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:

]]> http://milnikphoto.com/blog/powerboat-world-championship/feed/ 0 http://milnikphoto.com/blog/squvalp/ http://milnikphoto.com/blog/squvalp/#comments Mon, 17 May 2010 12:17:15 +0000 Mileta Nikoletic http://milnikphoto.com/blog/?p=915 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:

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.

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.

Simple huh? Well, no. Packing a photo bag is actually hard work, you have to know where every little thing is and have it easily accessible. If you’re driving your bag is gonna spend most of its time in the back seat of a car while you’re in the front so it needs to be packed so that you can one-handedly pick things out of it.

The general idea when you pack photo gear is to take as much as you can with you. Have two sets of bags, one to get the gear to wherever you are (say your hotel room) and the other to lug just the gear you need for a particular shoot. I couldn’t afford this luxury since the one bag I had, had to fit into the overhead compartment of the plane I was flying back on.

If you watch the video you’ll see that I stress the point of having as many lens cloths as you could possibly carry. This is good practice in any case but is especially important when shooting close to salty water or in areas where the prevailing winds blow in from the sea. Salt water tends to leave a sticky oily film on lenses which is really hard to get rid off. I tend to carry sensor cleaning equipment with me. It’s useful in case a major dust spot arises, but I don’t rely on it to thoroughly clean my sensor when away from home unless i’m certain that I have a nice dust-free environment I can work with.

Another point is to have a way to keep track of memory cards which have been filled up. I tend to put them back into the card compartments in my bag facing label down if the card  is full. Taking backups is a must here…i’ve never had a CF card die on me but i’m convinced it’ll happen one day. Even if I didn’t fill up my memory cards one particular day I tried to dump them onto my laptop once a day, since there I was creating two copies of everything  on separate hard-drives. This meant that I grabbed every possible chance I could to charge  whatever gadgets I had with me.

So that’s been my gear strategy, feel free to share yours…

Here’s the video:

Valletta is a city meant for street photography. The long straight streets, the multitude of people and again the texture of fortified walls surrounding it lend themselves to a whole lot of great images. Old stuff just has so much character that adds a soul to an image and Valletta is just that… old. There is also the cultural factor, considering cultural sites of interest per square kilometer the Valletta harbor area is probably one of the richest sites in the world.

The rest of the island is interesting too. The cliffs to the south-west, the hills and valleys to the north and the numerous fortifications sprinkled over the entire island just beg to end up on a wall as a large canvas print. All this said Malta is a large piece of limestone. There are pretty much no wild animals there, well maybe aside from a few rabbits, lizards and a host of migratory birds on their way to or from whatever warm place they fly to in winter. Malta would probably be paradise to  underwater photographers, but for us who prefer dry land under our feet wildlife photography is out of the question.

One thing I didn’t really think about  was how dark nights get there in summer. This is mostly because you can still pull a lot of detail from a handheld iso 200 shot at night here in Sweden, summer nights up here in the north are all but dark. In Malta, a tripod at night is pretty much a necessity if you’re looking for even a little sharpness. This is where my Gorillapod came in handy.

I flew Ryanair and expected a lot of fuss for carrying a large camera given that their TOS explicitly says that one piece of hand luggage means just that. Cargo pants were the solution here although I got some weird looks at the security checkpoint for taking 15 minutes to empty my pockets.

Here are some more images I shot in Malta:

]]> http://milnikphoto.com/blog/malta-limestone-sea-and-really-really-bad-drivers/feed/ 0 http://milnikphoto.com/blog/the-early-bird-photowalk/ http://milnikphoto.com/blog/the-early-bird-photowalk/#comments Sat, 18 Jul 2009 20:38:51 +0000 Mileta Nikoletic http://milnikphoto.com/blog/?p=532 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.

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….

The walk I signed up for is a bit of a special one (click here for the website). It’s even got a very fitting name, the Early Bird Photowalk, because it starts right at the crack of dawn, at 4 am (sunrise that day should b at 4:03 am).

Stockholm is a really beautiful city, and that beauty doesn’t disappear at night. The element of a sunrise should only make the images better. I’ve walked around the centre of Stockholm so many times now that it’s becoming hard to pick out something new and interesting to photograph, so this in itself will be a challenge. Seeing things in different lighting conditions than what I’m used to might make easier. This’ll be a chance to try out new techniques on subjects I’ve already covered. The do-it-yourself custom bokeh seems like something fun to try especially in combination with timelapse. Painting with light is another neat thing I’m considering. As far as the weather’s concerned, I’m almost hoping for something out of the ordinary. Mist would be great to shoot at dawn because it’ll diffuse the city lights and make the scene look surreal.

Here’s a small selection of my earlier Centre of Stockholm at night shots:

All that said, I’ll write a wrap-up post and post some photos from the walk after July 18th.