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Archive for the ‘Photography’ Category

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.

Smoke is one of those subjects that I always thought made impressive pictures. There’s an appealing surreal randomness factor in smoke images, something that maybe a designer could create with a pen, but nothing like any other photographic subject could provide. A vivid imagination helps a lot with these images, it’s really like looking up at the clouds and realizing that some of them form recognizable shapes. Because of the randomness of these images it’s easier to play around with them too. Mirroring a smoke plume and adding it as a second layer in PS can create some almost magical results. All in all it’s a great way to create interesting fine art photography.

What hit me though is how simple photographing smoke actually is when using the right gear. First of all you need something to burn, incense sticks work fine, they burn slowly and give off a constant, thick plume of smoke which can easily be shaped using different objects. I guess other things would work but the best results I’ve gotten were with incense sticks. Get ones that don’t make you nauseous, you’ll be smelling that smoke for hours….

A uniform background is another part of the equation. Anything dark will work fine. I used a large sheet of black cardboard from a local art supply store but I guess a sheet of fabric would do fine too. A matte background should be used as you want to avoid reflections.

Lighting is key here. It’s simple but it has to be done right to avoid a lot of work in post. Both constant lighting and flash are used. The constant light helps to light up the smoke creating enough contrast between it and the background for the camera to focus right. The flash is there to stop motion. Both lights need do be trained on the smoke. Getting light directly into the lens will almost certainly produce lens flare, which is not something to be avoided as long as it fits within the creative vision. Either a snoot or barn doors can be easily created out of cardboard and added to the flash. A snoot is better suited if you’ll be focusing on a smaller vertical portion of the smoke as the light will be more focused. The barn doors I made were held in place with patches of velcro, making them easily adjustable.

As the flash is off the camera it will have to be triggered remotely. This gave me a chance to test for my new Elinchrom Skyport trigger in a real-life situation. Turns out it worked without a glitch even when shooting sequences at 6.5 images/sec. The trick here is to underpower the flash so that its recycle time will be able to keep up with the camera. So with the flash in manual mode, set the power to ½. To avoid light spill directly into the lens you can also zoom in the flash anywhere from 85mm to 105mm. If you’re shooting sequences then high-speed sync should be on too. Typically the flash can sync at 1/250^th of a sec. To be on the safe side, with the camera set to manual mode you can set the shutter speed to one setting slower, so say 1/160^th of a sec. I had no problems running the flash sync at 1/250^th though; the Skyport trigger didn’t miss a beat.

To get the cleanest shot you should keep your ISO as low as possible. This shouldn’t be a problem as the amount of light that hits the smoke is controllable, you can always add more if you need to. The aperture should be set somewhere between f11 and f20. I was getting the best results at f18.

Smoke is rather unpredictable… you never really know what shape it will form, so shot a lot of frames and see what works best later on.

There is always a post-processing step, to get the right look and make the background uniform and smooth. The more contrast there is between the background and the smoke the easier it will be to correct the image. Then there’s the removal of little blemishes. The final step is to do something creative with the colors like invert the image or change the hue of the smoke. Smoke shots also work great when tiled like kaleidoscope images, mirrored in the y or x axis or rotated a certain number of degrees consecutively a few times.

So this is all it takes to kill an hour or two one lazy Sunday afternoon. The setup is simple but the images can be pretty moving. So try it for yourself….

My smoke shots are posted in my photoblog so check out the sidebar to the right.

My recent infatuation with the iPhone lives on. Recently i’ve been rethinking my approach to photography and digging deeper at the roots of the passion i have for it. Part of it is the gear, i’m obsessed with and addicted to anything shiny and new. The other part is the feeling i get when i see an image that moves me.

I’ve never really complained much about carrying a large photo bag all day in fact i like the look and feel of a heavy camera body. But gear isn’t everything. The iPhone is by no means a replacement for my camera gear. However it provides a great way to be creative on the go without having to lug my photo backpack with me. It also limits me, in terms of flash and the lenses i can use. I find this simplicity quite relaxing and inspiring and it makes me look for other ways to make an image great. Angles, composition and mood become more important and the lack of zoom or flash although technically a restriction does not stifle  creativity. This is generally true for any type of photographic gear. It’s also a pretty good tool for macro photography, and that’s something i haven’t done much of using dslrs.

What i mean to say is that a great picture doesn’t necessarily need to come form a dslr, it can come from pretty much anything. The more portable that camera is the more you’re gonna shoot with it. Chances of getting a “once in a lifetime” shot increase because you have a camera on you at all times. The most inspiring images almost always tend to be the ones that capture the energy of the moment, and that’s hard to do if you’re gonna need time to set up a shot.

