New Nikon - Handy New Bit

Just in on the shelves - the battery grip for the new Nikon D500 camera - the APS-C flagship DSLR for Nikon Australia. It is designated MB-D17.

Why buy?

1. You get to put another battery in the system - the camera shoots more shots and cycles faster with the extra power available.

2. You get a grip on the camera when it is being held in the portrait ( vertical ) mode that does not involve canting your right wrist up and over the body as you shoot. The benefit when you are doing this over a long session - for instance with dancers or portraits - is considerable. The joint strain after a couple of hours without this grip would erase all the fun of the photography.

3. You can control the position of the camera in the Portrait mode much better as this gives the same body feel as the normal side grip. Rubber pads and all.

4. There is a repeat of the major function buttons and wheels on the grip - you can operate as per normal without having two revert to the side controls. Just keep shooting.

5. You look like a cool pro while using it. I know this would never influence the sensible readers of this column, but I assure you it influenced me when I cared about what I looked like.  The downside was people would ask me for advice on their cameras and I had to invent things to say...

6. The grip has a little special cast compartment in the top surface that stores the rubber cover on the bottom of the D500 base. You can save it for later if you take the grip off.

7.  It's genuine Nikon, with the full Nikon Australia warranty.

Call in and try, or phone in and buy or come on line to our online store and....well...buy.

" How Did You Spend Your Weekend? "

" Recreating the St. Valentine's Day Massacre."

"...Well I just asked a sensible question! There's no need to give that sort of answer! "

" No, no, really. Come back. Don't go away mad. I'm telling the absolute truth..."

I had done a publicity shoot for a group of dancers a couple of weeks ago in a rather bare dance studio. Simple stuff, with a pretty bare backdrop and basic umbrella lighting. Really only record shots of their costuming - it was a practice session for a big show that saw them dressed as 1920's flappers. At the end of the evening I had them line up against the white wall and pretend to be terrified.

Note: dancers are good value as far as subjects go. They know how to pose and by the time they get to the stage-ready stage they have lost a lot of inhibitions. You can get theatre out of them with a cup of coffee and a strong light...

Into the studio - a flat bare tabletop with a dirty green cloth on it. Strong even light on a paper backdrop bouncing back into the camera. Two 1:18 car models - a Model A Ford and a Model B Ford. Posed them on either side of the frame in semi-silhouette and shot off a series of images.

Back in the dimroom, extracted the sillhouettes and layered them up. Extracted the dancers from the best image and layered that up - that was the longest part of the job. Photoshop Elements made it reasonably easy as I used about 4 different tools in various areas of the image.

I needed a dirty brick wall behind the girls and fortunately I had a disc of just such on file. The tiling and copying facility of Photoshop Elements was used to extend the wall wide enough to cover the entire frame. In retrospect I should have added some bullet holes but as the whole image is still in a psd form I can revise it later.

Making the splash of light from the car headlamps was simple - one bright layer of brick under one dark layer of brick and then erase part of the top with a fuzzy round eraser.

Making the reflected shadow from the dancers was also simple. Duplicated their layer, selected them, blacked them out, flipped that image vertically, spread it at their feet with perspective distortion, applied some gaussian blur, and reduced the opacity of the layer to match the shadows that the toy model cars were casting. If it sounds tough it wasn't

Blending all the layers was the trick - and the trick I used was to go round the edges of each image on a layer with the small blur tool set to 10 px and 50%. Just smoothed them enough.

Final touch was a suitable text underneath. Photoshop has a lot of fonts but there are far more out there in graphic design books. I got a one in Melbourne in January called " Retro Fonts" that has a CD in the back containing a vast number of authentic styles from all modern eras. You just select one, open it in the HD and assign it to Photoshop Elements and away you go. I picked Empire Deco as being exactly right for the period.

Fun? Darned right it was fun. And it made a good title image for the entire job. Two shots and a morning of computer work. Murder in Chicago was never this easy...or maybe it was...

The Stage Lights Are Calling - Or What's A Fella To Do?

Well, it's the old bump and grind this weekend. Three hours of colour, movement, and loud music. And I'm going to be out the front with a camera.

