VPW Intermediate Digital Photography BLOG

Nikon D-300 $1699.75 update

2008-06-05T00:02:00.000-07:00

http://www.dunneandrundle.com/

$100,00 cheaper than the Nikon Canada websit

http://www.nikon.ca/en/Newfromnikon.aspx

Interesting technique or dumb mistake?

2008-05-16T12:20:00.000-07:00

I processed some HDR tests in batch mode and the attached picture was generated as a result of a mismatch of number of files in my folder.

I can see I could do more fine tuning of the mix by using layers in Photoshop. I might try some more images like this because I think it looks really cool. What do others think?

Jay Maisel and Gregory Heisler Talk at The Ironworks Studios!

2008-05-16T09:35:00.000-07:00

Hello everyone!

next week is a BIG one for VPW. We have not one but two Master Photographers from NYC in town. They both will be dong a public talk and presentation at the Ironworks Studios, on Monday, May 19th, 2008.

This will be an exciting and inspirational evening!

If you can, come and check it out.

Here is the link to more info and registration!

Hope to see you all there!

Heatwave

2008-04-15T19:26:00.001-07:00

Don't know what any other graduates are doing but I've tried to keep active especially since the weather's getting warmer! This Heatwave is a rap artist that my step-son is producing. I set up the flourescent light studio like Marc did in our model shoot, then post processed the hell out of it.

Comments and criticisms are encouraged!

Geno.

Unusual photography projects

2008-03-24T12:40:00.000-07:00

This is a fun site, traveling across the continent with a custom built camera, taking gigapixel resolution images:

http://www.gigapxl.org

And another site with 360 degree panoramas shot from a kite!

http://scotthaefner.com/kap/360panos/

Apple presents Aperture 2 at Harbour Centre

2008-03-24T10:28:00.000-07:00

Apple is presenting the new version of Aperture at Harbour Centre on the afternoon of April 10th. It's a free session, so come on down and check it out!

Session details here.

An inside look of the statue of Venus

2008-03-20T13:22:00.000-07:00

Konica and Minolta used a laser instrument to create a 3D of Venus to study its "mysterious allure":

http://museumofbeauty.biz/

Nikon Users

2008-03-10T07:16:00.000-07:00

NIKON D300 body only : $1767.75 (CDN)

http://www.dunneandrundle.com/

Feb 28, 2008 - Model Workshop

2008-03-10T01:21:00.000-07:00

Model Workshop Feb 28, 2008

2008-03-10T01:03:00.000-07:00

More to later.

Gastown Pictures

2008-03-09T19:16:00.000-07:00

I wont be able to make it to class this week so I posted my pictures from the fieldtrip on Flickr.
Here is the link if you want to take a look.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/23861561@N07/sets/72157604085664405/

How to kill some time with Photography this weekend..

2008-03-07T14:23:00.000-08:00

How to kill some time with PHOTOGRAPHY this weekend..

Hello everyone,

Well, it's supposed to be my afternoon off and what do I do....looking at photograhy on the web and letting you all know about my latest find!

I have known about this series for a while, but haven't checked it out lately. This guy, George Jardin, is touring the country and interviews some of the top photographers (being paid by Adobe). He's got a bunch of very interesting podcasts available for FREE download.

I may just kill my whole afternoon listening and watching...

In addition to the interviews, he's also got podcasts with tutarials for Lightroom, also free. Note that he has got an interview with Jay Maisel and Gregory Heisler, both of them are coming to Vancouver in May for Master Workshops.

Here's the link to the site!

Enjoy the show(s)

Photographer's Sites to Check Out!

2008-03-06T22:23:00.000-08:00

Hello everyone,

here are some more weblinks to find some mostly free Photoshop tutorial documents:

Jean Miele
John Paul Caponigro

Oh, and here's Pooya's website link people were asking for:

Pooya's website

Where is the NOISE?

