the bottom or top third line. A lone tree might work in the middle of the shot, but putting it on the left or right third will likely be a more pleasing composition in most situations. Also, remember to keep your horizons straight. A wonky horizon line can be very disconcerting, unless it’s obviously intentionally wonky. A spirit level to go in the flash hot-shoe on the top of your camera can help, and many newer DSLRs actually have levels built in, so make use of these to keep your horizons straight.

Break the Rules
In image number 2200 you’ll see that I positioned the mountain very close to the bottom of the frame. You could argue that the tip of the mountain nears the bottom third line, but that’s not really what it’s about. What I did here was took the rule of thirds, and broke it. All of these rules of composition are more like guidelines to help you, rather than rules. Experiment, have fun and break the rules as much as you like to see what you get.

Last Light on Mount Asahi

Negative Space

Mystic Arch

You’ll also note in this image that there is a lot of what we call negative space above the mountain. Apart from a tiny bit of dark cloud in the top right, the blue sky is almost featureless, but it adds a lot to this image in my opinion. When I view this image I actually feel my eye coming off of the mountain and drifting upwards into the negative space, giving me an even greater feeling of the scale of things than another shot of this mountain that I made with little space above the mountain.

River & Mount Fuji

Another example of negative space might be image number 1177 (right). Here we have a silhouette of an archway which is one of the entrances to the grounds of the Taj Mahal in India. We can’t actually see the archway, because it’s totally black, negative space, but because of the shape it forms, framing the image, we can tell that it’s a stone archway all the same.

Leading Lines
Finding lines in your scene or landscape can help to lead the eye into the shot, sometimes even towards a small feature that might not be noticed without the leading lines. In image 1549 (left), the river leads the eye into the image, and although our eye initials stops at the cloud bank, to explore the detail there, that gets us close enough to the top of the image to make us peak over the clouds and find Mount Fuji in the distant background.

Insinuation/Suggestion
Image 2396 looks a lot like the eye of a reptile or even God Zilla, but it is in fact a knot on a burnt tree trunk, in the ashes of a camp fire. Look for things that when framed right will look like something else. This can lead to eye catching images.

Log Eye

Layers of Interest
Image 2392 (below) has two definite layers of interest. The first being the foreground tree, in its yellow and red autumnal colors, and the second is the waterfall in the background. You could also say there’s a third layer in woods behind the falls. Adding too many points of interest to an image can over-complicate and ruin an image, but adding two or three complimentary elements juxtaposed like this can be quite effective.

Tatsuzawa Fudoudaki with Kaede Autumn Leaves

Hibarako Kaede

Repeating Patterns
More than two of the same thing is repetition. Repeating elements can be a strong form of composition. I’d say that three is about the minimum you can work with, as with these three sets of leaves in image number 2390 (right), but often with repeating patterns more is actually more.

Poppy in Baby Blue Eyes (Nemophila)

Contrasting Colors
Look for contrasting colors, such as red and green, or bright colors amongst dull. Most of the things that I’m mentioning today I have podcasted about in the past. I did an episode on contrasting colors way back in Episode #31, when I kicked off with probably still my best example of this, which is image number 56 (left). Here we see a bright orange poppy amongst a patch of baby-blue-eyes flowers. I also discussed the Color Wheel that I placed on my site as a tool to experiment with this, but if you select these two colors in a color wheel, you will see that they sit exactly opposite each other, so there’s a reason why we find this contrast pleasing. Colors separated by one third also work well. Just look for contrasting colors or bright colors against a dark background etc. and you may be on to a winner.

Perspective
Your choice of lens changes the way the scene looks in your photograph. If you use a wide angle lens, say between 10 and 24mm, and get in close to your subject, you’ll get a very different perspective than you would say shooting the same subject from further away with a 100mm or 200mm lens. This can be difficult to grasp at first, but is easy to see what I mean with a little experiment. If you have a standard zoom lens, say an 18-55mm or a 24-70mm lens, shoot the same subject, first at the widest focal length, 18 or 24 using the same examples, then zoom out to 55 or 70mm, and move away from your subject until the subject roughly the same size in the frame as it was with your wide setting. If you have an even longer lens, say up to 200mm, try that too, again moving away from your subject to keep it the same size in the frame. Doing this will help you to see how the focal length of the lens changes your perspective.

Also note that wide lenses tend to make elements in your scene look further away from each other. If you photograph a person for example standing in front of a building, the building will look much further away from them with a wide angle lens that it would with a long telephoto lens. The longer the lens, the more you’ll get a stacking effect, like the mountains in image number 827 (below). You can see how all the mountains in the foreground all seem to be stacked up on top of each other in layers. That is because I shot this image with a focal length of 135mm.

Drama Through a Letterbox

You can also use perspective to effect as I have in image number 2353 (below). If you use a wide angle lens and point it up at tall buildings, the building will appear to be falling in on you, and this can give quite a dramatic effect.

Three People Silhouette

Look Up, Look Down, Get High and Low
Don’t shoot everything standing up and at your eye level. When shooting small children or pets, kneel or lie down on the ground to get to get to their eye level or even look up at them. Try shooting trees or building from a low perspective. Try shooting down into a valley from a mountain, or across the city from a tall building. Shooting from above or below your scene is fun and helps to get great images. As with the last image we looked at, be sure to look up and down as well while out and about. You only notice scenes like the one in image 2308 (right) for example by looking up into the tree canopy. Without looking up and down into the undergrowth for that matter, you might miss a lot of great photographic opportunities.

Watch Your Backgrounds and Edges
It’s very easy when you find a great subject to concentrate so much on that subject that you forget to look at the other elements in the frame. Do keep your eyes out for things like lampposts or trees in the distance that can appear to be sticking out of people’s head. Also, even when you are using a shallow depth-of-field to make the foreground and background out of focus, you still need to look out for what’s in that blurry bokeh. If you have patches of color, bright or dark spots in the blur, you need to make sure that these not only don’t distract from your main subject, but as you learn to use them, they can actually be used to enhance your main subject.

You also want to keep your eyes on the edges of your frame. Especially with beginner or mid-range cameras that typically don’t allow you to see the outer 5% or the photograph through the viewfinder, be aware of what’s creeping into the edges. If you are using a zoom lens, zoom out a little to check before zooming back in again, or if you are shooting hand-held, just wiggle the camera around a little so that you can see if there’s anything unwanted that’s too close for comfort.

Use a Tripod
Whenever possible, use a tripod. I know that when you first start out the thought of shooting from a tripod can be a bit daunting, but this will improve your images more than anything else you can do. This is not just because it holds the camera steady, but because when you use a tripod, you think about the composition more. You take your time and think about the whole process more in fact. Using a tripod is not always practical. Some fast paced shooting, like for some sports and some wildlife photography, as well as fast paced portraiture work will be much easier without a tripod. It’s your call, but my rule of thumb and guidance to you is to use a tripod unless there’s a reason not to.

Get It Right In-Camera
There’s a tendency these days to be sloppy in the field, because you can fix any errors in exposure or composition in Photoshop, by adjusting the exposure or cropping, rotating, and you can always clone stuff out later. Granted, you can do a lot in Photoshop, but it all takes time, and you will never develop good photography skills if you are sloppy in the field. Remember that when you have to save highlights or shadows in post processing, you are never going to get quite as good an image as you would if you nail it in the field, and it just feels better! I have nothing against Photoshop, and do save the odd photo myself too, but it’s always a last resort. I’d much rather hold my head high and say that I feel I’m a good photographer, than that I’m good with Photoshop.

In Closing
So, although I’ll do a follow up with some next steps advice in a few weeks, I’d like to leave you with a few thoughts from these two back-to-basics episodes.

Photography is both technical and artistic. Remember that you need to at once be both left brained and right brained. This comes easy to some people and not so easy to others. Whichever you are, please don’t lose sight of the fact that photography is supposed to be fun. By all means spend time on the Internet, in forums, reading books and magazines and view lots of other peoples’ images. It will all help. But the single most important thing for improving your photography is photography. Shoot as much as you can, and look at your resulting images. If you like what you see, think about how you achieved that result, and repeat it. If you don’t like what you see, check the shooting data, and recall what you did in the field, and try to learn from it, so as not to repeat it.

Really though, you have to enjoy yourself. If you get so caught up in trying to figure out all of the details before you get started, you’ll be getting in your own way, and that’s not good.

Here is the forum post on this from 5 years ago: http://www.martinbaileyphotography.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=170

Here’s the Contrasting (Complementary) Colours Episode that I mentioned: http://www.martinbaileyphotography.com/podcasts.php?ep=31#Ep31

And here’s the colour wheel: http://www.martinbaileyphotography.com/colourwheel.php

Music from Music Alley: http://www.musicalley.com/

Download the Enhanced Podcast M4A files directly.

Click a thumbnail to view the images from this post with limited shooting info. Once the image has opened, you can navigate back and forth by clicking the image.

If you have any problems watching the video here, download the file and watch it directly from your PC.

There is also an iPhone optimized version and an audio only MP3 version that you can download with links at the bottom of this post and from iTunes.

Here are the notes I made when planning, which are kind of a transcript, but I had no time to read this at the same time as operating my PC while recording.

Basically I explain about a project that I’m working on to [...]]]> This week I have created a video Podcast. It is also be available as an mp3 in iTunes and there’s a player at the bottom of this post too, for those that prefer only to listen. I do suggest trying to watch the video when at a computer though, to actually see what I got up to in Lightroom and when soft-proofing Photoshop CS4.

If you have any problems watching the video here, download the file and watch it directly from your PC.

