Kids are fun. Swings are fun. Swings (tend to) swing in a very reg­u­lar, pre­dict­able way. Espe­cially if the legs of the per­son on it aren’t long enough to touch the ground ;-)

Any­way, thanks to the reg­u­lar motion, it’s quite easy to get the tim­ing right to take a shot just at the right moment. In this case here, it was the point where Sophie was at the highest, so very little motion, but great “upside down” effect (as I shot upwards from very close to the ground).

It was also easy to get the focus right by just focus­sing once and then switch­ing to manual to pre­vent the cam­era from re-​focussing. This was cru­cial as I chose a very shal­low depth of field in order to get those trees in the back­ground blurred. I wanted to keep them in the frame as a dark back­ground for bright Sophie, but blurred so they don’t dis­tract and she “pops” out a bit more (which is also helped by the sun­set light com­ing in almost hori­zont­ally).

But the gist here is not to take pic­tures of kids on swings, but gen­er­ally to watch out for any reg­u­lar type of motion /​tim­ing which can make your life a lot easier in find­ing that one “per­fect” moment.

Sorry, just have to get this rant off my chest.

To Whom it May Con­cern,

My name is Florian, I live in New­castle and I went to the Maceo Parker gig last night.

While the music itself was massive (as I expec­ted) the run­ning of the event itself was a huge dis­ap­point­ment and source of frus­tra­tion: As you can ima­gine, it is a bit of an involve­ment driv­ing 2 hours (and another 2 hours back after mid­night) from New­castle, pay­ing for pet­rol, park­ing and of course the ticket, and then only have the artist play a mere 55 minutes, without any encores, but with some auda­cious per­son ask­ing every­one to leave as quickly as pos­sible.

I assume we pretty much just got to see the “first half” of the gig; with another set of fans hav­ing paid for the “second half”. Which is of course a very luc­rat­ive way of going about things (I don’t believe that Maceo Parker or his band are stuck for money, so I guess it must have been your idea to sell two sets of tick­ets for the even­ing).

In any case, this was the first time I went to The Base­ment (I have just moved to Aus­tralia), and I was very much look­ing for­ward to it. But please rest assured that it will be my last time too. If this is how you treat your cus­tom­ers I can only warn people of your busi­ness eth­ics.

Regards,

Florian Knorn

Update: To my big sur­prise, this wasn’t the end of it. Might have to recon­sider my opin­ion. Check out their response:

[…] I’m sorry that you’re still feel­ing unhappy about the gig, and wanted to reach out to you as well – in the last month, I have taken on answer­ing feed­back that comes in from the web­site. Usu­ally, it’s great, but every so often we find out that some­thing has gone awry, and we do what we can to rec­tify the issue.

First up, again, let me apo­lo­gise for the con­fu­sion that lead to you miss­ing the second show. We endeav­oured to do everything we could to make sure that it was a smooth exper­i­ence for all involved, and I’m sorry to hear that it wasn’t a flaw­less pro­cess. The night in ques­tion, our online tick­et­ing sys­tem was down, which meant that the door per­son was unable to check the sales manu­ally, and had to rely on the paper print outs that were given to her as pat­rons entered. I ima­gine this is why you why you were given the inform­a­tion that it was first come, first served – as a dis­claimer in case there were not enough tick­ets remain­ing, which we were unable to check in advance that night. To the best of my know­ledge, every­one who queued made it back in, but that’s little com­fort to you now, I know.

The decision to run the late night shows was actu­ally made by neither Maceo dir­ectly, nor by The Base­ment, but by Blues­Fest, the pro­mo­tor for Maceo’s tour. It was made when the first two shows sold out so quickly, pro­posed as a solu­tion that might also allow those with other com­mit­ments to catch Maceo, and to give those who wanted a dance­floor exper­i­ence that oppor­tun­ity. The inten­tion was truly to give more fans the chance to exper­i­ence the music.

It’s the first time that we’ve tried run­ning double shows on the same night, and it looks like we still have some fine tun­ing before we can look at doing it again. While I can’t rec­tify the exper­i­ence you had on Sat­urday, I would truly love the chance to change your per­spect­ive of The Base­ment by offer­ing you a double pass to a gig of your choice, on us. Avail­ab­il­ity with­stand­ing, take a look at the pro­gram, and when you find some­thing you like the look of, let me know.

While it may not have come across this way on Sat­urday, The Base­ment cares deeply about giv­ing its pat­rons a unique and excep­tion­ally high stand­ard of exper­i­ence. I hope we can show you that on your second visit.[…]

Sorry for the long radio silence, but as many of you may know, I’ve just moved to New­castle, Aus­tralia. Any­way, never prom­ise any­thing, but hav­ing pretty much settled now after prob­ably 3 months of nomadic exist­ence, I’ll try to get back into post­ing more reg­u­larly.

Today’s topic is rel­at­ively straight­for­ward. Cre­at­ive sources of light. If you are lucky enough to have some really bright glass and a cam­era that isn’t too shabby at higher ISOs (but which cam­era today isn’t?!), you may actu­ally con­sider some digital device as light source. I’ve done this a few times already, and it usu­ally turns out quite nice: In dark­ish, nat­ural light sur­round­ings, cap­ture someone look­ing at a lit screen.

This beau­ti­fully illu­min­ates the face, but rather loc­ally and from a dif­fer­ent dir­ec­tion than your reg­u­lar on-​camera flash would do. While you will typ­ic­ally have an issue with mixed white bal­ances (the screen being cold, “blueish”, and the sur­round­ings warm, “orangish”), this should not worry you. That’s just the way things are! But if it does, simply con­vert your image to gray­scale.

