The Glass Eye

March for the Alternative

2011-03-31T06:00:00.001-07:00

March for the Alternative Set on Flickr.

The March for the Alternative posed a problem regarding shooting; the ideal kit would have been my two Nikon D50 SLRs with a telephoto and a wideangle, but I was going to be walking all day, on top of which I've had trouble with my back recently, making me wary of lugging heavy kit for so long.

In the end, I settled for taking my Panasonic LX3 compact with a Fuji E900 for backup and telephoto shots. The wide end of the LX3 zoom is FOV 24mm, which pulls out foreground objects and pushes backgrounds into the distance, ideal for shooting in crowds. On top of that I underexposed backgrounds by a stop or so and used a pop of fill-flash to bring the foregrounds back. Early shots were taken with the flash on-camera, later ones I used a Cactus wireless trigger to get the flash off-camera, which looked much more natural.

Using a compact where I could compose using the rear screen worked out really well; in general I was getting closer because I could extend the camera to arm's length while still seeing where I was shooting. I could also shoot from high or low viewpoints much more easily than with an SLR (though I found myself once again wishing the LX3 had a rotating screen like the Canon G series). Depth of field was amazing; at f4 I was getting sharp focus from 3ft to infinity, going up to 1.5ft to infinity at f8. Most of the time I shot in manual focus, focussing hyperfocally using the handy depth-of-field guide in the LX3's focus indicator.

Favourite shot of the day:

2010-09-01T05:28:00.000-07:00

I've made up a "Best of" set of my photos on Flickr from our ten months in Thessaloniki - set here, slideshow here. Be warned, it's still 180 shots!

Welcome to Sunny Greece!

2010-06-05T08:51:00.000-07:00

Got caught out in a massive shower while out shopping this morning - luckily I had my cameras with me. Plus I ended up having a really nice chat with an American called Max from the US mission to Kosovo while sheltering under an awning outside Starbucks*. More on Flickr.

*It seems I have been living in Greece long enough to be mildly outraged at a café charging for water.

Googled!

2010-03-07T07:59:00.000-08:00

I just googled "Original Iron Man" and blow me if my Flickr shot of Classic Iron Man vs. Cybermen didn't show up in the thumbnails at the top of the search results! Here's the original from my Flickr site:

"Leave It, Tony, It Isn't Worth It…"

Dalek Corridor Set

2008-02-10T06:03:00.000-08:00

Red Movie Dalek in corridor set

I've had several requests to do something on the card-construction corridor set I made for my Product Enterprises Micro-Daleks. Having a proper set just adds another dimension when photographing models or toys, both in terms of composition and lighting effects (see below).

You can download the nets for this model as a set of PDFs to print out - there are more details (and some basic instructions) further down this entry in the section marked "Assembly."

Although the set is just made of flat sections of card printed with black line drawings, it works surprisingly well under different lighting conditions.

I’d been trying to put together some sort of modular scale set for nearly a year, collecting bits of packaging and other materials that might be useful, but I never seemed to have the time for the sort of model building that would require extensive planning, assembly and painting. I wanted a quicker method to get started.

Plan view of the sections ("nets") used to make the corridor set. I built these in Adobe Illustrator.

I decided to see what could be done with paper construction. This was a quick option for me because I work almost every day with Adobe Illustrator, an application that's ideal for generating the "nets" (see above) needed to make 3D objects out of folded paper or card. Working in Illustrator, I could do a bit here and there in between my paid jobs; what's more, Illustrator can easily generate and duplicate complicated geometrical shapes, so I could add detail to the surfaces of the set at the drawing stage, without the need for additional work during construction.
I made nets for a corridor section and an angled joining section. Since I could print these out as many times as I liked, I could have as many sections as I was prepared to spend time building. I included the angled section for two reasons:

By joining two corridor sections with an angled section, I got a more interesting set - effectively a curve around which lines of Daleks could emerge.
Because of the angle, the inside wall of one straight corridor section would not be visible from the other straight section. Leaving out said inside wall cut down assembly time and gave me more flexibility in terms of camera angles and lighting.

The nets were broken down into sections small enough to fit on A4 sheets for printing out.

Printing

The difficult part of printing was finding a suitable card stock to print on. Really I wanted a heavyweight matt-surface printer card - 250-350gsm weight - which proved remarkably difficult to find. Heavyweight glossy photo paper is common, but the shiny surface would have caused too many problems with reflections when being photographed. I could get heavyweight inkjet/laser card on the Internet, but only in bulk, and I wanted to do some test construction before buying. In the end I managed to find some satin-surface 200gsm printer card in my local branch of Partners - a little lighter than I wanted, but good enough for a test.

I'd designed the nets so they could be divided into sections small enough to fit on to A4 sheets for printing. There were ten different sheets, some of which (such as end walls) had to be printed out more than once to make a complete corridor section.

The card would take laser or inkjet printing, and I decided to use my old laser printer for the trial run, as laser prints would not run on contact with the water-based Copydex rubber paste I intended to use.

View of the three different corridor set sections built so far. The sections were left free standing so they could be put together in different combinations.

Assembly

If you want to have a go yourself, the nets can be downloaded as PDFs from this page. The files come zipped, so you may need the free StuffIt Expander for Mac, PC or Unix from smithmicro.com. But be warned; so far I haven't had time to write proper assembly instructions, so there may well be a lot of guesswork involved!

I printed out the sections, scored along fold lines with a scalpel (the card was too thick to fold neatly otherwise) and cut out each section with a combination of scalpel (for precision work) and scissors (faster for the edges of flaps where accuracy is less important).

For the straight corridor sections I first glued the triangular flanges onto the walls. There are two types of flange; a free-standing double one (sheet 5 of the download) that appears three times on each corridor side wall, and a single one (sheet 6) that attaches to the ends of the side walls.
I then glued the walls, floors and ceilings together, forming a sort of tunnel, and added the end pieces last for rigidity. The angled joining section was done in a similar way; walls, floor & ceiling first, end pieces afterwards.

I cut hexagonal "skylights" out of the ceilings to let light in. In fact, the holes are so small that the effect is little more than cosmetic; in order to get a reasonable amount of light in through the holes, you'd need to put a lamp right over the set, and the light would show through the thin card of the ceiling. A simple way to avoid this would be to back all the sections with aluminium cooking foil before cutting out and gluing, but I only thought of this after I'd finished construction.

I also found the 200gsm card was a little too thin to make the set completely rigid; using Copydex rubber paste to glue the set together didn't help, as Copydex gives a good bond on card, but suffers from shrinkage, so there's been some slight cockling of the card. The floor of the set does not sit flat, and on several shots I've had to use micro-Daleks as weights to flatten it out!
This problem could probably be overcome by gluing the floor section to a piece of thick mounting card (or even thin wood or plastic) with Spraymount before assembly.

View of the three different corridor set sections assembled for shooting.
This is the arrangement used for most of the shots above.
You can see cockling caused by glue shrinkage in the end section nearest the camera

The Sections

I'd originally planned to glue all three sections together, but once I had them assembled, I realised they were best left separate, so I could combine them in different arrangments.

Section 1: closed corridor section
Note the triangular struts arrayed inside the side walls; these help add rigidity to the walls, as well as making the corridor look more interesting.

The closed corridor section was the first one I built; it's a hexagonal tunnel designed for end-on shots where both walls of the corridor are visible. Despite leaving small openings in the ceiling, for photographic purposes the only usable illumination enters through the ends.

Section 2: angled joining section.

The angled section was a pig to design; working out two angled cross-sections of a hexagonal prism was a tricky job for someone with my shaky grasp of geometry, and it took me three goes to work out all the angles and lengths of side, and even then, the version you see here is very slightly "off" - the outer walls are a bit too big and don't fit flush with the end sections. I also thought I'd designed the section to angle at 22.5º (so that eight of them would form a complete circle) but the final product has ended up... not. Ho hum.
Nevertheless, The thing fits together well enough for shooting purposes, and does the job it was meant for (see below).

The angled joining section is visible to the rear of this shot; putting a bend into the corridor not only makes the set look more interesting, but allows a wall of the far corridor section to be left open without the gap being visible.

Section 3: open-sided corridor section.
The missing wall allows for side-on camera angles, or for light to enter the corridor section if it's being used as a background. One end is closed with a "door" loosely held in place by tape.

The open-sided corridor section is the same as the first, just with one wall omitted. Because the thin card I'm using isn't terribly rigid, I taped lengths of semi-rigid floristry wire along the end walls and ceiling (see below). Backing these sections with rigid card before assembly would work better, but would make assembly more complicated.

