Video Blog #4 - Using a Light Meter...

I am pleased to say that today’s video blog is back to the usual high standard as produced by my good mate John.

There was a bit of discussion regarding the subject matter we would discuss, and the more we thought about it the more we realised that it would take 4 hours to properly cover all of the topics that are discussed. But rather than bore you all at once with an extended Studio Lighting 101 lecture I thought it was best to keep the ideas shared at a very high level; but we will certainly be drilling down into more detail if future video blog episodes… so stay tuned!

Ok, back to today’s video blog. I’ll try to keep this text short and use it just to supplement the information in the video. Please remember what is discussed in the video is a guide only. The core ideal around photography is creativity. Now I didn’t really get the opportunity to get too creative in this episode, rather I just give a brief overview of “getting started” with achieving a balanced exposure. What you do with it from there is entirely up to you and your own creative genius! So here we go…

Timography Vblog Light Meters from Tim Watson on Vimeo.

1. Use the light meter in your camera! All D-SLR’s on the market today are equipped with their very own ambient light meter which will work just fine for all of your “general” photography requirements – that’s a given. Now there are a stack of things to remember when using your camera’s built in light meter though. The biggest one is that, by default (and there is nothing you can do about it!) the camera’s light meter will try to read every scene you point it at as 18% grey – this is your camera’s way of trying to get the best tonal range in a scene. This doesn’t always work though.

As a couple of extreme examples – if you are shooting a very bright scene such as on a beach in midday sun or in the snow, the camera reads the scene and will try to pull it back to 18% grey; therefore grossly underexposing the image. In a similar manner if you are shooting a very dark scene like a theatre show or a night cityscape, the camera will similarly try to drag the dark scene up to 18% grey therefore grossly overexposing the scene. This is exactly the problem I encountered a few weeks back shooting the fashion shows at Every Woman Expo 2009.

This is fairly easy to overcome though by dialling in opposite exposure compensation – but keep it in mind next time you have problems shooting a particularly bright or dark scene.

2. The “Sunny 16” rule is great to get you started. Of course the best way to start getting really creative with your photography is to take your camera off the Auto setting and shoot manually. Again you can use your camera’s in-built light meter to good effect here, but remember if you are outside in bright daylight, you will get spot-on exposure if you set your camera to 1/125^th second @ f/16.0 using ISO100. Similarly use 1/250^th second @ f/16.0 at ISO200, 1/500^th second @ ISO 400 and so on.

The variations I spoke of in the video are as follows (1/125^th second @ ISO100)-

f/16 – Sunny

f/11 – Slightly Overcast

f/8 – Overcast

f/5.6 – Heavily Overcast

3. Exposure Slide Rules are a handy tool to get you off and running quickly. Obviously they are not going to be spot on 100% of the time – but they will certainly give you a reasonable starting point to get you going.

4. I love my light meter. They are hugely versatile and allow you to get the “look” you are trying to achieve before you take the first image. However – they are so versatile and there are so many things that you can do with one that I think I will keep this text really short otherwise this will turn into a 1000 word essay. Just watch the video and bear in mind that I will be going into more detail in future video blogs.

Also, we didn’t have a model for this video blog to show you what the images would look like, but you can get a fairly good indication by looking at the light coming from the modelling lights, which were set to be proportionally as bright as the flash power setting.

Ok, so I know it is brief but we have tried to take a huge topic and break it down into little bite-sized chunks. Over the next few video blogs I’ll be showing you some more specific lighting set-ups and we’ll incorporate using the light meter into those examples.

That’s it for now – I’m running late to take my wife and son out for the day to the Good Food and Wine Show. I’m a bit of a wannabe chef in my spare time so I’m really looking forward to it… if you’re in Perth I might even see you there!

Making time for number one...

Like some of you reading this blog, my passion for photography has grown in fits and spurts over the years. As a kid I really wasn’t the slightest bit interested. In high school however I was fairly active; I remember taking most of the photos for my school yearbook in Queensland. I spent all of my early adulthood playing the drums in several bands around Brisbane - photography was the furthest thing from my mind...

About 4 years ago however, I took the plunge and bought a second hand D-SLR camera body and a few lenses on eBay in reasonably quick succession to buying a mid-range point-and-shoot. I was hooked again. I would take my camera everywhere in much the same way as I do now – the difference being I was constantly taking images too. Trees, flowers, bugs, my darling wife (who hates being photographed but became my #1 model) and basically anything else I could point my lens at. It wasn’t unusual for me to take at least a few dozen images every single day and twice on Sundays! Why? Because I could. Because it was fun. Because no matter how many images I took I still wanted to take more. I had passion! My new “best ever shot” was only one shutter actuation away.

