• Hot Shoe Diaries
  Joe McNally [Amazon $26.39]
  You cannot go wrong with Joe’s tips on lighting, simply superb, a must read
• Fast Track Photographer
  Dane Sanders [Amazon $26.95]
  Run your business, don’t let it run you. Learn how to get your career on the right track
• Digital Photography Book 1, 2, 3
  Scott Kelby [Vol 1 Amazon $16.49] [Vol 2 Amazon $16.49] [Vol 3 Amazon $16.49]
  I am including all three books in the series (hence 17 books), these recipe books help you get the shot you want
• The Moment it Clicks
  Joe McNally [Amazon $34.64]
  Excellent background and stories on different shots. Inspirational and educational
• Light: Science and Magic
  Fil Hunter [Amazon $30.91 ]
  Some consider this to be the ultimate book on lighting
• Within the Frame: The Journey of Photographic Vision
  David DuChemin [Amazon $26.39]
  Within the Frame is a book about finding and expressing your photographic vision, specifically where people, places, and cultures are concerned.
• Beaton: Portraits
  Terence Pepper [Amazon $40.50]
  This is an essay of the works of Sir Cecil Beaton who was a major contributor to Vogue and Vanity Fair
• Lighting for Photography: Techniques for Studio and Location Shoots
  Glenn Rand [Amazon $23.07]
  This book shows how to perfect lighting in the studio as well as on location
• Sculpting with Light: Techniques for Portrait Photographers
  Allison Earnest [Amazon $23.07]
  “With tips for working with individuals and groups, indoors and out, this book is not to be missed.”  —ImagingInfo.com
• The Daybooks of Edward Weston
  Beaumont Newhall [Amazon $44.97]
  This book gives an intimate view into the day-to-day trials of a working artist, Edward Weston
• Keith Carter Photographs: Twenty-Five Years
  Keith Carter [Amazon $35.00]
  Be inspired by looking through 25 years of Keith Carter’s work
• Minimalist Lighting: Professional Techniques for Location Photography
  Kirk Tuck [Amazon $23.07]
  “Pure gold, showing real solutions to real lighting situations and along the way creating some of the most natural-looking on-location portraits.”  —Shutterbug
• Minimalist Lighting: Professional Techniques for Studio Photography
  Kirk Tuck [Amazon $23.07]
  “Richly illuminated with location portraits and a few still lifes, and written in a clean down-to-earth style.”  —ppmag.com
• The Photographer’s Eye: Composition and Design for Better Digital Photos
  Michael Freeman [Amazon $19.77]
  The Photographer’s Eye shows how anyone can develop the ability to see and shoot great digital photographs.
• Understanding Exposure: How to Shoot Great Photographs with a Film or Digital Camera – Bryan Peterson [Amazon $17.13]
  For serious amateur photographers who already shoot perfectly focused, accurately exposed images but want to be more creative with a camera, here’s the book to consult.

If you have some favorites that I missed, please post in the comments.

The “Easy Way”
The easy way to get this shot is to shoot the card laying on its side. Once you have the image, take it into Photoshop and rotate it 90 degrees clockwise so it is then standing up, copy a portion of it, rotate it vertically, then add a gradient to fade to white, and viola, you are done. This would certainly have been less time in shot setup but more time in post production. What I wanted was to actually do as much of the shot in-camera as possible, hence, I didn’t do it “The Easy Way” and then “Fix it in Photoshop”.

The Shot Setup
The first thing I needed to get was the reflection under the product. A reflection actually isn’t very hard to do, I do it quite often. I just shoot the product over a sheet of thick plexiglass that is sitting on top of a sheet of white muslin. The image of the product will be reflected into the plexi and you have yourself a sweet reflection.

Getting the card to “stand up” required a little bit of thought. At first I tried some acrylic blocks but that stood out too much and would require more Photoshop work than I wanted to do. The same thing happened with white blocks. The final solution turned out to be super simple. I used a boom arm and suspended the cards using fishing line. With the strobes going off the fishing line just disappeared making touch-ups for real fast.

The Post Production
To get started, the images were imported into Lightroom and the Clarity and Vibrance were bumped a hair, the shots were cropped, and then the Adjustment Brush was used to completely blow out the background. A Foreground to transparent gradient was used to fade the reflection to white so the image would set nicely on a website.

The Results
The final images are exactly what I set out to accomplish with very little post production because I tried to get as much done in-camera as possible. While I could have used Photoshop I often think that it is better to get the shot as close to the finished product as possible when you capture it. By even taking simple shots like this and figuring out how to get the shot a different way is good exercise for when something more complicated comes up. Being able to improvise and come up with creative solutions to problems is a very valuable skill.

More Images

Video Explanation

Equipment Used

Strobelite Plus w/Barn Door Kit
Strobelite Plus w/24×36 softbox
Canon 50D
Canon 50mm f1/8
Photoflex Boom arm
Westcott light stands
Vanguard Ball head
Calumet tripod
Phottix Cleon II Trigger

Features

As we have already said, the core purpose of DSLR Remote Pro is to allow for tethered shooting. While that seems like a pretty trivial thing, its all of the extra things that DSLR Remote Pro brings to the table.

• Take control of your Canon DSLR camera from your PC (supported models)
• Retain full control from the camera
• Photos automatically downloaded to the PC and displayed in a large preview window
• Large high quality live view display on the  PC with live histogram, autofocus and intuitive manual focusing using mouse wheel with Canon EOS 40D, Canon EOS 50D, Canon EOS 500D/Rebel T1i, Canon EOS 450D/Rebel XSi, Canon EOS 1000D/Rebel XS, Canon EOS 5D Mark II, Canon EOS-1Ds Mark III or Canon EOS-1D Mark III
• Photos are saved on the PC’s hard disk and can also be saved on the memory card in the camera
• Full size preview window can display a critical area of the photo e.g. the eyes and face of your model during a portrait shoot
• Flashing highlight display to highlight over exposed areas
• Grid overlay display for accurate alignment of studio shots. The size and color of the grid is user definable
• Color management and sharpening options for more accurate display of preview images
• Auto bracketing of up to 15 shots ideal for HDR images, interior shots and product photography
• Timed bulb exposures controlled from the PC – ideal for astronomy (Canon EOS-1Ds Mark III, EOS-1D Mark III, EOS 5D Mark II, EOS 40D, EOS 50D, EOS 500D/Rebel T1i, EOS 450D/Rebel XSi and EOS 1000D/Rebel XS only)
• Focus point overlay display for more precise control of auto focus
• Automatic screen blank option – blanks the screen before taking a photo so that the light from the PC display doesn’t affect the subject lighting
• Fullscreen mode for large, uncluttered display of images
• Automatic edit option – automatically loads the image after downloading into the editor or program of your choice
• Automatically stores a short comment in the shooting data of images for easy identification e.g. the person’s name when taking id photos. The comment can also be used for the image filename to make it easier to identify images when taking product shots, school portraits etc.
• Automatically stores IPTC data in images as they are downloaded
• Time-Lapse feature which allows the number of photos in a sequence and the interval between shots to be specified.

