James Tucker

Nikon D800 vs Canon 5D2

2012-10-29T19:00:00.000Z

I'm as interested as anyone when it comes to looking at results of specific cameras vs each other so this weekend Dad came over to learn how to use bigger lights for a project that he's hoping to do soon.

While he was over I thought that it would be a great opportunity to do a comparison between my Canon and his Nikon D800 (he has the e version). The original plan was to test these 2 plus the 7D, and D7000 and at various apertures and ISOs, but through a combination of late arrivals, bored children and the weather we only really got to shoot out these 2 and at f11.

From everything that I have read and seen the 5D mark ii and mark iii are almost identical at low ISO by the way.

I was all set for the Canon to be giving the most pleasing skin tones with the Nikon having more detail and deeper shadows so to take away some of the subjectivity we shot with the same lights, calibrated both with a colorchecker passport and manually set the white balance in Lightroom 4. The lenses used were the Nikkor 105VR and the Canon 100L.

So here are the images (Nikon first), please click through for larger:

At full size you can see that the skin tones are very similar in both but the blue in the jacket in the lower right is cleaner in the Nikon (the Canon has a light red mottling that is false), when we played with the brightness and shadows the Nikon had so much more detail in the shadows and it was far cleaner too.

Personally I will still stick with my current system because it doesn't give me 75mb files out of the camera (they are about 25mb normally) and I am not at the point where the camera is the limiting factor but I am really impressed with this Nikon output!

Anyway, here is the final James version...

Basingstoke Live 2012

2012-07-28T09:38:00.000+01:00

**NOW WITH ADDED PICTURES (D'OH!)**

A couple of weekends ago I went to cover the Basingstoke Live music festival. This is a free music festival that is arranged by Basingstoke & Deane council and takes place in a large park (War Memorial Park) for a weekend in July.

I am not sure of the attendance figures for this year but it was a very full turn out despite the horrible weather.

I went along with my family not really knowing what to expect but I thought that some of the music was amazing and there was a really great festival vibe to the whole place. There were dedicated tents for different types of music such as acoustic, hip-hop, metal and others plus a main stage that started with a local gospel choir.

So here are some selected highlights from me:

DJ Haggis and MC Eksman enjoying the crowd

Fabio and Grooverider headlining

The crowd enjoying it

The Jam's Bruce Foxton (with his new band, "From The Jam")

Mr ShaoDow trying not to use his crutches!

Zuby working out on stage

A big crowd for Basingtoke

So thanks again for putting on the show to Basingstoke and Deane and particular thanks to Krissy Lloyd for giving me the access.

Chris Evans Magnifcent 7 at Thruxton

2012-06-30T15:45:00.003+01:00

Chris Evans was running his annual Magnificent Seven tour around the South of England this week so on Thursday I decided that I was going to find a way to get to my local race track and take some pictures!

I went armed with my Canon cameras and lenses not really knowing what to expect! It was pouring with rain as I drove there too, just to make things really interesting.

As I stood there listening to the rain drum on my windscreen I decided that I'd better scout for locations - the first one was going to be at the entrance as they crested the hill, the second was at the entry to the paddock and the third would be on the race track itself.

I was just in awe of the beauty of the cars (the appearance and the noise) and the fact that this even had raised over a million pounds for charity!

All of the track shots were with the 7D with a 70-200f4 IS, the paddock shots were with the 5D mark II and either the same lens or the 17-40L.

Thank you to Thruxton race circuit and to Chris Evans for allowing the photography.

Enjoy and please feel free to comment here or on the gallery!

Thank you for reading and looking.

Defection!

2012-04-01T21:58:00.000+01:00

Following the refund of the Leica I needed something fast for some Vanessa Knox shoots that I had coming up. Vanessa is a great designer that designs quite high end women's clothing including maternity wear. I'm not really the king of fashion but I still appreciate te cleanliness and seeming simplicity of the designs.

So with 4 shoots coming up in 3 weeks, a new (stupidly) high megapixel Nikon coming out as a replacement for my old camera and me not wanting to to spend a fortune upgrading my computing hardware to deal with the files I decided to go back to Sony....

But no one had the A900 in stock any more, uh-oh...

Maybe I could go to Nikon, no that's still not here... Rubbish....

Canon it is then! 5D Mark II please? Yes I know that the new one is due out any day now, but I don't want a 400 thousand megapixel SLR thanks... Oh it's not that? Maybe I do want decent autofocus and better weather sealing... Double the price you say? No that's alright 5D mark II and a fistful of lenses it is then please!

So I'd defected, I'd gone to Canon but guess what? This gave me the same looks as I loved from the Leica one of the things that I really do like as well is seeing the image you are about to capture in live view, it's changed tripod photography for me.

So I am now wondering why I was so reluctant to look at Canon before. I think that it must have been due to the way the old entry level dSLR felt compared to the Nikon D70.

I'll be sharing more as I learn this camera and a lot more Vanessa Knox pictures when I can, in the mean time though, I hope that you enjoy these from the old kit (Nikon D700, studio lights and a Macro 105VR lens):

Pipetto Product Shoot

2012-03-02T21:25:00.000Z

Hello again!