But then we decided to take my passion and try to make a bit of money out of it. Not a lot of money, but I was doing something I loved so it’s all good right? Well, yes – and no.

You see, I had (and still do have) a full time day job. It’s great – a nice security blanket thank you very much. But it also meant that any photography jobs I did get had to be held during weeknight evenings or on the weekends. Initially this wasn’t a problem – but in the last year things have gotten a little bit out of control. It’s totally awesome that people hire me because they like my work and would like to have me take their treasured images. It still makes me genuinely happy when I secure a new client. Not because of the money; although it is a bonus, but because those people have faith in my abilities and I will strive to give the best possible images back to them as a result.

But there is another cost, other than the monetary relief that my photography provides. Long gone are the days where I would regularly take a whole bunch of images of nothing just for the heck of it – for the pure enjoyment of the art, the ability to create a cool image out of nothing. In their place I instead have an enforced passion for post production. Instead of going for a 4 hour drive on a Sunday to Hicksville just south of nowhere just to grab a bunch of shots – now I spend hour upon hour cataloguing, editing, cloning, masking, duplicating, exporting and archiving about 10,000 images in a busy month. Is there any passion in this – no, not a great deal. As I said, the actual image capture part still gives me a buzz but that’s only about a quarter of the effort that goes into a shoot from welcoming the clients to “here’s your proofs”.

For the keen readers out there, you will know that this is part of the reason that I really enjoy going on photo walks with some mates from time to time. But if I had the opportunity I would jump in my car, by myself, start driving and stop driving somewhere like Prevelley Beach, Margaret River – or [insert desirable location here] only to get the shots I want and head home the same day… all “because I could”.

So, now that I have made a short story as long as possible I have decided wherever possible to take some time to keep my passion for photography alive, to ensure that it really does not become a second “job” that I loathe. I have come close the last few weeks; but it doesn’t have to be like that. Remember that the most important thing in your photography is you – not your clients, your peers or your critics. If you loose the drive that got you to where you are in the first place you might as well use your spare time more productively and strap a Domino’s Pizza delivery sign to the roof of your car.

Make time for you. Make time for photography that you want to do. No one will probably ever see the images from this down time, but who cares. It’s not about them – it really is all about you and keeping your creative passion. The end.

Shooting in a tent... and a trip to the hospital...

Wow, a week has almost passed since my last blog post… oops! Didn’t mean to abandon you, really!

As usual, it has been another full-on week with lots happening in our little Perth based Photography Studio here in Kelmscott. This week has been full of shoes. Women’s shoes specifically – and lot’s of ‘em. Now before you get too much more into that train of thought you are on let me clarify this a little bit.

I was able to secure a job for a client who owns a shoe store. They wanted images of their new spring stock to go onto their website. Cool I thought, I hadn’t used my light tent for some time so I thought this could be fun.

So, a couple of advantages here. I quite enjoy using the light tent to shoot product because it is quite different from the usual modelling and portrait photography that I am used to. It also means that I can really utilise the full potential of the brilliant live-tethered shooting application by Fujifilm – HyperUtility HS-V3. There are a few tethered shooting options out there for Nikon and Canon shooters; but this puppy from Fujifilm is awesome. Combine it with the live-view function on the Fujifilm S5 Pro D-SLR and product photography really is a joy. Just put a shoe in the light tent, sit down at your PC and start shooting. Live-view will show you how the shot is composed in the viewfinder before the image is captured, and if it didn’t capture correctly you can adjust ALL, yes I do mean all of the camera’s shooting parameters right from your PC. Very cool. So even though the product itself really didn’t do much for me it was a pleasure to do this job.

When I shoot product however I do like to shoot it ½ to 1 stop underexposed so that, even though I shoot in RAW in the studio, I ensure that the images are captured without any blown out highlights which are essentially un-recoverable; even if you are shooting RAW. But this has issues of it’s own in that every single image needs some post production work done to it. Enter stage left Photoshop! In the following very low-fi (for the sake of your bandwidth) home made tutorial I show you some quick and easy masking techniques. I hope you like it.

