The Best Camera:: iPhone App

I've been using 'The Best Camera' iPhone app for a couple of weeks now and I have to say that it's the best photography app that I've came across.

The app is by photographer Chase Jarvis, who is one of the online photographic communities most prolific contributors. Chase has also put out a book of his iPhone photos called 'The Best Camera Is The One That's With You', and put up a website that ties in with the app. Here's how it works:

You take a photo with your iPhone or use one that's already in your Camera Roll folder. Then you apply any of the cool filters that do things like - add saturation, desaturate, darken, warm-up, cool-down, add vignette....etc. You can also crop the photo into a square and add a white border. The filters can be moved into a different order to change how they effect the photo, or you can remove the ones you don't like.

After you're done with the editing side, you click on the Share button and you can save it back to your Camera Roll, send as an email, send to Facebook and Twitter (adding text to your tweet too) and even upload it to thebestcamera.com to be displayed on the site. Tap on the Globe icon and it will take you to a viewing wall (see the photo above). This is the view from the Best Camera website and is constantly changing. Now you can see your newly uploaded photo and you can click on a thumbs up icon if you like other peoples photos. Warning it's addictive...but it's cheap!

The UK:: More Afraid Of Photographers Than Terrorists?

I was in Aberdeen at the weekend and woke-up early with the sun projecting a nice orange glow on the hotel room wall. I got dressed quickly, grabbed my camera and headed out for the golden hour. After a session photographing down at the docks, I passed by The Mall on my way back to the hotel. The side entrance has lots of stairs that go from street level to shop level, which I thought might make some interesting black and white shots.

Ten shots later, and with no-one about, I was done. I headed up the stairs toward the shops, but before I reached the top, I was confronted by a security guard who asked why I was taking photographs. He told me that I needed permission and a permit to photograph in the mall. I pointed out that if it was for terrorism reasons, I don't think that terrorists would be standing their with a full sized pro body DSLR and a big Nikon 17-55mm lens. The security guard shrugged his shoulders and I left The Mall, never to return...ever!

How many people do you think take photographs in that mall every day with point and shoots and mobile phone cameras? I would think plenty, just like every-other shopping mall in the UK. I'm no terrorist, but if I was, I would use a point and shoot with a subject strategically placed so that I got whatever I wanted in the background. I would not walk in with a few kilo's worth of Nikon gear and a jacket that has derekclarkphotography.com embroidered on the front and back. The Mall does conveniently display a floor plan on their website for all your terrorist needs Click Here , but I didn't want to infringe on their copyright by posting the plan here.

Photographers are not the enemy! I personally don't even think the enemy are who we're told they are. I don't remember Afghanistan invading another country. I did notice that the UK and US did invade two countries lately though. I suppose it's different from when Hitler did it???

Sorry if this is a bit heavy for a photography blog, but we're losing all our rights, and worse than that, people are losing their lives! I'd rather be squeezing a shutter than squeezing a trigger!

Rules Are Made To Be Broken

There are lots of rules in photography, like don’t have your horizon in the centre of the frame, don’t have converging verticals and use a telephoto, not a wide angle lens for portraits. All good advice and worth keeping in mind most of the time.

On the other hand; sometimes you can get fantastic results from bending or breaking the rules. Take the above photo. Mark is a fantastic piano player who comes across as a very serious guy when you first meet him. But under the serious exterior, he has a terrific sense of humour. A medium telephoto lens, say 80mm or 105mm would have been fine for this backstage shot, but the 10mm f2.8 fisheye really helps to show you that Mark isn’t so serious after all. If a rule’s worth breaking, it’s worth breaking to the extreme.

Nikon Speedlights:: Part 3 – The Nikon Creative Lighting System

To round off this week’s Speedlight posts, I thought I would recommend a great book to help you master the Nikon Creative Speedlight system (CLS). The book is from Nikonians Press and is written by Mike Hagen.

Although it comes in at 153 pages, Mike Hagen’s book is split into sixteen chapters, four of which are optional. These are the chapters on the individual models, SB-600, SB-800, SB-900 and one chapter on the SU-800 SB-R200 and R1C1. The former three are pretty much identical and take you through all the controls of each flashgun. You can read the chapter for your model and leave the rest out until the day when you splash out the cash for the other toys. The rest of the book is made up of examples, accessories, camera set-ups, flash theory, CLS background and much more.

