Overtorquing...

Some people don't realize there are torque specs for just about every bolt/nut in a car... even the little ones! (Of course, finding those specs isn't always easy)

This is what happens when an overzealous repairer over tightens one of the nuts. A broken battery terminal clamp.

Next to it, a big fat, serious mutha of a replacement cable just waiting to take over!

The before shot, taken in a dark garage lit by car trunk light and an LED work light provides a great opportunity to test the lowlight capabilities of the Canon 1DMkIV and how steady my hand is... (1/10th, ISO 12800 !!!)

Not super-sharp, but an amazing example of being able to get a shot, no matter what the conditions, without having to resort to flashes.

... and after lots of cursing and violence due to the big fat replacement cable being too big and rigid to fit... finally there was an after picture.

This mod is purported to increase engine HP (like every other gimmick!) because the lower resistance allows the battery to charge better and reduce the load on the alternator. Hah! At least I know I can rely on my camera's lowlight claims...

Dunny Plumbing - Float Valve

Sometimes, a camera just captures a process.

1. Turn the flush buttons piece
2. Remove the buttons
3. Take off the top of the cistern

Now inside the cistern, the float valve is accessible, it just needs to be unbolted. Turn off the water first, then flush to empty the cistern (and put down some old towels because water will spill).


Spotlight with an LED torch. First take the nut off, then the plastic nut.


Out with the old, in with the new...

Tighten the nuts, and all done!

Canon vs Tamron the 70-200 f/2.8 challenge!

My mate Ed is selling his 70-200 f/2.8L, and graciously *cough* cheap sales pitch to try and sell it to me *cough* lent it to me to try out over the weekend. So here's a quick comparison between the Tamron and Canon.

Price
The Tamron will set you back about AU$1000-1100 new, best price, where the Canon will cost more like $1500 for a grey import, and increasingly upwards for Australian stock. So there is definitely a premium to be paid for the Canon, but is it worth it?

Looks

I like the look of the Tamron more, the all black on the black camera, just looks right, it looks mean, and it gets comments. The strange white striped L lens, it looks the part to people who KNOW that "L lenses are white", so it's a show-off tool amongst other 'togs.

Feel
The lens cap is tough to get off on the Canon when the lens hood is on. The Tamron is fairly easy to get off when the hood is on.

Tamron has a pull/push AF/MF focus ring, which is a bit clunky, where the Canon has full time manual focusing and USM which is just easier, quieter, and faster.

Other
The Tamron being a macro lens has a MFD of 0.93M (about 3 feet), where the Canon is 1.5M. That means the difference between a shot of a bug on a leaf, versus a shot of a leaf.

There is also a difference at the 200mm end, with the Tamron "zooming in" a little more, which is nice, giving you a bit more zoom, and the MFD makes it a bit more versatile.

Verdict?
If I had to choose from scratch, given that I already have a macro lens, I'd probably choose the Canon. Now that I have the Tamron, I think I'll wait and eventually go for the Canon IS model.

Flash vs Ambient

Yesterday I was lucky enough to help out Brent Pearson with his Off Camera Flash on Location workshop.

Where Brent leant towards a lightmeter, I ran the students through working out an exposure without one.

Here's a quick re-cap:

Use your Camera as a Lightmeter

I set the camera to AV (Aperture Priority) mode, and picked an appropriate working aperture. We were in full sunlight, so I knew I'd have to start small, F/8, ISO100.

Camera said 1/200th. It's a subtle point, but, the camera has just metered the light. We're about a stop off a Sunny 16 exposure.

An alternative is to set the camera to TV mode, and start with, say, 1/100th, the camera would then meter, and give an aperture - in this case, it would have been F/11.


Underexpose to Taste

Generally, I like contrasty photos, so I like to underexpose backgrounds by two stops where I can. Sometimes I'll go to 1 stop or less for a more 'natural', and less 'lit' kind of picture.

It's down to taste.

From F/8, ISO100, 1/200th, two stops gets us to F/16, ISO100, 1/200th. There are a lot of great resources around explaining this for anyone who is puzzling over it.

