Going off-camera

I was honoured to asked to do a demonstration of off-camera flash for Bluff Camera Club this week. At the talk, I promised to post links to some of the websites and equipment I talked about.

The shot on the left was lit with one umbrella-ed flash, from camera right, the middle one was shot with the same setup but with a reflector on the left. The last shot was taken with the flash above the camera and a reflector putting light under the chin.

Blurry good?

I was fiddling with the trial version of Nik Software’s Silver Efex Pro Photoshop plug-in and came up with this version of one of my favourite pictures, after trying a few different effects. Silver Efex seems to be a great way to convert images to black and white, offering everything you might want under under one roof, so to speak.

You can pick from a variety of presets and then customise the look of your picture by simulating the use of coloured filters, toning, and adding film grain. Using Control Point technology, you can apply effects to selected areas in a picture.

The package is pretty easy to use although I found the interface a trifle cramped, with there being no obvious was to maximise the work space to fill the entire screen. I like Silver Efex but the $199 price tag is too much for my slender means at the moment.

Photo Critique

Over the last months I’ve been tuning into an occasional video podcast produced by Atlanta photographer Zack Arias and his musician wife Meghan.

What happens is that Zack and Meghan review websites belonging to professional or wannabe-professional photographers and manage to impart much commonsense and wisdom along the way.

Photographers have to apply to have their sites and their work reviewed and, on occasion, it must be quite a painful experience. Not that the Ariases (I wonder what the proper plural is) are ever nasty or unkind, but they do tell it as they see it.

Graffiti

I notice I’ve been taking a few shots of colourful graffiti lately.

BigHugeLabs

I wrote about  photo website BigHugeLabs in my weekly computer column but I decided to archive that section of the article here.

I thought I’d share an interesting photo website with you.  It’s called BigHugeLabs and offers myriads of different photo-related services.  These include turning photos into a number of different things including a magazine cover, a motivational poster, a pop art poster, a mosaic, a jigsaw puzzle, an ID card, or any one of a number of other options.

You can upload photos directly from your computer or from the photo sharing site Flickr, and you can have many hours of fun creating your masterpieces.

BigHugeLabs offers you the opportunity of having these printed and posted to you, but this is of fairly limited appeal to us South African consumers, given the cost of international postage.

Where it scores, however, is that it allows you to download the file of the project that you create. If you use the free service, you can only download low-res files, suitable for putting on the web or e-mailing but, if you pay, you can download high-resolution files which would be entirely suitable for printing at a local photo lab.

There are a number of payment options ranging from $100 for your lifetime to $25 for a year, $10 for a month, or $5 for a week. Even if you don’t pay however, I still feel that you can have plenty of creative fun at the BigHugeLabs website.

 

Lens longevity

I’m an ignoramus when it comes to technical issues but I’m wondering about the pricing of electronic goods, lenses in particular. In the old days when you bought a good lens, you paid through the nose, as you do today, but at least you had assurance that that you would most likely have the use of the lens for your life-time.

Now when you cut off your limbs and give them to the retailer in exchange for a piece of glass, it will only be usable as long as the electrics last, and there’s no telling how long that will be. I would love to know how long these things are designed to last, but I’m sure that the average will be considerably less than the lifetime typically enjoyed by  pre-electric lenses.

What brought these thoughts on is that  a friend has had a Canon 24-105mm lens for a couple of years and it recently stopped working. He was quoted more than half of the dollar price for new lens, to have it fixed. In another case, practically our whole camera club used to shoot Canons and many of us owned their 17-85mm lens. Ever single one of us, and several other people we know, have had that lens fail, and had to pay plenty to get it fixed.

I was a pretty early adopter of Canon autofocus in my home town of Durban, South Africa. I bought three lenses in the early 1990s and one in 2003, when I switched to digital. Only one of those, a  35-135mm, is still working.

I don’t know whether lenses have come down in price much in real terms, but they should have. Do electronic lenses offer the same value for money as the  lenses in the past did? If the manufacturers offered parts at cost, as a service, maybe…

Panos again

I have been shooting quite a few panoramas lately, including the one above and the one at the bottom of this post.

Near China Beach

Took this one between Leisure Bay and Glenmore Beach the other day, and really liked it.

Doofus

Just when I thought I had got this Strobist off-camera flash thing taped, I managed to totally mess up a shoot. Our camera club had organised a model shoot with three gorgeous models but it rained and we had a sudden change of venue and a lot less light than expected.

A few of us Nikon shooters decided to practice our skills with off-camera flash and Nikon’s Creative Lighting System. We got everything set up quickly and were snapping away at a great rate, swapping models and poses and having a great time.

Getting Bown away

The last week brought me quite a shock, photographically speaking. First, to fill in the essential background, I have been wondering what my own photographic style was and what sort of photographer I wanted to be.

This phase has been going on for quite some years and I had come to some preliminary conclusions. These were, firstly, that I especially like shooting people and, secondly, that I like high contrast black and white, with inky-black backgrounds.