There is also an iPhone optimized version and an audio only MP3 version that you can download with links at the bottom of this post and from iTunes.

Here are the notes I made when planning, which are kind of a transcript, but I had no time to read this at the same time as operating my PC while recording.

Basically I explain about a project that I’m working on to create the first set of three folios that I will be making available for sale in the coming weeks, and this let me to research and start to use soft-proofing in Photoshop CS4 to get the prints perfect.

The first thing I did before I started soft-proofing was print all 12 images, 4 per sheet on 3 sheets of paper. This is to see how they look without soft proofing, and for the Flowerscapes folio none of them looked good enough to not soft-proof. Many looked good, and some had areas that just didn’t look right.

Following my paper tests that I discussed episodes 192 and 193, I had basically decided to create my folios on Harman GLOSS FB Al paper, and I will be using the Harman Gloss for my The Colours of Japan folio. When I first started to soft-proof the Flowerscapes folio images, I started with Harman Gloss again, but there were a couple of images that I just couldn’t get a to print how I wanted. I also really like the Hahnemühle Museum Etching and Photo Rag papers, and because I have to order the 8.5 x 11″ paper from the states anyway, I decided to try the 310gsm Hahnemühle Photo Rag Bright White paper. Basically I scrapped all of my Harman Gloss soft-proofs and switched to Hahnemühle Photo Rag for the Flowerscapes folio. Because the Photo Rag paper is much heavier though, this means that I had to remove two images, but I’m not too worried about that. I want each folio to be as good as it can be, and if it means using different paper and adjusting accordingly, so be it.

I am far from being an expert at this soft-proofing game, but having done this a lot in recent weeks I figured I’d try to do a video episode this week to share what I’ve learned with you in the hope that it will help you too. Note that I am still relying on just increasing the Exposure by about 0.15 to 0.18 of a stop in Lightroom for general prints. A lot of the time this is fine, as long as you are using the manufacturers profile for your paper and printer combination. As I say though, sometimes it just isn’t quite as good as you’d like, and this is where soft-proofing can help.

Before I jumped in and soft-proofed each print, I printed out my selection for the folio on 8.5 x 11″ paper, with four images on each page, just to get an idea of how close they were. I was hoping that some would be good enough to not have to be soft-proofed, but that wasn’t the case most of the time. From The Colours of Japan folio only one image escaped soft-proofing, and all of the Flowerscapes folio images required soft-proofing.

I normally work directly on the RAW files in Lightroom unless there is a reason to jump into Photoshop or any other application, but as I now knew that I was going to soft-proof, I just went ahead and made a copy of each image in a new directory, and then opened each of these in Photoshop to work on. After opening in Photoshop, I create a duplicate by selecting Duplicate from the Image menu. Right here I add “Soft Proofed#1″ to the file name, to save doing that later when I save the image. I add the #1, because most prints take a couple of tweaks to get right, and you don’t want to over-write your original, or you’ll have nothing to go back to if you don’t improve it with your tweaks.

Then from the Arrange Documents pull-down, select to show two documents at once, either horizontally or vertically, depending on the aspect ratio of your image, or the important elements of the image that you want to concentrate on.

Before you start your first soft-proof, select View, Proof Setup and then Custom. Under Device to Simulate, select your printer/paper combination profile. I’m going to be proofing for the Hahnemühle Photo Rag paper printed with my Canon Pixus Pro 9500, so I select that profile from the list. For the rendering intent, select Perceptual, and make sure the Black Point Compensation is turned on. I also select Simulate Paper Color from the Display Options section, and this turns the Simulate Black Ink option on by default. You can save the settings to make it easier to reload or switch profiles later. To load a soft-proofing profile setting, just click the Load button, and locate your settings file.

Once you have the profile selected, to toggle soft-proofing on and off, just hit the CTRL Y, or Command Y on the Mac, probably. You can see the difference between the two images already, and the basic idea is to get the images to look as similar as possible. For this image (Cosmos Rhapsody) I only had to adjust the Levels, so let’s create a Levels Adjustment Layer, by selecting Levels from the Adjustment Layer pull-down.

I find that most prints can be made to work by Adjusting the Levels. Some need some Hue/Saturation adjustments as well. One of the prints that I had the most trouble with was my photo of Mount Fuji, that I called Drama through a Letterbox. This required a lot of Color Balance tweaking too. I end up adjusting the Midtones by moving the Cyan/Red slider to +55, the Magenta/Green slider to +23 and the Yellow/Blue slider to -15. I also moved the Magenta/Green slider to +12 in the shadows, because the dark sky was too magenta when I did my test prints. This helped to balance the dark sky and subtle tones in the foregrounds mountains that are almost but not quite black.

As I say, there is always a need to continue to do test prints. This isn’t an exact science, as even with soft-proofing as a tool, I’ve found that it isn’t always as easy as just getting things to look exactly the same on screen. You really have to do test prints, and tweak the soft-proofs based on the prints you output. I had to do most prints at least twice and some took three times or more. Anyway, once you have made your changes, you need to save your images. I gave the file a name earlier, so it’s just a case of telling Photoshop where to put it. Because I opened the image from my Soft Proofs folder, I can just hit the save button, and Photoshop will put my copy into that directory. Because I work on multiple images at once, I wait until I’ve done a few, and then synchronize the folder in Lightroom to pick up the new files. As Lightroom get’s cleverer with editing copies, it does will automatically pick up the new file for you if you just hit save.

Remember that you have to do this for every printer and paper combination that you print to. If you change your printer, you’ll have to do this again. If you want to change to a different paper, you’ll have to do this again. Because of that, I don’t think that I’ll be giving up my simple Exposure Adjustment for general printing, but now that I’ve figured out Soft-Proofing, I will certainly keep it in mind as I do future prints. Whenever something isn’t as good as I’d like it to be, I’ll be falling back on this technology, and with much less trepidation than I have in the past. If you haven’t used soft-proofing yourself, I suggest you give it a try yourself too. It can really help to get your prints that little bit better when only the best will do.

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NOTE: There were problems with the original iPhone optimized version of this video podcast. If you are currently stuck with a copy of the video in iTunes that will not sync to your phone, please right click and delete the episode, and select to remove it from your hard drive if asked. Then right click the feed and select “Show all available episodes”. This will show the grayed out link to the iPhone optimized video again, which you can download and that should sync to your iPhone without problems.

I have split the audio into two parts, with the second part to be released next week, but here is the first part. There is going to be no transcript for these two episodes, as they were not scripted, but here are the images that I mentioned, and you can listen to the audio with the player below, or via iTunes as usual.

This is proof of how important (not) photography was in my house as a [...]]]> Many people have asked me to give more details about myself over the four years that I’ve been doing the Martin Bailey Photography Podcast, but I have never gotten around to it. When I spoke with Jack Andrys, the CEO of WebSpy, our sponsor, about having Jack on the show, he had the idea of him interviewing me. Little did we know that it would turn into a 2 hour and 20 minute marathon chat!

I have split the audio into two parts, with the second part to be released next week, but here is the first part. There is going to be no transcript for these two episodes, as they were not scripted, but here are the images that I mentioned, and you can listen to the audio with the player below, or via iTunes as usual.

This is proof of how important (not) photography was in my house as a kid. Someone, probably my Dad, used this photo of me at 19 months as a coaster, leaving a coffee ring and ripping off part of my face, then they folded the photograph!

Coffee Mug Damaged and Creased Martin at 19 months

In an early version of Photoshop, version 2 or 3, possibly 4, I cloned the right ear to recreate the right and got rid of some of the other crease marks etc.

Retouched Martin at 19 months

This next shot is the first school photo when I was 5 years old. Probably the cutest photo I have of myself, but really one of just a handful of images from my childhood.

1st School Photo - Martin 5 years old (Nov 1st 1972)

Most other photos from my childhood were taken by my friend Jim Canning’s Dad, Robert (Jim) Canning. It was Big Jim that started my interest in photography by letting me snap the odd landscape when we were on holiday together.

Copyright © Robert (Jim) Canning

That’s Jim on the left as we view the image, with my sister Pamela to his right. I don’t remember the name of the little girl next to me on the right.

By the way, the really weird music in this episode is me playing the Didgeridoo at a Christmas Party in 2002. I got a bit better than this before I stopped playing because it was too noisy and not fair on my neighbors.

I hope this episode is not too self indulgent, as many people have asked for more details about me. We also interweave a lot of photography related topics too, especially in the second half, so please do take a listen.

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So, let’s take a look at the winning images, as usual, in reverse order, starting with Marcus Bain’s wonderful image m13892 (below), which is titled “Oil vs Water”. I’ll go into what I think of the shot shortly, but first, here’s that back-story, which I’m going to paraphrase from Marcus’ follow up forum post.

Oil vs Water (Copyright © Marcus Bain)

We heard that Marcus used a Lensbaby 3G with F5.6 aperture ring and the [...]]]> Prefer to listen? There’s an audio player at the bottom of the post.

So, let’s take a look at the winning images, as usual, in reverse order, starting with Marcus Bain’s wonderful image m13892 (below), which is titled “Oil vs Water”. I’ll go into what I think of the shot shortly, but first, here’s that back-story, which I’m going to paraphrase from Marcus’ follow up forum post.

Oil vs Water (Copyright © Marcus Bain)

We heard that Marcus used a Lensbaby 3G with F5.6 aperture ring and the Lensbaby Macro Kit +4 filter and +10 filter combined. The camera is a Canon EOS 350D. Marcus got a small glass fish bowl for 100yen, which is about a dollar, gave it a good clean, and poured in a little water and placed it on some white card in the bright midday sun. Then with an eyedropper Marcus squeezed out a single drop of some cheap black oil based ink, which hit the surface of the water and spread out rapidly into the pattern we see in the image. Marcus shot this at various angles, hand-held and found that he liked this angle the most.