I haven't been around much as since getting the Leica M9 refunded I've been swamped with work on integrations, websites and a few photoshoots (it's tough but someone has to do it!) so I thought that I had better start telling you about them!

Today I am going back to December, and a little shoot that I did for Pipetto, I know always the same people right! The day started with me reversing into a flatbed truck, then progressed to Starbucks - I always think that a good shot of caffeine is what you need when you're buzzing from crashing your car...

Fortunately we were too busy to dwell on it for long so we travelled on to our venue, dragged a camera bag and a bag of lights into a pub and set up to fire some shots off in the hour before they opened. So with the help of Kick Ass's own Val Jobara and Chantal from Pipetto we went for some retro and some sophisticated city folk style shots to really try and promote the executive feel of the latest leather iPhone and iPad cases that Pipetto were releasing, so here are some of the shots - to see the edits go look at the Pipetto home page :)

Not much had to be done to them - a little bit of cropping.

Then we had a bit of a play before we had to pack up and move on.

Despite appearances, there was no natural light, it was a horrible wet grey morning and there was loads of furniture in the window, so the "sun through the window" is a beauty dish set about 6 foot high off right and then a big diffuser facing from behind (and just left) the camera the to add detail to the shadows but allow contrast.

All were shot on a Nikon D700 with Sigma 85mm f1.4 or Nikkor 16-35VR F4

Leica M9 SD Memory Card Issue

2012-02-20T21:08:00.000Z

I've not posted in a while, I was a bit busy with Christmas then I wanted to share my news about my perfect camera system and then it turned into a bit of a nightmare. I think it's now nearly over so I want to write a post in case it can save someone some time or pain in the future.

Background
Following my experience on the Leica experience day I had worked out that I loved the images that the camera produced, I loved the range finder way of working, the size was just about perfect, the controls were great. In short it felt like the perfect camera for me.

I looked at my bags of SLR gear and worked out that I could cover it all with an M9 and a few lenses so I sold all the Nikon kit, kept the family m4/3s and bought myself an M9, with a 50mm lens.

All was good!

I went out and took some of my favourite photos and had a great time doing it, here is an example:

My daughter Lucy with my lights

So all was good - my sensor was dirty, but that was OK, I got that cleaned at the Leica Boutique in Mayfair and went out taking pictures.

I covered a behind the scenes shoot of a fashion tv (fashionone) recording

and all was good.

Incident
Then the last weekend in January I took some shots of a pantomime that my Mum and her husband were involved with, it all looked good showing them on the camera - I got home to process them and....

Nothing - the card would not even mount! I tried it on 3 different macs, 2 windows PCs, inbuilt and external card readers, the M9 and the Panasonic camera. None of them could even see the card and in fact the M9 completely locked up and became inoperable, I could only restart it by taking the card and battery out of the camera and then putting the battery back in.

When I went on my experience day, when I got home I had a similar experience, at the time I put it down to the card that Leica gave me being brand new, or me storing it in the case incorrectly in my bag, or it being too near a phone or something - but I bought some software for the Mac to recover the data - it worked a treat - I low level formatted the card in my Mac and it's been fine again ever since (in my Panasonic and Leica).

I tried recovering the files again this time but was not so lucky, I got most of the images off the card, but some were now 0 bytes and ALL of the recovered images had the bottom third corrupted, 2/3s of it was slid along the file, the remaining third was the picture before with a purple tint, click through to see this contact sheet at full size.

I did the best that I could with them, but then I remembered the initial incident and so wrote this post on dpreview after contacting Leica, who told me to use cheaper SanDisk cards, it was an issue with me having the quicker cards and to build confidence take a load of images with cheaper cards. The outcome of the post prompted me to contact my dealer.

Others Experiences
If you read through that thread and follow other threads that link from it you will see literally hundreds on people that have had the same or similar experiences - you will also see that Leica has issued statements about this twice - once in August effectively saying that it was a Sandisk card issue, the second one in December says that they have fixed the issue with their cameras on firmware 1.176 and here is the notes from that firmware update (this was the first thing I applied when I got the camera)

Improvements in the M9 Firmware Version 1.176 1. Bug fixes:

• Fix of a seldom-occurring error when initializing the SD-card.
With that firmware update, we revoke the constrictions made with respect to the compatible cards. Generally speaking, the Leica M9/M9-P is compatible with any SD card that is in accordance with the respective standards. Unfortunately, it is impossible to test the compatibility of every single card of every single supplier.

All cards available from SanDisk have been compatibility-tested and the firmware version 1.1.76 ensures their proper function.

I read that to mean that ALL SanDisk cards are tested and the only ones that they have tested thoroughly so the Leica information did not make sense. The dealer confirmed that 1.176 should be compatible with ALL SanDisk cards and so asked me to bring the camera in as "Leica UK don't know what they are talking about". I agreed to this but the more I read the forums and these kind of posts the more uncomfortable I became.

