Upgrading my camera

After managing to drown my 50D taking long exposure shots of the sunrise at Baluran National Park in Java Indonesia, it was time to purchase a new camera. Even though I still have my 30D its tiny screen just doesn't cut it anymore, nor does its lack of bells and whistles.

The new mirrorless cameras really do look like the future, and with cameras like Sony's Alpha 7R with the ability to use your old glass from any make of camera (just add adaptor) I almost made the jump. Except for the price.

DSLR prices have reduced drastically in the last few years, probably because mirror technology seems to be an outdated medium. In fact anyone doing live view shooting or video on their SLR is using mirrorless technology. It's only a matter of time before viewing pictures through an optical viewfinder is obsolete, along with all that heavy mirror stuff that makes it possible. Digital viewfinders, so you can still use an eyecup, actually give you the advantage of seeing what your shot will look like, unlike optical, so it's an advantage along with a drastic weight reduction in the camera.

So instead of forking out for a full frame digital mirrorless camera I decided to buy a much cheaper Canon EOS 70D SLR. It literally cost half what I paid for the body of my 50D back in 2009 but I had to buy new batteries and cards (it uses SD cards rather than CF cards) and chargers so that upped the price a little. I think it's a pretty good reflection of where the market is going, but I'll wait a little for the top end of the mirrorless market to steady. Do I really need a full frame camera when half my lenses are optimised for APS-C?

The 70D has lots of features that the mirrorless cameras have, like live view, video and wireless connections to smart phones. You can bet your bottom dollar I'm going to be using these quite a bit, particularly as I also like the way the camera has been configured to get you easy access to these utilities. OK the WiFi set up is pretty gangly, but once you work it out it's not too hard.

I'm loving the live view, especially as the LCD screen folds out, can be tilted around to give you the best view, and allows for better composed shots from the hip. It also has a viewfinder level to correct my chronic off kilter horizons, and I'm particularly looking forward to getting some much crisper shots by utilising not only its improved sensor but the ability to zoom in on the screen to ensure you've got your focus right. Yes, that last bit requires a tripod peeps!

I'm yet to replace my 10-22mm wide angle lens so no long exposures for the time being (the ND filters only fit that lens) so I will be playing around with the camera using other lenses, maybe do a little macro, and experiment with the video. I'll also transfer some images over to the phone and edit them using smartphone apps. I love using Snapseed to edit photos, and having access to some of the files from my SLR with much larger colour spaces should give me a lot more creative freedom.

Photos transferred from the camera to my iPhone are converted to JPG and compressed, so inevitably I lose some quality The big plus is only needing to use one camera at a time to capture shots, but then being able to edit them in different ways ( I'm usually a bit more creative with my Snapseed edits than my Lightroom edits) on different devices. It means that I don't need to take an extra shot with the iPhone, and can utilise the optics of a wide angle or telephoto lens rather than the digital zoom on the phone. Both the above photos were taken with my iPhone, but I took many more with the SLR at the same time.

Like everyone, I sometimes want to shoot off a quick shot to Facebook to share, something I couldn't do with the old SLR without importing and editing through LR. So I'll take a few iPhone shots instead. They're usually rushed, and not great quality as a result. I'm much more careful with my SLR shots. Even though it will take longer than continuing to rush off some shots, having the option to transfer shots from my 70D to my phone for uploading to Facebook means my pictures should take a great leap in quality. Of course this requires a little self discipline...

There's also the option to connect wirelessly to the internet and to my computer, but since I wish to edit my photos first, and not tie myself to Canon's EOS utility software, I think I'll just keep to my usual workflow of download into LR, edit and publish. Except for my Snapseed photos, which I often publish direct to the web from my smartphone. So I'll stick with just smartphone connectivity for now.

I'm also working out how to do time-lapse using the smartphone as controller. Watch this space...

Long exposure photography

In keeping with a previous post, I've been spending a bit of time working on long exposure shots. Mostly of moving water in streams and small cascades, as well as ocean shots at twilight.

It's trial and error, because the amount of exposure time needed depends on the water flow as well as whether the sun is shining or not. It's much better to have the sun behind clouds for these stream shots so you don't get harsh highlights and shadows.