Thanks for the back-story Marcus, and I have to say that I totally love the resulting image. I applaud your pre-visualization and planning for this shot too. The effect is absolutely stunning. I’m so glad that you provided this background information too, as I’d have been floundering all over the place trying to figure out and explain how I though you did this. I’d probably have been able to say no more than “help!” The Lensbaby effect has added so much to this image, but the pattern that the ink has made, and the sharp detail is simply amazing. It’s out of this world! Congratulations on such a great shot, and on third place for the August assignment.

Size matters (Copyright © Helen H)

Next up we have Helen H, with image m14027 (right), which is titled “Size matters”. Helen also left a back-story, from which we understand that this is Helen’s partner’s Porsche Boxter and pride and joy, along with a 1/18 scale model in the same colour. When Helen saw the Juxtaposition theme they struck her as being an ideal subject – small and large versions of the same thing. This is great forethought Helen. Well done for thinking of the connection! Helen kneeled on her driveway and shot this using a Sigma 10-20mm lens on a beanbag. With the contrast between the dark cars and the brightness in the sky Helen foresaw that a single frame wasn’t going to work so took 5 shots from -2 to +2 EV and then combined them in Photomatix Pro. This was Helen’s first real attempt at HDR, so that makes it even more impressive. The angle that Helen has shot this at adds a lot to the image in my opinion. The image is probably tilted around 15 degrees clockwise, so both cars are also tilted at an angle, but that works very well here. We can see a little evidence of cloud movement, remnants of the HDR process, where the clouds have shifted between shots, but this isn’t overly distracting, and actually might even give us a hint of the process in the image. The clouds are nice and bright, floating in that lovely blue sky too, so all in all I think this image works incredibly well. Congratulations to Helen on second place with this classic shot, and thanks for the background information.

And talking of classic images, Landon Michaelson, or bksecret in the forums, has done it again with a totally beautiful shot of a father and baby, which is image m13984, called “Both Hands Full” (below). Landon also provided the back-story for his shoot, including a photograph of the client’s room with all of his gear set up ready for the shoot.

Landon tells us that he had nothing to do with the pose. The baby girl was hungry between takes and the dad really did not know what else to do, so Landon was presented with this great shot on a plate. Of course, it is still necessary to recognize that and pick up the camera to make the image. We heard that Landon used two 60″ shoot-through umbrellas, with back-spill control added, by using the black covers from the convertible umbrellas on the back of the umbrellas behind the lights. He used two AlienBees triggered by Pocket Wizards and the background is AutoPoles, cross bar and black fabric with a mottled gray “Fantasy Cloth” draped over double on the black.

Both Hands Full (Copyright © Landon Michaelson)

For this shot the main light was positioned about 3′ from the subject on camera right and the back light was positioned about 6 feet away to camera left behind the subject. This gave Landon good separation light and soft wrapping light at the same time. The background was illuminated by the light as it washed across it. The last thing he did was rotate the camera to reframe the unfolding event and fill the frame as we see in the photograph. Landon also points out that he rotated the lens, which we can see by looking at the angle of the milk in the bottle. The black and white conversion was done with Silver Efex Pro and selective sharpening was used to bring out the texture in the dad’s skin, but not in the daughters.

Well, it really did turn out to be the sort of masterful shot that we have learned to expect from Landon. Everything just works! The rotation of the camera resulted in a great composition, and the line of site between the dad and the daughter is very apparent, despite us hardly being able to see the subject’s eyes at all. The lighting is wonderful, and the tonal qualities are simply superb. Congratulations on both the capture, and taking first place with this unforgettable image Landon.

So, we’ve got just a ten days or so left for the September assignment which is on Mirror Image. Please do take the time to read the guidelines in the forum before selecting your image. There have been a number of people that have posted multiple images recently, when we actually only allow one entry per person. I can catch this sometimes, but others it’s difficult, so we really need you to take care of this. The images should also be taken during the month of the assignment, so you can’t go rifling through your old image library and drag out something that you already have, but that happens to match the assignment theme.

This assignment marks the half way mark for the six month group of assignments sponsored by WebSpy. We can also now see that Dan, the winner of the first two assignments and Landon, are now pretty close in the running for first place. I’ll put a link to the scores page in the show-notes in case you want to take a look. There’s still time of course for someone to knock Dan or Landon off the top spot, so do try to get out there and join in the fun, shooting for the future assignments, and you never know — you could be in the running for one of the great prizes that our sponsor Web spy has allowed us to make available to the three people with the most votes accumulated at the end of the November assignment. You don’t necessarily have to win to get placed high in the accumulated scores for the grand prizes. If you produce an image each month that captures the imagination of a lot of your peers, you can still steadily amass votes, so please do get involved. It’s not just about the prizes of course, because just taking part will almost certainly make you a better photographer, so in the end, everyone’s a winner.

To quickly recap on the actual prizes we’re offering though, the third place winner will receive every issue of LensWork Extended up until December this year. That’s 29 issues of LensWork extended, which is an incredible prize. Thank very much to the kind folks at LensWork for arranging such a great prize for us. The second place winner will receive a Lensbaby Composer. Again, this is just amazing, and will open many creative doors for the winner. Then the first place winner will receive an incredible Sigma 50mm F1.4 EX DG HSM Lens! If the winner already has this lens or simply does not want it, though I can’t imagine why not, you can exchange it for a $500 B&H gift voucher.

Back-stories forum post: http://www.martinbaileyphotography.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=3113&start=15

Here are the scores and accumulated votes: http://www.martinbaileyphotography.com/scores2009_2.php

“The Demise of a Canon EOS 5D Mark II” blog post: http://blog.martinbaileyphotography.com/2009/09/22/the-demise-of-a-canon-eos-5d-mark-ii/

Music created and produced by UniqueTracks.

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Canon EOS 7D & EF 100mm F2.8L Macro Lens Special Preview Event

On Saturday the 12th of September, 2009, I visited the Canon S Tower in Shinagawa, Tokyo, to attend the Canon EOS 7D and 100mm F2.8 L IS USM Lens Special Preview event. I’m a member of the Canon Photo Circle, which is basically a club here in Japan that you pay $80 a year for and they send you a magazine each month, and an annual, each year. You also get cheap services fees etc. and sometimes, you have a chance to see things like the 7D and the 100mm Macro lens before the general public. Today, this helped me to see these two bits of gear approximately 3 hours before the general public. The Canon Photo Circle members were allowed in at 10AM, and the [...]]]> Prefer to listen? There’s an audio player at the bottom of the post.

Canon EOS 7D & EF 100mm F2.8L Macro Lens Special Preview Event

On Saturday the 12th of September, 2009, I visited the Canon S Tower in Shinagawa, Tokyo, to attend the Canon EOS 7D and 100mm F2.8 L IS USM Lens Special Preview event. I’m a member of the Canon Photo Circle, which is basically a club here in Japan that you pay $80 a year for and they send you a magazine each month, and an annual, each year. You also get cheap services fees etc. and sometimes, you have a chance to see things like the 7D and the 100mm Macro lens before the general public. Today, this helped me to see these two bits of gear approximately 3 hours before the general public. The Canon Photo Circle members were allowed in at 10AM, and the general public from 1PM. I was actually there in the afternoon as well, and I think it was less crowded than the morning, so I’m not sure if this is a privilege or a clever marketing ploy, but I suspect it’s the latter.

So, I called this episode a preview and not a review because I really only had a few minutes here and there with the 7D and 100mm F2.8 L Macro lens, and there are already lots of great technical reviews out there for the 7D, by people that have received early or production versions for long enough to do thorough testing. What I’m going to do today is just relay some of my initial thoughts from the Preview event at Canon’s S Tower. I also made a couple of recordings that although a bit disjointed, will give you an idea of the atmosphere at the event, so I’m going to insert them here. The first recording was while I was actually in the event hall (photo above, right).

Recording #1

I’m at the special preview for the 7D and the new 100mm F2.8 L Macro lens. I just had a play them, and noted that the 7D feels solid. It definitely feels like the next in line in the 50D range, so not big surprise there. There are a couple of cool things that I just found out. I actually found something that the guy that was answering my questions didn’t seem to know yet. There’s a new Dual Axis Electronic Level Display, that looks a bit like the display in a plane’s cockpit, to show you whether you are level or not. It shows this on both the X axis and Z axis, so you can tell if the camera is tilted to the sides, giving you a wonky horizon, and also tilted up or down. Initially though, having just pressed the Info button, the level was just displaying on a black background, and I would really like to see this superimposed over the LiveView, which is what I’d asked the Canon guy if it could do or not. Initially he said no, it was not possible, but then I had a play with it, and you can indeed get the level to display in LiveView. It’s a little bit smaller and indiscrete which is good, but it can be displayed, which is great.

Apart from that, I took a look at the new 100mm F2.8L Macro lens, and took it off the body, to feel the weight. It doesn’t feel quite as heavy as I’d expected but it’s a good weight, and definitely feels like an L lens. From shooting with the lens on the 7D and then looking on the LCD, I can’t really tell if the image quality is perfect, or really check the bokeh etc. It doesn’t really enable you to see that on the LCD, but it was good fun. Without putting my own compact flash card in and taking the image home to look at them on the PC, I can’t really tell if the image quality is what I’m expecting, but it felt good. Easily as good as I was expecting, apart from the weight, but it will also feel heavier once I have the tripod ring that I also have on order fitted. In general it’s pretty much what I was expecting. I just can’t wait to get it on my own camera, shoot some images and then share some with you. At the moment, I intend to keep hold of my old F2.8 Macro lens, the none L version, and do some comparison shots before I sell it on, probably to Pete Leong in Fukushima Prefecture here in Japan.