If you are new to the CLS system or if you just picked-up enough from the first few pages of the manual to get you by, this is the book for you. In a very short time you will know your model of Speedlight inside-out and be ready to rock in a full blown wireless system. This is the book that you should read before moving on to The Hot Shoe Diaries by Joe McNally.

Nikon Speedlights:: Part 2 – High Speed Sync

Scenario 1: You’re taking someone’s photo outdoors with the sun behind them. Or maybe you’re subject is indoors, a window behind them with bright daylight outside. Easy, just pop a bit of fill flash in to light the subject. But the background is too bright; the sky is a washed out blue and too bright in general.

Scenario 2: You’re using flash outside, but want a nice shallow depth of field. You’re in aperture priority mode at ISO 200 and the widest aperture you can use is around f18 at 125sec), but you need f1.8 or f2.8 to get that blurred background you’re looking for.

Solution and Set-up: Use high speed sync! For this (the tip you never see in books), you will need to set-up your camera first. Go to your camera Custom Settings Menu > Bracketing & Flash > Flash Sync Speed. Now choose either1/320s (Auto FP) or 1/250s (Auto FP). I use the former, but any one will do (the important thing is the Auto FP). That’s it, you can leave it set that way forever.

Here comes the science bit: When you use a shutter speed of 250th or slower, the front curtain moves across to the end of the frame, and then the rear curtain follows. This leaves a point in the middle where the curtain is fully open allowing one big pop of flash light to expose the whole frame. If you use a very fast shutter speed though, the rear curtain follows the front one so soon that there is only a thin slit moving across the frame. But in high speed sync mode the flash will fire rapid bursts of light that will expose the full frame in stages.

Aperture priority mode will give you nice even results, but try using the camera’s manual mode and you can up the shutter speed as high as you like (8000th of a sec if you like) which will darken the background, still keeping your subject evenly exposed. You can almost change your background from day into night. Try experimenting with a combination of shutter speed, aperture, exposure compensation and flash compensation. You won’t always get the result you expect.

Nikon Speedlights:: Part 1 – Setting Up Wireless

In any wireless system you need a sender (commander) and a receiver (in this case a wireless flash). There are three options to use as a commander, camera pop-up flash, SU800 Wireless Commander or another hotshoe Speedlight.

Using the pop-up flash: When the pop-up flash on your camera is used as a commander, the flash fires before the photo is taken, sending rapid pulses of light that instruct the remote flash(s) how long the light should last and how much power to use. The downside to using the pop-up flash as a commander is that it could cause your subject to blink. I’ve never had this problem, but it is a possibility.

The SB900 is so simple to set-up and use. 1. Turn the selector switch (on/off switch) on the right hand side to Remote. 2. Use function buttons 1 & 2 to change the group and channel settings. If you’re only using one remote Speedlight, then set it to Group A, Channel 1, but as you add more Speedlights you will need to use different Groups. Make sure the Groups and Channels on the Speedlights match the ones on the commander.

The SB800 is a bit intimidating when you pick it up for the first time, but it’s easier to work than it looks. 1. Press and hold the centre SEL button for 2 seconds. 2. Move the cursor to the box with the squiggly lines (see above) and press SEL (the up and down arrows appear). 3. Scroll down to remote and press and hold select for 2sec. REMOTE is displayed on the LCD. Pressing the SEL button toggles between the group and channel sections and the up and down switches on the main selector increases or decreases them.

Controlling the wireless flashes from your camera: The great thing about wireless Speedlights is that they are controlled from the camera. So once your lights are set-up, you can stay behind the camera. Go to Custom Settings Menu > Bracketing/Flash > Flash cntrl for built-in flash > Commander Mode. To set the camera’s pop-up flash as a commander,change the Built in flash Mode from iTTL to – (two dashes). Group A and B adjust your Remote flash’s.

