månadsarkiv: oktober 2008

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Nikon D300

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So finally I have upgraded to a new camera. After using my D70s for several years I had a careful look-around at what was out there and I decided on the D300. I have met many photographers, both beginners and professionals who have used the D300 in the last year and all of them seemed very happy with their investment, although some said they’d waited for the D700 FX sensor camera instead if they had known it was about to be released.

I decided against the D700 for several reasons and the most important one was the lenses. DX lenses won’t be able to work very well on the FX sensor in the D700 and I like the DX lenses for two reasons, they are sometimes half the price of the comparable FX lenses and they are lighter to carry. The last point is important because I love to hike and bring the camera gear with me. 

The D300 is also a fair bit lower priced than the D700 which meant I got a nice kit including three lenses and an SB-800 for just a little more than what the D700 house would have cost me so I am really happy with it. 

The main reasons for my upgrade was the following

  • The small display on the D70s makes macro work difficult
  • There is no mirror lock-up function meaning mirror slap shakes when using long exposures and tripod.
  • The noise at higher ISO on the D70s is shameful compared to the modern cameras, in reality anything above ISO 600 is unuseable.
  • D-Lighting exposure control in the D300 and newer cameras is fantastic in some difficult light conditions.
  • 14 bit RAW format (12 in the old cameras) meaning 12 dB better image dynamics per colour!
  • No vertical grip for the D70s (that is seriously useful), the MB-10 battery grip for the D300 is awesome!
  • Faster serial shots, lovely when shooting animals like birds. 8 frames per second on the D300 is a vast improvement from the D70s.
  • Larger buffer memory also helps with serial shots.
  • Easier controls on the camera – even if the D70s had nice controls the D300 is not only nice, they are seriously well laid out and though through.
  • Faster in every aspect.
  • Has PC sync connector on camera
I will still keep my D70s of course and likely it will become a pure Infrared camera, converted to take only IR pictures in the future.

Here are some test shots, these are taken handheld in the middle of the night just using existing light. Yes there is noise, but not much and the pictures are actually quite nice. The D70s would come nowhere near this and would not even reach ISO 3200.

Allén

Misty street lights

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SLR Gear

This site is incredible. Really incredible. If you want to know how your lens is doing technically you must visit this site and check it out. Find out which aperture setting produce the sharpest images for each of your focal lengths.

SLR Gear >>>

Learning to read the diagrams here is a bit tricky but there is a wealth of information on almost any lens you can think of getting for your camera and also other stuff. But I really love it for their lens reviews.

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Tripods and Ball Heads by Thom Hogan

Weird Tripod
Car mounted tripod

This article is something you should take a look at if you are considering getting yourself a tripod to stabilize your camera.

I am already down that upgrade road where my lightweight video cam tripod is not really that good any more for several reasons including getting closer to the ground.

Ken Rockwell has a very different opinion on tripods but I find that they are necessary for a number of reasons. It’s not only the low light conditions they are useful, I use them in any type of light.

The reason for this is that cameras are heavy and to work wth your composition in a nice way you need to move around try angles and zoom and various framing options and a nice tripod is a help here making it easier for you to walk about, find the right spot, mount the camera there and then adjust it properly and take a great picture.

Studio taking form
My low budget studio with cheap tripod

If you can’t afford a top of the line tripod and a really good head, then by all means get something cheaper. You will most likely upgrade eventually so it might be a waste of money but at least you have something. I think lots of photographers will nod in recognition to this.

Other useful items to stabilize the camera could also include monopods (although I personally dislike them) bean bags (great for macro photos since you can place anything on them) and clips and clamps that you can use to attach your camera to a handrail or similar on a bridge. Lovely stuff all of it.

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Hair update

2 kommentarer

So it was Jeanettes birthday party last night and we went out to celebrate that. But before that she thought she’d spice me up a little bit and one way of doing that was to dye my hair a bit. "Just a tone, not a strong colour or anything, a bit of nutty brownish should do the trick" and I said yes. Apparently my very scandinavian blonde hair took a liking to the red tones in the colour and now I look like a proper carrot. Not that I suffer from it, I only see it when there is a mirror about.