The brightness of the picture has dropped off a lot, but I can see what I'll get for any part of the picture not touched by flash. Importantly (for me) the saturation in some of the colours comes up.


Add Flash

I had the luxury of a flash that could belt out enough power here. That's one of the top reasons anyone would invest in a bigger flash unit like the AB1600.

Essentially now, the majority of the light is coming from the flash, and the sun is largely 'filling' the shadows.

But, because of the very directional light from the sun, there's some strange shadows where the key (flash) light is in a different direction to the sun.

Finally...


Tweak

Don't rest on your laurels, now the light is sorted, get a good shot!

(FWIW, this was the third shot I took after the light was set)

Upgrading - 7D vs 5DMkII vs 1DMkIV?

... or how I learned to stop worrying, and love da bomb!

The Problem

I have a Canon 40D that I've been very happy with, but some of it's limitations were starting to bug me enough to upgrade:
- Poor low light/high ISO performance (3200 is noisy)
- Not full frame (always feels like I'm wasting my L lenses)
- No video (no big deal, but it's nice to have)
- Less than ideal battery life (for a full day of shooting)
- LCD could be better (usually only a problem in sunlight)

The Solutions

With the modern camera line-up, there are stacks of different ways to jump. I looked at getting faster lenses (I love my Nikon 55mm f/1.2 MF) for better low-light performance - I examined my most used focal lengths, and worked out a cost of getting 1.4 or 1.8 lenses in those. That was about the price of a 7D, and that only solved one problem.

Simarly, a quick trip to DxOMark quickly told me that the 7D wasn't worth the upgrade cost over the 40D - the only problem it solved was the lack of video.

The kings of low-light performance in the Canon range are the 1D Mk IV, 5D Mk II and the 1Ds Mk III, but the 1Ds Mk III is the king of wallet damage as well, which ruled that out as a viable option, which left the 1D and the 5D.

5DMkII

The 5DMkII is the choice of wedding photographers for it's combination of a reasonable price, with full frame capabilities and great low light performance.

But, the 5D, like so many Canon cameras (!!?) suffers from pixel stuffing - how high can we bump this megapixel count? Nikon got sick of that game a while ago. Not many people need that kind of ridiculous pixel count, and it just means you have a lower frame rate (3-4 pics/second - yeah, the 40D doubles this), and the pictures take more time to unload, process, etc.

It also suffers from an older AF system (compared to the 7D & 1D), a slow flash sync speed (a worry for a strobist), and the battery life is less than on the 40D!

All annoying downsides of a substantial 'upgrade'.

1DMkIV

It's low light performance is bordering on insane. While the 5D may have a slight edge on quality (if you believe DxOMark. Or if you look at the right sample images, the 1D has about a 1 1/3 stop advantage over the 5d), the 1D goes a further (usable) stop of ISO, just incase you HAVE to get a picture.

As far as battery life goes, one charge gets you about 50% more than the 40D, and it gets a tick for it's great LCD (no, really, it's stunning).

Video is included, so the biggest downside...?

It's big; it's heavy? So am I. It's not full frame? But it's closer than the 40D is.

Ok, it's bloody expensive. But if there's one thing I've learnt from the Strobist... rather than upgrading every couple of years, getting the best could mean no upgrading for a lot longer. The cost is spread out over a longer period.

At least that's what I told myself...



(Incidently, the Nikon D7000D700 solved almost all these problems, except video, for a better price than the Canon options!)

Get Close!

Don't be afraid to get close with your lights. It makes controlling the light much easier.

I started this shot with a 50mm lens and a Ray Flash for fill, but at the 2+ metres away I had to be for a nice framing, the Ray Flash was pumping light everywhere, even to the back wall several metres away!

Switching to about 35mm, allowing me to get to about half the distance (and dropping the fill power down dramatically) cut the light from bouncing everywhere, and gave me a nice black background instead of showing the rest of the apartment.

PiXel Knight ETTL TR-332 final thoughts

Here's some final scattered thoughts on my (short) experience with the PiXeL Knight TR-332. I'm sending them back soon, without having given them a full test run because I just haven't had the time...