Well there you go, simple but tells a story! Finally, I had the pleasure of enduring the Emergency Room at my local hospital this evening after our 13 month old son took a bit of a dive and appeared to really hurt his hip and left leg. Two and a half hours and three doctors later we were assured that the little guy had only done some soft tissue damage and he’ll be right in a day or two. Thank God. I started to get a little worried as patients started queuing into the waiting room coughing and spluttering who-knows-what out into the air; quickly followed by hospital staff running to them and handing out masks of a different kind to those I showed you in the video. Sign of the times I guess…

Love the one you're with...

Just a quick entry this evening. I was really looking forward to today. I had planned to go out on a photo walk with my good mate John. But I woke up feeling dodgy – not a good start. Nonetheless I packed my photo walk camera bag, which unlike my normal take-everywhere camera bag only contained one Fuji S5 Pro D-SLR body, my 24-70mm f/2.8 zoom and my 50mm f/1.8 and 24mm f/2.8 razor sharp prime lenses. I think I also packed my SB-900; just in case.

Anyway, I was feeling dodgy before I left but I felt 100 times worse when we arrived in Fremantle one hour later. It wasn’t Johns driving either – just my churning stomach. Oh, did I mention it was blowing a gale and heavy showers were passing through rather frequently? Well, they were. Am I painting a good picture so far?

So, with our camera bags still in the boot of the car we set off around Fishermans Wharf in Fremantle. To be honest the main reason we were in Fremantle was to visit an art exhibition, the images making up the exhibition were actually taken by an acquaintance of my mate and fellow photo walker. The images were quite good too. It was the sort of thing that at first glance it was a little hard to “see” but the more you looked the more you saw. Cool.

But then came the really cool part. Enter stage left the humble iPhone. For those who have never been to Little Creatures Micro Brewery (that’s such a silly phrase ‘micro’ as the place in enormous!) it as a great venue. Basically it’s a massive warehouse that has been converted into a brewery and funky restaurant. The venue was very much like the artwork on display that we had come to see – the more you looked the more cool things you could see to photograph. Before I knew it I was actually doing the photo walk after all, but I was using the camera I had on me; my iPhone.

I have been reading a lot recently in blogs from my peers that their favourite camera is the one that is closest. Sure they shoot with cameras that still make my mouth water and use lighting equipment that is “to die for”. But they too embrace these little wonders. I really don’t know for sure but just taking a stab in the dark I recon that three quarters of all mobile phones these days have cameras built in. Yes they are not the best quality and no I would never use one exclusively but they are so much fun – and I always have one with me.

So after all that we did end up having a photo walk of sorts; and our camera bags never left the boot of the car. In hindsight I would have got some really awesome images if I did have my camera bag with me. But you know what – I had fun, took some great little images, post processed them and even uploaded them to twitpic all using my iPhone – the only camera I had with me. I couldn’t have done all that with just my D-SLR.

I will always shoot with high end equipment when the need arises. But I finally can say that today, I loved the one I was with and had an absolute ball with the only camera I had on me at the time. I think this could become a trend…

The world is your oyster... just don't forget to let the world know...

Wow it’s the end of another crazy week already. I think I blinked and missed it. But that’s an occupational hazard I guess, especially when you work two full time jobs like I do.

So yeah, life is pretty hectic. I’m almost always doing something.

Now, put yourself in my shoes just for a moment. When you are that busy – how do you find the time to stay in touch? How do you stay up-to-date with your friends, family and peers? How do you think you would find the time?

Getting off subject just for a moment… I am a self confessed geek. I love technology. I embrace it. I seek it out! I really love my mobile devices though; my iPhone 3GS and my HTC Touch Pro. Apple and Windows. Chalk and cheese. But both are very cool and share similar functionality. One of those functionalities is internet access.

Now, who here catches public transport to and from work? Or who, like me, sits in peak hour traffic twice a day doing nothing but staring into oblivion through a double glazed piece of glass?

And finally, who here is on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace etc. etc? I really love Twitter and Facebook. Both are easy to use. One takes a little bit of time and the other can get you lost in pages and pages of… stuff. They are great though for networking; but not just networking with your friends.

In Twitter for example, I have chosen to “follow” my peers; photographers I admire and aspire to be like one day. I think it is great that with one finger swipe and one click I can see what everyone is up to. But it gets better. I advertise a link on my Perth Photography website www.timography.net that encourages people to follow me on Twitter – and they do. All of a sudden potential clients can scroll back through my previous posts to see what I have been up to. As some of you know I also love to post simple, often meaningless but cool images I have taken just moments before with my phone camera. This is all great stuff. It gets you out there – with a minimum of effort.