Open-sided corridor section with end "door" opened.
The "door" at the end of this section is held in place with masking tape and can easily be removed.
Note the lengths of floristry wire needed to strengthen the end walls and ceiling.

Camera Angles and Lighting

There were two reasons for leaving this section open; first, it allows for side-on camera angles, and second, it allows light to enter the corridor section if it's being used as a background (see picture below).
I also added an end "door" to this corridor section. This is fixed loosely with tape, and can be removed (see below) to allow a wider range of camera angles.

Above left: open-sided corridor section with end "door" opened, allowing the camera to be positioned in a way that would be impossible in a closed section. Above right: the photo that resulted.

In the pictures above, you can see how the open side and back of the open corridor section allows camera positions that would be impossible in a closed section.

Example showing how the open-sided corridor section helps with lighting. The open section lets daylight in to the background of this shot.

The open corridor section is also helpful regarding lighting; the shot above was taken in daylight, which entered the set through the end of the closed corridor section (behind the camera) and through the open wall of the open corridor section at the far end (hidden by the turn in the corridor), ensuring that illumination was more or less even all along the set. If the background corridor section had been closed, the far end of the corridor would have been too dark to make out clearly.

Using a desk lamp as a light source. Important: only ever use a lamp fitted with low-energy or fluorescent bulbs! Incandescent bulbs placed this close to a paper model would pose a serious fire risk!

If you're feeling more adventurous, you can try artificial light sources. An important safety warning though; only ever use low-energy bulbs or fluorescent tubes when working close to paper models. NEVER use incandescent bulbs, the heat they give off poses a serious fire risk!

I've tried both battery-powered LCD lamps and (shown above) a neat desk lamp from Ikea that takes low-energy fluorescent tubes. These have the advantage of being cool (therefore safe to put near paper!) and also give a strong but diffuse illumination that looks great when it bounces off the corridor walls (see below)

This is what the lighting looks like from inside the set. Ridley Scott eat your heart out.

To see the finished results, check out my Dalek photos on Flickr.

Better Is Not Always Best...

2007-11-04T00:37:00.000-07:00

The original shot; 916 views, 59 faves and 20 comments in a week on Flickr

Interesting quandary this week; last Friday I loaded the above shot on to Flickr. It was just a quick joke thing, shot on my Canon compact, up it loaded and then on to other stuff. Despite a busy week it did niggle the anal part of my brain that I'd not quite got it right though; the highlights on the figures are badly blown.
After a day or so I got round to re-shooting on my SLR (whose bigger sensor copes better with contrast) and then it took the rest of the week before I got round to getting the shot off the camera. Normally, when I make a technical improvement, I'd just replace a shot on Flickr, but in the meantime the original shot had garnered 916 views (2nd highest ever on my stream), 59 faves (highest ever on my stream) and 20 comments (2nd highest ever on my stream).

Revised version with better contrast control

I decided that, since the original had been so popular, and the new one had slightly different framing, it would be "cheating" to just replace it; besides, just because I prefer the low-contrast version doesn't mean my "readership" of 59 "favers" would think so. In the end I've uploaded both to my Flickr stream and linked the two so that people can see the differences.

E550 Extension Lenses

2007-10-08T03:25:00.001-07:00

5" Cyberman figures photographed with Finepix E550 and Fujifilm 0.76x Wide Conversion Lens WL-FXE01

Back in the summer I picked up an extension lens set for my Fuji Finepix E550; this comprises the Fujifilm Adaptor Ring AR-FXE02, that bayonets around the E550's lens, and has a 43mm screw thread that allows the
Fujifilm 0.76x Wide Conversion Lens WL-FXE01 or Fujifilm 1.92x Tele Conversion Lens TL-FXE01 to be fitted. 43mm filters can also be attached to the adaptor.

Left: urban landscape taken with the Fujifilm 0.76x Wide Conversion Lens WL-FXE01

0.76x Wide Conversion Lens WL-FXE01
This adaptor converts the wide end of the E550's zoom from 32.5mm to 24mm*; results are sharp, with a minimum of barrel distortion (curved lines at the edge of the frame). Despite the wide angle and the extra bits of glass placed in front of the lens, the adaptor isn't prone to lens flare. Vignetting wasn't noticeable on the shots I took.

*Field of view equivalent to 35mm camera lenses

The size of the wide lens does mean that it fouls the E550's viewfinder and built in flash.

As you'd expect with such a wide angle, depth of field is formidable at maximum aperture (f8), though all small-sensor cameras like the E550 have extended depth of field relative to 35mm or digital SLRs anyway.
From my limited tests, focus speed and accuracy seem unaffected.
Close-focussing is even closer with the adaptor attached, though the greater angle of view means that objects may not appear much larger in the frame. However, the angular distortion and receding perspective of the wide-angle is useful for lending an impression of large scale to small objects; the Cybermen toys photographed at top were only 5" high, but appear to be life sized; the front figure was touching the front element of the adaptor.

Above: superior depth of field: in this shot, the Fujifilm 0.76x Wide Conversion Lens WL-FXE01 allows complete front to back sharpness at f8

Although Fuji warns against this, I did find that the wide adaptor produced reasonable results at all focal lengths, though the telephoto end is shortened considerably. While it's better to remove the adaptor for non-wide angle work, I'd not hesitate to use the zoom for a grab shot if time didn't allow for the removal of the adaptor.

Above: grab shots taken with the wide(left) and tele (right) adaptors; focussing was not inhibited by either adaptor, an important factor for a camera as responsive as the E550.

Above left: excellent sharpness and contrast from the E550 with tele adaptor.
Above Right: don't zoom out! The vignetting visible as dark patches at the corners of the frame was not noticable in the camera LCD screen at the time.

1.92x Tele Conversion Lens TL-FXE01

This adaptor extends the telephoto end of the zoom from an effective 125mm to 250mm. Results were good; images were sharp, and there was no noticeable vignetting or image distortion. Focussing was not slowed.
The TL-FXE01 tele adaptor has to be used at the tele end of the zoom; zooming out only a little results in severe vignetting at the corners (see above, right), which is not always noticeable on the LCD screen when shooting.
As with all telephoto lenses, fast shutter speeds must be used to ensure a shake-free image. Because the aperture range of the E550 is limited at the telephoto end (f5.6-8 only), this adaptor would be of limited use to anyone trying to hand-hold the camera in low-light situations.

Above: though there's apparent flare at the bottom right of the frame, I couldn't repeat the effect by shooting into the light

Flare was generally excellently controlled, with one very small anomaly: when shooting a sharpness test with the sun at about 60% to the lens, an apparent flare spot appeared in the bottom right corner (small orange patch). Following this, I took a series of shots into the sun, but couldn't repeat the effect. If this was flare, then it only occurs when the light source is at a very specific angle; in general, the adaptor produced flare-free images under conditions that would have taxed my Nikon telephoto SLR lenses.

Above: The tele adaptor coped very well with shooting into the light; no flare is evident on all of the test shots bar one.

I bought the lenses as a kit from Amazon.co.uk. This cost me less for the adaptor and two lenses than some places charged for a single lens. The kit didn't show up in a general search, but required the specific part number B000GQ5EHM to be entered into the search engine. It's listed as an accessory for the later Finepix E900, but fits the E550 perfectly; in fact the packaging on the individual items listed them as for the E550.

The lenses do what they advertise, without degrading the image quality or performance of the E550. I don't use mine all the time, but on business trips when it's not practical to carry my SLR, they're a great way of extending the range of my "carry anywhere" camera.

Hurrah!

2007-07-24T04:32:00.001-07:00

Sad as it sounds, a long standing ambition of mine as a Flickr'ite has been to get a viewing figure on my site equivalent to ten views per photograph. Normally I'm too profligate a poster for this to work; every time I get close I end up loading another month's photos, and the chase continues. The recent house move has put my posting far enough behind that at 12.33 today I made 1502 posts/15020 views. Now I can go back to making my model of Salisbury cathedral out of matchsticks with a light heart ;-)

Dalek Patrol Step-By-Step

2007-03-16T03:58:00.000-07:00

Daleks on patrol
Canon G3, f8 @ 1/6sec, ISO 50
Flash and torchlight

I've been a member of the Flickr Dalek! group for a few weeks now, and was inspired by the group's description to try my hand at "Skaro-type scenery." I'd recently been watching the 1965 film Dr. Who And The Daleks, and was taken with the luscious blue-green lighting scheme used for the surface of the dead planet Skaro. Reproducing that look with only one flashgun would be tricky, plus there was the problem of setting up a suitable diorama.