Stack it and Bracket

Typically if you want an exposure bracket for HDR images you are limited to the camera’s 3 shot bracket. While three shots is often sufficient, there are times you really want to use more images, with DSLR Remote Pro you can do bracket sequences using either shutter speed or aperture of up to 15 shots. Using tools like PhotoMatix, you can get really incredible results when using larger groups of images.

Another interesting thing you can do with multiple images is called focus stacking. With Focus Stacking you take a series of images of the same object with the focus positioned at different points. When you combine the images you can achieve a super sharp image with a longer depth of field. Photoshop CS4 now has this ability and there are some free tools that can do the processing as well. To use Focus Stacking you actually need a script that will automate some of the steps in DSLR Remote Pro. If you are interested in this functionality, read more about it at http://www.breezesys.com/DSLRRemotePro/focus_stacking.htm.

Live and in Color!

With the newer Canon cameras that support Live View, a whole realm of possibilities is opened up to you since you can display full-screen Live View with a live histogram. The Live View mode also allows you to zoom into the frame at 100% magnification to ensure that your focus is dead on. This is exceptionally useful when doing macro, product, or food photography.

What’s really unique is the ability to do autofocus while in Live View mode. Hitting Ctrl-F will perform a contrast detection routine that may be a little slow but is usually quite good. This however will not work well with moving objects.

Another interesting feature is Onion Skinning. Onion Skinning is a term that is used in animation to be able to see an overlay of the previous image in order to draw a smooth animation. With DSLR Remote Pro in Live View mode you can load in another image or the previous image in order to get precise alignment. This is good for stop motion animation or to accurately align images for panoramas.

Step into my booth

One thing you really wouldn’t expect from a program like this is the Photo Booth mode since there are a handful of companies that make specific photobooth software. With DSLR Remote Pro you can setup a nice photobooth station, even build a whole booth around it, and offer prints right after a series of images are taken. This can be a fun option to offer your clients at different events.

Integrating with Lightroom

Since Adobe Photoshop Lightroom doesn’t have direct tethering ability at this time, the next best thing is to use DSLR Remote Pro and Lightroom together. Lightroom has a feature that allows it to watch a folder and import any files that it sees show up in the folder. This allows you to take full advantage of all of DSLR Remote Pro’s features while having the images go into Lightroom automatically.

Summary

If you want to take tethered shooting to the next level than DSLR Remote Pro is probably worth looking into. The only real downside is that you are limited to the length of cable between the camera and the computer. For $95 you pick up a ton of functionality that the free EOS Utility doesn’t have. For my own studio shooting, I rely heavily on DSLR Remote Pro and as it continues to evolve it just keeps getting better and better.

Breeze Systems Website: http://www.breezesys.com

Goodbye Dust Bunnies

There are three things that I keep handy in order to keep my lenses clean. A good microfiber cloth, a Giottos Rocket Blower, and a LensPen. I do not use any cleaning process that uses chemicals since even the best will leave some residue. Preferably I don’t want to touch the glass at all so the first step is going to be to use the Rocket Blower to get as much off the glass as possible. If something isn’t coming off easily I turn to the brush side of the Lenspen. If the issue is something different like fingerprints (my personal biggest issue) then the best way to clean that is with the felt tip of the Lenspen. The carbon dust will clean and polish the lens to perfection.

The following video will walk through my cleaning process that I go through before any shoot.

Equipment Used

• Giottos Rocket Blaster Air Blower
• Microfiber cloth
• LensPEN Lens Cleaning System

Kerry’s Equipment List

• Think Tank Airport International 2.0
• VANGUARD PAMPAS 57 Backpack
• Canon EOS 50D 15.1MP Digital SLR Camera
• Sigma 24-70mm f/2.8 IF EX DG HSM AF Standard Zoom Lens
• Tamron AF 10-24mm f/3.5-4.5 SP Di II LD Aspherical (IF) Lens
• Canon EF 17-40mm f/4L USM Ultra Wide Angle Zoom Lens
• Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II Camera Lens
• Lensbaby The Composer for Canon EF mount Digital SLR Cameras
• PhotoVision 24″ Digital Calibration Target
• Westcott 6 In 1 Reflector Kit 30
• Giottos Rocket Blaster Air Blower
• LensPEN Lens Cleaning System
• SensorKlear Loupe and SensorKlear II Combo
• BLACKRAPID RS-1 Camera Sling Strap
• LumiQuest FX, Five Filter Gel Set with Holder
• Lumiquest Promax System
• WhiBal White Balance Reference Card
• ColorRight Neutral White Balance Filter
• ExpoDisc Digital White Balance Filter, 77mm
• Polaris Digital Flash Meter
• HonlPhoto Speed Strap for Shoe Mount Flashes
• HonlPhoto 8″ Snoot
• Honlphoto Gel Kit 2
• HonlPhoto Speed Gobo Flag / Barndoor / Bounce Card
• HonlPhoto 1/4″ Speed Grid
• Canon CP-E4 Compact Battery Pack
• Canon EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM Lens
• Think Tank Pixel Pocket Rocket
• Wolverine ESP 80 GB
• Canon Speedlite 580EX II Flash
• SanDisk 16 GB Extreme III CompactFlash Card
• Lensbaby Macro Kit

With the Canon EOS 50D that I am using now life has become MUCH easier with the Live View mode and the ability to zoom into the image and just nail the focus. In this video, I demonstrate exactly how this process works.

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What exactly is this colorspace stuff anyway? Basically its the amount of color that is contained in the file when you save it. The three most common colorspaces are Adobe RGB, sRGB, and ProPhoto RGB.  As my friend Rick Miller puts it, you can relate gamut to containers of beer. With sRGB being a 12oz can of beer, Adobe RGB would be a pony keg, and ProPhoto RGB being a full kegger.

The image shown here (courtesy of Cpesacreta) shows the relative sizes of the different colorspaces.

The difficulty here is knowing when to use which colorspace. Who would take a 12 ouncer when they can have a whole keg right? You would think, but the problem is that not all devices can actually display the larger colorspace  which can cause even more problems when it comes to viewing the images, add to that the lack of color management in most applications (like web browsers) and you will often get dull or washed out colors when viewing the images.

Wait a second, huh? If you use a colorspace that allows MORE colors, than why would the images look WORSE when viewing them? The answer that since almost no devices can actually display Adobe RGB, you wind up with an intepretation of the image causing it to look dull.

Effects of Color Space

Does all of this really make a difference? Let’s take a look at some images that were shot in RAW (thus no colorspace recorded on capture) and then saved as both Adobe RGB and sRGB using Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.

Adobe RGB

sRGB

Adobe RGB

sRGB

Adobe RGB

sRGB

Adobe RGB

sRGB

In all of these cases, the images saved as sRGB should appear more vibrant in Internet Explorer and Firefox since they are not color managed applications. Apple’s Safari browser is supposed to properly display Adobe RGB files and Firefox is supposed to have color management in upcoming versions. However, until everyone is using a browser you should avoid Adobe RGB in order to provide the best images to the widest audience.

What about ProPhoto?

