reframing the world one picture at a time
This building is one of the more interesting in downtown Kuala Lumpur – mainly because of its highly reflective mirrored glass surface that causes its character to change with the light; it blends into its surrounding environment by reflecting it, yet stands out because it doesn’t look anything like the surrounding windowless concrete shopping plazas. Coincidentally, it also contains the offices of Leica Malaysia. MT
Series shot with a Leica M9-P and Olympus Pen Mini E-PM1.
Last night was the grand opening party for my exhibition of fine art watch photography at Starhill Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Pending any unforeseen changes, the images should be up for the next month on the first (Adorn) floor, and were co-sponsored by Jaeger Le-Coultre and Leica. Some images from the launch party follow.
For my KL readers, I’ll also be on radio – a short interview – on Friday, 4th May at 1.45pm on BFM 88.9. For everybody else, there’s a podcast on bfm.my. MT
Sorry, no POTD today – was trying to rush these out for today’s post.
Some images courtesy KH Yeo (D700, 24/1.4) and myself (M9-P, 35/1.4 ASPH FLE).
If you’ve got some free time and are in Kuala Lumpur, please drop by to have a look. The exhibition is on the Adorn Floor of Starhill Gallery, Bukit Bintang – where all of the watch boutiques are located. It’s scheduled to run for the month of may but there may be some changes to venue after the first week. I’ll update accordingly here.
More details on how the images were shot here and here.
I’ll also be hosting a small gathering for readers who’d like to come and have a guided tour of the exhibition; we can go grab coffee afterwards and shoot the breeze about anything photographic. This will take place at 10.30am on Saturday 5th May; we’ll meet across the road by the fountain at Pavilion. Would be great if you could leave a comment if you want to come, so I know who to expect. If you can’t make it, drop me an email and I’ll try to meet you there another time. Thanks! MT
One of London’s great open green spaces, home to the Maritime Museum (formerly Naval Headquarters), the Royal Observatory, and of course the Prime Meridian – or GMT-0 line. You could theoretically be in two timezones at once here, but curiously the whole of England is still on GMT. More interestingly for the horologically inclined, the observatory houses Harrison’s pioneering marine chronometers – the H-series clocks that made accurate navigation possible at sea through the calculation of longitude. And they still work. The park itself is just a nice place to spend a winter afternoon. MT
Series shot with a Ricoh GR-Digital III
For reasons I can’t fathom, this entirely man-made artificial construct on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur draws huge numbers of visitors – mostly young Malay couples on dates looking for somewhere dark that they can get away with holding hands in a very conservative country – in the evening. During daytime, it looks terrible. But at night, the shadows hide the artifice and provide a counterpoint to the multicolored bulbs. I went more out of curiosity than anything, and to see if the X1 could hold its own in a low light situation. MT
Series shot with a Leica X1.
Suicide bear at the adjoining funfair
Bodhanarth, Boudha, Boudhanath, Bodhnath…or any one of a dozen different spellings is a large stupa on the outskirts of Kathmandu, Nepal. One of the holiest sites in Buddhism, supposedly built over the grave of the remains of the enlightened person Kasyapa, who predated Buddha. It is a UNESCO world heritage site, and one is supposed to negotiate the stupa in an anti clockwise direction only to avoid bad luck. The stupa itself is surrounded by a mix of tourist traps and other temples, and kept fastidiously maintained by monks. MT
Series shot with a Nikon D700, 24/1.4 and 85/1.4 G.
Some urban scenery captured during downtime on another work assignment at the end of 2010 – often, this is all the time I get to shoot personal work. It’s a rather pleasant city by the bay that’s really quite nice when the sun is out – when the sun isn’t out and it’s cold and windy, it’s downright miserable. Especially when you find out everything closes by 5.30pm and there’s precious little in the way of dinner options. It’s also a popular cruise ship destination/ stopover en route to the outer Pacific islands or Hawaii. MT
Series shot with a mishmash of equipment – Apple iPhone 4, Nikon D700, AFS 28-300/3.5-5.6 VR and Sony NEX-5 and 18-55 kit lens.
Bonus points to anybody who can tell me which shot this is in homage to.
You could be in California.
The America’s cup legacy is everywhere.
The taxi driver I had on the return trip to the airport told me he just bought a new SUV to tow his 50ft yacht. I ran out of words, thinking solely that I was both in the wrong job, and living in the wrong country.
Hyperfocal shooting is a subset of zone focusing. Both are very, very useful tools in the arsenal of a photojournalist or street photographer; especially so if you’re using a manual focus lens, or one with a meaningful depth of field scale engraved on it. It means that if you know what distance your subject has to be at to fill your frame correctly, you can set that and just shoot straight away when you bring the camera to your eye – a very fast way of working. It’s what I usually do when I have enough light and a wide lens on my Leica.
Let’s start with zone focusing. It’s simple if your lens has a depth of field scale:
1. Pick an aperture
2. Find the depth of field scale markings corresponding to that aperture. They’re on the bit of the lens that doesn’t rotate.
