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Archive for the ‘Video’ Category

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:

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.

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…

Following my short lived attempt at using a flash in a remotely creative manner comes attempt nr 2, now wireless!

I picked up the Elinchrom Skyport universal remote trigger kit from Fotovideo in Stockholm. For the price (1695 SEK) it seemed to be the best thing going, with its ability to group flashes. Canon’s own remote triggering system works Canon’s flashes, which can all be run as slaves so no receiver units are needed, but this system is based on IR. The Skyport is based on radio and is better in sunlight or when a flash isn’t positioned in a line of sight from the camera.  An in-depth review and a few test images are coming in a futre post. So far after 2 days of searching i’m just happy to have found a 2.5 mm to 3.5 mm mono adapter without which this trigger wouldn’t work…

I know I should have posted this before my trip but I simply did not have time. The truth is I was too busy trying to find a way to pack my photo bag and deciding what to take. My starting point was simple, one bag for all the camera gear, that I could carry as cabin luggage on the flight back. I had to have a laptop with me and I had to have 2 copies of all my raw files I downloaded to it. I didn’t care too much about having a backup of my Lightroom library since I wasn’t planning to do editing on the road. I had to be able to charge everything from a wall socket as well as a 12V cigarette lighter socket in a car since most of the trip was to be spent driving and I had to be able to use AA batteries in at least one of my camera bodies.

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:

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….

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.

I’ve been reading the Strobist blog lately and going through the heaps of strobist groups on flickr. The quality and creativity of some of these images is pretty astounding.

So I decided to play around with off-camera flash. Lack of equipment was an issue to start off with. I had to get the speedlite off the camera. There are many ways to do that, and I won’t go into that here (the Strobist blog is where to look that up). I  decided to go with the el-cheapo solution (hotshoe adapter and pc cable) since I’m still learning, I’ll eventually upgrade to radio triggers. For about 300SEK/30€ I managed to get an adapter and 5m of  cable… yeah…that’s a lot of cable when you’re trying to work and not tripping over it was a bit of a challenge. Right there I began to see the advantages of radio triggers. You can run multiple strobes with this setup using splitter-cables but that involves even more mess.

The flash was run in manual mode and correct exposure was achieved through a now pretty much standard trial and error method. To go with the whole water theme used a blue gel. I tried several positions for the strobe. What worked best for the shots of drops was to lay the flash down almost parallel to the table but point it up just a little bit to give more light to the contours of the glass. The fill light was provided by the on-camera flash dialed 2 stops down. I’ve also tried reflecting the light off the sheet of glass that my subject was on with some pretty decent results. The wine glass was shot with the strobe dialed down to 1/32 and placed right of the glass, directly under it and looking up.  The setup is in the video. On a sidenote, I really need a better video camera, the LG Viewty, even though it shoots 120fps video just isn’t enough.

Here are some images:

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Things to think about:

A smooth non-reflective background is key. The cardboard I used had too much of a texture and I had to pull the blacks all the way town in LR for the black background to look smooth and black. Next time I’m gonna try a black sheet, sure it has a texture but I don’t think it’ll reflect as much.

Timing, at least for water drops, is everything. Maybe I’m just  uncoordinated but using a straw as a way to drip water into a glass is tedious and inaccurate. Next time I’ll try a pipette.

This is a trivial one…wash the glass properly. The clone/heal tools work wonders but not using them saves time.

As I was failing to time my shots properly I began to think about some kind of sound trigger, where the camera would be left in complete darkness with the shutter open and the flash would only trigger when say a drop hit the water. That however is  a story for another post, when I’ve had time to figure out how to build one of these triggers.