oooh lala an olympic blogger

This is pretty cool.
http://timesonline.typepad.com/olympictures/
The guy in the blog, is Marc Aspland, a multi-award winning Chief Sports Photographer. Anything with the word ‘Chief’ or ‘Master’ must mean he’s got mad skillz. It’s interesting, reading on some of his pics.
I think when I retire I want to just work for a news agency and travel around the world to take pictures of the Olympics (my sport of choice would be female volleyball, gymnastics (male and female), and maybe swimming, but I’d reckon swimming will be rather difficult. Or take pictures of Presidents or important people, maybe do a whole book on Teachers of America or something. How cool would that be? to be published on Time or Life magazine.

He took 2 1DMIII’s and 2 1DMKII’s (awww don’t I feel special, I own em both, only difference is he makes lots of cash with his, and I’m just an aspiring bloke). At any rate, it’s interesting, I’m curious to see how all his gear survives the heat/humidity. Plus I notice on a lot of his shots are shot completely wide open at 2.8. I guess for a $8.3k lens (That’s K as in ouch that hurts the wallet) it is pretty darn sharp at 2.8
But what’s more interesting is that they allow a man…with not one camera, but 4 cameras roaming around communist China. He said the army followed him and watched him like a hawk. Which I guess is better than in North Korea. I read a blog where a guy went there for a vacation ( I don’t quite know why ), but they had very strict rules about photography, and wherever you went, there would be an escort, and my assumption is if you walked off the beaten path and took pictures of stuff you weren’t supposed to take pictures of. You’d magically disappear into the night, never to be seen again. As a general rule of thumb, I tend to stay away from places like that.

Anyways I’d like to try my hand at sports one of these days. I have a coworker who has a little daughter in soccer. She’d make a perfect tester. There’s a lot of cool stuff to take pictures of. I just haven’t quite discovered them all yet. I’m actually pretty excited, I’m meeting a potential client tomorrow to possibly be booked for a same sex marriage. I’ve always wanted to do a SS wedding. Figured hey, it could be a niche I can fill.

Metal Sticker Blower Upper

That’s my new nickname. Chrissie went to an expensive fancy restaurant (with so-so food) yesterday for her friend Justine’s bachelorette party. She took two leftovers home so they packed it in a little ‘paper’ black box with some gold sticker on it. Well today, I plopped it in the microwave thinking woo warm food. Well I walked away from the microwave, went downstairs for a bit, then went back upstairs and realized. Holy smokes! The box thingy is on fire! Wow..I’m retarded. Clearly they didn’t have the big red letters for retarded people that stated ‘microwave unsafe’. If I waited any longer I probably would of burnt down the microwave. See, I thought it was just a retarded little sticker made of paper. Nevermind that it sorta looked like gold “foil”. *sigh* anyways so that’s my new nick name that Chrssie gave me. “Metal Sticker Blower Upper”.
Which I think is just a euphemism for tardmo.

Olympics 2008

wow, so I was watching that crazy opening ceremony of the Olympics in Beijing. Wow. It was pretty badass. I think the best part was the globe with the umbrellas of children from around the globe with Sara Brightman singing, and the other famous Chinese dude (apologize I don’t know his name). When the fireworks started flying and it panned to the wide birds-eye view of the stadium, I thought wow. All the nations are celebrating, and for once no one is killing each other. I think for a fleeting moment, I felt happy for humanity. Like there’s a modicum of hope that we’re not going to all kill eachother and destroy the planet. Though haha, I must admit when the umbrellas plopped up and faces were on it, I thought…wow.. That’s sooo ballsy! The Chinese have thousands of umbrellas of Mao Tse-Tung. Then I realized…oh, it’s just pictures of children. But haha, in hindsight, it would of been much more cooler if they had thousands of faces of Mao.

But I give it to the Chinese, that was one impressive show. And the song at the end with the kids singing while the guy runs across the sky with the torch was simply haunting. The fireworks at the end, puts little Mickey to Shame. Though I guess if you’re the nation that invented fireworks and gunpowder, you better put up an impressive fireworks show.

Not sure if another nation can top this. Though I was thinking I wonder if those torches have an auto light switch. Just in case the gas runs out, or the flame dissipates. I mean, it could happen right?

the FEL button

Researchers should really spend time figuring out why boys refuse to read the instruction manual to anything. Even if it pertains to equipment that cost roughly 4k. I decided since I was a tad burnt out from work, so I just wanted to sit down and read my instruction manual. Lo and behold, I learned something new today. What the FEL button is used for? Flash Exposure Lock. What on earth does this do and why on earth would you ever want to use it?
Apparently it works differently on different bodies. e.g. a 350D, 30D, 1D series bodies each have FEL. On 300D, the button is titled *. Ahh…standards….

