Category: Techniques

Posted on

Wedding photo shoot: pains of image processing

20130812-123057.jpg

Last Saturday, I was helping Armando as a second shooter on a wedding. It was a really fun gig, and I really enjoyed meeting the couple and the guests. Also, the wedding was at the Deep Cove Chalet in Victoria – quite possibly the best restaurant I know anywhere. The weather was also perfect for photography – slightly overcast with sunny breaks.

I heard an opinion shared by a few very influential pro photographers that shooting weddings builds experience for covering almost any kind of event. All in all, it was a great photo shoot. However, as it is typical for any event coverage, image selection and processing is a phase that can easily take at least as much time as the shoot itself.

This time, in the spirit of making the most of any situation, I am sorting through the images as I am recovering from extraction of my wisdom teeth. The painkiller drugs are a perfect excuse not to do any work that requires concentration, such as writing research papers.

20130812-123403.jpg

Posted on

Testing a new Canon EF 35mm f/1.4L

I took this shot of my daughter about to fall asleep in her mother’s arms in an almost dark room, handheld, no flash, ISO 2000, 1/80 sec, f1.4 (naturally!) using a Canon EF 35mm f/1.4L lens. The camera focussed a bit too close because I forgot that re-framing doesn’t work at f1.4, but it’s not really noticeable unless you zoom in to 1:1 (and you can’t do it here, can you 🙂 ) Still, pretty amazing sharpness, clarity and bokeh, in my opinion.

Posted on

Total recall: better memories through image post-processing

20121222-191505.jpg

A recent BBC article argues that doctored images alter our memories and, consequently, affect our behavior in a very real way. Personally, I don’t find this surprising, but it brings up an interesting question about post-processing photos that is not aimed at creating hoaxes, but simply enhancing the visual impact or expressing the photographer’s impression (after all isn’t that what “Impressionism” is about?)

Here is an example. I took this photo of a warbler running through the undergrowth in a very dark and shady part of a park (a small forest, really). I wanted to practice shooing with a Canon EF 300mm f/2.8L IS USM lens, and this shot really pushed both the camera and the lens to the limit. There was very little available light, I had a 1.4X extender attached to the lens, which further decreased its light capacity by one f-stop, the bird was small and fast-moving, and it was quite far (about 20 m) away from me. Most importantly, this guy was dark-colored – his plumage was a near-perfect camouflage on the background of fallen leaves.

When I opened the exceedingly grainy (due to the expanded ISO range) shot on the computer, it looked really underwhelming. So I decided to try pushing the post-processing much farther than I would normally do. After boosting the color saturation of the feathers and selectively decreasing the contrast and the saturation of the background, I was able to see the details in the bird that were not visible in the original scene. I like this (arguably, “overcooked”) image better than the (higher fidelity) original. This is how I’d like to remember this little bird – full of color.

We might actually be on the way to altering reality for the purpose of creating better memories (think “Total Recall”). Although, this altered memories will probably be mostly hazy, color-shifted and full of lens flares from all the Instagram filters…

Posted on

A baby and a telephoto lens: a sandboxing challenge

In computer security, the term “sandbox” refers to separating running programs. In contrast, here I am talking about keeping up with a 14-months-old baby playing in an actual physical sandbox, while trying to photograph her with a telephoto lens.

Last week, while my wife was immersed in a marathon exam marking session, my daughter and I went for a walk in the Mount Douglas Park. I took the camera with a Canon EF 300mm f/2.8L IS USM lens, so I could practice shooting with it. In terms of physical bulk, this lens is not much larger than a Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS USM lens, which I am used to, but the fixed focal length and the relatively more shallow depth of field give it a noticeably different feel. I really like the beautiful bokeh produced when shooting with a wide-open aperture. One neat feature of the 300mm lens is its ability to focus as close as 1.5 m, which makes it quite useful for macro shots. I played with it a little bit and took some photos of a family of mushrooms, while the little one was sleeping in her stroller. She woke up just as we reached the playground.

To take appealing pictures of children, one should generally try bringing the camera down to the same level with them whenever possible. The playground at the Mount Dog park is perfect for this, as it has a sloping lawn on one side. I could simply walk down the lawn and become effectively closer to the level of the sandbox, without having to lay down on wet grass.

