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It’s that time of year again, when somebody decides to hold the annual Stockholm photo expo, right around the 25th when everyone gets their salary. Seriously, people have got to stop doing that…
After missing last years’ photo expo I was happy to return and get a chance to play with the stuff they had on show. Being a total geek, I’ve already played with most of the gadgets, and since there were really no new releases planned for the show, I was just happy to be in an environment with that much technology. One thing that I haven’t played with prior to the photo expo, is Fujifilm’s FinePix Real 3D W3, a compact camera that like the name says shoots 3D. It’s basically two cameras in one, so two separate lenses and sensors, that get piped into the same processor for some image processing wizardry. Kinda nifty, but then at the same time kinda gimicky, since nobody actually goes around with a pair of 3D glasses.

One of my images was on display there, through Kth’s photo club, Knepp.

Anyway, I shot some video of the expo, Knepp’s wall can be seen at around 4:11 into the video. My image is the framed pano in the middle.

So the inevitable happened…I finally succumbed and bought a compact camera. Now I dislike compacts with a passion, they’re small, not ergonomic, have a very plastic feel to them even though some are made of metal, produce noisy images, don’t have much in the way of manual settings unless you get a Canon G series, and so on…
However, due to breaking my right wrist (i’m right-handed) i couldn’t lug the 50D around so i needed something smaller as a dump-in-my-jacket-pocket, take everywhere camera, and I needed it to shoot somewhat decent 720p video. In comes the Ixus 130. Knowing I wasn’t gonna demand much from it, I went for the 130 instead of the 210 touchscreen model, and I fell in love, so much so i’m thinking of ways to get my Macbook anodized in orange…

It’s got a decent build, most Ixuses do, looks amazing, especially in orange, is pretty much the size of a credit card and only slightly thicker than an iPhone, so it’s great to just have on you. The image and video quality is comparable to other cameras at the same price point. For someone who dislikes using the auto mode on anything, this little camera’s auto mode is actually impressively smart, not resorting to flash every time there’s a little less light than it would like to have.

And now for the drawbacks….it’s small and sleek, which is great if you’re just admiring it while it sits on a shelf, the surface isn’t too grip friendly and the buttons are small for my fat fingers, especially the D-pad. From what i’ve seen so far, it’s noisy above ISO 200. I do’t really know if that’s normal for a pocket camera, since so far i’ve tried avoiding them like the plague, but crank the 50D to ISO 1600 and it’ll almost beat ISO 200 on the Ixus 130. The exclusion of optical zoom in the video mode is an annoyance but I guess that at this price point Canon had to leave something out. In other words I’m eagerly waiting for CHDK to start supporting the Ixus 130.

Sample images:

Sample 720p videos:

They call it the Grand Prix of the Sea. Malta sees these powerboats once a year for 3 days of  intense. One thing’s for sure, there’s nothing like that much engine power pushing you forward through the waves. More info on the race can be found here.

All of these images were shot with the 70-200/2.8, at roughly f9-f11 to get as much depth of field as I could for the required shutter speed. ISO was set to 200. To get more awesome out of these images, I got as low as possible above the water on the cliff I shot them from. This is a much better angle to shoot from and it makes all the jumps just that  much higher.

Images from the qualifier round:

Images from race day 1:

Earlier I wrote a post on going from capturing audiovisual content to publishing it on the internet all in one device, the iPhone 3Gs. Relatively low resolution video can be captured on the iPhone and the camera app allows for some rudimentary editing. The true power of the iPhone comes through the app store and the multitude of 3rd party editing apps you can download from there. It’s doable, with pretty good end results, but the max resolution is still only 640X480 pixels.
With the iPhone 4, Apple just one upped itself. Same size sensor, more pixels, better low light capability….and here’s the kicker…. the ability to shoot 720p HD video! The real strength comes from being able to edit that same 720p video on the phone itself, and sharing it out to the internet. This is big. Very big.
Think citizen journalism, think seeing the news before it’s broadcast on national media networks, think sharing your experiences and doing all of this in HD.
Then think of the increase in traffic on video sharing sites and the increase in data trafic that phone networks will have to to accomodate the sharing of all of this content. There’s no doubt that iPhone owners are a very active bunch when it comes to harnessing the power of the internet through their devices and there’s no doubt that the network providers will feel the burn.
Either way this is a very large step in the right direction. Not because of the technology or the features but because of the usability of the software and the always on internet connection. Many other devices capture 720p HD video, very few offer a relatively full featured editing and sharing package to boot.

