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Wizard Trails: Home of a wandering wizard

 

A baby in the studio

Specifically my own baby, Rune. It's nice to have a "willing" subject to use in the studio, so over the past ten months since his birth I've taken some opportunities to shoot him.

Here he is at 6 months old:

At 6.5 months:

A favourite of mine at a bit over 8 months:

And finally a couple more recently at 9.5 months old:

Children this young are quite tricky to take pictures of. Either they are too young to sit unassisted, or they are too old to sit still. On the other hand, it's very difficult to take a picture of a baby that isn't cute to the parents :)

Rune in studio

First zoo visit with Teleconverter

Acdsee 3.0 Nikon D7000 RAW Problem

I'm having some issues with developing D7000 Raw files in acdsee 3.0 pro. I've updated to the latest raw plug-in and I can open the files, but as soon as I open them in the process screen (or convert them to jpeg), the colours go all wonky. Here's an example OOC jpeg and what I get from the RAW (without any adjustments):

(OOC jpeg)

(Unadjusted RAW)

Nikkor 70-200VRII with macro extenders

I ordered some macro extension tubes for my new Nikon system and they just arrived. I don't have a macro lens to put them on yet (can't decide which one to get), so I figured I'd test how well they work with the Nikkor 70-200 VRII. This lens has some pronounced focus breathing, meaning that the closer you focus, the shorter the focal length becomes, an effect making macro a bit tricky at best. Because of this, the lens's normal maximum magnification is only 0.13x.

My test was performed by creating a test target and showing that on an LCD screen. LCD screens are easy to focus on (lots of small detail) and since they are backlit, there's no problem with even very small working distances. I then set the lens and camera to M, focused to minimum and then found focus by moving lens, camera and tripod closer and further from the monitor with different extender/focal length combinations. Shooting mode was A and aperture f/2.8. I also recorded shutter speed to get some idea of light loss.

Note that I'm only testing field of view and focussing, not image quality.

My results:

• Column 1 (extender): Total size of the (combination of) extender(s).
• Column 2 (FL): Focal length set on the lens
• Column 3 (Field width): Horizontal field of view at focus on a DX sensor.
• Column 4 (Magnif.): Calculated magnification. Since the DX sensor of my D7000 is 23mm wide, magnification will be 1.0x if the field width is 23mm
• Column 5 (Work. Dist.): Working distance from the front of the lens to the target (so not from the sensor). To get inches, either divide by 2.54 or nag me to make an imperial version.
• Column 6 (Light loss): Number of stops of light lost, estimated by looking at the shutter speed. Since the only light was the backlit target, this should be a good indication, but I dunno if I trust my own values here ... take them with a pinch of salt.

The following graph plots working distance against magnification:

So what do we learn here? Well, that at very short working distances the 70-200 VRII can in fact reach macro terrain ... at least on a test target.

However, there's a but, and the but is up there in the third paragraph: I'm not testing image quality. A couple quick snaps in my garden show a considerable amount of Bokeh CA that may well make this exercise rather futile:

(122mm, 68mm extender)

(200mm, 68mm extender)

(70mm, 68mm extender)

(Sorry about low sample quality. These are quick handheld snapshots in a windy garden)

Move!

Lens problem

I've been experiencing an issue with my 9-18mm ultra-wide lens. At first I wrote it off as some smudges on the lens, but I've experienced it too now in shoots where I made very sure the lens elements were clean.

There's some damage on the coating of the front element of this lens, but this damage seems too little to explain these big blur areas, and they are pretty centralised (while the blur is not).

SKWRL

Wow, an update!

I've not been keeping up with the blog much, which has a variety of reasons, the primary one being that I've just been too busy.

So what have I been up to? Well, I became a father last week, which is one of the things that have been keeping me busy. On the photography side I've mostly been working on the Jespo assignment, finishing a bit over 40 photo shoots for them. I handed them the DVDs with pictures yesterday and they were very pleased. They've already used some of the pictures I handed them earlier in printed banners and other advertising materials. I can't wait to see some of those.
I'll probably do a more detailed write-up of my experiences on the Jespo shoots at some later date.