The editing apps are getting more and more powerful too. The apps i own right now can pretty much do everything i need but image compositing and multiple exposure HDR, and i’m pretty sure that that will be coming out in one way or another. Panorama stitching works flawlessly with AutoStitch. While a lot of camera phones can stitch images, this app allows you to take a matrix of images in any order and much like PS it’ll figure out what goes where and blend it together. Photogene, Photo fx and Best Camera are the apps i use for color correction/enhancements and the results are pretty great there as well. Although ColorSplash has masking capabilities i really miss this in all the other editing apps, it would be great if before applying a filter you could just paint a mask over the area the filter is to be applied to. And time-lapse, yeah there’s an app for that too. It doesn’t put the images together into movies but it’s pretty versatile with how many images and at what intervals it can shoot.

All this lead to me starting a new page titled “iPhone art” where i’ll post shots i take and edit on the iPhone. Check it out, see what you think, and be inspired to play.

I’m a fan and avid follower of the This Week in Photography podcast. It’s a great resource for everyone interested in photograpy regardless of their level of skill but a part of a discussion they had during an interview struck me as odd. They talked about the positive change in the way camera manufacturers think and referred to things like the creative auto mode on Canon cameras.

For those of you who’re not familiar with this, it’s a mode that shows sliders on the lcd  so you can intuitively chose between say a blurrier or a sharper background. My understanding is that this is done to assist beginners, make them previsualise the effect they’re creating before they press the shutter while not showing actual shutter speed and aperture values. By removing number values a photographer is meant to focus more closely on the picture they’re making. This is basically meant to remove the thinking about settings factor out of photography.
Is this really a positive change from the photographer’s point of view? Getting to know your gear is the first thing you should do when you unbox it. Knowing where buttons are on a camera and being able to have one finger on the shutter and one eye looking through the viewfinder and still find buttons and change settings. In other words very few dslr users actually look at the rear-facing lcd to adjust settings. Most people i know use the top lcd and the viewfinder so placing crucual controls on the rear lcd is a bad idea from a usability perspective. Another point is that you stop thinking about little but important details such as where the sweetspot for the particular lens you’re using is or the position of the sharp portion of your image. This makes a difference between a good but not tack sharp shot and a great shot.

From a conservative point of view it’s just plain wrong. Moving from looking through the viewfinder and being able to do mental arithmetic to calculate iso, shutter speed and aperture to using sliders that make the background more or less blurry is a large paradigm shift. Granted that our digital tools allow us the luxury of not needing mental arithmetic, but that’s as far as i’m willing to go. I’m in no way conservative when it comes to technology, i love my gadgets and for the most part i’m an early adopter of new gadgets and firmwares. But photography is runs way deeper than what new firmware your camera’s using or what new functions it has. It’s an art. People were getting amazing shots with pinhole cameras made out of cardboard boxes decades ago. Now more and more people are relying on technology to take the a great image for them instead of thinking it through and really focusing on what they can do to make the image better.

Then again i’ve not seen the CA mode on Canon’s higher end cameras, only on the xxxD and the xxD series. These are cameras that either beginners or advanced amateurs buy and as such, they  need to appeal to their target audience. Features like the CA mode might be of some use for this target audience, but i’ll still argue that dumbing down the use of a camera is not going to help these people become the photographers they could be in the future. A basic, dumbed down feature set should be reserved for lower end compact cameras.

That’s about the end of my rant, comments and hate mail are welcome…

You realize how big a part something plays in your life when you wake up at 2:30 am just to do it. The Early Bird photowalk in Stockholm is part of the Scott Kelby Annual worldwide Photowalk.

After meeting everyone at 4am in front of the Grand hotel we walked over to Skeppsholmen, then back over Gamla stan and ended up at around 6am at Monteliusvägen for breakfast and a phenomenal view of Stockholm. Two hours was just too little to get the creative juices flowing, especially if you’re meant to keep up with the group. Generally I tend to try and not cut a walk short as long as I’m feeling creative, but this is supposed to appeal to the masses and the masses don’t like carrying heavy photo gear. Here’s the route we took:

The weather was more or less exactly what I hoped for. Clear skies, warm and sunny, but I wouldn’t have minded a cloud or two just to make the sky a little more appealing to shoot and cast some interesting shadows down onto the city.

I was accompanied by the lovely @Pamstorr who shot some pretty great images herself.

