The Magic Photo Trick - Making People Disappear With A Wave Of the Hand

Well, it's not all that magic. All you need is a backpack sprayer of liquid manure and a hand nozzle. Crowds will melt away, as will some automotive paint finishes. The really difficult thing is trying to sell the images later when the client smells them...that and avoiding dog packs.

Leaving aside this intriguing mental picture ( though I hope it will disturb you for days...) we come to the bit of photographic history that had extremely insensitive recording materials and extremely dim lenses. And big sturdy wooden tripods. Using a plate camera on one of these with the lens stopped right down and a silver or glass plate with an ISO of 0.3 meant that the correct exposure of a Parisian street might be as long as 45 minutes. Long enough for the crowds that swirled through the street to pass by and not record on the plate - while the stationary buildings and other features did. We've all seen the ghostly picture of the street with just one leg on a shoe-black's box. it was the only living thing that was in one place long enough to record.

My bugaboo is people at car shows in front of the vehicles. I find the view I want but it is frequently blocked by the gawkers. They work in tag teams - as one finishes another steps in. I'm sure it is all a function of fluid dynamics and personal living space and bloody mindedness...I am debarred by foolish local laws from carrying a .44 and clearing the way myself - I must wait until they tire of the game and move off. Sometimes it is ten minutes wait until you can get 1/125th of a second for a clear shot.

I think it is time to think outside the square. And to think inside the square - the square of a 10 to 15-stop neutral density filter. Lee make 'em and they have a couple of sizes that would be suitable for use on a DSLR or mirror-less system.

Not cheap - Lee are never cheap - but the facility to increase an exposure in daylight from 1/125 of a second to 40 seconds or longer means that as long as the camera is on a tripod and no-one bumps it, the car will be recorded and the crowds passing in front of it won't. It may sound a bit drastic but then so is the .44 or bursting into tears or yelling " Fire!" to clear away the obstructions.

Note: Camera Electronic sell Lee systems in the shop and on-line. The standard 100mm holders, adapter rings, and Big Stoppers are a very popular sales item - every time there is a landscape photographer running a course in town the stock sells out. The Seven5 size...that's 75mm when they are not being twee...is the one for the mirror-less systems. There is a reduced-size holder and suitable Big and Little Stoppers. Look them up through the on-line store and follow along with the experiment.

I won't have the system in place for the Hyde Park Vintage Car Show but I might make it for the WA Hot Rod Spectacular.

Doin' The Maths

Nothing in this column is a surprise to anyone reading it - not even to the writer - Oh, sure, the owners of the business have learned to turn on the computer with the latest posting by using a long stick and shielding their eyes while they do it...but they are a cautious lot anyway...

What I am about to suggest may be hot stuff or heresy or hooey - and you can decide which for yourself - but here goes anyway...

The landscape shooters of Western Australia may be doing themselves an injustice - by doing a product an injustice. In particular when they overlook the Cokin range of filters in favour of other systems they might miss out on affordable opportunities.

Okay, it's your money. And if you come in and buy something it becomes our money - feel free to throw dollars at us all day if you wish - no complaints from the cash register side of the counter...but...

The Cokin system of filters has been an established product for longer than most realise - we saw it in the 1970's and it has burgeoned since then. If we remember some pretty horrible uses of the idea in the 70's and 80's...well, everybody has to have a adolescence and wedding and portrait photographers are no exception. I can take the high moral ground here as I never actually made a wedding portrait with the bride and groom in a brandy glass. I contemplated it, but never had the courage to try it.

The modern kit from Cokin that supplies three regular or three neutral density filters as well as a basic filter frame is the bargain of the shop. The filters come in a hard plastic organiser case, the filter holder is sturdy and light, and as it can be adapted onto lenses anywhere from 52mm to 82mm, it can go on the front of most of your glass.

The filters are certainly varied - and good quality. There is a useful, if bewildering, variety of graduated neutral density filters in 4 different sizes - you can accommodate some pretty big lenses. There are blue and amber varieties. There are lots of plain colour filters, if you think that is a help.

And now we address the elephant in the corner of the camera bag...some people have been told... and retell the idea... that the Cokin neutral density filters have a colour bias - in some cases people refer to it as magenta and others find some other tint to complain about. Believe what you will, but consider that nearly every cameras nowadays have a colour correction program built into the WB section of the menu. If you have convinced yourself that you are seeing a magenta colour balance, go in there and dial up a slight green correction. If your camera does not have it in the WB or you don't want to fiddle, crank in a slight green correction in the RAW converter.

