The Norwich Arts Centre Photography Blog: 2010

Tuesday, 10 August 2010

Bags update

First post since May? That's not exactly blogging, is it? Sorry.

So, I will be posting some images soon, I promise. In the meantime here's an update on the bag situation. I have gone back to the CompuTrekker AW Plus. The Fastpack 350 has been slightly relegated to hold all my flash stuff. Why? One word: Comfort. The CompuTrekker is simply more ergonomically betterer and gooder. Fatter padding on the shoulder straps, wider straps, much better sternum strap, better lumbar support, and the handle is made of nice pliant rubberised material rather than hand serrating webbing. And I was able to carry a tripod in one of the side loops that I never realised was there before. I didn't think these things could make so much difference, but they do. Also, when it poured with rain before I left the Arts Centre for home after a day shooting parkour leapers (very cool people - more about that soon, too), I was able to pull out the CompuTrekker's integral waterproof cover and keep all that rain from moistening my gear.

Sunday, 9 May 2010

Food Photography

chili

Originally uploaded by ...esther.

Elaina, who has been on several NAC courses and has become quite a photographer, dropped me a line:

"Mark, I just wanted to say that I really enjoyed the last course at the NAC and am looking forward to the next one. I've volunteered to do some photography for a recipe book for my school, so any hints and tips you (or anyone else) can give me would be very welcome! Elaina"

There was a really interesting piece on Radio 4's Food Programme the other day about food photography. Paint instead of cream, pulling out mashed fish from fish fingers with tweezers and replacing it with beautiful flakes of cod. You can listen again here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00s54dg

Meanwhile, for the rest of us, any tips for photographing food?

Here are some fantastic images and ideas from the readers of strobist.com, inspired by an assignment set by lighting guru David Hobby.

http://strobist.blogspot.com/2009/07/boot-camp-ii-assignment-2-results.html

Read the comments to see the controversy caused by the winner, and remind yourself that diversity of opinion is a GOOD THING!

But the big rules of thumb for food photography are: get onto the same level as the food, fill the frame, and light it from behind and above with a big, diffused light source. A window with net curtains or a thin white sheet might do the trick. Oh, and use a tripod. Don't kid yourself that you can get sharp images at 1/30!

Good luck. Send us your results!

Exhibition

I've been away in Japan for a month, and I'm only just getting back into the groove. So to ease in, here's an image from the exhibition that I meant to post while I was away, but didn't get around to.

Thursday, 25 March 2010

Photo Revolution @ The Forum - more info

Here's the flyer for the Photo Revolution exhibition/workshop/project that's kicking off on Monday at the Forum. Looking forward to it, and I hope to see people who have been on NAC courses coming along and putting their images up.

Wednesday, 17 March 2010

Photo Revolution @ The Forum

If you're in the city on March 29 or 30th, pop into the Forum and head for Fusion. Fusion is the huge screen near the BBC (you have to go past BBC reception to get to it, don't let that put you off). I'll be there for two days with a load of digital compact cameras and Apple Macs loaded with Photoshop.

The idea is we're going to build a spectrum of colour across the enormous screen, made from hundreds of pictures that will be taken by anyone who fancies having a go. If you have images that are dominated by a colour, bring them along and we'll put them on the screen. By the end of the two days, we'll have filled the screen with images that will reveal a spectrum of colour. Spread the word, anyone can have a go. Hopefully, there will ben email address you can send pictures to. I will post here when we know.

Friday, 12 March 2010

Bags

I'm going away in a few weeks and I'm going on an aeroplane. I want to take my laptop and my c amera, three lenses, a flash gun and a trigger. Oh and some clothes and stuff like that. My current bag, the vast CompuTracker AW plus is just too big to sneak on as hand luggage. So I've been e-shopping. Endless hours spent hunting down the state of play in the photo bag world led me to the LowePro FastPack 350.

It looks pretty good, I like the natty way you can slip it off one shoulder, open up the bag and have access to your camera. I also like that you can watch YouTube videos of people showing you how it works.

It should arrive in a week, I'll let you know how it goes. In the meantime, here's one of many YooToob vids about the bag. I like his moustache.

Friday, 19 February 2010

The Moon

This image was the runner-up in the Galilean Nights Astrophotography Competition.

Shot with an Olympus OM1 at ISO 100, 1/60, f/5.6, in Bogota.

Check that out, 1/60! ISO 100! And near an airport.

Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Wednesday, 17 February 2010

Copying or…

When does being inspired by an image become stealing the idea? Can you steal a view? When there are more digital cameras than people on the planet*, is it possible to take an original shot? Well, where there are photographers, there are disagreements. Check out the link and read the comments, which make compelling points for both sides of the row.