That was recorded while I was in the event, and I did record another slot, but there was a presentation by one of the photographer’s that Canon had given a 7D to, to test, that was doing a presentation while I recorded, and you could hear very clearly what he was saying. Although it was all in Japanese, it was almost like a recording of the talk, so it’s probably not the best idea to play that here. I spent the next few hours watching seminars, and I listened to the talks from the R&D heads that were responsible for the 7D and the 100mm L Macro lens development, and I recorded a second 10 minute note after I’d left the event, which I’ll play you now, and then add a few more thoughts after that, before we finish. Here’s a photo of the net enclosure that I mention, with the grass, trees and cosmos flowers that Canon setup to let people have a play with the 100mm F2.8 L lens, on either the new 7D or the 5D Mark II.

100mm F2.8L IS Macro Lens "Greenhouse"

Recording #2

So, I just got out of the Canon S Tower, where I attended the Special Preview of the Canon EOS 7D Digital SLR camera and the EF 100mm F2.8L Macro IS USM lens, and I’ve walked down and am in front of Shinagawa Station in Tokyo right now. The last seminar that I just came from was a talk by the R&D heads that were responsible for the 7D and the 100mm L Macro lens development. Being an engineer myself by trade, I was really impressed as you can tell that they are making these new products from the heart, putting everything that they can into it. The guy that was responsible for the 7D development was talking about there is two mirrors. There’s the main mirror and then a sub-mirror, which I think he said was for the auto-focus mechanism. He said that in the 50D they dampened the action of the main mirror to absorb the vibration from the mirror movement, to enable them to get to the 6.3 frames per second that the 50D has, but for the 7D, they had to dampen the action of the rear sub-mirror as well, to get to 8fps. He seemed annoyed with himself though when he said that they weren’t able to get it to 10 frames per second. So they are obviously trying to get as much as they can into these cameras, from an engineer’s perspective, trying to make them as good as they can be.

On the new Hybrid IS (Image Stabilization) on the new 100mm Macro lens, they were talking about how they had to analyze the types of camera shake that you get when shooting macro images and devise ways to measure the amounts of camera shake and camera movement. They were saying that when using a lens at normal shooting distances, the camera shake is more prominent in the movement of the angle of the camera, but when you get down to 30 centimeters, working in the real Macro range, the up and down movement, or the shift of the lens becomes much more of a problem, which is where the new Hybrid IS comes in. They added speed sensors to detect the up and down movement of the lens, so they now have two kinds of sensors, one that detects the angle or tilt movement and the new one to detect the shift movement, so they had to develop algorithms to merge data from both sensors together, to effectively cancel out the camera shake in the macro range.

As I mentioned earlier, the new Macro lens is a little bit lighter than I expected, and as I think about this, that is of course a good thing, because of course you want your gear to be as light as possible, but with high quality. They also said though, that even while they added the new Hybrid IS functionality, they actually made the whole Image Stabilization unit smaller, which is obviously going to help to make the lens lighter too. It is of course a fully fledged L lens, so it’s weather proof and dust proof, even though they were able to make it lighter, but as I say, that’s a good thing, as you don’t want to lump around a big heavy piece of glass all day if you can help it.

I am really, really impressed with the new auto-focus on the 7D. It looks as though Canon have done an amazing job on this, and it’s really the next generation auto-focus, after a number of years without any major improvements in this area. You can split the 19 focus-points into groups, so down the middle or either side, and you can even split the middle section into the top or bottom four sensors leaving the middle part out. They showed a video of two guys on mountain bikes, and I’m not sure if you actually set a start point as a feature, but they said that they set the start-point for the auto-focus on the guy on the right as you look at the scene, and then the two guys rode towards the camera at different speeds and zigzagged in front of each other, but the auto-focus in AI Servo mode, tracked the guy that they started to focus on perfectly, and didn’t switch to the other guy, and didn’t drop to the background at all. The background was pretty far away and not very contrasty, but still, the way the auto-focus just stuck with the one guy the whole time was really incredible.

So, the 7D is definitely a camera to be thinking about, if you are looking to buy something in this range right now. I don’t think I’m going to get one myself, though I’ve learned to never say never. But if you are a user of the 40D, 50D range, it’s definitely interesting. I think actually the 7D is more than the 50D range. I can see why Canon needed to take this camera out of the two-digit-D line, though I’m not sure single-digit-D was the right place for it. Maybe it should have been a 17D or something like that, but without a doubt, they have taken this camera way past the two-digit-D camera range.

I’m really pleased that I came to the Special Preview event today, though I really came mainly to look at the new 100mm Macro lens, as I already have mine ordered, and I am pretty impressed with it. I guess I’ll just go into something else on the macro lens, sorry for keep switching back and forth, but I’m all excited speaking off the top of my head here. I took the 100mm Macro lens into a big room that they had, which was a big net and I’ll stick a photo into the blog post, but it was like a room with real glass and lots of cosmos flowers, in which you get five minutes with the lens.

I had them put the lens onto the 5D Mark II as opposed to the 7D, because I use the 5D Mark II myself. With the aperture wide open at F2.8 I set the shutter speed at 1/6th of a second, and adjusted the ISO to make this an accurate exposure. I went to 1/6th of a second because this is four steps below 1/100 of a second. Remember that old rule of thumb that you use the focal length that you are shooting at for the shutter speed to avoid camera shake, so a 100mm focal length needs at least 1/100 of a second shutter speed. So starting there, if you half 100 you get 50, which is one stop slower. Half that again to 25, then half that again to 12, then half that again to 6, gives you a four stop slower shutter speed at 1/6 of a second, because I’d heard that this new Hybrid IS gives you four stops slower shutter speed. I then shot one of the cosmos flowers at F2.8 with a 1/6 second shutter speed, and it was a mess, not sharp at all. I then went to 1/12 of a second which was still a mess, and then I took it to 1/20 of a second, which is slightly over two stops down from 1/100 of a second, and I got a sharp image.

I asked one of the guys in the room what this was all about, as I’d heard that the lens had four stops of image stabilization, and he said that it does at a normal shooting range, but in the macro range that decreases to two stops. I thought this was a little disappointing at first, but then I thought about it. You can never really hand hold a 100mm macro lens at 1/100th of a second anyway, at least not when shooting very close or at 1:1 life-size. Once in this range, you really have to have 1/320 or 1/400 of a second anyway, to really be able to hand-hold and still get sharp images when shooting at life-size. So I reckon if you really can use this lens at 1/25 of a second hand-held that’s great, and I’m sure I’ll still be trying to get a shutter speed of around 1/100 of a second anyway, just to be on the safe side. As I say, you usually try to get a much higher shutter speed, and if it’s on the dark side, you just have to crank up the ISO, but this lens will allow us to go slower than we might usually, so it’s pretty cool that Canon have added this Hybrid IS to the 100mm Macro lens, and I did get a sharp shot at 1/20 of a second, and if I was in the field I’d probably secure myself a lot more, I’d get both knees on the ground or lean against something, and generally do stuff to make myself more stable, so I am really impressed. Also, the engineers said that they put multiple aperture rings into the camera. I think the diagram they had showed two aperture rings, to basically give the lens much nice bokeh. They said that only one other lens in the Canon range has had two aperture rings in the past, and that’s no longer in production. They really want this lens to have as sweet a bokeh as they can possibly get, so they’ve gone the extra mile here as well, which is all really good stuff, and I’m really excited that I came by here today.

So, just to fill in a few gaps here, as I listened to what I said, I thought that I should note that even if you can shoot hand-held at 1/20 of a second in the Macro range, you do have to deal with subject movement. If you are shooting outside, even the slightest breeze is going to make your subject move too much to be able to realistically shoot at such low shutter speeds.

The guys at Canon also strongly recommended using AI Servo with this lens when shooting macro, to counter any subject movement or your own movement, because we tend to rock back and forth a little, especially when crouched down shooting. I think I’m going to be changing some of my shooting habits once I get this new Macro lens with the Hybrid IS. I tend to shoot with a tripod for much of my work anyway, especially for macro work. If you are trying to shoot bees flying from flower to flower though, you can’t be setting up a tripod each time. I’ve done it before where I set the camera up, framing the shot on one nice flower, making sure the background is nice etc. and then just wait for the bee to come along, but this is time consuming. Just a week or so ago, I was shooting bees on cosmos flowers hand-held my current macro lens, it does enable you to get shots that you simply can’t get with a tripod. I’ve used the tripod with the legs closed up, like a monopod too, but still, you aren’t as free as you are when shooting hand-held. I’ll probably try shooting in AI Servo, and see how it goes. I’ll report back at some point after getting the lens and let you know how this goes.

By the way, they had a pretty impressive visual test going on with two of these new macro lenses (below). What they’d done is disabled the new shift, or up and down camera shake compensation, that makes this new lens’ image stabilization Hybrid, and set it up next to another camera with the Hybrid IS turned on. They then pumped a video stream from the two cameras to two large displays. The cameras were both on a large platform that was constantly moving up and down, which was the action that they had to compensate for with the new Hybrid system. The results were pretty impressive, with the Hybrid IS almost stopping the image dead, while the one with the shift compensation disabled was jumping up and down pretty badly. I am so looking forward to getting this lens out in the field.