And there you go - the aesthetic results you want from a plastic filter system that may be every bit as good as another plastic filter system...but at a fraction of the price.

But don't let me stop you from spending money.

Uncle Dick

Staggering Through The Darkness With The New Lee Filters

Well it is strange, isn't it. For a hundred and fifty-odd years  photographers have been trying to get more sensitivity out of their recording surface - sensitising plates, using speed-increasing developers. pre-flashing plates, etc. Developing flash power, flash bulbs, and eventually electronic flash to a very sophisticated level. Making lenses with wider and wider apertures...

And then Lee come along and clap a dirty great black sheet of plastic in front of all the other developments and ten stops of light disappear. People are thrown back to heavy tripods, cable releases and counting their exposure times on their fingers...

The power of fashion, eh? Well, what the heck, Misty waterfalls, glassy oceans, deserted streets - it's almost like Grand Final Day at 2:00 or Christmas Eve in the workhouse.

Up until now many of the fancier wide angle lenses that people wanted to use for landscapes and interiors were handicapped by the design of their front elements. They bulged forward in such an alarming fashion that no filters could be put on. Heretofore in this class of optic only the Nikon 14-24mm f:2.8G ED lens was catered for  - Lee made a holder kit called the SW 150 and a matching set of filters for it. Big. Really big. But everyone wanted graduated neutral density filters for landscape, so the kit sold well.

Now the range that can be catered to has enlarged with the Lee SW 150 Mk II. The following lenses can match to this filter holder:

Nikon 14-24mm F:2.8G ED
Nikon 14mmF:2.8D AF ED
Canon 11-24mm
Samyang 14mm f:2.8
Sigma 12-24mm f:4.5-5.6 DG
Tamron 13-30mm f:2.8
Tokina AT-X 16-28mm

The filters are the 150 size and you can get a variety including the popular graduated Neutral density and the very dark Big Stopper.

As well as the additional mountings, there is an improvement to the rig with the inclusion of a rear light shield in the basic pack. It makes sure that there is no light bouncing from the sides or back of the holder to give ghost images or flare that degrades the image. Of course there is the classic foam sealing of the Big Stopper filter contributing to this glare protection.

The picture of the Big Stopper is not just gratuitous advertising for my little studio - it uses a standardised business card to let you see just how big the dark filter actually is. That's a serious piece of plastic in that tin box!

The devices to which these filters fasten are large. The lenses to which the filter is fastened are large. The camera bodies to which the lenses are attached are large. Hopefully the wise photographer will also realise that they need a sturdy and ( large) tripod to support the whole. And they will be going out a long way on difficult tracks to take pictures of landscape...because that is where they keep the landscape. Good luck troops, and ignore that chuckling sound coming from inside the studio as you head out into the rain.

When Power Is Never Enough Or Far Too Much...

A client called today with an interesting studio problem. She has been thinking about it, experimenting, and doing the science correctly, so I learned something.

She shoots in a small space. She wants to do work at a wide aperture - wider than f:4. Even with one single light from her 400 w/s set and her camera set to a very low ISO, she still has too much light for the subjects.

She's tried the temporary dodge of covering the front of a softbox with a grey chiffon, but this contributes an unwanted colour cast. Basically she just has too much light.

Tempting to trade it in and get lower power, but she may have larger premises one day or be taking photos of big groups out in big halls...so keeping the power is good too.

The best solution would seem to be the Lee company and their theatrical gel material. It comes in large rolls and can be had with either clear colours or clear grey or translucent finish to drop even more light.

I hope she tries it and can report results. There are a lot of people who might be in her predicament - if the Lee material works I'll report it on this blog.

Note: I shoot studio too, but sometimes need to have all the power I can get for tiny apertures. Different subjects, different vision.

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...

The Light Fantastic - with Olympus and Lee

Looks as though someone is determined to get out and about - and bring back good landscape pictures - without throwing out a cervical disc.

Okay - all this is to introduce three ideas - the Olympus E-P5 camera, the Olympus 9-18mm lens, and the Lee Sev5n filter system - and to suggest them as a viable alternative for keen landscape photographers.

Landscapes are rarely encountered in a studio, unless you are prepared to make your own. ( I do, but I am odd...) Most people go to where the landscapes are stored - up the sides of mountains or down by the seashore or out in the woods. Some of the best landscapes are kept way out yonder and the roads department doesn't even bother to make a decent path to them. People are forced to walk to them and carry their photo gear with them on their backs. Burke and Wills were probably looking for a good vantage point for a seascape, and didn't that work out well...

