TindrumFire Photography

Emerging from my hole

// September 30th, 2009 // No Comments » // Photography

It’s been a while since my last update; roughly four months, to be precise. The relocation to Sydney went well and, what with Winter being almost over, I’ve managed to start spending more time rebuilding connections, organising some photoshoots, and generally getting back on top of things. I recently finished a shoot with Eminence at the Sydney Entertainment Centre; not only are they a great team, they’re remarkably photogenic! Time permitting, I should have some art along with a work review up sometime over the next week.

Stop motion pig

// April 18th, 2009 // No Comments » // Humour, Photography

Not quite what you think:

Truly impressive stuff …

Playtime: the project wrap-up

// April 17th, 2009 // No Comments » // Photography

The Background:

A few months ago I got the opportunity to do a large-scale shoot at a local playcentre.  Photographing just under 300 kids over five days presents some interesting challenges, not all of them obvious; on the bright side, getting to play with 300 kids is pretty darn fun!  It’s been a few weeks since I finished the shoot and I thought some of my readers might find it interesting what goes on during such a complex process.

It was pretty obvious before I’d even shot the first photo that good planning was going to be key; taking candids in a large playcentre isn’t easy.  Candid photography and portraiture can quickly go south if you don’t know what you’re doing – prior to shooting, I’d set the following goals:

• An average of 20 high quality, compositionally varied shots per child.
• No use of staged shots – only natural compositions.  Staged shots have their place, but they never show the person, only the staging.
• Minimal ‘play-time interference’ – I was there as an observer, not a director, and the kids should still be having fun.  Like a good wedding shoot, my aim was to be as invisible as possible.  ’As possible’ being the ter, as a madman running around with a massive f/2.8 lens is … shall we say, rather obtrusive.
• Processing turnaround and proofs delivery within seven working days.

I knew that it wasn’t going to be easy; ignoring the stuff I couldn’t predict, I already knew that:

• Light quality was going to be bad.  Very bad – industrial lighting, variable levels of natural light throughout the day, and a two-storey high ceiling don’t make it easy to set a consistent white balance, let alone have enough light to freeze the motion of playing kids in flight.  As the day progressed, I knew from experience that I’d have to deal with rapidly changing light conditions from class to class.
• Keeping the kids happy and relaxed was essential.  Kids freeze when they’re unsure or scared, and a stranger looming over them with a camera’s the best way to reduce a two-year-old to tears, not the greatest ‘natural’ shot to say the least.
• Time was short.  Each class was only an hour long, and with the number of kids in each class, getting a 20 varied good shots of each kid was going to be a challenge.
• The sheer volume of photos was going to create workflow and processing issues.  With roughly six classes a day on average and approximately eight kids in each class, I was projecting nearly 1,000 finalised photos a day.  Given the lighting conditions and the rapid subject motion, I estimated that I’d need at least double that to ensure an average of 20 sharp final shots, giving me a total of around 2,000 photos a day, or 250 an hour.  At around 12 meg a file, that’s around 3 gig an hour of data, or 24 gig a day.  Simply copying and crunching all that data was going to be a challenge, especially given I’d have minimal available time between days.

The Approach

To handle the above challenges, I ended up using two cameras; a D700 as my primary camera for its low-light capabilities and a backup D80, used for wide-angle photography during the short ‘playground’ play session without requiring a lens change.  I mentally broke each class up into multiple sessions where each session used a different focal length and composition to suit the action and class involvement.  

I couldn’t afford the time to change between more than a handful of lenses, so the main focal lengths I used were 50mm at f/1.8 to f/2.8 (to allow for a lower ISO due to the increased light availability as well as combat hand shake) and 100mm – 200mm at f/2.8.  I used the longer focal lengths to be ‘outside’ of the action and let the kids have fun, the main tradeoff being reduced light and increased hand shake, leading to a higher ISO / faster shutter speed with slightly increased noise levels (but still well withing acceptable limits thanks to the D700).