Hybrid Image Stabilization Demo

There’re just a couple more things that I wanted to talk about that I was impressed with, with the 7D, before we finish. The 7D has selectable 30, 25 or 24 frames per second when shooting in Full HD mode, which is 1920 x 1080 pixels, and when shooting in HD mode at 1280 x 720 pixels, you can select up to 60 frames per second, giving you the ability to shoot slow motion essentially. I know that video is not for everyone, but it’s good to see Canon raising the bar here as well. There’s also what Canon are calling the Intelligent Viewfinder, with a 100% field of view and a glass pentaprism. Not only is the viewfinder 100%, there’s a new LCD overlay that enables you to display a grid inside the view finder, as well as all the complicated focus point information, and an in-view finder display of the Dual Axis Electronic Level, so you can tell if you have the camera straight without looking at the LCD.

The new 63 zone dual-layer metering sensor also use color information for better metering. The guys at the event showed some example images shot in what looked like pretty challenging lighting conditions with back lighting and high contrast, yet they said that they were in Aperture Priority mode and had used no Exposure Compensation. One photographer went as far as to say that once you have learned how to use the new system, you can pretty much forget about controlling the exposure, because the camera does it so well for you. I’ll believe that when I see it, and probably still grab control even if I believe it, but still, I thought I’d relay this information.

The LCD is the same as the 5D Mark II with 920,000 dots, so it’s sharp enough to check focus, and they also said that it is ever easier to see than the 5D Mark II’s LCD, which is already quite impressive compared to the 1Ds Mark III. We also now finally have ±5 stops manual exposure compensation and ±3 stops selectable in Auto Exposure Bracketing. In Aperture Priority or Program modes, being able to compensate up to ±5 stops will be a huge help. Of course with the new metering system you shouldn’t need this as much, but there are always going to be times when you have to take control, either for artistic reasons or because you still fool the camera. However, good it gets, it’s still a machine.

I also checked the Canon Web site for information on starting the AI Servo with a certain group of focus points, as in the guys on the mountain bike example, and found the following sentence: “For automatic AF point selection, the AF point to start the AI Servo AF operation can be selected.” So I guess what this means is when you’re in AI Servo focusing mode, you select the focus point or group of points that are over the subject that you want to track, but then once you start to track the subject, you don’t necessarily have to keep that group of focus points over the subject. If it moves across the frame to other focus points the Predictive AI Servo will automatically select the correct group of focus points. It was really impressive to watch, for sure.

I can’t wait until this technology is built into the 5D Mark III, or the 1Ds Mark IV over the next year or so. Of course, the 1Ds Mark IV is going to have to come down in price dramatically for me to buy one. The $5,000 price difference between the 5D range and the 1Ds range simply does not seem worth it anymore. Sure, I want the weather proofing and sturdy build of the professional 1Ds, especially when in places like Hokkaido in the grueling winter weather conditions, but as Canon has now shown us that they are happy to put a similar number of pixels in the 5D line, as well as add other features that make it a better camera in many respects, you really have to ask yourself if that extra $5,000 is worth it. I reckon the only way I’ll go for a 1Ds Mark IV at the moment, is if the price comes down to around $5,000, or maybe even less. Of course, like I said earlier, I should never say never, but that’s how I feel right now, having seen the strides the technology is making even in the middle range bodies.

Anyway, that’s another story. For now, I’m going to wrap this episode up saying that it was a great day at the Canon S Tower, and I’m really pleased for those of you that buy into the 1.6X crop factor camera range. You have something to really sink your teeth into here. Congratulations seem to be in order.

Music from Music Alley: http://www.musicalley.com/

Download the Enhanced Podcast M4A files directly.

Click a thumbnail to view the images from this post with limited shooting info. Once the image has opened, you can navigate back and forth by clicking the image.

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Prefer to listen? There’s an audio player at the bottom of the post.

I’ve included the diagrams below, but I also published a rough [...]]]> This Podcast was originally released on the 12 Apr, 2008.

Prefer to listen? There’s an audio player at the bottom of the post.

I’ve included the diagrams below, but I also published a rough PDF of the diagrams, as it might be easier to compare the diagrams by just flicking through the pages of the PDF. If you move page by page rather than scrolling, you see the next chart an instant after the first, so it’s very easy to see the changes.

Anyway, let’s go ahead and look at Diagram #1. You can see that I’ve basically drawn a mock-up of a lens, with a few lens elements, and an aperture ring. The dotted line running through the center of the lens is the lens axis, and the thin blue lines that make their way through the lens from the film plane to the point we are focusing on in basically representing the light coming into the camera. I’ve used the actual metrics associated with a 50mm lens, and for now, we are focusing at 2m, or around 6.6ft, and I’ve made the aperture F2.8, which I’m imagining is pretty much wide open for this 50mm lens.

Diagram #1

What I want you to take note of right now is the X that the blue lines makes as it intersects at the point at which we have focused the lens, two meters in front of the lens. Either side of the X I have drawn a circle. You can think of this circle as the circle of confusion if that helps. If you don’t understand what the circle of confusion is, take a listen to Episode #65 when I discussed Hyper-focal Distance. It’s not important that you fully understand what the circle of confusion is right now though. Just think of it like this. As we move away from the point that we are focused on, the elements in the frame start to become less sharp. The point that we are focused on is the most sharp, but even before we leave what we call the depth-of-field, things start to get closer to being what we’d consider out of focus. These circles represent the nearest and furthest points at which the subject or elements around it will still be perceived by us as being in focus. In the diagrams I’ve called this the far limit and the near limit of acceptable sharpness. So, the light travels from the scene, into the camera through the lens, and the elements within the lens move around when we focus to make sure that the image comes into focus at the focal point on the film or sensor that we can see as a dotted line on the bottom right of the diagram. Although some of the lens elements do move around in reality, it’s not important to understand this concept, so I’ve not changed them in the diagrams.

Before we move on to the next diagram, let’s note the size of the depth-of-field when focusing at 2m with a 50mm lens. The depth of field is 27cm, or just over 10 inches. Also visually note the angle of the intersecting lines that make the X at the point at which we are focusing. Let’s now take a look at Diagram #2.

Diagram #2

The only difference between diagram one and two, is I’ve stopped the aperture down by two stops from F2.8 to F5.6. You’ll see that the angle of the intersecting lines making the X at the point we are focusing on, still 2 meters, is now much closer. So that we are all thinking the same way, imagine you are looking at the X from the front of the lens, so the lines just got closer. Now, the circles that represent the near and far limits of acceptable sharpness have to be moved further out so that they fit between the lines. With just two stops smaller aperture, the depth-of-field widens from 27cms, to 54cms, almost double. This is because we are focusing at 2m, just over six feet from the film plane.

Let’s look at one more diagram while focusing at 2m. In Diagram #3 we will close the aperture by a further two stops to F11. Look how close the two intersecting lines of the X at the point we are focused on are now. We can also see that the depth-of-field has increased greatly. Now to get the two circles of acceptable sharpness between the lines, we have to move them much further apart. The depth-of-field increases to 1.14m, or 3.74ft. Compared to the 27cm we had with an aperture of F2.8 focused at 2m, we now have over four times more depth of field. So, we have seen here that even at the same distance to subject, we can greatly increase our depth-of-field, just by making the aperture smaller.

Diagram #3

In addition to the aperture though, distance to subject, even at the same aperture has a huge effect on the depth-of-field. Obviously, because the lines of the X that we’ve been looking at continue to move apart, and the further away from the depth-of-field, or the area of acceptable sharpness they get, the more blurred the foreground and background gets. This is why the more acute the angle of the X the more quickly we start to see lots of out of focus areas, or bokeh. In Diagram #4 I’ve scaled the diagram down to around 1/2 size so that we can get it on the page, but if you look at the numbers and the size of the camera etc. I don’t think this will be too confusing.

Diagram #4

Anyway, what we’ve done now is kept the aperture at F5.6, which is of course relatively wide, but now we’ve focused on something 5m or 16.4ft away. Look how much closer the lines of the intersecting X are now compared to diagram #2 when we were focusing at just 2m. The depth-of-field has also increased from 54cm or 1.7ft to a whopping 3.8m or 12.5ft. This is seven times more depth-of-field, just by focusing at 5m instead of 2m. So now we can see how focusing further away increases the depth-of-field even with the same aperture.

Just to reinforce this, let’s now look at Diagram #5, and focus much closer to the lens. Let’s imagine we focus at 50cm, or 1.65ft in front of the film plane. All focusing distances are measured from the film plane by the way, so it’s not a problem thinking about the distance from the film plane instead of from the front element of your lens. Still with an aperture of F5.6, see how wide the lines of the intersecting X are now, and how close the circles of near and far acceptable sharpness now are. We have a depth-of-field of just 3cm, or just over an inch.

Diagram #5

If we open the aperture up to F2.8, as in Diagram #6, we can see that the lines of the X get even wider apart, and the depth-of-field is reduced to 2cm, or just over half an inch. If we compare this to Diagram #1, when we focused at 2m with the same F2.8, the depth-of-field has reduced from 27cm to just 2cm, by changing the focusing distance from 2m to 50cm, or one quarter of the distance.

Diagram #6

I think we’ve probably had enough of diagrams now, so I didn’t make any more, but I’m sure this will help you to appreciate why the depth-of-field gets so much shallower when doing very close macro work. Sometimes we’re focusing on things just in front of the lens, literally, if working at magnifications larger than life size. Say I’m using a short macro lens, and focusing on something very close to the lens, at about 20cm from the film plane, my depth-of-field is reduced to 2mm, because the lines of the X intersect at such a wide angle. When you do go larger than life size, it is not uncommon to have a depth-of-field of less than a millimeter, and have to stop down to F11 or F16 to get more than a millimeter.

