Midday Sunshine – Redux

I wanted to update you all on what worked and what didn’t during last Friday’s shoot outside at 1 in the afternoon. To review, I suggested 3 ways to deal with the sun: #1 Get out of it,  #2 Overpower it, or #3 Diffuse it. Let’s see how they did…

#1 Get out of it
This ended up being the big winner. I ended up using a big tent like canopy to block the direct light.  With so much light coming in from behind him on the edge of the shadow, I ended up with a nice backlit blown out which wrapped the light around his head.  And then later in the shoot we were working in the shadow of a building against a very nicely colored brick wall.  Shooting RAW made the kind of pictures I wanted possible, because there was enough latitude to save both the shadows and the highlights in post.

#2 Overpower it
Hmm.. not so much.  My Canon 550EX Speedlight at full power and a few feet away couldn’t overcome the big hot light in the sky, which was 93 million miles away.  Maybe if it was bare bulbed it would have worked, but not with any sort of diffusion.  And a bare strobe was not the look I was going for.  I’m sure if I had a more powerful light this would have worked better. Perhaps one of those Quantum systems, or certainly a studio strobe with battery pack, but we didn’t have time for that kind of thing.

#3 Diffuse it
This one worked some of the time.  However in the middle of the day with the sun coming almost straight down on the subject, it’s hard to get the diffuser in position and keep the assistant out of the shot.  Also, the sun was so bright that while testing, I found that I had to stack two diffusers on top of each other to get the light as soft as I wanted.  So this one worked, but was not the most convenient.

In the end, trying to modify the terrible light was more trouble than it’s worth, especially when you have the option of just getting out of it in the first place. 

Midday Sunshine

I’ve got a gig tomorrow… no, that’s what it’s called when you’re a musician.  I’ve got a job tomorrow…  no, that sounds like I’m a hitman for the mob.  Ok, someone is paying me to take pictures of someone else tomorrow… damn, no that makes me sound like a pulp fiction private investigator.

At any rate, I’ve got to take some portraits. And it’s notable in that  I’ve got to shoot  this guy outside by the river at 1 o’clock in the afternoon.  Now, as any visual person can tell you, the middle of the day is generally considered the worst light of the day.  It’s direct and it’s hard and leads to ugly shadows and causes the subject to squint and a whole host of other annoying problems. 

Now, not that good pictures haven’t been taken in the middle of the day, but for a guy who likes soft flattering lighting and has a small fetish for a subjects eyes it’s definately cause for some thought.  (I’m talking about me here in case you were wondering)

There are a few ways to deal with bad light. 

#1 Get out of it.
Go find some shade.  Under a tree or around the corner of a building or in a doorway. Or go inside and use the outside light coming into the window to good effect. 

#2 Overpower it.
Use a light or a strobe to overwhelm the bad ambient light. The low end of this is a boring old on-camera fill flash or even using a reflector to fill the shadows.  The hard part here is getting the right ratio between the flash and the sun.  Too little and it doesn’t help, too much and you might as well have taken the shot in the dark (some people go for this look).When possible, getting the flash off axis from the camera is a good idea.  It leads to more natural light (and less red-eye).  Diffusing the flash is also a good idea..  Something like one of those Sto-fen things that clicks onto the flash, I use a Lightsphere which does a pretty good job.

#3 Diffuse it.
Speaking of diffusers, my prefered solution is to soften the light. Do the best with what you’ve got.  A 32" foldable diffuser is a great tool.  Just stick it between the sun and your subject and ta-da! instant softbox.  And if that isn’t be enough, they make them 4×6 feet too, to cover a whole body.  The main problem with using diffusers outside, especially the big ones, is that they’re essentially a big white sail, so if there is any wind they can become a handful, or two if you catch my drift as well as the wind will catch the diffuser.

Tomorrow I’m going to be using  all of these and in combination to hopefully get what I want.  I’ve only got a 30 minute window so there are more variables involved than I like, but problem solving is part of the fun right?  (or so I keep telling myself).

