Archive: ‘Gear’



Flash Bus Tour 2011 and Team “That Guy”

Monday, March 14th, 2011


Warning: This post is geared towards fellow photographer lighting nerds.

Oh photography conferences. The speakers always show off their skills with their fancy $2,000 lenses or a $5,000-8,000 camera that makes you have gear lust. The first conference I went to had all these photographers use 1Ds Mark IIIs and 70-200mm f/2.8Ls for their portrait photography to get that bokeh. I went out and bought the Nikon version, but then after using one for a while, I thought to myself, “this thing is too darn heavy to carry everyday with me, and still really heavy to bring on shoots.” So most of the time it just sits at home, lonely and unused.

My friend Steve and I have a term for buying too much stuff: Team That Guy. “That guy” as in the dude that has way too much gear and doesn’t even use half of it. That guy who has tons of pro level gear with amateur results to show for it. That guy who constantly buys stuff to compensate for lack of skill. That guy who brings more gear to a shoot than he knows what to do with, and still comes back with really bad photos. That guy who does endless pixel peeping tests on his gear to make sure everything is perfect and only has photos of cats or brick walls to show for it. Yeah, we’ve all been there. The mindset of “if I had this piece of gear, I can totally do what David Hobby or Joe McNally does!” When we finally buy that piece of kit, we end up forgetting about everything else in our camera bag.

This is Team “That Guy” (Team TG for short), and it happens quite often.

This year’s Flash Bus Tour brings out Team TG in a different area – lighting. The famed Strobist (aka David Hobby) and Joe McNally are both huge users of small flash photography. They use these flashes to make the subject pop and manipulate light in a very interesting way. The downside for someone like me (that only owns one small hotshoe flash) is that these guys have and use a lot of them. It makes my camera bag jealous and want to buy more to match them.

The advantage to small hotshoe flashes is that they’re small and portable, but the downside is they don’t produce as much power as studio strobes. To fix that, you simply move into shade or darker environments where your flashes can overpower the ambient light. I have a studio strobe but that’s normally too big/heavy/cumbersome to bring on shoots alone. If I do decide to use it, I’d need an assistant or two to help me setup, tear down, and move from location to location otherwise it’s really slow. But now learning that these guys can take up to 30 minutes to take just a few photos at one location, I think I’m going to start trying that out. A few stellar quality photos is better than a hundred ok ones right?

Then we have modifiers. The shear amount of lightstands, boom arms, and light modifiers these guys have probably cost more than the flashes themselves; but they are very necessary in defining the shape and quality of your light. They went through each of the tools in their tool bag and did live demos on how they solve problems with making their photos. This was very enlightening – but also very gear lust inducing.

It’s very hard to avoid being “that guy” after watching their demo of how they work.

I have to hand it to them though, seeing their process and problem solving was very informational, and will definitely help me in creating better pictures. If the Flash Bus is coming to your city and it’s not sold out yet, I’d highly encourage you to go. David Hobby and Joe McNally are probably the photography industry’s best resource in terms of hot shoe lighting, and they are great instructors to boot. They were both funny, charismatic, and very generous with their knowledge.

Joe McNally and David Hobby

If you guys ever read my little blog, David and Joe: THANK YOU, and you guys are welcome back to Portland anytime. :)

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Back in Time with Hasselblad

Monday, March 7th, 2011

Back in December my good friend Steve and I were admiring the beauty that is Hasselblad. A beautiful all mechanical film camera that shoots bigger negatives than 35mm. At almost four times the surface area and Carl Zeiss optics, it’s a guaranteed knock out in terms of image quality. Looking through the viewfinder, everything has a 3D look to it. Just by holding it in your hands, you know it’s something special, and it’s a classic camera that will stand the test of time.

I’ve only had the thing for 2 or so months, but it has already replaced my beloved Nikon D700 in my everyday camera bag. Even though the image quality of scanned film is not even close to the D700, it is still my preferred camera, flaws and all. I am ridiculously slow and meticulous, adjusting little settings and trying to get the focus nailed down, but it is so much fun. The new digital SLR bodies technology kind of takes the fun out of traditional photography. Your focus and exposure is wrapped up in half-press and full press, you can shoot bursts of 3-8 frames per second so you can shoot multiple compositions of the same picture very fast. You’ll get the job done in a matter of seconds, but what’s the fun in that?