But here is the sandboxing challenge. As of about two weeks ago, my daughter became exceedingly mobile, as she somehow decided that crawling is not cool anymore and discovered her ability to run very fast by tilting her body in the general direction of travel and allowing her legs to try to keep her from falling. Normally, my wife and I can catch up with her quite easily to keep her from crashing into various objects, eating things that should not be eaten, and destroying flowers and houseplants. This time, however, there were two issues: a) it was just me looking after her, and b) the fixed 300 mm focal length forced me to stay at least 10 meters away from her while taking pictures. My daughter was delighted at her apparent independence and ran around the playground. I was glad when she decided to sit down and play with the sand. Just as I thought that my little photo session was going on brilliantly, she decided to check what this sand substance tasted like and put an entire handful of it in her mouth. It all happened in less than a second, while I was left to passively observe it from the opposite end of the sandbox, through my long telephoto lens.

Fortunately, she didn’t find the sand particularly tasty and spit out most of it right a way. I spent the next fifteen minutes or so getting the rest of the sand out of her little mouth. Letting her chew on a wet tissue did the trick. Such are the challenges of photographing children….

Posted on

Shooting sports: high adrenaline and higher ISO

I had a chance to get involved in some sports photography last couple of weekends. I was helping Armando Tura, who shoots regularly for the University of Victoria VIKES. We started with field hockey and rugby, trying out Canon EF 300mm f/4L IS USM and a rather monstrous 300mm f/2.8L IS USM lenses as well as a 5D Mark III body, all of which Armando was kind enough to lend me, along with about 10 years worth of his own experience. It was quite exciting to feel the adrenaline-charged atmosphere of the game and, as a photographer, to operate in a drastically different regime from my usual travel- and portrait-style of shooting (equipment-wise, I typically use a 5D Mark II with a 70-200mm f/2.8L IS USM lens).

It was at a basketball game the following weekend where I was really pushed out of my comfort zone. The ISO range that I had to push my camera to was mind-boggling to me. Note: a 5D Mark II at the auto ISO setting (“A”) only goes to 3200. One can dial in 6400 manually, or go to “H1”, which is in the expanded range and corresponds to ISO 12800 (sic). If you’ve been shooting mainly portraits and landscapes before, the grain would look horrible to you (as it did to me). It can be somewhat corrected in post-processing (I am using Lightroom 4) though. Most importantly, you’d have to embrace the fact that, in sports photography, “grain is good”.

After the basketball, which was by far the most challenging action I ever shot (with a possible exception of a horse race at dusk at the Palio di Siena), a swimming competition was relatively easy. The action is considerably slower, and the paths of the athletes are more predictable. Photographing swimming events has it’s own challenges, though. Mainly, the vantage points at the side of the pool are limited, and the flashes cannot be used, because they interfere with the metering equipment used by the event officials. A final note: keep your camera warm and in the bag before entering the pool area, otherwise the high humidity will cause the lens to fog up.

See more photos from these events here.

Posted on

Triggering AlienBees studio flash with Canon ST-E2 transmitter

During a recent studio shoot of our four-month-old daughter Anna, Svetlana and I used a Canon ST-E2 transmitter to simultaneously trigger a Canon Speedlite 580EX II flash and a pair of AlienBees B800 studio flashes.

The ST-E2 is specifically designed to trigger Canon’s Speedlites and to utilize ETTL (Evaluative Through The Lens) metering. In the ETTL mode, the Speedlite emits a brief pre-flash, during which the camera determines the exposure. The pre-flash is followed by the main flash.

A B800 studio flash can be triggered wirelessly by the optical slave cell, which is built in the back of the unit’s control panel. When the slave cell detects an external flash, it immediately fires the unit.

The potential problem with using the Speedlite to trigger the B800s is that the studio flash units are designed be used in the manual metering mode. The ETTL pre-flash causes the B800s to fire too early, which results in a dark image. If the output of the B800 is set to a low power, the unit can recharge and fire again during the main flash of the Speedlite, in which case the image will be exposed correctly. Thus, the dark images appear to occur intermittently, which make this problem very annoying and difficult to troubleshoot.

Here are potential solutions that do not involve wired triggering or purchasing radio transmitters/receivers (such as CyberSync or PocketWizard):

  1. Not using an ST-E2, but mounting the 580EX II Speedlight directly to the camera and switching it to manual mode.
  2. Covering the contacts on the ST-E2 with a piece of tape or paper so that only the central pin makes contact with the camera’s hot shoe. This simple modification will disable the ETTL pre-flash.

Please share your own solution if you have used a similar lighting setup.

See more photos of Anna.