I’ll let you know how it goes.

Printing Really Big

I’m of the belief that photographs have a natural print size. Some photos are meant to be 4×6 and look silly blown up, and some don’t feel like they can breathe unless they’re 20×30". Sometimes a little print just doesn’t cut it.

When I print in the studio I use an HP B9180, which I like a lot, but I’ll write about that some other time. The problem is that the maximum print width is 13". With a 13×19" print being about the maximum you’re going to get out of it. If I want to go bigger, I send them out.

A quick aside to those who don’t think there pictures will look good at 20×30" because it won’t be 300dpi like you’re supposed to have… Don’t worry, if it’s a sharp photo with good color, it’ll look great. Modern cameras, especially in the 10-12MP range up-res quite nicely. Plus you’re not looking at a poster with a loupe anyway, you’re standing a couple feet away usually.

Hell, billboards are only 10-20dpi. So taking the long dimension of my 5D 4368px/10dpi/12inchesperfoot = a perfectly nice looking 36FT billboard.

I’ve done up to 24×36" from a 5D file taken handheld with a 24-105L zoom lens and they look great.

www.elcocolor.com/poster_special.htm

Some explain this to me..

Ok, I’m probably going to start a flame war here, but can a fan of Fuji film (I’m talking C41 color here, not the instant stuff) explain to me why it’s good?

I remember a few years ago I shot a few rolls of NPH on the recommendation of a photo finishing place.  She had said she had a customer who swore by NPH.  Shooting it and getting it developed within hours (apparently that was the trick).

Well in the intervening few years, as I’ve gotten more into photography, I’ve become a fan of the Kodak Portra films.  On both 35mm and 120, I shoot usually the 160NC, 400NC, or 800 and I’ve found it to be very consistent, fine grained, pushable, etc.   Maybe I’ve become spoiled.

A few weeks ago I was at Calumet (it was a Sat, so I couldn’t go to any of the usual photo stores in NYC) and they were sold out of the 400NC I was looking for.  So I asked about the Fuji Pro 400H, and the guy behind the counter said, it was OK, but most people preferred the Kodak.  Since they didn’t have what I wanted but I needed some film, I said, “Ok, give me a couple rolls and I’ll try it out”.

Now, this isn’t an ad for Kodak or anything, but I’ve shot both of the rolls in my Leica and I’ve got to tell you, I’m very underwhelmed.  The colors are washed out, the contrast is “eh”, and it’s really grainy.  Well lit stuff shot at f/11 and 1/250 look soft and with grain that looks as if the film has been pushed a stop or two.  Look at the photo of the lamp in the next post down.  Look at the amount of grain near the lightbulb.  And this was a well exposed, correctly scanned picture shot in the middle of the day.

When it comes to chrome, I’ve been shooting Kodak lately too, I like the 100G stock, especially in my hasselblad when I travel. I have however had good experiences with Provia (and occasionally Velvia when I’m feeling saucy) on medium format, and Provia on the 4×5 comes out gorgeous.

So I feel like I’m missing something with their normal color film.  Let me know if I’m wrong or I got a bad batch, but from what I’ve seen both literally and figuratively, I don’t get it.

To DNG or not to DNG

For those who don’t know, RAW is a file format where your camera takes all the information that the sensor captures and writes it to the flash card without turning it into an image.  This allows you to have much more control over turning that data into an pretty picture, in your computer when you get home, instead of having you’re camera just turn it into a jpeg. I shoot RAW almost exclusively.  As my ‘look’ is largely created in post processing, having the extra information that a raw file contains (12 or 14 bits per channel instead of 8) gives me much more headroom for manipulation.  It’s also saved my ass more than a few times due to mistakes in exposure and white balance.

Canon and Nikon cameras save raw files in their proprietary .CR2 and .NEF formats, respectfully. While Lightroom and Photoshop and Aperture and all the rest of the aftermarket raw converters can currently open these formats perfectly well (sometimes you’ve got to wait a month or so for them to add support for new cameras).  Will that be true in 10 years?  If Canon goes and changes their format, is Adobe going to continue to support RAW files from the original Digital Rebel from 2004?  And wouldn’t it be better to have them in some publically documented format that a number of different companies support?

