Posts tagged photography

My niece, Julia, OMF, Camerons

Photography 2 Comments

Children in some ways are easier to shoot that adults. Of course, there’s a different set of challenges and also not everyone’s the same. Like adults, some are more comfortable in front of the camera. Recently, I was at Camerons and while relaxing and also planning out some big changes ahead as well as a lot of calendar packing events — including a large photo seminar for university students as well as the upcoming Shoot4Charity fund raiser. My niece Julia was there and she’s a gregarious kid and rather happy to be in front of the camera. She proudly exclaims “I’m shooting pictures!”. Best part is she’s able to tell my 5D Mark II, battery grip, 70-200 f2.8 compared to daddy’s 500D and 18-200, “Your camera is much bigger than daddy’s!” Size does matter?

The OMF bungalow has a nice open area for kids to run around. It’s also a good time to think, reflect and plan for the future. Change is definitely on the horizon. Most of the shots were flash assisted with my RadioPoppers, even some of the daylight ones as I wanted more directional lighting.

Julia found the older kids (another group who was also staying in the bungalow with us) playing football (soccer) but they didn’t want her to play plus also they were kicking much harder. The only time we had was later in the evening about dinner time (around 7pm) when the kids went in for their dinner. I kinda of like those shots where I had to drag the shutter down quite a bit. You can see the slow shutter in the shots — I was going down to 1/30 at f/4.5, ISO 1250 in those shots. Some shots had 3 580EX IIs going off to provide enough light but as I didn’t move my lights around, some shots had to make do with a single flash (the others were off position).















Creative Asia Photography Conference

Photography

World Class learning at an affordable and accessible price! Not only that, being in KL means much cheaper accommodation and travel costs for Malaysians especially if you compare to conferences and workshops in the US such as WPPI.

So why, wait? Sign up for the conference or a workshop or two today!

RadioPopper troubleshooting

Photography

My RadioPopper PX transmitters and receivers so far have been functioning great. Stuff that simply works is always a winner in my book. The only problem is that due to its usage of the 900Mhz ISM Band (902-928Mhz to be precise) it’s not available outside the US. This is generally due to GSM 900 being in used in many countries outside the US. GSM 900 technically spans from 890-921Mhz. RadioPoppers translate the e-TTL (or i-TTL) signal of your flash over radio instead of IR to allow the signals to go beyond line-of-sight such as behind walls, etc.

Anyways, I’ve never had problems using my RadioPoppers in Malaysia or Shanghai so… Most radio devices are also capable of working with the noise and I’ve used my RPs in a filled church hall, 100 feet from master to slave flash clamped above the gallery and they still work with full e-TTL and HSS (High-speed sync).

Realized I had the battery covers swapped – The transceiver is actually the receiver and vice-versa.

A friend had some issues with his RPs lately so I got hold of them and obviously, test them before I get one of my friends going to the US to get them sent in. So here’s how to check if your RPs are working fine.

Hardware Reset
First thing I do is to reset them. You do that by pressing X and then press P a couple of times until you reach the Reset menu. You’ll need to hold down the X till the countdown happens.

Reset, reset, reset!

After that, powering on the unit will display the firmware version. I then configure them to my usually preferences; Hardware mode: Canon, Brightness Level 1 (those darn LEDs drain power), Channel 9, Feedback Mode 2 (F2 – no feedback to allow 8FPS shooting). Don’t ask me why but channel 9 works for me all the time so far. Furthest range I’ve got is from the road to my backyard, approximately 130 feet with the whole house, truck in the driveway between master and slave.

Feedback Mode (F3)
Since I’m trying to figure out what was the problem, I set Feedback to ‘3’ which shows the the signal transmitted from master to slave. This code is displayed on master and slave. Easy to figure out if anything’s messing up or going haywire. This worked fine with numbers matching. So I dug out the rest of my RadioPoppers and then tried both the transmitter and receiver and all units synced up nicely. You will get a number, i.e. 11, 15, etc — it depends on your shoot settings but that number will be displayed on all receivers and transmitters. If it doesn’t match, you might have some issues.

Testing
Finally, the test was to test from 1/160 to 1/2500 with one, two and three slave flash units. Camera A is a 5D Mark II with 550EX as master and camera B is a 40D with 580EX as master. Slaves are 430EX IIs and 580EX IIs. Transmitters and receivers on channel 9. After 200+ shots, I got tired so, case closed. The shot below was taken from outside my house window, into the corridor with three flash units in each room. Distance to the last flash, 60 feet, 5D Mark II, f/6.3, 1/160, ISO 400, 105mm. You’ll need to look carefully to see the light from each flash. Anyways, test result shows that all transmitters and receivers work fine.

p.s. sorry about the silly bathroom rug 🙂

Storage strategies

Photography

A few people have asked me to elaborate on my storage strategy so here it is. Some background information is needed first. I started taking photography seriously in 1998. Buying my first SLR back then was a big thing and working through the lenses and other options. In late ’99, was basically scanning the prints on a flatbed scanner. Quality was amazing, or at least what I thought was amazing until I stumbled upon a very expensive (at that time, I wasn’t making much a month) option; the slide scanner. By skipping the printing stage and scanning directly from film, it delivered unmatched results from anything else unless you’re comparing to a drum scan. Since then, I’ve been scanning almost all my slides and negatives but most of what I shot were from my travels. Film costs a fair bit, especially if you shot transparency film such as Fuji Velvia, Kodachrome or Elitechromes, so the everyday life doesn’t often get captured on film.

