The Unreal Me

I recently finished a newborn shoot with a lovely new Mum, Nichola and her gorgeous new son, Tyler. Tyler was about 10 days old when we did the first part of the shoot and we finished it off a few days later on day 14.

Day one he was a little grizzly but with lots of feeding and coaxing things came along. On day two however he was a star! He slept like a, well, baby and if he got a little fidgety, we could pop him into the white fur basket and he’d either promptly fall alseep, or decide he wanted to eat it. The former made for some nice peaceful photos.

Most of the shoot was inside, using various backdrops and props. While I’m not a huge fan of black backdrops, I did capture a lovely relaxed shot of Tyler resting on his Mum’s arm.

Even though baby shoots are about the baby, I think it’s also extremely important to photograph special moments between Mum/Dad and baby and to work with the parent to get them to relax and be at one with their child in front of the camera.

The photo above I gave a slightly old style look to it in order to match his cute little corduroy overalls and hat. I also wanted to keep this one coloured to add to the look, as opposed to making it black and white like so many baby shots are (Often for good reason, they have very ruddy skin at that early age).

The final shot from the shoot that I’d like to share is a more casual shot that I felt worked best with an extreme black and white development.

For some reason I feel compelled to explain this photograph. Probably because I often don’t use such extreme black and white. I originally had an idea that I might use the earth tones of the curtains and couch to produce a nice look, but once I got to the post production stage, a harsh black and white look just felt better. Thinking about it, the overexposed look pulls the focus to Mum’s face and her joyous smile and the colourless image and darker tones of the background, couch and hair frame the body and face.

Tyler was a joy to shoot, and so very cute. I hope I get to photograph him again when he’s older.

Uncategorized Photography, Shoots

I’ve had my 50d for about 5-6 weeks now, but for the last 2 1/2 weeks, it’s been at the Canon service centre. I was browsing some images in Aperture and noticed a bright green spot on one. I zoomed into the image and yup, it was a hot pixel. I then scanned the rest of the image and found 2 more. OK, could be a one off, so I scanned a number of other pictures and they all had them. So I narrowed down the parameters that could be affecting it, by looking at my images with different apertures, ISO, shutter speed (This is usually the culprit) and voila! Exposures from about 1/2 a second or greater exhibited these pixels.

“Hmm” I thought, “This is a bit of a bummer”. While screen size viewing often hid the issue due to scaling and 100% view was required to see it most of the time, it was still visible at normal viewing occasionally and nonetheless the camera was only 3 weeks old so I felt that it should still be in primo condition. So, I popped it into the Canon service centre after ringing the retailer and like any good software engineer entering a defect, I gave them all the tests and parameters on how to reproduce the problem. What ISO, shooting format, shutter speed and I even gave them pixel locations of the hot pixels. No way were they not going to find the issue – a week or so later and I’d have a nice sexy clean camera!

So, skip ahead about 13 days and I ring them to see what’s up. “Camera has been checked and no problems found. But we cleaned the sensor.” was the reply. Followed by “High ISO will result in noiser images.” – I had to chuckle.

“You sure they tested it right, you need to do this and this and this?” I remarked.

“I’m sure they did, the camera will come down to pickup in a couple of days. We’ll ring you when it’s ready.” – I hang up, very very confused as to why they couldn’t see some blatantly bright green pixels  at the locations I specified.

Now where is that green pixel?

“Wait a minute! I wonder if they shot JPG!” which essentially nukes the image so bad you can’t see the problem. Another phone call and this time he said he’d ask the technician….couple of hours later.

“I have talked to the technician and he shot ISO 3200, RAW, 8 second exposure, Auto WB blah blah”. All OK it seemed but how could he not see the problem?

“He did clean the sensor” the support guy said “so maybe wait and see if that’s helped.”

“Well, that doesn’t produce hotpixels as far as I know, but OK” – hang up again.

“Ah ha I then think again! I can provide them the crops which display the problem plain as day!”, so I call them and suggest it.

“No need, just wait.”

“OOOOOOK, I said but I have no faith it’s fixed and all I want to do is avoid having to come back.”

So today I get another call, they go over the results yet again, I pick up the camera, walk downstairs, fire off a few shots at 4s exposures, load into Aperture, go to the pixel locations and blow me down, there are green pixels there – who’d have ever thought that!!

Of course the next step if I’m not satisfied is to go back and try and get them to see what I see and agree that it’s a problem, which is possibly harder than you might think for a number of reasons.

Hot pixels are a very debated topic. Manufacturers try and tell you it’s part of owning a digital camera, but of course not everyone has them and if you do, it sucks. When I bought my first dSlR, a used 300d it had no hot pixels for sometimes before they appeared. Essentially lasting about 5-6 years before showing a problem.