The viewfinder in the Hasselblad is a waist level finder. You have to look down to see what you’re shooting. The really fun part is, left and right are backwards! It’s an uncorrected mirrored image you see because it doesn’t have a prism to correct it. Trying to move the frame to the left means you have to move the camera to the right, a lot of fun! Larger 4×5 and 8×10 view cameras are even more fun, the image is upside down! I don’t know why, but I like how it really slows you down because you have to think hard on composition. I also like that film is expensive to shoot – the cost of film, development, and 4×4 prints costs about $12, or $1 per shot. Can you imagine handing someone $1 every time you take a shot? It gets expensive fast, so each frame takes super long to shoot!

The images it produces are wonderful though, something that you can’t reproduce with a 35mm format camera. The Carl Zeiss optics combined with the large film surface area gives it a very unique look. The bokeh has a certain signature to it, and the overall grain structure and color of film gives it a lot of character. I’m still experimenting with different types of film, and I will likely shoot Kodak T-Max, Tri-X, and Portra exclusively. I have a pack of Velvia but the exposure is so hard to get right, and developing is expensive! Apparently not many labs do E-6 anymore.

Here are a few pictures that I shot and scanned recently:


Penny looking cute!


Good friends Barry and Meredith


The famed Portland sign in downtown.


The top of Multnomah Falls, still trying to get a hang of black and white!

Do you see the difference in image quality between film and digital? The one thing I’ve noticed is the transition of colors is a lot more natural with film. When digital sensors get blown out with white, it usually has a really ugly transition to pure white where one of the red, green, blue channels aren’t even. It may not matter in black and white as much, but it is pretty noticeable in color.

If you would like to have your portraits taken with medium format film before Kodak stops producing them in the next 2 years or so, let me know :)

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Starting out with Portraits

Friday, January 28th, 2011

A lot of my clients and friends have asked me how to take better portraits. This subject is so incredibly broad that it’s impossible to cover everything. Photography is not only an art, it’s also a science, so gear does matter. Think of lenses as your brush as a painter – different lenses are like different strokes and completely free you if you choose the right ones.

For more traditional portraits, you will want a lens with a large aperture to isolate the subject. I know many pros will argue that you can also use light to isolate the subject as well – I do this a lot, but that is more advanced and a topic for a later date.

In technical terms, the bigger the aperture, the smaller the “f” number. For example, you will often see kit lens zoom ranges from f/3.5-5.6. This means at the wide end, the largest aperture possible is 3.5, and on the long end it is 5.6. You must understand that each stop is multiplied by 1.4, and the amount of light doubles or halves at each “stop” of light. For example, f/1.4 lets in double the amount of light than a lens at f/2.0. The stop increments are: 1, 1.4, 2, 2.8, 4, 5.6, 8, 11, 16, etc. This means, if you buy a lens at f/1.4, your shutter speed is capable of being ~8 times faster! (2^3)

A large aperture (which means the lens can let in more light in a given time) will blur out the background, isolating the subject and making them “pop”. This forces your eye to the subject, and viola! You have a portrait!

The fact that it lets in more light also means you can increase your shutter speed for fast moving objects. Parents, take note: you will have a better chance at taking pictures of your moving kids in darker places (indoors).

Generally speaking, the larger the aperture, the more expensive the lens will be – this is especially true for zoom lenses. To achieve this effect at a much more cost effective rate, there are “prime” lenses – single focal length lenses that you can zoom with your feet. These lenses are generally cheaper and easier to engineer, so the optical quality is much better per dollar spent.

If you’re just starting out and not sure which lenses to try out first, here are some gateway drugs to better photography:

Nikon:
Nikon 50mm f/1.8D AF Nikkor Lens for Nikon Digital SLR Cameras ~$130
Nikon 35mm f/1.8G AF-S DX Lens for Nikon Digital SLR Cameras ~$200

Canon:
Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II Camera Lens ~$120

If you want to splurge a little and get a really really awesome lens in the same range, I have this one:
Canon:
Sigma 50mm f/1.4 EX DG HSM Lens for Canon Digital SLR Cameras ~$499
Nikon:
Sigma 50mm f/1.4 EX DG HSM Lens for Nikon Digital SLR Cameras ~$499

The above picture was taken with this lens. I would recommend splurging for the Sigma version of the lens if you can afford it. It has excellent background rendering qualities, sharp at 1.4, and excellent resistance to flare. It even comes with a lens hood and pouch, which is a plus! Be sure to fully test the lens before committing to keeping it, sometimes they have focus issues in which you should exchange it for a different one until you are satisfied. Luckily for me, mine was perfect on the first try.

If you are just starting out and don’t want to invest that much money in a lens because you’re not sure about photography yet, the cheaper lenses listed above are also excellent choices. Please note that certain Nikon bodies without focusing motors will not play well with the 50mm 1.8 AFD, get the excellent 35mm 1.8 DX AFS instead.

If you have any questions or comments please leave a comment :)

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