Workers. Leica D-Lux 5
Any guesses as to which famous photographer’s style I’m emulating here? MT
Long term review postponed: The Nikon D800
May 1, 2012 by
I was originally going to post a long term review of the Nikon D800 today, but seeing as my camera has been autofocus-crippled and I’ve only used it under studio conditions with manual focus, it wouldn’t be fair. Instead I’ll roll my conclusions into the D800 vs D800E review which will go up later this month, once my camera arrives – I’m told later this week.
But what I can say is that the sensor is absolutely stunning, and remains one of the best, if not the best I’ve ever used – at least in 35mm format (sorry, I haven’t had a chance to shoot with the H4D-50MS or IQ180 backs). And it definitely provides more flexibility than anything larger; you can use the high ISOs, you can shoot faster than 1fps with it, it can do video…and I’ve not run out of useable dynamic range yet. Yes, the product definitely has some early teething troubles – and I’m not for one minute saying that we should let Nikon off the hook, because it is a lot of money – but if you stop for a minute and think about what we’re actually getting, it’s pretty amazing. Ten years ago, the same money got you a D100: the output from that camera was so soft that you wouldn’t even know if you were having edge AF issues or not; in fact, nobody would think to use the edge AF points for anything other than viewfinder decoration because they were that inaccurate.
I don’t know how many more large leaps in technology we’re going to see at the advanced consumer/ pro level – look at the incremental changes to the flagship Nikon and Canons – but I honestly feel the D800 is a game changer in the sense that it’s now truly made the next step in image quality accessible at a much lower price point than before; forget the Pentax 645D. But the same caveat always remains: just because you can afford the tool, doesn’t mean you know how to use it properly. And no amount of money can replace dedication and hard work in achieving photographic results. Then again, I suppose you could just buy a large print. MT
POTD: If you thought one watch was bad…
May 1, 2012 by
…try dealing with the reflections off two!
Sarpaneva Korona K3 Northern Stars. Nikon D700, AFS 60/2.8 G Micro
Photographs involving multiple watches require extremely good lighting control, assuming you are not going to be compositing images (and sometimes, you have no choice). What looks great on one watch may not look so good on the other, and vice versa. You also need to be very, very careful with positioning your subject – not least because they may scratch each other! I use a small bit of tape or paper to act as a buffer, tucked neatly out of sight. MT
Some thoughts on storage and backups
April 30, 2012 by
What are your images worth to you? And by worth I don’t necessarily mean in a financial sense; how would you feel if your primary hard drive toasted itself and you lost most or all of your images today? What would you do? Personal and family images would be be irrecoverable and gone forever. Your stock library would suddenly cease to exist. No more portfolios. Images that you hadn’t finished editing and obviously not yet delivered to clients…imagine having to ask for a re-shoot.
Clearly, backup is important. Very important. Currently, the weakest link is in the camera at the time of capture: most cameras only have a single card slot, which means only one copy of the image at any one time. Even those that have dual card slots and allow parallel writing (best configured to mirror to give optimal flexibility) create issues when browsing, deleting and otherwise managing files in camera – it isn’t seamless or intuitive, and the limitations of a button driven graphical UI make file handling less straightforward and easy that on a PC. And even if you mirror your files to both cards, if your camera happens to suffer say impact damage or a moisture-induced short, you can probably say goodbye to both cards. Incremental backup to a PC on site either via an Eye-Fi card, WLAN or tethering is an option, but can be time consuming and downright impractical if you’re a photojournalist.
My current workflow is still subject to this limitation:
– I shoot as normal, and backup to a computer as soon as I’m done with the shoot.
– I won’t format the cards until everything is backed up, which means that I have two copies of the files at any time (and yes, I have a lot of cards – SD: 3x32GB, 5x16GB, various odds and ends; CF: 2x16GB, 3x8GB, 3x4GB – it’s a lot considering I’m only dealing with 14MB per RAW file on my sole CF camera (D700).)
– At incremental stages – usually every hour or so when editing – I’ll run a time machine backup of my working machine’s drive, which gives me a third copy of the original files, and a second copy of the edited files.
– Hard drives are kept disconnected from the computer and power supply to prevent any accidental data corruption due to surges, odd software glitches etc.
– Once I’m done with the processing and editing, I make duplicate backups of all files onto a pair of hard drives.
– Time machine the main editing machine again – now I’ve got four copies of the finished files, and five copies of the original files. Still with me?
– I don’t keep the original files on my main editing machine because of space limitations, but I do keep the finished files.
– Now I can format the cards from the shoot – this leaves me with four copies of finished files, and two copies of the originals.
– You want to maximize redundancy and failure-proofing with your backups, so keeping one full set of files off-site is a good idea. It’s also nice because you can easily access your work if you’re not in the office. Both of the backup hard drives and the time machine drive I currently use are 1TB portables; they require no external power supply and are small enough to go anywhere. One stays in my bag, which is almost always with me.
