A Tale Of Two Cities - And You're In One Of Them

This will be a far, far better thing than you have ever done before. And when you are done you can go to a far, far sweeter rest than you have ever known...

Actually, you are going to have a Dickens of a good time with one of the best Leica Photographers there is  - Thorsten Overgaard. Thorsten has selected Perth as one of only two Australian cities* for his next tour and seminar involving Leica photography.

Thorsten does this a lot and does it very well - he will be taking this tour of instruction to many countries in the world and to many large cities. Perth - and Camera Electronic - is darned lucky to have him here.

The day to set in your mind for Perth is Thursday the 10th of December 2015... but bear in mind this is not just a few hours - this is a four-day event. It'll be involving you totally until Sunday the 13th of December. And the involvement will make you a better and more visually aware photographer.

The first evening concentrates on Leica gear - and you'll be asked to bring your own cameras and lenses so that you and Thorsten can figure out which combination of equipment will give you the best chance of success.

 The second day is action - a photo walkabout with interactive help and advice about the coverage you are getting. We note that Thorsten's webpage with the details advises a good pair of comfortable shoes, so the walking may indeed be about...

Day three brings the images shot into the computer and details workflow and editing. You'll need to make sure your computer will work with Aperture or Lightroom to get full benefit.

And day four fills in the holes - gaps in your knowledge and vision that have become evident - and chance to know better and to make it better - and then have a final analysis of your results.

This level of commitment to you and dedication to your learning - remember the seminar is limited to 8-10 people so you very definitely are getting personal instruction - doesn't come cheap. No true learning does. The whole affair costs $ 2500 but if you go to Thorsten's website and make an Earlybird booking it comes down to $ 2000. In Leica terms that is not a surprise...

Here's the link

We're not suggesting that you should lose your head over this, but really these sort of things are quite revolutionary...

* Sydney is the other place - you'll like Perth better...

Hold High The Multiple Standards, They Must Not Suffer Loss...

I am always amazed when I note that the manufacturers of regular flash-light batteries  managed to make AAA, AA, C, and D cells and by and large the products of any particular maker are fairly similar to the same class from another factory. Of course there can be a variation in the supplies - some have lots of electricity and some don't - also some leak and some don't. But generally an AA cell will fit in an AA holder no matter who made it.

Not so for Li-ion batteries. Each maker seems to have a different shape or size, and not just different from other firms - different from themslves. It is a rare and welcome thing for the developing line of new cameras to contain the same battery three years in a row.

A nightmare for the user? For the stockist? Wait until you consider what those batteries do inside the cameras...

The jpeg is pretty universal for most cameras. Take a jpeg and everything can read it from the storage device and show it on a screen. But there are limitations - even with the best jpeg cameras in the world, you can sometimes exceed the capabilities. RAW files are what you need. And then away you go on the chicken chase again as you try to get your new camera's files to open in your old computer program. Or find an update. Or find a new program. Or take to drink.

Some manufacturers have tried to institute a DNG file that will be universal but then lots of their competitors have not taken them up on it. Indeed sometimes there are computer crashes and problems but then that is one of the  mysteries of the occident.

Occidents will happen...

The Big Blue Blanket - A Day At the Races

Did goe to the drag races yesterday and was greatley entertained. The event was far too busy and far too many colourful cars were seen to be reported here - if you wish to see what transpired you must go to:

hrhoa.wordpress.com

The blog is " Here All Week" and there will be a stream of posts regarding the races and car show emanating from it during the coming weeks. The blog you're reading right now is the work one that sells cameras so we must keep on topic...

Big Blue Blanket. Look it up in the history of WWII and see what it meant. In my case it is the perpetually surprising sky here in Western Australia - the clear blue bowl that overbears us all.

I don't see it, though it is there all round. I go out on a bright day - to the car races, say - and set my Fujifilm X-pro1 to Auto White balance...or to the daylight icon...or to 5500º Kelvin. I shoot away with the old Metz 45 flash to fill in the shadows. I bring the images back on the SD card and bang them into the computer and am confronted with - the Big Blue Blanket.

Every surface that has been illuminated by the sky - and it is all around - and is at all reflective - and remember these are hot rods with chrome parts - is blue. Sometimes it is light blue, sometimes it is bright blue. I fail to see it when I am shooting because my mind filters it out, but the camera's sensor is a faithful observer.

