Mike Hamilton Photography's Blog

What's In My Camera Bag?

2013-02-14T12:50:00.001-08:00

Hello

What do i carry around in my camera bag on a day to day basis you may ask?

Well quite alot actually when i get it all out, and that's not including my car rig, which i shall cover later.

Below is a very quick snap shot of all of my basic kit.

My Camera Equipment

Lets look at all that lot in more detail.

The bag itself is a LowePro Fastpack 350 , which is just about big enough for my needs at the moment, but when i get bigger telephoto lens' i will need to upgrade my bag.

My camera equipment is as follows : -

Canon 7D
Canon EF-S 15-85mm
Canon 50mm f/1.8
Sigma 10-20 f/4-5.6 EX DC
Sigma 70-300mm F/4-5.6 DG Macro
Canon 430EX II Speedlite
Cheapo remote shutter release / intervalometer from ebay i got for £3.99 :)

Unfortunately my 50mm f/1.8 and Sigma 70-300mm are basically useless, as the 50mm will not focus correctly and is soft, and the Sigma 70-300mm has got a broken zoom mechanism where my son who was 3 at the time decided he would rather throw my lens than his ball, and its also softer than baby food.

So very soon i will be replacing these, most probably with a brand new 50mm f/1.8 and maybe a Canon 70-200 f/4 L :)

Mt tripod is a Redsnapper RS284 with a Manfrotto 496RC2 Ball Head, this makes for a fantastic sturdy tripod and head and would recommend this setup to anyone and only cost me £70 in total!!

I also have quite alot of filters, as i used to and still am in to landscape photography, although i have now moved more in to car / automotive photography, but these all still come in handy :)

I have :-

Cokin ND4 Grad Filter P121M
Cokin ND2 Grad Filter P121L
Cokin ND8 ND Filter
Cokin Normal P Series Filter Holder
Cokin Wide Angle P Series Filter Holder
Hoya 72mm ND8 Screw Filter
Jessops 72mm Circular Polariser
Neewer 72mm UV Filter
Jessops 72mm UV Filter
Hoya 58mm Circular Polariser
B&W ND110 3.0 10stop 77mm Filter

As mentioned before i am currently more focused in Car / Automotive photography. For me to keep up and be ahead of most of the competition, purchased a car photography rig. This is used for rolling shots like this.

An Example of a Rig Shot

This is a picture of my rig in bits.

The rig was purchased in a kit which included: -

2x Manfrotto F1100 suction cups, with custom columns.
2x Interlocked Manfrotto Super Clamps per cup
Telescopic pole (black pole) with up to 2.5m length
Double Ball Joint Connector
Manfrotto Camera Plate

It quickly became apparent that the 2.5m boom length was simply not enough, as even using my Sigma 10-20 the car was filling up far too much of the shot. So i recently bought three 1.5M interlocking Ariel masts for £8 to make my total new boom length of 4.5M which is much better> i am even thinking about buying one more section to go to 6M in total!. Watch this space.

Here is the rig on a car in action

That concludes my tour of my photography equipment.

As always, please take a look at my Flickr for my full portfolio of pictures, also my Facebook page where i post new content before anywhere else plus behind the scenes stuff :)

Links are below

Many thanks for reading

Mike

Night Time Driving Shots, Outside The Car

2012-04-08T12:25:00.000-07:00

Ok, so inside the car driving shots look cool but how about from the outside?

How is that done you ask, well i have a car rig :) Which consists of two Manfrotto F1100 suction cups, four Manfrotto super clamps, a long aluminium pole and a camera mount. I will cover my next rig shot in detail in a future Blog post ;)

What i decided to do for the outside driving shots was to dis-assemble one of my suction mounts to the car rig, so i was just left with the bare suction cup with its metal attachment spike. Then i took the camera mount from the car rig and attached that to the metal spike of the suction cup, to end up with this.

