Author: Richard

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.

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.

Maternity shoots are always fun, I have done a few in the past for ladies who have never been in front of a photographer before, its always important to remember the small talk and concentrate on building a relationship with the person, I often have the future father present to give support and if I can persuade them to take part as well.

Watching the initial viewpoints of the new Nikon Z9 has led to some controversy.

The first one is the small buffer, only 30 shots before the buffer fills in lossless compressed RAW. That video was from a reviewer who only had slow XQD card. Another reviewer who had a faster CFExpress card got 90 shots. So a big controversy was generated over nothing. Next year when the next gen CFExpress cards come out this will not be an issue for people who need that performance, but that seed has been sown in peoples mind and will hurt Nikon.

Some of these initial reviews have been big events organised by Nikon, the camera getting passed from reviewer to reviewer. One video I saw, the reviewer was getting a good hit rate for focus on birds in flight but it some times struggled to initial get focus. Towards the end of the video the reviewer mentions that the focus had been setup oddly, not on animal or auto, so later he reset it and now the camera was focusing and getting that initial lock straight away. Someone watching the first half of the video would get a very different impression of the focus abilities then someone who watched all the video.

Some of the better videos have been with Nikon Ambassadors, some who have had the camera for nearly three months and really gotten to grips with the features. The problem with videos from these people is can you believe them? They are chosen by Nikon and would not want to hurt the hand that feeds them so to speak.

I think with any camera its better to wait until everything is finalised on the camera (these were pre-production models with early firmware), and a reviewer that can spend some time learning the ins and outs of the camera. The release of the Z9 by Nikon has been handled fairly well, much better then the Z6 an Z7 which had very early firmware and still were not focusing very well, this was fixed and then revolutionised with firmware v2 and v3.