The answer to removing the blue is complex - I can trick the camera by lying to it that I am really in overcast or shade. There will be some artificial colours elsewhere in the jpegs, though. I can take the whole thing in RAW and fiddle the white balance later in Lightroom, Aperture, or Silkypix. I can hire a zeppelin painted 18% grey to hover over the cars as I photograph them to hide the sky.

This is difficult, as the zeppelin is not always available - this week it is off bombing Lowestoft.

Easiest idea so far has proved to be shooting the hot rods in Melbourne. They only have blue skies for a very small amount of time and frequently this is at night...

The next time I go to the Kwinana Motorplex on one of these bright blue infinite days, I shall try the effect of a circular polariser. Logic tells me that it will do something but quite what remains to be seen.

Uncle Dick

Experimental Weekend - A Note Of Caution

This has been a weekend of quiet experimentation in the dark room. Not the darkroom -  chemical work was laid aside some years ago and has not been picked up. The dark room that used to be the darkroom, but is now a not-so-dark room. I hesitate to say a light room for fear of Adobe's branding lawyers...

Right - level of illumination aside, it was a weekend of careful photo manipulation and posting on several websites. During which I gained an insight into what several of our customers have been saying - they don't want anything to do with photo manipulation and storage if it involves the cloud system.

I heard them say this but was ignorant as to the whole affair - a little questioning of other staff and of family members helped, but I still thought that the customers might have been making too much of a fuss about nothing - after all, the internet works flawlessly and all those servers and computers and experts would make sure that it all went perfectly...no?

Well, no. Not for me this weekend. Starting with an attempted hack from overseas, a reset password for Facebook, then hours spent trying to re-connect the Wordpress blogs that I write to a Facebook page, then watching selected posts drop out of FB, then drop back in again, then lose their photos, then regain them...

It was interesting work resetting and reconnecting things but it used up hours of reading, clicking, retracing, etc. Had I experienced the same misery with Photoshop manipulation or the localised resizing and reformatting of photos that is be done with Aperture or Silkypix I would tempted to unplug the entire electronic web and get out the developing tank and trays...

The day was as slow as the internet was slow and as scattered as the various places that needed to be contacted. I suspect that cloud storage and accessing would have been impossible yesterday. which leads me to the point of this post: there are still a few programs available that are not cloud-based.

I see we have some Photoshop Elements 13, some DxO programs, and some of the Lightroom ones that can stand alone on your computer. I would encourage anyone who is at the same level of computer knowledge as me ( The I is on and the O is off, do not lick the monitor screen...) to think about keeping the photo manipulation in-box as it were rather than depending upon Telstra, Berkeley, and state of the atmosphere to make it possible.

Curing The Group Portrait Blues - With DXO

We all love doing group portraits. Not.

Whether it is an undisciplined family group at a party, an overly-disciplined regimental portrait, or just wedding guests gathered around the wreckage, the shoot can be difficult to do, and the results patchy.

The family party is composed of people who will not obey - the relatives and children. They will be difficult to marshal into one area, will insist on changing places continuously to gain precedence, and will never ALL be looking in the same direction.

The regiment or ship's company CAN be compelled to sit or stand in order - correctly - and can be ordered to all look toward the camera with no-one making Indian feather fingers. But you won't be the one doing the ordering. For that you need the senior warrant officer. Contact him early on, do as he says, and he will deliver the goods.

The wedding group includes the bride and groom and their parents - who are paying you to be there. Put them in the center, expose so that they look good, and let their relatives fall as they may.

All this said, there is one problem if you have a large group to photograph that spreads wide in front of your lens - you will be forced by the geometry to use a wide-angle lens and that in turn will force you by the nature of optics to get distorted faces on the outer edges. Faces that started out round end up flattened like pumpkins. Grins become maniacal.

If you can get the group to curve round you like the horns of a buffalo, you can reduce this. If not, try getting one of the DxO Viewpoint 2 programs - you can plunk it into a number of Adobe photoshop programs - both regular CS. PSE, and LR, as well as Aperture 3.

