2010 Redbubble Calendars

My 2010 Calendars are now for sale on Redbubble! I've got 4 different calendars for sale this year with the New Zealand Landscapes and a Still Life calendars new this year!

Links:
Will's Calendars
Will's Bubblesite
Will's Redbubble profile

Yongnuo 2.4 GHz flash triggers (RF-602)

This is just a quick post to say that my Yongnuo 2.4 GHz triggers last week and they are great! I haven't yet used them for an actual shoot but I've done some quick tests.
These remotes are designed as wireless triggers for either a camera shutter or a flash and because the operate on the 2.4 GHz frequency the seem to avoid a lot of the interference problems that some other flash triggers have. In the wireless flash flash trigger market there is now a wide variety of options from cheap 'ebay'/GI/Cactus triggers (with various levels even in this category) to the expensive pocket wizards. These triggers fit into the top end of the 'ebay' triggers, they cost a bit more than most in this category but seem to have good reliability. There is a very long thread with loads of info in the Strobist flickr group if you want to read more.

So my first quick test was to plug some things in and see how they work. My test camera was a Canon 50D and my flashes were Canon 430EX, Nikon SB-24 and Nikon SB-25 which were fired against a white wall. I did not have any misfires with any of the flashes and I was able to get full sync at 1/250 (the 50D's max sync speed) with all flashes, when I went to 1/320 I got a black line (shutter curtain) at the bottom of the frame. The triggers were also able to keep up with continuous shoot at 6.3 fps, I only tested short bursts but I figure the flash is going to run out of power first anyway.

My second test was try remotely firing the camera, there's not much to report here except that it work. I haven't tested the half press autofocus thing yet because I'd have to chance my custom functions to allow a half press to do autofocus.

That's about all I have to report for now, I may add some details later with some pics but it seems I finally have a set of reliable triggers for not too much $$ which is exciting, particularly since I've been taking on some paid gigs.

--------------------------------------------------

In other news, I may have started up yet another blog that I won't have time to update, it is all about food and till I find a better name it's called "Will's food ideas", creativity was never my strong suit. Anyway, hope to bring you some more posts soon!

Gear-a-holic

Hi my name's Will and I'm a gear-a-holic . . Ok so I'm not as bad as some but here is a bit of a review of my photo gear that gives me a fix and fuels my addiction.

• Canon 50D
• Canon 30D
• Canon 300D
• Canon 10-22mm (I love this lens!)
• Tamron 17-50mm f2.8
• Canon 100 f2.8
• Sigma 50mm f2.8 Macro
• Sigma 70-200mm f2.8
• Canon 50mm f1.8
• Sigma 17-70mm (more or less unused)
• Canon 18-55mm (unused)
• Canon 430EX Speedlight
• Nikon SB-24 Speedlight
• Nikon SB-25 Speedlight
• Nikon SB-22s Speedlight
• Manfrotto 055PROB tripod with joystick head
• Manfrotto 785B Modo Tripod
• Olympus lightweight tripod
• Light stands, umbrellas and remote triggers
• Polorising filter, shutter release, CF cards, ND filters, Grad ND filter, Batteries etc.
• MacBook Black to process it all

How did it all start?

Well years ago when I was in year 9 I started with a compact film camera and grew to love taking photos, particularly of wild places, and the more I took the better I got and the more I liked it.

Fast forward a few years when after a year of engineering placement at uni when I had some $$ I thought about upgrading to a new digital camera. This brought on much research into high end compact cameras reading review after review, I wanted something that I could take landscapes and sports shots with. Eventually I gave up and got talked into buying a 300D kit, so begins my camera addiction . . .

My upgrades from there were a long time coming, but after I finished my degree I started to add to the kit. Frist what I didn't have a loved, W I D E, with the 10-22, next, sports 70-200 f2.8 for volleyball, then the 50mm macro to give me a 10-22 + 50mm macro hiking kit. Then I added a flash with the 430EX and then with the prospect of a sports job I upgraded cameras to a 30D and picked up a new mid-range zoom, the Sigma 17-70.