Of course a tripod is a necessity. A good sturdy strong one. Water and cameras don't mix!

All these photos were taken with my Canon 50D body and 10-22mm EF-S lens. Using neutral density filters. The ISO was set at 100, but apertures and exposure times were really variable. From 3 seconds to 30 seconds! There's no easy way to work out what's the right exposure, though I do use the in camera light meter to give me a guide. After all, you're trying to create something that you can't see - a picture of light in motion - so only practice gets you there.

I'm working with two different neutral density filters at present. One is the Tiffen Variable ND filter which gives you a bit of flexibility in controlling the light coming through the lens, between 2 to 8 stops, which means you can try a bunch of different timed exposures to find the right look. I found this filter particularly useful for running water shots.

The second filter is the previously mentioned Hoya NDX400, which is one dark piece of glass, and awesome for those silky long sunrise shots over the ocean.

The final thing that happened not long after this shot was captured was a wave toppled my tripod and flooded/ ruined my camera. Perhaps I hadn't stabilised it as well as I thought I had - it was certainly a rather unpleasant surprise.

So I'll soon be the proud owner of a new Canon 70D!!

Photography Workflow

Recently I returned from a 2 month backpacking trip around Java in Indonesia. Usually when I backpack I don't take a laptop, but on this trip I did, because I wanted to trial my photography editing workflow whilst on the road. I wanted to see whether I could do everything I do at home from anywhere, i.e. be location independent. And the answer to that question is resoundingly yes!

A while back I talked about management of files, and although I still haven't worked through my backlog of photos I am at least being more organised with my new photos. And sticking to one system. So I thought I'd describe my system and how it differs when I'm on the road.

Let's start with the basics. My home computer is a Macbook Air 256Gb SSD drive which I bought in 2011. It's pretty fast, but I'll probably soon update to a newer MBA with USB 3.0 ports and a larger SSD drive. For now, it serves its purpose well and is wonderfully light for travelling with. Same computer for home and the road.

Because the MBA only carries 256Gb of storage all my photographs are stored on an external hard drive. At home my main external drive is a mains powered 1.5Tb Seagate drive using the Seagate GoFlex thunderbolt adaptor. This means I can use any SATA drive, connect it to the adaptor and I have fast thunderbolt connectivity. It's quite a neat system, just not portable for backpacking.

Instead, when travelling, I use a Lacie 1Tb Rugged external drive. This is USB powered, and since the MBA only has USB 2.0 it can't take advantage of the faster USB 3.0 it's made for. It's still fast enough though. The latest Lacie Ruggeds now have thunderbolt connectivity and cables - at a heftier price tag though...

Prior to travelling I clone the drives, and clone back on my return. For this I use Superduper. I also use Superduper to clone my MBA hard drive every few days so I have a backup OS should the MBA die. At home I use a second external hard drive that the MBA is cloned onto, so I need to do the same thing on the road.

Now at home I also use another external hard drive to backup to Time Machine, and another to store all my RAW files to a second location should I lose the photos on the external hard drive. This equates to four separate hard drives, with lots of redundancy. FWIW I also do another copy of my pictures for storage elsewhere, like if the house burnt down or something.

For travel, I'm not going to carry a whole bunch of external hard drives, so instead I've partitioned one 1 TB WD hard drive to carry the clone of my OS, Time machine, and the RAW files. And a fourth partition for any extra storage I'd like to bring or use. GoPro footage for instance. Of course if this hard drive fails I lose all my redundancy in one fell swoop, but it's only redundancy remember, not the main files or OS, so I can clone again with a brand new drive. This means I only need to travel with 2 small external hard drives.

This setup allows me to continue the same workflow as at home, which goes like this:

I import all my photos into Lightroom using custom presets. My custom presets use the same naming protocol - I use dates and timestamps - and all apply copyrighting meta data on import. They only differ in a few different ways based on camera and destination.

The first custom preset I have is for iPhone photos. Since these photos are JPGs I simply copy them from the phone into Lightroom and don't make a second copy elsewhere. The custom preset already determines the location, and simply needs to be edited to the new location hard drive the first time I travel (the Lacie), and then on my return (back to the Seagate). Because the files on the hard drives are identical I don't need to change the destination folders within the catalogue, as Lightroom is able to be redirected to the new hard drive quite easily.