ProPhoto offers the widest gamut of the available common color spaces so should have a place somewhere right? Well yes it does. The best use of the ProPhoto is to use it within your workflow to preserve the largest amount of color in your images and then only do a final conversion to sRGB when saving your images as jpegs.  This is quite easy with Photoshop and Camera Raw while Lightroom uses ProPhoto RGB internally (Geek Note: Actually, Lightroom uses Melissa RGB which uses ProPhoto RGB chromatisity values working in linear gamma, named after Melissa Gaul, one of the Lightroom engineers).

Should you shoot in Adobe RGB or sRGB?

This is another tough question that different people will answer differently. The simple answer is niether. Shoot in RAW and convert to the colorspace you want during your workflow process. If you want to shoot in JPEG then you have to make the choice. The best thing to do is actually experiment with your equipment and software to determine what gives you the best results. Some people think you should shoot in Adobe RGB and then convert to sRGB if the file is for the internet, while others think you should shoot in sRGB so no conversion or translation is applied, thus you should get more accurate color representation.

In the end, you have to make up you own mind as to what works best for you, but you do need to be aware of the differences and some of the issues you can run into based on your choice.

Author: Kerry Garrison

References used in this article

http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/sRGB-AdobeRGB1998.htm
http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/adobe-rgb.htm
http://www.steves-digicams.com/techcorner/October_2006.html
http://www.smugmug.com/help/srgb-versus-adobe-rgb-1998

DSLR Sensor

What are you really cleaning?

There are two components that we will look at cleaning, the first being the focusing screen mirror. If you remove your lens and look into your camera with a lens off, you will see a small mirror.  Dust typically doesn’t stick to this surface very much, so a few quick blasts of air from something like a Rocket Blower should keep the mirror in relatively clean and clear.  This mirror, however, only affects what you see through your viewfinder and not what the sensor sees.

The second component is the “sensor”.  To get to the sensor you have to put your camera into sensor cleaning mode which moves the mirror out of the way, letting you get to the sensor plate. It is important to note that we are never actually touching the sensor itself.  The sensor sits behind a thin sheet of glass and it is this glass that we will be cleaning.  Knowing that you are actually going to be cleaning a piece of glass, and not the actual sensor itself, will hopefully make some of you feel a little better about this process.

And for those of you who take your camera bodies to Canon and get a free cleaning whenever you want (like we do), be aware that the days of free cleanings are about over.  Manufacturers are soon going to be discontinuing this free service, from what we have been told.

Lenspen SensorKlear II CCD Sensor Cleaner and SensorKlear Loupe

Tools of the trade

There are many things you can stick into your camera body to wipe down the sensor, but the goal of this article is to show you how to do it right.  There are many, many products available on the market to clean sensors in DSLRs today.  And quite frankly, many of them just don’t make sense.  Recently, we were at PMA in Las Vegas and we saw the myriad of cleaning products and solutions available for this job.  It is both overwhelming and confusing.  Then, we came across a product and a solution that just made perfect sense.  It’s called the Lenspen SensorKlear II CCD Sensor Cleaner and the SensorKlear Loupe.  These two items, together with a blower ball like the Giottos Rocket Blower or the Lenspen Hurricane Blower, make perfect sense as a solution to the problem.

Blowing out the camera

What are we getting into here?

The inside of the camera body is a dark and tight space.  To know what you are getting into, the the SensorKlear loupe is what you use to look into the camera to see if there is any dust that needs to be cleaned off the sensor.  This device is specially engineered to light the interior of the camera body and sensor surface, magnify the view to the eye and allow easy side access to get to the sensor.

There are also two kinds of dust that we will encounter.  Dry dust and sticky dust. Dry dust will make up about 95% of the dust particles you will encounter which is good news since they are easily removed with a blower ball.  A few quick blasts on the mirror, then putting the camera into sensor cleaning mode and then a few quick blasts onto the sensor is usually all you need for the majority of the dust you will encounter.  This should always be your first step when cleaning your camera’s sensor, and many times will be more than enough to solve your problems.  Once you complete this step, either check your sensor with a SensorKlear Loupe or put a lens back on, turn on manual focus and shoot a photo of a white background.  Check to see if there are any spots on your image.

Any dust that remains on our sensor and refuses to budge with just a simple blast of air is known as “sticky dust”.  This dust may be sticky from humidity or it is static charged and wants to just hang on the sensor.  There are several ways to get the sticky dust off and dozens of companies that are ready to sell you all manner of cleaning supplies to solve this problem.  In the worst case, it is possible that a spec might not be so easy to remove.  There are brushes that may work, or sometimes they just end up moving the dust around.  The other products offered are chemicals that will often leave a residue on the sensor glass (and yes, they ALL leave a visible residue… some just less than others).  Depending on the environment, some dust could even have some oil on it and the best you can do with brushes is to move it around and never get it to come off.  That’s when a chemical process and swab may (worst case scenario) have to be used to get that stubborn piece of dust off.

Lenspen SensorKlear

But outside of the worst cases (which RARELY occour), a simple blow, look and swipe should handle all your needs.  This is where the two piece solution of the Lenspen SensorKlear II CCD Sensor Cleaner and the SensorKlear Loupe make the perfect combination.  Let’s get into detail about these two pieces.

The SensorKlear Loupe is an electronically lighted eyepiece that sits over the body where the lens normally sits.  With it’s multiple LED lights, it gives you a wonderful, lighted view of your sensor that is magnified many times.  With this, you can see every spec of dust and debris on your sensor’s surface.  This is the only way we know of today to effectively see what needs to be cleaned.  You simply tell your camera to pup up the mirror for sensor cleaning, remove the lens and lay the camera on its back.  Then, you put the SensorKlear over the body opening and turn on the light.

The Lenspen SensorKlear II CCD Sensor Cleaner is a pen-like device with a hinge in the middle.  It has a capped cleaner surface at one end.  This cleaner surface is a specially designed chamois surface that is shaped like a rounded triangle to allow you to get into the corner of the sensor area and reach any surface.  Unlike brushes that can simply move things around, this pen can wipe just the area where the dust sits and pick it right up.  If the dust is sticky, it will usually pick it up too, or in some cases, it will move it around and turn it from sticky to dry dust, which can just be blown out of the camera.  Either way, there is no form of dust it cannot seem to handle.

Using the SensorKlear Loupe and SensorKlear II CCD Sensor Cleaner

So, the next step is to remove any debris we see.  We are assuming at this point that you have blown out the camera.  With the SensorKlear over the opening, there is a side access opening.  You simple bend the CCD sensor cleaning pen at a slight angle and reach in through this side access opening, watching the whole time throuh the eyepiece.  You make a small wipe or blot of the area where the dust is and it is immediately picked up and swept away.

We know that this sounds like a product plug; and truthfully, it truly is.  This is the first series of products that have actually made us feel comfortable cleaning our own camera sensors.  And that is saying a lot.  As a matter of fact, we heard rumors that Canon service techs themselves use these products for the work that they do on customer’s cameras.  I guess that makes sense to us too.  After all, its the best solution we have seen.