Apparently, either I suck as a photographer, or the FEL button is useless. After all these years, I’ve had ZERO need for the use of the FEL button. I’m hoping it’s the latter (crossing my fingers). So what precisely is flash exposure lock?

I can’t exactly try to explain it in normal terms, seeing as I’ve never used this ever before in the field) but from what I understand, E-TTL (electronic through the lens) flash metering determines the proper exposure (provided you have an E-TTL compatible flash and camera body, will blog about this later). But for all intents and purposes, you point the camera to spot A. The lens tells the camera aprox. distance, and the camera tells the flash to be be stronger or weaker to get the proper exposure. (prior to this people had to use meters and egags!…mathematical calculations to determine proper exposure). Lets say for a given shot, you wanted to keep that same exposure and light output. If you pointed the camera to shot B, E-TTL will recalculate distance and strength. FEL essentially locks the settings from shot A and applies it to shot B. Once you hit the FEL button, the flash fires to get the exposure and locks into memory. Once you take the shot, the memory buffer is flushed and every subsequent shot calculates E-TTL normally. To maintain in memory shot A’s settings, simply hold down the button and shoot. When it is released, then the buffer is flushed and things are back to normal. Like I said…I’ve never used this.

On 1D series bodies, FEL also has another useful feature. Of which I’ve never used before either but now I know about it I really should start. The human eye is pretty darn amazing. It sees light, can focus in near dark, blah blah. If you have a pair of eyes I don’t really need to explain its features. The camera on the other hand is quite stupid. It can be tricked by say, light juxtaposed with dark areas. The meter gets confused and doesn’t know how to get a proper exposure. Snow also confuses the daylights out of it due to glare. Anyways, so the amazing people with much higher IQ ratings than I created ‘spot’ metering. So it meters the light exactly where you point the camera from within a 3% radius ( the 3% varies of course between bodies ). So if you point it at the dark scene it’ll try to get a reading and expose for that. (which means the light scenes will get uber light ) Or say if you expose for the light scenes, it’ll make that area be exposed properly, but the dark areas will be uber dark losing details. The FEL button on 1D series lets you calculate ( at least the 1DIII) up to 8 readings. Point the camera at a dark, hit FEL. point it at the light scene, hit FEL. The camera takes the average of the two readings and then calculates the exposure. I think this can be extremely useful for when you get a group of people together and some are in the bright sun, and some is standing in areas where trees put them in the shade. I really should of done this at the last wedding because I had some group shots for exactly this condition. Yippeee to reading.

‘Live View’ from sucky to amazing

When I first heard about ‘LiveView’, I thought to myself. Wow that’s a gimmick that I’ll never ever use. I even laughed at it thinking it’s for amateurs! What is LiveView? it’s a feature that up to this point was limited only to fixed focus lens ( ie your point and shoots). It wasn’t until the advent of the 40D, 1DMKIII and 1DsMKIII that added the feature. I think the Xsi has this feature as well. What it is is it allows you to view what the lens sees through the LCD. At first I thought it was the most useless feature, and now I realize it has 3 real practical applications.
1) Macro photography
2) space photography
3) Quiet photography

How it works is the shutter rises up and stays open. Your sensor is pretty much working overtime at this juncture, so it does get toasty, and the batteries drain a little faster. But this sensor is for all intents and purposes an eye that opens and you see what it sees. When you snap the picture, there isn’t the usual mirror slap (or the sound the shutter makes when you click it. that is usually the mirror slapping up and down). So it essentially falls under application 3. Quiet photography. As you will notice, since the mirror isn’t slapped around, it isn’t as loud. Very useful for quiet church receptions that have priests who don’t like photographers and their clicks.

It’s not without it’s drawbacks though. What you lose is the camera’s ability to autofocus. But you can zoom in 10x and focus on the hair of a fly’s butt then snap the shot. So the loss of autofocus isn’t really a big deal, especially when it pertains to macro photography.
How did this all come about? Well my friend Gene at digimation.com has a mandolin that’s from the 1900’s that he wants to take pictures of. I have zero experience taking pictures of musical instrument. Not wanting to be caught with my pants down (figuratively speaking of course), I figured I’d make a first pass at my violin to see what pitfalls I’d run into.

Taking pictures of inanimate objects is bloody difficult. The trick is making said inanimate object interesting to look at. Go and try to take a picture of a pencil, and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

So I first whipped out the 1DMKII, and after laying on the floor and trying funky angles, I realized my eyes hurt from trying to see through the viewfinder. After a few clicks I realized I’m using the wrong tool for the job. Enter the MKIII with live view to the rescue! here are my results. It was so so. Here are the ones with the MKII.


MKIII

The last pic I thought sucked but it proves a point. A master of light, once told me, “when photographing a cube, each angle must be a different shade, in order to provide richness and depth”. Ok Ok..a master of light didn’t exactly tell me that. I read it in a book. So technically by proxy he did tell me that! =)
At any rate, as you can see the violin looks flat and very blah.

for those who are interested or care, here are pics of the setup.


