Polaroid Pogo

So it ain’t 55, but it’s something.  My friend Mary Elizabeth Williams stopped by today with a Polaroid Pogo that she’s reviewing for her radio show.  Imagine a battery powered photo printer about the size of couple decks of cards next to each other.  Plug it into your camera, or wirelessly over bluetooth from your phone, and you can print out “instant” (about 60 seconds) photos.

They’re small, about 1.5×2″ (they say they’re 2×3 but they’re not.  Very contrasty, not very color correct, but in my book they’re not supposed to look good. They look like mini polaroids.  Kinda like the mini bites at Cinnabon.

Retails for $99 and packs of 30 sheets of the instant paper go for about $12 from what I understand. The ‘ink’ is included in the paper. 

Is it reasonable to plug a 21MP 1DsIII into such a device?  Probably not, but it worked. Pretty easily and flawlessly actually.  Do I want one?  I haven’t placed and order, but if I were to get one as a present it could be kinda fun.  I’m not sure that there’s enough of a market of 15 year old girls to make it work long term, but I’ve been wrong before.

Oh and did I mention that they’re stickers too?

Short-takes 12/10

– I’ve seen the future of my backups and it’s an eSATA hard drive dock. Like this one
I got one delivered today with a little $20 eSATA PCI card and a 1.5TB seagate drive and it works great. 100MB/sec transfer and I can just get a bunch of bare drives to write my stuff to each night. Already ordered a little Pelican case to hold them. That way if my house is burning down, I just need to grab one box to save my whole life’s work.

– Spent last Saturday at the Whitney Museum’s William Eggleston retrospective. I wasn’t sure if I was a fan of his work, but after seening this large collection of medium size and beautiful prints, I’m a convert. He sees those things around us that I wish I saw. Just wonderful and well worth the trip if live in or around NYC. If you can’t make it, consider getting the book for yourself or your photographer friends.

– Speaking of books, my friend Meg Wachter made a book of her series “Dumped!” So go buy one!

– I will be taking delivery of my 5D Mark II tomorrow, I’ll certainly let everyone know how that goes.

– And on friday I should be getting my new NEC 3090 monitor, a review of it will be forthcoming as well.

– Oh and while the hard drive and 4×5 and lensbaby are sold, I still haven’t closed the deal on the lenses and monitor from last week’s sale. I’ll give it another couple days before I put the stuff on ebay. Everyone who was interested, please email me.

For Sale – Winter Cleaning

In photography as in most pursuits that involve gear, you end up buying a lot of things that you either don’t end up using or use for a while and then move onto the new piece of kit.  Well it’s time for me to move some stuff out of here.  So I figured I’d give my readers first bite before I bother with ebay.  All prices are without shipping added.  If you live in NYC you can certainly come and pick them up.  Email me if you’re interested:  bill at billwadman.com

So without further adeu (images below):

Canon 17-40mm f/4 L with lens hood.  Very good condition  –  $450
I loved this lens when I got it.  My first taste of L glass and I can’t go back.

Canon 70-200mm f/4 L with lens hood.  Good condition (couple of nicks on the white paint – see photo) – $400
Known as one of the sharpest lenses Canon makes.  Great when you need a little reach.

Canon 100 f/2  Very good condition – $300
Crazy sharp, good for concert photography.  I once read a review where the guy said “never take photographs of your significant other with this lens, it’ll show all their flaws and they’ll never talk to you again.”   Yes, it’s THAT sharp.

Lensbaby v1  EOS mount – $40
If you don’t know what a lensbaby is, I’m sure you can do some research online, but imagine a finger focus lens that gives you results somewhere between tilt-shift and a Holga

Graphex 4×5″ rail camera with 135mm lens – $50
Honestly I’ve never actually used this camera. I bought it on a whim and then the next day ended up buying a high-end modern one.  That said, the shutter works and seems timed about right. I can even throw in a few film holders to get you started.  If you ever wanted to mess around with large format for fun, this might be your chance.