But I kept my eyes open for suitable materials, and in the end the problem was solved using a toy Sonic Screwdriver, three celeriac roots and a very old baking potato...

Camera on a tripod with flash aimed at big sheets of green card to create the green lighting.

Set-up: the landscape is made out of pieces of celeriac and sprouting potatoes, resting on a sheet of heavy-duty display card, white side up. The vegetables were cut in half to give the impression of rocks embedded in snow. I was surprised at how few pieces (five halves of celeriac plus half a potato) were needed to make an effective diorama. A dusting of flour gives the impression of snow.
The green light was provided by bouncing an off-camera flash off some big sheets of fluorescent green paper. It's a Canon camera and flash linked by an old Nikon cable (therefore no TTL flash control), so I set the flash to manual mode and made test shots at different power settings till I got clear, but gloomy looking green illumination. The camera was set to f8@ ISO 50.

The camera is a Canon G3 compact with a lens adaptor and +4 close-up filter attached.

The blue spotlight on the Daleks came from a blue LED torch (appropriately, sold as a Dr. Who Sonic Screwdriver toy). I set the camera to manual, and fiddled with the shutter speed* until the blue light from the torch was bright enough - this LED torch is quite strong, so 1/6 sec was enough for a correct exposure.

*I needed to leave the aperture at the camera's maximum setting of f8 for two reasons; first, the flash was set up to give correct exposure at f8, secondly, f8 delivers maximum depth of field, making more of the model come out in sharp focus, which makes it seem bigger.

A shot as it comes out of the camera - in this case, focus is on the Daleks and the foreground is blurred.

I tried a number of different arrangements of Daleks and landscape. The camera could not keep the whole scene in sharp focus, so I took three shots of each set-up, one with focus on the extreme foreground, one focussing on the lead Dalek, and one on the far Daleks. In the sample shot (above) you can see that the foreground rocks and background Dalek are out of focus.

3 shots combined give sharp focus from front to back - the background hillocks and Dalek are overpainted with semi-transparent green to give the impression of a foggy atmosphere.

The next step (above right) was to paste foreground, midground and background shots into layers in a Photoshop file, then hide the out-of-focus parts of each layer using layer masks until only the sharply-focussed parts of each shot were visible. That creates a combined image where everything is in sharp focus from front to back.

Left: Detail showing the image with the mask (top) and without (bottom).

I also sampled the sky colour and used it to paint semi-transparent masks over the background Dalek and hills to give the impression of a slightly foggy atmosphere, and to make the foreground Daleks stand out.

The same scene with moon and hand-drawn snow added

The next step was to add wind-blown snow (above). For this I sampled colours from the picture, and on a new layer I drew little dashes over the picture with a Wacom tablet. I tried to make the colour of the flakes match the lighting of the picture. I then used Photoshop's Motion Blur filter to add a bit of "zip" to the flakes, as if they'd been caught in motion.
I added flakes on several layers, making the dashes fewer and bigger towards the foreground. The "closest" dashes had Gaussian Blur added to the Motion Blur, to give the impression they were out of focus because they were so close to the camera.
I also added the moon to the sky, using a green borrowed from the reflections on the hindmost Dalek. The moon was a black & white picture pasted into an alpha channel in Photoshop, then loaded as a selection and filled with a gradient (green-to-transparent).

Grain has been added in the sky to give the impression of distant snowflakes.

I decided the background looked too clean; there should be thousands of snowflakes in the sky. That's far too many to add by hand, so to give the impression of tiny flakes, I duplicated the image, flattening layers, and applied the Add Grain filter. This gave a gritty look to the sky, consistent with falling snow. However, the effect was all over the image, including the foreground where there would be no tiny flakes, so I copied the image and pasted it into a layer in the original file. I then used a layer mask to hide the foreground parts of the picture, letting the smooth, unfiltered image show through from beneath (above). I also added a bit of airbrushed "dust" to the base of the Daleks' skirts.

After all that, I decided the hand-drawn showflakes all looked to even and regular, giving the impression of something drifting gently through the air rather than being whipped along by a storm. So I made a copy of the file and re-drew the snowflakes, this time following the lines of the landscape and mixing the directions up a little, to give the impression of gusting snow (below).

The finished item: I really should have been working instead.

E550 Update

2007-03-10T06:29:00.000-08:00

Middlesbrough, March 2007

Six months on from first getting my Fuji Finepix E550, I thought I'd do an update on my first report. I'd been attracted to the E550 because of its fast startup time and minimal shutter lag, despite slight niggles about limited macro focussing and JPEG compression options.

First off: after six months, the E550 is still the camera I carry everywhere, and buying it has proved to be a very good decision. The quicker startup/shutter release has given me the ability to catch shots I'd simply have missed with my older cameras.

Top: Sascha the cat, Edinburgh, February 2007
Left: Harvey Nichols, Edinburgh, February 2007
Right, Manchester, February 2007

Sascha the cat here was endlessy pacing back and forth along this windowledge, but the E550 kept up with her just fine; similarly, the illicit shot of the mannequin taken in Harvey Nichols was made possible by the fact that the E550 starts up just about as quickly as a film compact. The picture of the drummer doesn't look as if it required split-second timing, but in fact it was taken on a packed shopping street; it had to be grabbed during a moment when the crowd parted.

There have been a couple of occasions when I've missed the better macro mode of my old Canons, but since I mostly use the E550 for candids, it's not really been an issue. Most of my macro stuff is done at home using the old Canon G3, but the E550 is still good enough to capture shots like these:

Left and Right: Edinburgh, November 2006

Neither are world-beating by the standards of modern digital compacts, but they'd still have been completely beyond the reach of my old film compacts.

JPEG settings - the E550 is a 6mp camera with an option to interpolate files up to 12mp. Now for me, 6mp is more than big enough, but annoyingly, there's no high quality JPEG compression option at that size; you have to go up to 12mp to get it. I'd read on DPReview that it was worth using the 12mp mode to get optimum image quality, but after a month or so of waiting ages for the bigger files to download from the camera (and open in Adobe Bridge) I gave up and went back to 6mp. For the uses I put my pictures to, I can't say I've noticed any adverse effects.
My only real niggle about the compression settings is that at 6mp, the digital zoom option is always on. I hate digital zoom and never use it, but I can't find a way of switching it off. Although there's a step between optical and digital zoom (the indicator "sticks" for a second when you reach the threshold so you don't just slide from one to another), I always worry that I'll end up in the digital zoom range without noticing.

To counterbalance the previous niggle, the E550's flash is, for my purposes, the best flash unit of any compact I've ever seen - that is, it suits the purposes of someone who hardly ever uses flash, and certainly doesn't want it firing accidentally when he's taking candids.
The E550's flash unit is a little pop-up unit that will only ever pop up if the user chooses to switch it on by hand. It's obvious when the flash is extended and when it isn't, so there's no chance at all of it going off when you don't want it.
Flash exposure is excellent (even close up) though it does lock the camera up for a second or so while it recharges after each shot. If you use flash a lot, this system would be annoying, but as far as I'm concerned, the only way they could improve it would be to remove the flash entirely and replace it with a hot shoe.

After some initial paranoia about dynamic range*, I'm now happy to use the E550 for the sort of fine-detail, extended tonal range "pseudo medium format" type shots I used to do with my old Canons. At the lowest sensitivity setting (ISO 80), the sensor produces smooth images that convert beautifully to black & white.

*Based on nothing at all, I had the feeling that Fujis "should" be more contrasty than Canons.

Sheffield, February 2007

If you look at the image above, the dynamic range is excellent, with detail preserved in both the highlights and the shadows areas. Up to ISO 200, there are no issues with image quality for my purposes, and noise is well controlled at ISO 400.

Grassmarket, Edinburgh, January 2007

The E550 has an ISO 800 setting that works at 3mp resolution only, but it's still perfectly usable, especially if noise-reduction is applied; this shot of the Grassmarket (above) was taken at ISO 800.

Left: Lille, December 2006
Right: Edinburgh, January 2007

The E550's automatic exposure copes well enough even with difficult situations like the wok chef (above left). For more difficult subjects like the all-black public ashtray (above right), I switched to manual and used an incident meter to take an exposure reading.

So any actual problems?

Well, the E550's controls run the opposite way to the Canons I used previously, with the result that I'm always turning things up when I mean to turn them down and vice-versa.

I love the fact that the flash defaults to "off," but others might not.