– There’s yet another copy of my portfolio files and critical image files on my travel machine (a Macbook Air) and iPad, making six sets for critical files. I’m fairly confident with this setup that I’ll be able to find an image if I need to, even if two or more drives fail. (And that’s not counting the drives that I’ve archived, which I’ll touch on in a minute.)
Now you’re probably wondering what happens if my backup solutions run out of space – after all, these days 1TB isn’t that much, and the minute you touch video work (a whole new kettle of fish) then the storage requirements multiply exponentially.
Fortunately, the pace of file size increases has also roughly matched then pace of both increases in storage density and processing speed (score one for Moore’s Law). I double the size of the replacement drives I buy – usually one every year and a half to two years or so – and find that gives me enough breathing room. When the new drives are in, I’ll make a fresh copy of all the files (NOT using a cloning tool, because that can also clone over any errors and bad sectors the old drive has – negating some of the advantage of fresh drives) onto my new, larger drives.
I recently had my time machine drive fail; that, culminated with a general lack of space (only 50GB left and plenty of those enormous D800 raw files) made me upgrade to one of these array thingies. I’ve got a WD MyBoook Studio II 6TB array, which is set to RAID 1 (mirroring) and partitioned into a 1TB block for my time machine backups, and a 2TB block for storage. Firewire 800 is thankfully supported, which makes moving huge files around quite painless. I’ll probably add one of the new WD portable 2TB Firewire/ USB3 drives to replace my portable 1TB so I can keep an offsite backup of my work on me (and a handy archive) wherever I go.
Backup is something everybody needs to think about seriously, today. Tomorrow may well be too late – there have been several occasions where I’m glad I was running multiple backups; unluckily I had a Maxtor primary drive and a Maxtor backup drive fail within a day of each other – leaving me with just a single (fortunately non-Maxtor, those things are a disaster) drive. If you can’t afford to lose your images, don’t put it off! MT
POTD: Lanterns
April 30, 2012 by
Lanterns. Nikon D2H, 80-200/2.8 N
Last day teaching in Singapore. Returning home tonight to about 30GB of files…MT
Photoessay: Electric trees
April 29, 2012 by
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
POTD: Electoral reforms
April 29, 2012 by
Protest. Leica M9-P, 2.8/28 ASPH
I chose today’s image in light of what’s going on in Malaysia at the moment. If I was in KL, I’d most likely have been there shooting. This is history in the making, or what is probably the beginning stages of it. I have to say upfront that I hate politics, and try not to think about it – let alone pass opinion – because it just makes me angry. Hundreds of thousands of people joined the Bersih 3.0 rally yesterday demanding electoral reform, and got teargassed and fire hosed in return. There were a lot of families in the crowds, too. I’m sure there were the fair share of violent anarchists too, but surely not 10% of the population of greater Kuala Lumpur is trying to raise hell.
This is prime evidence that there’s an extremely strong discomfort amongst the masses with the current leadership.
Yet the rest of the world sees a) the responses epitomizing an oppressive government that’s trying to suppress/ repress the population and b) at some point in the not too distant future, all hell is going to break loose when the number of people completely overwhelms the police. And it’s going to be May 13, 1969 all over again – one of the most embarrassing and bloodiest days in Malaysian history.
I just hope whoever is really in charge wakes up soon enough to realize that continuing along this path – being driven by greed and power – is going to destroy the hand that feeds them first place. Leadership has never been about ruling and controlling people; a good leader always has their people fully supporting them because they feel like they are part of the process, and there is some element of fairness. It’s okay if you’re going to make money out of being a head of state – there is a lot at stake, and plenty of responsibility that lies on your shoulders – just don’t do it at the expense of the people who entrusted you with that responsibility in the first place. MT
Stabilization systems and their limitations
April 28, 2012 by
Image stabilization systems are all meant to do one thing: reduce the effects of camera shake to prevent you from getting blurry images. If you know that, and know their limitations, you’ll find them very useful; if not, you’ll wonder why you can’t get a sharp picture of a racing car even though you’ve got an IS lens.
Rule 1: Stabilization systems are not a replacement for proper technique or support.
If you have good hand-holding technique or a tripod, you can always get a sharp image at shutter speeds below the 1/focal length threshold. No issue. If you don’t, then a stabilizer will help a bit, but it can’t prevent your finger from jerking when you press the button – that’s training. You can’t use a stabilizer for a long exposure, either. There’ll still be camera motion because it’s physically impossible for a person to stand that still. Lean the camera against something or get a tripod. It will help you when you’re shooting from an unstable platform – such as a boat or moving vehicle – but make sure you disable the lens’ panning mode to prevent it from canceling out motion in one direction only, believing it to be panning rather than irregular camera movement.
Rule 2: Stabilization systems will not affect subject motion.
The stabilizer is in the lens, or on the sensor. Either way, it’s attached to your camera. Not the subject. But you’d be surprised how many people think that VR or IS or OSS or SSS or whatever will also keep the bird still for you to get the shot. It won’t. Your subject is still bound by the same minimum shutter speed rules as all other subjects: about 1/30s-1/60s for people, 1/500s for human action sports, 1/1000s for motorsport, and somewhere between the two for animals.