Even better is to write a blog. Put your name and your business all over it. It doesn’t really matter what you write about (clearly you know that by now if you are still reading this!) but it all helps with your Google ranking. I posted a tweet about this a few weeks ago, but go here and have a look at this video. It’s the best hour and a half you will spend on the internet this year – I promise. Three of the worlds most well known photographers all telling you how to make the internet work for you. I currently pay Google a princely sum of money each month to make sure my name comes up in the sponsored links of just about any photography / wedding / portrait keyword search that you can think of relating to Perth photography. But I don’t have to pay them that much – I could do it myself. But, even better my tenacious little wife is learning how to do it so I don’t have to – bless her.

To end for today, my point is this; we all have the ability, the time and the means to spend a few seconds to a few minutes to an hour or so being productive with our “downtime” and promoting ourselves on the web. I am writing this as much for me as I am for you guys. Sometimes (ok, most times!) I need a kick up the butt myself when it comes to promoting my little home Photography Studio here in Kelmscott, Perth. Interesting fact: since I started this blog I have added over 40% more traffic (unique visitors) to my website which already had a respectable number of unique visits per month - in the region of 400-500 visits per month (45,000 individual hits). And the people that do visit are coming back twice as much and staying about 40% longer on my site each visit. The people that visit my site from 0-30 seconds has dropped a whopping 30%. People that stay from 30 minutes to 1+ hours has risen also about 30%. Now you might think that isn't a lot. Well truth be told, you are right. But compared to this time last year it is a HUGE improvement, and I think that’s pretty cool. All I did is get a Twitter account @timography and started to write this blog – all in my spare time. If I can do it anyone can. I can't wait to look at my website stats in a year from now...

Which begs the question, what are you waiting for? More internet exposure + more website hits = MORE CLIENTS!!

PS – from this blog post alone Google will find 4 keyword phrases that will lead to my website… and they didn’t cost me a cent.

Video Blog #2 "Grid Spot Lighting"...

Well it’s been a couple of days since my last blog post but that doesn’t mean that I have been slacking off!

So, once again with the help of my good mate John we have released our second video blog post. In this video I quickly demonstrate three different studio lighting setups; all of which utilise grid spots to really focus the light coming from the flash head.

I really love this style of lighting at the moment. In fact I would have to say that my “favourite” way to light in the studio at the moment is using set-up #2 in the video. Everything is so crisp and clean as far as the lighting is concerned- and you can make this style of set-up as simple or as complicated as you like. Sure, it’s not the kind of lighting that you can use every time you shoot in the studio as it can get a little much sometimes. I guess I just really love the way that it does such a good job of making the subject standout so much more from the backdrop.

Timography Blog - Grid Spot Lighting from Tim Watson on Vimeo.

Ok, I’ll give you all a quick run-down on the three set-ups shown in the video.

1. Single overhead light with beauty dish attachment. This is such a simple arrangement that works well without fail! The key is to make sure that the model always keeps their head tilted slightly up to avoid heavy shadows under their eyes, nose and chin. The light falling on the models nose was metered for about f/8 in this instance. Shutter speed was 1/125th sec @ ISO 100. For digital capture I drop my aperture back to f/7.1 (1/3rd of a stop) just to give the image a little more “punch”.

2. Overhead light is still in place but is augmented by the introduction of a “rim” light coming over the models left shoulder. This light is also metered at f/8, but this is really only a guide as it can be set wherever you like really. At f/5.6 it will be barely noticeable and very soft. At f/11 or f/16 you can start to create some really interesting effects. Just make sure you can still obtain correct exposure on the models face though.

3. Finally, we add a third light onto the backdrop. I didn’t mention in the video but this light was metered to be one stop lower than the key light – so it’s set at f/5.6. Basically the more power you feed the backdrop light the brighter the “spot” becomes on the white backdrop. If you were using say, a red backdrop; f/5.6 would make the spot a wine red colour. At f/8 (the same as the key light) the rule-of-thumb is that the spot will be red. At f/16 the spot will be hot pink, and so on as you vary the power of this third backdrop light.

So there you go; three really simple lighting set-ups that work really well and can be set-up in no time at all. A big thank you to Jodie Edom @ Je Mode Makeup and Styling and also to Tarnee Bidzinski from Metro Modelling.