Nikon D300s Raw Files:: DNG Workaround

So, if like me, you have your new Nikon D300s and are out there shooting lots of photos to test it out. Maybe, like me, you have an important job coming up and you’re looking forward to putting it to work. But if you shoot in RAW and use Lightroom or Aperture, you have a problem, as the D300s is so new, neither Lightroom nor Aperture can handle the Nikon NEF RAW file format for the camera yet. So until they have been updated, you will either need to shoot JPEG or use Adobe’s DNG converter (*see bottom of this post about Camera Raw 5.5). I always shoot in RAW, so JPEG is not an option for me.

Using Adobe DNG converter, there are two ways to go. The first option is to convert NEF to DNG...job done. The downside is that you can’t extract the NEF file once the Lightroom/Aperture updates are available. The second option is to convert to DNG, and embed the original NEF file inside the DNG. The downside to this is that the converted DNG file will be around 25mb, double the size of your original NEF, but you will be able to extract the NEF at a later date.

*There is a 5.5 update for Camera Raw which covers the D300s, but it looks like it will only load on a 64bit machine. Photoshop CS4 will not work on a 64bit machine (according to the forums). Camera Raw 5.5 won’t work in Elements either...useless!

Download Adobe DNG converter at http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Camera_Raw_5.5

If you want to see previews of your DNG’s in Windows explorer, you will need to download the DNG Codec at http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/DNG_Codec

Media Storm

If you’re into photo journalism or documentaries, then head over to www.mediastorm.org. The site is photography based, but the images are interwoven with video and music to create fantastic pieces of multimedia. Subjects range from easy on the eyes to hard on the heart and mind. There are some fantastic films on a wide verity of topics. Some of the hardest hitting are, Bloodline, Rape of a Nation, Never Coming Home and The Marlboro Man.

My personal favourite is ‘Intended Consequences’ by photographer Jonathan Torgovnik. The film starts with a young Rwandan girl holding a photograph of a lot of skeletal remains, and pointing out which ones are her mother and her brother. It’s a powerful piece on Rwandan children that have been born through rape, and the mothers who say they don’t love their child.

Intended Consequences, like everything else on MS, is a first class piece of journalism. Don’t forget to watch the epilogue, where photographer Jonathan Torgovnik tells his story of having to interview these women. Jonathan tells the story so well, and you get a real sense of how much of a mark it has left on him.

www.mediastorm.org

www.jonathantorgovnik.com

Sigma 17-70mm f2.8-f4.5

I bought the Sigma 17-70mm f/2.8-f/4.5 about six months ago when I was planning on buying a spare Nikon body as a back-up. I had a similar size Nikkor lens, but I wanted to keep that in my main camera bag. I bought the Sigma because it was an f/2.8 at the wide end. I payed £128 second-hand from eBay and didn't expect much. Six months on and I'm using this lens more than any other. The 17-70mm is one of the sharpest lens's I have used and it's not even one of Sigma,s high-end EX range (I have a new Sigma 10-20mm EX now too). If my gear got stolen tomorrow, this is the first lens I would buy again. The only downside is that it's not a fixed f/2.8 aperture.

I had a shoot last week for an album cover by Italian guitarist Will Barbero and the 17-70mm was the lens I used for 90% of the job (Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 made up the other 10%). The photo of Will bellow was taken by the Sigma and has been reduced from a 9.35mb raw file to a 43.3kb 640x425 blogable image. Taken at 40mm, f/5.6, 60th sec, 200 ISO on a Nikon D300 on manual.

Give Us A Decent Viewfinder On A Small Camera…Please!

So Olympus has released the E-P1 Pen Camera. I’d like to try it out, especially at higher ISO’s to check the noise levels. A smallish camera with interchangeable lenses is most welcome for a carry everywhere unit, but it has one very important thing missing...a viewfinder.

I know that Olympus has a hotshoe viewfinder available as an optional extra for the 17mm pancake lens, but what I’m looking for in a small camera (Canon G11, Olympus E-P2, Panasonic LX4, Nikon P7000) is the following...

I want a really nice viewfinder with all the usual shooting info on display - aperture, speed, ISO, exposure compensation... I don’t want to look at a 3” screen when I’m taking a photo, it doesn’t feel right. I’ve used Live View on my Nikon DSLR about twice since I bought it, and both times was for shooting at ground level. At the very least, I’d like a nice bright, wide viewfinder with good optics and I’d settle for the shooting info on the LCD.