Once this was done, armed with my cheapo remote shutter cable i got from eBay for £5. I headed out in to the night.

*One very important tip i will give to anyone who is thinking about buying a car mount or suction cup for this sort of photography or anything else is to prepare the surface you will be sticking it too. It is vital to have a clean surface to stick the cup too, as you wouldn't want your camera & lens falling off ant any point!*

Once i had arrived at my desired destination, i took about 5 / 10 minutes with some quick cleaner fluid and cleaned the area of the roof that the camera would be mounted, i also gave the bonnet a clean as the bonnet would be in shot.

I then went about attaching the mount to the roof, i adjusted the camera mount so the camera would be central in the roof, this was the end result.

One thing that i will do differently next time is to put a filter on the lens, even if it is a £3 UV filter, as if a stone was flicked up id rather the filter be broken than the lens front element.

As you can see from the picture i have the remote cable which is just about long enough to get back through the drivers window in to the car, to allow me to release the shutter on the move.

Once the camera was nice and secure on the car i went about composing the shot and getting the exposure correct, i took a number of test shots while the car was stationary and got the exposure / focus correct. I then switched the lens to Manual focus, as i really didn't want the camera hunting for focus as i was driving along.

So now i was set, so i got in the car and started driving at about 10mph. There was no need to go any faster as i had a shutter speed of 15 seconds so even at that low speed i would still get plenty of movement in the shots.

All that was left to do was to drive around very quiet back roads and get a few shots. I didn't drive around on any main roads as i didn't want to draw any attention to myself, but even on back roads i still had a nice passer flag me down to tell me i had a camera on my roof!

The end results!

As with my interior rolling shots the only post processing work done was to adjust the White Balance a touch to remove some of the orange glow from the streetlights.

Picture 1

Camera details
10mm Focal Length
15 Second Exposure
f/10

The green dots were added in Photoshop CS6 to simulate traffic lights.

Picture 2

Camera details
11mm Focal Length
15 Second Exposure
f/10

I shot around 30 pictures, but as they were all basically the same i picked out these two as they were the best of the bunch.

As these pictures have been a success and have had very good reception on Flickr & Facebook etc... once the weather cheers up i will be doing some more of these. This time with the camera in different locations, and also i will do them a little earlier so i get some lovely dusk colours in the sky.

I hoped you enjoyed this Blog entry, there will be many more to come :)

As always, please take a look at my Flickr for my full portfolio of pictures, also my Facebook page where i post new content before anywhere else plus behind the scenes stuff :)

Links are below

Many thanks for reading

Mike

Night Time Interior Driving Shots

2012-04-05T05:53:00.000-07:00

A while ago I experimented with a long exposure shot from inside my car to capture the movement of the lights outside, along with the light from the cars dash / dials. As my car has nice vibrant green dials with red needles I thought this could give a nice effect.

Here is the final shot.

I used my Redsnapper tripod and had two legs in the gap between the rear seat bottom & back and the other leg sitting in the handily placed rear cup holder. I also had a mate assisting in keeping the tripod steady whilst driving. For this I used my trusty Sigma 10-20mm Lens on my Canon 7D and set the shot up to get the dash centred in the frame, but also with as much of the windscreen in shot as possible. As after all what's going on out the window is the main interest in these type of images images.

Camera settings for this shot was : -
10mm Focal Length
13Second Exposure
f/8.0
Auto White Balance - But this was corrected in Photoshop after shot

The car was moving at about 10-15mph during exposure, anything faster would have resulted in a blurred image.

As this was my first time trying this kind of Photography and me being a perfectionist, there are a few things that I could and will do better for my next inside the car shot. As I think the focus was slightly off and I should have cleaned my windscreen!!

After shot I had to do very little in the way of editing, as the basic shot was usable, all I did to this shot was alter the white balance just enough to remove some of the horrid orange tint that the street lamps give out.

Then it was just a case of save and upload to Facebook & Flickr.

My Facebook Page
My Flickr