milnikphoto.com/blog

Archive for the ‘Photography’ Category

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 Rålambshovsparken.

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.

It’s always a good thing to recap and look back at the images that meant the most to you during the past year. Most of the time you can see a clear evolution of the techniques and post-processing styles and gear that you’ve used. It’s great to see what direction your photography has taken and where it might go. Here’s a collection of  about 200 of my images:

Feel free to link me to similar slideshows, it’s always entertaining to see what other creative minds are up to…

So this is my first post of 2010! Here I go…

My problem with going someplace worth photographing is coming back with 40-50GB of photos to sift through and edit. I usually just don’t have the time to go through the sheer number of images after a trip and tend to leave it for later, months later and in some cases years later. Let’s face it, post processing takes time and inspiration neither of which can be conjured up at will.  When I come back from a trip I typically go through my images, delete the ones I don’t need and roughly mark the ones I’d like to edit at some point. Months later I’ll go back and edit these images turning them into what I originally envisioned. Most of the 4-5 star images tend to go through several re-edits until I’m completely satisfied with the result. Talk about a time consuming workflow…

I recently had a little time to sit down and stitch a few panoramas taken in summer ’09 on my trip though Nordland and Finnmark in Norway.

Honningsvåg, Finnmark

Honningsvåg, the northermost city in Norway. Well it’s more like the northermost large fishing village with a city status but it sure is picturesque, especially when you see a full grown white reindeer grazing in the local school’s yard. It’s also the starting point for most tourist excursions in the area.

A beach at Bleik, Andöy, across the road from the camping grounds where we stayed for a night to catch up on sleep and free wifi. Nothing but fine white silky smooth sand dotted with patches of vegetation as far as the eye could see.

The North Cape, often referred to as Europe’s northernmost point. However, the neighbouring point Knivskjellodden is actually 1,457 metres further north. Here the sun never sets in summer, well from the 14th of May to the 31st of July.  This shot and was taken just before midnight. Being woken up by reindeer herds wondering through the parking lot is an awesome experience. This image has been in the header for some time now. I was going for an almost artificially created simplicity…

Midnight sun at the North Cape

Another shot of the North Cape. The shots for this pano were actually taken between 11 and 12pm. This sight never ceases to take my breath away. Going along with the North Cape theme this is one of the images in the running got blog header for at lest the first half of 2010.

Wiew of a sunset in the Norwegian sea off the Hurtigrutten boat we took from Tromsö to Hammerfest. Shooting panoramas off boats is tricky, especially in low light conditions and in spite of the sea looking rather calm i was having trouble hand-holding a 70-200mm lens due to the gusts of wind blowing over the deck. However, I found comfort in the fact that even out in the middle of the Norwegian sea, I had almost full cell phone reception, something my phone company can’t provide in central Stockholm.

Narvik was a strategically important port during WWII and still today is the closest port to the iron ore mine in Kiruna that does not freeze in winter. Also it is one totally awesome great place to ski. The city also has its “own” whale which will periodically wonder deep into the fjord. I’ve been here twice and so far had no luck when it comes to spotting this whale.

Lillsjön, Upplands-bro

Part of the experience of living a little outside of a busy city center is experiencing the nature around you. Lillsjön, a little north of Stockholm is really nothing special given the fact that there are about 520000 lakes in Sweden. However this tends to be where I go most often.
I digress. Photography is about experimentation. Trying out something new and figuring out how you can make it work for you and incorporate it in your workflow. I’m a little torn on the subject shooting panoramas. Yes you have to have the camera on a tripod with a pano head to avoid parallax errors in stitching later on in Photoshop, but lately the software has gotten so good that i’m really doubting the necessity of an expensive head. I shoot most of my panos hand held but make sure that I try to line up the images, shoot portrait instead of landscape, have 20-30% overlap and rotate the camera around the plane of the aperture ring as much as possible. All this applies to scenes with good light, because no matter how steady your hand is a tripod is always better in low light. A tripod and pano head will however give sharper images, especially when used with a shutter remote, and will minimize the need for lens distortion correction and cropping in post.
Going back to trying something new I heard about an interesting technique for shooting panos. When shooting hand held there will be more resolution loss due to cropping in post. Now most of this resolution will be from the edges of the middle section of the image. So the idea is to shoot a few more frames above and below the middle section, this gaining back that resolution. That’s it!
Above is the result of a photowalk I took the other day.

I recently went back and re-edited a shot I took in autumn last year. Because I already had a finished  shot from the same series I thought hard about how I want to process this one and if the two could somehow be combined in the same context. So I went back to the first shot, examined it for a while and thought about what stood out and was inspiring about it.

Too many people motordrive their cameras because digital pictures “cost nothing” and put very little of themselves into their images. This is a valid logic when the goal is just to collect information, getting as many pixels as possible in a short amount of time. When this isn’t the case it is important for an image to convey a context, to tell a story or to induce an emotion and to get people thinking. Although other people may not feel the exact same emotion, if they feel anything, be it positive or negative and if they can somehow relate a piece of themselves to my image, I’ve done what I set out to do.

This got me thinking about why I fell in love with the subject of these images in the first place. As a kid there was nothing I enjoyed more than to run through dry fallen oak leaves in autumn. Simple times, when I didn’t have a care in the world. There was always something magical about autumn leaves and the freedom I felt every time I ran through a pile of them. To me this couple of images embodies just that. So that’s what the dreamy soft focus, the high grain grittyness and the strong contrasts between the snow, the leaves and the not too subtle black vignette are meant to accomplish.

Convey an emotion. Move someone with your image.