Rule 3: Stabilization systems have an optimal window of shutter speeds.
Generally, if the manufacturer claims an X number of stops improvement, then deduct one and use that as a rule of thumb. So if a lens offers four stops, then your lowest shutter speed is going to be 1/focal length x (1/2)^(X-1). Confused? Example: 100mm lens with 4-stop stabilizer. Don’t expect sharp shots any slower than 1/100s x (1/2)^(4-1) – that’s somewhere between 1/10s and 1/15s.
What they don’t tell you is that there’s an upper limit to stabilizer effectiveness, too. Above a certain shutter speed, the stabilizer mechanism can’t respond fast enough – so you’re actually going to get a bit of smearing or double imaging. In general, I’d turn it off above 1/500s or so.
Rule 4: Not all stabilizers are created equal.
There are three types of stabilization: lens-based, which has a moving element controlled by two or more gyroscopes; sensor-based, which moves the sensor through lateral translation axes, and in the newest generation of cameras, also yaw, pitch and roll axes; and finally, electronic systems that use software-based image subtraction and have no moving parts at all. The least effective are electronic stabilizers – they are effectively useless, and worse still, leave behind odd image artifacts. Lens-based stabilizers are generally more effective than sensor-based stabilizers. This is because the moving lens element is generally at the nodal point of the lens, and only has to tilt in the opposite direction to compensate for relative camera motion; it can compensate for a greater degree of camera shake than a sensor based system, because the sensor has to move through the actual distance the image is displaced by on the focal plane; this means that sensor-shift systems get less and less effective as the focal length increases.
Rule 5: Turn off the stabilizer when using a tripod.
Stabilizers, by definition, use moving parts. The problem here is that when everything is locked down and not moving – i.e. a tripod-based scenario – the moving parts can’t stay perfectly still, unless they’re locked in place – i.e. the stabilizer is turned off. Even the systems which are claimed to be able to detect tripod mode don’t physically lock down unless turned off manually.
Rule 6: Stabilizers always cause some sort of image degradation.
This is unavoidable; to deliver optimal results, the optical formula must be precisely matched by the physical configuration of the lenses. Fine manufacturing tolerances and errors are enough to cause subpar performance; imagine what a moving element does to that mix. Conclusion: turn it off, lock it down, and use a tripod if utmost image quality is your objective.
Beware of the limitations, but also know that stabilization systems can give you a little edge when it comes to unique images – the best example I can think of is when you want static buildings but a little motion blur in the people to convey a sense of activity; throw in a longer focal length and it’s not really something you can produce without a tripod (often inconvenient, or downright disallowed). Another example is where you’re shooting wildlife with a monopod at dawn or dusk; light is marginal and you’re not using a tripod for maximum flexibility, but you need a little more latitude with shutter speed to keep the quality up. It’s situations like this where stabilizers shine. MT
Limited fine art print offer! (and POTD)
April 28, 2012 by
Seeing the wood from the trees. Leica M9-P, 21/3.4 Super Elmar ASPH
Today’s POTD fell out of a test run for the 21/3.4 Super Elmar ASPH, which I’ll be reviewing in the next few weeks. Initial impressions: hugely impressive, especially in the corners. I see almost no optical flaws anywhere, at f4 – which is just half a stop down from wide open.
I’m also happy to announce a new partnership with Giclee Art in Malaysia (a HP print ambassador) and master printmaker Wesley Wong. The work I’ve seen is stunning – he will be printing the images for my upcoming exhibition.
Both of the prints you see in this post will be up for as a limited run. (These things help me keep the site running – creating content takes time I can’t use for anything else, and I really want to keep the site ad-free to maintain the picture viewing experience; also, it helps you decorate your walls 🙂
The print offer will be limited to 20 copies of each image, at 16×24″ (A2) printed on 20×30″ paper. Here’s the kicker: the prints will be done on 380gsm matte fine art paper, printed with 200 year archival grade pigment ink on a HP production class machine. The look of the black on the paper is indescribable – I’ve never seen anything like it before, and I knew I had to make some prints with this. There are no reflections anywhere, which means the image is so much more viewable. The blacks are dense and chalk-pastel like, with fine tonal transitions. All prints will be numbered and signed. (And no, there will be no black borders around the images in the final print).
Schonbrunn Fog, Vienna. Leica M9-P, 28/2.8 ASPH
The price for either print is US$550 net to me including shipping worldwide via courier in a sturdy tube. To keep things simple, payment can be made via Paypal to [email protected], which means you can either use your Paypal balance or a credit card.
Please include in the message field which image you’d like, plus your shipping address, contact email address and telephone number. I’ll email a confirmation as soon as I a payment from you. If you’d like multiple copies or multiple images, that’s great too – you just make one payment.
I’ll be closing the print offer at the end of May, and shipping shortly thereafter. First come first served! Remember, these images will not be offered for sale again at this size. Thanks for your support everybody! MT
Photoessay: Boudhanath Stupa
April 27, 2012 by
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.