The left side I used a straight on flash with a diffuser umbrella, and for the right hand I just reversed and used reflection, to try to really disperse the light and not get a harsh hit. ratios were 1:4 so they don’t hit the subject dead on to make it look even more flat. If I cared, I should of adjusted it some to mitigate or completely eliminate the shadows on picture 2.

All In all, I thought it was a good practice run. Not bad for never taking a pic of an instrument before.

Memory Lane

This morning I knew Howard Stern was on repeat from my satellite radio, so I figured I’d go through my CD collection to listen to a good old fashioned CD. I know it’s the age of ipods and mp3’s, and the Compact Disc is going the way of the Dodo. But something as simple as making a CD choice became a rather pleasant experience. I went through and realized most of the CD’s that I have conjured up some memory from my past. The Cure, boys don’t cry was the album I listened to after my first breakup with my high school sweatheart. Cranberries, No need to argue, album we listened to while hanging around with my buddies Jeremy and Viet. The list goes on and on, and after every row, I could name the history and where I was generally at when those CD’s were listened to. Now they are sitting there collecting dust. But for a fleeting moment they all gave me joy again. Even memories that were once painful are very pleasant because funny thing about time. When you look back at things years later, huge events that seemed so important at the time have now been transformed into trivial, blissful traces of memory. I now realize why older people tend to listen to music from the era that they grew up in. I realized my memories stopped after high school/college. Pretty much that’s when I stopped buying CD’s and I’ve been listening to existing music ever since, so my chain of memories from my music collection draws a blank after college. I think everyone after a few years should travel down memory lane and go through their tape or CD collection. If anything, just to bring a smile to your day.

pat myself on the back

Call it Hubris, call it what you will.  I know people out there other than me must do this.  I can’t be the only retard out there.   So I’m sifting through these images (all 5200 of them), and occaisionally I run across a gem, and then I get really giddy.  Pat myself on back, and literally say “I rock!”.  No, I don’t say that in my head like most normal people, I say it out loud, like a crazy man.  Then I take a well earned break, go back, stare at the picture again, smile and then get on with more sifting pictures.

Of course there’s the opposite, where I weed through a series, and don’t find anything good, then yell and scream at myself for being sucky.  Anyways, just a quick rant.

workflows and Lightroom 2.0

Yippy, I don’t quite remember when the last time I was excited about software, until LightRoom 2.0 finally was released a few days ago.  I was traveling for work so I never got a chance to order it until I got home.  I had a love hate relationship with adobe.  They bought out Raw Shooter Pro (RSP) a few years back, made the creators really rich, and gutted the entire project making it obsolete.  Genius really.  But I loved RSP, so for awhile I refused to use LightRoom 1.4 .  It was just painfully slow.  It wasn’t until the newer camera bodies that were released did I realize that I have to embrace the change in technology, because my old RSP doesn’t support the 1DMKIII, or the 40D cameras.  Slowly I forced myself to learn lightroom 1.4, it literally was like eating bitter veggies.  It wasn’t until the beta version of LR 2.0 came out that gave me hope.  Importing went from dog meat, to actually usable!  I also liked the nested collections, though I don’t use ‘collections’ like I should because I can’t stand the way they are created and organized (But I shall not bore you with the details).   So I did participate in the beta, offering my 2cents in the forums and bugs.  Now that it’s out, I picked up the upgrade for a mere $99 and have just finished organizing about 5.4k worth of pics, shot from my last wedding.

So I got sick of spending countless hours on my importing and organizing, so with this last shoot I read about something new and figured I’d try it.  My photography assistant/second shooter and I Grant, synced up all 4 of our cameras to a cell phone clock.  The theory was when I took all the CF cards jammed them into a directory, and imported them into LightRoom (LR), I can choose to import and move by ‘timestamp’.  Which is perfect…I just shaved off a few hours of my life in trying to get these random cards and start shifting and organizing them in events.  It makes things soooo much easier if I can see in chronological order and therefore makes moving groups of photos of ‘events’ into their own folders much more easier.  I’ve minimized the ‘hunting back and forth’.  Since everything is in sequence.  So what took me about 7-9 hrs now only takes me about 3.5-4 hrs.  Bruhahahha .

There are a few tweaks LR needs to do in my opinion.  Moving photos from one folder to another isn’t the quickest, and it sometimes errors out.   All in all, I gave LightRoom 2.0 a worthy upgrade for what I’m doing.  If you’re dealing with <100 photos at a time, I suggest you stick to Lightroom 1.4.  It’s not worth the upgrade.  However if your workflow requires a significant amount of photos to be dealt with, adobe’s moving towards the right direction with 2.0.  I just hope they release a new patch that’ll optimize more speed out of it.  The thing eats my system alive.