Hackintosh
My computer has been acting a little funny lately. Now it’s acting even funnier. Everyone who is a poweruser of Windows knows that there is a time when you should just wipe the drive and start over. This happens less and less as time goes on, but even with 7 x64, it happens. It was time.
Yesterday however, I took a detour and instead installed Snow Leopard on my machine. Using iBoot and Multibeast from tonymacx86.blogspot.com almost everything worked right out of the box. I had to swap my ATI video card for an Nvidia based one for $65 on newegg, but other than that it’s the same i7 hardware I put together a couple years ago.
Quick run-down. Asus P6T WS Pro motherboard, i7-920 @ 3.4GHz, 12GB of 1600 ram, Intel 80GB SSD.
The only thing that gave me a bit of a hiccup is that it wouldn’t sleep/wake quite right, but after a little searching I found this ‘sleepenabler‘ ktext to install which did the trick. I put it to sleep last night and it brought me right back in the morning. Beautiful.
Gives me a geekbench score of 1oo34, which puts me faster than the current 4 core 3.2GHz Mac Pro, and that machine costs $3424 with the same kit in it. I’m even approaching the speed of the 8 core monsters from a couple years ago. Not bad when you consider that I spent $1000 on this machine when I built it.
Though it was a bit of an experiment, I think I’m going to keep it for a while and see how it wears. Moving my pictures over to Mac formatted drives is going to be a pain, but nothing a little music chair/drive and a lot of time can’t fix. It’s funny, the thing that annoys me the most is that Mac OS reacts differently to my Kensington Expert Mouse trackball so I’m having a hard time getting the speeds right.
Improvised Light
Get the opportunity to take a picture and missing the right light? A nice big softbox would be perfect, but that’s back at the studio. Maybe you’ve got a speedlight, but you stupidly left your diffuser at home? Well where there is a will there is a way. Though there are entire sections of the B&H catalog with all kinds of expensive ways of manipulating your light, you don’t need to spend a lot of money or any money at all really. And in a pinch, your imagination can do good things.
In it’s most basic, light is either diffused or it’s not. And that has everything to do with the size of the source of light. Front of speedlight is small and therefore very directional. Sky is big, therefore diffuse. And where there are a ton of ways to make your light bigger, from umbrellas and shoot through umbrellas and softboxes and octabanks and beauty dishes and parabolic reclectors, among many others; For the most part, they’re usually pretty subtle variations on the ‘make the light bigger’ motif.
So there I was at my friend’s Hardin and Jenn’s this weekend and wanted to take a couple of portraits of them, but didn’t have a diffuser with me. Could have used a nice window of course but instead I tried a technique I’ve read about on the intertubes. So I grabbed a big white plastic bag from under the sink and cut it into a nice 2×4′ white plastic sheet. Had one person hold the plastic and I or another person held the flash pointed through is and voila, basically I had a softbox. 
The light hitting his left shoulder and side of his face was from a window behind him. So, two soft lights for the price of one speedlite.
Is it as soft as a big box with an extra diffusion panel? No not quite. But for free and in a pinch, it’ll do. If you zoom into his eye at 100% you even see what looks like a softbox to his right. This is the same lighting that I used on yesterday’s 365.2011 of Jenn. In that shot I had the panel and light above the camera looking down as opposed to the side, but that just shows the versatility. Sites like Strobist and the like post this kind of stuff all the time. And while I wouldn’t rely on a plastic bag as my main diffusion source on a big ad shoot, it’s handy to know it’s an option.
Vignette? Sorry, I don’t speak French.
Vignetting refers to darkening of the image at the corner of your frame, usually when shooting a wide apertures. It’s an optical phenomenon that has to do with the way the lens is designed. Oh and it means ‘something small’ in French. And that’s pretty much all you need to know about it because it’s meaningless nowadays. End of essay.
Ah, if only that were true. Well it is kinda. If you look up lens reviews on many sites they’ll show charts of the light falloff in different corners due to vignetting, and they’ll show how one less is better or worse than some other lens. If what you’re going for is perfect continuity of light across the frame (and agast! Who isn’t?), then hell you better make sure you’re lenses are of good quality. And even those of good quality better be stopped down to prevent the evils of vignetting to bite you in the ass.
