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Hitting the limit of the LX3

Sunday, May 9th, 2010

It’s official: I’ve hit the limit of the LX3′s capabilities. The lack of zoom wasn’t what did it in, interestingly – it was the cost of accessories.

To explain: since I spend so much of the year in cold places, I tend to escape to warm places. These warm places tend to be areas where you can swim, and spend time on the beach. And in those places, you must have a waterproof case.

The last two trips that I have taken were effectively without the waterproof housing. You may recall that my old camera died on the first one, and I spent the second trip occasionally borrowing one. I will not go through that again, so it’s time to look for a replacement.

That replacement is now here: the Canon G11. Not sure if I like it that much, but we’ll see if it grows on me.

G11, Sample image (macro)

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Tags: canon, g11, photo equipment

Urban Disguise – first impression after heavy use

Sunday, August 9th, 2009

Just returned from a short vacation. It was a personal thing, but also a chance to try out the Urban Disguise as a travel case. I’ll write up more once I get a chance to recover, but for right now take this as a general overview:

Major Pros:

Small, easy to pack, lightweight, carries a fair amount, tons of pockets.

Cons:

Doesn’t carry as much as I’d like, tight fit for a lot of equipment, bulging when overloaded can be a prob.

Overall:

I’m afraid I’m still looking for that miracle bag that does everything. This one won’t be sold out – I’ll keep it in my arsenal, but probably as a carry-on for travel & a daily around-down bag for short shoots. For longer-term shoots? Not quite good enough…

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Tags: photo equipment

Had my hands on a Speed Graphic

Monday, July 27th, 2009

well, for a few minutes at least. The one I had my hands on was one of the older (70′s? 60′s?) models, the type that had originally been used by the press. It was great: bellows (with holes, unfortunately), all manual switches & dials, 4×5 film size, even a plate on the back for viewing – and true to large-format cameras, you view it upside down.

So, why mention in here? Just because it’s cool. I mean, how often to you get your hands on a large-format camera with bellows?

Urban disguise, first impressions

Wednesday, July 8th, 2009

So after a few days, my first impressions of the Think Tank Urban Disguise 40. I love it.

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 (note on this: Nikon Rumors claims it has been discontinued – the price has fallen far!), a Nikon 105mm lens, my lovely Nikon 50mm f/1.4 (not the ASM, and I highly recommend you grab it!), along with my Nikon 18-200mm and my Sigma 10-20mm.

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.

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Tags: bags, photo equipment, product reviews, products

Searching for a new bag

Friday, June 19th, 2009

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?

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Tags: bags, eq, photo equipment

When White Balance is Wrong

Tuesday, April 28th, 2009

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…

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Tags: photo equipment, white balance

CHDK on the sd500

Sunday, April 26th, 2009

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.

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Tags: chdk, photo equipment

Hand over the Camera

Sunday, April 26th, 2009

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.

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Tags: ISO, photo equipment, photograph

After work, another example

Saturday, April 25th, 2009

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.

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Tags: alaska, ISO, photo equipment, photograph, sd500

Exposure Values on the sd500

Thursday, April 23rd, 2009

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.

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Tags: manual mode, photo equipment, sd500

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