Some software tries to mask it, often successfully. Sometimes some pixels don’t appear on my images because Aperture has found and squished them. This isn’t infallible however and I still need to check all my images.

Turning on Long Exposure Noise Reduction in the camera can often remove it. Downside is that it takes twice as long to take the shot (30s for a 15s exposure) because the camera takes another black exposure of the same length to use as it’s base for subtraction.

And as I said before, printing at a small enough size or viewing at monitor size often doesn’t show it up at all.

So I’ll go in tomorrow and see where I get. I don’t want another camera or major repairs and I’d be more than happy to have them just mask the pixels out. My main concern is not having to post process all my images that might have a slightly long exposure of a second or two and end up missing one and handing over someone a print with a bright green dot on someone’s forehead.

If I forget to Photoshop out one of Uncle Billybob’s extra fingers, then that’s my fault, but if my camera is adding rubbish to my images that shouldn’t be there, I’m not happy.

Uncategorized Photography

The last week or so, I’ve felt awful. Not physically, but inspirationally with regard to my photography. I feel like everything I’m doing is rubbish, I don’t know where to start on getting the handle on some techniques I’d like to master and when I’m out and about doing some general shooting I come back with almost every shot being a piece of rubbish. Needless to say, the motivation when I’m out is just not there.

However, a few days ago I stumbled upon a video by photographer Zack Arias that was created as an entry for famous photographer Scott Kelby’s website. (If you don’t know who Scott Kelby is, and you’re into photography, go find out, now!) The video pretty much sums up how I’m feeling, but I haven’t yet hit the positive side that the video ends on.

Check it out here.

Note: The first few minutes is random Zack Arias. Stick with it.

Uncategorized

Nothing more to say, other than here’s the link

Uncategorized baby, ivf

I just opened up another regular site that I visit called BeyondPhotoTips and the first thing I saw on the front page was this photo of mine.

I thought “What is this doing on the front page?” and then noticed “First Prize” just above it! I had entered the photograph in the their latest competition titled “Detail Everywhere” a month or so ago. Not only do I get a cool feeling, I’ve also won a copy of “Fundamentals of Photography” By Tom Ang and a $50 Amazon voucher.

Here’s the link to the competition announcement page!

Rock on!

Uncategorized

Another cool thing happened last night. I had submitted the photo below to the Auckland Festival of Photography website about a week ago and when I checked their page again today my photo had been selected as photo of the month! Not sure if I win anything (I may get some Gravity coffee or something like that) but it was cool to see it up there on the front page. Strange thing is noone contacted me to tell me about this.

Summer fun

Personally I really like this photo. Out of everything I’ve shot, this is the only one I’ve been tempted to print. If I can get over the shock of the cost (About $65 for an A3) I might just do that.

UPDATE: I just received their email newsletter and this was the blurb they gave my photograph.

“We loved the sublime, cinematic quality of this shot, with the tiny figure and the kite perfectly placed amongst the vivid green fields and blue colour and acutely placed hint of brown fence to the left hand side. The radiant blue sky with white pillow clouds is the main character of the scene; its apparent descent to meet the figure with the kite adds to the feeling of freedom and joy in this beautiful summer photo.”

Uncategorized Photography

After 8 months with my first ever digital SLR, the trusty Canon 300d I have finally done an upgrade. I’m now a proud owner of a new Canon 50d and wow, is it a step up from what I was using.

Canon 50D

My 300d was starting to feel slow and painful to use. Writing to a memory card took about 5 seconds (I use fast cards too), so if you took a shot and wanted to review it, you’d be waiting upwards of 10 whole seconds before you saw it. My 50d on the other hand is almost instantaneous. Among some other improvements we also have:

• 15MP vs 6.3
• 3″ screen at VGA res, vs 1.8″
• ISO up to 12800 vs 3200
• Shoots in smaller RAW modes like sRaw1 and sRAW2
• Buffer up to 16 RAW images for burst shooting vs 4.
• Super fast Digic IV processor vs “who knows what” on the 300d which makes the shoot-write-shoot cycle so fast now.
• Auto sensor cleaning. The sensor vibrates for a short perioud on startup or shutdown to remove dirt. Not a full clean but it can help.
• Micro AF adjust so you can account for back and forward focussing lenses
• Standard weather sealing, vs “point me at some water and I stop working

and those are just a few. Overall the whole package is just much easier to use.

The purchase wasn’t without it’s problems though. Originally I had wanted the 40d because I knew that would serve me well and be about $600 cheaper but the two stores I went into didn’t have them and my impatience made me get the 50d. I did regret it to be honest, as I would have preferred to save the money.