As I said in the video – if there is anything that you would like to see demonstrated or any techniques that you wanted to see then please let me know. After all, I am making these video blogs for you guys out there…

5 photos in 5 minutes within 5 paces…

I remember reading a blog post on DPS a year or two ago. I didn’t think it would make such an impact on me. But it is a really great idea – so I thought I would do the right thing and pass it on to you… um, I might have changed the original idea ever-so-slightly but not to worry…

For a little bit of background, a while ago I was feeling like I was not doing enough with my photography. Clients were a little scarce and my camera was not getting much use. I started to think that I was going backwards with my photography but at the same time I was not doing a lot to remedy the situation.

Around the same time I subscribed to DPS or Digital Photography School’s website. The very first blog post I read really inspired me to stop complaining and get off my butt and do something about it. Here is the idea.

Get your camera and select a suitable location. The location might be your home, the park, the beach – it doesn’t really matter. But here’s the great bit. You try to take five interesting images in five minutes that are all within five paces of each other.

Sounds simple right? And it is. That’s it! It does encourage you to take a closer look at your immediate surroundings and try to pick up points of interest that could make a cool photo. Now, no one expects that you will win the POTY Award at next years AIPP Awards ceremony - the image I have posted with this blog post is testimony to that! It’s all about getting you off of your couch and out taking photographs.

Now just to clarify; for those of you who are thinking "that's just a photo walk" well you are kinda right. But when I go on a photo walk I am certainly gone for more than five minutes and I definitely take more than five images. I really love photo walks but I think they deserve a category all of their own. What I am talking about here are instant results with minimum effort. There really isn’t a need to over-complicate this.

I try to do this once or twice a week. Sometimes I do more, sometimes I do less. But that’s the really great thing – it doesn’t really matter how much or how little you do, it’s just the act of doing it at all that’s important. Have a go today.

Shoot anything, and shoot it often. You can only improve yourself as a photographer as a result!

Releasing the model… a.k.a who’s got the copyright?

So at the risk of stating the obvious, as photographers we take photos of all kinds of things. Friends, relatives, immediate family and pets I guess are the obvious ones. But many of us also photograph landscapes, urban scenes, static products and of course clients.

Now – from the get-go I want to let you know that I am simply repeating information found by doing a simple Google search, I will make a few references to a couple of great resources at the end of this blog post.

Anyway, back to my story, I was talking to a photographer a couple of weeks ago about what kind of model release form they use when they want to publish images on their website; for display purposes or otherwise. “A ‘model release’, what’s that? I don’t need one of them do I, it’s not like I am selling the images or anything…”

Well, sadly it is a sign of the times but in this litigious age we live in, a model release or some form of consent from your clients or models – paying customers or freebie shoots – is essential. Myself, I have been using a couple of different model release forms for years now. I have a generic one for when I shoot a model portfolio as a “freebie”, and a couple of more specific ones if the nature of the images are a little more, um, sensitive. I make no secret of the fact to every client that will need to sign one, and they are made well aware of it long before they step foot into our studio. In fact, why don’t you have a quick look here on my website to see the wording involved in the release form.

I guess they best way to explain all this is to repeat a couple of Q&A forums I found on Australian Copyright Laws.

Do I need permission to photograph a building?
Generally, no. Although a building is protected by copyright, a special exception in the Copyright Act allows buildings to be photographed without permission. Be aware though, that the owner of a property may impose restrictions regarding entry onto the property. It may sometimes be the case, as with photographs of people, that certain unauthorised uses of a photograph of a particular building may raise issues under other laws, such as trade practices legislation.

A client has not paid me. Who owns copyright in the photographs?
The photographer generally owns copyright unless there is an agreement to the contrary. However, if the photograph was commissioned for a private or domestic purpose, the client owns copyright unless there was an agreement to the contrary.

If the client owns the copyright, the photographer is entitled to recover the debt, but not to prevent the client using the photograph for the purposes for which it was taken.

Your solicitor should be able to draft a contract in such a way as to give you rights under copyright law as well as under the contract. Such a contract may assist you in the event that a client uses a photograph before paying you.

Do I need permission from people I photograph?
A person’s image is not protected by copyright. However, in some cases, using a person’s image without permission may be prevented under other laws, such as the law of passing off, the Trade Practices Act 1974 and State and Territory fair trading laws. These areas of law concern conduct which may mislead or deceive the public and may particularly come into play if the photograph you are taking is of a well-known person, and is to be used, for example, as a poster or as a postcard or in advertising. In some cases, uses of photographs may be defamatory of people in them.