No, not the burlesque. That's not my beat - though I have seen some dynamite shows here in Perth and some very good publicity, event, and art shots taken by the photographers who specialise in this. I'll be at a hafla - a belly dancing show held at a suburban school.

The school isn't just your regular local primary - the Saturday venue is a pretty swish one that takes in private-school money. And spends it on their theatre facilities, I might add. The main performance space and seating is very professional - more so than many public venues. They have good lighting, good lighting control, and good sound - and a large enough stage to make a real production.

I'll set a fixed camera with radio wireless control to capture full-stage shots from the mezzanine ( They have a mezzanine! ) and roam the aisles and floor with a large-aperture Fujifilm lens on my X-Pr01. The high ISO capability and the big aperture should allow enough shutter speed to stop much of the motion.

But.

But the lighting plan can sometimes be highjacked by a temptation to use too much colour - if there are gels on a lot of the floods and spots they sometimes run a whole number under pools of red, yellow, and orange. Then blue in the background and green as a follow spot. Add to this the fact that the costuming can be very colourful to start with and it gets a little out of hand.

Don't get me wrong - Bollywood can never be too bright. Or too bouncy. Bollywood makes you feel happy no matter what. But some of the other dances need mood and it can be hard to make someone look sexy if she is lit up in Tiger Moth Training Yellow - complete with roundels...

I am hoping that they tone down the gels and concentrate on more of the white lighting. It's no good trying to get a custom WB when the business can change so fast between one minute to another - I might as well put it on Auto and go from there.

Shoot RAW or jpeg? Well, what the hell. Fujifilm jpegs are all I could ever want and the exposure will be right if I use spot metering on the individual figures - then the black stage does not influence the equation. The X-pro1 writing jpeg and RAW would be slower than the dance requires. It'll be jpegs. Lotsa jpegs.

After the first three big production numbers I go deaf anyway so why not.

Uncle Dick

Too Much Monkey Bidness...The Focus Issue

Did goe to a belly dance show on Monday and was greatley amused - as I always am. The dancers moved like women possessed...mind you at one stage they took 0ne of them away for non-payment of debt. She was a woman re-possessed.*

They move fast, belly dancers - mostly. The tribal ones who follow their leader are very stately in their movements and are easy to capture - the rest are like shooting down kamikazes. Using a camera that has an electronic viewfinder for this sort  of shot is problematical - there is a tiny time lag between what is happening and what the finder displays to the eye.

It is a very small time lag, and the makers of the cameras are doing their best to reduce that lag even further. There is also a small time lag in any auto-focus camera while it does the distance measurement by various means and then focuses the lens. Unfortunately these delays can add up and prevent the shutter from going off before the dancer crashes into the front line of seats and bursts into flame.

In an effort to reduce this with the Fujifilm X-system I have selected a camera with a direct optical finder - the X-Pro1 - to eliminate the perception lag. ( Note that the X-pro1 also has a switchable EVF that you can use for precise focusing when time is not critical.)
I experimented with the focus settings and found that the S setting introduced too long a delay as the camera settled into a perfect focus. The C setting sometimes did not get to a point of focus before the shutter went off - and sometimes seemed to pick up the backdrop as the point of focus rather than the dancer.

The M setting was most useful. A little pre-dance experimenting with the centre point of the stage meant that there was a starting point and every time a dancer passed it flailing I could fire instantly.

More experimentation is needed to see just how high the X-Pro1 will synch electronic flash. Conventional wisdom says 1/125 for sure but I suspect I can stretch it up to 1/250 before trouble ensues. The Fujifilm X-100 camera would synch at 1/1000 but I needed a different focal length for this stage.

The too much monkey bidness  ( thank you Chuck Berry...) refers to the OS setting on the 18-135 mm lens vs the camera on a monopod vs a shutter speed of 1/30 to gather some of the stage lighting vs a Metz flash firing off the ceiling. Eventually the interconnected calculations and estimations for all this overwhelm the brain and I long for an iPhone...

But it is all good in the end. One day I will get the exact rig working perfectly. Then all I have to fear is a costume malfunction.