I also spoke to an American pro who had been told in writing that Leica knew what the issue was and were not going to do anything about it. I was alarmed by this but as he didn't want me to use his name and was not prepared to send me the email I had to put it into the possible explanation pile.

Someone that I respect as a photographer and Leica user was very helpful in keeping me sane while this was going on was telling me to switch to Lexar as he had had no issues since switching, then last week I felt I had cursed him, he had the beginnings of the same kind of issue on his Lexar card. If you read his post you will see that he and I have put a lot of thought into this - I come from an electronic engineering and computing background so I had some theories on what was going on with the cards, and Michael's research seems to back up my thoughts.

Outcome
I am currently awaiting my refund from the dealer, I have a series of shoots starting in about 10 days time and it gets very expensive if I lose key images, I need something that I can trust so I am going back to the big bad world of SLRs as soon as the refund clears.

As I said at the beginning I was just going to ignore it and put it down to it being a one off but as lots of others have experienced the same (someone else that commented on my dpreview thread lost his images on the experience day too and was told it was too much chimping, which is reviewing the images on the camera) I decided that I should post my experiences in case it helps anyone else.

Please feel free to comment here or on Michael's post if you feel that there is anything that you would like to add (positive or negative).

Once this is all resolved I think my next post will be about expectations and experiences...

Leica M9 Mini Review

2011-12-09T12:39:00.001Z

I'm getting to play with a lot of cameras lately!

Last Friday it was the turn of the Leica M9 courtesy of the Leica Akademie in London (http://www.leica-storemayfair.co.uk/leica-akademie/leica-akademie.html). I got to spend a morning playing with the M9 and the newest 35mm f2 Summicron (and for a little while the f0.95 Noctilux!)

This was the first time that I had ever used a range finder, manual focus for me has always been through the lens, film SLRs, digital SLR, any form of medium format, etc. So that was the first thing that I was afraid of! It's also got the least amount of controls of any camera that I've ever used and they are in a different place to where they are on SLRs too - the aperture ring is at the front of the lens for a start...

I have to say that I think it's actually a lot easier to focus on a range finder than an SLR - is not subjective, you are not trying to second guess where the piece you want is sharpest - you have a focus rectangle in the middle and you twist the lens until the images overlay exactly - then you recompose and press the shutter button. It all feels very natural and focusing was fine even at f0.95 as you can see here:

Click through to see it larger this is a straight out of camera jpeg, my conversion is later in this article.

The thing that struck me most was how easy composition was - you see everything sharp through the viewfinder and have to imagine how it will look through the lens (this is the opposite to an SLR where everything is more out of focus than it will be when you take your stopped down shot).

One of the first shots that I took on the day was of a car that pulled up in the street as we left the building - I have cropped the top from this and converted to black and white but not done any sharpening or blurred the background - I could see the couple walking through the viewfinder and just had to wait for them to enter the imaging area:

Again click through for larger - this was with the Summicron @ f2.

So that's great - static subjects waiting for framing right? Well I am looking at this as a potential SLR replacement so for me the camera would need to be able to pan as well, so guess what I tried that too!

Not my greatest ever (by the way the processing is just removing saturation of everything other than red or blue from in Lightroom) - but it shows me that with practice this could be used for panning shots too - some of Brett's images that he showed us were perfectly panned, but he's had a lot more experience!

When I didn't like what the meter was giving me I just chose a shutter speed and shot away, for me it was all just so much quicker than an SLR - Aperture is always on the lens - shutter speed is always on the top - shutter release is by the side - it just works and lets you work.

Here's an example of me seeing a shot and taking it quickly - it's also 1/8s @ 35mm - this would look pretty blurry on an SLR shot - even at this size:

Fortunately for me Brett then let me use his Noctilux which I was using wide open at f0.95 - it was beautiful!

I was then allowed to try it with radio triggered lights in a studio but those shots are boring so I won't be sharing but it was great there too!

So the image quality was amazing - the overall look of the images was special and I found it an absolute dream to shoot - downsides appear to potentially be battery life, lack of easy macro functionality - restriction of focal length on lenses and (the elephant in the room) cost...

But despite that I am absolutely bitten by this system - it gives me all the IQ and more that I would expect from my full frame DSLR kit - plus it's not much bigger than a micro 4/3 system (and the lenses are tiny!) and it's just so fast to use!

I am currently planning how many jobs it will take to add this to my personal list of cameras - or how much SLR kit I can replace with it - I liked it that much.

Thanks again for the opportunity to try this kit out to Leica Akademie in Mayfair and particularly to Brett for being so helpful and letting me use his own personal lenses. His photography is inspirational! http://www.flickr.com/photos/fotografiebrett/

EDIT - just reconverted the Aston and thought I should share (it deserved better)

More Thoughts on Real World Sigma SD15 Usage

2011-11-20T10:03:00.001Z

I have seen that a lot of people have come to my blog looking for a Sigma SD15 review, and although I felt that I covered it with a lot of posts, I don't feel that I ever really gave a proper conclusion or a weigh up of the pros and cons. So today I am going to attempt to do that!