I did have a weird problem with the camera conking out in mid-exposure which was solved by replacing the really cheap NiMh rechargeable batteries I'd been using with better quality ones (Jessops own brand); battery life has increased greatly, too - from about three days between charges to about three weeks.

Because I use cameras from three different manufacturers, I don't bother with camera drivers and software; I use a card reader and Adobe Bridge to preview the images I want to download from the card. If I accidentally apply Bridge settings (say rotation) to a file on the E550's XD card, there must be some sort of metadata conflict that causes the name of the affected file to be completely rewritten and the .JPG file extension to be lost.
The result is that the JPEG preview image disappears and Bridge (and Mac OS) classify the file as "Unix Executable" rather than any readable image file format. However, all is not lost - by copying the file to the hard disk and renaming it according to the Fuji convention - DSCFXXXX.jpg - it returns to life as a fully usable JPEG. Sadly, as far as I can make out, there's no way of renaming the original copy of the file on the XD card, so that remains unreadable by the camera.

Overall, my impression of the E550 is the same as it was a few months ago - it's a very fast and flexible camera, well suited to capturing fast action and candids, albeit with the odd little quirk. If you like the look of it, consider also the replacement model, the E900, which is available at a very reasonable price on Amazon right now.

More Tiny Daleks

2007-03-10T06:09:00.000-08:00

Trial Dalek's-eye shot with Sigma 10-20mm zoom.
The foreground Daleks are within the lens's close-focus limit,
but remain relatively sharp due to depth-of-field (lens @ f22)

Further to my last post, I had a go at photographing close up with the "24mm" wide-angle adaptor on my Canon G3. The adaptor does wonders for the close-focussing distance (it can focus on objects that are touching the front element), but the micro-Daleks still weren't any larger in the frame than they had been with the Sigma 10-20mm zoom. Furthermore, the strong barrel dostortion caused by the adaptor is really prominent close-up - the end result is, it might be useful for the odd special effect (maybe even the view through a Dalek's eye-stalk), but when it came down to it, I got a much better result simply using the G3's own lens at the wide (35mm FoV) setting, with a +4 close up filter on the lens adaptor.

Dalek's eye view with Canon G3, 35mm FoV with +4 close-up lens @ f8
The narrower angle allows the foreground Daleks to fill the frame and then some.

Tiny Dalek Hordes

2007-02-16T08:18:00.001-08:00

Dalek Hell, 2007
Canon G3, +4 Close-up lens

As a result of my recent Micro-Dalek-buying binge, I've been getting back into table-top photography. This was a favourite activity back in my teens when I got my first "proper" camera. It was my dad's old 1964 Canon FX SLR, which had neither TTL metering and nor even a multiple exposure lever.

My schoolmate Mark Wheeler's Japanese robot kit,
photographed circa 1985 with a 1964 Canon FX SLR, cheapo 35-135mm zoom
and two bursts of flash from an old Sunpak manual flash gun.

I nevertheless worked out a way of making multiple exposure shots of my mate's Japanese robot kits by shooting in total darkness, the camera mounted on a rickety tripod with the shutter locked open on "bulb", me stumbling around with an ancient flash gun in my hand, firing it more or less at random in what I hoped was the right direction. With no means of making an accurate exposure reading (or even of seeing what I was doing), I would get one barely usable shot out of every six rolls of film, but I probably had more fun with photography than I've ever had since.

Once I started working, I got a Nikon kit with proper macro lenses and even a multiple-TTL-flash set-up, but after an initial burst of enthusiasm it somehow all seemed too easy. On top of that, I realised that reliably shooting minatures was only the half of it; what I really wanted to do was create still photography versions of the sort of effects set-ups I saw in films. These relied on compositing a number of images onto a single frame, an activity could only be accomplished using incredibly expensive optical printing machines at that time.

Models shot on film with Nikon F4 and 28mm lens, circa 1994
Scanning and compositing done 1998

When I acquired my first Mac, with scanner and Photoshop, it occurred to me that I could start thinking about doing my own compositing; I had a go with some photographs I'd shot a few years earlier, but lack of time for model building rather put a stop to the whole business.

Switching to digital in 2001 sort of got me started again; the Canon G-series compacts I favour have a good built-in macro mode, plus the ability to take close-up filters. Indeed, I bought my original Canon G1 to photograph aircraft models for reference for a storyboarding job.

Radishes, 2006
Nikon D50, Sigma 18-50 f2.8 EX Zoom, SB-24 flash, Auto mode

Rather than getting back into effects-type model shots, I became interested in still-life, largely because I could quickly set-up shots around found objects (mostly leaves and foodstuffs) without needing time for model building (the results can be seen in my Filckr set, Macreaux). I did stray back to my roots a couple of times with whimsical photo-stories featuring toys; both Little Blue's Big Adventure and The Dalek Invasion Of Matt's Desktop, 2004AD involve not only close-up model photography, but effects work that would have been impossible for me a decade before.

From The Dalek Invasion Of Matt's Desktop, 2004AD
Canon G3; multiple shots combined to create artificial depth-of-field
Compositing and "exterminator" effects added in Photoshop 7

With Dalek Invasion, I also discovered the neat trick of taking the same shot several times at different focussing distances, then compositing the shots to make a single photo with a large apparent depth-of-field that's normally impossible to obtain when shooting miniatures (though the 1/8in chip on my Canon G3 meant I was getting pretty good depth-of-field to start with). Used along with a wide angle lens set at a low angle, this artifically extended depth-of-field makes miniature toys and models look life-size(see below).

If you look carefully at the in focus area in the shot above, it's actually nonsensical; instead of a plane of focus extending across the frame, it goes into the picture, keeping the Daleks in the background and the toys in the foreground equally sharp, while the wall to the right of the frame is always out of focus, even though it also extends front-to-back. The eye doesn't question it because it makes sense from a storytelling point of view; the important elements (toys and Daleks) are sharp, and the out-of-focus wall doesn't distract from them.

Again, lack of time put a stop to further playing about, but in the last month my new-found addiction to Product Enterprises Micro-Daleks has given me a ready source of models for new set-ups. For me, having stuff on hand to photograph is a big spur to getting stuff done.

Micro-Dalek Horde
Canon G3 with lens adaptor and +4 close up lens with 550EX flashgun,
f8 @ ISO 50 with TTL flash bounced off wall to left of shot

At about 2" tall, these Dalek toys are just large enough to allow for full articulation and a good level of detail. They're a little bit bigger than the Corgi ones I was playing with back in 2004, so they're easier to photograph. Even on the wide-angle setting, my Canon G3 can get in close enough for "upper body" shots. Some experimental group shots show that, even with foreground Daleks at frame-filling size, depth-of-field at f8 is reasonable. The shot above has some sharpening on the two closest Daleks, but even without it's much better than I expected; defocus is consistent with life-sized objects rather than the madly-shallow focus of the classic miniature shot. I reckon I could get complete front-to-back depth of field in two composited shots, when I'd anticipated needing four at least.

Nikon D50 with Sigma 10-20mm zoom, 10mm @ f22
SB-24 flash on Auto, bounced from wall on right

Almost as a joke, I tried my Sigma 10-20mm wide-angle, not expecting to get in very close, but thinking the angular distortion of the lens might yield interesting results. Then it occurred to me that at F22, the enormous depth-of-field of this lens might allow objects well within the minimum focussing distance to appear reasonably sharp. It worked better than I expected; you can make a Micro-Dalek fill the frame with reasonable defocus. The extreme angle of view really does make these miniature toys looks life size, though at f22 you get considerable image degredation (fringing) at the edge of the frame. The results were good enough to make me think about a close-up filter for this lens, though with a 77mm thread, it wouldn't come cheap*. In the meantime, I'll try the wide (FoV 24mm) adaptor on my G3, though I'm not sure what that will do to the close-focussing distance.

*And I've already blown the next three month's spending money on Daleks.

It's Still Life, But Not As We Know It

2007-02-03T09:00:00.000-08:00

I'm lucky enough to live a short walk from Edinburgh Central Library, which has, tucked away in a turret at the top of the building, one of the best arts libraries I've encountered. The photography section is excellent, and among its many gems are a number of books by the great Irving Penn. Having already borrowed Penn's 1990 retrospective Passage: A Work Record, I decided this time to go for Still Life. There's a lot of overlap between the two books, but Still Life devotes whole pages to pictures that appear as mere thumbnails in Passage.