What a bunch of horse shit. First off it’s rarely strong enough to even really notice, and you’ve been staring at photographs with lens vignetting your entire life so you’re used to it. Secondly there are a real reasons to stop down your lens, namely depth of field and corner sharpness because those are things you can’t improve once the picture has been taken. Vignetting is not on that list. Maybe, and I really mean maybe, back in the days of film there were times where vignetting was a problem for certain technical photographers. Mostly due to the fact that it’s a pain in the butt to compensate for in the darkroom.
Now however, we’ve got all kinds of things that fix vignetting automatically. On my 5D Mark II, Canon has even added an in-camera feature that does it, with a fancy name and everything! “Lens Peripheral Illumination Correction” is what they call it. So turn it on, and voila! You’re all set, even when shooting jpegs. I’m sure there is a similar setting on other serious cameras. And if you’re a RAW shooter, every converter I know of can to this as part of lens correction. Lightroom 3 for instance has profiles for a ton of lenses and fixes vignetting while taking care of lens distortion and chromatic aberration to boot. It’s a good time to be a photographer. You can buy crappy lenses with all kinds of problems and computers just fix them for you before you can say ‘poof’.
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Why I Like Wide
I’m a portrait photographer who uses wide-angle lenses a lot. These are two things that are not supposed to go together very well. If you’re up close wide-angle lenses can tend to distort and accentuate people’s features for example. And sometimes not for the better. That said, I think they get a bad rap. As I wrote a few months ago, that distortion can be interesting. Let me say here that I’m not suggesting super-wide like some of these 15mm, 17mm kinds of focal lengths. To me, those are special purpose lenses which are so obvious about themselves that they take you out of the image and make you think about how it was taken too much. Ok, end mini-rant.
Megapixels, Who Needs Them?
Well, me for one, though in my opinion most people don’t.
The first consumer digital SLRs were 6 Megapixel cameras. I remember, I had a original Digital Rebel back in 2004 when they came out and I thought 6MP was a world of data. Granted my previous digital camera was a little 2MP digital Elph so it real was a world of data. Then I went to a 20D at 8MP and a 5D at 12MP and finally to a 5D2 at 21MP. Now the average pocketable compact camera is 12 to 14 megapixels, which I think is just crazy.
DigiCams
First off, most of the people using these cameras are coming home from a vacation and dumping their 140 pictures of them and their family at the beach onto their computer. Probably into iPhoto or similar and then onto Flickr or Facebook. Both of which will involve throwing out 90% of the picture’s information to get it down to the 1000px that’ll fit on your average screen. Very few people print anymore. In fact, I don’t think I know anyone other than pro or serious amateur photographers who does. I’m sure there out there, but I don’t know any, and I think the days of having shoe boxes full of 4×6″ prints has certainly come to an end.
It’s not to say that I don’t think people should print. I certainly think they should. Most of the online places will do 4×6″ prints for 20 cents or less. I think people should come back from their vacation, cull the 140 pictures down to 30 good ones and have them printed and put in a box or an album. No one needs to see 7 shots of that same sunset. Pick the best one or two and move on. In fact I think that’s a problem for photographers in general in the digital age. Digital lets you take a lot of pictures, but that doesn’t mean you should and it doesn’t mean you have to keep them all. It’s all about editing.
And even if people are actually printing; How big are they printing at? I printed a couple shots from my 6MP Rebel at 20×30″ and they’re passable from a foot or two away. But how many people print posters? I’d say that 99% of pictures are printed 8×10″ or smaller, and a 12MP compact is overkill for that size print.
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What’s in a Bag?
Here to the left is the green “North Face” backpack I bought for my trip to Japan a couple years ago. It’s perfect for a week long trip the way I travel, which is very lightly. My sister recently gave me crap about it saying, “Sure you only carry one little bag, but you’re wearing the same thing in every picture”. Perhaps, true enough. I’m all about comfort and layers, so be it. At least I can carry my luggage around with me which gives me a certain sense of freedom when I’m abroad. If you’re the kind of person that has 2 big suitcases with them when they travel, you should try my way next time. I’ve found it pretty great.