The other thing to bear in mind is that focal length has an influence of depth-of-field as well. The reason for this is because if we still focus at 2m, say with a 100mm lens, instead of a 50mm lens, the subject is magnified to twice the size. This in turn means that we are magnifying the circles of acceptable sharpness, so they go out of focus twice as much. To counter this we have to half the size of the circle for it to still be acceptably sharp, and that means that the circles move closer to the intersection of the X, and the depth-of-field decreases. Basically the longer the focal length of our length, the smaller the circles of acceptable sharpness get.

Anyway, I hope this has helped if you didn’t really understand why aperture and subject distance affected the depth-of-field the way it does. If you are still confused, how about grabbing a small object, and a tape measure, and setting up your camera on a tripod and put the object 2m away from the camera, and take three photos. One with your lens wide open, then stop down by 2 stops, so if you start at F2.8 you’ll go to F5.6 and a third having stopped down by 2 more stops, so F11. If your lenses widest aperture is F4, try F4, F8 and F16. Then move the object you shot to 50cm, or as close as you can focus on it, if your lens doesn’t focus as close as this, and shoot three more shots with the same three apertures. Then move the object out to 5m, and repeat the three shots. Then take a look at your images on your computer, and you will be able to see the difference very clearly.

Another very simple trick you can try is to hold out your finger, at arm’s length, and focus on it. Notice how blurred the background is using your peripheral vision, that is don’t actually focus on the background, just see it while focusing on your finger. Then move your finger towards your eyes, while continuing to focus on it, kind of like in AI Servo or continuous focusing mode. As your finger gets closer, you’ll notice that your surrounding go out of focus even more. Move the finger back out, and the surrounds become more focused. You can do this with both eyes open or just one and see the effect, but bear in mind that your camera only has one lens, so closing one eye should help you to see very much as your eye does.

Here is the PDF file that contains the six diagrams I use to explain this topic: http://www.martinbaileyphotography.com/podcasts.php?dt=ti&ep=132.1#Ep132.1

You can also find the diagrams in lower resolution in this forum post: http://www.martinbaileyphotography.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=15231 (These are actually the same as above in the blog post.)

Here’s a link to Mikkel Stegmann’s Barnack utility that I reference so much, and mentioned in the Podcast:

http://www.stegmann.dk/mikkel/barnack/

Here’s the blog post that I mentioned in the housekeeping section, from Stefan Neuweger’s blog in which Stefan has kindly done a write up on the Martin Bailey Photography Podcast: http://fotos.neuweger.com/2008/04/08/podcast-showcast-mbp-podcast/

Download the Enhanced Podcast M4A files directly.

Click a thumbnail to view the diagrams. Once the image has opened, you can navigate back and forth by clicking the image.

It’s Only Natural

The first thing I’d like to say is that it’s natural to feel nervous about the client’s reaction to the images from a shoot. I recently read a blog post by Joe McNally in which Joe talks about this apprehension while waiting [...]]]> Prefer to listen? There’s an audio player at the bottom of the post.

It’s Only Natural

The first thing I’d like to say is that it’s natural to feel nervous about the client’s reaction to the images from a shoot. I recently read a blog post by Joe McNally in which Joe talks about this apprehension while waiting for word back from his assignment clients, and Joe is one of the best photographer’s in the world. The point is though, people worry about this, regardless of what rung of the professional ladder you are perched on. That said this fear of rejection can be so great, that it prevents a budding photographer from taking on any assignments at all. It can be paralyzing, and that’s not a good thing either.

Assuming that you have a good grasp the techniques and skills that you require, you have the vision to create good photographs, and you have a desire to make some money at photography, here are some things for you to think about as you prepare to charge for your work.

Charge with Confidence

Firstly, do not feel guilty for charging for, or even just wanting to charge for your work. If someone likes your work enough to have approached you to do a shoot for them, it means you are doing most things right already. If they want the photographs, and you decide not to do it, because you feel bad about charging, then the money will go to another photographer, and you will not grow as a photographer. You have to get over this apprehension, and I’m going to offer some advice and methods to help you do so. How you proceed is up to you.

Personally, when I decided to start doing paid assignment work, I was confident in my ability to either nail the shoot with my current skills, or being able to quickly learn the additional skills necessary to confidently take on the work. I have not yet overstretched myself, but if I got close to doing that, I’d probably employ one of the strategies we’ll talk about shortly. Basically though, when you can interact with a possible client with confidence, it becomes so much easier to talk about money. This is always helped of course by being able to show a portfolio of images that will help to convince your client that you are up to the task.

I’ve done some work without a relevant portfolio though. I got the jobs based on the work that I already had out there, and a bit of a leap of faith on the client’s part. I’m possibly even a little over confident though, and some people aren’t prepared to put themselves in that position without a little something extra to help them on their way.

Practice Makes Perfect

One thing you can do of course is to try to emulate the shoot that you are being asked to do, if possible even before you say yes to the client. For example, if you are asked to do a family portrait shoot, ask your brother or sister or friends families if you can practice on them. For family shots of course you would likely not be charging, but you’d gain invaluable experience shooting family portraits. If you are required to shoot the family indoors, using say strobes and umbrellas or soft-boxes, you have to make a decision as to whether or not you are prepared to invest in this equipment beforehand. If you can, pick up what you will need, and practice the hell out of it. Use Internet resources like the Strobist Web site, and again, practice with your own family or a friend’s, and build enough confidence to be able to go back to your potential client and say “yes, I’d love to work with you on this project” and start to negotiate a price. The amount you charge of course will depend on where you live, and the saturation of the market in your area. It will also depend on your own skills of course, so because we’re really talking about you getting started here, you do not want to falsely inflate your prices. Quote what you know other pros in the area are charging.

If having practiced the sort of photography you’re being asked to do, you still don’t feel that you coming up with the goods, I suggest you turn the assignment down. You might simply need more time to develop the skills required. If you feel that your getting the images, and you have maybe been able to get some feedback on the work from a friend that you can trust to tell you that the photos stink if they did, then we’re probably back to the point that David is in that you are now simply afraid to charge for fear that the client won’t like the images you shoot. The chances are that the Client will love the images, but just based on that, you still aren’t prepared to negotiate a price.

Work For Free, On Your Terms

I always maintain that total honesty is the best practice. Try talking to the client. They can either trust you and go with your proposal, or decide to ask another photographer. If the latter, just take this as a sign that you need to develop your skills and in turn confidence further, and turn this into motivation. Don’t let the rejection hurt you, after all you were just being honest. You will have earned the Client’s trust, and that may come back to you in a positive form at a later date.

If the client is open to your ideas, explain that although you are confident in your photography skills, you don’t feel that you have enough experience in the type of work they are requesting you to do, to take it on as a paid assignment. You could either offer to do the work at a reduced rate of say 50% or even 25%, just to cover your costs. I’m a strong believer in getting something for your time, but it does not necessarily have to be a direct monetary payment. If part of your problem is that you simply do not have a portfolio of images in the line that the client is looking for, offer to do the work in exchange for access to subjects that you might otherwise not be able to photograph. As payment, you could ask that the client arranges to get a model or property release signed, allowing you to use the images you shoot in your future marketing or even to sell the work for commercial use. This would put you in a position to possibly make something for the shoot after all.

Only If You Initiate It

Note that I only support working for free if it is you that initiates it. If someone comes to you from the start, saying that they want you to shoot for them, but they can’t pay you, think long and hard before accepting. The chances are that this sort of client will never have any money to pay you, and you’ll just become their photographer lackey. You could even get a reputation as the guy that works for nothing, and then other clients would start to call on you to work for nothing, which you obviously don’t want to happen. Ideally you’ll walk away from this kind of offer, unless the work will greatly enhance your portfolio, and the client is willing to help get model releases signed etc. In that case, then you make the call, but read on to see what you have to do to stop yourself from becoming the photo-lackey.

The only reason you are going to do the job for free or for a greatly reduced fee, is because you want to build your confidence and your portfolio. You should draw up an assignment contract as you would if you were going to charge. This shows the client that you are serious and prepared. You should even include the fees that you would charge if you were going to, but then write that off with a 100% discount, and state why you are doing so. You should also include a statement to cover the fact that the client will sign a model or property release that will allow you to use the resulting images in your marketing or even to sell commercially. Draw up your model releases as a separate document and get them signed, before the shoot, if possible.

Limit Free Shoots to Three

Remember that every shoot you do to build your own business, is taking money out of the pocket of other photographers. To avoid this becoming a habit, or a way for you to overcome your own lack of confidence, decide on the number of free shoots you do, before taking this route. You could give yourself say three shoots to build the confidence that you require, and to build a small portfolio to base your future marketing and negotiations on. Promise yourself that you will start to charge from the fourth shoot, and stick to it. If a client that you worked for free for comes back to you requesting another free session, point out the undiscounted rate that you wrote in your agreement for the first job, and tell them that you are now confident that you can do the work professionally, and are now charging for your services. If they don’t come up with the cash, walk away from the negotiation.

The Pressure Stays On

Of course, just because you’ve decided that this will be practice for you, you should not allow yourself to take the pressure off. Your client has thought enough of your work to ask you to do the shoot in the first place, so you should not let them down. All of the best practices that would usually be followed should be followed. Have a pre-shoot session with the client to fully understand their requirements. Create a check-list of shots that they require, adding any ideas that you pre-visualize yourself, assuming the schedule has the flexibility for a little extra shooting.