Penn's still-lives broadly divide into two groups. There are those shot on commission for magazines (mostly Vogue), as illustrations for articles. These usually tell a story or express a theme; the items a lady would take to the theatre, cholesterol-rich foods, moisturising face-masks, frozen foods (above).

The second group are personal projects, groups of photographs themed around subject matter or technique; animal skulls from Prague Zoo, blocks of metal and sections of bone, photographic distortions made by painting with light, tulips.

What unites all the photographs is Penn's bold, modernist approach, his rigorously balanced compositions, his eye for form and texture. Everything he photographs looks lusciously glamorous, yet at the same time there's always a little nod to imperfection, wear and tear, decay; smeared lipstick, rusted metal, rotten apples and dying flowers all play their part in his compositions, even the commercial work. As T.S Eliot said of Webster, "...(he) saw the skull beneath the skin." That dash of memento mori is what saves his work from becoming an empty collection of beautiful surfaces.

The effect is at its most striking in Penn's food photography. He treats foodstuffs purely as raw material for compositions, without any concern for making them appetizing; raw frog's legs, oysters and live snails make up one composition, yet the photograph itself is still beautiful.

Fired up by all this, I decided to pick on some mushrooms bought at the farmer's market this morning; though somewhat limited by having only one on-camera flash (and a fifteen-year-old SB-24 at that), I'm pretty pleased with the results.

Mushrooms On The Loose

Nikon D50, Sigma 18-70 f2.8 EX, SB-24 Flash

F9 @ 1/125 sec, ISO 200, Auto Flash set for f8

Flash bounced off a white wall to the left

Background is an old baking tray

Friends Of Sigmund

2007-02-03T08:42:00.000-08:00

You're never alone with an AF-Nikkor 80-200mm f2.8 AF Zoom.
The chap in red has my borrowed zoom lens; I took their photo with his.

Rather a nice, if unexpected, international encounter today at the end of Princes Street. I was grabbing a quick architectural detail shot with my big telephoto zoom (nicknamed "Sigmund" as in "Sigmund Freud would have a field-day") when I caught the eye of a nice non-English-speaking asian* chap with a D70, who pantomimed a request to try my lens. What the hell, I thought, so we swapped and I tried out his Nikkor 18-70 while he blasted away at distant objects with mine. Then I took their photo with my lens on his camera, we swapped back, they took my photo with them, and off they went, leaving nothing behind but the big grin on my face.

*Possibly Malay - I base this on the dimly-remembered notion that plurals in Malay are generated by repeating the word in question, and he kept saying "thankyouthankyou" in a rapid fire manner.

Not Flockin' Bad...

2007-01-13T07:33:00.000-08:00

Flock for Mac: start page (the default search engine is Yahoo!)
http://www.flock.com/

The other day I was looking for updates for the Flickr Uploadr and found this; a new browser with a hostage-to-fortune-name and built-in photo uploading features. Based around the notion of making all sorts of blogging, sharing and community activities more streamlined, it seems to be built around the same open-source core as Firefox and Safari. Flock therefore has a load of familiar features including tabbed browsing and web searches from the toolbar (though it seems to favour Yahoo! over Google). The word-processor style blogging tool interface is identical to the one in Firefox.

Uploading photos to Flickr using Flock's built-in uploader
(also works with Photobucket)

The stuff that interested me was the photo uploader and "photo-bar". The uploader will work with Flickr and Photobucket; you just drop photos from your hard drive into the uploader window, after which you can re-title, add captions and tags just like the Flickr Uploadr; once you click "upload" you get a second window offering the chance to add them to an existing set or create a new one*. You can re-order the photos in the list before uploading, a feature not offered by the Mac Flickr Uploadr. When I first tried Flock, I couldn't find a way of adding batch tags, but as of the Flock 0.7.12 update, I can add batch tags by selecting multiple photos in the ulpoader. Whether this is a new feature, or whether I just missed it the first time, I can't be certain.

*this is with Flickr; I don't have a Photobucket account.

Drag-and-drop photos from the photo-bar into blog comments
(on some sites you see the photos, in others you get the html)

Once photos are uploaded, they'll appear in the Flock photo-bar, along with everything else in your Flickr stream; you can then drag and drop the images into blog posts or comments. When you click on a photo thumbnail, three tiny icons appear, allowing you to pick whether you want to add a pic in Flickr's preset small or large sizes. If you want the photo in a different size, you can add a sizing instruction to the html tag (height="xxx" width="xxx" where "xxx" is the number of pixels) - the photo below is a Flickr large image that was scaled down to fit this blog's column width.

Flickr large image dragged and dropped from photo-bar,
then scaled down to fit Blogger column width

Flock impresses me enough that I've started using it regularly, though more as a substitute for Flickr Uploadr than Firefox. The usefulness of the photo-bar means it's taking over for blogging, but for general browsing it's so similar to Firefox that there's no point in swapping over, especially as I have all sorts of extensions installed which might or might not work with Flock assuming I knew how to import them and could be bothered doing it.

Pros:

Firefox-like interface and functions make it easy to get started
Runs smoothly
Photo upload from inside application
You can change order of photos in uploader
Supports batch tags
Photo-bar very handy

Cons

Yahoo! search engine

Available from www.flock.com and well worth a go. Like Firefox, it does take ages to self-configure when you first install it.

No Added Colours Or Preservatives

2007-01-11T03:44:00.000-08:00

Edinburgh Central Library from Candlemaker Row
Nikon D50 & 28mm f2.8 lens

Sometimes things just fall into your lap - I spotted this terrific sky on the way back from the shops yesterday. One of the few times I've uploaded shots to Flickr without any colour or contrast correction (though I did straighten the verticals and add a bit of sharpening).

Towards the Grassmarket from Candlemaker Row
Nikon D50 & 28mm f2.8 lens

It's The Little Things That Count

2007-01-06T06:40:00.000-08:00

Tough on Thals, tough on the causes of Thals
Ganon G3 plus adaptor and +4 close up lens, macro mode, f5.6 @ 1/8thsec

After covetously eyeing macro lenses for my D50 on the web, it occurred to me it would be a better idea to rescue my old Canon G3 compact from the loft, since it has a decent macro mode on it (especially when coupled with the lens adaptor and a +4 close up lens.)

This effort's a wee bit blurry, due mostly to my enthusiasm for a new idea leading me to try and handhold a macro shot at 1/8th sec. (never a good idea). The "new idea" was to try using the visualiser on my copy of iTunes as a back projection for my new toy Dalek. The effect worked pretty well, but the need to balance light sources meant that I couldn't use optimum brightness for the toy Dalek without bleaching out the LCD screen behind (you can see some slight light spill at the edges of the frame).
If I had it to do again, I'd shoot the Dalek against a green screen, record the iTunes pattern separately, and composite them in Photoshop. In the time it took me to get this, I could have had a choice of Dalek poses against a variety of backgrounds. Perhaps I'll come back to it.

Edinburgh Torchlight Procession

2006-12-31T08:27:00.000-08:00

Procession passing St.Giles Cathedral - Sigma 18-50 f2.8 zoom @ 18mm or so.
The Sigma zoom is a bit soft at the corners wide open, but it's so lightweight and
compact that I will actually carry it all the time.

On the way home from town the other night, after a meet-up with Graeme Reid, (a regular of my other blog), I was cut off from home by the annual torchlight procession - and with only my Fuji E550 compact, my SLR and three lenses to hand! What could I do but keep shooting until my cards were full?

Luckily, I was carrying my old 85mm f1.8 lens, which is an excellent fast telephoto, except that it's prone to internal reflection from bright light sources - note the green ghosting from the torches in the top quarter of the frame.

Because I normally carry a fast mid-range zoom and a fast prime telephoto, I could shoot in the available light coming off the torches - it was bright enough to handhold even the 85mm lens at ISO 800, which gave usable results without needing noise reduction.

Merry Christmas!

2006-12-25T15:37:00.000-08:00

Princes Street Gardens, Edinburgh, with the Walter Scott monument behind the big wheel.

Even a hard-hearted old techie like me can be touched by the spirit of the season, so here are some Christmassy photos taken on and around Princes Street this season. Merry Christmas!

The clock tower of the old North British Hotel building behind the ferris wheel on Princes Street.

Composite panorama showing Edinburgh Castle and the illuminated trees on the mound.

Samhuinn 2006 in Edinburgh

2006-10-31T05:55:00.000-08:00

80-200mm f2.8 zoom handheld in available light

I was invited to come out and photograph the Samhuinn celebrations in Edinburgh by fellow Flickrite Sibelian, who's taken part in the ceremonies in past years; it's a big theatrical pagan event, enacting the overthrow of the court of summer by the court of winter.