This partially explains why very few people these days use 10" x 20" glass plate negative cameras for landscape work. They are heavy and hard to carry. And glass is expensive. Most people settle for DSLR cameras that are hard and heavy to carry, with...expensive glass. Sometimes these digital cameras are lighter than the 10 x 20 bellows camera and sometimes they are not. This sort of burden leads to a lot of landscape work being done from a car park.

Well Olympus have a good answer to that - their series of micro 4/3 cameras with wonderful lenses like the 9-18mm and first-rate stabilisation systems. Light, small, precise, detailed, great colouration, easy to use.

Now that we have some of the Lee Sev5n filter holders and graduated filters in to assist with the light control in bright skies there is no reason that the landscapist cannot cope as well as with a larger system. If there is a lightweight tripod like a Cullmann 625T, all the better. No need to destroy the back or knees while trying to haul your own weight in lenses and camera bodies up the side of Bluff Knoll.

Note: Would the marketing teams who dream up the names of products please refrain from mixing letters and numbers together...it mucks up the computer systems something chronic if the bar code is missing.

Out Of the Woods

This view of the Carrie Nation Memorial Forest is brought to you by courtesy of the Lee company. The same people who make the Big Stopper, the Little Stopper, and the Enormously Popular System Of Graduated Filters. They also make large rolls of transparent and translucent plastic sheets that you can put over studio lights to change the colours.

You can have mild filters and wild filters - the weak ones compensate for inadequacies in the lighting and the wild ones compensate for the lack of artistic ability. The rolls are big enough that you can cover the front of a soft box or cut them up to make reusable ones for the smaller reflectors. I sandwich them between bits of matt board or plywood and then hook that over the rim of the reflector. Crude, but effective.

Beware of the heat generated by the modelling lights - Lee make heat-resistant gels for theatrical use that can withstand the stage lights - if you have a choice get this kind.

Roscoe also make this sort of material, and sometimes we have interesting packets of pre-cut gels here in the shop. Heck, they're cheap enough and you never can tell where a colour will be needed. You can wrap them on a speed light and do it out in the field as well. A splash  of green on a bride's face at the altar is always a nice touch...

The Demise Of The Catalog - And Its Resurrection

I loved October when I was a kid in the Canadian bush - the catalogs arrived for Christmas. Hudson's Bay Company, Eatons, Sears, Montgomery Ward.

Big thick buy-anything from a .303 Enfield to a baby-doll nightie catalogs were issued once a year and were the basic go-to for all of us out there in the woods. We could write down to Calgary or Edmonton - or over east to the main stores and they would put stuff in the mail or on the next CNR freight train and it would eventually reach us. We reckoned that the Mounties might occasionally lose their man but the Hudson's Bay Company would always get our order to us.

Now the Christmas catalogs were thinner, brighter and glossier. They were pointed affairs and it was at us kids that they were pointed. Toys, sweets, clothing, Christmas decorations, and then all the other ephemera of the season that our parents might have wanted to get for themselves -  never looked past the toys but I could let my folks know which ones I wanted ( like, them all...) and most times something appeared on the day. The catalogs were more than just a quick list - they were inspiration books that proved to be playthings in themselves for the months leading up to December 25th. They generally had accurate depictions of the articles for sale - unlike the fraudulent sort of advertisements that we saw on the back of the comic books. You could trust the Christmas catalogs.

Used to be the same with camera manufacturers - big thick catalog books from Leica were the staple of photographer's dreams. Linhof books were like texts - you learned more from careful perusal than ever you did from your teachers. Indeed, Linhof books were written with a Germanic rhythm to the text and a ponderous exactitude to the images that marked them apart even from the Leica house magazines. Leica images were ...umm...lousy ( Ouch, ouch, ouch... but it is true if you look at the LFI) but Linhof's were perfect.

Hasselblad produced their Forum...and traded on NASA and the moon for decades while displaying some pretty basic images. Oh, we tried to emulate them but that is another story.

Today Nikon make a series of pamphlets to advertise their cameras, lenses, and flashes, and they are beauties. Good images, enough technical information on the back to satisfy the geeks, and generally a pretty fair explanation of the thing in advertising terms in the middle. They function as a great wish-book for people to take away and chew over - paper salesmen, in effect.

Olympus has produced a rather artistic catalog for the latest E-P5 camera and a number of their lenses. It has incorporated drawings on modern style of the design features of the body - to inspire you to appreciate it as a work of sculpture rather than an instrument. Do that if you must, but not where we can see it. Anyway, it is a wonderfully glossy catalog.