Range

Today I attended an Orbis workshop out at Canon in Sydney, so while there, I hooked up the TR-332 receiver/trigger combo and a 580EXII with Orbis. Took about 10 shots, doing a quick range test on the system... all shots were fine until we got past about 80m. Quite a usable range (see the pic on the right).

High Speed Sync

I have not been able to get a non-Canon flash to sync above 1/250th (my max sync speed). The triggers quite happily let me go up to 1/8000th with an SB-26, but it only illuminated a small strip of the shot (as expected), even at 1/320th I was missing part of the shot. The upside is they will still let you try :)

Interestingly, when I put the SB-26 into slave mode, beyond 1/250th, it didn't even show up in part of the shot. But on the TR-332, it partially lit the shot, depending on how far beyond 1/250th I went.

HSS with the 580EXII is fine. I had one shot where the camera switched back to 1/250th, but out of hundreds of other shots, no problem.

Reliability

The reliability issues I encountered seemed to disappear when I used the OC-E3 cords and also when I put the receivers into different groups (as suggested on another thread), but I didn't have a chance to test in different groups 'in the wild'.

User Interface
The UI is not great, with only two buttons on the trigger and the receivers, the buttons are quite overloaded, so you have to hold for 2 seconds to power on/off, and to get into the menus.

The other thing that annoys me is that I can't control the flash power from the in-camera menu, I have to set it on the trigger. But I CAN set it from the trigger, it's just not as user-friendly as the in-camera menu.

Other stuff
When in ETTL, compared to an ST-E2, they do seem to overexpose more often. Not always in my tests, but often, especially with darker subjects. FEC to -2 seemed to fix this up.

I hooked up the ST-E2 to the receiver, and was able to trigger the 580EXIIs via TR-322 -> ST-E2 -> 580EXIIs, but I lost the ability to control the ratios. That is to say, when I set the ST-E2 to 8:1 and put it on camera, I got an 8:1. When I put the ST-E2 on the receiver, and the trigger on my camera, then I got a 1:1, not an 8:1.

Overall
I liked them. Being able to do HSS and ETTL over radio is nice, but because I'd still be reaching for the ST-E2 and/or OC-E3 cord in a lot of cases, personally, I wouldn't buy them - because I already have an ST-E2 and an OC-E3 cord.

If I didn't have those, I'd definitely consider them.

PiXeL Knight ETTL TR-332 do macro

Knights
After having some troubles with reliability on my first real test, I decided to hook up the 580EXII flashes via OC-E3 (off camera cord) to the TR-332s...

It's well known that with the PocketWizard TTL range, 580EXIIs have issues due to interference (from the flashes themselves), and I was having enough trouble with the TR-332s to warrant trying something else...

No extremes this time, just f/8, 1/100th, ETTL, 2 flashes.

What can I say? They performed admirably. The shots looked just as they would have with an ST-E2 on the camera.


Shot notes
These were all simple A4 white paper 'macro studio' shots. With an A4 sheet underneath, one more on top, and one in front, to the right to bounce a bit more light back.

Flashes are on either side to get nice highlights down the sides.

Nothing fancy...

PiXeL Knight ETTL Triggers First impressions

Elvis aka elv0000 was kind enough to pass on a set of the new PiXeL Knight ETTL triggers for me to give them a test run, which I finally got around to over the Easter long weekend.

Build
These seem very professional and built fairly well. They come with a nice plastic cover over the screens so they arrive shiny and unscratched. A metal hot-shoe on the trigger, and a nice weight makes them seem tough.

Reliability
With a single flash hooked up, they have been perfect.

On a limited test run (11 shots) with 2x580EXIIs hooked up and synching at 1/8000th, I got about 80% reliability - in one case, only one of the flashes fired, and I had one case where the HSS didn't work - it dropped to 1/250th, and one case where at 1/8000th I got half the frame lit, half not.

I consider 1/8000th to be an extreme test case, and I'm still impressed by the fact the triggers could DO that!

Functionality

ETTL support works well, no need to adjust the flashes when changing apertures or shutter speed. Easy. When the flashes were connected to the triggers they showed 'TTL', once the camera was switched on, they flicked to 'ETTL' - they recognized the camera was connected.

