Panographic

Empire State From Rockefeller

Originally uploaded by mjm1138.

The Canon G9 giving it all it’s got, albeit with a bit of help from Aperture 2.1. It was raining in New York for a great deal of the time we were there, including when we were out on the observation deck of Rockefeller Center (or “Top of the Rock”, as the literature calls it). Anyway, it’s a great view from up there, and we spent a fair bit of time taking it in and snapping pictures. Just barely visible in this photo, off in the distance to the right is the statue of liberty, which of course looks tiny from here, but we’re a few miles away at least.

More pictures from this trip are on my Flickr page.

This is a good example of a photo that would be extremely hard to capture in a JPG format. I ended up doing quite a bit of dynamic range compression to bring in detail in the blown out highlights and the shadows, and if you’re not working with a raw format file that highlight and shadow detail data will have been discarded in the camera when it was making image processing decisions.

With RAW, you don’t get to use a lot of the “scene” modes on the camera, which can be a serious drawback for tricky shooting situations. Of course, if your camera supports RAW, chances are it included software which can take those files and process them as though they had been processed in-camera in a “scene” mode. One nice thing about the Canon G9 is that it has a couple custom modes, where I can save handy presets for settings that aren’t affected by the RAW format (e.g. flash settings), so I don’t have to manually check settings every time I power up the camera.

By the way, Aperture 2.1 is a great upgrade from 1.5, and if you’ve been a longtime Aperture user and have old photos that were processed using Apple RAW 1.1, take the time to go back and reprocess them with RAW 2.0; the difference is striking in some cases.

Olafur Eliason - 1m3 Light (1999)

Originally uploaded by mjm1138.

Sarah and I went to New York for a long weekend. Many highlights to the trip, and one of them was definitely the “Take Your Time” exhibit currently on display at MoMA and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center. Go if you’re able! This piece was one of the ones at MoMA, halogen lights describing a 1 cubic meter area in a fog-filled room.

The whole exhibit is must-see (oh, and while you’re at it MoMA has perhaps the most important collection of modern and contemporary Art in the world).

More pictures from NY soon. It rained the whole time, but it was a fun trip!

DSC_0104

Originally uploaded by mjm1138.

Another shot that does a somewhat better job of capturing the type of scenery in the Bassam area. I shot with both the Nikon D70s and the Canon G9 on this trip, so I’m looking forward to getting the Canon shots off the camera and doing some comparing. After several weeks of shooting with the G9, it was nice to handle the Nikon again and feel in control. It’s a much bulkier camera obviously, but a much quicker and more natural shooter for me.

DSC_0008

Originally uploaded by mjm1138.

Sarah and I spent a lovely Memorial Day weekend staying at the Bassam Forest Service cabin just down the road from Buena Vista. If you live in Colorado (and probably elsewhere, but I don’t know), Forest Service cabins are a great way to get into the woods for a weekend without all of the fuss and planning involved in tent camping. Bassam Cabin ended up being lovely, and smack dab in the middle of a network of nice 4×4 trails and some of the most lovely scenery I’ve seen in Colorado.

Unfortunately the aspens didn’t have their leaves yet, so I ended up getting a lot of shots of dead-looking trees. Also took some shots for HDR processing which I’m hoping to get to in the next couple days. In my flickr stream there’s also a shot of maybe the biggest aspen I’ve ever seen. Bassam Park (the area where the cabin is) is definitely on my list of places to visit in the fall to catch the aspens turning.

April Snow

Originally uploaded by mjm1138.

I think a lot of people would pick February as their least favorite month, at least anyone who has spent February in the upper midwest. Here in Colorado though, I think it’s April that really drives people crazy. This shot is from the 17th of April. Two days previous the temperature reached 78F. The snow in April comes fast and thick, and right when you’ve overcome your rational self and become convinced that spring is, at long last, here. Oh no it isn’t. Of course on the flip side, I had to take this picture first thing in the morning, as the snow was all gone by evening. Today, three days later, it was in the 70’s again and I was out golfing.

