LensMonger

Low light photography. Not easy, but not impossible

derrick — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 00:13:17 +0000

As somebody who hates flash^*, this is a subject near to my heart. Harry Benson, known among other things for his photos in the immediate aftermath of Robert Kennedy’s assassination, offers tips on using natural light in dimly lit environments. It’s mostly common sense. Shoot in aperture priority mode, use a fast (insanely fast, in the case of his 50mm 1.2 prime) lens, utilize the light that’s available to the best possible effect and, perhaps most importantly, don’t be afraid. Still a good read. Two things he doesn’t mention; things that are equally obvious; Use image stabilization if you have it and the single most important tip: use a tripod if it’s even a little bit viable.

(New York Times)

^*: And by “hate” I mean “doesn’t know how to use very well at all.”

The Impossible Project May Be Just That

derrick — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 07:46:05 +0000

The Impossible Project had 31.536.000 seconds to re-invent Instant Photography. Big countdown. Big announcement imminent. Then, nothing. Reports are in that the new instant film may never see the light of day. What’s the holdup? Nobody knows, but the news doesn’t sound good. The project “encountered an unexpected problem with one of the components vital for production,” says a spokeswoman. “This undesirable fact is now engaging all of the Impossible team’s attention and is forcing a rescheduling of the project’s timetable. As such, the NYC press event on 22nd February has to be postponed.” That would make the timing of Polaroid’s announcement of a new line of instant cameras rather unfortunate.^*

^*: It’s worth noting that Polaroid isn’t really Polaroid any more. Polaroid went bankrupt in 2001 and its assets were liquidated. A bank bought them and created a new corporation to exploit the name and technology. This group licensed its name to everything it could extract a dime for, stopped making film and cameras and went bankrupt in 2008 after its parent company turned out to be a four billion dollar ponzi scheme. The Polaroid assets, including its fine art photography collection, were auctioned off to some company nobody’s ever heard of for two pittances and a goat. This company, PLR IP Holdings, intends to recoup its investments by auctioning off the right to use the name Polaroid to different companies for different applications, including gaming peripherals and USB speakers. The right to slap a Polaroid logo on instant cameras went to the Summit Global Group, and they’re the people who thought it would be a good idea to create a new instant Polaroid camera that would use the Impossible Project’s possibly impossible instant film.

It’s not the Camera!

Blake — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 02:46:45 +0000

I have a nice Nikon Digital SLR and it has a lot of buttons, lots and lots of buttons combined with so many menu settings that I am still finding new options. This camera takes an amazing technically stunning photograph. There are two questions that I ponder on. Do I take a stunning photograph? Is that particular photograph improved with all the technological wonders of my digital camera?

The answer to both of those questions is yes and no, great, ambiguity within the second paragraph.

Yes: Having a high end digital camera with all of those buttons and menus does assist in creating a stunning image. The emphasis is on the word “assist”.

No: No matter how advanced, expensive or brand of digital camera it will not magically create a portfolio maker.

Here is something that you the reader need to understand. “IT IS NOT THE CAMERA!”

It is you that takes a portfolio maker and what you shoot that image with is 100% irrelevant.

It is your personal vision for the subject material that you like to shoot. It is your vision on where to place the device you use to capture that image. It is you that decides what lighting to add. It is you that decides where to have you subject placed within the frame. It is you that decides where the props need to go and so on. I could keep going “it is you” for another 30 pages.

Starting to make sense?

Now to go back in time. The cameras that were used up to the mid 1950’s were rather primitive compared to the film cameras that we started to see in the 1960’s through to the early 1990’s. There was a period of great leaps in camera technology after the 1950’s. I know of photographers that are to this day shooting with a very well maintained Hasselblad that was manufactured in the 1960’s. Present day the selection of film cameras is very small compared to even a couple of years ago.

All of these cameras including cameras that Ansel Adams, Henry Fox Talbot, Helmut Newton, Herb Ritts, Richard Avedon, Irving Penn and hundreds of other great photographers, did one thing, they captured an image.

The cameras were not advanced, Ansel Adams who I am sure all of you have heard of used a basic 8”x10” view camera. This is just a lens on the front and a film plate on the back. You manually control the focus, movements and controls on the lens. You can’t get any more basic than this, I know I use a 5”x4” view camera on a regular basis.

Great photography is created by a human being, when they press the shutter button. Or even in some cases just flip a lever.

Don’t fall in love with the gadgets, fall in love with photography.

Blake Foss is a San Francisco based photographer, designer, developer, and model maker. His entries are crossposted with permission from his blog at www.blakefossphotography.com

A wealth of vintage photography ads

derrick — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 02:53:30 +0000

Perusing the amazing Project Gutenberg, I stumbled across a motherload of vintage photography ads. From the No. 1 Autographic Kodak special pictured aside to the photo oil colors I’ve mentioned before, this is a real treasure chest of nostalgia.

A lot has changed in the last 90-odd years. f4.0 was considered fast back then, for one, and “practically free of double image” was considered high praise for a lens. Most of these ads are for products produced by boutique manufacturers long since forgotten: Ica-Contessa, Willoughby’s (the world’s largest camera supply house), Wollensack, Glundlach, and more. They’re all here.