It is still real world - I don't have the camera here to take any more shots and I also didn't bother with test charts or anything like that - I just have my old photos and thoughts.

So to start you off here's a quick history of me and cameras so that you can see where I am coming from:
I used to use my Dad's manual focus Minolta SLRs when I was a small child (from the age of 5 or 6 I think) and loved them but had no idea why!
When I was 7 I was given my own focus free P&S and didn't use it as much as it's expensive developing films when you are a small child with no job...
I played at times with my father's AF Minoltas after that and then bought my own one in my early 20s when my passion for photography was reignited.
I got the Nikon D70 a few years ago but was pushing up against the limits in some situations so I traded it in for a D200 and was happy shooting sports with it - I also acquired a Fuji S5 Pro as payment for some work I did for someone.
The D200 was replaced after a fall with the D300.
I got some photography work and decided to go back to Minolta (now Sony) as I loved the output of the A900 with Minolta lenses (sold all F mount kit).
After a year I realised that I had got spoiled with the Nikon AF and really wanted it back - so I switched to the D700.

The point of this is to show you what cameras I am used to, as they all have quirks, issues and benefits. On top of this I still run a Nikon 35mm film camera, our family P&S is a Panasonic m4/3s and I have a 70s Bronica MF camera that gets occasional use!

So now back to the point of this post, the Sigma SD15!

Ergonomics:
I stand by what I said at the beginning, in most ways this feels like a proper photographers camera. There are dials for most tasks but you can navigate just as easily by using the quick settings menu at the press of a button.

It doesn't feel as solid as my D700 but it feels robust enough to take some abuse and it feels really well balanced.

The fact that you have to press a button and turn a dial to change the autofocus point or metering mode are really big minuses in my book though, silly Sigma. But if you are using this in a studio or for landscapes then that is probably not a big issue either.

Image Quality:
As stated before the image quality is truly amazing at a pixel level if you are used to a bayer based sensor camera, have a click through and look at the samples I posted earlier or at these ones if you want to see that quality:

And looking at the output more closely I actually agree with Sigma's trumped up marketing claims of a resolution similar to 8-14 megapixel, these files can be upscaled a lot with no break up or artifacts or anything else to hint that they are digital images. Something else that I have come to agree with is Sigma's statement that the Foveon is digital film - it just is in so many ways.

My hesitation before on image quality was that although these are amazing on screen at 100% what do they look like when printing form such a small file (I assumed that it would be giving away a lot to the Nikon D700).

I should have known better!

Up to about A3 size (about 18 x 12 inch) prints are very similar I printed out this photo at that size and there are no jaggies, there's no break up nothing - this looks every bit as good as a D700 photo - now maybe my subject lends itself to enlargements but even so:

So as long as you can take the image with the correct exposure in the first place and frame as you'd like to in the camera there's no real downside at base ISO (100 on this camera).

The other major plus with this camera is that because the number of photo sites is low compared to the detail that you get out it works really well with budget lenses! For most cameras you can buy optically great lenses on a budget but you lose convenience (no auto focus, need for adapters, manually controlling aperture, etc) but all of my examples were with kit lenses - you just can't do this on Nikon, Canon or Sony - the cheaper lenses limit the sensors.

Here's another example to illustrate this:

Remember that all of these were shot on the variable aperture "kit" 18-50mm and 50-200mm lenses. I didn't ever try it with more expensive lenses as I can't afford to run 2 camera systems and this can't compete with the others on some features that I need for work.

So in terms of image quality - I think that it's an amazing achievement and still keeps up with or exceeds the quality of the equivalents from the big boys.

So where did it all go wrong?
There's a few parts to this answer, it depends what for...

Sports

The AF is too slow and not flexible enough (compared to what I am used to)
Noise is noticeable at ISO 200 and just keeps getting worse from there
Renting lenses when needed for the Sigma mount is not easy

Reportage

AF is not flexible enough
Higher ISO is not good enough

Studio

I couldn't calibrate the colours as easily as the output really needs to be done in Sigma's own software - colour accuracy is critical when you are photographing clothing, pleasing is not a real option!

If the camera was quicker or the SD1 was cheaper I am sure that I would have spent more time working around these issues or would have ignored them and kept this as a still life and landscape only camera but overall it's just not quite there for me.

Having said that if I hadn't been spoilt by high end Nikon AF and ISO performance or I was still shooting just for me the whole time then I would be very happy with this camera and the fact that I do not need to spend as much on lenses would be massive!

So here is the summary

Pros

Stunning image quality - on screen and on when printed
Relatively cheap
Gives great results with cheap lenses
Handles really well
Has a lot of lenses in the system
Is suprisingly compact
Bags of tonality
Great dynamic range (at base ISO)

Cons

Needs to be at base ISO to deliver the results
SLOW
Needs to use Sigma's own software to get the best results
AF is very dated
The mount

Nikon 24mm PC-E Update

2011-11-18T23:03:00.001Z

As promised when I looked at this lens last time...