I also shot a close-up session within each class at approximately 28mm to provide compositional variation.  These were shot using the D80 backup camera; the tradeoff was higher noise, but the advantage was absolutely no setup time, something that was really key given the short periods of free play time the kids had.

I used multiple CF cards along with a laptop / USB drive backup system to stream photos off my inactive card onto a backed up system while I was shooting.  I intended on limiting my use of flash photography as much as possible, but ended up compromising on this somewhat from the second day on.  Bounce flash was next to useless given the high ceiling, so I mainly used flash to provide some weak fill where absolutely necessary.

Lessons Learned

• As bad as you think the light’s going to be, it’ll be worse.  White balance was impossible to set with any consistency (even with the use of a grey card) and needed to be adjusted every time the cloud layer changed.  During the worst periods, this was as bad as four different white balance points within a single hour, all of which being significantly different to each other.  Even worse, the first two classes of each day consistently struggled to have enough light to maintain acceptable shutter speeds; only skill, luck, experience, and thinking on your feet can get you through this one.
• Selecting and processing over 10,000 photos takes longer than you might expect.  A lot longer; while I met my 7 day turnaround for most people, the final two days stretched out to around 10 to 12.  While not the end of the world, the delay was frustrating (probably for me moreso than the parents).
• Processing and coordinating shipped orders becomes increasingly complex as the number of prints increases.  This was something I hadn’t planned for and could have definitely been done better; there’s a big difference between dealing with individual portraiture / wedding shoots and dealing with over 200 individual orders.  I got some key learnings out of this one for next time, as well as a lot of ideas around how to streamline my ordering workflow; overall, while it was painful, it was invaluable.
• Not everyone’s always easily identifiable.  Lots of parents prefer to have their kids photographed without nametags on (as their clothes are lovely).  While it does make very nice photos, it also make matching names to faces a lot more complex, leading to additional work and delays.
• Communication is key.  I already knew this one, but it was good to see that it helped.  Communicating early and communicating often with everyone led to little additional time required doing one-off communications. 

What worked well?

• Planning the shoots beforehand.  While in post-processing, I was regularly surprised at how much compositional variation I was able to get given the large number of kids, the limited class times, and the highly limited amount of time I had to spend with each child.  The planning worked!
• Optimising the shooting workflow.  I spent quite a bit of time before the project planning out how to optimise my shooting / processing workflow.  This worked extremely well and in doing so, I’ve learned a lot of tricks that’ll help me in the future.  Overall, the best measure is that out of close to 300 kids, there were only two who I didn’t end up getting enough photos of and, while I can’t be one hundred percent sure, I’m pretty sure that least one of them disappeared for the majority of the class.
• Pre-planning the communication and delivery process.  By putting a fair amount of thought into the entire process beforehand, it proved easily manageable even when complications set in.
• The D700.  It’s rare that you can specifically point to equipment making the difference on an entire project but, in this case, it’s true.  The low light capabilities of the D700 made what would have otherwise been utterly impossible totally achievable.  And, that’s saying something. 

 What would I do differently next time?

• Spend more time optimising my shipping workflow.  Packing, sorting, printing, and posting all takes time, and the scale of this project highlighted a number of inadequacies in my current system.  
• Optimise my ordering system.  While it worked and was usable, it didn’t achieve one hundred percent success.  Usability was an issue for a small number of people, and some small language issues within the automated mailing system led to some ocassional confusion.  I don’t think there’s ever and end-state for this; I think it’s something that needs to constantly evolve and improve.  Having said that, I have ended up with specific changes that I can make that’ll improve things.
• Drop the second camera as an active tool.  While it was useful, the benefits of using a second camera weren’t outweighed by the increase in noise and the difficulty of getting good exposures using an APS-C sensor-based camera.  The extra minute it’d take to swap lenses and reset white balance are worth the increase in image quality.  While nothing that came out of the D80 was necessarily bad, it was just simply too slow to catch the more energetic kids on the trampoline and in the swings. 
• Pay closer attention to my suppliers.  One messed up order can waste hours.  And, it did.  I’m now weighing up the benefits of doing printing in-house because of the time I ended up having to spend sorting out a set of orders that were incorrectly printed.