2008-03-04T12:07:00.000-08:00

Another shot from the long exposure workshop last weekend (more to be found below).

This image was taken with a total of 20 stops ND Filter (two 10 stop filters stacked). The exposure was 45 minutes. Camera was the Canon 1Ds Mark III, noise reduction in camera was turned off.

Image was taken into Camera RAW and then Photoshop for cropping, BW conversion, and tonal corrections (increased contrast). No noise reduction was used, as it was simply not necessary.

The moral of the story? Got money, have no noise...

No seriously, it is impressive to see what digital technologies have accomplished.

Most digital SLR's available today will produce great quality for exposures up to 5 minutes. Above that, noise starts to become a factor.

Realizing that this is a niche technique, this fact will only be interesting to a selective group of photographers. As film doesn't suffer from noise, this would be the alternative to anyone not wanting to commit the $8000 or so for the 1Ds but still wanting to use much longer exposure times.

INFRARED Digital taken for a spin!

2008-03-04T11:12:00.000-08:00

Hello everyone,

I hope you all had a great weekend!
I taught my long-exposure BW workshop, and had a great time playing with an Infrared converted Canon 20D that one of the students from the US brought with her. One of the great joys of teaching is letting yourself be inspired by your students, and this group featured many very accomplished photographers. We shot for 2 full days and could not have picked a better weekend as the weather miraculously cooperated and gave us 2 days of sunshine and dramatic cloud formations.

The images I am posting for now are all taken with the infrared converted 20D Canon. I will talk more about this in-class this week, but couldn't wait to share some right away. The following images have received just minor processing, mostly contrast and selective tonal adjustments. They were taken with exposures of up to 12 minutes, which smoothes out the water and clouds as they are moving across the sky. Shooting locations were Point Roberts in the US, White Rock, and Stanley Park.

The conversion of the camera is permanent meaning you have to commit to the infrared look. The conversion of this particular model was done by Lifepixel and costs around $450. Check out their website for more info and to see lots of example images.

And now, onto the photographs:

Photographer's Sites to Check Out!

2008-02-27T19:53:00.000-08:00

OK, I admit that I am very partial to BW photography, so here are some Photographers to check out:

Ralph Gibson

Michael Kenna

Video about Michael Kenna's work (really worth seeing)

Josef Hoflehner

Helmut Newton

Check out these free and rare VIDEO Interviews with Master Photographers

The best PhotoBook store (click on the galleries section!)

PDN Legends Online, a great collection of the most influential photographers!

Index of the Masters Of Photography!

Great NYC Fashion at it's Best!

The service that I use for my website (has some great photographer's links as well)

Easy Watermark for your Images

2008-02-27T19:41:00.002-08:00

Check out this useful tool to add a Watermark to your images:

Easy Batch Photo

Or, you can built an action in Photoshop....

IS for non-IS Lenses

2008-02-15T11:07:00.000-08:00

Here's a cheap and easy way to eliminate camera shake. YMMV.

http://www.switched.com/2008/01/30/the-one-dollar-image-stabilizer-for-any-camera/

Want fun in low light? Try FIRE!

2008-02-13T03:56:00.000-08:00

At the end of class last week, I was encouraged to post some examples of my fire-performance photography. Now that Marc has the posting permissions fixed-up... I guess I'll do that.

I really like low-light photographs, but when it also includes a moving subject, good luck getting a nice sharp photo... the slow shutter speed needed to get your exposure tends to blur almost any subject.

But when those subjects just happen to be providing their very own light-source, as fire performers do, that can tip things in your favour. Woo hoo!

I happen to have the good fortune to be married to a woman, whose claim to fame back when I met her in 1999, was that she was Vancouver's *only* Firebreathing Bellydancer. Things have changed a lot in the years since, and fire performing has really caught-on in Vancouver. We've seen a number of other people since who mix various forms of fire performance with bellydance, but as yet I haven't observed any other people doing that particular combination.