So with digital scans dating all the way back to 2000 (the 2700 dpi scans tend to produce on average 14MB LZW compressed TIFF files), storage is key, along with a proper backup strategy. I went with CD-Rs and then DVD-Rs but they never were convenient (not fun, not quick, and laborious process) meant that you will almost never will do it timely enough so I decided to stick with hard drives. They get cheaper and are inherently quicker to access if they’re stuck into a spare machine that can be booted up anytime you needed to.

I upgraded scanners so the file sizes got bigger and films like Velvia and EliteChrome 100 pushed the resolution (grain?) further. Then came my first DSLR, a 300D (my shortest-lived DSLR ownership) and my 20D several months later. So came RAW files, 16-bit PSDs, and the story continues until I hit my 5D Mark II with 21-megapixels, Full HD movies. Backup is getting more important but also important is accessibility.

I needed to backup and offload my main PC but also need to access the “older” stuff occasionally. Leaving your main storage server switched on/off daily or 24×7 wasn’t something I want to do on a daily basis so I got a NAS which I quickly outgrew within a year so that too got upgraded to a 4-bay unit.

I have a storage server with 6x1TB disks. It’s all RAID 1. Mirrored. So I get a net space of 3TB. I have a “_photos” folder shared out that further breaks down by year, i.e. “2001”, “2003”, along with some odd directories. I also have a “_videos” folder where I back up my created DVDs (ISO format) and Adobe Premiere Pro project files. The problem is occasionally accessing stuff from say, 2006. My main PC only stores past 16-odd months so I ended up going to my storage server regularly. So what’s running 24×7 is my NAS box with 4x500Gb in RAID5. That gives me about 1.4TB of disk space. That way, I get that past 2-years on it; i.e. 2008 & 2009 along with my 60Gb music collection on the built-in iTunes server. My IP cameras also record to NAS and they keep the past-7 days recording. I also have imaged backups of all the machines in my home so that if the primary disk crashes, recovery is just a click away. Keeping everything in sync is the unix utility rsync (the windows equivalent is DeltaCopy).

With the growing file sizes, I’ll be moving my storage server to 1.5TB disks by Q4 this year and my NAS will grow to 4x1TB*… one can never have enough disk space!

* That’s one thing I like about my NAS. I can live swap the disks and expand it without powering down and losing my data. I can easily move from 500Gbx4 to 1TBx4 and later to 2TBx4.

Mark II Firmware, GF1 Firmware and then some

Photography

Canon has released 2.07 Firmware for the 5D Mark II

This firmware update (Version 2.0.7) incorporates the following improvements and fixes.

  • Fixes a phenomenon in which the aperture exhibits abnormal movement when shooting movies in manual exposure mode and Aperture Priority AE (Av mode) using some Canon lenses (such as macro lenses)
  • Fixes a phenomenon in which the exposure level shown in the LCD panel differs from what is shown in the viewfinder when shooting still images in manual exposure mode.
  • Fixes a phenomenon in which the Wireless File Transmitter (WFT-E4 or WFT-E4 II) may not automatically power off when used for FTP transfers.
  • These phenomenon only occur with the Version 2.0.4 and Version 2.0.3 firmware.

Download it from here.

Of course Panasonic already released updated for the micro 4/3s system such as my GF-1. Firmware 1.2 can be downloaded from here and it fixes the following:

  • Improved operation menu for image stabilizer ([OFF] will be added under [STABILIZER] only when LUMIX G VARIO 14-42 mm / F3.5-5.6 ASPH. / MEGA O.I.S. (H-FS014042) is attached).
  • Improved AF (auto focus) performance with lenses of other manufacturer.

The GF-1 update doesn’t affect me at the moment. I’ve only noticed the Mark II problem once in China but update I will.

Been busy on work but also working on two Photobooks, and prepping some small surprises come second half 2010.

Yes, cameras do grow on trees!

CF, SD, Batteries…

Photography

A sign of the times. It used to be little kiosks selling CR123, CR5 or CR2 lithium batteries (remember those) and AA, AAA batteries alongside boxes and boxes of Kodak and Fuji film. Today, if you find your fancy-pants digital camera running low on juice or memory cards, you go look for a little stall like this one.

This little kiosk in the Yuyuan area in Shanghai was selling all sorts of media cards (CF, SD, SDHC, etc) along with 3rd party made-in-China batteries in various Canon, Nikon, Olympus, Panasonic flavors. They do say that the batteries are “charged” so you can just pop them in and use them. This particular kiosk still had some film products but they were heavily showing off their instant inkjet printing service. While Kodak may be a icon of the film era, its transition to the digital era has hit some turbulence. So while they had a couple of rolls of Kodak film, majority of their products are for digital cameras. I wonder when I might see a Sandisk branded kiosk… soon perhaps?

Run out of batteries and media? Head for the kiosks!

p.s. what “real” photographer would only have one battery and one memory card with him/her at one time?