Down The Home Straight - Day 12 - And It's Filters And Cards

Okay. You've borne with us for the last 12 trading days as we've sung the syren song of photographic retailing. You've steeled yourself not to buy any more camera systems. You've steeled yourself not to buy any more lenses. You've even carbon fibre'd yourself not buy a new tripod...even though your old one has only two legs...

What can we say? If you are determined to be unhappy there is only so much we can legally do to cheer you up. But we'll have one final try.

Today. Camera Electronics. Filters and memory cards.

Buy one, get another of the same value  - or less value if that is your wish - for free. That's it.

You get to choose from San Disk, Hoodman, Hoya, Kenko, and B+W products. All top quality goods. All applicable over most brands of camera and lens.

And all useful in the extreme for digital shooters. Don't look on it as indulgence - look upon it as opportunity.

Heck, the writer of this blog is going down to the shop and snag a coupla memory cards. I've got a trip coming up and I don't want the hassle of downloading stuff onto a tablet - I'm just going to fill cards and be done with it. They are THAT cheap!

The Deserted World - Ten Stops Of Solitude

We all remember that famous picture of the Parisian boulevard taken at the start of the photographic era - wide, clean, deserted, with only a disembodied leg propped up on a box on one sidewalk...eery...

It wasn't an 1840's  zombie apocalypse - it was the extremely slow speed of the first photographic plates that required such a long exposure that every moving object failed to imprint upon it. The buildings and pavement did not move and so eventually made their mark.

 The detached leg belonged to a man who was getting his boots shined on the street. He had the foot on the bootblack's box long enough for it to be the first record of a person on a street. I daresay he went to his grave all those years ago without ever knowing his fame.

Nowadays it is also fashionable to stretch exposures to the breaking point - though modern digital cameras and film emulsions can not go down to the low sensitivity of those first metal plates. We need extremely dark filters to allow the technique to work.

The Lee company make them - so do the Kenko and the B+W companies. 8, 9, and 10-stop neutral density filters that you screw or slide onto the front of your lens to dramatically reduce the light falling on the sensor. If you camera will keep the shutter open for as long as you wish - and many of them will - you can experiment with cleaning the people out of the world.

You can't focus through these filters, and neither can your AF mechanism. Focus with the manual focus setting on your lens before you attach the filter.

You can't hold your camera steady for 20 minutes - zombie apocalypse aside - so put it on a good tripod. I use a Cullmann Concept.

You can't keep your finger on the button for that long either, so use a remote release with a locking mechanism or the "T" setting if you camera has one. Cable remote releases are most reliable. Mr. Hahnel is your friend.

Now this long exposure technique will soften water, clean out skies, and make trees into fantasy cotton wool balls. Waterfalls become veils of mist. Consult any amateur photography magazine of the last two years to see these effects...

And when all else fails, pick your time and place carefully....and you don't need a filter. Just put the camera on a tripod, make the panorama shots, and then hold hands and try to contact the living...

* Maylands on Saturday morning. They hope the water will stay there rather than seep back into the land they built those big houses on...

Fill A Bag - Lots of Little Bits For Sony

Sometimes we forget that some manufacturers do it differently. Anyone who has ever tried to fire a Swedish military rifle will know what I mean...

In the camera business Sony make the vital component for many cameras by many different makers - the sensor. They incorporate this in their own cameras, too. They also have a number of their own ideas - like the lens mount, the electronic cable release socket and the flash hotshoe - that are unique. A lot of the standard accessories don't fit.

Fortunately the manufacturers of aftermarket bits have realised this and made some specials - here are a number of them.

From JJC, a flash hot shoe to PC socket block for the top of the Sony DSLRs. Now you can fire a studio flash.

From Kenko, a two-tube set of extension tubes for E mount. Gets insanely unusably close when you use two of them on an A6000 but if you use only one you can do good macro.

Hahnel contributes one of their reliable cable release sets - with a 2 mtr extension cable.

Promaster makes the humble body cap. if you have a humble body this is for you.

Sony user, no longer do you have to feel left out when photo shop browsing. You too can fill your gadget bag with equipment rather than sandwiches.