I got red hairIf I look a little tired here it is because we had considerable to drink yesterday and I am a little bit tired today. For some reason I’m not 18 any more.

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Winter Approaching…

The winter is approaching, already people are talking about how we never seems to get any decent winters here in Stockholm any more, it is all about global warming and how the effects of increased CO2, methane, water vapor or other such greenhouse gases in the atmosphere may affect the climate.

I like winters, when the temperature is reasonably, say -10 to -5°C or so, that’s lovely. A nice sun shining and that’s great. But to remind everyone that we do actually gett good winters now and then and avoid the ”I don’t know when we had some realy snow last time” here is the winter of 2005-2006.

In a galaxy, far away…

Mälarstrand
Stockholm across Riddarfjärden
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My street in the winter time.
DSC_1195
Bench
DSC_0736
Lake in Norberg

I am hoping for a winter with lots of snow because I want to test out IR photography in the winter time. I think it can be pretty awesome with the right light…

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Autumn 2008

So the autumn here is nearing winter, the weather is getting colder and many trees have already lost their coloured leaves. There are still some brigh coloured trees around here and there but there are more branches becoming barren and winterlike every day.

The evergreens remains of course, the firs, pines and the spruce trees, the most common evergreens in Sweden. Here is a collection of some of my favourites for the autumn 2008, in no way complete but these are some of the shots that carry special meaning and rememberance for me.

Enjoy the slide show.

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Sunday studio photo shoot

Last Sunday we had a lovely photo shoot in the studio with Theres as a model and Annie doing the makeup and then three photographers. Here are some of the pictures from this session. Annie is a makeup artist from the Stockholm Makeup Artist school and Theres had modeled only once before and that was on the Saturday but everything got great and we had a lovely time!

The full set is here >>>

The slide show of the full set is here >>>

Theres

Theres

Theres

Theres

Theres

Theres

Annie

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Backup your photographs

You never know, the accident is closer than you might think. A few days ago my workdisk started having funny noises and thrashing about. I quickly checked that backups was running as they should and just for the heck of it made sure I got a full backup of the whole thing before it went dead.

Then I went out and bought myself a new USB attached disk, 1 TB of capacity is a lot but I am sure me and my camera will fill it soon enough. So I started transferring data and then the old disk just died. Flat out died. Lucky to have a backup on my other disk I started transferring the backup onto the new disk. A few percent in it started sounding bad and then the disk failed.

Not knowing what to do I quickly dismantled my backup disk, another external disk although attached by firewire instead of USB. The disk was so hot I could not touch it so I quickly realized the problem was overheating, it wasn’t really designed for extensive data transfers like this. So I let the disk cool down a bit and rest, then I disassembled it completely so it could run in free air, I used the cabinet fan to cool the hotest circuit, I put ice clamps around the back side of it and the sides and right now it is running fine, I have extracted all my photos up to 2005 so far.

This just goes to show that you can’t be too careful. Keeping your disks cool are important but keeping more than one recent backup is even more important. I have also considered getting a disk to swap with a friend to put backups on to it and I will push and see if she is interested. Then we can back up and meet up bi-weekly or monthly or so and exchange the disk. I am scared of what would happen to my collection of photographs if there was a mishap, burnout, smal fire, accident, electic overload, lightning strike… well there are many things that may potentially damage more than one disk at a time.

We are talking several hundreds of GB here people. CD’s are not an option, a full backup would mean close to 600 CD’s to burn. Just the sheer time of it is incomprehensible, but let’s say a full data CD takes 8 minutes to burn top speed. That’s 80 hours. Two full working weeks.

DVD’s are not much better either, they have a magnitude up on the CD’s or so but it is definitely not an option either, a full backup there would be 150 DVD’s or so, they take longer to burn than CD’s so I bet the time necessary to do that is about the same.

That’s why I use hard disks to store everything and I then schedule backups from one to the other. The whole idea is that a single point of failure should never mean a loss of data. My worries after tonight is that if there is a second point of failure I might be toast. I don’t like that.