Well, DNG is an open raw file format that Adobe has come up with.  DNG, as in Digital NeGative. A handful of cameras use it as their default RAW format, such as the sexy Leica M8.

Some people think Adobe’s DNG format is the answer.  There are free converters available that will turn your .CR2 or .NEF files into .DNG files.  With a few practical upshots that I’ve found. For one, Lightroom no longer has to keep metadata in additional .xmp ‘sidecar’ files.  So my hard drive has less crap all over the place.  One file per image instead of two.  And secondly, Adobe has included lossless compression of the raw data so it takes up less space on your hard drive without losing any data.

Anyway, I took the plunge this week and had Lightroom convert all 26,000 or so CR2 files in to the DNG format. In the process I gained back 100GB of drive space, I assume, due to the lossless compression.

Some people claim that upon conversion, you’re losing additional undocumented metadata that the camera added to the images.  I’d really like to know what kind of data they’re talking about because I haven’t noticed anything missing. As long as it keeps the date, iso, exposure settings, and copyright, I’m not sure what else I could really need.  Either way it’s too late for me, I’ve jumped in with both feet.

So, if you’ve got any thoughts, comment, questions, or rants on the subject, we’re all ears.

Feel free to tell me that I’m crazy and a fool if you like.  I’m used to it.  😉

Asset Management Essay 2 – Back Me Up

As a short addendum to yesterdays hard drive rant I wanted to talk a tiny bit about offsite backup.  RAID 1, and physical prints, and the original negatives are all well and good until your house or, in my case, apartment burns down.  I’d rather not lose everything I’ve ever shot, so I’ve been looking for off site backup solutions.

Of course, I’m not going to backup 500GB of data over the net, but I can save full resolution jpegs of my final work as a last-ditch lifeboat.  So when I’m done working on an image, I’ve started saving these jpegs into a folder called ‘Ark’, as in Noah’s.  Then it’s just a matter of where to put them.

I could just buy more space on my webserver and ftp them up there, but that seemed clunky.

For a while during the 365 portraits project I was using Mozy to back-up final jpegs just in case.  You install this little app that runs in the background and keeps an eye on certain folders you designate, uploading any changes to the mozy servers.  This system is great and at $5 a month for unlimited space, seemed pretty good.  But I decided to do a little more research…

And I found an app called Jungle Disk, which is a front-end for Amazon’s S3 (simple storage service).  Now, S3 is really designed for developers and such, but Jungle Disk makes it easy and it works just like Mozy does. 

So why is it better?  Cost and Longevity.  First, you pay for each GB of storage and transfer, but the costs are so low.. 15 cents a GB/mo that unless you’re putting TONS of stuff up there, it’ll be cheaper than Mozy.  I’ve transfered a few GB up there already and so far my bill is 38 cents.

And I’m sure the Mozy people are secure and what-have-you, but I’d bet on Amazon being around in 10 years more than them..  but maybe that’s my own bias.  According to what I’ve read, Amazon keeps redundant copies at multiple data centers, and jungle disk encrypts the data between you and the server, so it’s secure.  Oh, and they’re both cross platform, so the can be used on both Mac and Windows.

I’ve only been using it for a couple of days, but it looks pretty good so far.

Asset Management Essay 1 – Store Me A River

When you see old time photographers studios, they’re usually floor to ceiling in storage boxes.  Print storage boxes and negative storage boxes up the wazoo.  In many ways, the digital photography revolution has helped in this manner.. at least as far as the negatives go.  We can now store a hundred thousand ‘digital negatives’ in the same space that a paperback book used to take up.

However, with great power comes great responsibility.  With digital you tend to take and keep more images, so the 100,000 that may have represented a photographers career a generation ago might now be one year’s catch for some people.  In fact, I did some calculations and figured out that I shot about 100,000 frames over the course of my 365 portraits project last year.