This photo is of my wife blowing a good-sized fireball to help ignite an effigy of a man that was being burnt at a local event last year that was thrown by some Vancouver members of the Burning Man community.

It was shot on a borrowed Canon EOS-30D, using my 50mm f/1.8, shooting wide open. It's quite a lot noisier than it needed to be, since I was shooting at 1600 ISO. The fact is that I needed to go to that high ISO to get the fast shutter speed for many of my other shots that night, but this particular fireball produced so much light that ultimately I could've got the same shot using a slightly slower shutter speed at ISO 400 or so, and have introduced far less noise. -sigh- Always something to do better next time.

This shot was also from a Burning Man event... this one put on by the community down in Seattle last November. A large group got on stage and did some very intricate fire performances. Many of my shots were good, but this is easily a favorite due to the wonderful intimacy displayed by the performers.

This was shot handheld on my Canon Rebel XTi, using a 50mm f/1.2L lens that I rented for the weekend from Beau Photo. I believe that I was also shooting wide open here, and necessarily using 1600 ISO to keep my shutter speeds nice and speedy. The Rebel XTi's performance at 1600 isn't particularly great either, but I think it held up okay here.

Finally, I'm including this shot to illustrate that you don't always need a big bad DSLR to get a compelling fire shot. This one is a shot of my wife just doing a bit of spinning practice with a friend down at Trout Lake. It was shot with a simple little Pentax point-n-shoot, just in it's automatic night mode. Not having a fast lens, or high-ISO capabilities, there was no potential to freeze the motion here, but I think that the blurring of the path of the staff gives this shot some good energy. (I'll admit that this wasn't a conscious shooting choice. The photo was simply taken long before I invested in a DSLR.)

As you can guess, there's rather a lot of haphazardness with shooting fire performances, mostly because the performers are typically playing to the audience rather than for the camera, and you really need to just adapt to the shooting conditions as best you can. It's great because you really never know what you might get, and it can be far more challenging than your average daytime shooting.

If you want to try this out, my recommendation is to grab the fastest lens you can... typically it'll be a prime. If you shoot Canon, then the 50mm f/1.8 is a great option because it's really quite sharp and it's extremely cheap. I pretty much exclusively use that lens or my Sigma 30mm f/1.4 for my fire photos at the moment.

Also you'll probably want to very specifically control the autofocussing mechanism of your camera, as best as you can. DSLR's have a heck of a hard time pulling sharp focus in low light. In the case of my camera, its center-positioned autofocus point performs best in low light, so I force focussing to be done at that point and then do a lot of focus-and-recomposing to get my shot. I've even gone as far as investing in the Canon Speedlite Transmitter ST-E2, not to use for its ability to remote-triggering a flash - but to park in my hotshoe and allow its infrared autofocus-assist mechanism help me pull focus for shots like these using available light.

So, I hope that was somewhat interesting.

Feel free to poke further around my Flickr galleries (http://www.flickr.com/photos/yonderboy/), where you'll undoubtedly see many more fire shots, as well as lots of bellydance shots... all buried under literally thousands of shots from my annual trips to Burning Man. ;-) However, I should warn that not all photos there are 100% work-safe... so surf at your own risk.

Ciao,
Frank Roberts

How to Protect Your Images?

2008-02-12T20:37:00.000-08:00

Wondering what you guys are using to protect your images on the web. I know many pro photographers use flash to display their galleries, which is nice because the images can't be downloaded easily. However, for those of us on Flickr or other photo sharing sites, what should we do that doesn't cost lots of registration fees (e.g. Digimarc)?

Watermarks? Low-res image display only? A copyright text on an edge of the image?

Any advice?

Joe McNally BLOG

2008-02-12T11:33:00.000-08:00

Hello everyone!