Overall, it’s been a fun, interesting, and educational project, one that I’d happily do again.  Pending sorting a few final things out and time permitting, I might post some example shots at some stage.

Intelligent lenses and not so intelligent design

// March 12th, 2009 // 1 Comment » // Photography

Here’s an interesting one; we all know that everything we use is getting smarter, but did you know that even your lenses are now considered ‘field upgradeable’? According to DPReview, Olympus has just released a firmware update for their 9-18mm lens.  On the surface, this seems like a good thing – if there’s an issue, it’s fairly easy to fix.  Delve a bit deeper though, and it’s not so rosy; one of the banes of consumer electronics introduced by the Internet and the ability to be perpetually online is that manufacturers and developers can adopt a ‘just ship it and fix it later’ approach to design.  Software’s famous for this – prior to the Internet when fixing a bug required shipping out a whole new set of media at the developer’s cost, people were a little more careful about what they released lest they go through what Sierra went through with King’s Quest VII.

The Internet gets rid of a lot of this pressure, unfortunately; software that gets patched after release is the norm, as is stuff that just flat-out frequently doesn’t work.  So, it’s quite possible that this’ll be two firsts; one of the first lenses to get a firmware update, and one of the first examples of a slackening of pressure on the manufacturers and a move towards fixing things in software rather than getting it right in the first place.

Olympus gets it, why can’t everyone else?

// March 10th, 2009 // No Comments » // Photography

I’ve been meaning to write about this since it hit, but time keeps escaping me; the tragedy of the megapixel war is that the only casuality is the consumer.  Naive logic would suggest that more megapixels are always a good thing – after all, bigger numbers are always better, or at that’s what marketing tells us.

The reality is that while more megapixels gives you more to play with, that doesn’t do much good if those pixels are largely noise.  As I’ve discussed previously, the sensor is the major limiting factor in extracting quality out of a given capture.  Garbage in, garbage out; it still irritates me to no end to see cell phones with 6 or 12 megapixels.  Sure, it sounds great, and it makes a spectacular bullet point on the back of the box, but when the sensor and lens can only capture two megapixels of usable quality information, those extra megapixels just translate into additional storage and management costs.

Sure, storage’s cheap – I personally have over four terabytes of primary and secondary storage at home, and relatively to many, I’m not that extreme.  However, those larger images take longer to process, they mean I have to spend money on backing them up, and if the quality’s poor to being with, why am I bothering in the first place?

Enter Olympus, stage left.  In a remarkably insightful discussion, the head of Olympus’s planning department recently said that 12 megapixels is enough for anyone other than a professional.  Surprisingly, there’s been a remarkable dearth of cries of ‘luddite’ from the bowels of the Internet – it seems like most of the people ‘in the know’ get this and agree with it.  12 megapixels may not seem like enough, but it’s more than enough to get an extremely high quality standard print.  It’s even enough to blow up to around a 20cm x 30cm, if you know what you’re doing, use quality lenses, and are careful in your enlargements.  For the vast majority of non-studio / non-professional photographers, that’s good enough.  More than good enough – the current trend seems to be towards canvases, and they’re far more forgiving of enlargements than standard print technology.

Instead, Olympus thinks the future is in autofocus and other ‘non-megapixel-related’ technologies.  And personally, I agree with them – it’s one thing to be shooting for billboards and posters and yet another to be shooting for everything else.

Now, why can’t every other consumer photography vendor clue in?

Improving image quality with a DSLR

// March 4th, 2009 // No Comments » // Photography

Carrying around a hefty digital SLR seems like overkill to most; fully decked out with a decent low-light telephoto lens and flash, my camera weighs in somewhere around three and a half kilos.  That’s a lot of weight to be carrying around your neck, so why do I do it?  After all, why use this?

Nikon D700 (12 megapixel)

When you can use this?