School tradition is something to be admired. Squvalp is a celebration of ingenuity and beer drinking skills. It’s a day when KTH students design and build water craft and then race them in an epic battle to the finish that according to tradition takes place at 14:08 at RÃ¥lambshovsparken.

In exchange for my photography services  at this event, I was compensated in beer, perversely  large amounts of beer, and some of the best grilled meat I have tasted in a long while.

So all in all it was a pretty full day, we were given the freedom to shoot what we wanted and how we wanted. I worked with the 24-70/2.8 on one camera body and the 70-200/2.8 on the other. I figured this would be easier than swapping lenses and I was right… changing lenses in full on rain mixed with sawdust and beer is not the safest thing for your glass or your cameras. I’ve come to realize that a rain coat/poncho is a crucial tool. Due to the weather the light was pretty bad too, I shot a few test shots with flash while keeping the ISO as far down as I could but wasn’t getting the results I wanted so I opted for higher ISO and batch noise reduction in post. To be fair ISO 500-800 images from the Canon 50D come out relatively crisp, apart from the obvious color noise which is easily corrected.

This is the first time I’ve done event photography and it was a blast. Photography generally involves a lot of solitude, and this is something I enjoy. It gives me time to think, to relax, to take time and compose an image so that it conveys a certain emotion, to focus (pun intended). But once in a while it’s good to introduce a social aspect to it. This extended not only to the other two photographers I worked with, but to all the participants as well. Doing something you love and meeting new people in the process can’t be bad.

Squvalp 2010 - Sjösättningen

I also used this opportunity to test the  spring 2010 refresh of the 13″ Macbook Pro I recently purchased. I’ve edited the entire shoot (ca 1200 images) on it and boy am I impressed. It’s at least on par with my more powerful Win 7 desktop when it comes to running Lightroom. I haven’t had too many issues with the glossy glass screen, but I guess coming from a white 2007 Macbook I’ve gotten used to a little gloss. However the glass screen on the Macbook Pro provides way more contrast. The real improvement is the trackpad, which compared to the 2007 Macbook is actually very usable, though for most of the editing I’ve used a Wacom pen. For smaller jobs I see this being my main computer.

As a side note, the Lightroom catalog I worked with for this event contained about 1300 images. I still have to test how the Macbook Pro performs with my main image catalog containing around 70000 images. Here are a few more images from Squvalp 2010:

A while ago I replied to a tweet by Kerry Garrison (@KerryGarrison) of cameradojo.com where he asked for ideas for a short video tutorial he could do. Lightroom import workflow was my idea and it seemed to have resonated with him…

At the time I was starting to shoot more often and I was filling up memory cards and hdd space, so I needed a good strategy to already on import apply the right presets and sort out my images so that I could streamline the post processing phase.

A big part of how a raw image is going to show up on a screen is what camera profile you use. Certain profiles apply more “pop” to your images. So just by changing your profile you can get a part of the way  to a finished shot. On export this “pop” gets baked in. I tend to import with the Adobe Standard profile, this at least on my screen does not give the image as much “pop” as Camera Standard but gets it to where I want my starting point to be. As a side note, this only works on raw images.

The whole point of developing an import workflow is to streamline the process of creating a ready to publish image. So as another side note, why not bake in some IPTC information, such as the author name, website and email as well as a copyright notice at the time of import? This text you input in the “Copyright” field can later be used by Lightroom to tag your images on export. The same applies to keywords. Searching for an image is so much easier when Lightroom has at least a few terms to constrain the search results.