I had a chance to play with it for it's normal purpose a couple of weeks ago. Generally these types of lenses are used to try and get a whole image sharp (when conventionally it shouldn't be) or to correct for perspective distortions.

Last time I realised that you could use them hand held and that gave me a cunning plan... If I could shoot handheld wide open I could get all the depth of field that I wanted with a quick shutter speed as the lens was wide open! Awesome :)

So a couple of weeks ago I thought I should give it a go as the opportunity was there and here is the result of the first attempt - handheld, D7000 @f3.5

OK - great it can work for conventional photography... What about my style!

If you look at the full size images on flickr you will see that there is a stripe of sharpness on this from my feet, over one duck and through the gap in the trees, that stripe amazing BUT even I think that this is pushing things a bit too far on the limited DOF front, but at least I have proved to myself that they can be used handheld.... I wonder what a longer focal length would look like!

PS Check back later this weekend - I have another article on the Sigma SD15 to write.

First Magazine Cover!

2011-11-04T08:54:00.000Z

Hey, just a quick one today!

My friend Andrew got a new (to him) Jaguar a few months ago and came to visit - I looked at his car, he looked at my camera, we went to go and have some boy toy fun together in the country lane A roads near Basingstoke!

I set the camera up with an extreme wide angle lens to raelly accentuate the curves of the car and to make it look really aggressive and we took a few photos (6 or 7 in total I think).

When I got home I had a bit of a play in Lightrom and with the Nik Viveza 2 plug in to play with the saturation of different parts separately to really make and sent Andrew my played with results which he really liked - he sent them to a magazine with an article and then this happened:

But I still preferred my black and white conversion:

Anyway - I am very excited about getting my first magazine cover and hope that it is only the first!

Thanks to http://www.jaguardriver.co.uk/ for letting me post the images.

Stourhead In Autumn

2011-10-31T11:08:00.002Z

This weekend we decided to spend some time together as a family so we all (Grandpops, Lucy, Oscar, Sophie and me) piled into the car and headed out to eat and enjoy the view at Stourhead, a brilliant National Trust property on the Wiltshire / Gloucestershire border. I've been once before when Oscar was tiny so I knew what to expect but Sophie didn't and was a little bit concerned about going to visit gardens in late October.

But it was well worth a visit - we saw some stunning landscapes and Grandpodps and I tried to capture them as best we could in our own individual ways. Here's a slideshow of our day as I recorded it:

I will try to post links to some of Grandpop's images when he posts them, but we had a really great time and recommend that you go to see it in the Autumn if you can. Our images should look really different though as I was using a 105mm fixed lens and 28-75mm Tamron zoom - he was using the legendary (in our house) Nikon 24mm pc-e lens.

Review: DxO FilmPack3

2011-09-23T22:09:00.000+01:00

I have been taking some photos recently, honest!

We've been shooting Spring Summer 2012 for Vanessa Knox at the same time as getting Autumn/Winter up on the site, I've also taken some images for Pipetto for their new range, I had a holiday where I only took pictures with my medium format Bronica camera, with one lens and no built in metering (one of the rolls of film was ruined during developing - that took close to 3 weeks! That's a pretty appalling service in anyone's book).

Anyway that brings me onto a new product that I was trying out and then bought today, FilmPack 3 from DxO, you may have heard of them before as they have a monopoly on testing sensors and lenses - they also know devices inside out and make some of the most accurate RAW conversion software around.

I've always had a thing for film and even in this day and age there's something that I really love about film - it's partly the process, it's partly the smugness of seeing your vision again 3 weeks after you captured it, but it's mostly the character. Digital just looks, well, digital!!

My ideal set up would be digital for convenience and speed of being able to see the finished result (and for accuracy to be honest, lots of people have a romantic notion that film was more accurate and more what you saw - well that's just wrong, each film has it's own character) - but with the character of certain films for certain tasks.

So today I had a play with FilmPack 3 vs real film! One of my favourite films is Fuji Superia Reala, it's a wonderful portrait film and it is quite saturated but gives really nice skin tones (see, character, not accuracy!) Fortunately I have some digital images and MF images from Reala shot under the same conditions within a few days of each other - I apologise that they are family snaps but here we go, real Reala first, fake Reala second and original digital third...

I'm quite impressed - I think that it adds the feel of Reala, but retains the convenience of digital, it allows you to correct the white balance (if needed like here, Lucy definitely has blue eyes!) but look at how the real Reala and Reala-alike are both giving pinker flesh tones, darkening the highlights slightly and just making it a softer image without losing detail - I was sold just on this comparison!

So I decided to go and see what some of the other film treatments were like - I had a play with the Velvia 100 setting for a macro shot that I had taken - Velvia is renowned for being high contrast, massively saturated and very fine grain...

Simulated Velvia:

Original:

I think that the qualities people like in Velvia are more like digital images anyway but even so there's still a not so subtle difference - please check this page to see the samples larger if you'd like to further compare yourself, all 5 are in there.

This is only just brushing the surface, there are negative and slide films as well as classic black and whites - this application doesn't give you the flexibility or customisation of the Nik plug ins that I really love, but it gives something very different and equally as pleasing to use. It gives you film images with digital convenience.

