After a short couple of weeks, I can say that I’m starting to like what the urban disguise offers. Give me a month though, and you’ll get a better overview. I have some events coming up that’ll really put it through the paces.
This short in, I just want to say: it does very well at storing everything you need, like a “go bag.” Right now, I can grab it & go, assured that I have the minimum of what I need to get things done.
So after a few days, my first impressions of the Think Tank Urban Disguise 40
Part of that is the pack-rat in me. There are a ton of pockets – you can’t open a flap without getting an extra zipper. It’s extremely well designed for daily walkabout use, and you can pack a crap-load of stuff in it. For landscape an wildlife photography, I’ve packed it with my Nikon d200, the old-style (meaning huge & bulky) Nikon 80-200mm lens
But that’s not all – it also carries my blackrapid strap, filters, memory cards, extra batteries, pens, paper, space for a few magazines…
I’ll update again in a couple of months, but it looks like an excellent carry-around bag. The type that works well for urban photography, travel, and maybe even car camping.
It really is my bag, baby! Or rather, that’s my excuse for not lugging all of my photo equipment around with me. The problem is, I’m starting to get tired of that excuse. More importantly, I’m starting to feel the pain of not having my equipment with me when I need it. I’ve narrowed my search down to two choices:
I’m leaning towards the urban disguise right now. Any thoughts?
Playing in the water
Unless you have lived up here for a while, this may be hard to understand: we’re finally getting temperatures in the 60′s! Now, to most of the world, that’s nothing that impressive. For us, however, this is something: we’ve just wrapped up an eight-month winter (seriously, it starts in mid/late September and ends in late April/early May). Before that long, cold winter, we had one of the worst summers on record.
Normally, we get a sunny May and June (occasionaly cloudiness & maybe some rain), partially sunny July, and a partially rainy August. Then it gets nice again in September, but it’s cold – around mid September things will occasionaly start to freeze, and by October it’s pretty regular.
Last summer, however: no such luck. We had some sun in early May – when it’s still cold. From that point on, it was mostly overcast through July, and then rain and cloudy conditions from there to September. We didn’t have a summer.
Now we’re finally getting one. I just hope it stays.
Click on the image for a larger view. This was a shot I took today at Goose Lake. It’s May 3rd and already warm enough that people are getting in the lake. Just last Friday there was still ice on that lake, even now it’s cold. But refreshing
photo details: -1/3 EV, ISO 50, Sunny WB, manual mode on the sd500
A mid-winter scene. Note the yellows.
Stepping back to last week’s white balance post, Let me show you something that was wrong. During the winter, most of my small-camera photography is indoor. As such, ISO is always set high/fast, and white balance is usually left on Tungsten (the light bulb icon).
So I walk out of a building (at 8:30 in the morning, no less), and this is what I see. It’s cold, maybe -5 F, and I don’t want to mess around too much. ISO was already at 400, as it usually is in the winter. Flash was off, EV was at 0. This is the exact exposure as it appeared that morning.
However, note the yellows. I could fix that (easily) in post-production, or I could claim that it’s part of my artistic vision. It’s neither, however. No, this was the effect of taking a pic when White Balance was set to daylight. The big light there? It’s not at daylight colors. Thus everything went yellow.
Still, not really a problem. I have a feeling this would work extremely well in black & white…
Sunset shot on Maui, shutter speed at 1/100,000 (click for larger pic)
CHDK. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s a pretty neat thing. Go ahead, read about it on the link above. I’ll wait.
Back? OK, great. so the summary: the CHDK project allows programmers with more time than I have to hack in to the camera’s firmware and setup your own environment. for example, you can override the shutter speed, like I did in the photo to the right. That’s a late-afternoon shot, directly at the sun from a beach in Maui.
The main reason I use CHD is so that I can get RAW images out of the sd500. The JPG versions are excellent, but RAW give me some flexibility.
For example, in this pic: the photo directly out of the camera is definately on the dark side. A little bit of the details have been lost in shadows. To resurrect? Well, with RAW, I can nudge up the exposure, lighten the midtones, and bring back down the shadows. The result: more detail, still keeping the dark overall feeling.
This pic makes me think of old pinhole shots, the kind that required an incredible amount of light to make a photo.
Continuing this thread, what about when you hand the camera to another? My daughter saw me playing with my camera at a stoplight & asked for it. I know full well that she’ll drop it, push buttons, but will also try to take a photo or three.
So, before handing off the photo, I set ISO to 200 since she’s a shaky shooter. Whaddaya want at four years? White balance to daylight, EV stuck at -1/3. Gets us the shot below.
This one did take some post-processing. If you notice, there’s a wide, wide range of exposures here. Had to play a bit before I could resurrect it.
At a stop light on the way to day care, actually.
You’ve seen the beach, now the other extreme: winter in Alaska. This photo was taken after work, in early January. It’s pretty unremarkable – a failure, by my standards. No detail in the moon, the sky overly noisy… But the colors are rich, and the warmth of the lights reflects (lightly) off the snow.
To pull this one off: ISO set to 400, white balance to daylight, EV still -1/3. The camera set shutter speed at 1/20. If I hadn’t been shivering, I might have worked that to my preference.
January Afternoon Moon - 4:45pm on 1/9/2009.
Building on the last five posts or so, the next few days will be examples of photographs taken by following my technique (more-or-less). I’ll describe the situation, the settings, and then display a photo for the day.
Today, I start with a picture from last November. We were on vacation in Wailea, Maui. If you know about the area, you know how nice it is. The weather was unnaturally windy, though – rough for that area. It even rained one day! And by wind, I mean “light breeze.”
So here we are, in a beautiful area, but there are clouds. Spotty clouds, mostly sunny. Going down to the beach, I have the sd500 in the waterproof case. ISO is pre-set to 50, white balance to daylight, EV to -1/3. At the beach (same area as the image posted on April 5th), I noticed a rocky area to the south, and some rocks stacked up by (assumedly) the locals.
Stack of rocks, setup by locals (I'm assuming).
EV Compensation in action
Exposure Value (EV for short) is a way of adjusting your exposure. Exposure, which is to say how bright the photo is. By default, EV compensation is set to zero: don’t make it brighter, don’t make it darker. Just take it at what the sensor thinks is the correct exposure.
Notice that I’m set at -1/3. Each full number can be considered a “stop”, and (gross oversimplification, I know) each photo will have roughly 5 stops. So, by shifting it to -1/3 (that’s 1/3 of a stop darker than normal), I’m slightly skewing the end results to be darker. Why?
The main reason it to retain detail. Sometimes, when there are extremely bright highlights, will bump it down to -2/3 or -1. A full stop darker will help keep those highlights from being blown out.
Digital photography basically works like this: if something gets too bright, it stops registering info. Or rather, the sensor keeps reading light, but it won’t go past 255 (for red, green, and blue channels) – too much light and it stops there. There I go, getting lost in the technology again. Ignore it, just accept: if too much light hits the sensor, no detail gets recorded.
Stepping down the EV will cut down the amount of light hitting the sensor. Fewer pixels hit the maximum, and more detail gets saved. The tradeoff? More noise – darker photos have less time to write valid data to the shadows, so shadows get noisier.
So, I take slightly darker photos, and massage them in Photoshop after the fact to get back to where I want.