More On Infra Red With Kenko

Our post yesterday regarding infra-red film from Maco lead me on to look and see which of the infra-red filters are in stock.

Looks like we have a fresh supply of Kenko IR filters in 49mm, 52mm, 67mm, 72mm, and 77mm size. They are dark as and prevent ordinary light from penetrating to film or sensor - only the IR gets through.

The results can be charming, with white foliage and black skies on monochrome or wild colours with a colour setting on a digital camera. Exposure is long, and you need to let the camera decide this for itself sometimes - you can't focus by normal means either - you have to set the distance scale yourself and it has a slight offset for the IR wavelengths.

Serious experimenters would do well to get a book from the library about this, or search out one of the Fawcett publications from the bookstore. Like pinhole photography, IR imaging is a totally scientific and absolutely predictable fairy tale told in a foreign language in the dark in a high wind so be prepared for anything...

No Need To Be Koi About It - Use A Polariser

The Japanese fish in this picture are pretty contented. They live at the Asakusa Temple in Tokyo and are cared for in the ornamental pond - there are a number of signs warning people not to feed them, so I suspect they are sometimes too well cared for. No matter - they are spectacular and friendly. Perfect subjects for a picture.

Except when the skylight blocks out the surface of the water. Then you see whatever is bouncing off that surface. It is the same with shop windows and other shiny surfaces.

Answer is, and always has been, to use a polarising filter on your lens. The older types were known as linear polarisers and did a very good job of seeing down into water surfaces. The newer types are called circular polarisers and may be a little less effective in actually penetrating the surface, but do give a more accurate light meter reading. The Circ Pol's are the ones most often supplied for modern digital cameras.

We've got 'em from Kenko, Hoya, Promaster, and B+W. They are not as cheap as UV filters - never could be - but they are a pretty essential tool for landscape and marine photographers. Useful, too for correcting colours under trees in open sunshine - you can lose the blue fill from Western Australian skies. particularly recommended for bridal work in these circumstances.

Studio? Well there are times when you need to see into things and these can help. You can also use them with sheets of polarising film and studio lights if you are going to copy glossy or textured flat art work. a little more complex than just twirling it in front of the lens when you are out at the beach, but essential to capture the true colours of some canvases.

Note for newbies: Either put a UV on the lens or a Polariser. Not together. Too many glass surfaces, and sometimes you start to unscrew the UV when you think you are turning the Circ Pol.

Seeing Clearly Through Clear Glass

Well, I seen it. The customer brought it in and told me about it and I was just about to dismiss it as nonsense...but I took a look and he was right. I seen it.

He was concerned that the lens on his Nikon camera was playing up - that or the focusing screen. He said that when he took pictures of a bright light source on a dark field that he got "ghost" images all around the image. I was initally going to dismiss it as either a figment of his imagination or lens flare but I took his camera over to the bright LED lights on the new Nikon cabinet and looked.

You could see flare alright - no way you can expect not to. But there on either side of the main image were two separate faint images of the light. They moved around when you waved the lens past the light. Ghosts, but perfectly formed ones... ooeeooeeooeeooee...

A different lens showed none of this effect - you could get flare but no perfect little ghosts.

The culprit turned out to be an old uncoated Focal UV filter on the first lens. Clean enough, but every time you screwed it on the ghosts came back.

We screwed on a multi-coated UV filter from Kenko - not an expensive one, either. Ghosts exorcised!

Moral of this is listen to the customer, and throw out your old cheapjohn film filters and get some modern ones. There may be a lot of your image that is being obscured by ghosting right now that you do not even realise.

Adjusting The Sun

Landscape photographers have a good deal in common with wedding photographers; they have to hike great distances hauling heavy equipment, their subjects that have impossible dynamic range, and they are never quite at peace with the weather.

The first problem can be addressed by simply employing native bearers or wives. They carry the tripod, gadget bag, 14 different lenses, and water bottles on their heads and you simply stride through the dripping jungle or the local council gardens with them in a long line behind you. A solar topee is not absolutely necessary but it makes a nice touch. It is wise to determine if the natives or the wives are friendly before you put the topee on...