I got into a rather poor position for the main event, jammed into a crowd so tightly packed that I couldn't get into my rucksack for my telephoto lens until late in the proceedings. As a result, I didn't get a record of the whole thing (I also forgot to take establishing shots again), but I did get some good single shots, including the dramatic bonfire shot above, and some good individual portraits of interestingly painted people in the procession down to The Mound.

80-200mm zoom with SB-24 flash in manual mode

18-50 f2.8 zoom @ 18mm, f8, focus pre-set at about 10ft, SB-24 flash in auto mode - exposures were pretty reliable

18-50 f2.8 zoom @ 18mm, f8, focus pre-set at about 10ft, slow-sync flash with SB-24 in auto mode.

Stuff That!

2006-10-30T15:36:00.000-08:00

Nikon D50 & Sigma 10-20mm f4-5.6 EX Zoom

I've been getting a bit stale recently; shooting a lot of stuff to test new cameras, but not really getting down to any serious (or frivolous) photography. Since moving to central Edinburgh, I decided to revive an old project by re-shooting some of my portraits of stuffed animals on better-quality digital (my first tries were in 2001 using a Canon G1, a camera not best suited to low-light work.)

Nikon D50 & Sigma 18-50 f2.8 EX Zoom; obligingly, she wore headphones,
so I could practically stick the camera in her ear
without her noticing the shutter click.

The faster response of my new cameras has meant that instead of just concentrating on the exhibits as I did the first time, more candids are creeping in too. I'm looking at extending the project out into the rest of the museum and maybe to others in Edinburgh too.
The existing images are on Flickr; just click on the pictures here to get to the set.

More E550 Candids

2006-10-30T15:32:00.000-08:00

Johnny REM in Bradford, September 2006

Since moving to Edinburgh, I've not been getting out to shoot as much as I'd like, but I've managed to collate some more shots from my Fuji E550 into a Flickr set.
Despite it not being quite as nice and jewel like as my old Canon S50, I note that it's become my first choice carry-everywhere camera. Noise at 400ASA is much better controlled than with the Canon, and the battery life using NiMh rechargeables, which I was a skeptical of, is pretty impressive.

Using A Manual Lens With The Nikon D50

2006-09-07T12:12:00.000-07:00

"You've attached what to your Nikon D50?"

As part of my ongoing project to hamstring my Nikon D50 digital SLR, I tried it with my old 100mm f2.8 E series manual focus lens. The series E lenses were plastic-bodied AIS lenses designed for the budget Nikon EM SLR back in the 1970's; I bought one years ago for my manual Nikon FM camera, as snobbery among collectors about the plastic construction meant you could get these excellent lenses at knock-down prices second-hand (the lens elements are all glass, of course, and very good too).

The first effect of fitting a manual lens to the D50 is that the metering system is completely disabled; without the CPU inside even the oldest AF-Nikkors, you get nothing, neither matrix metering, centre-weighted nor spot. The aperture readout on the top plate LCD and in the viewfinder reads "--" and none of the automatic exposure modes will work. You have to switch to Manual exposure mode, and, unusually for the D50, set the aperture via the aperture ring on the lens.

For a metered exposure, you'd need either a handheld incident meter or a second camera. Luckily, I'd used an old non-metered Rolleiflex TLR for a number of years, and had got used to 'guesstimating' exposure. A great advantage of digital is that I could take test shots and adjust accordingly. Much to my satisfaction, my guesses were mostly within about a stop of the right result.

My original estimated exposure for this was only one stop over.

Focussing is, naturally, manual, but I was pleasantly surprised to find the D50's electronic rangefinder still works; this shows a green dot in the left-hand corner of the viewfinder when the subject in the focussing brackets is sharp. You can go a bit cross-eyed trying to keep the centre focus brackets in position while monitoring the in-focus dot, but it works well enough; sadly, the D50 doesn't possess the useful direction triangles (telling you which way to turn the focussing ring) that were present in the finders of my old F4 and F801s. Given the speed and accuracy of the D50's AF, I can see why this is; I only use MF as a way of locking focus or when setting focus to a given distance for depth focussing* - either way, I almost never fine-focus manually.
I had thought that the focussing screen for the D50 was fixed, but since Katz Eye Optics make a split-prism screen with microprism collar for the D50, I guess it must be interchangeable. I'm not sure if Nikon make a compatible manual focussing screen, but there evidently is a third-party option if you were thinking of using manual focus a lot.

Grab shot - it was about 1 2/3 stops under, but rescuable in Photoshop - like slide film, digital images respond better to slight underexposure.

So results; well, it wasn't as convenient as shooting with an AF lens, obviously, but it was a lot easier than I'd feared. Although it was a bit awkward to use, having the electronic rangefinder for reassurance made a big difference. I was surprised that I managed to get decent shots of a moving target like my mum's cat, and even a grabbed candid (above) using this camera/lens combination.

Not being able to meter the exposure slowed things right down (having an incident meter to hand would have made a lot of difference) but given a bit of experience and the ability to make test shots, it was surmountable, to the extent that if you predominantly shot static subjects (i.e., still life or plants) under reasonably controlled conditions, you might not even miss having a meter. If you were shooting at night with (auto) flash and a pre-focussed wide-angle manual lens, you could also bypass focus/exposure issues.

The D50 obviously isn't intended for use with manual focus lenses, but, depending on what you shoot and how you shoot it, you might be able to keep on using an old favourite. A couple of caveats though; bear in mind that the D50's chip is smaller than a 35mm film frame, so multiply the focal length of your lenses by 1.5 to get the new angle of view - in practise this means that your wide-angle lenses will become less wide-angle, in fact even lenses as wide as 28mm really stop being wide-angle at all.
Secondly, not all old Nikkor lenses can be attached to the D50 - in particular, there seems to be a long list of exclusions among the teleconverters, bellows and PC-shift lenses. I'd strongly advise checking lens types and serial numbers with Nikon (or seeing if your local dealer will let you look in the back of a D50 manual) before buying.

*setting the focus for a given distance with a reasonably small aperture and using depth-of-field to keep subjects within a given range in focus.

Animal Experimentation With The Fuji E550

2006-09-01T14:33:00.000-07:00

Don't worry, it's only artistic experimentation - dogs in the post office, Gijòn

I first noticed the Fuji Finepix E550 after checking out the shooting data for Dr.Beef's excellent cat pictures on Flickr, wondering how she got such spontaneous shots of her furry friends. The answer came a few months later when my friend Irma Page showed me her E550; she was taken with it for its high resolution, I was astonished by the speed with which it powered up and took shots. I was using two Canons; a PowerShot S50 and a PowerShot G3, both excellent cameras, but not the fastest beasts on the block.

I'd been looking to upgrade my S50 for a while, but when I discovered you could get a Nikon D50 SLR body for less than the compact I was then considering, the Canon S80. The chance to use my old Nikon lens collection again was too much to resist, so I gave up on upgrading from the S50. But then, while talking to Irma, she mentioned that E550s were being sold off very cheap (probably due to the introduction of the E900), so I had a look on eBay, and here we are...

I won't bother with a detailed description of the E550 as those nice people at DPReview have done a much better job of it than I ever could; the short version is the E550 is a just-about-pocket-sized, rather boxy and unlovely-looking camera with full manual control, a 32.5-130mm (35mm FoV) f2.8-5.6 zoom and 6.3 megapixels that can be interpolated in-camera up to 12.3 megapixels using Fuji's "Super CCD" system.
It runs, usefully, off AA-sized batteries; I use NiMh rechargeables, but it will take ordinary alkalines if you're caught short. It has a built in discharger to help prevent battery memory problems.

You lookin' at me?

So, how did it perform? I'd had it for a while when I decide to really test the shutter-lag (or lack thereof) and continuous shooting against visiting cat Button, who was being steadily driven kill-crazy by the swarm of dragonflies flitting around our garden this afternoon. The first challenge was to see if I could capture a simple portrait - often tricky as a cat will usually look in any direction except at you when you're pointing a camera at him. My usual experience with cats and Canons was of sitting there like an idiot, making a variety of squeaking, whistling, clicking and popping noises until one of them finally piqued the cat's interest, at which point I'd be rewarded with a fleeting glance, which I'd miss by 1/8 second due to the camera's shutter lag.
No such problems this time - lots of squeaking and clicking, true, but two out of two glances caught successfully, of which the one above is the best.

Believe it or not, he's heading out of the frame here...