Here’s a selection of mine:

Some of these images can also be viewed larger on my photoblog, just click on the thumbnail in the sidebar.

To wrap this all up, this was one great experience, meeting new people, seeing the way others work and exchanging tips, tricks and techniques is well worth getting up at some ungodly hour. Looking forward to next year.

Here’s another little timelapse video. Looking forward to trying one of these at night, trouble is nobody in Stockholm bothers to kill off all the mosquitos, so being out at night is out of the question.

There are very few cameras that have an onboard time-lapse feature and I’ve never really understood why manufacturers don’t just start incorporating this. It shouldn’t be hard to implement, but I guess there is more interest in decent HD video than time-lapse, so much so that while the Canon G9 had this feature (well a dumbed down version anyway) the more recent G10 doesn’t.

Back when I started this blog I’ve written about a simple way to turn your TI83 graphing calculator into an time-lapse remote for the Canon xxxD series cameras (click here to go that post).  The way this works is that the remote jack for the camera is the same the TI83 uses so you can program the calculator to send out signals to the camera at regular intervals.

Things to think about:

Steady the camera: Depending on what type of scene you’re shooting you could use a tripod. Nobody likes Mr. ShakyCam videos. Also if you’re using the TI83 method a tripod gives you something to strap your calculator to so you don’t have to hold it.

Set up your focus: If you’re shooting a still scene (or at least one that’s far away) and your camera is on a tripod use AF to set your focus and then switch the focus to manual. If all the AF points are selected and AF is left on the camera will start picking what it wants to focus on if your subjects starts to move. This results in totally random, rapidly changing focus in the video. If you’re shooting hand-held and you’re tracking a moving subject select the AF point you’re going to use to track your subject. Make sure that you that AF point then aligns with the subject and that the tracking motion is as smooth as possible. Using a high frame rate for moving subjects also helps.

Lock your exposure: The camera will meter the exposure for every shot unless you take a test shot first and then use that exposure setting for the rest of your time-lapse. This will result in an even exposure throughout the video.

Set your image quality: This should be set to low jpg. The images you get from the camera are still going to be high-res enough make a good video. Unless you’re using a blazing fast memory card your camera’s buffer will fill up very fast and this will result in an uneven time interval between shots. The post processing time will also be longer (depending on the computer you’re using) if you shoot full-res images.

All of this will inevitably drain both your TI83′s and the camera’s batteries so use a battery grip on the camera and 4 fully charged AAAs in the calculator. You’re gonna be shooting a lot of images so batteries are important.

All this said, there’s one more thing to consider. A DSLR mirror and shutter mechanism is made to handle a finite number of actuations. Your camera will die on you a lot faster than normal if you run the shutter as much as you need to for time-lapse movies. Use an old backup camera unless you can afford a new body every six months or so.

So what do you do when you come home with a few thousand images for your time-lapse video? Import them into Lightroom. After doing basic color correction on them (saturation and clarity) export them all using the “sharpen for screen” option to a single folder.  You can also resize all your images on export. Then use Apple Quicktime Pro to create a video out of your stills. To do this click on file > open image sequence. Pick the first image in your folder and QT will automatically create a movie from the sequentially numbered images. Think about what frame rate you shot at and what frame rate you want your video to have. On export, click file > export, play with the controls, AVI or Quicktime Movie formats worked best for me. The resulting movie can then be imported into any video editing software, I used Imovie on the Mac.

Here is video I shot today:

Gone swimmin’ from Mileta Nikoletic on Vimeo.

That’s it for today, go out and try this, it’s great fun….

Lately I’ve been swamped with work. Exam time’s creeping up so my focus was there and this created a whole lot of downtime when it comes to my photography. I had very little time to go out and take pictures, and those pictures are still littering my Lightroom catalog waiting to be processed. Nevertheless, downtime doesn’t necessarily need to be time wasted. There are loads of ways to turn downtime into time invested in collecting ideas for new shoots, for the website and the blog.

Twitter

First of all, I know twitter hasn’t really taken off in Sweden, but it’s an amazing tool for photographers. People see twitter as a way to keep up with friends rather than an incredible up to date news source and an informational tool and as such they ask themselves “Should I really have to deal with one more social network?” while refusing to create an account. The flow of information on twitter is insane and the best thing is that instead of actively searching for ideas, links, tutorials and reviews they come to you! So when you know that editing an image will take you a few hours, save that for later and indulge yourself in 15 minutes of typing hashtags into twitter search. Then save those searches and go back to them later for inspiration.