I reckon the fact that the ground was retaining heat from the previous days explains the weird lumpy nature of the snow here. Any snow that came in contact with the ground melted, so it was just the flakes that were suspended on the (let’s call it) grass in our yard stayed frozen. Nice almost foamy effect.

Shot with the Canon G9, using the built-in “snow” setting, with no post processing other than cropping and whatever resizing flickr did. I got the camera because I can go full-manual and shoot RAW, but there’s definitely something to be said for the idiot-proof modes when I’m walking to my truck in the morning and I just want to snag a couple shots without thinking about them too hard.

Happy Nora

Originally uploaded by mjm1138.

Our cats Nora and Lenina just turned 17 years old! They are two of the shrimpiest cats you’re likely to meet (Lennie is the big one by a wide margin and last time she sat still on a scale she was 8.5 pounds). They’re transitioning from kittenish straight to little-old-ladyish. Nora here has been on maintenance meds for chronic intestinal troubles for a couple years now, so we’re lucky to have had as much time with her as we have. Last spring when she shed her winter coat she was suddenly all salt-and-pepper with lots of white hairs appearing everywhere.

Here, she sits on the wool rug in our bedroom and enjoys some sunshine. Shot with my iPhone a couple months ago, while she was still in her winter coat.  I like how the white rug in the foreground contrasted with the black background echo’s Nora’s coloring.

Boulder Creek

Originally uploaded by mjm1138.

Got a new camera as a carry-around daily shooter, a Canon Powershot G9. Great specs for a (fairly) compact camera, with some important features for photo geeks, notably the ability to shoot raw. It feels great in the hand, very solid, and the manual features are easy to get at and reasonable to use. Yes, we’d all prefer knurled rings on the lens barrel for aperture and shutter speed setting, but let’s all repeat together: “Canon is not Leica”.

The only real quibble I have with this camera is the sensor. At 12 megapixels, it’s way too much resolution, especially for a small sensor type like this. I’d much rather have purchased this camera with an eight megapixel sensor and gotten even lower noise at higher ISO ratings. When you’re talking about the consumer space like this, the main thing that more megapixels buys you is more noise in the image, more disk space taken up on your computer, and longer transfer and processing times.

That said it’s a minor quibble, as it achieves very low noise even at reasonably high ISO, and the extreme ISO settings (800 and above) I’d go so far as to call usable in a pinch. The image above is a shot of Boulder Creek I took this morning before heading in to work. We got a nice little snowfall last night to remind us that spring is not here yet, and in fact March is the snowiest month of the year usually.

We went out for a day of shooting in September, driving the pickup south over Guanella Pass. The day was blustery and cloudy, which made for some nice shooting conditions. I attempted to shoot several pictures with the idea to combine them into HDR images, however I didn’t have a tripod on hand, so I set my camera for auto-bracketing, set for continuous shooting, and shot off three hand-held shots in quick succession. This produced photos which weren’t suitable for automated HDR creation methods, so I was left to line the photos up by hand and use the magic of layer masks to combine properly exposed areas from two photos. Here’s the result of the first attempt:

Clicking on the image will take you to my flickr account, where the picture can be viewed larger. This is from two exposures. The sky is from an underexposure and the foreground is from a metered exposure. The hills in the background are blended between the two exposures. It’s definitely got that faky HDR thing going on. There’s a bit of haloing around the border between the hills and the sky, due imperfections in the layer mask and layer alignment. It’s a kind of interesting, the border provides contrast while maintaining the atmospheric perspective, but it doesn’t feel genuine. For comparison, here’s one of the exposures by itself, processed through Aperture:

Again, you can click the image to go to my flickr account and see other sizes. A somewhat more natural photo, with the tradeoff that it does show the limitations of the camera’s dynamic range. Oh and the layer mask method: whatta pain in the butt! I’m sure it’s possible to become efficient with practice, and it feels like a very powerful method viz the control you have over what comes out of it. Maybe with a truly exceptional shot that can’t be processed any other way it’d be worth the effort.

IMG_0058 - 2007-08-18 at 20-35-33

Originally uploaded by mjm1138.