Uncle Dick

* Here all week. Try the veal.

Going To The Square To Get Some Air - With Hasselblad and Fujifilm

I take pictures of belly dancers. It is a humble job but someone has to do it...I keep telling people...

Not surprisingly, dancers move around a lot - possibly to get away from the music. I, on the other hand, am fixed in place by the audience and have to stand there and endure it. Fortunately years of firing heavy rifles and cannon have reduced much of my hearing.

The visuals, however, are wonderful. Colourful is an inadequate word in the world of belly dance and Bollywood costuming. I have learned not to set the saturation of the jpegs on high as the cameras start emitting smoke. If the show is illuminated with a Fujifilm, Nikon, or Metz flash the colour return can be so intense as to require me to de-saturate it in the final image...and desaturation for me goes against my very nature.

This year's WAMED dance show at the South Perth Civic Centre will give me a larger foyer to play with and I can project my exhibition pictures with the wife's digital projector and this MacBook Pro. I've even got the old slide projector screen that so terrified audiences in the 1960's. So all is good.

Good-ish. Sort of good. Good-lite. I have the same problem that existed in the 35mm slide days - the format of the slide did not match the format of the square screen - Horizontal images left a white border top and bottom on screen and vertical images moved these blank spaces right and left.

When I projected 6 x 6 Hasselblad slides on the screen all was well - it looked perfect. Of course Hasselblad slides had the advantage of perfect lenses, too. Well, lenses aside, the 3:2 ration format of most of my 35mm and digital output is not going to do the same thing when they are projected.

I decided to dodge sideways. I've digitised a lot of the Hasselblad negs of the 1990's so they can come out square. I've started to search the image files of the last ten years to find the ones that can also be re-presented as squares. And I have discovered that - for this purpose - I have framed too tightly with the rectangular cameras.

I shall perform an experiment when taking the WAMED dance show images this year - oh, I'll be still balanced on a Pelican case in the middle of the crowd with the Fujifilm X-Pro1 camera and Metz flash supported on a Manfrotto monopod for four hours. I'll still hear the music...but I'll deliberately switch on Raw + Normal for the recording and 1:1 for the format ratio. If I'm correct the full 3:2 image should flood into the RAW file but the viewfinder and jpeg image should be going at 1:1. I'll keep single dancers in the square sights while settling the central green cross on the mid dancer in a line and the whole lot should be there in the RAW if I need it to spread across a 9:16 widescreen TV.

Well, that's the theory. I'll test it out in the next few days and report back. Who said digital photography isn't rocket science? Goddard? Von Braun?

No Flash Permitted

Every photographer's had that awkward moment when someone comes up to you just before you start a job and announces that there will be no flash. This is no problem if you are going to shoot a car show in the Swan Valley at midday - see previous blog post  - because you WILL have light. But bob down the road to St. Grubby's church in the park and get told that you'll have no flash and windows the size of postage stamps...and here comes the the bride...

The  church problem was solved by having the bride's mother savage the vicar, but one cannot always enjoy oneself like this - sometimes we have to suck it up and put away the flash.

Case in point was a dance show this weekend - the big school theatre where it was held had stage lighting, but it was way up in the rafters. Some additional towers were put on the stage - but again these were modest output. The lighting equation would have been pretty well unsolvable had I been using regular sorts of films or regular sorts of digital camera. Dancers move fast and you can't do long exposures.

Fortunately I found out last show that the Fujifilm X-E2 could go to 3200 ISO without coughing - and this time it went to 6400 with acceptable shadows -and a DR of 400%.
As well, the Auto white balance nailed the mixed stage lighting very well - as soon as it went through Aperture 3 or Lightroom all the jpeg files fell in place.

I noted that this does not seem to be the case with other images posted from audience members - they have been forced into some pretty grim colour. Presumably the results are from smaller compact cameras or older digitals that don't quite have the newer circuitry or capabilities.

I reflected at the time that Nikon pro users would have been as well or better served in the same circumstance - the low-light capabilities of the D3, 3s, 4, Df, and D750 are justly lauded. 'Course they would have been hauling heavier iron than I was and that does make a difference if you're holding it for 3 hours or are lazy...

