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August 12, 2010
Petra Hall, a pretty awesome wedding photographer in Sweden, first posted this incredible story on the Digital Wedding Forum, and she kindly gave me permission to re-post it here.
the Canon 7D might be rugged, but it isn’t entirely fire-proof …
Petra’s fiance, Erkki, recently bought a new (used) car, just before a planned vacation. They had intended on cruising in the MG convertible and just enjoy the sports car in the summer. They were going to just drive around and take some photographs of the scenery.
The weekend before their vacation started, Erkki was on his way home from work when something in the car exploded and the car caught on fire. Huge flames engulfed the entire car. Erkki’s Canon 7D (with a 24-105L) was inside the car, as well his MacBook Air laptop. Everything went up in flames – the car; the camera & lens and the computer. Luckily no-one was harmed.
Since the car was imported from the UK, the insurance for it hadn’t taken effect yet. Therefore nothing will be replaced that went up in flames.
Here’s how the camera looks like now.
It’s going to hurt.
You might want to look away in case you’re the sensitive type …
A computer techie managed to get the hard-drive safely out of the computer, so Erkki could copy all the images that he’d taken since he got the 7D last winter.
The best part of the story though is that the 7D did keep a secret inside its melted body …
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August 11, 2010
reducing the blue color cast in white clothing
Often when working in the shade, or anywhere we need Cloudy or Shade white balance, we’ll often see a blue tint in the white clothing. I suspect this might be due to detergents being used which give a blue-ish tint to white clothing to make them appear cleaner. Or perhaps this is from UV light when we’re working in cloudy conditions or in the shade. However it might be, we will often get that blue tone in white clothing, as in this photo below …
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August 10, 2010
on-camera TTL fill-flash
With this recent photo session I didn’t have an assistant with me to hold a softbox. I therefore relied on on-camera fill-flash where necessary, and careful positioning of the couple, Renee and David, to control the light.
With the two photos above I used different amounts of flash exposure compensation (FEC), for more pronounced, or for more subtle fill-flash …
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August 8, 2010
sequence of photos – posing
The photo above is one of my favorite images. It was also subsequently chosen as the cover image for my book on off-camera flash photography. Oktavia is a professional dancer and we both wanted some photos to extend our portfolios. Of the number of places we used as a backdrop, I really liked this place – an art gallery in Manhattan where we were kindly allowed to use as a setting. What I’d like to show, is some of the images leading up to this final choice – how a combination of positioning Oktavia and changing the light, culminated in this photograph.
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August 7, 2010
The best way to deal with digital noise in photographs is to start with having a correctly exposed photograph taken by a high-ISO capable camera. Then digital noise mostly isn’t an issue unless you start pushing the upper limits of what the camera is capable of. But sometimes (hopefully only sometimes), you have to deal with an under-exposed photograph from an older camera … and then the digital noise becomes apparent. Then we have to use software to clean the image up …
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August 6, 2010
analysis of the lighting setup during a photo shoot
The photo above of Jessica, my assistant, shows the final lighting setup during a recent commercial shoot. I had to photograph various people at a medical technology imaging company for use on their website and promotional material. I had to show some of the workplace, but put the accent on the person I am photographing.
Of course, it is much easier to work with my assistant, and do test shots and changes in the setup beforehand. Then we can change the lights and anything else we need to, until we’re happy with the results. Then only do we call in the people we are actually photographing, and place them in position.
With this post I want to show the thought process in setting up the lighting for this photo. There were a couple of dead ends, and a couple of adjustments as we went along …
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August 2, 2010
high-speed flash sync / auto FP .. vs .. normal flash
There have been a number of questions about high-speed flash sync (HSS), and how it affects the output from your flash. There were also some questions asked about high-speed flash sync with this recent post where we tried to reverse-engineer a photo.
I decided to do a series of comparison photos, so we can actually see what happens before, at and beyond maximum flash sync speed. And we can also see what happens with high-speed flash sync. To do this, I set up very simple portrait lighting using a single speedlight and a large umbrella. A simple white paper-roll backdrop, and our model, Rachel. Here is the setup in my dining room …
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