The impossible dynamic range is a stiffer problem. Brides WILL insist on wearing white, or some variation of it. Grooms WILL wear black. You have to make the dress and the tux look good so sometimes you have to adjust the dynamic range of your camera to try to accommodate this. Just when you get enough detail in the two extremes you note that everything else has gone dull gray... Grit your teeth and post process it.

Adjusting the weather or the angle of the sun is not easy - even Joshua needed help doing that - but you can use the sun that is overhead to help you out. Remember that you don't just have one light source up there -you have two. The vast bowl of Western Australian blue sky is an immense fill light, but unfortunately biased in its colour temperature. You might have to retreat under a tree and get a polariser to remove the blue from the scene. You might have to overpower the sun with a close-range burst of light from a Canon or Nikon speed light.

You might have to get an assistant to shade your subject with a diffusion panel - here the wedding worker has the advantage as it is easier to shade a bride than Bluff Knoll. Remember that there are any number of HDR programs available as plug-ins for your computer and if you are prepared to explain to the bride why her complexion has come out
looking like that, you can get great effects in the bridal dress. Those of you who are booked for a lot of  brides and grooms on pebble beaches under a storm-wracked sky in Yorkshire may care to remember this. You'll be the darling of the English photo magazines...

Ivory And Ebony

The advance of digital photography has seen some remarkable trends - none more so than the photograph that slows a waterfall to a mist - or levels a moving sea. Or removes all the people from a busy city street. We mean the interposition of a very dark neutral density filter into the light path which permits a very slow shutter speed.

The name that is on everyone's lips is Big Stopper - it is the catchy tag for the Lee company's 100mm x 100mm resin filter. It fits into their standard holders and drops 10 stops of light. I wish I had invented the name Big Stopper - it is the sort of thing that you can bandy about at a camera club meeting and sound really cool.

Oh, would that you could go into a shop and buy one. Like into our shop, for instance. Because of their great popularity and the drought that has been affecting the English filter fields...we never seem to have enough of them delivered to satisfy the clubmen. Please do not think that I am criticising English manufacturing practice - I am sure that if you wanted a Quad amplifier or a Manton shotgun you could find them at any corner store...

But for whatever reason, the Lee filters are hard to get. We have found another good answer for the landscape photographer. B+W make 1000x filters in screw-in sizes that will do the same job as the Big Stopper. Kenko make an ND 400 that gives you 9 stops of darkening. And Promaster make a wonderful variable neutral density filter that looks as though it would do 1 to 10 stops. To prove it to myself I put one over a light box at the two extremities of adjustment - have a look at how dark it gets.

The video people can also use this sort of a variable filter to do fade-outs at the end of video shots.

I should purchase one in the largest size lens that I use, then adapt it to smaller lenses with simple step-dow rings. The whole deal would be cheaper than Lee, but don't let that influence you.

The Dawn Of Beauty

Landscape photographers are romantics. They must be - they go a thousand kilometres to camp overnight in freezing bush so that they can get up at 3:30AM and hike through bush to a beachfront. Then they haul 500 Kg of equipments over wet rocks and stand there shivering while they are waiting for he sun to rise. They have $ 8200 sitting on a tripod in front of them on the slippery rocks and are waiting only an incautious moment to tip it into the sea.

Then they drive a thousand kilometres back home and spend week of nights in a dark room trying the HDR the result. This seems clear evidence of either romance or madness.

One of the symptoms of this madn... I mean one of the useful and perfectly normal items that every landscape photographer needs is the circular polariser filter. See the opening image for a typical polariser in operation.

The polariser makes blue skies bluer, green seas greener, and white bride's dresses whiter. Foliage loses the blue cast that Western Australian skies put into it and the colours seem much richer. They can also be used to see through water surfaces and glass shop windows to reveal the goods within. It makes everything look like it is straight from the pages of ARIZONA HIGHWAYS.

Good? Yes. Bad? Yes. WHAT?