3. There are two of them. Everything between those two marks will be inn acceptable focus. Why the hesitation around ‘acceptable’? Because sharp-at-the-100%-pixel-level defines acceptable focus, and that will vary from camera to camera – the higher your pixel density, the narrower the acceptable focus margin will be. You’ll have to experiment for your camera and find out how much (if anything) to compensate by – for some cameras, you might find you have to as much as halve the width of the gap between the two markings.
Leica 21/1.4 Summilux-M ASPH.
Example: in the image below, the lens is focused just after 1.5m. This means the sharpest point will be at 1.5m, but if we set f2.8, objects from 1.2m to a bit over 2m will be in focus. Selecting f5.6 expands this further to 1m to 5m.
A good rule of thumb is 1/3-2/3: one third of your DOF will be in front of the focus distance, and 2/3rds behind.
Simple, right? There are a few more things to know.
1. It works best for wide-angle lenses, because they have more DOF for a given aperture. (You could zone focus with a telephoto, but you’d need a silly small aperture and probably run out of light).
2. It works best during daytime, because you’ll have enough light to stop down a bit (and thus increase your margin for error).
3. It works best if you have some practice estimating distances, because you can adjust on the fly without having to bring the camera to your eye.
4. It works best with smaller sensor cameras, because again there’s more DOF for a given angle of view (focal length equivalent) and aperture – for instance, the Ricoh GR-Digital III has a ‘snap’ mode that sets focus to certain distance; at f2.8 and 1.5m, almost everything will be in focus from 0.75cm onwards or so.
5. You can’t do it easily with modern AF lenses – those which do have DOF scales usually only give f11 and f22, which are heavily restricted by the amount of light you’ve got to work with; then the distance scale itself is short and probably not very precise, with few distances marked; lastly, there isn’t enough precision in the focusing ring. You could do it by using the AF system to focus on a distance, switch to MF, and set your aperture – but you’d have to memorize your DOF tables, which is never easy or fun.
6. Some compacts are better than others for this than others; the best kind have manual focus with a DOF indicator bar and scale – the Leica X1 and Ricoh GR-Digital series come to mind.
Let’s move on to hyper focal. The hyper focal distance is the setting beyond which everything is in focus to infinity at a given aperture. Even super-shallow DOF lenses like the Noctilux 0.95 have a hyper focal distance – but it’s probably 50m or something at f0.95. Once again, the wider the lens, the nearer the hyper focal distance will be for a given aperture. With lenses in the 28mm range, you can work at a reasonable aperture of f8 or so and have hyper focal distance at about 3m on a full frame sensor, which is great for capturing spontaneous moments in photojournalism or street photography.
There are several very useful calculators online, such as DOF Master – playing around with this will give you a good idea of which of your camera/ lens combinations is best suited to zone focusing. I personally do it with my Leica M9-P, and sometimes with the Ricoh GR-Digital; but never with the DSLRs because AF is very nearly as fast, especially on the D700. Also, beware lenses like the Olympus ZD 12/2 for micro four thirds – it might look like it has distance and DOF scales, but the focusing ring is electronically coupled, and lacks the resolution to make it truly useful. MT
City Hall, London – headquarters of The Greater London Authority and home to the Mayor’s office. An interesting blob of a building located in Southwark, near the southern end of Tower Bridge, it was designed by Norman Foster and opened in 2002. It sits at the center of an open plaza with a recessed area containing F&B outlets and entrances to the surrounding buildings, as well as a museum. I just like the architecture. MT
Series shot with a Leica M8, Zeiss ZM 2.8/21 Biogon and Voigtlander 50/1.1 Super Nokton.
Shadow projection.
Repairs.
Oddly reminiscent of a coil of DNA inside a nucleus.
I get two questions regularly:
1. “What camera should I buy, or should I buy X or Y?”
2. “I have the same equipment as you. How do you make your images look the way they do? Why can’t I do it?”
I’m not going to address the first question here. As for the second question, there are two answers and one fundamental underlying question: assuming the problem isn’t with your composition, what is it about your workflow that creates that very visible difference in the final image?
Workflow is very important to professionals, because if you’ve got a very high image throughput, then you can take on more work, deliver better quality images to your clients, and at the end of the day, make more money. So it’s in our interests to be as efficient as possible, without sacrificing quality. Good workflow should have the absolute minimum number of steps, be fast and easy to execute, automated to the greatest extent possible (but recognizing that individual images are like children: you have to treat each one differently) and most importantly, be camera independent. The latter requirement is so that you are free to use the best tool for the job without worrying about what to do with the files later. There’s no getting around the fact that different cameras and lenses require different amounts of editing or correction to achieve the desired results; it’s just something that has to be built into your process.
A common misconception is that workflow just covers the post-shoot editing process: it doesn’t. Workflow affects the entire way you execute an assignment, from preparation to final image delivery. What follows is a high level overview of the way I work, and some of the key steps.