Lacie 250GB USB 2.0 hard drive – $30  
This is the full size version that needs to be plugged into the wall too, but otherwise a nice drive for backup and such.

and finally, last but certainly not least

Eizo CE240W 24″ LCD monitor – $1000
If you’re up on these things, you’ll know that this is a GREAT monitor.  Eizo is not to be compared to your run of the mill Dell and Apple. I could talk all day about how much I’ve loved this thing (best thing I’ve ever bought for photography) but you can do a google search for reviews and you’ll see.   You’ll have to wait til next week some time to get this one though, I’m waiting for it’s replacement to get delivered.  Also, this one would probably be easier to do locally as shipping might be expensive.

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Mac / Photoshop Performance

I’ve been doing some more computer research as of late.  Trying to figure out how to best speed up my photoshop workflow.  So yesterday I wrote Rob-Art over at Bare-Feats to ask a mac question and he answered well and also pointed me to an online guide I think might be useful to some of you.  Fascinating stuff.

Apparently, my waiting 30 seconds to save my 30 layer, 16bit PSD files is something I can’t do too much about.  Has to do with the way Photoshop is single threaded while saving.  Sad.

Anyway, here you go.  Excellent read for digital darkroom dorks: http://macperformanceguide.com/index.html

Annie’s book

There aren’t many living photographers you can refer to by first name. In fact, Annie Leibovitz might be the only one.  Certainly the only modern photographer any non-photographer has ever heard of.  I’m not a fan of all of her work, but most of it is beautifully done.  So when I heard she was coming out with a book about her ‘at work’ I went and pre-ordered on amazon that day.

Well it was released last week and while I can’t highly recommend it as a reference book, it was definitely worth the read.  She goes into little depth about technical matters, so if you’re looking for details on her lighting setups, look elsewhere, or rather look at her photographs and experiment until you figure it out.

The things I most took away from it were more basic realizations. For example she talks about shoots that went badly, or times that she screwed up technically or conversationally.  It’s nice to know that I’m not the only one who makes mistakes. Simple stuff, but sometimes easy to forget if all you ever see if the final polished retouched glossy shot in Vanity Fair.

Also it seems she was a fan of polaroid 665 pos/neg film.  She mentions it a few times specifically, well she mentions polaroid negatives repeatedly and then shows images that could have only been made on medium format.  I myself was a big fan of polaroid 55. In fact I’ve got about 12 slices left that I’ve got to use before they go bad.  Time to pull out my 4×5.  <grin>

Photoshop CS4 thoughts

Ok, CS4 is now released and available, so I thought I’d write a little about what I like and don’t like about it.  I’ve been using it over CS3 for about 4 months now in beta form, and it had (as most beta software does) a few rough edges until the last few builds.

Let’s start with things I like:

– GUI is now rendered by your video card, so zooming includes a zoom animation, and odd percentages look smooth.  For example, in the past if you were zoomed to 33% there was a roughness to the image which made it pretty useless to tell what you were editing. You were kind of forced to go to 25% or 50%. Now it’s all anti-aliased and smooth as glass.

– I haven’t gotten into using it yet, but there is a new rotate view function (related to the GUI stuff above) where you can rotate the image while your editing just like you can a piece of paper on your desk.  It’s not rotating pixels in the file, just your view of it on the screen. I can imagine this one being very big for illustrators who are used to drawing in the real world.

– Adjustment layer palette. I use adjustment layers constantly, sometimes 20 to an image. Want to burn parts of the image?  Create a curves adjustment layer, make it darker, set the blending mode to multiply, fill the mask with black and then paint with white.  That way you can always go back and edit the mask, or pull the opacity of the whole layer down to soften the effect, etc.
Well in CS4 instead of double clicking to open up the adjustment dialog, there is a palette (I keep it right above layers) which changes depending on which layer you’ve got active. Click on a curves AL and it shows that curve panel, click on a hue/saturation, and that’s what you see. Much less modal and always right there where you can see the curve and histogram of the masked area.

– Which brings me to one of my favorites.  Vibrance adjustment layer.  Anyone who’s used Lightroom has probably played with this effect.  Basically a smarter version of saturation that’s much more smooth and natural. Won’t let separate channels to get blown out.  Very good for controlling skin color that gets out of control when you’re adding a bunch of contrast.  Or maybe that’s just me adding a bunch of contrast.