High Speed Sync support works well (apart from the extreme case mentioned above).
The Z3 photo was taken at 1/400th, with no issues, just ETTL and press the trigger.

More tests to come to test further functionality, so far I've only done ETTL with HSS in every case :)

Wedding DIY

Got married recently. Decided to do a bit of our own photography, and just use a pro for the ceremony, and some shots afterwards.

That meant things like the make-up, bouquet, all those 'behind the scenes' sort of shots were up to me.

We got married in Hawaii, which meant, I had to use the gear I could carry on a plane. No worries, if anything, strobist has taught us to pack light (not that I usually do), and use what's available.


Enter, the DIY studio...

A fairly simple setup, with a double 580EXII through a brolley, using a reflector for fill, and a cool DIY glass+coffee cup bouquet holder.

Why a double 580EXII? Because I had them already set up on the stand that way, and it seems to give a slightly better light spread.

Why the umbrella slightly collapsed? Because of where I needed to put the camera. At that sort of distance, the light source is still big enough to be soft.

The real gem here was using the towels.

By getting the camera to bouquet to towel distances right, to match the aperture... the towels blur out nicely, so you don't pick up the rough detail on them, and they become a nice, draped background, reminiscent of a wedding dress, without having to try and work out how to hang the wedding dress above a TV!

Oh yeah, and that's a light stand under the tall towel...

AlienBees abduction!

I just had a trip to Hawaii to get married (yay!), and it gave me an opportunity, thanks to Hawaii Photo Rental, to try out some of the AlienBees range.

I knew I wanted to fight daylight, so I thought an AB1600 would be a good place to start. Added to that was a 47" Octabox, to get nice soft light, and a Vagabond II since I knew I was going to be out on the beaches.

What follows, are some comments from the experience.

First, the Octabox is dead easy to set up, and quick. Likewise to tear down and put it back in the bag. But, the carry bag could do with a carry handle.

Setup-wise, the Octabox's internal baffle was very hard to remove (despite having those snap-on button things), and as I was time pressured, I didn't remove it.

The second internal baffle meant I wasn't getting as much light as I needed... so the light needed to be fairly close, even at full power!

By close, I mean, front of the octabox about 1m away I could beat sunlight by a stop or two. If the light was further away (say 2-3m) I could about equal it.

Getting the light close made things hard, since I wanted to use the wide end of my 10-22, so juggling keeping the light just out of frame while it was being blown around in the wind... definitely required an assistant. Thanks to Amanda's mum for that.


Now, I haven't managed to get reliable flash sync when I use my radio remote camera triggers AND the Cactus V4s, so we needed a 'trigger man' to shoot most of the shots... that made things tricky for some of the action shots, but we got a couple of good ones anyway, thanks to Amanda's dad for that.

That brings me to my final comment for now... he got a bit trigger happy, and ended up popping off shots every second or so. The gear was _almost_ up to the task, 1 shot would be fine, the next a little under, and the next one would be fine again! At full power, using the Fast recycle on the Vagabond II, I was very impressed!

So this was our first 'fight' as a married couple, hopefully all our other fights will be about as serious as this one :P

Canon's High Speed Sync

Not long ago, Mr.McNally blogged about High Speed Portraiture. That post co-incidently followed a quick shoot I did using Canon's High Speed Sync (HSS) of the lovely couple below.

For this shot, I had to concern myself with:
a) Not blowing out the background on a bright morning.
b) Not seeing too much detail in the background.

To get a nice balance ended up at ISO 100, f/3.5 (for blurry background), and 1/800th (for no blown highlights)... Beyond normal flash sync speed.

Luckily, I've got a nice 3 metre (9 foot) home made OC-E3 (off camera cord) for my 580EXII, so I could get that off camera, in a nice cross-lighting position... by turning on the HSS feature (it's just a button on the back of the 580EXII that has a lightning bolt next to an 'H'), I bumped up to full power, bounced into a reflective brolley, moved in as close as it needed to be to still be out of shot, and pumping out enough light to get a nice exposure.

Why full power? As Joe mentioned, the downside of high speed sync is a big loss of flash power. And when you bounce into a brolley, you lose even more.