Click on the image to launch the vintage photography ad slideshow.

A hundred years of infrared photography

derrick — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 02:25:28 +0000

A hundred years ago, the first infrared photo was published in the Journal of the Royal Photographic Society. To say that the world hasn’t been the same since is a bit of an exaggeration, but it’s certainly looked a bit trippier since. Like so many things, once the purvey of the rich and dedicated, IR photography is almost trivial now. Your camera sensor is already sensetive to IR light, if less so than visible light. So all you have to do to take an infrared shot is filter out the actual, visible colors. I guess it goes without saying that there are filters for that. Once you filter out the visible spectrum and you dial up (way up) the exposure time, what you get is a glimpse into a world that looks almost, but not quite, just like our own world.

Even if you don’t have a camera that takes filters, you can play around with IR photography yourself. All it takes is about four layers of Congo Blue and 30 seconds or so of exposure in full daylight. And a tripod. Trial and error may be involved.

(Photo via Wikipedia)

How I know you’re not a professional photographer

derrick — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 03:56:21 +0000

Full disclosure: I’m not a professional photographer either. However, I’m also not an idiot. My friend Blake (who is – a professional photographer, not an idiot) and I paid a visit to a local military monument Saturday; a beautiful aircraft carrier that now serves as a museum, oozing history and character. We were both having a huge photog geekout, pointing out interesting subjects and angles and fussing over ISO settings and aperture. These excursions aren’t just interesting because of the pretty things they offer as photographic fodder, they also provide an opportunity to become more familiar and comfortable with your gear. We both ended up snapping on macro lenses and taking pictures of rivets and latches and gun barrels. The lighting wasn’t great below deck, but neither of us were about to bolt on a flash. Blake has a d300 and the sensor and that thing will go down to 1600 ISO without a hitch – bit of grain, sure, but not even that much. I was shooting with a fairly new and very fast Sigma prime, so my relatively crappy sensor didn’t matter too much.

Of course we’re not the only people taking pictures. At least half of the visitors are carrying a little point and shoot and recording their fun family outing for posterity, but we haven’t seen another SLR since we got there. Until we ran into that guy. That guy is an aging hipster, longish hair, skinny. Jeans. Kid in tow though, so not entirely out there.

We’re walking across the hangar deck and stop to let him set up a shot of the helicopter that’s caught his interest. He’s crouched down, setting up a Digital Rebel on one of those tiny six inch tripods they sell at Radio Shack- about 12 feet away from the chopper. I’m feeling slightly less antisocial than normal, so I casually ask him, as his in-body flash goes off, whether he’s getting any good shots. “It’s alright,” he says “but you can’t get any good shots without a flash in this light.”

I shrug and mumble something along the lines of “It’s not so bad.” The hipster glances at Blake’s camera. “Sixteen hundred ISO,” says Blake. He looks at me. “F one point eight.” In fairness, we may have been a little bit cocky. He looks mildly crestfallen, but his complexion soon lightens as he comes up with an out. “I’m a professional photographer,” he says. “This is just my personal camera for family outings.” Guy’s kid is standing there, looking mildly embarrassed already, so we leave it at that and he’s eager to wander off and escape from even our mild scorn.

Here’s the thing. There was light enough to take decent shots freehand at a reasonable ISO, even with a Canon kit lens. This guy was using a tripod, so he didn’t need a flash at all. in fact, there was no sane reason to use a flash – It was probably detrimental to the shot.

Almost everything I know about photography I learned from other people – watching them take pictures and asking them questions and making them critique my shots. A few years ago I would possibly have done the same thing – set the camera to auto, compose a shot, pop open the flash, and let the light fall where it may, but people with more experience and expertise than I have shown me a better way. As a result I’ve evolved as a photographer. Had I simply pretended to be a professional photographer and wandered off every time somebody approached me and asked whether I was getting any good shots, I would be just as dreadful today as I was several years ago. It’s taken me just that long to work out how much I don’t know and begin – just begin – to rectify some of those shortcomings. I’m pretty sure I learned more last weekend than the “professional photographer” whose manhood we inadvertently impugned.

The Orpheum Theatre and Film Scanning

Blake — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 17:05:14 +0000

Years ago when I was shooting as a commercial photographer in Sydney I did a lot of architectural photography. I was hired mainly because of my specialty with low light and available lighting. I loved shooting the visions of architects and interior designers, but most of all I loved the heritage listed and older buildings around Sydney.

My particular obsession was with art deco and gothic theaters. At that time most of them had been torn down or abandoned, the few that remained were so beautiful and many of them had been restored to original specifications.

There is a theater in Cremorne called “The Orpheum”, an art deco theater built in 1935 and fully restored in 1987, reopening in December that year. I used to see any movie that was showing just to experience being there. In the main theater they had an organ that would rise from the ground and would be played before the movie started. Now this was cool as most theaters you are bombarded with Coke ads, boring and I don’t like the taste of the stuff.