– Oh and I like that it’s 64bit on Vista x64 which I use.  Not sure that I can tell a tangible difference (I haven’t tried 32bit since I moved to 21MP files) but I like the idea that Photoshop can use more than 4GB of my RAM.  Though the downside of this is that 32 bit plug-ins don’t work, so I’ve got to open my stuff in CS3 to use Exposure.  And if I’ve got any of those Vibrance layers, it makes a mess going backward.

Now the things I’m not happy with:

– Well, it’s bigger than CS3, but every new version of software is bigger. More features, more bloat, but that’s why we buy faster computers.  What’s the point in having the horsepower if you’re not going to use it?

– Honestly that’s about it for the negatives.  I’m sure there are other things I’ll think of while going to sleep, but it’s been stable and the additions are already so part of my workflow that I can’t go back very easily.  It’s crazy how fast that happens.

Quandary Decisions

Ok, so I’ve made some computer decisions that I’ve been complaining about for months (sorry about that).

First things first, I’m going to stick with Vista x64 instead of moving my desktop to OS X.  I’ve never had Vista crash on me, and it can actually use the 8GB of RAM I’ve got installed, as well as the fact that 64 bit Photoshop is Windows only for a while and I’ve come to really like CS4.

I’ve also decided to not replace my desktop, but rather upgrade it instead. Next week, Intel’s new i7 processors will be available, along with the new motherboards and DDR3 memory that goes with them.  I’ve been eyeing and waiting for them for a while, but you know what?  My Core 2 Quad 6600 is pretty darn fast, and as I’ve said, I’ve already got 8GB of RAM, so why replace all of that for not that big of a speed boost for what I do? In fact, I think the only thing I ever wait for the CPU in Photoshop is the lens blur filter on the rare occasion I use it.  Most of the time I wait to save my 500MB layered 16bit PSD files.  Which brings me to the changes.

Currently I’ve got 5 hard drives in my machine. 1 old 74GB Raptor as a boot drive,  1 500GB RAID 1 array for random documents and downloads, and another 1TB RAID 1 array for photography.  That’s a grand total of about 1.6TB of space on the built in Intel RAID controller on the motherboard, and I’m running very low, easily down to below 20% space remaining on all of them.  Hard drives slow down as the fill up, so this storage situation is my big problem.

Therefore here’s what I’ve done.  This morning I ordered a new case, 2 more 1TB drives, and a new bigger power supply.  When they arrive (part tomorrow, part Friday or Monday) I’m going to transplant my current system into the new, larger, fancier case (more on that in a moment), add the new drives as an additional photo array and my current collection across the two.  So I should end up with 2 photo arrays which are about 40% full.  I figure that at my current rate of consumption, this should easily last me a year. And since hard drive space keeps doubling, I can just upgrade to bigger faster drives next Christmas for the same price.  That said, the files from my 1Ds3 are twice the size of those from my 5D, so we’ll see how well my math holds.

Initially I was thinking of keeping the storage in a separate enclosure and connecting them to the machine via eSATA, but the high end enclosures cost about $500 empty, so I figured I’d be better off just getting a bigger case and doing 7 drives internally.  This giant Lian-Li case was the answer.  Looks about perfect for my usage.

When I finally get paid for the UBS job I did a few months ago, I think I’m going to get myself a little extra treat in the form of an Intel SSD to use as a boot drive.  $600 yes, only 80GB yes, but those who have taken the plunge have said that it’s done more to make their computers ‘feel’ fast, than any other upgrade they’ve ever done.  Yum.

Time

Last Friday I had a studio portrait shoot for a magazine.  I’ll keep you in the loop and show you outtakes when they get back to me about their selections and what issue it’ll be in, but I bring it up to talk a little bit about time. That is, the amount of time you have to shoot your subject and how you deal with that.

I once read about when Platon shot Bill Clinton for Esquire back while he was still president and he was given 7 minutes in the President’s schedule.  I’m pretty sure Platon had a similarly short amount of time for Vladamir Putin when he shot him for TIME last year.

The flip-side of this might be when Bert Stern shot Marilyn Monroe back in the day. She showed up a couple hours late and he was very worried that he had lost his window, but when asked she said that she was prepared to stay all night if need be.