So that held off my addicitons for a while untill I discovered off camera lighting and of course now needed a lighting kit to go with my camera kit! So flashes, light stands, radio triggers, umbrellas and a bunch of home made stuff and I had a pretty good set-up for doing still life and portraits and all sorts of things, the one day I was doing some still life photos and my 50mm macro died! So I jumped online and found out I could get a 100mm macro from the US cheaper than in Australia, so out came the credit card . . . again! In the mean time the 17-70 proved to be very good for still life close-ups!

Further upgrades have slowed a little, I was not particuarly happy with the focusing of 17-70 for more distant subjects so I went and got a tamron 17-50 with has been very nice though I still have some doubts about it's focusing. Then when I started to get some wedding work I got myself a Canon 50D. The main thing that I wanted over the 40D was the lens micro adjustment for a couple of my lenses however it didn't prove very useful as they were backfocusing at one end of the zoom range and front focusing at the other. So I'm not entirely sure it was worth it, image quality is said to be not much different to the 40D with similar noise levels and 15MP chews through the memory, but time will tell and and the autofocus live view has been useful a couple of time.

So yeah, I guess that is my camera journey to date. Did I make some mistakes, well probably, there are some things I'd probably change a little but hopefully my experience is useful in your own decision making. I'm looking at upgrading some lenses and pondering full frame so the journey isn't over yet . . .

Redbubble Calendars!!

Redbubble now have calendars for sale! So why is that so exciting I hear you ask, well because it means that I now have calendars for sale!!

Last year Redbubble came up with a way that allowed us members to put together calendars and get them printed, for ourselves. Well almost a year on and we can now offer those calendars up for sale direct to the public. They have not yet been incorporated into "Bubblesites" but I hope they will be soon.

So anyway, if you ever wanted a calendar of my photos then step right up and order one. At the moment I haven't added any new designs but I hope to get to that soon. Oh and let me know if you have any special requests!

Redbubble
Will's Redbubble Site
Will's Calendars

HSS hack update

I posted and article called Sync speed and flash duration earlier this year describing a hack to enable cameras with mechanical shutter to shoot using a flash at shutter speeds over the cameras max sync speed WITHOUT using a proprietary flash system. Since then a little more info has become available so I thought I'd write another article focusing on how to do it rather than just investigating what it is. If you want more info on mechanical shutter and why it works then have a reader of the other article here.

So what do you need?

• Camera
• a proprietary flash that can do HSS/FP
• A flash with manual settings
• An optical slave
• Optional: Radio trigger and a way to attach the optical slave to radio trigger

If you are using a Nikon camera with PC port I believe you can do this without the optical slave and connect either the flash or a radio trigger directly to your cameras PC port.

Ok now to put it together . . .

1. Put the proprietary flash on the camera and select HSS/FP mode (this is the trigger so reduce power and point away from subject if you don't want to use as a light source)


2. Select full power on the manual flash


3. Put the optical slave where the on camera flash will trigger it


4. Then the manual flash can be connected by a number of different methods, either directly to the slave, with a PC cord or a radio trigger can fill this gap, i.e. the transmitter can be attached to the optical slave and the receiver to the flash.

And . . . Ta Daaaa, you have a system that should give you HSS using a camera with a mechanical or focal plane shutter. You still need to remember that we are now using the flash as a continuous light source rather than an instantaneous flash, therefore shutter speed will now affect the exposure of the flash. Because the "continuous light source is not on for long and varies in power you will also see some light drop off across the frame, particular as the shutter speed gets higher. This also means that you will not get the large relative "gain" in power you can when you have a camera with an electronic shutter but it is another technique to keep in the back of your mind that might be useful one day.

Will's new gallery

What's that I hear you say, bout bloody time?? Yeah I agree, my web site has been neglected for a long time, largely because it was very labour intensive to update the image gallery and I figured there was no point putting more effort into a lost cause. I've know for a long time that I've needed some sort of an automated site builder/image gallery/content management system but didn't really know how you went about setting it up and the one attempt I had was a bit of a mess.