I'd love to hear your thoughts, please feel free to comment with questions or your own views.

A perfect compromise as far as I am concerned!

Even more testing

2011-07-25T00:41:00.000+01:00

Well, today my favourite model and I decided to go and play at the park for a while in return for him helping me to test if a Nikon Sb-900 , a Nikon SB 700 and pop up flash were enough to do a shoot in a forest.

I think that the answer is yes!

I had the SB-900 mounted on a Gorillapod wrapped around a tree pointing down at him with the SB-700 sometimes to the left and sometimes behind him and controlled the exposure wirelessly from the camera.

These are all unedited as they were just a technical test, and they were all shot at ISO 200, 1/200s and f11 so I think that it should be OK...

Impromptu Studio Day

2011-07-18T17:00:00.001+01:00

As Dan had travelled from Leeds for the course he brought his family down too and they stayed until Sunday lunch time, so on Sunday morning we had a bit of a play with some lighting taking portraits as a bit of a break from the landscape photography.

We set up some lights and made a background using mounting board - Dan took a picture so I am happy to share that:

We didn't have a lot of space as I was just setting up in my office (the other rooms in the house were being used by people (how dare they!) so we were looking at how to control the light to get clean and sharp images without shadows of us dominating the scene - here are my favourites from Dan first (of his little girl Phoebe) with my pictures of Lucy following - as far as I am aware there has been no post processing of either.

I can't choose which is my favourite!

Obviously the first one technically but the second would look great with a little bit of work and it is very cute.

Here's Lucy:

And finally one of me demonstrating what the like will look like if we switch of the fill light and only light across the subject with a spotlight style light.

Course 2 is safely finished

2011-07-18T10:28:00.001+01:00

This weekend Terry and I went back to Dorset to go and run another landscape photography course. This time the weather was not so good as a group we had to deal with different types of conditions, although it did clear up massively in the afternoon. The main lesson from this course ended up being looking at the image, not the subject and making sure that it's not cluttered.

The guys on the course gave a lot of valuable input again and everyone had a great time (especially once it had got sunny in the afternoon). The slideshow below is showing some of my shots from the day, photographs taken by course participants will be posted throughout the week on flickr, please feel free to join the group if you want to see more.

This one was at Lulworth and Durdle Door and it ended with the guys wanting to buy filters and weather protection for their cameras. I also learnt that microfiber clothes still leave fluff on coated lenses when they are wet.

Thank you to Christo, Dan and George for making it an easy day, I hope to see your photos soon.

Dan and I also had an impromptu studio session the next day - new post to follow.

It's Fidgety Friday

2011-07-15T12:06:00.000+01:00

I always try to set my weeks up so that Friday's are free....

It very rarely works that way, this week I am getting testing done on a few behind the scenes changes on a couple of websites, as well as some pretty technical bits too.

I had set aside today to clear up my office too - I've spent a couple of hours and here are the results so far...

I only have to organise everything for the next training day tomorrow and get some printing done on top of the testing and signing off - EASY!

Sigma SD15 For sale, experiment is over

2011-07-11T08:24:00.001+01:00

Well.... I don't think that the SD1 will drop in price any time soon and I don't want to have to run 2 separate expensive systems so I am selling the SD15 with the 18-50mm kit lens and 50-200OS lens too. All of the kit is pretty much as new - I've not registered it with Sigma and I've taken less than a thousand photos in total.

It's a shame as I was super excited about this system and I love the results from Foveon. Let me know if you're interested at around £550, if not it will be finding it's way to ebay this week.

I honestly thought it would come down to an ergonomic or useability issue - but it's not, it's just the price of the SD1! I could buy a Nikon D3x and have a lot of change and the ability to use the lenses I've already bought for the same money...

Nikon 24mm PCE Tilt Shift Hands On

2011-07-03T10:44:00.002+01:00

Firstly, this is not a review!

I had about 10 minutes with this lens in total.

It's this Nikon lens which is available from Amazon:

On Friday Dad came over and brought his new 24mm PCE lens with him so obviously I had to mount it on my D700 and have a play.

I'd read a lot about T/S optics, I'd been out with Dad using them on his view camera, I'd read reviews, write ups and just about anything that I could about these lenses but even so they are so different when you actually get to use one.

The first thing I'd like to point out is that images in this post were all wide open @ iso 800 and manually metered and focussed through the viewfinder with no aids, so that's myth one blown out the water, you CAN use them hand held (whether you'd want to is another question).

The next is the "incompatibility" with the D700 - the reports are right, you can't rotate the lens the whole way as the prism is too low and a gear on the lens touches it at about 80+ degrees rotation - simple answer... Rotate it the other way instead! Easy...

So with no formal training, no previous experience and no tripod I decided to have a play to see how I would use it ( I love selective focus)

The first shot is one of Dad in focus, he's about 2 or 3 feet away and Holly is another 4 or 5 past him so this could be done in a similar way with a wide angle f/1.4 lens... But it's not, it's a f/3.5 lens, and even at f1.4 I am not sure that the out of focus would be so smooth.