Yeah, I got much stuff on my Flickr account, but not the negatives, the RAW files, the working copies, the drafts the ORIGINALS and more important my own notes and stuff. I need a solution for this soon. The broadband ISP has a solution with online storage but only 10 GB. I need at least 60 times that in order to feel safe.

It’s not an easy solution, disks do go bad, the only thing you can do to make sure your data stays around is to copy it and copy it again and keep it current. Digital data screams to be copied of course but it scares me sometimes how easily I could lose everything I have done.

And don’t talk to me about RAID systems. I have trouble shooted and fixed enough electronic systems to know that when stuff runs together it needs only to be an overvoltage problem in a single power supply and your whole raid stem is fried.

My backup copying is now at May 2005. Perhaps I will make it this time as well. I swear, I will buy a new backup disk on salary day.

I use tar as my backup software almost exclusively and here is the trick:
Every week or two weeks or when you think it is necessary you make a full backup
Every time there has been changes or just daily to backup the changed files since the last full backup

Using tar this is pretty simple, in the first case

# A full backup of my entire home catalogue

tar c -f backup.tar /home/ichi

# I normally never compress my archives. There are two reasons for this and
# the most important is that there is a better chance to save the contents
# if the file is damaged if it is not compressed. The second reason is because
# of the large amount of data compressing / decompressing takes a lot of time
# the full backup is already several hours of work.

# An incremental backup since my last full backup

tar c -x -N 2008-10-21 -f backup-partial-`date -I`.tar /home/ichi

# The -N flag backs files that were touched after this date (and on this date).
# so in this example the last full backup was at 2008-10-21. All files touched on
# this date and later will then be backed up.
# The `date -I` is a nifty trick inserting todays date in the file name

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Flickr Aquaintance: Björn Sahlberg

I met Björn when we met up for an excursion into the Solna Badlands. He seemed to have an affinity for shooting abandoned industrial areas and general industrial environments. Here in Sweden it is increasingly difficult to find abandoned places like this but Björn has recently put up a series of pictures from an abandoned Sugar Mill in the southern part of Sweden. We also had company of another Flickr photographer, Len Lysén.

All pictures in this slide show are Copyright Björn Sahlberg, I have just linked to his Flickr set displaying them as a slide show. Enjoy the tour.

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Shooting handheld with long exposure

2 kommentarer

As everyone knows the trick is to keep the camera steady and this is easier said then done. When the exposure times goes up to 1/30s and more most people run into problem. There is a simple formula you can use to calculate the slowest exposure for a given focal length and it goes like this:

t = 1/f

t is your exposure time (shutter speed) and f is the focal length you are currently shooting with.

Some people also say there should be a 1.5 factor here because of the crop factor of the APS-C sensor in most digital cameras. That’s not my experience and I believe the explanation is that the smaller the sensor, the less the camera shake is noticeable. Anyway, I have never had a problem shooting handheld with this formula.

This means that for a 200 mm lens you need 1/200s in order to shoot sharply handheld. This is a good aim but sometimes you can not get that because the light is not goot enough and you don’t want to bump that ISO setting because it produces far more noise in your pictures.

On a 50mm it says you should be able to take sharp pictures handheld down to about 1/50s which is a pretty low shutter speed. This is definitely possible but for the best result you can practice the McNally Grip, also known simply as ”Da Grip”. This requires you to be a left-eye shooter and is easier for right-handed people.

It’s not always practical to carry or even use a tripod. If you are doing street photography with a tripod in certain places you know the police may take an active interest in what about you are up to. Basically this is the same technique as when firing a rifle, you keep it well tucked in, steady and squeeze the trigger as you slowly exhale. Same thing here, just a camera trigger.

Ubuntu ColaUsing this technique most people can shoot about 1-2 EV lower than they would otherwise. This means that if you can just about do 1/50s with a 50 mm you may be able to get tack sharp pictures down to 1/25s or even 1/10s which is really really good!

This is handheld only in lamp light in the metro line of stockholm city (focus is deliberately on the Ubunty cola poster to the right hand side):

The reason I took this is because Ubuntu is also a Linux distribution.

I happen to be both so I love this.

McNallys blog post here >>>

Or you can watch his video here directly if you like.