Now, if you know ahead of time that you’ll only get a sliver of time, as with the Platon shoots, you can generally do more work up front.  Know what shots you want to get, have lights setup, or at least experiment before the subject gets there, so that you can hit the ground running.

Temperament comes into play here though, as you don’t want to make your subject uncomfortable by coming on too strong because you feel rushed.  In fact I think this is a good point all the time.  In my opinion, the subject should always feel like you are in control and have all the time you need.  Making them confortable is job number one.

The there are the times when the plans change in real time, as they did on Friday.  My assistant Meg and I had gotten there about 30 minutes early and setup the lights and chosen a nice burnt umber paper that happened to be leaned against the wall.  I was told I’d have the subject from 1:30-2:30.  1 hour.  More than enough time for a photographer like me. Not too long, not too short.

But 1:30 comes and no author.  He was getting interviewed before the shoot and it seems the writer was running long.  1:40, nothing yet, 1:50, ixne.  So couple minutes before 2, they show up.  Which means my 1 hour is now down to 30 minutes and that my experimentation time has been cut way down.

I was looking at a book of Mario Testino photos the other day.  And I’ve always loved his use of light, but I started noticing that he had a definite set of ‘safe’ setups that employed more often than not.  It was like he had a book of recipies that he liked to cook.  Which is funny because I think we all of these safe zones.

When you’ve got 30 minutes to get a shot good enough for a full-page portrait in a national magazine, you’ve got to KNOW you’ve got it.  These are the times when I think it’s perfectly reasonable to shoot at least some of it in your safety zone.  Once you’ve got that in the can, then you can mess around.

So this is what I ended up doing.  I shot for about 15 with a simple single soft light setup that I could probably shoot with blindfolded. Only then did I pull out another light with a grid and get a bit more adventurous.  That said, I don’t think that anyone would ever accuse me of being a multi-light whore, so even these setups were pretty straightforward.  Plus a lot of my look is in post-production, so shooting for me is more about connecting with the subject and getting good source material for my final image.

In the end we finished a few minutes early (something photo editors seem to remember positively) and I’m happy with the images.  Would I have setup differently if I had known I’d have 30 minutes instead of 60?  Perhaps a bit.  I would have brought more lights and had setups and ratios ready so there wasn’t a minute here and there lost getting the lighting right. That’s also a minute that you’ve lost the attention of the subject, which can be the difference between something great and something exceptional.

Anyway, just some thoughts. 

The night group shots.

OK, so here are two examples of the group shots from last Wed. The first is what you get when I did my best to equalize the background and foreground lighting. Though Thomas in the back left is a bit soft. The other is a composite of a separate background exposure I did before everyone got there while there was still light. It’s fine to me, thought in comparison to the first I think it looks less organic and a little too pasted in.

Trouble Shooting redux

I’ll probably post some examples a little later today, but I wanted to give everyone an update on my shoot I had last night.  Well, like I thought, it was cold and very dark. 

For the group portrait, I shot two ways, high-iso medium-aperture in order to try to equalize the subjects in the foreground with the buildings in the background. It worked to a point.  It’s a little noisy, especially after my brand of retouching, and the guy in the back isn’t perfectly sharp.  But it’s passable.

The second option was to shoot them with a smaller aperture to get them all in focus and make up the difference with the flash, but which left me with too little light to hold the background.  Before they got there I took some long exposures of the background, which I then merged in post.  The result is passable, in fact, the average person would probably never question it, but then you see it next to one of the single shots, it looks a tiny bit off.  Again, passable but not super.

For those of you who don’t know me, I’m a bit anal about my photography. Scratch that. I’m just plain anal about it.  I need my pictures to be good, so I hate situations where there is no perfect answer and it’s just the lesser of two evils.  Last night was definitely one of those.  Though I don’t know what I could have done differently, it still bothers me. We’ll see what the client has to say.

On a brighter note, during the individual portraits, I got some really nice shots of one of the guys. we were standing on a corner down on Wall street and the sum of all of the lit buildings and street lights and headlights of running cop cars led to this storm of light that looked really cool at 1600 iso and short depth of field.

Anyway, more later.