The second custom preset is for RAW photos. Because there are 2 different hard drives involved - one for the main import and one for the second RAW copy - I have 2 different presets. One is called "RAW imports", the other called "RAW imports while travelling". The first converts my RAW photos to Digital Negatives (DNGs, the generic, non proprietal form of RAW photos), imports them onto the main external drive (the Seagate), and stores a second copy of the RAW files on a second hard drive.
The second preset does exactly the same thing, but imports the DNGs to the Lacie, and the RAW copies to the partitioned hard drive. So as long as I use the correct import reset, I just connect the hard drives and I'm away.

This is where having such a good program like Lightroom makes its purchase so worthwhile.  The fact that one can switch hard drives with such ease and the software can recognise it (sure you have to show it where it is, it doesn't do it automatically), means travel and maintaining the same workflow is a breeze. I can not say the same for some other programs I've used, yes I'm looking at you iMovie!!

So, once the photos are imported, I can select and edit those photos I wish to keep and then publish them to a selection of websites. Each new iteration of Lightroom seems to get better at this end of the workflow, and these days there's a plethora of plug ins that allow you to publish photos directly to many popular photo sharing and social networks. In the past you needed to export the photos to a file on your computer and then upload them individually or in batches onto your selected website. Or upload directly from the camera, unedited, which is what I used to do before. Now, that can all be done within Lightroom.

The main website I use is Picasa, because that's connected to my blogs, but I also use Flickr and Facebook. Without leaving Lightroom I create a new album on my Picasa webpage, put the photos into that new album (it's actually a smart collection within Lightroom so not using up precious hard drive space either) and then when I'm ready I just click the publish button and it all happens. It's a fairly similar process for the other websites as well.

For travel, I only need to be connected to the internet at 2 times during this publish process. I need to be online to create the album in the first place, and of course I need to be online to actually upload the photos. But I don't need to be connected to edit and stock the album, meaning I can pick and choose what I want to publish at my leisure and should I decide to re edit a photo I can republish the new edit next time I'm connected to the internet. In the past, travelling without a computer, uploading a huge amount of unedited photos took a lot of time at internet cafes, because I didn't have the luxury of editing as I went. I guess I now spend that time on the laptop in my room instead, but I end up saving a lot of money and being a lot more ruthless with my photography - both great things! And with wireless technology I can now take advantage of cheaper internet usage rates, like between midnight and 9am in Indonesia, to do all my large file uploading.

So, that's my workflow in a nutshell.

Happy editing!!

Using a Neutral Density Filter

Since my last post I have indeed been shooting exclusively in manual mode. I've played with changing the ISO, the aperture and the shutter speed to get a well exposed shot, and although I haven't taken any pictures worth bragging about, I have learnt a lot and believe I'm taking better exposed pictures as a result.

I can highly recommend going fully manual, you will really get to understand your exposures so much better.

Ever since I began trying to take long exposure shots of waterfalls I've been coveting a neutral density filter. The problem with taking longer exposures of white water is that although you get the silky look, the white tends to be over exposed. Which is where the neutral density filter comes in.

A neutral density filter is like a pair of sunglasses. It reduces the amount of light coming through the lens, therefore allowing a longer exposure - to get the silky movement - without blowing out the highlights. The filters come in various strengths, depending on how many stops down of light they block.

I have a variable ND filter on order, but at present am working with a Hoya NDX400 which is effectively a 9 stop filter. This filter is considered the grand daddy of ND filters and came with a hefty price tag, but hey, it's Christmas right? It's also summer, so no waterfalls anywhere near me at present. Lots of ocean and sunsets though.

I had to head up to Carnarvon for a teaching session, so I threw the swag in the car and headed north on Thursday, stopping in at Gladstone for the night. This is an old loading jetty on Shark Bay, now disused and falling apart, but the shallow waters of Shark Bay make for a good subject for my first attempt at a long exposure shot with the filter.

The following photo was taken at f/18 for 30 sec, ISO 100 using my EFS 10-22mm lens at 10mm. Without the ND filter this would just be white. I've done some post processing to bring out some of the colours.

Comments always appreciated.