15MP is insane! For what I do presently I don’t need a 15MP camera (the 40d is 10MP) and the added file size does cause Aperture to crawl a bit now when loading images (Lightroom doesn’t have this issue so I’m thinking of switching). However, if I get a few really nice photos that I want to print the added MP will allow me to print larger and retain detail.

Mine has developed bad pixels. Yup, within 3 weeks I already have at least 3 hot pixels that I can see in exposures as short as .5s. They manifest as bright green dots on the image – this sucks. I’m sending the camera into Canon soon for servicing under warranty but I’ll be without it for about 10 days. What I imagine they will do is simply map them out so that they’re some sort of average of the adjacent pixels. While this seems dirty, I would challenge anyone to even tell. The old 300d will be resurrected while the new guy is in hospital.

Now, my 50d has made my images sharper even on my old lenses but to get some more benefit from the resolution I will need to step up to something better. I’m just using the old kit lens (18-55) and the old 75-300 III zoom at present and while they work, they are the low of the low with terrible image quality relative to almost anything else.  The problem though is deciding on what glass to get. Canon have done an amazing job of making a selection of lenses which don’t cover all your bases. One might miss Image Stabilisation, one might be a little slower (f4 vs f2.8). One might have USM focussing and one might not etc etc. The choices are full of compromises unless you spend 3k on something like the 70-200 f2.8 IS USM.

Now I can’t spend 3k on a lens, so the choice is now between mid quality zoom and high quality prime lens. That’s a decision I’m finding hard to make because I don’t know what I will shoot and I don’t have much experience with both. I did do a shoot yesterday though that helped a bit and I’ll post about that soon.

Uncategorized Photography

OK, here are some of the photos from the evening.

Uncategorized Filmmaking, Music

Last night we had the official unveiling of the new 8 Foot Sativa music video that I was proud to have had a part in making. My official title was co-producer and that involved me finding some sponsorship, getting the locations sorted, getting permission from people to film, finding props, sets, helping manage the budget and finding actors and things. The reality was that I did all that as well as lug gear, build sets, work lighting and a myriad of other odd jobs.

We initially weren’t sure if we were going to do anything after finishing the video but decided that seeing as we’d put so much effort into it we should unveil it with a bit of an occasion. I’m very glad we did.

The launch went off really well with about 60 people attending. We had speakers from New Zealand Open Rescue who provided the undercover footage seen in the video, along with vocalist Ben Read from 8 Foot Sativa and the director Duncan Eastwood. Drinks and nibbles were had by all, a few showings of the video ensued and we had a jolly good time.

To be able to make a video for a band as popular as 8 Foot Sativa is one thing, but to make one with a strong animal rights theme is a once in a lifetime opportunity. I’m extremely proud of what we achieved (On almost no budget) and very excited to finally be able to unveil the video to the public!

Photos will follow once I’ve sifted through them and tidied them up (They were all shot by someone else at -2ev, so way underexposed) but for now, enjoy the video which is embedded below.

Uncategorized Filmmaking, Music

OK here are my next two entries for the year.

January 3rd 2009

I was at the beach with my niece and wife and in the distance I saw this kite. I then saw another kite further down the beach so pulled out my camera with ye olde 75-300mm f4-5.6 MK III non USM, non IS lens and took some photos. When I got it back home and was previewing them, I saw something in it that I wanted to try. So a little cropping and some tweaking and I had this.

Dogfighting Kites

There were a couple of things working against me in this one. First, I was miles away so had to zoom in (No IS = shakey shakey). Second, I didn’t zoom enough so had to crop quite a bit and lose res. The main problem with zooming though was the focus. I have no image stabilisation and a SUPER SLOW DC motor zoom on that lens, so trying to nail a kite that’s zipping around was almost impossible. I was damned happy that I got it as close as I did.

January 4th 2009

I dub this photo “Copout #1″. My niece was visiting and we had planned a pretty busy day and I find that busyness tends to cramp my photography as I don’t want to be stopping all the time and holding everyone up while I walk around all over the place trying to get a photo. That and when I’m busy my brain can’t think. So while we enjoyed an awesome vegan icecream from “The Castle” I shot the brick wall as a safety shot for the day and then at night I went out and shot some sunsets. Unfortunately none of them were too exciting and seeing as I’d already done a sunrise the other day I threw the idea out and put up my bricks.

Bricks

I think the tweaking I did to this could have been a little more obvious to sell the effect. There is a B&W copy on the bottom layer and the top layer is actually only the three diagonal bricks that are in a column in the middle. Then there’s a middle layer of the whole picture, with it’s opacity set to about 70%. The idea was to try and make those three middle bricks pop a little more but not too much.

One plus from this photo is that I discovered the scissors select tool in The Gimp which I used to select around the concrete between the 3 bricks. It’s an awesome tool.

Uncategorized 365in2009, Photography