If you are commissioned to take photographs, it should not generally be your job to check these issues. However, it may be a good idea to alert clients to the fact that they may need to seek advice from a solicitor with the relevant expertise (note that the Copyright Council does not advise on these other areas of law).

Generally, if you have asked somebody to sit for you, it’s a good idea to get a “model release” from that person so you won’t have to worry later about whether or not your use of resulting photos will raise issues under areas of law such as passing off or the Trade Practices Act. (For a sample photographer's model release, with explanatory notes, see the Arts Law Centre of Australia website.

In other cases, photographers may take more casual shots—for example, photographs of people in the street or at markets, or playing sports. If you know that you might later be using such a photograph commercially, it’s generally a good idea to get a model release from the people you have photographed. If it’s impractical to get the people in your shots to sign model releases, or if they refuse to do so, your ability to use or license the use of the photograph in certain ways might be limited because of the laws discussed above.

It is generally not an invasion of privacy to take another person’s photograph. However, in some circumstances, you may be required to comply with the National Privacy Principles in the Privacy Act 1992 (Cth).

For more on this boring but oh-so-important subject, have a look at http://www.copyright.org.au/. I guess the purpose of this post is to help shed a little more light on this topic that doesn’t seem to get discussed all that much – which I quite frankly find surprising. Remember, in the eyes of the law ignorance is not an excuse to break the law. Enough said.

Please feel welcome to use my model release form, or modify it to suit your own needs. Use it. Love it. Never forget to have the client or model sign it if you wish to use their images.

Video Blog #1 "What's in my bag"... and an iPhone 3GS...

I like to carry my camera bag with me everywhere. I take it to work, when my family and I go to the shops, it even comes with me to the odd restaurant or three. Why you ask? Well mostly because I live in a slightly dodgy suburb and I have had the unpleasant experience of being broken into more than once before. But there is another reason. I never miss a cool looking shot; a sunrise on the way to work, an evening sunset – that kind of thing.

One thing that stands out though is that it is a rather large camera bag, not a small little inconspicuous thing. And it weighs about 14kg! At least twice a week I get asked why I carry such a large bag with me. Obviously Joe Public doesn’t understand the inner-workings of a photographer so I make light of the subject, it’s not worth trying to explain myself. But I do like to carry all this stuff around with me.

So, with the help of my good mate John, I made this little video blog about the contents of my camera bag. Click on the window below to watch it.

Timography Blog - Camera Bag from Tim Watson on Vimeo.

Please let me know what you think of this video. I plan to make a few more video blogs in the near future. You don’t need to tell me that there are already “X” number of photography tutorials on the web. A You Tube search for [photography] will give you enough videos to watch for a week – and then some. So I want to do something a little different. I'll demonstrate some more specific light-shaping tools other than umbrellas or soft boxes. We plan to video a location shoot or two, using wireless triggers and battery packs for the studio strobes. Also a video explaining how to use that fantastic little WhiBal card you just saw in my camera bag.

But most importantly – if there is something you would like to see demonstrated then I would really love to hear about that; so let me know.

And finally, as the title of this blog post alluded to – I could not wait any longer so I got myself an iPhone 3GS this week. O.M.G. My workstation is PC based. I have a very cool little HTC Touch Pro windows based mobile for my business. But they have faded into obscurity now I found Apple. I love this little device. It is missing one or two features that I really like on the HTC but overall, it is awesome. I am slowly filling it up with all sorts of apps. Photography apps. Networking apps. GPS apps. I’m in love.

Get yourself one – at whatever the cost!

The Final Word...

Amongst everything else that has been happening over the last week and a half, I still had floating around in the back of my mind the outcome of the Nikon D700 vs. Fuji S5 Pro “shootout”. I also thought that this would be a great opportunity to throw in a gratuitous plug for my “Portrait of a Phone Box” images. So here goes.

Have a look at the image I have posted with this blog. I can honestly say with my hand on my heart that the only retouching done on this image was a slight horizon correction and I cloned out a couple of distracting lights in the background. I have not applied any noise reduction filters, nor applied any curves adjustments on any part of the image. Colours and saturation are as shot. The histogram is the same as it came out of the camera – and all captured as a fine JPEG too – no RAW files here.