Subscribe to a podcast about photography

Your commute is going to be a whole lot less tedious if you do this. Just like twitter this is a way to let information come to you instead of you spending time to search for it. A lot of photography podcasts are community-based and supply information both from the hosts and the listeners, so that’s a great way to get other people’s opinions and learn about their experiences. Most of them have a website where you can find galleries of user-submitted images and other info. A few also have Flickr groups associated with them so check those out too. All I will say here is Itunes and an Ipod make things like podcast way simpler.

Backup, Backup, Backup

Having a working backup solution is something a lot of people see the importance of, but don’t really get around to doing. With storage costs/MB these day hitting rock bottom there’s very little excuse for not having a mini server farm at home. The minimum is one external hdd that’s kept synced with the internal one you keep your images on. And just because Lightroom does an automatic library backup it still does it on the same drive, so keep a backup of that too on your external hdd. Just to be safe it’s good to have an offsite backup, so dropping off a copy of what you have at home once a months at your aunt’s house (especially if she has a fireproof safe) is a way to go. Alternatively there are various online backup services, which I’m looking forward to trying out.

Setting up a backup disk does not take much time, it’s the initial backup that does, so plug a disk in, set up something like MS SyncToy and go do whatever is on the top of your priorities list.

Organise your LR catalog

This should really be done on import, but if you’re like me and you got into photography before you started using software like LR, then it might be a good time to look through your old work and keyword it properly. Always add at least 3-4 keywords so that you not only get the subject of each photo but also the context or location in which it was taken in every search. Starring and flagging images is also useful. One of the main strengths of software like LR or Aperture is the ability to search by pretty much anything.

Register for competitions

There’s a recent twitter trend that photo competitions get tagged with the hashtag #togcomp. Now there’s one of those ideas where I go “Why have I not thought of that???”. Fire up twitter, search for a competition and submit your best work. If you’ve keyworded/starred/flagged your images it should be easy to find the one you’re looking for. Looking through the submitted images is a great way to get inspired and see how you stack up creatively.

Look into stock photography

Not everyone is of the opinion that stock photography is good for already established photographers or photography as a business. I think that it’s a great tool for improvement and source of inspiration for advanced amateurs. It’s not in any way a get rich quick scheme; for stock photography to be a profitable business you do need to put a lot of time and effort into it, but there’s nothing wrong with getting paid a little for your work. And again, if you keyworded your images right it’s easier to find themed shots to upload.

Canon 50D with 70-200/2.8 L USM

People say “I’m too poor to buy cheap stuff” and there’s a whole lot to be said about that. This is my first L lens and now I know why people sing Canon’s praises when it comes to this wonderful glass. Yeah L lenses cost a lot… but they are absolutely worth it. For anyone even remotely serious about photography, an L lens is a very good step in the right direction.

Toward the end of summer I’m planning a trip to Nordkap, Norway. There’s gonna be a whole lot of nature photography, low flying birds, possibly whales if I manage to fit a whale safari in, moose, deer and loads of open vistas. I have a wide lens for the vistas but I was lacking a telephoto zoom. The 70-200/2.8 fit right in. I decided against the IS version mostly due to the cost and the very positive reviews of the non-IS. I’m probably going to get a 1.4X extender to go with it just to add some more range.

The gist of this is that the USM motor focuses lightning-fast, the images coume out crisp, the colors are clear and maybe on the saturated side of things (at least on my screen), there’s the least possible hint of chromatic abberation even in the most high-contrast of areas and the f 2.8 aperture makes things smooth and bokehlicious. Oh and it ships with a pretty decent lens pouch and a collar for mounting it on a tripod.

I’ve had the lens for 3 days now and I put together a video with some test shots, watch it in HD. I’m not sure if it’s Imovie or Vimeo  but for some reason I haven’t been able to get rid of the pixelation on some images in the video. The images are unedited, I just imported them into LR and the exported as 100% quality .jpg.

Canon 70-200/2.8 L USM from Mileta Nikoletic on Vimeo.

Update:

What can I say… This thing is actually comparable to a prime lens. I get less chromatic aberration than with my 50/1.4 which is pretty unusual for a zoom. The range is also pretty good, Canon must have found a range vs. optical quality sweetspot here. The AF is stunningly fast and after switching to my Sigma 18-200 mm the difference in pretty much everything was very noticeable. The  build quality is the first thing that struck me, the 70-200/2.8L is built like a tank… really. Probably the single best piece of photography gear i have ever bought.