Richard & Caroline's Blog

Olympus and Nikon have been the leaders in new flash tech from the camera brands; but now as the camera market shrinks Nikon are now engaging with third parties to enhance their flash system support.

This has been an area that Leica have been lacking but I see now with the release of a new controller from Profoto they now have Leica support which will please quite a few people.

I am a huge fan of Profoto, yes its not cheap but your paying for the R&D and the licenses for the frequencies that Profoto use.

Last weekend I was at a local studio and I was not using my Profoto gear but their gear. I wasted a good half an hour getting their triggers to work correctly.

The fans of the cheaper Chinese studio flash systems will gleefully point out that their controllers have had power readout for a while and are cheaper, but us Profoto users who don’t use the A10 as their controller but have the older ProFoto controller will definitely upgrade and leave our old triggers as spares.

The British love a celebration, and this weekend we have good reason to celebrate. Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II has now been on the throne for seventy years.

No matter what your views on the monarchy you have to agree she has given us loyal service representing the county for all that time.

Our village has gotten into the spirit of things, with decorations, we also have a small beacon in the pub carpark which we lit.

The weather is starting to improve, and so as well as booking studio shoots I am now starting to arrange a few outdoor shoots.

Last year I did some great work outdoors in the good weather. I go a few good shots early in the year but it was cold and the models were brave.

Here’s to better weather and summer shoots.

I have mentioned before that there is a lot of difference between different memory cards.

The SD cards, cheap but easy to break, and do fail on writes occasionally causing lost work. Note after you have downloaded the photos, and have backed them up, format the card in camera. Then before use format again. If the format takes longer then usually your likely to soon have issues.

CF cards use a different technology, are much more robust and are less likely to fail but still take precautions, and make a note of when you bought a card and how much it has been used. Refresh old cards, also it is often better to use a couple of smaller cards than one big card.

So the reason for this post is I see Delkin are about to release a new version of their Black series CFexpress card, which can write faster than a Nikon Z9 can write. So no more buffer issues if you like shooting at 20fps or more. I currently use Delkin Black CFexpress cards myself.

There is a new community resource opened near to us. An old smoke house that on the ground flour is a plain white brick well lit space, and a dark plain brick walled basement with no light.

Its available to hire for a nominal fee for local Yoga, Pilates groups, knitting and sewing clubs etc. It also makes an interesting space for photography.

So what to do, well I booked a local well known model Girl On Fire for the day and as well as shooting some local lifestyle shots for both are portfolios in coffee shops and around the local village, we spend a few hours seeing what we could produce in this space.

We had a lot of fun and created some great pictures, I’ll definitely be trying this out again.

All cameras today are excellent whether you shoot Canon, Sony, Nikon or Fuji. All the leading cameras now can produce very clean 14 bit (or more for medium format). This allows great potential for post production and editing. With a colour checker and custom profile you can really get the colours accurate or colour graded exactly how you want.

I know a number of portrait photographers who at the end of the session hand the jpegs out of camera to their client. With the right lighting, and knowing your camera you can get exactly the output you want. Many of these use Canon 1D and they love the out of camera jpegs.

Fuji is famous for their film simulations, if you liked one of their films then they have a simulation to match.

Hasselblad and Nikon tend to go for a more neutral look, I myself shoot a neutral flat profile with Nikon but have a number of Adobe Lightroom presets I have created to add the colour grading I like.

I know many users just love the Nikon colour science and the look out of camera.

If you want a particular look I suggest you have a look at your in camera settings, even cameras with limited profiles allow customisation so you can set things up as you like. Have a play and learn.