Now, think about the dynamic range of the image. We have blackness surrounding the scene; with the lights coming from the booths themselves coming close to clipping but stopping short thanks to the wonderful sensor in the camera. Can you see any colour banding? I can’t. Can you see any luminance noise? Nope. How about chroma noise? None of that either. Sadly I cannot upload the full size (6.2 meg file) image because Google will not let me, but I wish you could see it at 100%... I would stop short of saying it is medium format quality because that would be stretching it a little too far but it really is glorious. Sadly I will make you read the rest of this post before I reveal which camera took this image. I made a point of testing both the Nikon and the Fuji in this scenario to see which one handled the scene with the minimum of fuss.

From a handling standpoint, I’ll quickly break this down into a few categories;

Focussing
With its 51 auto-focus points, and 15 of them being “cross type array” the Nikon D700 won hands down. The Fuji is still very good with its 11 points, but when the action was happening on the catwalk and there were models going every which way – the Nikon didn’t skip a beat. The Fuji would lock –on, but it would take a second or so sometimes, by which time the shot had disappeared from my viewfinder.

Under normal circumstances though, both cameras are great. After all, the Fuji does have the exact same auto-focus system found in the Nikon D200.

Metering
This is a very close call as both camera bodies have exactly the same 1005 pixel RGB sensor used exclusively to meter the image and utilise 3D Colour Matrix Metering which Nikon is famous for. Sorry Canon guys but even you must agree here! Getting back to the metering, it is only fair to say that the D700 does have the “2nd Gen” 3D Colour Matrix Metering but I believe it is still the same hardware, only the cameras firmware applies a slightly more forgiving algorithm than the Fuji. In hindsight though, from my experience at EWE 2009 the D700 did produce more, much more blown out images than the Fuji – but this is probably due to my lack of experience in driving the menus compared to the Fuji.

To summarise – a lot of the fashion parades looked like this; black catwalk – black carpet on the catwalk. Black backdrop. Models dressed in black with black shoes. The models however only had black singlets on, so their arms and faces stood out like the proverbial, and they were wearing either brightly coloured accessories or sparkly jewellery – or both. That’s quite a scene for ANY camera to meter well… Once you dialled in enough negative exposure compensation things settled down a bit but it was still a challenge.

Speed
Again – no brainer here. The D700 can pump out 5fps, or 8fps with the MB-D10 battery grip on. That’s 3fps short of the giant killing D3! You also get about 25 fine JPEG’s (or Raw files I am lead to believe) in the buffer, but they move along rather quickly. I do not recall having to stop shooting once with the D700 and wait for the files to write to the memory card. Fantastic. Well done Nikon.

The Fuji on the other hand – oh dear. In its defence it is doing a heck of a lot more in camera processing than the Nikon if you are using any of the Film Simulation modes in the S5 Pro. But let’s face it; if you have a S5 you only ever shoot with the film modes turned on, they are that good! Add increased dynamic range into the processing; another Fuji trademark – it gets worse. With everything turned off and shooting a “plain” JPEG or Raw file, expect 3fps for 7 frames. Then put the camera down for a little while and wait. Then shoot some more, then wait. With in-camera image enhancement on, that dreadfully slow 3 fps all of a sudden drops to 1.3! All this seems not to matter though when you see the gorgeous image appear on the little LCD screen.

In the real world as a portrait, modelling and sometimes wedding photographer I have never needed 8fps on more than a handful of occasions… but I can certainly see the benefits.

Menu System
In the D700 everything is in the one place, spread over one very large scrolling menu. Major functions are colour coded in similar groups though so that helps to find your way around a bit better. More than once though it took me ages to scroll through 14 sub-menu’s to eventually find what I was looking for. As with anything; the more you use it the more familiar it becomes. You get to know where things are - but it still takes 28 button pushes to get there.

The S5 Pro however has 2 separate menus, accessed by different buttons on the rear facia of the camera. One is only for current shooting options such as Film Simulation modes, colour space, white balance, image recording, ISO etc., whereas in the other menu you can find every other option you would otherwise require. Does this make a difference? I think it does, but that’s just my opinion. From having to use both cameras in a pressure situation, I preferred the Fuji.

Wow, I just looked back on how long this blog post is, I had better start wrapping this up! Both the Nikon and Fuji are great D-SLR bodies in their own right. Both produce great images. But one is newer and much much faster. Also the Nikon has a full-frame sensor which really does perform exceptionally well in low light and that is a very important factor that carries over into just about any shooting situation you may find yourself in. But at the end of the day, if you are shooting 11fps or just one, really it comes down to the images that the camera produces, right? Isn’t that what it’s all about? Great images with a minimum of fuss?

