Category: Photography

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Social Media and Censorship

I am predominantly a people photographer. While I do some wildlife, landscape, the bulk of my work is people.

Weddings, family and corporate photography is some of my photography that generates an income but my studio, work, especially art nude is what I love.

With this being my personal blog, I try to keep it safe for work, my more professional site has a selection of work including up to full frontal nude.

Having a site to show ones work is great but social media is where it is at, if you want the general public to find you. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter being the main three.

I do not use Facebook but do use Instagram and Twitter. I find social media to be a bit of a cesspool containing the best and worst of people. Twitter seems to allow nearly anything and I can post any of my work, but twitter really does show the best and worst of people.

Instagram, like Facebook I have issues with. They do not allow adult shots or any nudity, unless your very famous or playboy. The more famous you are the more you will get away with. They are more likely to allow a shot showing violence against women, then a wonderful shot of a woman breast feeding. The internet is very much two faced.

I do not know the answer when it comes to the internet and censorship, I have more of an issue with violence than sex. So we use what platforms we can and promote ourselves without upsetting our internet masters by showing a nipple.

With the recent changes to Twitter I have now created an account on Mastodon. I like how you can find a server that supports what you need and you can mark you work as ‘NSFW’ Not Safe For Work and they can then only view it if the select to.

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Colour Temperature

I had a studio shoot this last weekend with the lovely Katey. I took the time to test some of my white balance tools.

WhiteBal Card
Popup Greycard/WhiteBal
Colour Checker

Sunlight, age and general use, dirt, oil from our hands all slowly impact on the accuracy of white balance tools.

I have three of various ages.

An X-Rite Colour checker is my oldest and I use it for creating profiles as well for colour critical work.

My little WhiteBal card, and a pop-up grey/white balance card.

My pop up colour confidence grey/white balance card I tend to use the most, it also gets used on location so gets dirty, and has been rained on.

So I decided to, in a single shot capture all three cards. Then cloned it three times and used the white balance picker in Lightroom to compare.

WhiteBal Card
Colour Checker
Pop up

As you can see the white balance card and colour checker despite there age are still close together. The pop up card is showing much warmer.

I really need to repeat the experiment under more controlled lighting conditions but it was interesting.

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Acceptable Focus

We now auto modes for everything, focus stacking, eye detect for pets people and even motorcycle detect mode for focus.

Many of the classic pictures of the past were taken quickly in the moment, some where not quite exposed correctly, many missed focus.

Now we expect perfection in our images, following the rules of composition.

On Wednesday I had some meetings in Lincoln, so in my lunch break I grabbed my Leica, with a 35mm lens, set the aperture to f/8 and the focus to 2 meters and just fired when I saw a shot.

No focusing no worrying.

So what happened, well no great pieces of art, lots of blurred out of focus images but a couple that I liked.

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When is a colour card not a colour card – Grey Cards

how not to set white balance

I see on the forums, YouTube and general internet sources a lot of confusion about setting a custom white balance.

Custom Profile

The main issue I see is that people are setting colour white balance using a grey card. This is potentially wrong. A grey card is calibrated 18% grey in order for you to get your metering correct. A colour checker card to set white balance has a neutral grey or white, ie the red green and blue channels are balanced.

Now you can buy 18% grey neutral grey cards, so these can be used for exposure and for setting white balance, but do not assume a grey card is neutral!

How to use also generates some debate. First thing is to get the lighting and exposure right. In the top picture, I was setting a fairly simple lighting set up. I had the model hold my colour balanced grey card white I tweaked the lighting and exposure. Do not take the white balance reading until you are setup, changing the lights and exposure can change the white balance. The picture here has a number of issues, but the biggest is that the cheap studio provided trigger is not syncing correctly with my camera thus the dark area at the bottom.

Step one, setup your shot, get the lighting, exposure all how you want.

Step two, take a photo of the subject with the colour checker, white balance card in the shot.

Step three – this is where we have some debate and it does not really matter. Either set a custom white balance using that shot in camera so that all your future shots are correct, or in your tethering software so everything looks correct. Or after the shoot most RAW software allows you to sync the corrected balance that shot to the other shots. Generally you edit that shot, do a custom white balance using the card in the shot, then sync the white balance settings across the other shots.

One last thing to consider; if like me you have custom import profiles that set a particular look, these may overwrite the colour balance, as may any other development profile you apply.

Oh and we are talking RAW, JPG bakes the colour temp into the file, it needs to be right.

What do I use and how? Well I have a couple of small white balance cards scattered across several camera bags as well as a A4 colour checker in my largest bag, so I always have something with me. As to how I use, well its naughty of me but I am not consistent.

When doing a shoot I am often in a manual white balance setting, using a card for important shots, then syncing things up at the end. It is an area I need to improve on.

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More Autumn Light

After spending a week resting and several days in bed, due to the dreaded COVID, I have finally started to get a bit more energy.

Ted the Greyhound has been desperate for a decent walk so finally this weekend, I got up early and with a Nikon Z7 and 35mm f/1.8 lens over my shoulder and we went for a stroll.

There was a touch of low mist, and early warm light which made the day look lovely, so I could not resist taking a few snaps. This square image I cropped to post on Instagram.

This was the limit to my photography this weekend. I did have a shoot all booked but luckily I managed to get the location and model to slip by a week. I wanted to have two weeks clear from my last positive COVID test before I risked anyone else’s health.

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Autumn

The seasons turn and we are now into Autumn.

As late summer turns to Autumn the light turns, and once again we grab the camera and walk round the village documenting the wonderful light.

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The boring 50mm lens

Nikon Z7 50mm f/1.2

Most of us photographers use zooms, for a lot of my professional work I use zooms. When shooting a wedding its generally a 24-70mm f/2.8 on one body and a 70-200mm f/2.8 on another, with a fast 50mm in the bag for when the light levels drop.

Sometimes for personal work I use a simple Leica with either a 35mm f/2 or 50mm f/1.4, I also sometimes adopt that simple approach when using my high resolution Nikon Z7 for portraits, using the Nikkor Z 50mm f/1.2 and Z 35mm f/1.8.

This simple image was just with my Nikon Z7 and a 50mm f/1.2 wide open. A simple but very pleasing portrait.

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System Cameras and third party support – Canon

Nikon Z7 Z 35mm f/1.8 with Profoto B10Plus and large shoot through brolly for fill light

Sony reached their current status by embracing third parties, it took a while but now we have lens, flashes etc available from a broad range of suppliers.

Sony and Fuji, and the L alliance with Leica, Panasonic together with Olympus have very large well established systems.

Canon and Nikon are the new kids on the block for mirrorless. While both are the joint kings of the SLR realm and have been since the 1960’s, they are new to high end mirrorless and are building their systems quickly. There has been a lot of chat about whether these will remain closed systems or welcome third parties.

Well now it seems we know. Canon have issues legal notices to a number of lens manufacturers to stop them from producing lens for the RF mirrorless mount, while we see the first authorised lens from Tamron for Nikon, and we see Nikon executives, carrying the little Zfc with cute Voigtlander primes on the front.

I feel this is sending the wrong signal from Canon, whilst their high end L glass for the new mount has been good the rest is certainly not near the quality of the Nikon Z S branded glass, or Sony’s G and GM glass. Certainly if I was getting into photography now for full frame I would look at Nikon and Sony not Canon. If you have the budget then go Canon for the rest of us Sony have the bigger range and Nikon are knocking it out of the park with their Z lens. If you are into your cropped sensor then neither Nikon or Canon have much to offer from themselves and you are better off looking at Fuji.