SensorKlear and Lenspen CCD Pen

Lenspen Website: http://lenspen.com

Authors

Maurice Naragon
Digital Creations
Website Development and Marketing
Professional Photography in Orange County, CA

Kerry Garrison
Orange County Wedding Photographer

Canon DSLR Hot Shoe

During a wedding shoot one day I noticed that my flash was only firing occasionally. After the initial panic, I quickly figured out that if I held the flash with a little counter-clockwise tension, then the flash worked fine. At the first break, I tried my backup camera and it was doing the same thing. When I got home, I checked it against my daughter’s 20D and it worked fine, and it also seemed that the hot shoe on my cameras was loose compared to hers.Another symptom of this is that the flash will switch from E-TTL mode into TTL mode and the exposure will usually be very overexposed.

After some research on the net, I discovered that this is not an uncommon problem for cameras that get heavy use. Typically, a quick trip to a service center will fix it, but the actual fix is quite simple and you can help ensure that it doesn’t happen again.

What you will need

Protective Plate

The tools needed to make this repair are quite simple, although small. What you will need is a very small flat screwdriver and a VERY small Phillips head screwdriver. A typical cheap set of jeweler’s or eyeglass screwdrivers should do the trick quite nicely.

To make the fix more permanent, you may want to get some mild Loctite or other thread adhesive. I would not use the heavy duty stuff as that is only needed under heavy vibrations and someday, someone may actually need to take your camera apart for service so the more mild version should work perfectly.

You will also want a good clean work area, preferably with a towel underneath everything, if you drop one of the damned-near-microscopic screws you will be in a world of hurt trying to find it in the carpet.

Getting Started

Hot Shoe Removed

I don’t know if this is the same for Nikon or other brands, but I would assume its not too different, if you run into this issue on other cameras, its worth a try before sending it to service.

When you are looking down into the hotshoe, you will not see any screws, they are covered by a removable plate that slides off. This plate is a good thing to have there as on one of my cameras several of the screws were completely backed out and would have been lost if that plate hadn’t been in place.

There is certainly a technique to popping the plate off which is a bit hard to explain but simple once you get the hang of it. The way I do it is to slide the flat screwdriver under the plate coming from the rear of the camera towards the front. You want to be gentle here and not bend the plate, it will come off with very little pressure. With the screwdriver under the plate, the goal is to lift the back of the plate (side closest to the front of the camera) so that a little lip on it clears the bottom section. With a little pressure on the screwdriver to life the backend, and a little pressure on the plate with a finger it should slip out of place slightly. A little wiggling should allow you to pull it the rest of the way out.

Screws Holding Hot Shoe

At this point you will have access to the four small screws that hold the hot shoe connector in place. if you just want to tighten them up, go ahead and do so and skip to the section of reassembling the protective plate. If you want to use a little thread lock, then continue reading.

The cleanest way I have found to remove all four screws without dropping them is to loosen them all up all the way and then place a magnet (I stole one off the fridge). This will allow you to lift the hot shoe connector and all four screws at once. I then clean up the connector and the camera to remove any dust or debris that is there and put the connector back on the camera. If you are using some thread lock, you just need the smallest dot of liquid on the threads, you can do a quick dunk if you have small enough fingers or apply a little to the threads with a toothpick. Put the screws back in and tighten them up.

Putting the plate back on

Plate Rear Hooks

Oh sure, you popped off the protective plate like a pro, did a solid to your camera with a little Loctite, so putting this little piece of spring-steel back into place should be child’s play right? Its actually pretty easy to screw this part up and end up wondering for an hour what the heck you did wrong. Take special note of the picture here showiing how the plate goes back in with the little hoops going DOWN towards the camera. Those little hoops slide into two slots on either side so you have to make sure they are lined up when you push the plate into place and the rear lip slids into place. If you don’t have those two hoops in the right position, removing the plate again to reseat will be an excersize in frustration.

Trust me on this one, I am speaking from experience here. Once the plate is back in place properly, you are all finished and ready to go. If you are using some thread lock, be sure and give it a little time to dry before attaching the flash and torquing the screws, you might end up loosening them before they get glued into place which would really not be a good situation to be in.

At least you now have one thing you can fix if it becomes an issue for you.

Author: Kerry Garrison

It all adds up

If the visual references isn’t quite enough, then another way to think about it is to think of a perfect exposure as the combination of the right proportion of ingredients made up of ISO, Shutter Speed, and Aperture setting. If a perfect exposure = 9, and you have equal parts of Shutter, ISO, and Aperture, then you have a good mix (3+3+3 = 9). If you need to adjust one of the ingredients, then you have to adjust one of the others to come up with the same final number (2+4+3=9), subract from one, you have to add to another to make up the difference. If you have too much of one, without substracting from another, you end up with an overexposed image. Conversly, if you take away from one but don’t add another, you end up with an underexposed image.

The Sunny 16 Example

In a previous article we looked at the sunny 16 rule, this states that on a bright sunny day, a perfect exposure should be f/16, ISO 200, 1/200th of a second. (ISO and shutter are the reciprocal of each other). If we wanted a shallower depth of field and wanted a larger aperture like f/2.8, then since f/2.8 is 5 stops brighter than f/16, we would then need to compensate with either a lower ISO or a faster shutter. Increasing the shutter is the easiest in this example then we need 5 stops of shutter giving us a speed of 1/6400th of a second.

Low Light Adjustments

In low light we have the opposite issue, trying to get enough light into the camera. We only go so slow before we run into blurring issues with slow shutter speeds, and the aperture limit is going to be based on the lens we are using. If we still don’t have a bright enough exposure then we have to compensate by increasing the ISO speed.

Bringing it all together

While each setting can have an effect on the overall image quality, the sum of the three effect the overall exposure. For a refresher on the other settings, be sure and go back through these previous articles:

• Beginner’s Guide to Aperture
• Controlling Exposure
• The Sunny 16 Rule in Photography
• Capturing movement with shutter speed
• Understanding Depth of Field

Author: Kerry Garrison

“Hey Guys,

I got a question for ya. Sorry the answer to this might already be on your site somewhere but I’d just thought I would msg you instead. I was wondering if you had any suggestions for photography books either having to do w/ business or the technical side of things. I’ve read Professional Wedding Photography by damien lovegrove and am in the process of reading understanding exposure bryan peterson. I have fast track photography on order..

Maybe one to do w/ posing??? Its weird I study photography all day long everyday.. but when it comes down to being w/ the couple it’s like I forget everything I ever learned and freeze. Then i want to slap myself because I could have done this or this shot but was having a brief moment of anxiety. I suppose posing and things will come with practice and the more I do it but I really thought I would have the hang of it by now. Any suggestions? ”

Yes Heather, David and I both have a list of suggestions for you.