Ditto Panasonic - though we get fewer of them here than other manufacturers. They tend to give out more of a general listing and they make a LOT of different models...I suspect that these sorts of catalogs are outdated as they appear since the production lines are faster than the writers.

Deare Olde Canon...who produce some dynamite gear and conduct a very good promotional day whenever they release new products...have eschewed the big pamphlet or printed catalog. Go on-line to see their gear and read all the good reviews and see it in-store...but I can't help feel that they would do better if they followed the lead of Nikon and gave us a collection of take-away books. They did a wonderful hard-cover book for their lenses and many people have it, but you really need to give someone a small thing that they can leave around the house for their family to see...

And finally...Lee. Makers of wonderful filters and gels. Great quality stuff. Desired by professionals and amateurs alike. Costly. They do a great catalog, however, and we have a lot of their catalogs. They send them out in all their deliveries. Can't supply their most popular filter, mind, but they can supply catalogs. I think they run on the soviet system...

I am getting cynical in my old age. And good at it too...

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.

New Packaging For A Favourite Product

Here's the new product packaging that came in this week for the Lee Big Stopper filter.

The Big Stopper is Lee's way of slowing the world down - 10 stops of light reduction with no annoying colour shifts. You can smooth out skies, make waterfall misty, and put a soft fog effect on the restless sea.

You can photograph city streets full of busy travellers and have most of them disappear - of course you can do that by broadcasting live from Parliament, but we're talking art, not angst.

This new packaging is fun - a neat tin box with internal padding to protect the filter. I have no idea why they changed it from the  previous padded pouch, but it makes a nice change on the shelves.

Note: Big Stoppers sell like hot cakes and are less fattening. If you want one get it now before we sell out again.

The Little Guys Get To Play Too - With Lee Filters

We've been selling Lee filters for years to professional and advanced enthusiast photographers. They value them for the clarity of the filter - no colour casts - and for the sturdiness of the holder system. They can get some filters that are unique. And they can adapt them to some very strange lenses...albeit in some very strange ways.

Okay - up to now I have only known about their big range - lo and behold we now have some of their Seven Five product in store. It seems to be a miniaturised version of the larger filter holder and of the graduated neutral density filters.

The principle of the thing is the same - a dedicated adaptor ring for the front of your lens, a holder clamped onto it, and the neutral density filter sliding up and down in the holder. But in the new small size, it can go onto mirrorless and micro 4/3 cameras.

The astute photo enthusiasts will realise that this might free them from having to take a large DSLR on a long trek into the bush for a landscape photo just to make use of an ND grad system. Now they can take their Panasonic, Olympus, Nikon, Canon, or Fuji and pack it into a very much smaller space.

Those who still wish to take larger gear are recommended to contemplate a 4 x 5 monorail outfit with full compendium up the side of Bluff Knoll in a rainstorm...

Note from the pack shots that there is a starter kit with one ND grad and also a three pack of different strength filters. They are all small enough so as to justify carrying the lot on your next venture - local or overseas.

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...

Colour Your World - with Honl

It is often tempting to colour a backdrop with our lighting systems - whether it is flash or steady , we have all been fascinated by the business of shining the light through something translucent and seeing what happens on the backdrop. If you pop a piece of coloured glass or cellophane in there you can get amazing tints. Tempts you to just keep one roll of paper on the back and change the appearance from the flash.


Well, if you are using a roll of backdrop paper that is white or very light grey, you may be disappointed with what you get. You can generally see a strong colour when you are  setting up the shot but when full power goes through the gel and records on the sensor surface, it can be nearly a complete washout. You see a little colour round edges or where there is some shadow, but very little else.

What you need is a mid neutral grey or even a black. These give some "tooth" for the gel to bite on and depending upon the level of lighting, you can get some very strong colours.

Honl make a number of small gel sets that can be attached onto most speedlights and you can choose Hollywood, Colour Correction, Deep Colour, Autumn...well you can match the foreground mood no matter what it is. They are not expensive, and are the best way to experiment with this form of illumination.

If you need to do bigger lights such as LED panels, or hot lights, you need Lee theatrical gels. These can also be bought in a large set, or ordered in rolls. Generally you have to make your own holder depending upon what sort of light housing is used. It is not hard - my studio has several sets that flop onto the front of Elinchrom lights and the holders are variously 1/8" ply or a couple of sheets of stiff cardboard. There's nothing quite like a hatchet lighting scheme with magenta and electric green to liven up a portrait. Add a smoke machine and a pile of plastic skulls and you have a wedding to remember.