1. Prep
– Make a list of equipment you’re going to need.
– Charge batteries, and bring 2x the number you think you’ll need – s*** happens.
– Ensure you have spares: cards, batteries, flashes, bodies, RF calibration spanners…
– Unless you’re shooting a run-and-gun stealth photojournalist assignment, or are going to be carrying your equipment for long periods of time, take everything you think you might need. Better to have it and not use it rather than miss a shot for want of a lens.
– Pack with plenty of time to spare, in case you find you’re missing something or can’t decide which configuration to use – at least you’ve got time to think it over or go out and buy anything critical that’s missing.
2. Shoot
– Turn up early so you can set up (if required) and be relaxed. Nervousness means jumpy hands which means blurred images.
– I always shoot RAW, for maximum latitude later when processing.
– Write-protect your keepers in camera to prevent accidental deletion.
– Shoot bursts where possible, both to get duplicates (insurance) and a choice of material to work with later.
3. First edit
– Delete the ‘obvious fail’ shots in camera when you have downtime – but ONLY when you have downtime. Missing a shot because you were staring at the back of your camera is an amateur’s mistake. I’ll probably dump about 50% of the images at this point.
4. Post-shoot
– Unpack
– Clean equipment – lenses, filters, eyepieces, LCDs etc.
– Recharge any depleted batteries
– Put everything back where it came from, so you can find it again next time.
5. Dump cards
– I will dump all cards to my primary processing machine at this point, and leave the cards unformatted back in the camera – just in case a file gets corrupted or I need the original, I know it’s still there.
6. Backup
– I use a Mac. At this point, I’ll run a time machine backup on my primary processing machine.
7. Second edit
– Delete the images that don’t really work at larger sizes – see my previous article here on editing. I use Adobe Bridge to delete and rate images. Another 50% of the images will go.
8. RAW conversion
– Depending on your machine, figure out how many RAW files you can open before it starts to slow down (use the ‘efficiency’ display in Photoshop; it’s in the bottom left of your image window. 100% means that everything is being loaded to RAM, which is the fastest way of editing). I can open about 15 12MP files in 16 bit before things start to slow down. This means I’ll probably load 20-30, because I also delete some at this point.
– Load bunch of files (20-30) into Camera Raw.
– Make primary exposure adjustments; I will adjust white balance, exposure, shadow/ highlight recovery sliders, vignetting.
– I only crop to aspect ratios that are non-native for my camera. If I’m using a multi-aspect ratio camera like the Leica D-Lux 5, I won’t crop at all.
– I have created a color profile for each camera I use so that I can get consistent color and the same look out of any camera I use, this is applied to the raw file in ACR.
– And same for the tonal response curve.
– Open the files in Photoshop (I’m using CS5.5 Extended now) at maximum quality: 16bit, full resolution.
– B&W conversion: depending on what final look I want, there are many options: gradient map, desaturate, channel mixer…to be the subject of a future article.
– Make curve adjustments – sometimes up to four or five times.
– Any retouching is done at this point – e.g. dust removal for product shots, or color enhancement using brushes and masks. I use a Wacom Intuos4 6×9″ tablet for this, nothing else so far gives me enough fine control.
– Local dodge and burn where applicable.
– Finally, sharpening: do this last, so you don’t land up increasing image noise/ grain. Must be done after curves.
– Convert to 8 bit and desired color space.
– Save final file. I generally use a maximum quality JPEG unless the client demands otherwise; you really can’t tell the difference unless you’re going to do future manipulation on it. (Revisiting old files will be the subject of another future article).
– Optional: do an incremental backup again, if it’s a big conversion job you can’t finish at one sitting, or if each file is time consuming and will take a lot of effort to duplicate.
9. Final edit
– Go through the set again. Keep only the unique, essential images. By the time I’m done, I keep only 1-5% of the initial shoot volume.
10. Portfolio selection
– I keep a portfolio of images for the subjects I commonly shoot; this gets updated after every shoot, especially if I feel there are images that should be added. It’s my aim to have at least one image to add to the portfolio (and replace an old one) from each assignment; this way, I force myself to continually improve.
11. Backup and format
– Dual duplicate sets of images with all raw files to external hard drives, one of which is kept offsite
– Keep finished files only on main processing machine
– Final backup: time machine of main processing machine
– Only now will I format cards. Where possible, I keep at least two copies of the original files – just in case something goes wrong. It’s happened to me in the past, and I’ve been very, very grateful that I did remember to backup. I’ve been doing it religiously ever since, and highly recommend you do the same.
A note on filing: I store images in hierarchal folders by Subject>Event/date>Subset. This allows me to find things easily. I have a separate folder for work on assignment, which is named with something sensible and a date. I don’t like database-based programs for image management like Aperture, because it’s very difficult and unwieldy to manage if you have a lot of images.
12. Delivery
– Send off the images to clients; either over the web, or via DVD.
Now, repeat! MT
Behind the scenes videos
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