David’s Picks

• Jerry Ghionis’ Pic Pockets $80
  These are small reference cards that show a specific scene, then on the back it goes into detail as to how the shot was taken.
  https://www.theicesociety.com/?page=72
• Bambi Cantrell’s Cue Cards $100
  These are stacks of cards demonstrating different poses and ideas to give you recommendations for setups.
  http://cantrellportrait.com/extra/online_store.php
• John Mireles Look Book $75
  More like a paint swatch sampler, the look book contains a wide variety of common poses to help you from getting into a rut or just for inspiration if you need some.
  http://photographerstoolkit.com/lookbook

Kerry’s Picks

• Photographing People – Rotovision $26.00
  Excellent book on posing and lighting setups and each shot includes a 3D drawing showing exactly how the set was designed with the placement of lighting, subject, reflectors, camera, etc.
  Photographing People: Portraits, Fashion, Glamour
• Posing for Portrait Photography: A Head-to-Toe Guide by Jeff Smith – $21
  This is  great book that goes through the correct placement of each section of the body from head to toe with plenty of example images to help make the point.
  Posing for Portrait Photography
• Professional Portrait Posing: Techniques and Images from Master Photographers by Michelle Perkins $23.72
  This book goes through the particular styles of a handful of professional photographers to show their distinct styles for posing and lighting subjects.
  Professional Portrait Posing: Techniques and Images
• The Moment it Clicks – Joe McNally $39.59
  Joe is a master of lighting and this book, while designed as a book on lighting, uses almost exclusively human subjects so it also is an excellent book for posing.
  The Moment it Clicks

What is a RAW image?

By RAW, I mean an image that is shot with your camera image quality set to RAW mode which stores the actual sensor data for the scene that was shot. This is different than a JPEG image that is a rendered image of the RAW data that has different effects applied to it by the camera such as sharpening, saturation, and contrast. A good quality JPEG image can look incredibly good and can be printed at large sizes and will look great. A RAW image will need some form of software program to convert the RAW data to something usable. The most popular programs for this today are Lightroom, Photoshop, Aperture, Capture One (Nikon), and Digital Photo Professional (Canon).

Is there a technical difference?

Anyone that tries to tell you there is no difference in image quality between a RAW image and a JPEG is simply mistaken or ill-informed. From a purely technical perspective, a RAW image will always give you a better image. A RAW image simply has more data, for each pixel there is at least twice as much data on older cameras like my 30D and as much as eight times as much data with newer cameras that have more bit depth. This means that a RAW image has the ability to have a greater tonal range than a JPEG. A RAW image will also then have greater latitude than a JPEG image, giving you the ability to process the image to recover shadows and highlights more than you can if you started with the JPEG. Since white balance settings are applied when an image is saved as a JPEG, shooting in RAW will allow you to adjust the white balance during post processing without sacrificing any image data.

This is not an opinion, it is a pure technical fact. So let’s accept that this is true and that RAW has a distinct technical advantage over a JPEG saved from the camera. I don’t think we need to debate that RAW has an inherent technical advantage and I think some people get caught up in this. I think the real issue is whether or not you need the advantages of RAW versus the negative reasons for using RAW that we will look at later.

Getting down with the downside of RAW

The big debate over RAW vs JPEG is whether or not the pros outweigh the cons so let’s look at the cons and see what the downside of using RAW images is:

• Increased file size
  This is probably the biggest issue there is. RAW images are considerably larger files than their corresponding JPEG images. With my 30D, a RAW file will typically be around 5mb while a fine quality JPEG will be around 1.5mb. As the megapixel count goes up, the files get downright huge with RAW images from a new Canon 5D MkII being around 22mb each. If you are shooting lots of images, at a wedding for example, then the larger size of RAW files will be a significant hit. Since the files are larger, they will require more horsepower from your computer to process. For the same number of images, you will need more flash card storage.
• Specialized software needed to process
  If you can call Photoshop, Lightroom, or Aperture specialized software, then yes, you will need something like this or use the software that came with your camera. If you use something other than these programs then you may have issues dealing with RAW files. For a brand new camera, you may have to wait for updated versions of these programs before they can recognize your files. This also means that if your camera is discontinued in the future, there is no guarantee that your camera’s format will always be supported (this is a good reason to use DNG files, but that’s for another article).
• RAW workflow is different than a JPEG workflow
  Is it? If you are already using Aperture, Lightroom, or Adobe Bridge for processing JPEG’s, then there is little to no change in your workflow. Two years ago, before tools like Lightroom and Aperture, working with RAW images was such a pain that RAW was said to mean “really awful workflow”. Since many of us are using Lightroom and Aperture now, there is little to no changes at all for working with RAW files other than they take longer per image to download off a CF card.
• RAW images in third party tools don’t look as good as the JPEGs
  This has been a real serious problem for a while as only the camera manufacturers really have the secret sauce for decoding their RAW images properly. Adobe has pretty much solved this issue with Lightroom 2.2 and the inclusion of camera profiles that setup the RAW processor to match the settings used to create the JPEG images in your camera.

Again, we are looking at facts here and not opinions, but it is important to understand that there is a downside to using RAW files even if I personally feel that the negatives are typically blown a bit out of proportion with the exception of the increased file size which can be a really significant issue for heavy shooters.

The non-destructive workflow

One of the biggest advantages of shooting RAW is that it inherently provides you today with a non-destructive workflow. What it means is that there is no image degradation between saves and any given step in the editing process can be removed. If we are using any of the three most popular tools today (Photoshop, Aperture, or Lightroom) then when we edit a JPEG, and make our changes, those changes are permenant, and because we just re-saved our image as a JPEG some compression has occured, every time we do this we lose some image quality. Sure you can make multiple copies along the way so you can go back to previous versions, but that negates the whole point of JPEG’s saving disk space. I personally work in Lightroom and I can take my RAW images and apply as many edits to them as I want but these changes are simply stored as a set of instructions to Lightroom, thus the original image is never modified. This also allows me to make virtual copies of an image so I can have a color, B&W, Sepia, or dozens of different versions of an image and take up only a trivial amount of disk space since it is only storing the steps to make the changes and isnt storing a new copy of the image itself and again, no matter what I do, there is no image quality lost at all during the post-production process.

Is anyone still using JPEG these days?

If nobody was shooting JPEG anymore than I wouldn’t have so many questions about it but are any real professionals shooting JPEG and the answer is yes.

Carlos Baez is a wedding photographer from Florida, this is someone who makes his living delivering top quality images to high paying clients and yet Carlos shoots JPEG because he can consistently deliver great images without the extra overhead of RAW files. Carlos is an expert at lighting and understanding exposure so he doesn’t rely on post processing to get his images right.

Ken Rockwell is a huge advocate for shooting in JPEG mostly because a lot of people use it as an excuse to not get the image right in camera. Although he has an article about this (http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/raw.htm). I have posted a link to his article because he does make a few valid points but I think he does go over the top a little on some of the negatives while I do agree that many people use RAW without either knowing why or using it to correct their mistakes from not knowing how to use their camera properly.

Pros against JPEG

It’s only fair that I point out a few pros who have made the switch to RAW and some of their reasons for doing so.

Scarlett Lillian from Florida has been shooting RAW since she started shooting weddings but then tried going to JPEF to save disk and CF card space. After really giving it a try, she finally switched back to RAW because she felt she just wasn’t getting the color and skin tones from the JPEG files that she was when she was using RAW. She uses Photoshop with Bridge as her workflow tool.

David Ziser is, without a doubt, one of the biggest names in wedding photography and recent convert to the RAW side. David’s big switch came when he started using Lightroom for his workflow and then discovered that the images he was getting with Lightroom and RAW files simply gave him a better image than starting with JPEG. David details his experience in a post on his site, although he also make a case for use JPEG for less critical shots that will never be printed at larger than 5×7. Anything destined for the album or enlargements he suggests shooting in RAW and the filler shots can safely be shot in JPEG to conserve space.