Got an iPhone recently. It has a little 1.9 megapixel still camera built-in; very cheap. That said if you tweak the output a little bit you can get a nice Loma-like quality; albeit with a lot of chromatic abberation and other noise. This photo was taken from the Cinderella Twin drive-in movie theater in Englewood, CO. The camera interface is nicer than most cell phones (of course), so I do find myself using the camera more than with phones I’ve had in the past.

As Sarah and I get more serious about shooting, we’ve been slowly investing in better gear. This week we got a studio monolight from AlienBees.

At left is an image from a shoot we did for our friend Chris’s current musical project. Clicking the image takes you to my flickr account, where there are more images from this shoot. We used photofloods with 250W bulbs and gel filters for the red light to the left, and the green wash in the background on the right. Primary light was provided by by the AlienBees B400 strobe to the right, with a reflector on the other side for fill and an old Vivitar potato masher with a slave sensor overhead for a hair light.

Here, I’m on full manual with the D70 handheld, keeping the shutter open for a little over a second and setting the aperture for proper exposure with the strobe. That’s how we end up woth the colored trails mixed with the frozen image more-or-less in color balance. It’s evolving into a style, which I like. A big danger when you start working with pro studio gear is that it’s the easiest thing in the world to create very boring, very generic “highschool senior” type portraits, and I’d rather not waste my time with a lot of that.

For a while I’ve been messing with using long exposures with flash on handheld photos for motion effects. I’ve been doing a lot with a Nikon SB-600 speedlight, and that’s a fantastic piece of equipment, but not really designed to light a studio scene. For doing larger-scale shoots we’ve used rented strobes, but the rental process is painful and the equipment frequently shows the wear-and-tear of use by many inexperienced hands.

So the AlienBees B400 is a bit of a revelation. At 400 “effective” watt-seconds, it’s the lowest-powered strobe they make (at 160 actual W/s, it may be one of the lowest-powered monolights you can buy, I’m not sure). A watt-second is a measure of power output, and like all good technical metrics, is completely meaningless as a method for comparing the light output of studio strobes, thus AlienBee’s claim of “effective” watt-seconds. The claim is that this light compares with 400W/s units from other manufacturers.

Whatever. It’s perfect for what we’re doing. One of the problems we had with renting high-end monolights was that, even at their lowest setting, they produced way too much light for the way we wanted to shoot. The B400 allows me to choose a power setting that allows me to control depth-of-field while not blowing out highlights. While I’m writing a mini-review, I’ll mention that the monolight casing is made out of Lexan, which I believe is the same stuff they make Nalgene bottles out of. This means that it should be extremely durable over time. It looks and acts like a high-quality piece of equipment. I definitely plan to continue building a full light kit with gear from AlienBees.

For these shots, we were using a 48″ silver umbrella and a 48″ silver disk reflector on the opposite side of the room. Still not the ultimate control you get with softboxes, but it’s getting much easier to produce studio output suitable for publication.

We’ve also been experimenting with shooting “tethered”. That is, I keep the D70 connected to a Powerbook via USB while I shoot. Nikon’s Camera Control Pro software can listen on the USB port and dump new images to a predefined folder as they come in. A separate utility watches this folder, and moves images from there into Aperture for display and organizing. This allows the photographer, art director and subject to see the shots at a good resolution as they’re being taken, making it easy to make adjustments while you’re still in the studio.

It’s a great way to shoot, and adds a lot of value to the interactive process of making a portrait. It’s a little frustrating with the D70, which is USB1.1 only and therefore takes several seconds to transmit a single image. Since it doesn’t buffer images to the flash memory card, this means that once the internal buffer memory in the camera gets filled (about four frames shooting RAW), you have to wait for an image to spool out before you can shoot another frame. If you have a deliberative shooting style in the studio, this is manageable. If you like to pop off hundreds of frames, this is obviously not a tenable approach (at least not without a high-speed connection and a pretty darn fast computer). For me though, it’s great. I think I’ll stick with it for studio work. Camera Control Pro also offers the capability to shoot frames via remote control from the computer both live and on schedule. This means it could be used for time-lapse photography, a possibility I’ll have to investigate if I can think of anything good to time-lapse photograph.