DVPhoto

BLOGGER WANTED! Are you obsessed with cameras, lenses, and other photo gear? Do you know damn near everything there is to know about photo equipment? Do you have strong opinions and are eager to sound off? …
…It’s a freelance gig; the pay isn’t much; but the potential for perks, fame, and the future are amazing. …

Popular Photography want bloggers! While I don’t think I’ll even bother applying, since I don’t write nearly well enough, or regularly enough; I’m sure some of you out there must be interested.

Well I finally placed the order for those Gadget Infinity v2 remotes last night. Strobist have a first look at them today, and it seems that they work okay. Not perfectly, but well enough that they provide very good value for money.

I’ll try get a review out soon after I get mine; hopefully the combination of my 350D and cheap ass Phoenix ZBIS-92C TTL flash works fine.

I’ve been reading quite a lot of blog posts lately about such things as, Who Qualifies As A Photographer?, and Philosophy of Photography: Photograph versus a Snapshot. These are questions that I’m sure have been asked since shortly after a second person made themselves a light tight box and started making images. However, during times of upheaval in the photographic world, I think these questions are naturally asked more often; and the times we find ourselves in now, with not only the digital revolution happening, but online communities making it easier than ever before for even the lowliest of photographers to be seen, must surely qualify as being in upheaval. It is because of this that we are hearing more often than ever before, the question: Are Digital Cameras destroying photography? I have to say no, they are not.

Now I posted a quote a while back in a post to do with the micro-stock market, and it went:

…created an army of photographers who run rampant over the globe, photographing objects of all sorts, sizes and shapes, under almost every condition, without ever pausing to ask themselves, is this or that artistic? …They spy a view, it seems to please, the camera is focused, the shot taken! There is no pause, why should there be? For art may err but nature cannot miss, says the poet, and they listen to the dictum. To them, composition, light, shade, form and texture are so many catch phrases…^,

It was only slight apt in that post, now it is perfect. Of course it was about dry plate photography, the new process that was rapidly replacing wet plate colloidal photography at the time. Roll film replaced it soon after as the new “too easy” format, and years later 35mm (and a number of other smaller formats at the time) replaced roll film as the film of choice for the amateur. Every step of the way, users of the previous formats looked on in disdain at the newer formats and their users. If it wasn’t “destroying photography”, that was only because it “wasn’t actual photography”. Every step of the way, taking a photo became just a little bit easier, a whole lot cheaper, and even more accessible to the average person. A fact that irks the established photographers who feel they had to learn things the hard way while these newcomers don’t even try to learn at all. It is of course understandable; seeing people doing something you love with so little actual knowledge hurts, in any field of study.

I don’t think that this actually hurts photography. Sure the percentage of people out there, snapping away happily, never knowing what aperture or f-stop means, has grown exponentially in the last few years; but I think that the number of truly good photographers is growing rapidly as well. Photography is more than just knowing the technical details of your camera and how it works, a lot of it requires an eye that can see the image before it is taken; something that isn’t easy to learn. I believe there are many people out there these days taking amazing photos, who would have never even tried 10 years back. They have the eye, the artistic ability; they just don’t have the ability (or desire) to learn all the technical details.

I’m a technical person, while I had learnt on old camera’s a child, I’d spent a long enough time away from photography to have forgotten pretty much everything. When I got back into photography I immediately went digital. Since I am technical by nature, I immediately set out to learn every technical detail of taking a photo; f-stops, aperture, ISO, shutter speed, etc. Within a very short period of time I knew exactly what I needed to do, to gain a certain effect; and yet, in my opinion, most of my photos still lack something. My ability to see a shot, envision it as a print up on the wall, was and is still limited. I’ll learn and develop (I hope), over time, and I’ll have fun doing it; if I had started photography 50 years ago, it would be the same, if slightly slower. However for the technically inept (no matter how good an eye they might have had), learning photography, until recently, must have been a truly daunting task. Now they can continue to take photos and learn, slowly, over time. At least now they have a chance to produce something beautiful.

Most cameras have a built in flash, and most aspiring photographers learn quite quickly just how horrible the results from this flash can be. A little research on the web will of course teach our aspiring photographer that the absolute minimum to get some decent results is either off camera flash, or more often bounce flash.This gives
a
softer more
natural light

Bounce flash is when the light of the flash unit is bounced off the ceiling (or nearby wall) onto the person/object being photographed. This gives a softer light, coming from a more natural position. You’re subjects will now look like they are standing under normal lighting, and not caught in the headlights of an oncoming 18 wheeler.

Now if you buy any modern flash unit, it will almost certainly have bounce capability (and swivel if you want to bounce of walls, or the ceiling when using it in portrait mode). Yet perhaps you don’t have the cash for a separate flash unit, or you just don’t like the bulk it adds to your camera; yet you still want to use bounce flash. Well it’s pretty simple really; and cheap.

Tin foil.