Well, consider - if you want to see bluer skies and greener seas and fluffier clouds, all very well - you can produce this effect and good luck to you. It is charming but fraudulent. If you wish to represent what your eye actually sees in a scene, consider that your eye is seeing the light scatter anyway - remove it and you are interpreting rather than representing.

Morals aside, if you want to get the full effect of the polariser remember that it works most effectively at 90º from the sun. If you try to put one onto a lens that has too wide an angle of view it will work in one portion of the scene differently from another portion. You may be better in these cases to seek your colour enhancement by computer means further down the track.

Please note that the polariser filter and polarising sheets may be a real boon in art copy and scientific work - letting us see what the light scatter spoils. We are seeking science, not art. And generally don't have to stand on wet rocks to get it.

Students! - No More Naked Lenses!

I know you are a struggling student and I know you have no money and I know you are trying to make great art with your Canon DSLR...and I have a great idea for you.

Stop looking at the internet and the camera magazines and the secondhand cabinet. Count over your pennies, give up drinking at the student tavern for a week, and come in and get yourself a Canon 50mm F 1.8 EF lens and the proper accessories for it.

The proper accessories are a UV filter to protect the front of the lens from the fingers of your fellow students and a lens hood to protect your images from light flare. It is okay to have flair in your images, but not flare...

The 50 is about the most accurate small lens you will ever find for your little Canon - and remember that it is a red-dot lens and can go onto your Canon 1Dx when you become an international iconic superstar. It has great bokeh and can also make the background blurry, depending on which school you go to. It does good portraits so try to make friends with the good-looking students. It also does good art copy, so you can add the artists to your list.

It is light and fast. If you are trekking in the mountains with your Canon DSLR, or just fleeing from the authorities through dense bush, you'll appreciate not having to carry extra weight.

Best of all, the whole box and dice that you see on the heading image is only $ 169.45 complete with a year's warranty. No, you can't have a discount - that is cheap as chips as it is. You can get your normal 10% discount on ink, paper, film and chemistry.

Note to the non-student: the 50mm lenses of any manufacturer are generally the bargains of their respective ranges. They are, by now, probably the most developed of the glass, and can be the most accurate lenses in any lineup. YOU need one too.

Through A Glass Darkly - With Lee, et al.

We are frequently consulted by clients as to how the can make people disappear from their images. Apart from the convenient suggestion of using Sarin or the services of the Ton Ton Macout, we also have a series of technical exercises that can be done with equipment available here in the shop:

1. If it is just one person in an image, erase the offending individual with the content-aware eraser in Photoshop Elements 11. This brush looks around the image and draws inspiration from whatever the subject is standing next to and then repeats this in a convincing manner to replace them. It is surprisingly effective - I made light fittings and an entire Volvo prime mover disappear from a wedding shot by these means. Fun wedding.

2. If it is a larger area that needs to be depopulated, mount a very heavy neutral density filter in front of the lens and let the shutter stay open for a very long period of time. All the movers and shakers in the picture will be gone. Of course you will also have movement in clouds or water but this can be a great aesthetic result as well.

3. Lure the people away with a promise of something for free - or scare them away with the threat of something for free.

Okay, look at the heading picture. Lots of manufacturers are onto this need - B+W make a 1000X graufilter that is 10 stop. Kenko make a filter that they refer to as ND400 that is effectively 9 stops. Lee make a square filter for their own holder system with the delightful name of The Big Stopper. This is also 10 stop but that is such a great name that it is the one that sticks in people's minds - we just wish that Lee were more efficient in supplying it to our shop as people sometimes have to wait a while for it. Note that you can also get a very deep blocking of light with the Kenko R72 Infrared filter but this is entirely different as an effect from the more predictable one of a pure ND. It can be extremely interesting but funky.

You could stack ND 8 filters together to achieve considerable darkening but you'd be adding glass surfaces to degrade the resolution. Decide yourself if this is a good idea.

Oh, while I remember it - you can also do this by going with a good old paper negative in a good old 4 x 5 camera with a good old red yellow filter in front of an f:128 lens but this would require you to be both good and old. I have managed only part of the equation...