It's all here…

* I made up that statistic. It's not true. Probably.

Saturday, 6 February 2010

Street Photography

Today the SLR Shooting Day went off with six enthusiastic shooters, whose enthusiasm (and mine) started to wane by about two in the afternoon when what had a nice sunny day turned into a very cold foggy one. Still, some nice shots were taken, and we experimented with hyperfocal distance, thanks to my iPhone apps DOF Guide and the slightly weird DistanceCam (both free!)

The street photography portion of the day threw up some interesting dilemmas, mostly around feeling so intrusive and conspicuous. And just in the interests of transparency, above are my feeble efforts, shot with a Sigma 10-20mm (hence the wide angle distortion - which I like) and firing the on-camera flash to fill the shadow that I would have got given that I was shooting against the sun).

Well, if you need any inspiration to get on with street photography, and as therapy to get past that fear of getting in people's faces too much, check out this video of the legendary Bruce Gilden. The man has no fear!

Thursday, 21 January 2010

Oooooh!

Whose media lab is now stuffed with seven shiny new Apple iMac compooters?

Norwich Arts Centre's! That's whose!

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone and image fiddled with using the Tilt Shift app, lovely!

Calibrating your screen

Here's something that came up the other day on the Go Manual SLR course.

Problem: Your images aren't printing out the way they look on your computer screen, they're too bright or dark, or the colours are wrong. Or your images look way brighter on your screen than they did on the LCD of your SLR.

Solution: Ah! If it were that easy… Calibrating your printer so that what comes out of it is the same as what you see on screen is the trickier part of this, and one day I'll do a post about that, especially if the Arts Centre buys the pro printer they've been umming and ahing about for a while.

Calibrating your computer screen is very much easier and is something you should do right now. If you use an Apple Mac, it's easy. Go to System Preferences>Displays, then select the Color tab, then click on the Calibrate… button and follow the instructions. It will take you through step-by-step, and at the end you will probably notice your screen appears darker. Colours should be more accurate. This is how I have calibrated my screen, and when I print (using the online service Photobox) the colours match pretty well.

If you use a PC with Windows XP, then things are a little more complicated. Here's a link which explains it better than I could, mainly because I don't use PCs, and they frighten me. If you're using a PC with Windows 7, here's a link for that, and it looks a lot easier. If you're using Vista (ouch!) you might want to try this free software, QuickGamma. I can't vouch for it, I've never used it, but it looks like it deals with XP, Vista and Windows 7.

Is monitor calibration a nightmare? Yes. But you just wait until you start worrying about printer calibration. I don't even go there. I use Photobox.

Big bad wolf

I'm always reading scary stories about wolves to my three-year-old. Here's one [click here] for all you aspiring wildlife photography competition winners…

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Tuesday, 19 January 2010

Megapixels,the New War!

The 2010 courses have started here at the Norwich Arts Centre with the Further Adventures in SLR course on Monday morning, and I've just finished teaching the Go Manual course this morning.

On Monday, the subject of megapixels came up. It's a digital photography old chestnut of a topic, if we can have such a thing, that has been raging for at least three years. See this article from the New York Times, by ace technology writer David Pogue, for evidence of that. It was written in February 2007!

And now we have the full-frame Canon 5D Mark II with 21 megapixels and the crop-frame Canon 7D with 18 MP, while Nikon has the full-frame D3X with 24.5 MP. Interestingly, Nikon's latest offering, the full-frame D3S, has a mere 12.1 MP. So while Canon have gone megapixel mad, Nikon, it seems, are reigning back.

Perhaps it might be more helpful to consider pixel density. Striking a balance between how many pixels (or photosites) a sensor has, against how much space each of them has to itself might give us a better indication of likely image quality. Higher density is likely to mean more noise, but more MPs means better resolution. But there is a limit to the resolving power of the eyeball and brain, beyond which greater resolution from MPs becomes a bit pointless.

And so, those MP density readings are (drum roll):

Canon 5D Mark II - 2.4 MP sq

Canon 7D - 5.4 MP sq

Nikon D3X - 2.8 MP sq

Nikon D3S - 1.4 MP sq

So the Nikon D3S is the winner of the New Megapixel War! Density Wars!

Just for comparison, the Canon 40D comes in at 3.1 MP sq, the 400D is also 3.1 MP sq. The Nikon D40 is 2.7 MP sq, the D90 is 3.3 MP sq. All data comes from the excellent spoddy technohead camera website www.dpreview.com where you can find out the MP density of your camera in seconds.

Does any of this matter? Well, an image can be as sharp as a razor, but if it's not interesting I won't look at it for long. I'd rather look at the fuzzy, out of focus shots taken on a camera given away for free and is held together with Sellotape and rubber bands two MPs.