When I started last year I had four 500GB drives in my desktop computer, setup as two RAID 1 arrays so I didn’t have to constantly worry about a drive failing. For those of you who are unaware of what I’m talking about, RAID stands for ‘Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks’.  And while there are several different, what are called, RAID levels, the one I’m talking about here means that the computer reads and writes the same information to two physical hard drives all the time.  So if one of them goes kapootsky, you’ve still got all your stuff on the other. Redundancy is good.

So there I was with a Terabyte of redundant storage.  Just as an aside, what’s really crazy is that 5 years ago if I had told you I had a terabyte of storage you probably would have laughed me out of the room, but I digress. However toward the middle of November, I noticed that I was running low on space and something had to be done, and being low on cash-on-hand it had to be done reasonably cheaply.  I decided that as an interim temporary solution, I would buy a couple of 1TB drives and replace two of the 500’s, there by giving my self a total of 1.5TB of space to work with. And that worked until recently where I started getting to about 200GB free, which sounds like a lot, but is a brick wall I’m driving towards pretty quickly.

As my career and jobs and projects progress, I’m trying to figure out the best way to store my work and I’ve got lots of options and none of them are ideal.

Here are my requirements:

1. It’s got to be able to store a lot of stuff.  I think 2-3GB would probably keep me alive for a while.
2. It’s got to be fast.  Fast enough that I can work off them with 500+MB Photoshop docs. and not have to take a coffee break when I hit ‘Save’
3. It’s got to be expandable, as I don’t want to go through this again in a year.
4. It”s got to be redundant. So RAID 1 or perhaps 5.
5. I’d really like to stay platform agnostic. My desktop machine is a Vista64 box but my laptop is a macbook pro.  So I’d like to try to not use any sort of software RAID if possible.

Ok, now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s look at some of the solutions that I have considered.

• External HD’s – your average USB2 or firewire drives are not going to work.  They’re not the fastest things in the world and most of them don’t do RAID, and the ones that do max out at a couple of 1TB drives, which is where I am right now.  Plus I don’t want a stack of ugly mismatched drives sitting on my desk.
• NAS boxes, or Network Attached Storage – Basically a server that you plug into your network that all your computers can talk to.  The best of these, like the Infrant ones, MIGHT be an option, but I’m very suspect about their real world throughput, even with gigabit LAN.  I’ve got two gigabit network cards in my machine so I COULD dedicate one to just this, which might help, but still, I’m suspect.  If anyone out there wants to try to talk me into or out of this solution please comment and share your experience.
• Upgrade the Internal Drives – I could also just upgrade the other two drives in my machine to 1TB, and move all of the extra crap like movies and music over to an external drive where they’re out of the way. But I feel like this is going to max out at some point too.  And I’ve have nowhere to go until they start making drives bigger than 1TB.
• External Sata Enclosure – The most promising solution I’ve found so far.  Basically a box that sits outside your computer containing hard drives and a power supply, that talks to your computer on a eSata connection.  eSata is just the external version of how internal hard drives connect to your motherboard, so it’s just as fast.  The problems are price, they tend to be expensive, and most of them use your operating system to do the raid stuff, which is not ideal if I ever wanted to stick with one platform or the other. 

There is a company called Sonnet that makes these external enclosures and eSata cards to go with them.  They seem high-end, selling to video people and such, and have gotten very good reviews, but I can’t seem to take the plunge yet.

 If any of you out there have anything constructive to say on the subject, I’d love to hear from you.  There doesn’t seem to be too much consolidated information about this issue, which I’d imagine a lot of people are dealing with. In my search, the only site I found that was really useful was Brian Smith down in Miami on his Brian Smith Photo Gear blog http://briansmithphotogear.blogspot.com/. He’s the guy who turned me onto the Sonnet stuff.

So, this is a call for opinions and comments.  Let’s see what we can come up with.  Thanks.