As I men­tioned above, you’ll usu­ally need some “bright” lenses (i.e. with a nice, wide open aper­ture of ƒ/​2 or below, so small ƒ-num­bers) and a cranked up sens­it­iv­ity (ISO set­ting). Then: Patience and care­ful focus­sing, as with the shal­low depth of field and gen­er­ally little avail­able light for your auto­fo­cus sensor to work with you might need a few shots to get in focus what you want (clas­sic­ally the eyes of the sub­ject).

If you want to take this whole idea one step fur­ther: There’s an app for that…

Just returned from an assign­ment today, so this one’s fresh off my cam­era, the flash units hav­ing barely cooled down. I was hired to take some pic­tures of folks from the NUI Maynooth Rugby Club together with the trophy from the Heineken Cup.

The prob­lem: The shoot had to be fast (the university’s pres­id­ent only had 20 minutes for the gig and 15 odd group pic­tures had to be taken), the pic­tures obvi­ously had to be really “nice”, but worst of all: The weather. No, it was not rain­ing — to the con­trary — the one-​in-​a-​million thing happened… 100% pure 3pm-​sunshine. Great, since the shoot was to take place on the rugby pitch (to get the NUIM post-​padding in).

So there I had it: pho­to­graph people in plain sun­shine. While sun­shine is really pretty for land­scapes, it’s not ideal at all for people. Extremely harsh shad­ows on people’s faces and a great deal of squint­ing are the main issues. There’s not much you can do about the squint­ing, apart from turn­ing them as much as pos­sible from the sun. But the harsh shad­ows can be alle­vi­ated with some extra gear.

That meant to charge my flash gun bat­ter­ies to the max, pack two tri­pods and a reflector. Steffi was kind enough to woman the reflector (which made the squint­ing worse, but I needed all the fill light I could get). The two flash guns I have were moun­ted on the tri­pods, set to 100% power (their are GN 56 and 58) and wire­less trig­ger­ing. Unfor­tu­nately I don’t have radio trig­gers, so I had to go the much less reli­able route of optical trig­ger­ing. Yeah, in bright sun­shine. Thank­fully, the flashes did sur­pris­ingly well and they had a trig­ger­ing rate of I’d say over 80%. Again, not great, but it had to do.

The setup was the fol­low­ing: I placed the people so that the sun is about 60° to their right; the flash guns and reflector (1m fold-​up golden reflector) where set to come in at the same angle from their left, about 2m away from them, as close as pos­sible without get­ting them in the shots. To get the sky as dark as pos­sible I used a polar­ising fil­ter, which also allowed me to use a fairly large aper­ture. But with aper­ture and expos­ure time fixed (I set it to the shortest pos­sible value to reduce the ambi­ent light impact on the pic­ture) I brought the ISO up until the image was well exposed. Although the flash units were work­ing at their highest set­ting, I still had to bring the ISO up to 1250. Yes, that makes the images a bit more noisy than what I would have liked, but there was not much I could do about that.

I think the end res­ult came out quite nice, I hope the uni will be happy with it. It cer­tainly cost me a few gray hairs…

This is just to make small dis­cov­ery pub­lic (I didn’t find this any­where else). When cre­at­ing books in iPhoto, you can fine tune and edit lay­outs by using com­bin­a­tions of mod­i­fier and arrow keys!

This is great news, you see, because I always used to use trial ver­sions of Aper­ture to be able to cus­tom­ise the lay­out — and gran­ted, you are much more flex­ible this way. But, while there are no more trial ver­sions of Aper­ture, this now be be done (to some extend) in iPhoto:

First: Select the box you want to edit (it will be high­lighted in blue).

Then: Press com­mand + arrow keys to move the object around. Com­mand + option + arrow keys will res­ize the box. If you add in the shift key, the step size will be much lar­ger.

See this quick video demon­stra­tion below:

Why would you wil­fully ruin the war­ranty of a lens? Well, if you’re mad into pan­or­amic pho­to­graphy, that’s just the thing to do.

I’ve stuck for a good while with the Peleng 8mm, but have now upgraded to the Sigma 10mm F2.8 fisheye as I was fed up with remov­ing the lens flares in my images. The 10mm is a very good and still rel­at­ively afford­able lens com­pared to the Peleng (a good bit sharper and vir­tu­ally immune to lens flares). Sadly, it has a fixed lens hood (as it is designed for crop sensors). That means, although the lens pro­duces an image circle that is almost ideal for pan­or­amic pho­to­graphy (on a full frame sensor), the built-​in lens hood blocks cru­cial parts of the image circle — in par­tic­u­lar the areas that, with the cam­era in por­trait mode, cap­ture the ver­tical up– and down areas of the image.

So, some gen­tle­man from Ger­many by the name of Tobias Vollmer has made a small side busi­ness out of pro­fes­sion­ally shav­ing those pesky lens hoods (there are sev­eral lenses that have this “issue”). Here’s his web­site. For a very reas­on­able 50 EUR he’ll do the job — includ­ing the prom­ise that if he acci­dent­ally ruins the lens, he’ll replace it. And, what shall I say, he did a very good job, with a very quick turn around time (less than two weeks, and that’s ship­ping to and from Ire­land). You can see the before and after above.

I’ve also pre­pared two com­par­ison shots to show you the effect of the shav­ing. So, while you get a 180° field of view with the lens before the shave, this only holds true for the diag­onal of the image. After the shave, the 180° area is a good deal lar­ger, but — most cru­cially — includes the zenith and nadir (ver­tical up and down). With the lens shaved, I can again get a full 360×180° pano with as little as 4 shots. Yay!

Also, since the lens is a 10mm lens I get a slightly lar­ger final out­put size, and, as I said, the per-​pixel qual­ity is much bet­ter as the lens is just much sharper everywhere.