Then I tilted it to get the focus the other way around:

And finally I tilted it to get both faces sharp, this should would have been impossible with any other style of lens I think. To get that perspective with everything sharp would require a very small aperture and I think I was already at 1/50s at f3.5 and ISO 800 you would have also had subject movement to deal with:

It's a very well made lens - the range of movements seem to be massive, and I can now see how versatile and useful they can be - I've only ever seen them used for product shots or landscapes before (and of course for the cartoony model shots), but I think that they could be used for pretty much anything now that I can see that I wouldn't need to confront my allergy to tripods!

If I were buying one I'd personally go for one of the longer focal lengths - I'm not sure which (ideally I would have all 3 but that's a lot of money for some pretty niche lenses) I think that it would probably be the 85mm but I'm not sure.

Even from my 10 minute play I could see the qualities of this lens and the image quality it produces as well, the well documented downside is no control over the angle of rotation of the tilt vs the shift, did someone say Schneider?

New photographer to me

2011-07-01T15:20:00.001+01:00

http://www.ianbramham.com/

I wanted to mention the site of Ian Bramham, he's an award winning black and white photographer based up north of England who specialises in very atmospheric photos.

His images are all available to buy as prints so if you get a chance check his work out, he's won several competitions and is waiting on the results of another at the moment.

My personal favourite is the bull in the field, he looks very bored!

Canon 9000 mk II vs HP B9180

2011-07-01T15:17:00.000+01:00

First an explanation of why I am comparing the 2 printers...

A few years ago I needed to do some A3+ prints for a project and had some budget left (it was March) so I decided to get a new printer instead of sending the files away - I run a network of machines so I wanted networking built into the printer and it needed to be capable of producing good quality long lasting prints.

At the time it ended up being the HP or an Epson.

I went for the HP as the print quality seemed to be about the same and the HP had some cool features like auto calibration.

For 4 or 5 years I used it with no problems and it ran absolutely perfectly but then I switched to Mac - oh dear! The printer needed a new print head anyway, it was clogged and couldn't be cleaned and it would need new ink soon but the Mac just kept throwing error messages all the time. It also wouldn't print at full resolution which I will put down to being a driver issue - it was as though the printer gave up part way through an image every time when it was set to full size and resolution.

I decided to change printers after making a few last prints as there was a special offer on the Canon plus a cashback offer which brought the price below a new set of cartridges and print heads for the HP so here are my findings:

Print quality on matte and semi-matte paper:
Pretty equal, they both producing a great output that is the rival of any lab print (as long as you use the right colour profile for the paper and put the paper the right way up)

The biggest differences are actually down to the image, I think that the different types of inks must be suited to different types of image.

Print quality on glossy paper:
The Canon wins hand down. It uses dye based inks not pigment inks - when you use the pigment inks in the HP on glossy paper you have 2 issues, the blacks change to a bronze colour at certain angles and the the pigment inks tone down the gloss of the paper - not ideal.

The canon is better on glossy than matte and it's already outstanding on matte.

This is a clear victory to the Canon

Print Speed:
Clear win to the Canon again (unless you now factor in that I don't have a natural break when printing that's long enough to go and make a drink)

Another win for the Canon

Convenience:
The HP has built in networking, automatically self cleaned, self calibrated when you wanted to use new paper and has a few other niceties that the newer Canon still doesn't.

One back for HP

Print Longevity:
If you want to get technical we're talking 200years vs 100 - I'll be long gone before either of those so I am calling it a tie!

Overall:
As the new printer cost less than half the old one, is faster, gives better quality prints overall, just works and the cartridges are a lot less for a similar size I am going to have to go with the Canon.

If you do go this route you are giving up the network port of the HP and the auto calibration - but as most paper companies give profiles for the Canon printer anyway that's not an issue anymore.

Quick Printing Tips

2011-06-27T15:37:00.000+01:00

I know that this is really obvious and I am an idiot but....

Make sure that you know which way up you should be printing your paper! Some more expensive photo papers are textured on both sides and don't have logos on the back and if you don't make a note of which way up the paper should be when you first open it then it can be tricky to get it right!

When you are trying to fix a printing issue this doesn't help you narrow down the fault either.

So lets imagine for a minute that you can put your paper in the right way up and make sure that the ink tanks are full.... The top 3 things to look for are:

1) Use the right colour profile for the paper (companies like Hahnemuhle and Canson allow you to download profiles for your specific printer)

2) Use the right paper for your printer (some work better with pigment inks and others work better with dye inks)

3) Make sure that your file is a high enough resolution for the size print that you want to make

I will be writing a review comparing my Canon 9000 mk II to my HP B9780 soon so please check back.

t2landscapes photography day

2011-06-17T13:39:00.001+01:00

Last Saturday I had the pleasure of running a photography course with an outstanding teacher and landscape photographer, Terry from t2landscapes (he's my Dad, so I may have cheated a bit here).

