July 5, 2010
I went to the Goodwood Festival of speed last Friday, for a full day of petrol head nirvana.
Highlights of the day was seeing a Ferrari 458 in the flesh, and photographing it from all angles, and seeing an attractive Audi hybrid prototype, which was really well lit, and ideal for photographs.
Audi hybrid
I also met Anna Louise Felstead, a brilliant painter of all things military and motoring, see her website and photograph below.
Anna_Louise Felstead - famous painter.
June 19, 2010
If you have calibrated your screen, printer and paper and inks, and are still not getting accurate colour, the only step remaining in the process is to calibrate your camera. It is remarkably easy to do.
Step 1. Take a photograph of a known calibrated colour chart such as the Xrite chart below.
Step 2. Open this with Adobe’s free DNG profile editor, click on the “chart” tab, and move the 4 circles that appear onto the four corner colours.
Step 3. Click “Create colour table”
Step 4. Export the profile “recipe” created for your camera.
Step 4 In Lightroom, choose this profile from the drop down list in “camera profiles” function of the Develop module.
It took less than 15 minutes, and the results were good, with the resulting on-screen image closely matching the Xrite colour chart.
Adobe DNG profile Editor with X-rite 24 patch colour chart
Adobe DNG profile editor can be downloaded for free here
A comprehensive set of instructions from Adobe can be seen here
Adobe Instructions
June 7, 2010
I have just uploaded some sample images, with crops at different ISO’s that you can zoom to 100%
June 6, 2010
Yesterday I visited a Park Cameras open day in Burgess Hill, Sussex where a number of camera manufacturers had representatives and equipment to sample, and there were some seminar sessions, including a talk by fashion photographer Jon Gray who demonstrated a photoshoot with fashion model Katie Green (Who famously campaigns against size zero).
Katie Green - Canon 5dmk2 24-105 @ 75mm f8 1/125th
May 25, 2010
Mirror lenses, which are also known as ‘catdiotropic’ or ‘reflective,’ were all the rage in the ’70′s, and 80′s but dropped out of favour in the ’90′s . In the digital age do they have a purpose? This article tests several mirror lenses from different manufacturers, explains the advantages and disadvantages compared to conventional (refractive) lenses and shows how most of the disadvantages can be overcome in the digital darkroom. There are plenty of test pictures throughout and sample images taken in the years since I carried out the test all available in a Flickr album at up to full size.
Up until around 6 years ago, Tamron, Nikon, Zeiss and Minolta all still had mirror lenses in production. Now of the big brands only Sony have one available, and this is the previous Minolta model rebranded. There are some other cheaper makes such as Kenko, Vivitar and Centon new. There are plenty of lenses to choose from on ebay, and I bought 4 of them to evaluate, eventually selling all but one.
May 17, 2010
My first digital camera was the Canon D30 from 2001, a DSLR with a 3 Mega Pixel APS-C sensor, I just found this comparison with 100ISO film, and it wins! No wonder I didn’t shoot a roll of film after buying it! My latest camera is the 21MP full frame 5D mk2, I regularly print A2 images which look sharp even when viewing from inches away. It’s hard to imagine how far we have come in 9 years of digital camera technology, looking at my film prints from several years BD (Before digital) they look soft and grainy. (if you like that effect, it is easy to replicate using Photoshop and/or plugins like Nik Silver Effects Pro).
Imagine if cars had advanced so much in that time!
It is interesting that when scanning a 35mm slide, it is possible to obtain a simply huge file, – bigger even that a 21mp digital file, but the file size is so big because of the intricate detail of the film grain. This larger file contains no actual extra useful resolution, which is why the D30 managed to deliver such an an unexpected result in 2001.
May 3, 2010
This interesting new compact has not yet been released, but with samples appearing online, and the elapsed time from announcement to the press at over two months, it must be arriving soon. I am really quite excited about this one! I hope it lives up to its on paper spec.
May 1, 2010
There are only a small number of compact cameras capable of delivering a high quality image. In this article I discuss the design, technology and recommend some to try.
April 29, 2010
The May 2010 edition of B&W Photography has the following Zeis lenses on test by Lee Frost.
21mm f2.8 Distagon, 28mm f2.0 Distagon, 50mm f2.0 Makkro Planar, 85mm f1.4 Planar
Frankly it is a pretty lightweight article with no printed comparisons, but it does come to similar conclusions to my article and testing. The 21mm is the pick of the bunch as it is a unique lens, incredibly sharp and comfortably outperforms the Canon 17-40 f4.0. The 50mm Macro lens is useful, sharp and excceds the quality of the Canon L24-70 f2.8 zoom. (No comparison is made with a Canon 50mm lens). The 28mm f2.0 did not outperform the Canon 24-70L and the 85mm similarly was not noticably sharper than the Canon 70-200 f4L.
No testing or mention was made of focus shift issues with the 85mm lens, where the plane of focus moves away from the camera as the lens is stopped down from f1.4 to around f2.8, making precise focussing almost impossible unless using depth of field preview and live view simultaneously, which is not too convenient for a portrait lens!
I have uploaded many examples taken with the Zeiss 21mm f2.8 to the Flickr Zeiss Distagon Group.
April 22, 2010
Digital cameras have a come a long way in the past ten years, and now a RAW file from a full frame camera can have a 12 stop exposure range. (Though it is in reality actually rather more difficult to extract the full range). There are many situations when this will not be enough, resulting in blown highlights and shadows dominated by noise. Combining several exposures in post processing will recover the highlight and shadow detail. In the early days of digital, this was little more than making an exposure for the sky, and another for the ground and merging them in Photoshop – often with mixed results. The launch of HDR software like Photomatix and the features progressively added to Photoshop have made this somewhat easier – no need for masks or manual blending. However, HDR has received bad press due to the unreal results that can be obtained with it.
Recently I have been carrying out an extensive test of Photomatix against various competitors that use the “Enfuse” open source algorithms to fuse multi-exposure images to give a more natural look than the classic “HDR”. This is partly due to frustration when using the Photomatix Lightroom plugin or standalone application at the difficulty of obtaining a natural image. I’m very impressed with the ease of use and the results from some of the Enfuse based systems. And the process of Enfusing also reduces noise – Tone mapping increases it. There is much less control than Photomatix, but as you will see, this seems to be an advantage in terms of the quality of output.
Before I start I should state that my interest here is to obtain a natural exposure – as close as possible to the original optimum exposure – but with the highlight and shadow detail from the lighter and darker exposures “added in” in a way that looks completely realistic. This would be like having a 24 stop exposure range on the camera. I am not interested in using “tone mapping” for creative effect.