I wanted to photograph this place so instead of hoping I would one day be hired to shoot it I just called and asked if I could come in before hours and take the photographs. The manager agreed as long as I let him select a couple of images to use for marketing. A small note on doing this, always get an agreement in writing when doing a trade for prints as he took my images and when they were returned many of them had been “lost”.

For years I would see my photos in magazines and newspapers as well as self promotion. Fortunately I had backups of all my shots as I shot 2 images of each setup using different films. I kept the Fuji Velvia images and they received the Kodak film that was better for low light, but lacked the strong color saturation of Velvia, a film I still use today.

ALWAYS GET SOMETHING IN WRITING WHEN DOING A SHOOT THAT HAS ANOTHER HUMAN INVOLVED!

About 8 months ago I had all of my negatives and slides shipped from Australia and rediscovered the shots of the Orpheum Theater and I loved them even more and wanted them on my web site and portfolio. Only problem, they were color transparency film shots and I needed to digitize them.

I always believed that to obtain professional results from a film scan you had to use a drum scanner or really high end flat bed scanner that cost a lot. I had not kept up with the changes in technology and found that I was able to purchase a flat bed scanner that would scan up for a 6cm x 12cm (panoramic medium format) film image for less than $500.00.

It took a few days for the scanner to arrive after I ordered it and I spent the better part of a week working with the supplied software and 3rd party software to optimize the scans. After a lot of tests on several different types of film ranging from color transparency film and black & white negatives I had the perfect profile saved.

Basically I tossed the supplied software away and used a 3rd party scanning application that did several things that provided me with the quality I wanted.

It runs several scans over the film strip at different exposure levels and either combined them or saved them as individual images
This produced in a sense a High Dynamic Range HDR image and when opened in photoshop I am able to combine the images using the HDR feature in PhotoShop to ensure I had detail in the blacks and no blown out highlights
The scans were raw, no unsharp mask. This allowed me to have control over how much unsharp mask I wanted within PhotoShop
The software also didn’t add any form of color compensation or balance keeping the images neutral, again allowing me to optimize in photoshop
No dust removal. Usually with careful cleaning dust spots are minimized and easy to retouch. Some scans actually had no dust spots at all. Now that is a clean workspace justification.

Each image takes a while to get to the final stage and worth every minute. I still have some of the prints that were done chemically from the transparency and I used that print as a base. I printed the digital scan and at the print size of 9.5” x 11” (US letter size) I saw no difference, none at all. This is a huge advantage when I do shoot with film today as getting a print from a transparency is really expensive. Negative film prints are a lot cheaper, but color negative film will never give you the same rich colors and tonal range of transparency film.

Over the last few months I have been scanning in my original film based images and will post some more of them later. In the meantime here are some of the images from the Orpheum Theater in Sydney, Australia.

One image has been posted on this blog, under the entry, My First Portfolio Maker. A wonderfully dark and grim portrait of a friend of mine.

Once you have seen them you will understand why I love the place so much.

Click on the image to launch a slide show

Blake Foss is a San Francisco based photographer, designer, developer, and model-maker. His entries are crossposted with permission from his blog at www.blakefossphotography.com

There is nothing I don’t like about this camera

derrick — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 02:32:53 +0000

Holgas are known for their optical shortcomings and the interesting effects those shortcomings produce; Light leaks, plastic lenses, shutters that can only be called such by the greatest possible stretch of the imagination – all part of the Holga experience. This though – this takes the cake. The Holga stereo pinhole camera omits the lens(es) entirely, opting instead for a teeny tiny aperture (f 80 or so, if memory serves). I’m thinking a tripod is pretty much a must for this. I’m also thinking the trademark holga imprecision may work against this fascinating little machine. Light leaks may lead to interesting effects, but in 3D photography you really can’t have inconsistencies between the two images. Still, it’s a fascinating idea, executed in typically minimalist style, and I’m aching to get my hands on one.

(Holga 120PC-3D Stereo Pinhole Camera)

Britain iS Holding a Photography Contest

derrick — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 04:31:30 +0000

The Guardian, that stalwart bastion of not being the Times, together with iStockphoto, bastion of not being fotolia, is holding a photography competition. The theme: the British Zeitgeist. I’m not entirely sure if the irony there is on purpose or not. First of all, the zeitgeist in Britain is apparently that only terrorists take pictures. Also, zeitgeist is. . .erm. . .not a British word.

Snark aside; the prizes ain’t great – in fact, they won’t even buy you a decent camera, but the terms are fair; you keep the rights to your pics. My assumption would have been that iStock would get to license them inb seven sizes starting at a dollar each.

(Britain iS)

More Follow Focus Madness

derrick — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 01:49:53 +0000

That follow focus hack form last week? I got that. I mocked it, but I got it. This though – words fail me. It would appear that the inventor used a hand drill to make this thing. I’ve always loved the spirit of invention that permeates photography. People make diffusers out of milk packs, barn doors out of cardboard, monopods out of string. Some of these hacks have been so elegant that they’ve become viable commercial products. Somehow I don’t think that the hand drill focus crank will be joining those hallowed ranks any time soon.

(Focus Drill)