The Package Shot For The Landscape Shooter

I used to be a little reticent about taking package shots - it always seems to be somewhat of a cop-out on the part of an illustrator to just show the outside of the box. Some products had a little printing on the outside but some were the classic " plain unmarked box "...It seemed unfair to make the prospective client buy it with just the promise that there was something in the cardboard.

So for years I tried my best to gently ease the shell open to get the nut out. Some of the Japanese packagers who were origami experts defeated me easily - it was either guess at the possible contents or take after it full-blown with a chain saw. This seemed to worry the management and the customers.

Imagine my relief when the packagers decided to put their own advertising on the outside of good quality printing board. Pictures, descriptions, and contents out there where you could see them. Wow.
Even if they then super-wrapped it with shrink plastic and buttoned it over with Kevlar tape and strap-iron it made no difference -you could still make a decent show of it.

So, herewith we present  the new stars of the modular filter system stage - the NiSi filters. They arrived at the studio all sealed up and By Golly they'll leave in the same condition. If you buy them you'll be the first person to see whether there really is a filter in there.

a. The little one is the NiSi Nano IR ND filter

100m x 100mm at a strength of ND 64 or 1.8 pdf you use the alternate system. Neutral density and neutral colour with a great deal of light stopping power for longer exposures.

b. Next size up is the NiSi Nano IR GND filter

150mm x 100 mm graduated to slide up and down the holders. The power on this one peaks at 8 or .9 in the other measurement. A sky modifier for the land and seascapes.

c. the big one is the Nano IR ND again in 64 or 1.8.

The big difference is that this is the one with 150mm x 150mm size to provide filtration for some of the very wide FX lenses. These would be Nikon, Canon, Tamron, and Sigma special lenses.

d. The white kit pack with the convenient description on the front is the V5 starter for the NiSi system - the 100mm filter holder assembly. Looks as though it contains the holder, several adapter rings, a round circa-pol filter, and substantial hard carrying case. You could stack one round and three square filters onto it if you could figure out what for.

The literature says that the holder is aluminium and the filters themselves glass, coated to prevent excess red in long exposures.

The film also apparently makes a series of round ND and protector filters. And of course there are are the dedicated holders for the 150mm series and all the adapter rings for various sizes.

Come down to the shop and stare at the packages, or go on-line to our Nisi online store

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.

The Round Of The Staff: Daniel

Did you know we have another contender for the systems filter stakes? I didn't, until I baled up Daniel and found out about it. You see, I believe the goods are only available from our on-line shop - either that or the rest of the staff are just being mean to me...

Nisi. This company turns out to a very complete set of 100mm x 100mm filters, holders, adapter rings, and storage cases. They also make 150mm sizes as well if you are playing with those really big wide-angle lenses.

ND's, ND grad's, polarisers, and some intriguing IR filters. All the good stuff for the landscapist and escapist shooting, and at affordable prices.

I got to see a kit that seemed to be a good start
-out deal - the basic 100 x 100 filter holder, a circular polariser to fit it, and three adapter rings all housed in a fitted case.

Pop over to the Camera Electronic on-line shop section of our website and look at the range of things that they make. Seems a fine idea.

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.

The Neutral Density Controversy Explored - Through A Glass Darkly

The future, as George Orwell would have it, is grey. We can supply it in varying strengths and configurations, we might add, and it in different diameters. Big Brother would approve.

The neutral density filter makes things go darker. You can make things go darker by one f stop - or two, three, four, six , nine, or ten stops quite readily with commercially available products. You can get filters that allow variable density from 1 to 8 stops - just by rotating the filter. You can get filters that start out at the top with a dark patch and then fade out half-way down. You can even get in-built neutral density filters in some special cameras.

The uses that people out these humble little bits of glass or plastic to are manifold:

 Landscape shooters position the partial filters so that bright parts of their scene are brought into the camera at a lower intensity  - the sensors then cope with the highlights much better.

Special effect photographers stack up extremely dark filters to allow long exposure times - and eliminate people from cityscapes or convert moving water to flowing mists.

Photographers who need to balance flash with daylight and high shutter speed sometimes need to use neutral density filters to make the complex equation work.

Videographers can use the variable density filters to provide fade-out and then fade-in scenes. The variable ones are a bit of a risk for some stills shooters as the angle that the filter may subtend might mean that odd patterns occur during shooting - video people rarely have this problem. Smaller sensor or the fact that the scene is there and gone?

The advent of the frame systems for filter holding ( Cokin, Lee, etc.) meant that rectangular filters could be made that slid readily up and down in front of the lens for the partial blocking of the scene - the graduated ND filter. These are readily available with either a sharp or a gradual transition between density and clear - you pick which makes the image look the best then slide the thing up and down until it matches.

Note: Popular legend has it that Cokin neutral density filters have a colour tinge that the other brand does not. I cannot see it myself, but it's not worth arguing about. Nearly all good DSLR and mirror-less cameras have fine tune adjustment of magenta/green in their menus and if you think you can see something you can crank in a bit of green. You could put it in as a custom channel, I shouldn't wonder.

I am pleased with the 3X ND filter in my Fujifilm X-100. It enables me to use a slower shutter speed out in the sunlight if I am using a higher ISO for the extra dynamic range it provides. And it is just a button click in the menu. The trick is to tie a string around your finger to remind yourself that it needs to be turned off later...

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...

Too Much Of A Good Thing - Elinchrom and Fujifilm

I was shooting pictures yesterday of the flight of the Spokane Sun God over the Umgawa waterhole in Zumba and ran into a problem that is rare - too much sunlight. And I had foolishly not equipped myself to deal with it.

The problem was that I did not want to have the waterhole in sharp focus as the Buhl sesquiplane passed over it - just a little out of focus so as not to scare the elephants out of the waterhole. The aircraft was going to have to pass fairly low to have the waterhole appear large underneath it and the depth of field of the lens at small aperture meant that the elephants were going to be in sharp focus.

There was too much light for this - the lowest ISO that the Fujifilm X-E2 goes with a good dynamic range is ISO 200. I would have been forced to use f:16. I really wanted f:2.8.

Had I been wise, I would have employed the Fujifilm X-100, 100s, or 100t because these have an inbuilt switchable 3X ND filter. Or I could have put a three stop ND filter on the 35mm lens that was used on the X-E2. Then the shot could have been done in one. As it is I made multiple shots of the plane and waterhole and made sure that the latter was very deliberately de-focused. It looked fine in the composite, and the elephants did not stampede.

There is more need for this sort of thing than we suspect - the landscape worker who wants to emphasise a foreground by going to f:2.8 or wider would like to focus on the main subject and let shallow depth of field make it pop. The shooter who wants to make moving parts of the scene blur out and needs to have  long shutter speed to do it.

These are the natural customers for he ND filter - of course there is also the specialised landscape shot that also needs a graduated ND filter, but that's another tale. The full ND is available in square Lee or Cokin, or any number of round filters of different diameters. Power can be as weak as one stop or as strong as ten stops.

It is a useful accessory for most camera bags - and I'm going to make sure I have one of the  3-stop variety in place next time.

* Note: it was necessary to set the sun back another 5 metres to get the shot of the waterhole in mid-morning. The dawn shot was easier because the light is lower and more orange. Elinchrom make a nice powerful sun, but sometimes it is too much.

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.