In the next few weeks I'm going to dust off the studio a bit and spend some time in there playing with different lighting setups. I'll also probably do a studio session of the new baby (hey! free model!)

Jespo day 1: sailing and olympic games

Whew... it's been almost a week since my first shoots and still no write-up. Shame on me!

I don't know whether I'm allowed to post any of the pictures here, so this write-up is without any. Sorry.

The first day of shooting for my jespo sports project was last wednesday and was supposed to be a triple: first a combination of sailing and windsurfing, followed by a sport called "olympic games" (basically an introduction for several different sports). I say supposed, because none of the kids showed up for the windsurfing. The instructors blamed a lack of wind (apparently these kids were experienced enough to know when to simply stay home) and a bus strike. The sailors, however, were unperturbed and took to the lake in their little boats.

For this shoot I had a new toy, bought the day before: a ZD50-200 lens. I had been planning to get this lens for quite a while now and it had been on my wishlist for several years. Now with two of my lenses out of action (sent in for repairs) I was forced to buy this lens a bit earlier than originally planned. That said, I'm glad I did because it proved the perfect lens for this day.
Apart from the shiny new ZD50-200 lens, I had my E-3 (fresh from repairs itself), the ZD9-18, the ZD50 (for portraits) and the E-510 kitlens ZD14-42. The latter only because my 14-54 was one of the lenses in repair.

Sailing

For the sailing the instructors took me along in their motorized dinghy allowing me to stay close to the boats. This was a good thing because while the ZD50-200 is a great lens, they were sailing on a pretty great lake. During the shoot I tried to stick to the new lens as much as possible, only switching to the 9-18 a few times when we got really close to the sailing boats. Switching lenses in a rubber dinghy is a bit precarious, especially since I didn't yet have a good place to put the new lens while not in use.

This last bit deserves a bit of expansion. My standard camera bag is a front-carried waistbag. It's a pretty big one, in itself large enough to hold the E3 and a couple of (smaller) lenses. It's expanded on both sides by cylindrical lens holders for my bigger lenses. The upside of this is that I always have my gear in easy reach in front of me. For the new lens, however, I didn't have a side bag yet (the one for the 135-400 was too narrow because of the oversize lens hood of the 50-200) forcing me to use the standard lens bag that came with the lens, slung over my shoulder. This was all fine ... until I sat down in the dinghy and that extra bag proved most unstable. These kind of concerns may seem trivial, but I think it's important to have everything worked out beforehand so that during the shoot you don't lose time, focus and shots with mere practicalities,

Back to the shooting. Sailboats are very vertical things, especially when the sail is at an angle. I found myself using portrait orientation most of the time, even when I had multiple boats in the picture. The verticalness comes from two things: first, the masts and sails obviously leap way above the boat, and secondly the reflection of the boat in the water adds some depth below it.
While shooting I always tried to get as much of the reflection in as possible, but I found that in post I cropped most of it away again in favour of getting a better composition.

The weather was gray and uninteresting which resulted in low contrast shots. Not much you can do about weather, except do the best with what you got. At least there was heaps of light shining through the clouds.

I experimented a bit with taking some shots from right above the water level. Easy thanks to the E-3's liveview and articulating screen and not too scary thanks to its weather sealing.

Olympic games

The olympic games were held on the other side of the lake, in a city sporting hall. When I got in it looked bright enough, but a quick test with the camera showed me that my eyes were deceiving me: there was very little light indeed. In fact even at ISO1600 (a setting I'm loathe to use) and with the relatively bright ZD50-200 I could not get shutter speeds faster than 1/80s, which is borderline at best to take pictures of young kids running around.
I stayed on the side lines because I hadn't brought appropriate shoes (preparation again) which strongly limited my perspective. Still, I did my best and got a heap of shots in. These will need quite a bit of work in PP to remove at least some of the noise, and even then I won't be able to remove the motion blur. Luckily these pictures will not be printed at huge sizes.
For future indoor shoots I will just have to use a flash, possibly with a couple of reflectors.

For this shoot I needed to use C-AF, and I'm going to need a lot more practice at that. I used a trick I found somewhere on a forum to get better results, but even then I often missed focus entirely (not to mention that I forgot I was using the trick a couple of times).