Apart from butchering my name (and who can blame him? I’m gonna start including a phonetic pronunciation of it from now on) Garrison’s tip is gold. Check out the video he posted:

Gallery-wrap canvas of Strandvägen, Stockholm

How many of us really take the time and the effort to apreciate the art we create? A lot of people today use the computer as the only medium of interaction with their images. Sure, those images get posted on Flickr, Twitter and Facebook, but an lcd leaves lots to be desired when viewing an image. A screen is dynamic, it can show a lot of information at once. That leaves the more ADD-prone among us juggling 17 browser tabs, 4 im clients, itunes and a torrent app all at once while viewing an image. This leaves the brain scurrying to grasp all this visual information and not really immersing itself in the image. An image is almost never just “pretty to look at”, there’s always a little detail that stands out, that invokes an emotion, that makes your mind wonder a certain way. It takes time to see these details.
All this is eliminated when you hang a picture on a wall. People (mostly) tend to treat physical images with more respect, the stand in front of them longer and take more time to let them soak in. Regardless of how good your art is, being proud enough of an image to commit it to canvas and hang it on a wall moves you further away from the negative connotations of what some call being a “Flickr photographer” and closer to becoming an artist.
Print your photos, try different ways of mounting them, give them away as presents to people or hang them on your own wall and enjoy them…

If you’ve been following my photography you’ll have seen a fair amount of HDR images. I tend to try to not overdo the use of HDR, and by that i mean that i try to keep a certain element of the reality of the scene. However one in a while it’s fun to just play…
Here’s a HDR pan of the view from my balcony, stitched from 10 shots, in Photomatix. I tend to apply the HDR effect to each set of 3 different exposures first and then stitch them in Photoshop. I guess it would be possible to create 3 different exposures of the final panorama and then HDR them in Photomatix, but due to the extreme exposures in the -2ev and +2ev images I could never really get Photoshop to to the stitching right, which led to alignment errors in Photomatix. The final color correction is then done in Lightrrom.

You can find a larger version of this image on my Flickr page.

After taking almost a month off from pretty much anything related to photography, I’m back with a new post. New gear really does bring with it new inspiration and that’s something I tend to be lacking this year…

I thought long and hard about my choice of lenses. The lens I use most often is the Sigma 18-200/3.5-5.6 IS, which is acceptably sharp at 18mm but it gets really soft at from about 150 and higher. To add to that the AF motor is pretty slow compared to Canon’s L line. For my trip last summer I decided to go with the Canon 70-200/2.8 L because I needed something sharper and faster focusing at longer focal lengths.
Now comes the dilemma. I own a crop sensor body, so do i go with EF or EF-S lenses? I currently own 2 crop sensor camera bodies, both with a crop factor of 1.6, so am I ever going to upgrade to a full size sensor? My reasoning was the following. I could get the 17-55/2.8 IS which is a great lens for the money, but it’s not weather sealed and the AF isn’t as fast as in the 24-70/2.8 L which costs about 1.5 times more. However the 24mm end of the 24-70mm puts me at about 38mm accounting for the crop factor of my sensor and this is not wide enough for some situations. IS is always good to have in a lens but I haven’t really found it to be a make or break factor. However my Sigma 18-200mm does perform well as a wide angle lens, so I decided to go with the 24-70/2.8 L instead of the 17-55/2.8 IS. I also applied the age old logic…You can’t go wrong with L glass.

At some point I’ll probably get a full frame body, but that’s going to be way down the line, so from that perspective investing in EF-s lenses seemed pointless. Also EF lenses, since they’re meant to be used with larger sensors are gonna produce better edge to edge sharpness when used on a crop sensor.

I haven’t really had the chance to test out this lens, given the cold and snowy weather we’ve been having here, although this could be an opportunity to see how the weather sealing works on both my 50D and this lens. What I did notice so far is edge to edge sharpness very much comparable to the 50/1.4 and a very limited amount of chromatic abberation. Sample images will follow in a future post.

So here it is… a short unboxing video of the Canon 24-70/2.8 L USM.

Numbers are good, and numbers are part of what makes a camera great. The other part is how often you’re gonna be using it, because what good is a camera that sits at home gathering dust? This is just another segway into a rant about how great the iPhone is as a tool for photography and sharing images and video.

The images for this video were shot using the iPhone 3Gs. The photo apps used are PRO Hdr, Photogene, Ps Mobile and The Best Camera. The slideshow video was put together using ReelDirector. In other words this entire video from capture to web was created by a tiny pocket device most of us carry with us without even realizing its true potential.

ReelDirector will only do 640×480 output, so i’ll be posting the full-res images in the Iphone Art section.

For those of you interested the video was shot at Romme Alpin, a few kilometers away from Borlänge in Sweden.