Gotta love long off camera cords a.k.a. strobe on a rope.

Also good for the occasional dramatic sunset

Canon and Rear Curtain Sync

A few nights ago, I was taking shots of a friend, using a slow shutter speed to try and capture some nice night lighting. But (of course!) we had a sword, and hoodies galore, so fast action martial arts was the call of the day. What to do?

Use flash to 'freeze' the action. No biggy. But what about the ambient exposure blur during the frame? Well, everyone knows, you just use 2nd (rear) curtain sync, so the movement happens during the early part of the exposure, and then the flash goes at the end, giving a nice sharp final image. Easy!

The problem is, Canon (in their wisdom?!) decided that the only way you can do 2nd curtain sync is if you have a flash on the camera, and NO other flashes.

I'll let that sink(sync?) in for a moment. WTF? Seriously.


As soon as you add a second flash, and have the on-camera flash acting as master, you just lost 2nd curtain sync capability. WTF?

As soon as you put an unrecognized flash, or a remote trigger on the camera, you lose 2nd curtain sync.

Obviously unacceptable to any strobists.

The solution? Use an optical trigger. Thanks goes to Rαfα on flickr.

Now I've tested this, and a few things I've worked out:

• It works with Cactus V4 triggers.


• If you go faster than 1/25th, the 40D (and I'm going to assume others) switch back to 1st curtain sync anyway.


• If you plug a PC sync cable into the side (with a flash on top) you get 1st curtain on the PC sync port, and 2nd curtain on the flash.


• It works with an OC-E3 cable. Get a long one and half your problems are solved.


• Nikon SB-26 slave mode also works a treat!

In this final picture, I used a 5 second exposure (to get nice burn in of the ambient tungsten lights), and had a 580EXII on OC-E3 (left) triggering via the Cactus the 580EXII at rear, and the Nikon SB-26 (right) triggering via its optical slave mode. All fired on the second curtain, at the end of the 5 seconds.

Problem solved.

Strobist - SYD-SA7.5 and the Ray Flash

Today saw me attending the 7th and a halfth (latest, whatever) installment of the Sydney Strobist meet, SYD-SA7.5.


Every chance I got - mostly while the other guys in my group were setting up lights (sorry guys) - I'd take out the Ray flash and snap off a few shots... giving the models something to do rather than just stand around while photographers talked softboxes and lighting ratios.

With the gorgeous models we had, I loved the ease of getting a nice looking shot, with an absolute minimum of thought/effort on the lighting, throwing the flash in either ETTL or manual mode, and sticking the Ray flash on.

Adding a voice activated wind machine (a.k.a. a group member waving a reflector around) to the mix, just added that extra something, and worked wonders with the Rayflash.

Of course, headshots against a wall get pretty boring pretty quickly, so I tried something different when I could...


It seems that this kind of on-axis fill is where the Ray flash seems to really excel - just get your directional key light set up, then dial the Ray flash up or down to fill the shadows to taste. Easy!

Wireless Wackiness

Today I decided I wanted to get both 580EXII off camera further than an OC-E3 cable would allow - like 10 metres away from my camera... and I don't have a 10 metre OC-E3 cord.

So I tried some wireless wackiness. I grabbed my old Cactus triggers/receivers leftover from my pre-OC-E3 days. But, one receiver is a V2 and the other is a V2s. The V2s doesn't work with the 580EXII, so that was good for one flash... what about the other?

Easy! Set the 580EXII on the V2 as a master and have it trigger the other one as a slave - should work, right? (Of course, ETTL goes out the window. No problem for a strobist)

Sort of.

It seems there's a signal propogation delay meaning that I couldn't sync both flashes above about 1/60th of a second. Not a big deal for what I had in mind. The point is, it worked!

Strobism gives you wings...

... but it won't help you shave!

Rayflash Ring flash adapter review...

So the other day I had to drive past the infmaous DD on the way to a studio to play around with some lighting. I'd heard the day before that DD had some cheap Rayflash ring flash adapters, so I just couldn't resist stopping in and getting one to play with.

I'd heard rumour that it only lost one stop of light compared to bare flash, but I wasn't sure what that actually meant, so I did some testing to see what kind of light I could get, and this is what I found...