Next came the attempt to capture Button in action. Whenever a dragonfly strayed within range, Button would go for it by leaping backwards and up, so that he performed a complete backflip. Seen out of the corner of the eye, this gave the impression someone was hurling him across the garden like a boomerang.
It was hellishly difficult to capture because the leaps came suddenly and at random, though usually in pairs, followed by long periods when the cat would be getting his breath back. Button also tended to leap farther than I expected; this meant my first few shots consisted of random bits of kitty anatomy poking in from the edge of the frame.
The important thing to note, though, is that I was getting the cat in mid air; my reflexes and panning skills might not have been up to tracking a pinwheeling furry maniac, but the camera was keeping up with both of us.
I decided to try the continuous shooting next, and that was my downfall. Because the Canons were so "laggy", I'd developed the technique of continuous shooting from just before I thought something was going to happen, in the hope that the frame burst would catch what reflexes could not. The E550 has two continuous modes; one takes four shots at 3fps, then stops to write the pictures to the card. The other mode will capture an apparently limitless number of frames, also at 3fps, but only save the last four pictures shot. This allows you to keep shooting until you see the shot you want, rather than having pre-empt the action and hope it will occur during a limited shooting burst. Furthermore, that 3fps is pretty scorching for a compact - in fact it's better than my D50 SLR can manage.
I set the E550 to the latter continuous mode, then waited for Button to spring. Up he went - perfectly centred in the finder for the only time that afternoon - but then, much faster than I expected, another four frames went through the camera and my perfect shot was lost. I was left with four frames of a cat landing on a lawn (which looks not dissimilar to a cat crouching on a lawn, and not at all like a cat hanging in mid-air over one, perfectly centred in the frame.)

Button flees my belovèd, the startling Dr. F.
Why, I don't know; I'm the one who trod on him...

Since Button's bursts of motion were so short I decided to try the more usual "shoot four and save" mode - this worked much better, as you can see above. I think this was originally frame two of a set of four.

So, on a first quick try, the E550 does what I bought it for; catches the moment quickly and discreetly. There's stuff I don't like about it - the macro mode is poor, the zoom has trouble focussing in low light at the long end, the JPEG compression options are limited and it's possible to wipe the XD card by carelessly disconnecting the camera from your computer - but as a carry-anywhere candid digital camera it's the best thing I've found so far, especially for the (second hand) price.

Focus Tracking Tests With The Nikon D50 And Older AF Lenses

2006-09-01T11:53:00.000-07:00

(The photographs shown here are uncropped and uncorrected. I've posted them on my Flickr account at full size, so you can download them to examine if you wish.)

After being held up by work, I'm finally getting round to writing up the tests I did with my D50 and my telephoto lenses. The D50 has a useful focus mode called "AF-A" - this defaults to single-shot AF, but will switch automatically to continuous focus (focus tracking, in fact) if the subject it's locked on to starts moving continuously towards or away from the camera.

I was a bit wary of this setting, but it works like a dream; it doesn't seem to cause focus lock problems in single-shot mode, and the transition to continuous focussing is pretty reliable (though it does work better the longer the focal length of the lens - it seems happiest at 85mm upwards). I now leave my D50 on this setting all the time.

Lenses and settings

28-85mm @85mm
85mm prime lens
80-200mm @ 80mm
80-200mm @ 200mm (3 sequences)

All are pre-D Nikkors, the 85mm and the 80-200 zoom are the old type with the locking pin on the aperture ring.

AF was set to use the central focus point. Mode: AF-A.

The D50 controls aperture via a dial on the camera body, so the aperture ring on the lens has to be locked for all modes, even aperture priority and manual.

Details of the focus tracking tests

On our local high street, I tried tracking approaching cars moving at 20-30 mph from a set of road markings about 100m distant, until they passed me.

Sample first and last frame from a test sequence taken with the 28-85mm zoom at 85mm (click on images to see full size version)

With each lens, the D50 managed about 7 shots in the same distance. I couldn't time the tests and also shoot, but I'm guessing that the camera was shooting a little below its maximum burst rate - what you'd expect, given it was focus tracking at the same time. Focussing at 80mm (FoV 120mm) was accurate and also consistent, despite the differences in maximum aperture and the physical bulk of the three lenses. The D50 has no trouble driving the big 80-200mm zoom.
At the 200mm (FoV 300mm) setting, accuracy started to suffer - of the 25 shots I took at 200mm, 5 were unsharp, one unusably so (the camera had focussed some distance behind the target car). But to put that in context, 58 out of 59 shots were as good as or better than I'd have expected to manage by the only other technique available - pre-focussing on a spot in the road and waiting for the vehicle to pass.

More problematic was the tendency for the shutter speed in Aperture Priority to drop as the approaching car filled the frame; sequences starting at 1/350sec would drop to as little as 1/60 sec by the last frame, resulting in camera shake. I'd expected the matrix metering to compensate for this, and it's possible that a D-type lense might cope better. It's worth noting that it 's better to use manual exposure mode for this type of shooting.

Sample shots affected by camera shake - but if you look at the seam line on the bonnet, they're still in focus (click on images to see full version)

It still has to be said, these results are significantly better than I expected, and better than anything I've achieved with my film SLRs. I never considered focus tracking to be a serious tool before, but I'll now be using it, particularly with that conventient AF-A mode.

Sample shot from 80-200 zoom, this time without camera shake

The fact that the 1gb SD card on the D50 will routinely hold 360 images at JPEG Fine (83 more than the counter suggests when the card is empty) makes me willing to use the "motor drive" much more than I ever would have when shooting film, though I'm not sure if that's actually a good thing or not.

Recently I had a chance to repeat the tests with an AF Nikkor 70-300mm f4-5.6 D lens; the D specification had no effect on exposure, though it did routinely manage one more frame per sequence than any of the non-D lenses. While it's no surprise that it could focus faster than the bulky 80-200 zoom, I'm surprised at it out-performing the fast 85mm prime. At the 200mm setting, the D lens focussed more accurately than the 80-200mm, the lighter construction presumably offsetting any disadvantage from the smaller aperture.

End shots from two sequences taken with the AF Nikkor 70-300mm f4-5.6 D Zoom - note the camera shake still present in the first shot due to shooting in Aperture Priority mode with a dark-coloured car filling the frame.
The second shot is was taken in Manual exposure mode with a shutter speed of 1/800sec - this was the last shot from a prodigious run of 13 consecutive frames, all in focus. (Click on images to see full size version)

Conclusion
I thought this would be where any cracks in the D50's performance would appear, and I was happy to be proved wrong. I'm not saying that the D50 will give the ultimate in performance when fitted with an old AF Nikkor lens - I'm sure a new G-type zoom would give better results (as, for that matter would a D2X) - but the fact remains that if, as I am, you're trading up from an early-90's film SLR and you don't want to ditch your old AF lenses, you can be confident that the D50 will give at least as good a performance as your old camera, if not slightly better. What's more, the D50's FoV conversion factor of 1.5 means that your telephoto lenses all effectively become longer - so my 80-200mm zoom now gives the same field of view as a 120-300mm zoom on a 35mm camera, and my 70-300 zoom acts like a whopping 105-450 zoom. Not bad for a budget solution.

Unusual things happen when you don't expect them

2006-07-18T03:48:00.000-07:00

Transcendant, originally uploaded by The Glass Eye.

The thing about the really good shots is, they never happen when you go out to take photos. The number of times I've set a day aside to go "trawling" and come back with next to nothing... even in promising locations like the V&A or the British Museum.
But here I was last night, rushing with my girlfriend for a dance class we're already late for, and as we cross the centre of Nottingham we hear the sound of blues guitar from one of the city centre regulars, but there's also this middle-aged guy in big heavy boots dancing his soul out on the zig-zag brick paving.
I often wonder why I persist with candid photography when most of it is fruitless waiting and the remainder is usually frustration at missing the shot - that and the embarassment of confronting people, risking upsetting them for nothing more than a passing whim.
I suppose I should blame a book called Shots From The Hip by "Alias Johhny Stiletto," an advertising copywriter who claimed to shoot three rolls of film a day, mostly not looking through the camera. Shots From The Hip contains more good anecdotes than photographs, but there's one paragraph which is still my photographic mantra today:

"Photography isn't two weeks' holiday in Spain. It's carrying a camera with you when it would be easier not to, a pocket that's always out of shape and a pair of eyes than never stop looking. Unusual things happen when you don't expect them; that's what makes them unusual. If you use your camera when everybody else uses theirs, you'll end up with shots that look just like everybody else's."

