Hi everyone and welcome to another enthralling diatribe from us here at Timography.
I know I say it every post but this really is a quick one tonight! I have been putting in some late nights recently in order to get some post production out of the way and it is starting to take its toll on me. I must be getting old huh... wait, don’t answer that. Gone are the days when I could stay up past 2am on consecutive evenings without trouble. These days, not quite the case. I’m rambling again huh.
Ok, so to tonight’s post. I have had a mobile broadband thumb-drive modem with a certain phone carrier for a while now, and this week saw it was ready for renewal. I often use the thumb-drive if I am out and about seeing clients and I need internet access, or if I am just out and feeling bored and happen to have my (albeit large 18” Toshiba) laptop with me I’ll kill some time and surf the web. I’m sure that a lot of you have similar devices with other mobile phone carriers and they are a cool peripheral to have at your disposal.
The plot thickens. For a while now I have wanted to get myself a netbook. Why you ask? Why not an iPad? Well that is a whole other blog post in itself. Back to the netbook. I have always loved the idea of taking my laptop with me. Yes, I love to embrace my inner geek. But as I mentioned, the Toshiba is large and heavy; but it is very powerful and capable of any task or program that I throw at it. The downside of all this computing power and that huge 18” screen is that the battery life is 2 hours tops, 2.15 if I turn everything (including the screen brightness) down. You would be amazed how quickly that passes once you get into it.
So I thought the netbook would be perfect for allowing me to do simple things like browse the web, watch a movie or two on iTunes and maybe act as a backup photo storage device on larger shoots. The super long battery life of a netbook certainly appealed to me. I started looking around and did quite a bit of research and it turns out that a netbook wasn’t really going to cut the mustard as far as my needs were concerned. Then I discovered that one mobile phone carrier was bundling their mobile broadband plans with some funky little netbook computers. I looked a little further and I discovered that they also were offering the very cool and certainly very capable Acer Aspire 1410 laptop. Yes that’s right, laptop. Although this thing is only tiny with an 11.6” screen (although larger than a netbook’s 10.1” screen) this puppy certainly packs a punch, and it’s running a full version of Windows 7 Home Premium, not Windows 7 Starter or ~gasp~ Windows XP SP3 like on some current netbooks on the market. I have loaded on Lightroom 2.7 and Photoshop CS4, both of which run just fine thanks very much. It even plays 1080p HD movies – smoothly – without dropping frames. And the best bit; the 3G modem is built in so no more thumb-drive to get in the way and the battery life on this thing is 10+ hours. Oh my God. I’m a happy camper.
To the images accompanying this blog post. Katie is a model that contacted me through our website. She had done some modelling in the past but was looking to get back into more regular work. For this shoot we headed back to the old timber mill at Jarrahdale that we used a while back with Tanayah at sunset; the images from that shoot turned our really well indeed.
The image at the top of the page was amongst the last few shots that we took after the sun had set. I was using my Fujifilm S5 Pro and Nikon 85mm f/1.8 combo. The light for this image was being supplied from a single bare headed Nikon SB-900 mounted to camera right, and was being triggered by using another SB-900 on top of my camera in i-TTL mode using Nikon CLS. I wanted to keep the image, or more specifically the background, fairly light so the camera was in [A] Aperture Priority mode, 1/60th second shutter speed, f/2.8 @ ISO200. Unlike our last blog post where the saturation was pumped up to 11, everything was zeroed as far as the in-camera processing was concerned.
The next image shows Katie being lit again by my beauty dish. The S5 Pro was this time locked in manual mode, 1/250th second shutter speed, f/7.1 @ ISO200. I like the subtleness of the lighting here. This image was one of the first of the shoot and Katie has done really well I think with this pose. She was feeling very nervous (which is natural, of course) and it did take a while for her to loosen up. But by the end of the shoot we were getting some great shots. Thanks Katie.
I wanted to finish this post with a quick look at a new iPhone app that was released in the last couple of weeks, Camera +. I have to admit that I am a bit of a sucker too when it comes to apps for my iPhone. At last count I have downloaded about 150 from iTunes and have at any one time about 80 or so on my phone. I was a great fan of Chase Jarvis’ “Best Camera” app as it allowed you to do everything you needed to from within the app. That is, you can take the photo, edit it and upload it without leaving the application.
Camera + adopts this theme but takes it to the next level. You see, Best Camera has about 13 presets that you can play with to manipulate your image, and you can stack multiple effects multiple times on the one image to give you literally billions of combinations; but sometimes it was hard work to push your image in the direction that you wanted to – creatively speaking.
This app however makes things very easy. You select the image you wish to edit, or take a fresh one. You can then select “scenes” which mimic flash patterns or other in-camera presets such as “portrait”, “landscape” , “sunset” and so on. You can then go on to apply a number of different one touch color tonings, crops or photo borders. The cool thing is that it will give you a small thumbnail preview of how each effect will look on your particular image which makes the whole process very quick and easy. And when you are doing this kind of thing on your phone, isn’t that the whole point? Finally, if you enter your Facebook or Twitter information into the app it will upload the end result for you as well. Job well done!
Ok, time for us to go. Take care and keep shooting what you love. Oh, speaking of good things coming in small packages – this entire post and everything in it – the images, Photoshop work, watermarking, the lot – was done on my new little laptop. I love it so much!
I’m going to get a life now... :o)
No comments:
Post a Comment