There's plenty enough light belting out of the Rayflash for a head-shot @ 50mm on a crop sensor (ISO100, f/5)

... or even 70mm (ISO100, f/2.8)

For more idea on the power, I set a 580EXII to 1/128th power, camera on manual. For about the same crop as the mannequin shot (a little tighter) I could shoot at f/2.8, ISO100 and still be in the top section on the histogram (f/1.8 was probably a better exposure).

1/128th power, ISO800 @ about 2m at f/1.8 was blowing out foreground white paper, maybe slightly overexposed in the mid-ground (model), which gives you about another 7 stops to play with (without touching the ISO!). Much higher than my expectations.

The only thing(s) that bug me about it so far are that the actual ring is a little small - it'll fit over a 77mm sized lens, but, maybe not if its got a lenshood, and the actual ring of light (the thickness of the ring) itself is fairly small.

From what I've seen the 'pro' alternatives have both a larger and a thicker ring, so you get a bigger apparent light source, which (though I haven't done a comparison) probably gives you a softer light as well as the ringlight effect!

Click here for David Hobby's full review, with usage suggestions

Strobist - SYD-SA6

Sunday saw me attending the latest (6th) installment of the Sydney Strobist events, SYD-SA6.

For those that aren't in the know, many moons ago a guy called David Hobby aka Strobist started a blog called Strobist. This was a place where people could learn to use inexpensive flashes ("strobes") to acheive studio-like lighting results.

Little did David know, this blog would spiral ever and ever bigger, gathering dust along the way, pulling in people from all continents. Groups all over the world now organize events where budding "strobists" can meet, greet, practice their lighting and share their knowledge with others.

From my experience with these, you can't go there expecting to take a killer shot. Even if you do, you'll probably end up with at least 5 other people who have exactly the same killer shot (I've heard plenty of comments like "can you do that pose you were doing before for him" and "how were the other guys lighting you?").

As a photographer, what you CAN expect is to be able to chat with like-minded individuals... have a beer at the pub afterwards, learn something, get a chance to practice, and maybe get to play with extra gear you'd have to rent otherwise.


As a model, you can expect to spend a lot of time waiting for people to set up lights around you, but at the end of it, you can expect a lot of good shots of you... many almost the same, but on a proper shoot, you'll end up with tons of shots almost the same, just from one photographer instead of 30.

On both sides, you might just find that person who's perfect for an idea you've got in mind, and you can arrange another shoot afterwards... and who knows, you might just end up with that killer shot!

Enjoy your hobby

Recently, I was lucky enough to be given the opportunity to photograph a mate's wedding.

Lucky? Yeah, because he and his wife had hired a professional photographer to ensure that all the bases were covered. And with the Cold War style proliferation of digital cameras amongst wedding guests these days, I could pretty much focus on... well, whatever I wanted, and still got to enjoy the wedding as a guest!

I didn't have to worry about making sure I got a photo of the bride's family or even if my shots were in focus; one of my favourite photos from the wedding is the blurry little guy on the dancefloor.

If I was doing it as a job, I wouldn't have had that luxury. You have to make sure you get the key shots, and once you have all of them, you might have some time to do some experiments ala Ryan Brenizer, if you're lucky... (I'm not saying professional photographers can't enjoy their work, just that its not always fun)

Similarly, I went on a road-trip from Sydney to Brisbane over the Christmas/New Year's break, and of course the camera came along... but I made sure to take plenty of shots for me that (chances are) nobody else will like. Like an old Nissan Urvan on a beach at sunset.

And no, its not a great shot, the sunset is hugely overexposed so I can show the detail in the van, because the derelict van on the beach is what appealed to me.

A hobby should provide enjoyment, remember to enjoy your photography.

Cheers,
Scott

First post!

Ever been on a site where there's a rush to be the first poster, the first to leave a comment to a story or a blog article? The first to leave a note saying nothing other than "I'm an avid fan"?

Well here's my first post. I'm an avid fan of what this blog may become.

I intend this to be an educational tool for photography, because I've learnt plenty from resources online, and now I feel its my turn to pay it forward.

Cheers,
Scott