Canon Ixus 980 (~15 megapixel)

The Ixus 980 has roughly 3 more megapixels and is significantly lighter (160g vs. ~3.5 kilos), so that makes it a better camera, right?

As with most things in life, there’s no such thing as a free lunch – yes, the Ixus is lighter, but there’s a world of difference in what’s inside.  To understand why, we need to take a step back and understand how a camera works.  At its most basic, a digital camera has three elements – a lens, which lets light into the camera, a sensor, which captures the light, and a viewfinder, which lets you see what the camera is seeing. 

Your standard point and shoot replaces the viewfinder with an LCD attached to the sensor; the sensor is then left permanently on and the camera transmits what the sensor ‘sees’ to the LCD, giving you a live view of the action.  Most digital SLRs are slightly different in that they use a relatively simple mirror / prism system to reflect the light through a viewfinder; the sensor is only activated when a photo is taken.  The rest of the time, the sensor is hidden by the mirror.

Logically then, there’s really only two things which affect how well the camera can capture what it’s being focused on – the lens and the sensor.  Lenses are a topic in their own right, so I’ll skip over them for the moment.  Suffice to say that while most people tend to focus on the body of the camera, your average SLR photographer has probably spent on lenses anywhere up to ten times what they spent on their camera body.  Sound insane?  Well, yeah, it kind of is, but there’s good reasons for it too.

Sensors, on the other hand, are where the first major difference lies between your standard point and shoot cameras and your average digital SLR.  It’s pretty simple – as a general rule, the larger the sensor, the more light it can capture, which in turn means that for a given number of pixels, the better the overall quality of those pixels.  Despite what may seem logical, not all pixels are of equal worth.  Without getting too complex, every pixel has a certain amount of ‘error’ around what it shows compared against what’s in front of you; this error shows up as variation in colour (chroma) or brightness (luma).  The better the sensor, the smaller the average error.  And, the bigger the sensor for a given number of pixels, the easier it is to control the error (as each pixel has more information to draw from).  The greater the average error, the noiser the image becomes and the blurrier hard lines in the image get.

How much of a difference can there be, I hear you ask?  Check this out (taken from Wikipedia):

Camera sensor sizes

My main camera uses a full “frame sensor”, shown in the top left.  Your average point and shoot uses one of the sensors in the bottom row.  Your typical entry-level to mid-range digital SLR uses the APS-C sized sensors.  When you consider that at a minimum, your average digital SLR is using a sensor six twelve times bigger to achieve the same number of megapixels, there’s a reason SLRs tend to take clearer images, even when using a relatively cheap kit lens.

Is it worth the extra weight and bulk?  Sure it is, at least if you want to ensure you’re getting the best image possible.  Entry-level SLRs like the Nikon D60 and Canon 1000D aren’t even that big or heavy, relatively speaking.  They won’t fit in your pocket, but they also don’t weight over a kilo when kitted out with a general walkabout lens either.

Having said that, the camera is the least important part of the picture; a good photographer is a good photographer, and good composition is good composition irrespective of the tool used.  People have even managed to take some amazing photos using nothing more than a cellphone …

Grey market camera equipment

// March 3rd, 2009 // 7 Comments » // Photography

This is an update of a post I wrote quite a while ago on a blog I’ve since retired; I’ve carried it across because judging by my incoming search trends, it’s still quite a popular topic.  In the main, it’s still applicable, although a few things have changed with time.  I’ve updated it to reflect this.

In your search for a DSLR, you might have heard something about “Grey market cameras”, often spoken about in both positive and negative connotations.  You’re probably asking yourself, “What are these strangely named beasts?” 

Basically, the major camera manufacturers lock up each region around the world through exclusive wholesaler arrangements.  So, if you want to buy a Canon or Nikon camera, you have to go to the (normally) single wholesaler who’s authorised to purchase from Canon or Nikon.  Obviously, in these days of global trade and the Internet, their closest competitor is only a single click away.  If you don’t like the prices they’re charging, you’re free to go to a vendor in the US, the UK, or wherever else.  Great for you, not so great for the retailer.  And, in turn, not always so great for the manufacturer’s ability to find retail outlets and offer a significant enough margin to make carrying their goods worthwhile.