Rick Miller who is a Senior Solutions Engineer at Adobe does a segment when he is demoing Lightroom where he shows a picture of his girlfriends dog that is a white curly haired dog. Rick took a picture of the dog that when the rest of the scene is properly exposed, the dog is overexposed. Saved as a JPEG, the details in the dogs fur are completely lost and unrecoverable. The same image shot in RAW is able to use tools like recovery and exposure control to regain all of the detail in the dog’s fur. This demonstrates how even a shot that is technically correct for the rest of the scene may still suffer from being shot in JPEG.

RAW or JPEG – Which is for you?

Since I am far more likely to forget to change my camera from JPEG back to RAW when I need to, I simply leave it on RAW and take the disk space penalty. With a large wedding costing me around 10-12gb of space, it isn’t that big of an issue. If I upgrade this year to a 50D or 5D MkII and I move to having 30-40gb of space per wedding, I may have to rethink this strategy. What I like about shooting RAW for weddings is that in the thick of things, if you do make a small error in exposure or white balance, it is far easier to correct it afterwards. I don’t use this as a crunch, but it is a safety net.

To decide If you should stick with JPEG all you need to do is to take a close look at your images and compare them with what you can get from a product like Lightroom and then decide if your images are good enough or if any improvements that you get from using the RAW image are noticeable and worthwhile.

What do some other photographers say?

Mark Teskey “RAW only. Shooting JPEG is like working without backing up files or a second body/flash. There’s no safety net with JPEG.”

JE Images “RAW all the way. if I need to tweak anything then I have full access to all the info..”

Denise Clay “[I shoot] RAW – I used the best film I could that matched the job in film days, why not do the same now with the best digital file?”

MrsBoesch “I shoot JPG. It takes up less space on my hard drive, and I am of the opinion that you should try to “get it right” the 1st time”

So what are you to make of this?

There is certainly a case to be made that higher quality final images can be made from using RAW files and that shooting in RAW provides a technical safety net (even if you dont need it because you are wicked good). The main issues of working with RAW for me are the non-destructive workflow and the ability to have multiple virtual copies of an image without eating up more disk space. I do believe that almost all of the main complaints about RAW have been more than satisfied with current software leaving the issue of disk space and storage being the only real issue, albeit a signifigant issue for some people.

In the end, the only thing that matters is that you are happy with the images that you are delivering and if you are shooting for clients, that they are happy with the images you are delivering. If you are shooting in JPEG and are happy with your images and you see no compelling reason to switch, then don’t. If someone like Carlos Baez can shoot a wedding in JPEG and he makes a LOT more per wedding than I do, I am not going to tell him he is wrong for shooting in JPEG. On the flip side, if you are shooting in RAW and the disk space is killing you and you are good enough that your images require basically no tweaks for color, white balance, exposure, fill light, highlight recovery, or saturation, then you may be a good candidate for shooting in JPEG. It all comes down to a personal choice. There is no right or wrong answer to this debate, its just a question of what works for you in order for you to deliver the best quality images to your clients.

Author: Kerry Garrison

Have you ever imported some RAW files and when you first open the image in Lightroom the image is vibrant and looks great and then all of a sudden the image switches to something that is less sharp and the colors are all bland? If you have seen this phenomenon, what you are seeing initially is the embedded JPEG image being displayed first and then the on-screen image changes to the RAW sensor data image. The reason why there is a difference is that the JPEG images have had your camera settings applied to them before being saved. With Canon camera, this is usually Standard, Faithful, Landscape , Neutral, and Portrait. Other camera brands have similar types of basic settings. Many people complained that the JPEG image was often very nice and it took a lot of work to get your RAW images to look as good as the JPEG image.

To solve this, Lightroom needed to have a way to understand what the cameras where doing to the images. Initially, you could use the camera calibration controls to dial in some default settings, but this was really inaccurate and rather a pain to use. Shortly after Lightroom 2.0 came out, Adobe came out with the first beta versions of the camera profiles. These profiles were actually based on the characteristics of the different cameras and can be used to very quickly get your image looking better right from the beginning.

Sometimes the effect is more subtle

For some people who still shoot JPEG instead of RAW, one of the complaints about RAW is that it takes longer to process RAW images to get them look good. Lightroom 2.2 with camera profiles solves this problem quite nicely. You can easily create a camera profile preset (or download ours here) and use them as an import preset so that it is applied to every image as you are importing them. Applying the Standard profile during import will get the vast majority of your images looking almost identical to what you would get from saving the image as a JPEG.

Beta Profiles

If you have installed the beta profiles, you can go ahead and remove them using the following instructions specific to your operating system.

Go to the following folder (based on your operation system) and delete anything with the word “Beta” in it’s title. Then restart Lightroom and all should be good in the world again.

Mac: /Library/Application Support/Adobe/CameraRaw/CameraProfiles
(note: the Library folder for Macintosh HD, not your user account)

Windows 2000 / XP: C:Documents and SettingsAll UsersApplication DataAdobeCameraRawCameraProfiles

Windows Vista: C:ProgramDataAdobeCameraRawCameraProfiles

Video Demo

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.0 Camera Calibration from Kerry Garrison on Vimeo.

Author: Kerry Garrison

While there are a number of other programs available to do HDR with, we are going to look at the three most common ones mentioned in most posts and blogs, these are:

• Adobe Photoshop CS4 – Merge to HDR Function
• Photomatix
• Enfuse

Photoshop CS4

To be completely fair, I am using the different HDR tools here with their default settings and am not doing any additional tweaking afterwards to make the images look better. That being said, the Photoshop result is certainly the worst of the batch. The dark areas are too dark, the bright areas are too bright and it just didn’t do anything to really impress me. I also cannot find any noticeable difference between Photoshop CS3 and Photoshop CS4 in the final output. Even though you could tweak this image in Photoshop, it would be quit a bit of work because you really need to darken the sky and brighten up the building and parking lot. There may be a particular type of image that Photoshop likes better, of perhaps it doesn’t like that the images covered a 4 stop range. If someone has some tips on working with the Photoshop HDR merge, please post them in the comments.

Photomatix

Photomatix is another commercial tool (http://www.hdrsoft.com) that many people consider to be the best HDR tool available. Comparing the images, the Photomatix output most certainly gave the most dynamic range, so much range that it is actually easy to get an image that doesn’t actually look natural. The way Photomatix works is a complete mystery as even in the overexposed image, you can’t see the detail in the windows and doorways of the building the way you can in this Photomatix output. From a “wow” perspective, it is most certainly the most vivid image and has an amazing amount of range, there is almost nothing in the image that is too bright or too dark. While this may be good for some images, if you are trying to replicate what you are seeing with your eye, this isn’t quite accurate. Is it stunning in it’s range? Absolutely, no question there, it wins hands down in that area.

Enfuse

Enfuse is a different type of tool that compares multiple images and chooses to keep the pixels it feels are the best exposed. Using Enfuse by itself can also be an exercise in frustration. To simply using Enfuse, I use LR/Enfuse from Timothy Armes (http://timothyarmes.com/lrenfuse.php) which integrates into Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. Using just the default settings, the result is an image that is much more natural and is truer to what you would see with your eye. A big advantage of using Enfuse (especially with LR/Enfuse) is that it is significantly faster than Photomatix, the downside is that you don’t get the amazing results that you can get from Photomatix. Enfuse is going to give you a far more natural look.