Make sure that all of your gear is in good working order. Have a backup camera body and make sure that your cameras’ sensors are clean. Make sure that you have more than enough memory for the images you will shoot. Get all your batteries charged and lenses clean too. Check that your cable releases work and the strobes are firing as planned. If you are using wireless lighting, make sure that the channels are all set, ready to go. If you could not avoid getting some new gear for the shoot, use it as much as possible beforehand, making it almost second nature. The last thing you want to do is to fumble around with your gear in front of your client.

If something should go wrong, stay calm. If you start to panic, the subjects will become uncomfortable and this will show in the images, and if your client is overseeing the shoot your panic or lack of confidence will look very unprofessional. Things do go wrong, but how you handle the situation can make you look like a competent pro, or a complete hack.

If you have a way to make a backup of the images you shoot in the field, either to a laptop computer or portable storage, or maybe to multiple card slots in the camera as you shoot, do it. The sooner you get a backup of your images the better.

The Value-Add

When shooting, capture anything that could work, even if it is not on the shot-list. If you impress your client by coming up with something cool that they didn’t think of, you will come across as a true pro, and it will certainly go a long way to getting you a second assignment. I shot a bunch of images with foreground bokeh like image 1885 below, during an assignment that I did in 2008, and these ended up being some of my client’s favorite shots, and were used in the book, despite the fact that they were not on the shot-list.

Assignment Image with Foreground Bokeh

After the shoot, unless you have been requested to submit every image you shot to the client, do a strong edit. Don’t send the client 22 identical shots that you took just because you weren’t confident that you’d nailed it. (Chances are you nailed it in the first one or two frames, but you shot the other 20 anyway. ) You should give the client options, and include what you think works photographically. In fact, I often find that the client likes images that I really don’t care for, so it really does pay to include images that work, even if not your personal favorites, just avoid multiple seemingly identical images. Mark the images that you shot on their request accordingly, and show anything that you shot off your own bat accordingly as well. Part of your job is to make the task of looking through the resulting images as easy on the client as possible.

Nail the Shoot for Yourself

There’s a lot more we could talk about here, but the main point is that even if you end up shooting an assignment or two at a reduced cost or even for free, you should do everything you can to really nail the shoot for your client and for yourself. After all, the payment that you are receiving here is in portfolio images and confidence. Don’t waste the chance to capitalize on your time investment, until you are able to charge a fair price for your skills and your time. And remember, that if Joe McNally is concerned that his clients might not like the images he submits from an assignment, then you don’t have to feel bad about being apprehensive yourself.

Joe McNally’s blog post in which he mentions apprehension regarding the client’s reaction to photographs shot on assignment: http://www.joemcnally.com/blog/2009/08/14/joes-version-of-children-of-the-corn/

Music from Music Alley: http://www.musicalley.com/

Download the Enhanced Podcast M4A files directly.

What is Dynamic Range? In simple terms, Dynamic Range is the difference between the darkest thing and the lightest thing that your camera can capture and still retain detail in these areas of the subject. I guess would could think of it as pure black and pure white, because that’s what will happen as you hit the boundaries, and that may often [...]]]> Prefer to listen? There’s an audio player at the bottom of the post.

What is Dynamic Range?
In simple terms, Dynamic Range is the difference between the darkest thing and the lightest thing that your camera can capture and still retain detail in these areas of the subject. I guess would could think of it as pure black and pure white, because that’s what will happen as you hit the boundaries, and that may often be fine, but most things in the real world have some level of texture and shades, tonal values other than pure black or pure white. If I am photographing a white object though, I am going to want to be able to make out the texture in that object or subject, and if I overexpose the subject, I lose that detail, and the information recorded in the image file becomes just pure white.

I should mention that if you shoot RAW, and you should if you care about the quality of your images, you can bring detail out of the highlights and shadows to the tune of around one stop over or underexposure, but this still depends on you having some detail in the over exposed highlights or deep, seemingly plugged up shadows. If you were to sample an area that’s overexposed in Photoshop and find that the RGB values have gone to #FFFFFF, or pure white, for any significant amount of the image, there’s no texture in there at all. There’s no way to bring any detail back in post processing. The same goes for something pure black in the deep shadow areas. Once the shadows go to #000000 for any significantly large area, the details are gone.

Shoot for the Highlights!
We’ve spoken before about exposing for the highlights, and most of the time this is going to be true. It’s of course always best to get the exposure as good as possible in camera, but if you lose control of your exposure for one reason or another, and your histogram starts to clip, hitting that right shoulder, then you’ll start to lose detail in those whites, or whatever color you are overexposing. It’s important to note that if you have an RGB histogram, use it. You can blow out just one channel, like the Red channel, and it doesn’t always show up in the black and white histogram, and it can look pretty bad to have just one channel blown out. Sometimes even worse than when you blow the whole thing out. The point is to try to get the brightest part of your scene close to, but not touching the right shoulder of your histogram. When you do this though, if the lightest and darkest values in your chosen scene are greater than that of your camera’s dynamic range, you are going to start to lose detail in your shadows as they start to plug up.

When NOT to Shoot for the Highlights
There are times when you will allow large parts of an image to blow out, for the sake of the main subject, as in image number 2308 (below). Here the histogram will spike to the right, as we see to the in this histogram, well and truly hitting the right shoulder. But when shooting this I knew that the sky was going to blow out, so I chose to ignore the histogram. I concerned myself only with getting nicely exposed, fresh green leaves. Had I exposed for the highlights, not only would the greens would be muddy, the bark on the tree trunks would have been very dark, and probably even under exposed.

Big Tree and Fresh Leaves

You do have to be careful here mind, because when you do allow the sky to overexpose like this, it will gradually start to bleed into the important main subject. I like this effect to a degree, as you can see in this image. I think it even adds a little sparkle to the overall effect. But there are limits. If you ignore a bright light source too much, it can bleed into the main subject so badly that it becomes totally washed out, rendering the image pretty much useless.

Exposure Value?
Before we can start to talk about how much dynamic range our camera’s have, let’s look at the units of measurement used. Dynamic Range is measured in EV, or Exposure Value, which can also be termed a “stop”. One “EV” is one “stop” in exposure terms. We know that there are three settings on our camera that affect the exposure, and that is the Aperture, the Shutter Speed and the ISO. Changing any combination of these settings will modify the EV. The chart to the right shows the shutter speeds required for each aperture from F1 to F32 to capture a subject with the Exposure Value from -6 to 23 EV at ISO 100. If we were to create a chart for ISO 200, basically all of the shutter speeds would be halved, and of course halved again for ISO 400, and so on.

An aperture of F1 is basically a lens that is as wide as it is long. What I mean is, if you have a 50mm focal length lens, to make it F1, it would have to have a 50mm wide aperture when it’s wide open. The common 50mm F1.4 lens has an aperture of about 36mm when used wide open. You get this by dividing 50 by 1.4. If you close the 50mm down to F2.8, the aperture will be around 18mm and so on. Another example I like to use to emphasize this calculation is the 600mm F4. If you divide 600 by 4, you get an aperture opening of 150mm, or 15cm, or about 6 inches. That sounds pretty wide, but if you’ve ever looked into the barrel of a 600mm F4 lens you’ll know that it has huge lens elements, but I digress.

If we start thinking about this from F1.4, you can see from the chart that at F1.4 an EV of one requires a one second exposure. As you increase the Exposure Value, you can see the shutter speed halve with each stop, until you get to the fastest shutter speed for most cameras on the market today, which is 1/8000 of a second at EV 14. If your scene is brighter than EV14, the only way you can shoot it without overexposing it is to close down your aperture, or if you don’t want to do that, say because you want to shoot with a wide aperture for a shallow depth-of-field, you can add a Neutral Density filter to cut out light and in turn reduce the EV. I hope I’m making sense. If I’m not, I suggest you study the EV chart on the blog a little more. It’s pretty straight forward.

How Much Dynamic Range?
The human eye can see around 24 stops of dynamic range because the pupil opens and closes dynamically as we scan a scene. If you think about it, we are pretty much stuck in Shutter Priority mode, with automatic ISO. As we look at the world around us, if we look at something bright, the pupil get small to stop the bright areas from being too bright and in our cases even possibly damaging our eyes. If we look into the shadows, our pupils open up to reveal some detail in the shadows, even at the expense of some very bright areas in our peripheral vision. When you open your eyes at night, way when you’re laid in bed, you’ll probably notice a lot of grain, and the world is pretty much black and white, because you lose the ability to record the colors and tonal values the higher our brain sets our ISO. This all amounts to around 24 stops of dynamic range in pretty much full auto, but If we could stop the pupil from opening or closing, essentially making just one frame, it is estimated that we see between 10 to 14 stops. If you are wondering where I got this information from, it’s from the Cambridgeincolour.com Web site. They have a great article on Dynamic Range, which I’ll link to in the show-notes.

I’m sure by now, those of you that have never investigated this are wondering what dynamic range modern digital SLR cameras are recording single images in. Well, the 5D Mark II is said to have a dynamic range of just under 12 EV, so it’s actually very similar to the human eye, if we could fix the aperture in our eyes. Like the human eye, the camera’s dynamic range reduces as you increase the ISO. The 5D Mark II captures just under 12 EV when the ISO is set between 50 and 200. As you increase the ISO, the dynamic range decreases, as does the tonal range of your images. It’s not a rapid decrease mind. You lose just under two stops to around 10 EV as you drop down through ISO 400 to 1600, then another EV for every stop of ISO from then on. That means you drop to 9 EV at ISO 3200, 8 EV at ISO 6400, 7 EV at ISO 12800 and just under 6 EV at ISO 25600.

