Category: Photography

Yesterday was Nikon’s much waited for press conference. Rumours abounded about new full frame cameras; the D4, the D800; even a brand new interchangeable mirrorless lens system.

Instead we got more compacts.

The Sony announcement was much more interesting. The new enthusiast / professional NEX7 was quite a revelation.

With the Leica M9, Leica X1, Fuji X100, Panasonic GF and Olympus Pen range; and of course now this, we have a number of large sensor Compact Cameras where size does not necessarily have to mean less image quality.

My criteria is interchange lens, high quality prime wide angles and a decent view finder.

As always I’ll be waiting till I can test one in my hands, but the new Olympus Pen 3, and now this are at the top of my lists.

Today was my outdoor shoot with the lovely Alice.

It was a test shoot to try out a few ideas out in the field. A mix of motion and dance themes, some art nude and a picnic shoot.

All of these whether or not they included motion all consisted of creative use of flash, mixed with daylight. Some 80% Sunlight 20% flash, up to 20% Sunlight 80% flash.

This was made easier because of my light meter. The Sekonic L-758D has a neat trick, in that as well as showing the shutter speed and aperture it shows the percentage of daylight to flash. Neat trick and very helpful.

Balancing the light can be difficult in very bright conditions. Studio Flash tends to only sync to between 1/80 – 1/250 second depending on make and model.

You also have to consider the camera flash sync speed. This is where medium format has the advantage over 35mm SLR. With their leaf shutters built into the lens they will sync easily to 1/500 second. Most modern SLR’s are limited to 1/125 to 1/250.

You could resort to your modern camera flash gun, these often have a high speed sync mode, letting you use up to 1/4000 second, but your camera flash has little power compared to a studio flash and your batteries would quickly die.

As you can see in the above photo, I have also tried to be a little creative with my post processing, giving a stylised feel to the shot.

Altogether a great day.

Well I have an outdoor test shoot booked for a few days time.  A lovely dancer is going to model for me and we have a private location with parking and the land owners permission.

Cannot wait!

Still my normal pre-shoot checks to do and a final shot list and clothes list to sort.  The only thing I cannot really plan for is the weather.

Fingers crossed.

Workflow. Something many photographers need to consider.

• Importing your photographs
• Backing up your photographs
• Processing
• Digital Asset Management
• Metadata, keywording
• Choosing your Picks
• Choosing your Selects
• Final imaging processing
• Long Term Storage

Thats a lot to consider, and i’ll not go into it all today in this post but lets consider the first part.

Before I start, let me suggest you get yourself a good DAM program (Digital Asset Management). If I had to pick one it would be either Adobe’s Photoshop Lightroom or Apple’s Aperture program. These two programs enable you to handle the processing, DAM, and metadata and keywording. They can also handle 90% of your post processing needs, meaning you need to spend less time in your heavy duty pixel wrangler program (eg GIMP/Photoshop CS5/Coral Paintshop Pro).

• Importing your photographs
• Backing up your photographs

Your photos are on your Compact Flash/ Secure Digital card safe in your camera. But what next.

Well for a start they are not safe, you only have one copy, you need to get those files backed up so you have two copies. First rule, don’t connect your camera to your computer. Take the cards out and put them in a card reader. If your in the field many photographers use devices such as Epson Photo Viewer, some are using Apple iPad’s via a camera connection kit, as am I now.

If your using a laptop, then for myself, I back them up to the local hard disk. I pack the memory cards and the laptop seperately. If one gets lost the images are still safe.

Once back at the hotel/home/office, I then import the photo’s into my DAM program. For me this is Adobe Lightroom, the import preset applies basic metadata information and keyword details. The preset also copies the files to an external hard drive. This now gives me three copies of the files. One still on the cards, one on the laptop and one on the external hard drive. At the end of the day I run a backup (if your an Apple Mac User with OS 10.5, 10.6 or 10.7, use the built in Time Machine Application or I recommend you buy the application SuperDuper) this does a complete backup of my laptop including my photos, this now gives me a fourth copy of the photographs. Its now at this point i’ll risk wiping the cards.

Sound like overkill, well it does not take any real effort when you have the right products, and how much are the images worth to you?

If you follow Scott Kelby’s blog you will see that the World Wide Photowalk has again been announced.

I’ll let Chris Bennett give you the details over at his blog.

Chris has entered all three up to now, while I have entered the last two. Last year I was pleased and proud to win the Lincoln round.

Hope to you there.

Saturday I spent the afternoon having a bit of fun.

The great thing about C-Stands is there versatility, with the boom arms fitted they not only light stands but also background stands. It was this versatility I wanted to test to day.

Clearing some space I set up the C-Stands with there boom arms, and used them to support a background roll of paper.

I then set up my Elinchrom Rotalux softbox using my portable Elinchrom Quadra Flashes to provide the illumination. One head in the soft box and one pointing at the background.

Using my long suffering and ever patient wife Caroline as a test model, and using my light meter, I soon had everything set up to give professional high quality results.