Summary

It’s not entirely clear if these is a real no-brainer choice between Photomatix and Enfuse as it is really dependant on what you are trying to accomplish with the final image. Photomatix can certainly deliver outstanding images that are virtually impossible to achieve any other way and can also create more natural looking results by toning down the resulting image making it a more versatile tool overall. Enfuse has its advantage in being fast and easy to use when integrated into Lightroom and will create very nice, natural looking results, and if that is your goal then sending a few bucks to Timothy for LR/Enfuse is well worth it. Personally, I have both installed and will choose when to use each tool based on what result I am looking for, and knowing the strengths and weaknesses of each option will make it easier for me to decide when to use which tool.

Author: Kerry Garrison

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What is this aperture thingy anyway?

Inside each lens is a diaphragm that can open and close, the size of the opening at any given setting is what we refer to as the aperture setting. On our cameras we refer to specific size settings as f-stops such as f/2.8, f/5.6, f/11, etc. While the obvious value of adjusting the aperture is to control how much light enters the camera, there is a secret hidden world beneath the hood that we will need to get a grasp of as well, but let’s start at the basics first.

For a given ISO setting and shutter speed we can adjust the amount of light entering the camera by adjusting the aperture, a smaller diameter (higher f-stop value) will allow less light in, while a larger aperture (smaller f-stop number) will allow more light it. If we refer to the Sunny 16 rule, we know that on a bright sunny day, if we are using ISO 200 and a shutter speed of 1/200^th then we will get a good exposure at f/16. As the sun goes down and there is less light, we need to allow more light into the camera, we can do this by opening the aperture up (again, using a smaller number) to allow more light in. This sounds easy enough right?

If that is all there is to it, then this whole aperture thingy would be a piece of cake and life would be good. It is enough to get you going into how aperture plays a role in getting a good exposure, so it is certainly a lesson worth learning and understanding well.

Have you collimated your rays lately?

The opening of the diaphragm also will control cone angle of light coming into the camera and this is why adjusting the aperture can affect the depth of field. To see how this works use your thumb and pointer finger to make a big circle, with one eye closed look through that at a finger on your other hand held about 12″ away. This is going to simulate a large aperture, you will be able to focus on the finger but you will have far less focus on something across the room. Next, make the circle very small and look through it again (now simulating a small aperture), you will be able to focus on both your finger and something across the room equally well. The reason for this has to do with the angle of light coming into your eye, with the large circle, light is able to come in very straight which creates a shorter focal plane, with a smaller aperture opening the light comes in as a cone shape giving a longer focal plane. While this simple experiment has a very subtle effect (not everyone may even notice it working) in your camera it can have a dramatic effect on how your images look.

Factors that determine depth of field

There are three factors that will determine the amount of depth of field you will have in your image, and taking from a comment post from Photo Larry, this points out the different factors:

In a comment from an earlier post, Photo Larry provided this very simple guide:

• Distance from the subject (Close=shallow, Far=Deep)
• Focal Length (Short=Deep, Long=Shallow)
• Aperture (Small=Deep, Open=Shallow)

Aperture Setting
We have already covered this one, the larger the opening (smaller f-stop number) the shorter the depth of field will be.

Focal Length
The longer the focal length the shorter the depth of field will be. This is why you will get more blurring effect on telephoto lenses than you will with wide angle lenses. The most popular portrait lens is the 70-200 f /2.8 because as you back up from the subject and use the longer focal length with a large aperture the more the background will get blurred out.

Distance to Subject
The further you are away from the subject, the more depth of field you will have as well. This is much easier to see with a long telephoto lens, if you focus on something very close to you, much of the background will be blurry, as you focus on things further away less of the foreground and background will be blurry.

Two images with different aperture settings

Summary

Hopefully this will help you understand the basics of what your aperture setting can do for you and how to begin to use it to your advantage both in getting enough light into your camera and by being able to add some extra flair to your images using the depth of field.

Author: Kerry Garrison

What is exposure?
Exposure is, simply put, the amount of light that enters the camera and hits the sensor. The more light that hits the sensor the brighter the scene will be. If too much light hits the sensor, parts of the image will be “blown out”, this is considered to be over-exposed. A scene that is too dark and the details in the shadows are lost is under-exposed.

Under Exposed Image

Over Exposed Image

How to control exposure
There are three camera settings that control the exposure, these are:

• ISO speed
  • Controls the sensitivity of the sensor to light
• Aperture
  • The aperture controls the size of the diaphragm over the shutter, the smaller the aperture number the more open the diaphragm is, allowing more light to enter.
• Shutter speed
  • The slower the shutter, the more light will enter the camera

We will look at these settings in more detail to see exactly how the play together later. First, you need to start thinking of light in terms of “stops”. A stop is not an exact amount of light, it is a relative amount of light, each stop of light doubles the amount of light. For example, if we have a single lightbulb as our base light source, adding a second lightbulb (doubling the amount of light) increases the light by one stop. If want to increase the light by another stop we have to again double the amount of light to four lightbulbs. Understanding this is going to be the key to understanding how the different camera settings affect our exposure.

ISO Speed
As already mentioned, the ISO speed will control the sensitivity of the sensor. The lower the number, the less sensitive. For low light you will need a higher ISO number to make the sensor more sensitive. The downside is that the higher ISO the more digital noise (grainy look) will show up which will degrade the image quality.

Each time you double the ISO speed you increase the exposure by one stop, so ISO 400 will give you one stop of exposure more than ISO 200, and ISO 800 will give you one more stop over ISO 400 etc. Some cameras have some in-between ISO settings to provide a finer level of control.

You currently see high ISO performance as being a major selling point for new DSLR cameras as this allows them to shoot in lower light conditions with less noise.

Pro: Higher ISO allows shooting in lower light conditions
Con: Higher ISO settings result in more digital noise

High ISO Digital Noise

Aperture
Aperture is a little confusing because the larger the number the smaller the size. The largest aperture lenses are f/1.0 although most of the good prime lenses start at f/1.4 – f/1.6. Zoom lenses typically are not available that can do more than f/2.8.

So besides letting in more or less light, what does the aperture actually do? The more light that comes in at a particular shutter speed, the shallower the depth of field. If you want more depth of field you use a smaller (higher number) aperture setting.

Pro: Larger apertures allow more light in and thus allow shooting in lower light conditions
Con: Larger apertures reduce the depth of field which may not be desirable

Shallow Depth of Field

Deep Depth of Field

Shutter
The faster the shutter, the less light enters the camera, the slower the shutter the more light will enter the camera. If you are shooting in low light conditions, you may need a slower shutter speed, however, too slow of a shutter and you can introduce blur from the subject moving, accidental camera movement, or both.

Sometimes a little blur can help portray movement and action, a sharp bike rider with a blurred background will make the rider look like he/she is moving fast where a tack sharp image shows no motion at all and would make the same image look boring. While blurring on other images can ruin the image.