Just take a piece of tin foil and hold it in front of the camera’s flash, at about a 45 degree angle to the ceiling. With a DSLR, the tin foil can be moulded to fit around the pop up flash, meaning you don’t even have to worry about holding it. Now of course the flash is going to have to travel a little bit more distance, and tin foil isn’t perfectly reflective, so you will have slightly less light; but that’s still better than giving your subject a deer in the headlights look.

Of course if you don’t mind spending a bit of cash, you might want to let someone else do all the work and just purchase The Scoop from Professor Kobré

Win a
Canon
1Ds MKII
from CrestockThe Crestock Photography Contest 2007 is open, and the prizes are definitely worth a look. Broken into three rounds, the prizes are as follows: a Leica D-LUX 3 for round 1, a Nikon D40x plus PhotoShop CS3 for round 2, and the big one, the Canon 1Ds MK II for round 3! Yes that is a 1Ds MKII, with a 50mm f1.4L lens to go with it.

The theme for round 1 is “the Meaning of Life”, with submissions starting 2 days ago, and ending on the 7th of May. Round 2 has “Feeling Sexy?” as its theme, with submissions starting on the 7th of May and ending on the 21st of the same month. The final round, with the biggest prize, is “Speed Demon”. It opens for submission at the end of round 2, and ends on the 4th of June.

The rules as well as the terms and conditions appear to be quite fair; which is nice, given the number of competitions these days that have ridiculous rights grab language in the fine print.

Once each round is finished, the voting starts. Voting lasts for the length of the next round, and until the 18th of June for round 3. Unfortunately, the winners are determined by 50% of the public vote, and 50% the judges. Unfortunately I say, since this will probably give people with popular blogs and image galleries a huge advantage. One “Vote for My Image” post and they will surge ahead regardless of the quality of the submitted photo. Still, it looks to be an interesting contest, and hopefully the best images will win, even if they aren’t posted by the most popular photographers.

Oh yes, and look at the list of judges. Some very good photoblog owners in that list.

Now this is a monster camera!

What the Duck today is well worth the read.

WTD 199

Without hard guidelines people will alter important new content, either by intention or innocent ignorance. Alteration is simply too easy and too useful, either for reasons of aesthetics or agenda.

A very good post on T.O.P. titled Don’t Make News. A take on the recent furore on edited newspaper photos, with some interesting points that might not be immediately obvious.

You are very limited in the lighting effects you can get from your built in flash. It’s fine for those party pics, but beyond that you’re going to need to get something better. Maybe you buy a decent hot shoe attachable flash; something that can bounce the light off the ceiling, perhaps even with ttl so you don’t have to think too much about setting the flash power. Now you can do some slightly more interesting lighting, peoples faces will actually have depth and shape instead of just being flattened with a straight on blast of light. Now of course, to be able to do some lighting from off camera flashes would be nice, so what are your options?So what
is
there that
a poor amateur
can use?

Well being on a budget, a very tight budget, I decided to go with cheap optical slave flashes. Not very powerful, yet quite cheap, and so far reliable; these slave flashes opened up a whole new world of lighting for me. Suddenly I could easily light objects from behind and the side, I could apply modifiers to each light source (though not many due to the lack of power), I had fun. Yet I still had to use an on camera flash to be the optical master, this placed some limits on what I could do. So obviously some wireless flash system was required. So what were the options?

Well, Canon’s flash line up have wireless capability if you are buying the 580ex or their ST-E2 transmitter, but B&H’s 2×580ex + ST-E2 kit at $959.95 is a way to much for me. And of course their system only works with Canon flashes, so I’d be limited to that in the future. There is of course the Pocket Wizards, that I would definitely go with if I were a pro and doing this as my job. I am not a pro though, and the $400 or so I’d have to pay to just remotely trigger one flash, is certainly not worth it. So what is there that a poor amateur can use?

Well there are the Gadget Inifinity remotes. At $29.95, these are much more in my price range. I was a bit worried about their reliability, though the general consensus on the internet is that they are pretty good considering the price; not something a pro would want, but perfect for an amateur. Some misfiring occurs, and the range is very short. However, they are easily modified to increase the range (and even if you break one, at $29.95, who cares). And now apparently they have a version 2 out. It’s not backward compatible with the old remotes, the price you pay for buying cheap I guess (Pocket Wizards maintain backwards compatibility with their products, they have to at that price!).

Well, I think I’m going to bite the bullet, and purchase some of those cheap remotes next payday.

Wired has an article up about how adobe plans to tackle photo forgeries. The tools they are working on? A clone stamp detection tool, a tool that will determine the camera used to take an image, and most interestingly, a tool that will check if a photo has been changed at all. This final tool manages this due to the demosaicing that bayer array cameras have to do when processing the image. Apparently this causes a colour relationship between neighbouring pixels that will most likely be destroyed when the photo is edited in Photoshop.

Since all these tools will use statistical methods to determine the authenticity of a photo, there will always be a number of false positives. Adobe are aware that this is a problem, and are going to continue working on the tools for the next 1 to 3 years before releasing them to the world, in an attempt to minimise the percentage of errors. Still no matter how good the tool are, it is likely they will return false positives now and again, so I hope the editors realise this and don’t just automatically assume the photographer is dishonest when the tools say so.