Going manual

It has been a while...

It isn't that I haven't been taking photos, I have, or that I haven't been thinking about taking better photos, I have, it's just I haven't posted anything. This blog is supposed to be a journey, and well, I've been a little stagnant...

Recently I returned from a 3 month trip to New Zealand, the home of drop dead gorgeous landscape scenery, so I've been pretty snap happy. Both the SLR and the iPhone got a good workout, as did the GoPro, and I've got some fantastic images. But I realised that I was struggling a lot with getting the right exposures, so on my return I've hit the books and decided to start from square one.

I'm going manual.

This means setting the camera to manual settings and working out my exposure by fiddling dials. I've ISO, aperture and shutter time to play with (I'm leaving the focus on automatic for the time being) and I'm basically learning how my camera works. It also helps to read the manual it came with. Duh!!

I've set the histogram to blink when I blow the highlights or there's too much black, and I'm using a 50mm prime lens to take some of the complexity away.

I've pulled out my old Canon EOS 30D for this exercise, but am unsure whether I'll keep with it. The shutter button has quite a delay on it, which is weird, and may well be the reason I upgraded to a 50D in the first place. Won't hurt me to persist for a few days anyway.

I've tended to stay on aperture priority unless I'm taking moving water shots, so I need to get out of that rut and experiment a bit. I'll post some pictures next weekend.

Happy shooting :)

Gadgets, apps and smart phones

I have never been a great fan of mobile phones because I actually like not being contactable. Perhaps because I spent so much of my early working life attached to a pager!

Then along came smart phones. It took me a little while to join the crowd, but when I was having battery problems with my old phone, and needed a new point and shoot camera after my Nikon Coolpix disappeared, I decided to upgrade. I bought an iPhone 4S because its camera got such a good review, and well, the rest is history....

I predict that point and shoot cameras will soon be obsolete. With a smart phone you can take great photos, use apps to edit them, and then share them online within minutes. Oh yeah, and you can make calls and text on it too!

My iPhone takes fantastic quality shots. Last year on my ski trip to NZ I left the SLR behind and just took the iPhone. It felt snug in an inside pocket of my ski jacket, I could listen to music whilst skiing, and could pull it out for those memorable shots.

Then add apps. Until I got my smart phone I didn't understand what all this excitement about apps was about. It didn't take me long to find out, and soon I was downloading all sorts of stuff from the iTunes store! And so cheap compared with add on software for computers!

But it can be a bit overwhelming. A great resource I found was an eBook on iPhone photography that informed me regarding what apps are available. Did you know you don't have to use the photo taking software that comes with your phone? That you can use apps that allow you to control the focus and exposure, and that allow you to take photos just by tapping the screen? And then there's editing options. You've heard of Instagram, but there's a myriad of other free and not so free apps out there to edit your photos. And some awesome photo-stitching apps as well. The photo heading up this blog? It's a panorama taken from eight photos at Mt Hutt ski field in New Zealand with my iPhone and then stitched together and cropped. Not bad hey?

Your smart phone has other uses too. Like when you are using your SLR instead and would like to have a few tools at your fingertips. The Photographer's Ephemeris is something I'm only just starting to use, but it's a great tool for planning the best time to take a photo at a particular location. It uses GPS coordinates and times of sun and moon rise and set, so you can plan to be at the right place at the right time for your perfect photo. I'm not quite in that league yet, but the tool's there, just saying. And it's on your phone in your pocket any time you need it.

Another app I like to have, and am using quite a lot with macro photography, is Depth of Field Calc. I upgraded from the free app, which allows me to plug in what camera I'm using, and then customise focal length, distance to subject and f-stop to determine the depth of field of the shot I'm about to take. It can take the trial and error out of setting up a shot. In the old days people had paper charts, now you have an app in your pocket with customisable options. Awesome!

But say you only have an iPhone and want to take macro shots? All credit where it's due, many of the point & shoot cameras were strong here, but all is not lost, because you can get a gadget for that! I've got an Olloclip, but there's a few other gadgets out there that do the same job. The Olloclip allows you to do macro, wide-angle and fisheye, adding alot of creative fun to your iPhone photos.

Here's a few shots to show you what a wee iPhone, an Olloclip, and some apps can achieve.