This data by the way is from DxO labs, on their DxO Mark site. If you want to see all kinds of information on your own DSLR, go to dxomark.com and select your camera brand and model from the pull-downs on the top page. I also checked the information for my 1Ds Mark III, and was pleasantly surprised to see that it actually beats the 5D Mark II just by a hair with a dynamic range of 12. Nikon users will also be pleased to hear that the D3X has a dynamic range of 13.7, and the D3 and the D700, as well as the D3X all beat the 1Ds Mark III and the 5D Mark II on dynamic range. The good thing is that we all beat the Hasselblad H3DII 50. The only camera that beats both the top of the range Nikon and Canon DSLRs as of August 2009 is the Phase One P65+. This is a 60MP medium format camera though, and will cost you in advance of $40,000 US, for the basic kit including an 80mm lens, so I don’t think many of us will be losing sleep over this.

Now, I know that some of you will be jumping up and down in your seats now wanting to talk about High Dynamic Range, but we’re not going to get into that today. Yes, you can shoot multiple images, or use multiple exposures from a single RAW file to create images with higher dynamic range than the current technology allows, but I personally don’t really shoot HDR, and I only like to talk about things that I either do myself or have a pretty good understanding of.

Flowering Lotus with Seed Pod

Do We Really Need More Dynamic Range?
When you think though, that modern DSLRs are now capturing roughly the same dynamic range as the human eye with a fixed aperture, do we really need much more Dynamic Range? I’m going to play devil’s advocate here and suggest that we probably don’t. I believe that the image above was enhanced by the sparkling highlights shining through the leaf canopy. There are times when the contrast in a scene is simply too great, and I’m sure we’ll enjoy it as camera manufactures find ways to increase the dynamic range of the sensors, but you know what? When that happens, I can definitely see myself grabbing that Blacks slider in Lightroom and deepening my shadows. I don’t think we necessarily need to see detail in shadows in every image. Take a look at image number 2333 to the right. This white Flowering Lotus stands out beautifully against the dark shadow background formed by some trees in the late afternoon. The only thing that was not pretty much pitch black was that area of grey that we can see to the right of the seed pod. I think this was the trunk of one of the trees. This is pretty much as my camera recorded the scene, except I’ve converted it to black and white.

(I’ve added three more color images to the album at the bottom of this post as other examples of where I’d deliberately plug the shadows by dragging the Blacks slider in Lightroom to the right, if of course, my camera had a wider dynamic range than it does. These shots are all pretty as the camera rendered the shot.)

If my camera was capturing say 24 EVs, like our eyes with their automatic aperture control, although it will be nice some of the time, I really think that there’ll be occasions when it’s just too much. It won’t feel natural to use. I’m sure I’d want a custom setting on my camera to restrict Live View and maybe even the preview images on the LCD to only display 12EV or any incremental value with a slider for example. I don’t necessarily want to see the full gamut on my LCD. I can see most of it through the lens of course, because I’m using my 24 EV dynamic range eyes, but I feel that the feedback we get on the LCD either in Live View or in the image we captured, can help us to use the shadows to effect, that I fear we could lose if dynamic range gets too great in every image. Of course we would adapt, and it may just become another aspect of the photograph that we pre-visualize. We might even just get totally accustomed to 24EV shots, and they start to look natural too us. Right now though, I like the deep shadows that we get in some situations with today’s cameras. Hopefully this will give you a little food for thought though.

Great Dynamic Range article: http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/dynamic-range.htm

Camera dynamic range and other measured data: http://www.dxomark.com/

Music from Music Alley: http://www.musicalley.com/

Download the Enhanced Podcast M4A files directly.

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"Gecko on leaf" by qmcgrath

So, the images that we’ll look at today as usual will be included in the enhanced podcast, so you’ll see them in iTunes or on your iPod etc. Of course here on the blog they are posted below.

Let’s first go through the top three winners of the July Assignment that was on the theme of Backlit.

In third place was the totally amazing image, Gecko on leaf by Quintin McGrath. This is really just such an awesome photograph. I totally love it. Quintin has basically caught a Gecko, as the title implies, sitting on a leaf, and shot it through the leaf, using, yes, you guessed it, backlight. This is has so much depth, as we see the shadow of the gecko become more blurred as up the legs and torso, then on to [...]]]> Prefer to listen? There’s an audio player at the bottom of the post.

"Gecko on leaf" by qmcgrath

So, the images that we’ll look at today as usual will be included in the enhanced podcast, so you’ll see them in iTunes or on your iPod etc. Of course here on the blog they are posted below.

Let’s first go through the top three winners of the July Assignment that was on the theme of Backlit.

In third place was the totally amazing image, Gecko on leaf by Quintin McGrath. This is really just such an awesome photograph. I totally love it. Quintin has basically caught a Gecko, as the title implies, sitting on a leaf, and shot it through the leaf, using, yes, you guessed it, backlight. This is has so much depth, as we see the shadow of the gecko become more blurred as up the legs and torso, then on to the head, because of course these parts of the gecko are further away from the leaf than the feet. The feet themselves though are transparent, as the light pours through them and through the leaf beneath. Compositionally, you’ll notice great use of the rule of thirds, with the center of the leaf running up the right third of the shot, and the gecko sitting on the top left third intersection. I know that rules are meant to be broken, but we also find this sort of composition very pleasing for a reason. It’s imprinted in our artistic DNA from centuries ago. The overall colour is a yellowish-green, with beautiful texture captured in the leaf itself. This shot couldn’t be better executed in my opinion. Congratulations to Quintin on this really awesome image.

Next up is another simply amazing shot (below). The quality of entries never fails to amaze me and this is another great example by Dennis Brennan, which is called Holding Hands, in second place. This is obviously a visualized and posed shot, with someone’s hands cupped around a leaf. The image looks as though it’s been converted to a Sepia toned image, but it’s almost deceiving, in that the skin tones could be that color, as could the leaf, if it’s a freshly fallen autumn leaf, although it does look like a nice fresh green leaf.

The decision to sepia tone this was masterful, and the lighting is just exquisite. Beautiful soft light, with obviously some light coming from the front, from the direction of the camera, but much more light coming from behind, in line with the theme for the assignment. This has caused very sharp shadows of the fingers behind the leaf, which adds so much to the image visually. The hands themselves seem very soft, and maybe the thumbs are slightly out of the depth-of-field, to good effect of course, but the leaf itself is sharp as tacks, again, just making this image such a winner. It almost has a classic feel to it, and I applaud Dennis’ vision and skills with his lighting to execute what again is just such an amazing photograph. Well done indeed on taking second place with this image Dennis.

"Holding Hands" by dennisbrennan

"Stare" by Mr Nikon

I guess as we get into the second month of the six month group of assignments sponsored by WebSpy, it’s not hard to figure out that Dan is currently in first place with the accumulated scores as well. If you go to the scores page that you can find on my Web site, and there’s a link in the show-notes, you can scroll down to the bottom of the page to see the total accumulated scores from the votes that people have amassed so far. We can see that Mr Nikon has 64, followed by Landon Michaelson or bksecret with 43, and qmcgraph, or Quintin, who scooped third place in this last assignment, has 31. Dennis Brennan is just slightly behind Quinitin with 27 and in fifth is Edwin C with 26. As we’ve seen in the past, you don’t necessarily have to win to get placed high in the accumulated scores for the grand prizes. If you produce an image each month that captures the imagination of a lot of your peers, you can still steadily amass votes, so please do get involved and try to get your hands on one of the amazing prizes that our sponsor WebSpy has enabled us to offer for this six month group of assignments.

A reminder the scores from all six assignments from June to November 2009 will be tallied up to find the three photographers with the most votes after the November assignment, and they will receive some incredible prizes. There’s a post on my blog with details of the prize which I’ll link to in the show-notes, but to quickly recap, the third place winner will receive every issue of LensWork Extended up until December this year. That’s 29 issues of LensWork extended, which is an incredible prize. Thank so much to the kind folks at LensWork for arranging such a great prize for us. The second place winner will receive a Lensbaby Composer. Again, this is just amazing, and will open many creative doors for the winner. I’m totally loving my LensBaby Composer that I picked up a few months ago. Then the first place winner will receive an incredible Sigma 50mm F1.4 EX DG HSM Lens! If the winner already has this lens or simply does not want it, though I can’t imagine why not, you can exchange it for a $500 B&H gift voucher.

Remember to tweet “Thanks to @WebSpy for sponsoring the @MartinBailey photography podcast!” to show your support and let our sponsors WebSpy know that you are listening. Without WebSpy there would be no prizes.

Remember also that the August assignment theme is Juxtaposition, and if you have trouble figuring out what that’s all about, go and take a look at the thread for this assignment in the Photography Forum at martinbaileyphotography.com. Dan, the winner of these last two assignments has kindly done a bit of research and posted some definitions for us, which was a help for me too, as I wasn’t 100% sure of the meaning either.

Here’s what I need you to tweet on Twitter: Thanks to @WebSpy for sponsoring the @MartinBailey photography podcast! #photog

Scores and accumulated votes: http://www.martinbaileyphotography.com/scores2009_2.php

Assignment prizes: http://blog.martinbaileyphotography.com/2009/06/09/competition-prizes/

Music created and produced by UniqueTracks.

Music from Music Alley: http://www.musicalley.com/

Download the Enhanced Podcast M4A files directly.

Click a thumbnail to view the images from this post with limited shooting info. Once the image has opened, you can navigate back and forth by clicking the image.