So the conclusion is, get Fujifilm, or Nikon, or plead for permission to use flash. Or bring the bride's mother...

GN - Who Knew?

I do an annual job at the WAMED Bellydance Bazaar. ( WAMED = WA Medicated Ethnic Dancers. By the time they finish a week of hip drops and shimmies they are all on Volataren, Deep Heat, and chardonnay...)

I stand on a Pelican 1620 case with my Nikon D300 camera, 18-200 lens, Manfrotto monopod, and Stroboframe flash bracket. For about 4 hours...and then I need medication. It is a simple recording of dancers on a plain black stage. The stage lighting is not so good as to permit ambient light photography so I use a couple of SB 700 flashes to illuminate them and stop action.

I use two flashes because the shooting is rapid and the batteries get hot. I rest one with the batteries out on the cold floor as I use the other one. There are 500 to 800 shots needed, so the batteries get a hammering.

I have taken to using one-shot AA lithium batteries for their capacity. But I always wanted to limit the amount of electricity going out with each shot to extend the life. Up until now I have left the SB700 flashes set at iTTL BL and been happy with the results, but idly searching through the internet...

I found a site that adequately explained the GN setting on the Nikon SB 700 flashes - and it seemed to just suit the situation I was going to be in. Once you set the flash on and click it down to the GN, the SB 700 extracts information thr0ugh the hot shoe as regards the ISO and aperture you are using. It tells you on the LCD screen the range of the flash. In my case it was 800ISO, f:8 and 37 -45 feet.

As I was fixed and the dancers were restricted to a stage at about the 40 foot mark, it all worked. the flash did not need to give out a pre-flash and then calculate the next move and the camera was never fooled by what refection came back from bright costume or dark stage. Each flash was consistent. It saved enough electricity to allow me to do the whole shoot on one set of lithiums.

Not a setting you could use every time, but a great resource for just this sort of situation. Yet another example of how good the SB 700 is!

Note: I have just about decided to get rechargeable NiMh batteries from here at the shop - they'll pay for themselves in 6 months.

A New Year's Resolution

New Year. New financial fear. Added to accounting for a new calendar year, new religious year, and new car license year...every year...it is a wonder that we can remember anything that we have resolved. I have taken to putting stickers around the house to remind myself, but I sometimes forget where I put the stickers...

Never mind. If we are enjoined o make moral resolutions for the religious new year and practical ones for the calendar new year, I guess we can make financial ones this month. Here goes.

I have a bundle of old camera equipment that is sitting in the studio and the safe - unused for 5 or more years. If it was socks there would be moth holes in them - as it is there is figurative dust accumulating. It is time to turn these still-fine items into new items that I actually will use.

I'm lucky - I have gear that still has some intrinsic value - not much, but a little. I can offer it for sale knowing that there are actual customers for it. My resolution is that I will get off my rusty and actually do it. The return of some money will be one thing, but the real benefit will be that it will clear the mind of sitting and wondering what to do with it. Once gone and converted to a new lens I will be off to new adventures.

May I suggest the same to you? If your old gear is truly old junque...I realise these are strong terms, but we are adults now...give it to a charity. Or take it to the Workshop Camera Club camera market and set up a stall and learn a great deal about human nature in the space of a morning. One tip - sniff. If granddad's dear old 35mm Flapoflex or your automatic film compact smells like vinegar or old socks or a rabbit hutch in hot weather, ditch it in the bin.

If it is not bad and not cheap and not broken, a professional dealer may express some interest - but generally only if it will have a profitable resale. Be honest with yourselves - if no-one wants to buy it from the newspaper or Gumtree or the camera market, they are not going to buy it from a shop. Time to be realistic. Bin.

So where has this blog gone? Round in a circle, I daresay, but at a tangent from that circle will be some benefit from the turnover of the gear that is just sitting there. I am sentimental about it, but then I am sentimental about Curtis Lemay and the 21st USAAF and that never gets me noticed at parties either.

Change.