Well this little green bag has proved to be a pretty great photo bag as well. I’ve got a couple expensive Crumpler bags (I really like my Crumpler bags, they’re not cheap but they hold up and look cool) which I use much of the time (one backpack like this one and a shoulder type like this one), but sometimes I need to carry a bit more than just my camera and a lenses or two with me. The setup that can fit in this bag is what I used for most of the Drabbles shoots, which gives you some idea of it’s versatility.
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A Workshop? Really? Yep.
I’ve been getting a few emails from photographers who want to learn, asking if I do workshops. I love teaching photography to people, but up until now the answer was a “No, not really”, but now I’m thinking that it might be fun. I will show some lighting tips and setups, lens selection, working with subjects, choosing the right images, doing a little post production work. And I’m sure you’ll not just learn from me but also from one another, so it’s actually pretty exciting stuff. I can’t decide if I want to try environmental portraits or get a studio to muck about in.
So perhaps on a Saturday in late February or March (date to be determined), I’ll have 6 to 8 people people get together for 4 hours or so. Other people seem to charge a few hundred bucks for this kind of thing, but I was thinking $250 the first time to give it a shot.
If you’ve got some interest in participating, go ahead and send me an email to bill at billwadman.com and I’ll add you to a list.
Also, if you’ve got any ideas for particular stuff you think I should include, just put them in the comments below, I’d love to hear what you think.
The Tale of Three 50s. Good, Better, & Best
Many of the camera makers will make similar lenses at different price points. People ask me if it’s worth it to get the next one up. That is a very difficult question to answer, but I’m going to try.
Let’s start off by offering the fact that almost all modern lenses are really good compared to the past. Sure there are those people who swear by their dad’s ‘72 Nikor whathaveyou and 1950s Leica and the T* Zeiss stuff for Hasselblad glass is gorgeous, but for the most part, older 35mm lenses in particular, are not as sharp as modern lenses. They’re soft at the corners, have serious vignetting, and often much less effective lens coatings to control lens flare and such. Of course some people like these distortions and think they give their pictures a certain look, to which I say good for them. For me, I’d rather stick with modern glass when I work. So even a crappy zoom lens they throw in when you buy a cheap body is pretty good optically as long as you stop down the lens a bit. Lenses tend to get sharper as you stop them down (to a point, most hit their peak at f/8 or f/11). That said, a nice lens with a fixed focal length, or ‘prime’ lens as they’re called, can really up the image quality ante. Being a bit of a 100% pixel peeper myself, image quality is next to godliness.
Ok, now back to the issue at hand. There are a million examples of what I’m talking about, but I’m going to choose one easy one. 50mm Canon primes. Canon makes a 50mm prime lens with apertures of 1.8, 1.4, and 1.2. The last one being one of their L line of high-end glass. I happen to own all three of these, so I’m in a good position to talk about them.
NY Photogroup Salon
I’m one of 5 speakers tonight at the NY Photogroup Salon at SoHo Photo. Looks to be quite an eclectic grouping of work so I highly suggest you stop by if you’ve got the night free. $10 at the door, but I’ve heard that they’re well worth it. I’ll be sure to make your $2 for me worth your while.
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The Making of Drabbles – Video Lecture
Some of you may remember that I gave a lecture on the making of my Drabbles portrait series about a month ago. Well my good friends Dan and Claude used their nerdy might and recorded it for your viewing pleasure. It was, as you would expect, quite dark in the room, but I’ve gone in and inserted full screen images of what was on the screen for your viewing pleasure.
About 45 minutes of photoshop post-production and compositing goodness. If you ever wanted to know how I pulled a lot of them off, this is your chance to find out.
I could embed it here in a smaller size, but go over to vimeo and watch it at full-size instead.
I hope you enjoy, and please spread it around.
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