The phone booth shot was somewhat predictably taken with the Fuji S5 Pro. The same shot from the D700 simply could not record the same dynamic range of the Fuji. They still look like fine images, but the Fuji’s look exceptional – consistently. And that’s enough for me.

As I said in an earlier post, I will still be buying a D700 - and soon too, I can’t wait. But I will only ever replace my Fujifilm bodies when the shutter mirror falls off and the lenses start dropping off for no reason. Oh, the Canon 5D MkII does that already. Oops – better luck next time Canon. :o)

Every Woman Expo 2009 wrap-up...

Well I think my head has stopped spinning sufficiently from last weekend and I have finally finished all of the web updates that I wanted to do to my website http://www.timography.net/ so now I can relax a little bit and digest the outcome of Every Woman Expo (EWE) 2009.

After having the opportunity to review (albeit rather quickly) all of the images taken over the weekend I have to say that the overlaying theme from the weekend was over-exposure. But not over-exposure in a good way like when a company gets a plug every 15 minutes by the M.C. of the show. No, a rather more annoying over-exposure unfortunately.

You see, at a show like this one the catwalk is lit for one purpose – to benefit the audience. Photographers are rather more of an afterthought. No consultation is done to try and achieve a happy medium between the two. Yet the exhibitors and the models would both love to get some fantastic images of the event, so it’s all on the shoulders of the humble photographer to pull it off despite the “challenges” represented by the venue.

So the main difficulty I faced at this years event was to achieve a balanced exposure despite the ambient light on the catwalk. For those who did not attend, there was a trestle rig directly behind me (and about 10 metres in front of the catwalk) facing the front/centre of the catwalk. This light was shining all the way down the catwalk and doing a good job of lighting the models as they walked down the runway. But the kicker was – well, the kicker lights that were placed at regular intervals along the sides and across the front of the catwalk. These kicker lights are small triangular shaped lights that sit at floor level and tilt backwards and up to throw light up onto the models was they walk by. They were halogen filament bulbs and therefore a different colour temperature to the tungsten spot lights shining down the runway as mentioned before. Therein is challenge #1 – try and fine-tune your camera’s white balance setting to that! Every time a model walked past, or stood in front of one of these kicker lights they got “hot-spots” on whichever body part was in line with the throw from the light. And because the lights were placed at regular intervals but just far enough apart so they did not overlap it was like the models were walking down an imaginary zebra crossing of light-dark-light-dark as far as my camera’s light meter was concerned. Very annoying!

See, at an event like Jailhouse Frock which I shot earlier in the year, if my S5 Pro could have handled the higher ISO of the D700 I would have been in heaven just using the ambient light as the catwalk was only softly lit from above – the models themselves where lit by a solitary spotlight as they walked down the runway. This is about as best as you can hope for when shooting ambient lighting for a fashion show. Sadly not the case at EWE 2009.

Getting back to the lighting at EWE 2009; there is really only one way to successfully shoot nice images in difficult ambient light situations. Overcome it. Overcome the ambient light. This means bringing your own. Keen readers of my blog will know that I have done just that at this event in the past. Reviewing those images reveals a much higher “hit ratio” at getting the metering right. The white balance of the venue is easier to get right by setting a custom value in your camera whilst triggering the strobes before the event is underway. Sure, you have to play with the aperture of your lens the whole time as the models approach and walk past the metered “sweet-spot” on the runway. But this is easier to deal with than really bad ambient.

As Google will only let me upload 5 images with this blog post, I have placed a page on my website here where I have a representation of the lighting I will bring to EWE 2010. All I need is two strobes right behind me on the lighting rig for the venue spot lights. The heads will be placed pointing 11am – 1pm left to right respectively with just spill-kill reflectors on them so I get a broad spread of light coming from them to fill a large area. I envisage (and this is just a guess at this point) but I will meter the lights so that when the models are down the front landing of the runway I can get f/11 all across that area. The middle portion of the runway will meter at about f/5.6 and the rear landing will meter at about f/3.2. This is how I set the lights at EWE 2007 with a reasonable amount of success.

Ok, that’s enough of a lighting lesson for today! I will be spending the next couple of weeks going through all of this years images; discarding the over-exposed images and trying to colour correct the rest of them. Next year though, look out.

I have learned my lessons the hard way this year. That’s fine – that’s how we learn. If you no longer make mistakes you are not trying hard enough to improve yourself.

Ok. I’m done. See ya tomorrow.