To stop you from doing this, most local service arms will refuse to service or honour the warranty of models purchased overseas.  It doesn’t matter if you bought a $2,000 camera in Singapore from an authorised vendor – their default position will be that because you bought it overseas, your warranty isn’t valid.  Nice, isn’t it?

These imported models are called “grey market” cameras.  They’ve been imported legally and are technically exactly the same as the models being sold domestically, but they aren’t recognised by the distributor.  The primary advantage this gives them is that they can set prices in each region to be whatever they want.  Canon and Nikon, for example, tend to charge approximately 50% more in Australia than in the US or most of Asia.  On the other hand, Pentax is really cheap in Australia, but expensive in Europe.  They’ll normally tell where the camera was purchased via the serial number of the bottom of the camera – Nikon varies the first number depending on which market the camera was intended to be sold in.  Most retailers will provide domestic support of a foreign model as long as you purchased it in person overseas from an authorised vendor, but Canon’s a bit prickly about this one, apparently.

They argue that it ensures consistency of product, better consumer satisfaction, and so on, but that’s just marketing-speak.  It’s basically a form of price discrimination.

So why go grey market?  It used to be extremely cheaper (hundreds of dollars in many cases), but this price differential has decreased somewhat with the collapse of the Australian dollar.  A recent local camera I bought was only about 3% more expensive than its grey market counterpart.

Why not?  You normally lose local warranty support and may have difficulties getting your camera serviced later on.  Bear in mind though that this isn’t necessarily the end of the world – most cameras only come with a one year warranty anyway, and there are other service centres that really don’t care where you bought the camera in the first place.  Most reputable local retailers will also provide the warranty coverage for you (which they have to do by law), so if your camera breaks, they’ll take care of shipping it back and getting it fixed in the country or origin.

So, in a nutshell, the advantages of going grey market:

• Generally significantly cheaper, but this is heavily dependent on the current exchange rate.

The disadvantages:

• If your retailer goes bust, you’re out of luck during the warranty period unless you’re willing to ship it back at your cost.
• You may have difficulties getting it serviced by the manufacturer after the warranty period.  Then again, you may not – it’s luck of the draw.  On the other hand, you can always get it serviced by someone other than the manufacturer – most people just want your money and don’t really care where you bought it.

The two companies most people know of in Australia that deal with grey market cameras used to be PhotoBuff and D-D-Photographics.  It’s up to you whether or not you want to take the risk, and I make no comment about the long-term reliability of either company.  However, I believe PhotoBuff’s been around for about three years, and D-D-Photographics about five.  Having said that, PhotoBuff’s been out of action for quite a while now and it’s rather unclear as to when, if ever, they’ll reappear, so with much in life, nothing’s really guaranteed. 

What would I do?  Personally, I take into account the potential loss should the camera die, the length of the warranty, and the price differential.  At the moment, I’ll happily buy local models simply because a 3% price difference isn’t worth the headache to me if the good dies during the warranty period.  On the other hand, a year ago I wouldn’t have gone past the grey market models, largely because the price difference was so significant (upwards of 30% in some cases), it was worth taking the risk.

Caveat emptor.

Seeing things others can’t

// March 3rd, 2009 // 2 Comments » // Photography

Photography’s all about seeing that which others can’t; well, at least that’s what I believe it’s about.  It’s about taking the ordinary and turning it into the extraordinary, regardless of whether it’s a person, whether it’s a situation, or whether it’s something as mundane as a bowl of fruit.  Good photography makes you double-take and go, ‘Wow.  I didn’t even see that!’.

Which is why I’m so impressed with this:

Bathtub IV from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.
 
Using a tilt-shift lens?  Not so new.  Making a progressive montage of photos to tell a story?  Again, not so new.  But combining them to turn it into something that looks and feels different?  Sheer brilliance.