Fisheye

Macro

Sun and moon

perfect reflections

And one last thing. How often do you use your SLR to take self portraits?

Management 101

Don't know about you, but I've got about 6 or 7 years worth of digital files, and another 30 odd years of film stock sitting around gathering dust. And a pretty poor management system.

Whether starting up, mid flight, or just staring down a pile from the past, I doubt there's anyone out there who hasn't thought to themselves "I've gotta have a system for this". Well lucky for us there's enough OCD types out there in geek land who have developed systems for us!!

I'm now working from a Mac, and am in the process of collating my past files from numerous sources, consolidating them, and backing them up. I'm just going to talk about digital files today.

The software I use is Lightroom.

The reasons:

1. It is a database. If I import all my photos into the LR catalog I can do all my renaming inside the catalog and the catalog finds my photos when I go looking for them. All file management is done from inside the application. One place does it all, and every new version just gets better!

2. It's backup friendly. I actually purchased Lightroom outright, but an alternative these days is to join the Adobe Cloud and get access to the software (in fact all their creative software applications) for a monthly subscription, meaning should you need to reinstall the application you can. If you haven't already set up your own backup that is! Lightroom allows you to backup your catalog - for which most people utilise cloud services like Dropbox - and your photos to a second location. And you can set this all up to occur automatically using preferences and presets.

3. It's intuitive. Look I've struggled with Photoshop for years and I just find all the switches and toggles, layers and masks, brushes and smart filters incredibly overwhelming. I don't understand how to use them and I'm scared I'll do something destructive. I've even bought books and tutorials but it's just got too many bells and whistles for a girl who's just a photographer. Lightroom, OTOH, is completely non destructive and can now do pretty much everything for photographs that Photoshop used to. The way the graduating filter and adjustment brushes work make so much more sense to me. It still can't do HDR or photo stitching but there's good software available to go to for them anyway. Editing really is very easy, and if you make a mistake, you just reset or go back a few steps. And you can make multiple virtual copies from the one photo which I think is awesome.

4. You can do slideshows, make books and upload your pictures directly to online photosharing sites. Be it Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Picasa, Smugmug, there's a plugin available so you can publish your edited collections straight to your online accounts, without having to export them and then upload them manually. And if you then re-edit a photo, it'll republish the edited photo for you! How's that for saving you precious time?

I'm afraid I've never seen Aperture, which is really the only other viable competition, but with a history of PC and Premiere Pro use for my video work, I'm sticking with the Adobe platform, which these days is fully Mac compatible. I've actually heard alot of Aperture fans have moved to LR because of its superior data management system, but I'm making no comparisons, just saying what I use and why.

So you have a nice little application, now you've got to use it properly. Let me give you a few tips.

1. Don't go moving your files around, renaming them or whatever, outside the application. You want to show someone some of your photos? Open LR, find the photos and start a slideshow. It'll take less than a minute to set up and if you've got a good data management system, you'll find the photos really easy.

2. Develop a workflow and stick with it. Naming your files in one consistent way. Adding keywords and location metadata to your files makes them so much easier to find. Learning how to use the filters to find your photos helps of course, and you do have to put in a bit of hard yakka initially to make the database work its magic for you. But because Lightroom allows you to make presets, and remembers what you do often, you get faster and faster at the data entry as you go. Use smart collections to track your progress through the workflow. You want to know where you are along the treadmill, how many photos you've yet to keyword, or edit, or upload to your preferred photosharing site.

3. If you have a system, this job doesn't seem insurmountable. No system and it's a source of ever mounting anxiety. Trust me, get a system!

Let me introduce you to Gavin Gough. Don't know the man but if I ever meet him I'd give him the biggest hug and kiss for publishing not only an eBook, but also a bunch of presets and smart collections that I can use to instantly have a fully functional workflow. Not quite instant, it probably takes a day to read the book and set up Lightroom before you're ready to go, but a day!!! Not bad work for years of barely restrained panic at the sight of those thousands of photos banking up.

You can find Gavin's book here. Use code photowork33Jan to get a 33% discount till the end of January.

Oh, and what he has to say about backing up your files, do it!! I mean, external hard drives are so cheap these days it's a no brainer.