If you're looking for some cool lighting advice and ideas, here's a link you can't ignore: Joe McNally Lighting Blog Joe came here last November and gave a workshop on location lighting. He is one of the great Masters, friends with Strobist author and many other master Photographers. He is planning to come back here this year for another workshop, but due to his busy schedule we do not have a date just yet. If you guys are interested, I can show you some of the images that were taken during the workshop last November in class. He is not just a great photographer but also a truly gifted teacher. VPW has ordered copies of his book, which should be one of the most interesting reads on the subject.

By the way, Joe just emailed me this morning that one of the pictures he took during our workshop here is on the top of his blog. You have to refresh the page a few times to load images into the header, but sure enough the image of Syx Langemann comes up! Syx has been teaching with VPW for over 2 years, and was helping out on Joe's workshop. The image was taken around the corner from our Gastown studio, in an alley. Equipment was a Profoto Pro 7B battery strobe with a small softbox. Light was dialed up to key-shift by about 1.5 stops (the flash overpowered the sunlight by 1.5 stops). Syx was posing with his skateboard, dressed in a white leather motorcycle suite...

HDR Article worth checking out!

2008-02-06T22:32:00.000-08:00

I just found this article describing a full HDR workflow. It is very detailed and worth reading if you're interested in learning more about this process. You can find the article here: HDR article

Post Images, Questions...

2008-02-05T22:54:00.000-08:00

Looking to see your images and questions....I am sure you guys must have some interesting work to share. Post away!

Nikon D300 Wireless Flash Fun!

2008-02-05T17:28:00.000-08:00

Well, I have to admit I have just converted to the 'dark side'. No, not really. But I did buy myself a Nikon after close to 20 years of shooting Canon (my first Canon was given to me by my father when I was only 12 years old). I taught a workshop on on-camera flash last weekend, a perfect opportunity to test my new D300 and its wireless TTL system.

For this image, I used 3 SB800's in wireless mode. The first was positioned to the (camera) right of our model Aleksandra, diffused through a small Soft-box. The second was placed inside the piano, firing towards Aleksandra with the aim to act as a rim light. Finally, the third flash was lying on the keys of the piano, pointed up and zoomed to illuminate only Pooya's (our male model) face. This flash was dialed down by 1 stop, and an orange warming filter was used. The flash inside the piano was set to minus 2 stops, the Soft-box illuminating Aleksandra was firing at normal power. ISO was set high on the camera (ISO 800) and I used a slow shutter speed to catch the light of the candle. There was hardly any other light in the room, so pretty much all you see is flash (with the exception of the candle). This was the final setup during our workshop and aimed to demonstrate how quickly and efficiently you can create dramatic lighting effects using battery flashes.

By the way, Canon also offers wireless flash operation, and this very scene could have also been setup with inexpensive Vivitar flashes using optical slave triggers. I just really wanted to test my new toy, and was pleased with the results I got with minimal effort and time spent on setting it all up...

"Performance" Gallery Show!

2008-02-05T17:26:00.001-08:00

Don't miss thiis opportunity to see Photography in Vancouver!

This Friday at 8pm at the Exposure Gallery located on 754 East Broadway.

Exposure Gallery is one of the only galleries in town solely dedicated to photography. The shows are famous for great turnouts and energy- you really get a feel for the community the minute you step through the door! This gallery supports emerging photographers, so if you'd like to see your work on the wall come and see what they have to offer. Exposure Gallery is run by a non-profit society and works exclusively on a volunteer basis. I am on the board of Directors, and have been in 20+ shows. Don't miss this great opportunity. See you there!

For more information about the gallery, please visit their website: www.exposure-gallery.com

Hello Everyone!

2008-02-05T14:22:00.000-08:00

Welcome to this new blog.

It is our hope that you will use this blog to post images, exchange feedback, ask questions and generally connect with each other outside of class time. In contrast to many other similar services out there, this blog is for the exclusive use of you and your fellow class mates only (think of them as a great resource). Ask questions and post comments as you all venture through this course together. The potential is there for this blog to be a great addition to your learning experience. I welcome any and all of your posts.