So what changed?

Well I had the opportunity to shoot an event (the event album) that I thought I'd be able to sell prints from and needed somewhere to sell them. So research ensued, I checked out all the Australian "smug mug" type web sites and found none of the suited, either out of date, too expensive, couldn't get info on them (even after email requests) so I decided to set-up my own shop front.

Will's attempt at creating an online store for photos using free PHP software = Fail.

What happened, well I managed to install two different pieces of free shop front software and found both of them lacking mainly because selling photos is a little unique, you have a very large number of "products" that will all have the same set of multiple prices depending print size. Now it may have been possible to fix this and or install a "photo sales" module but I couldn't see and easy way of adding the products and I'd yet to learn about modules. Besides it was after 2am, I needed sleep.

So I had in my head that I needed a bulk upload facility that I figured an image gallery would have, so the next day research started again and I came up with a list of free image gallery software (and a suggestion of using drupral). In the end I went with "Gallery" image gallery software coz it looked good, seemed pretty easy to use, had many modules to customise the look and function including a couple for shopping carts that use Paypal! YAY! So I eventually figured out how to install it and a few module and upload a couple of photos, double YAY! After 2am again, bed.

The following day I was researching way to further customise it, details of the checkout, changing themes and layouts, privileges and all the rest and it was starting to come together and actually looking functional. I decided to use the "checkout" module, it seemed streamline and it actually worked when I tried it (usually a good thing). So i continued improving things, getting down to the smaller and small details, the only problem is that the more I played, the more I wanted to play and improve and change and tweak and . . . and . . . and crap, 2am, need sleep again.

Anyway after that there haven't been a lot of changes, I do try new themes occasional and I have a few things on the "improvements" list but I need to learn more about tweaking the actual code and style sheets (I did try it once and broke it for a while, good think I always keep the backup). On of the things that I have done is start to migrate my old "art" image gallery across to the new location so that it hopefully shows off my work a little better and I can keep it up to date much more easily.

So where to now? Well it still needs to be properly integrated with my web site, not entirely how to do that right atm, if I move the site to gallery or gallery to the site or both to a new content management system the might include this blog a bit better too. We will see, only time will tell but for now I'm just happy to event photos up for sale (with ppl buying them!) and my 'art' photos are slowly coming up to date.

- View the Gallery -

High ISO on Canon 30D

I just got back from Hullabaloo, an awesome swing dance exchange (big dance event over several days) in Perth where I had a great time dancing up a storm and even managed to snap a few photos.

My kit for the trip was:

• Canon 30D


• Sigma 17-70mm


• Canon 50mm f/1.8


• Canon 430EX

to give a versatile and light weight kit to shoot scenery, people/group snapshots, portraits and even some dance action shots. Anyway let me get onto what this is all about, pushing the camera to the limit.

At a few of the events I decided I couldn't be bothered using the flash despite it being very low light so I put on 50mm, set the camera to ISO 3200, f/1.8 and a shutter speed of around 1/40 to 1/60 and snapped away.

Here are some of the results (click on thumbnail for larger image):

Basically you are limited by the single focal length and shallow depth of field, particularly for group shots, and a steady hand & still subjects is required but it produces some nice shots. I did a little noise reduction using the photoshop filter and usually left them with a fairly warm colour balance that I think suits the mood a little better.

I haven't yet tried printing any of these shots but I think they will work ok as 6"x4", and, well, that's about it. Just a little case study.

When considering the quality it is worth nothing that even at these settings I was underexposing between 1/2 to 2 stops, the bottom one might have been even more. Now these shots may not be high enough quality for you or just not to your taste, but it shows what is possible and produces some different images that stand out from the crowd.

Thanks to (in order from top to bottom): Robbie, Kat Sherrard, the mask, Corinne Allen & Ben (who are glowing after dancing hard!), and Lexi for looking awesome and letting me post their photos.