And that was why, fourteen years later, I happened to be carrying an SLR while rushing to a dance class, and was able to capture this moment of magic.
Look at the guy dancing; he's completely lost in the music. The expression on the guitarist's face is priceless too, though I can't work out if he's worried about why I'm photographing him with such a big camera, concerned that I'll take a shot that undermines the dignity of the guy dancing, or just afraid that I'll break the spell.
In the end, we were only ten minutes late for the class.

Semana Negra

2006-07-16T10:40:00.000-07:00

Nikon D50, Sigma 10-20mm f4-5.6 EX Zoom

Just back from a trip to Spain for the Semana Negra festival in Gijon - took the D50 along with me and it held up well, though after all my banging on about old Nikon lenses I shot mostly on my Sigma 17-50 f2.8 EX zoom for convenience sake.
My first batch of shots from the Semana Negra are on Flickr here. Those are shot on a variety of lenses plus my Canon S50 compact.
I've sorted out another set shot purely on the Sigma 17-50 for anyone interested in seeing how that lens behaves. EXIF information and full-resolution versions available.

Oh, and after all my complaints about the slowness of my Canon compacts, best candid of the trip went to my S50 (above)

Fresh Chucks

2006-07-11T06:59:00.000-07:00

Fresh Chucks, originally uploaded by The Glass Eye.

Call me a slow learner, but it never ceases to amaze me what great results you can get with some of these tiny compact digital cameras; this was taken with my old Canon S50, which isn't as tiny and compact as some, but does have all the manual and auto options you'd expect from a decent SLR. I used it for this shot so that I could use my feet to fill the shoes out while holding the camera at arm's length to get the right framing and angle in the rear LCD.
Taken using daylight coming through French windows, f5.6 @ 1/160th, ISO 100/21º*, 27.3mm (FoV 105mm) Aperture Priority & AF. The rather dull oatmeal carpet was selectively darkened in Photoshop to push the shoes forward.

*several reviews put the measured sensitivity of the Canon S50 ISO 100/21º setting at 160/23º

28mm Candids

2006-07-08T08:54:00.000-07:00

AF-Nikkor 28 f2.8, Program Mode. I was pleased at how close in
I managed to get for this shot; it's not cropped.
If you click on any image, you can view the original on my Flickr site; clicking on "all sizes" will give you access to the full-resolution file

On a Nikon digital SLR, a 28mm lens ceases to act as a true wide angle; its FoV is 42mm, which turns out to be quite a pleasant "wide standard" focal length, taking in a little more than the standard 35mm (FoV 52mm) lens, but not offering noticeable wide angle distortion when used close-in.
My old AF Nikkor 28mm f2.8 is, like most of my lenses, pre D-type, so I was out to see how it would perform in terms of focussing and exposure. Results were good on both counts; the focussing was fast and accurate (particularly impressive on the shot of the stripey couple which was a real whip-round grab shot) and the reduced matrix metering the D50 uses with pre D-type lenses performed well even with difficult backlighting.

AF-Nikkor 28 f2.8, Program Mode. The reduced matrix metering coped well with the backlighting; I printed it very hard but there's bags more highlight detail in the original JPEG.

AF-Nikkor 28 f2.8, Aperture Priority @ f8. I saw these two pass me, belatedly noticed the stripes, turned and fired; The D50 focussed in the time it took to depress the shutter release.

AF-Nikkor 28 f2.8, Aperture Priority @ f8. The camera didn't hesitate but I did;
I missed the optimum shot with the dog looking back at the old lady.

Despite the handiness of zoom lenses in general, prime lenses seem better suited to shooting candids. Partly, they tend to be smaller and make the camera less obtrusive, but also, in circumstances where you have to shoot very quickly, a prime lens gives you one less thing to worry about. If you work with the same lens for a bit, you quickly learn to place yourself at the right distance to get the shot. The pictures above are shown in reverse order of shooting; the first two I took had to be cropped a little, but by the last two (the old people in the buggies and the girl with the beekeeper) I was placing myself well enough so that a step forward or back would get me the framing I was after.
If you don't have a prime lens, you can get the same discipline by setting a focal length and then popping a bit of tape over the zoom ring to fix it in position.

More Street Shooting

2006-07-07T04:04:00.000-07:00

Nikon D50 with Sigma 17-50 f2.8, zoom setting 24mm;
pre-focussed at 10ft, aperture f8, cropped.

Had a quick go at shooting with pre-focussing while out shopping the other day (yes, I'm sad enough to carry a D50 round the shops). Because the D50's sensor is smaller than a 35mm film frame, depth-of-field should be a bit better for any given angle of view/distance combination. This was where I really felt the benefit of using an SLR; my Canon G3 couldn't have started up in time to catch the boy on the bike (top).
With the second shot of the lady, I aimed away from her so she wouldn't try to veer out of shot, and watching out of the corner of my eye, waited until she was in position before turning quickly to shoot.
I shot these at 24mm (35mm FOV), but I had to crop a bit; 28mm or 35mm would have been better.

D50 with old Nikon lenses part one

2006-07-05T14:51:00.000-07:00

Fun with vegetables and the Nikon D50

I've just finished retyping the first part of my review of how my Nikon D50 has coped with my old AF lenses. It turned out so long that I've posted it as a separate web page here.
The continuous focus test still has to be written up, but that will have to wait for a bit.

Getting Something Back

2006-07-04T07:18:00.000-07:00

Upper Parliament Street, Nottingham

This isn't much of a shot, I have to confess - It's not symmetrical enough, there are too many people with their backs to us, and nobody's doing anything interesting - but it retains a special place in my affections nevertheless.
Anyone who knows me knows that I always, but always carry a camera. Ten years ago, I really was rabid about it, I tried the whole Cartier-Bresson living your life with a camera in hand, and my reflexes got pretty good. I then had a nasty bout of something glandular-fever like that laid me out for a few months, and somehow I never quite got the edge back afterwards. Then a couple of years ago, I switched to digital, but the compact cameras I was using, small, silent and operable from waist level as they may have been, were too slow for real serious candid work.
So cue yesterday when I went out "on the trawl" with my new camera for the first time... the D50 isn't that big for a modern SLR, but compared to my compacts it feels like you're levelling an artillery piece. I kept seeing shots but not having the nerve to raise the camera.
Then I came our of a shop and saw this window with the reflection and suddenly the old reflex kicked in and up came the camera and twist-turn to switch on and steady the shot and Tchap! it's taken all before I really had time to think about it.
Didn't manage it again all day, mind, but at least I know something of the old spark is left...

Grab Shot

2006-07-04T05:22:00.000-07:00

Candid with D50 and Sigma 18-50 2.8 - she was wrapped up in her work and the shutter was quiet enough not to disturb her. Focussing was also very quiet, even though it's not supposed to be a silent motor.

I had my lens review 90% written and then lost 2/3 of it to a freak cut n' paste error - that'll teach me to compose really long stuff in Blogger.
Overall news is positive - all my lenses seem to work at least as well on the D50 as they did on my old film cameras. The detailed stuff will have to wait until I can find a couple of hours to write eveything up again. Maybe next week.
I've posted some focus tracking tests on Flickr - they might not make too much sense without the text, though.

Back With A D-SLR, Boys

2006-07-01T01:58:00.000-07:00

So, after several years of using Canon compacts (mostly PowerShots G3 and S45/50), the price of digital SLRs dropped to the point where it was cheaper to buy one than upgrade to a Canon S80... and my collection of old Nikon lenses was sitting there, staring at me, accusingly...

Grab shot with D50 and sadly-defunct 35mm f2 AF-Nikkor

I had also been trying to get back into candid photography, and like most digital compacts, the Canons suffered from achingly slow startup times and annoying shutter lag.
(Incidentally, if anyone out there has dope on compacts with fast startup/low shutter lag, particularly the almost suspiciously low-priced Fuji E900, I'd like to hear from you.)

So I went for a Nikon D50, which, after a couple of days, I'm still astonished by... SLR design sure has moved on in the 13 years since I bought my trusty F-801s. I've used the old professional Nikon F4, and the D50 is as fast and responsive (in focussing terms), plus it has multiple focus points, built-in flash, 1/500sec flash sync(!)... I really thought I'd have to compromise to afford a D-SLR, but I remain gobsmacked at what Nikon have put into their bottom-of-the-range model...

When I was researching the D50 I couldn't find much information about its performance with older pre-D type AF lenses, so I'll do some tests with mine and post them here.