It will perfectly correct the distorted faces at the edge of the frame without narrowing to ones in the middle. If you have jiggered up architectural shots it will straighten and correct the distortion. You'd be surprised just how much better this makes even studio shots when you are using extreme wides but have let you camera deviate from the horizontal ever so little...

The Bastard File

I used to be embarrassed in shop class when the teacher talked about using bastard files. That sort of language was discouraged at home. I was careful not to use it in front of my mother.

Bless her, she is long gone. I am free to express myself when I edit pictures on the computer. And I do. Sometimes the family are scandalised and I have noted the occasionally the wife closes the door on the computer room when I am working in there. I just wish she wouldn't wedge it shut with a hammer...

Bastard files come in several varieties:

1: The ones that have a dynamic range of 56 stops. The low tones are so low that you can see nothing and the high tones are so high that you can see nothing. Eventually you lose interest and stop looking.

2: The noise traps. No matter what setting you have dialled into the camera these files have electronic noise. In the low tones, in the high tones, in the margin. Even the Exif data is speckled and grey. They look like someone has dropped them onto the floor and rolled them in kitty litter.

3: The Walking Dead. Files that have so little character or substance that the most attractive portions of them are the chromatic aberration. Many of them have been made using Big Stopper filters and many of them have been made by elderly Frenchmen.

4: The Fun House. Files so distorted that they could feature in a parliamentary enquiry. That lens that you bought at the Camera Mart for the low price was being sold for a very good reason...

5: The files that are supplied in the 18.5 - bit HOOTx format. This is a format devised by a graduate student in Nebraska that was briefly thrown out as freeware on the net in 1998 for a week. Before the narcs got to him. It surfaces like a dying Soviet submarine every few years and some fool converts normal digital data to it. and then throws away the normal digital data. No known program actually decodes it but once the files get into your drive they can never be removed.

6: The files that are all watermark. No actual image but entirely safe.

7: Commercial traps. The file that contains an opposing product to the one that you are trying to advertise. The kind of photo-bombng that spreads radiation.

8: Private traps. The thumb drive o' death that your mate gives you. Plug it in at your peril, but be warned that your mate has nursed a grievance against you for a long time and this may well be the opportunity to revenge it.

You must understand that none of this ever happened in the dear old days of film photography. We were pure and simple and never had fungus on our lenses. And none of our negative files ever got wet an smelly and mouldy. Wanna see some of my unicorn pictures?

You Say Potayto - I Say Potahto...

Speaking with the members of the Bussleton Camera Club this weekend alerted me to the interesting fact that a lot of people have a lot of programs on a lot of computers ...that they do not use. Oh, they know that the programs are there, and they paid money to put them there, but they don't go there.

Of course this is perfectly legal - you don't have to use every steak knife in the drawer every meal - but sometimes I wonder if some of the digital photographers are trying to eat a wonderfully elegant electronic meal with the equivalent of a hatchet and a coffee stirrer.

I was like this at the first - my old government-surplus PC ran a Windows program that was so old that the registration code was in Roman numerals and the word processing program in it still used Liquid Paper to correct errors. I installed a free copy of Adobe Photoshop Elements 3 and commenced my digital adolescence. It was remarkably like real adolescence - I broke out in pimples and girls wouldn't talk to me.

Times have changed. I run two Apple products - an iMac and a MacBook pro - and there are a bevy of high-powered programs in there churning the electrons to good effect. I have selected the Apple Aperture program and the Adobe Photoshop Elements 10 as my image handling tools and am awaiting some plug-ins from Alien Skin to fiddle with the black and white conversion and art effects.

So apparently do a number of the club people - they run a mixture of Photoshop CS products of all numbers, some Elements, a few Apertures and a number of versions of Lightroom. But they sadly confess that while these competent programs sit dormant on their computers, they still just wipe the backsides of their jpegs and slap them onto discs - they are afraid to use the capabilities that exist in the electronics.

People, take heart. Get in there and poke those buttons. You will get some dreadful results, and some of your images will go to electronic heaven and never come back, and occasionally your screen will go blue - as will your language - but all you have to do is turn it off and on again and generally things come right. All that the image programs do is fiddle with red, blue, and green pixels and you can't kill the computer if you get the saturation wrong. The Aperture and Lightroom programs will adjust most of the pictures that you'll want to show off, and if you need to lie shamelessly you can bounce the file over to a PS product and it will abet you in your sin - then bounce it back to Aperture or Lightroom. The chiefest thing to remember is either to admit to everything - like Christian Fletcher and I do - or deny it absolutely.