The main objective was to get people to think about what they want their pictures to look like and then to actually get them thinking about how to make them look that way instead of settling on what the camera chose for them. We started the day in Osmington Mills but went to a few locations along the Dorset coast and of course found time for a pub lunch and image review.

The feedback so far has been very positive so we will be running the course again on Saturday 16th July, please get in touch if you want to get involved, we have filters and cameras that you can use if you want to try anything different.

Here's a little slideshow that I've put together of the day

I've also set up a flickr group with these images plus images that the participants have included which can be found here

Big thank you's to Christo, John and Jon (in alphabetical order!) for being such keen learners and making it a great day. The feedback that they have all provided is excellent too.

Last Update on the Sigma SD15

2011-06-17T10:01:00.002+01:00

OK, it's probably getting boring now but I thought I'd share one more specific post on the SD15. I ran a course last weekend with my father in Dorset. Before the course officially started we had a little walk around Corfe Castle and I grabbed a shot with the kit 50-200mm.

I really loved the look - very delicate but also bitingly sharp and colourful

anyway, that's enough on this camera for now - more information about the course and details on how to be involved on the next one later!

More on the Sigma SD15

2011-06-10T19:56:00.000+01:00

Well now I've had a chance to look at more SD1 samples and all I can say is WOW!!

I just wish it was the original estimated price.

Anyway, here's another shot where I feel that the Foveon sensor really shines - look at this at 100% - it's amazing, the tonality is spot on, the colours are awesome and this morning I had a play with it with my Dad (he's much better in Photoshop than me) and we resized it to double in both dimensions - and then sharpened and it was still outstanding. I am blown away again.

Especially when you remember that this is an incredibly cheap kit zoom.

Anyway here's the image, I will print it when I get a chance just to see how it scales in the real world but I am already sure that I am going to love it.

I think that's it for me for this week as I am teaching a landscape course tomorrow (so expect to see how I turned it into a Macro workshop next week!! LOL)

Sigma SD15 Mini Review

2011-06-03T13:56:00.001+01:00

OK, well I've had this camera for most of a week so...

I am still holding out for a realistic price on the SD1 sometime soon but in the meantime I decided to grab an SD15 and to make sure that I really did love the Foveon sensor! I still think that if the SD1 comes down in price it will be the ultimate affordable studio/product camera for anything short of billboards.

OK so after having the Sigma SD15 for a few days here are my thoughts:

Ergonomics:

It feels like a photographers camera, the quick settings menu system is great and doesn't get in the way at all - I used to think that the Sony system was just about perfect but this is actually even quicker to use!

The camera feels right in my quite large hands and is very well balanced.

My gripes with ergonomics are only really to do with metering and auto focus. To change autofocus points you have to press a button and twist the dial, seriously?!? There's only 5 points so it's not the end of the world...

Metering is the same kind of issue, except there is not viewfinder indication of the type of metering that you are on so you have to press a button, turn a wheel and look at the LCD top screen. That is silly considering for a landscape photography quick access to spot metering is essential and this camera probably should be aimed towards them!

Image quality:
This is where the camera and the sensor really shine but they are also a mixed bag...

Look at the next 2 photos at 100% on flickr (you should be able to click through) - the fine detail and subtlety of colour are amazing - no break up whatsoever right?

Brilliant - never seen anything like it, amazing!

Also look how this image has that "retro" (circa a few years ago LOL) film look that people really enjoy at the moment

(Ignore the grey highlights - that's me not knowing the software well enough yet)

Again look at the 100% detail on this image - I didn't even know that Lucy had light tiny hairs on her face until after I saw them on here!

And it even captures lots of detail in really awkward conditions

But here comes issue number one:

There's just not enough pixels! It's great for resizing but rubbish for cropping (I don't very much anyway, just to change the overall size ratios normally). It's alos an image that's not much bigger than your screen - notice how you can work out where you are in the picture at 100% without thinking about it?

Issue number 2:
Dynamic range - the capture captures a lot of detail (an incredible amount per pixel!) but only if exposure is spot on, if you've under exposed too far then there is not much that you can do unless you are happy with noisey muddy shadows - if you overexpose it's more graceful than a lot of other older cameras (not Fuji S5 levels) but it gives you a false sense of security, you think that you can keep pushing, but you can't!! It will just go at some point!

That's not a massive negative though - I have been very spoilt with the Fuji S5 and now the Nikon D700 and it could also be my post processing that needs improvement instead of the camera.

Speed:
Yawn... Seriously, coming from a Fuji S5 Pro (slowest ever Nikon body?) Yawn... If this is the quick one I'd have thrown the others away!

It is useable though and in fact fun still, but not for those that want really instant results, the AF is very simple and a bit laggy compared to what I am used to as well but again I am comparing it to some very very capable cameras with much more expensive lenses (I am using a couple of kit lenses at the moment - yes that is the 100% on screen results from very cheap lenses!)

I'm going to give it more of a work out over the next few weeks as I am loving the results and I quite like the challenge. This is why I am still convinced that the SD1 should be an awesome studio camera - it's not just the amazing prints that I saw back in the first week of March.