Try it. You'll like it.

Ten O'Clock At Night

Ten o'clock at night. Remember that time. It is important for photographers - it was in the analog days and is even more so now that we use digital.


10:00 PM is the dividing point between success and failure - between reputation and disgrace. In some cases it is the determining factor in life or death. Let me explain.

If you are a wedding photographer or someone who covers social events like corporate balls, 10:00 PM is the point of time when you must either leave in a calm and professional manner, or stay and eventually help shovel the corpses into the truck. The booze will have been turned on at 6:00 and four hours is more than enough time to fuel the company. If you leave at 10:00 you avoid having to protect your gear from flying drunks and/or rescue your assistant from amorous embraces. You can drive home safely without going to sleep and ending upside-down in a ditch.

And of course you remember the primary rule of event photographers - do not download your cards or try to do any processing after 10:00. Never mind the phrase " deadline ". The only thing that will be dead is you if you inadvertently erase or damage the information on that card through inattention. The bride and groom and the ship's company are not going to disappear if you don't hand them an entire job completed next morning. They want the pictures and they will be back to get them.

Likewise, do not attempt to do professional colour work on files after 10:00 PM even if it is next day. Your eyes tire and your colour perception may well lead you astray after this time. I accept that if you have calibrated your camera, screen, and printer with the appropriate Datacolor or X-rite products - and I do - that you are starting with a level playing surface. I accept the fact that EIZO monitors are the best on the market. But after 10:00 YOU are tilting and are likely to make the wrong decision about what you see.

At this point users of  Lightroom, Aperture and a number of other editing programs point out that they can batch-process any number of images and if they got one looking good earlier in the evening, all they would have to do is press the button and their work would be done. Never - even with the assistance of this feature they still need to tweak here and there and as soon as they do it with tired eyes the whole job is a patchwork quilt again.

This was also the case in the analog days - I lost an entire costume ball through to trying to mix chemistry and process the film after returning to the darkroom late at night. Wrong recipe, flat black negatives...

Please note that it is also a bad idea to clean firearms, purchase real estate in Queensland, or contract marriage after 10:00 at night.

Good Night.

Been There, Done That, Making Money From It

That, in a nutshell, is the experience I had with the time I spent at Shoot Photography Workshops next door to our shop.


Last year I attended a course run by Mark Wagenaar that comprised three evening lectures over a three-week period. The subject was the Aperture 3 program for the Macintosh computers. I had just installed it into my iMac and was unsure what it could do.

Mark is an accredited Apple lecturer and uses the entire system himself - to do photography as well as writing and other computer tasks - so he is not only academically qualified to show, but also to tell. As well, he is a wonderfully patient man - some of my questions needed that.

The Aperture 3 program is a very similar thing to the Adobe Lightroom product - but not entirely so. In some areas it goes far away and far above this. As it is unique to the Mac platform, all the users will be on the same computer page, but it also works in as a partner with any number of other programs that can be accessed. Plug in is not a dirty word.

Mark's lecture is illustrated by real-time work on the projection screen at the front of the room. He brings in files, catalogs them, stores them, then brings them out for modification right there in front of you - no guessing or trying to read down through a page of  > and  +  symbols and arcane commands. If you bring your laptop or iMac with you you can follow along right then and there and finally understand what is happening.

Note that I said I am making money with this experience? Yes - Mark showed me how this program can batch process and re-process raw and jpeg files in a fraction of the time that was formerly required using just a picture editing program. Computer room time has dropped, productivity has soared, and more profit returns to me. 90% of this additional profit is spent on whiskey and women of the night and the other 10% is wasted.

But do not waste time - contact Shoot Photography Workshops right now on their website or by telephone and book in for the course. There'll be three lectures  - one each on the 3rd, the 10th and the 17th of August. The cost will be $ 350 dollars and it will be money well spent. It is one of the few instances I have ever seen of being able to by time with money - and happy time too.