Pro: The right shutter speed can really make an image more dramatic. Fast shutter speeds can freeze action, slow shutter speeds can add a dramatic motion blur.
Con: Fast shutter speeds require lots of light, slow shutter speeds are harder to control

Fast Shutter Speed

Slow Shutter Speed

Summary
By understanding the three variables that control exposure along with the pros and cons of each one, you will be able to better control the different options that are available to you.

Author
Kerry Garrison
http://kerrygarrison.com

Real and fake SanDisk Ultra II CF cards

The first fake CF card I came across was pretty obvious, visually. I received it with a used camera I bought, so I really couldn’t complain. It was basically free and I was thrilled at the time (2006) to have a 2GB card thrown in with a camera. But it was the performance of the cart that tipped me off to the real problem. The card was significantly slower in the writes than my other SanDisk Ultra II cards; about half the write speed or worse. Here is a look at the fake card next to the real card (right):

Back of 2GB SanDisk Elite CF cards

It is pretty obvious here which is the fake card. Come on, counterfeiters, can’t you do a better fake label than that? As I read up more, it seems that the early cards were easier to detect. Not only were the front stickers obvious, but the rear stickers were missing a lot of telling information. There were no serial numbers on the fake card. This was the first give-away. There was really not much of anything specifically identifying the card on the back label of the fake card. Notice that the real card on the left had the SDCFH identifier, as well as the patent numbers. This would be easy enough to fake too, if they weren’t so lazy. (right):

Close-up of real & fake SanDisk Ultra II CF cards

When you zoom in close (these images were made on a cheapo flatbed scanner at 1200DPI), you can also see the difference in the grain of the plastic. The fake card has a rougher texture and surface on it than the real SanDisk card. On closer inspection, you can see that the grain in the printing is finer on the real SanDisk card also. But these differences alone are harder to distinguish with the naked eye. If the labels were better duplicated overall, you might not even notice such small details as those. You can click to enlarge the photos to the right and get a better, more detailed blow-up of these differences. (right):

Sides of SanDisk Ultra CF cards

But here is one place that they did get clever… the serial numbering. Notice how close the printing is on both of the cards? Without contacting SanDisk, there is no way to tell which one is real and which one is a fake. (right):

So, recently I decided that it was time to buy me a new, 8GB SanDisk Ultra IV compact Flash card as my Canon 1DS Mark III burns through a lot of space at around 25MB per image. 2GB and 4GB cards were just not enough for events. I decided again to test my luck with a new SanDisk Ultra Card, and thought I would try to save a few bucks on ebay. What the heck… if the owner says it comes new in the box, that’s a pretty good sign, right? And sellers in Hong Kong can have real product once in a while too, right? Especially if it is in the new, retail box? And since it is not from the U.S., it could be cheaper, right? Like half price?

O.K., I have to say that right off the bat the first signs of trouble are right here. Half price, easily duplicated product from Hong Kong is a sure sign of fake product on ebay these days. However, for $29.97 shipped, it was worth it to see how good they really are.

Fake SanDisk Extreme package

Here is what I received, in a padded envelope from Hong Kong, partially crushed (right). Surprisingly, the box looks very very real. The gold foils are vibrant and shiny, the texture of the box is identical. And inside the box was the card in a plastic holder, a SanDisk keychain card holder and an SanDIsk RescuePRO 4.0″ installation CD. Pretty much every detail of the real box and contents was duplicated here with extreme care, and with only minor differences. At first glance, I was fairly convinced that this was actually real, or was it just a really damn good knock-off. After closer inspection, it seems that the later was the case. How could someone afford to go to all of this trouble?  Was there really that much profit in selling a $70 card for $30 on eBay with all of these production costs?

Real and fake SanDisk Extreme CF boxes

Looking at the box itself side by side with the real thing, it is hard to see many differences. The boxes look identical from the front, outside of the print color being a little off at the bottom (which is much more apparent in these photos and to the eye). Producing boxes like this with the gold embossing is not cheap process. Either these are the real thing, or someone is mass producing these to keep the costs down. I fear at this point that the compact flash counterfeiting business is not a small one. Someone is investing a lot of money into fake product and fake packaging here.

Back of SanDisk boxes

The back of the box is a bit different too. That would be the next clue on first, unopened inspection of the box. The real SanDisk IV box is the one on the left with a lot more text on it.  I only have 4 SanDisk Extreme IV boxes in my office (real ones).  The boxes for my SanDisk Extreme III cards are in storage, so I cannot see how much the back of the boxes changed from the III series to the IV series, but I assume that all boxes of series IV cards are pretty much the same.  This makes these changes on the back of the card more suspicious.

Real SanDisk Exreme Box

Fake SanDisk Extreme box

Now let’s look at a real box and content next to the fake box and content. They both have the same sleeve and slide-out insert format. They both have the same inside plastic housing and clear cover. They both have manuals, a CF hard plastic case and mini CD with software on them. They even both have a keychain CF card holder, although the real one has red text on it and the fake one white text.  The only piece missing from the fake packaging is a small advertising insert.

Real and fake SanDisk manuals

The manuals/documentation are slightly different.  The fake manual (on the right) is printed on cheaper paper with a much yellower cast to it.  The print quality is slightly lower than the original, real documentation pamphlet.  Interestingly, my real documentation is in Spanish, even though it was bought right here in the U.S. from an authorized SanDisk dealer (samys.com),   Notice the difference in phone numbers? I tried calling the number on the fake document and it rings SanDisk.  The phone number on the real pamphlet… wrong number/disconnected.  Now that’s funny.

Bottom of SanDisk boxes

On closer look at the bottom of the boxes you can see a numeric difference with the 8.0GB box. The real 2.0GB box has a part number of SDCFX4-2048-901. I assume that the 2048 is for 2,048MB, or 2GB. The 8.0GB fake box has a part number of SDCFX4-4096-904. Would that not be the part number of a 4,096MB card, or a 4GB? In an internet search for SDCFX4-4096, it seems it is the part number for the SanDisk Ultra IV 4.0GB compact flash card. There is our first clue.

8GB Fake SanDisk Ultra IV CF card

But, once we take out the CF card and begin to examine it, the details start to appear. The first thing I noticed was that it looked very close in all aspects to a real card. “Hmmm… maybe this is a real SanDisk Extreme IV.” Even the bottom edge of the card has a full serial number and ‘Made in China’ perfectly stenciled onto the case.

In further examination, I started to notice that the label was on crooked. But hey, that could be an issue in assembly that could randomly happen, right? Then, as the light caught it right, I also noticed two bubbles in the front label sticker. “Hmmm… this is getting more suspicious. SanDisk usually doesn’t let these kind of flaws through. This must be a hand-applied label.” Also notice that the corners of the label are square and not slightly rounded. This is another sign of a shortcut in the die cutting process of the fake label. On even further examination, you can see that the outer plastic edged of the card is different – different plastic to metal widths in the edges of the card.

8GB real vs fake SanDisk Extreme IV CF cards

The next thing I noticed is an issue which began to appear in several other articles, is that the holographic background to the lettering scans as a blue tint, and not gold like all of my other SanDisk Extreme cards. In this image (right), you will see that the fake card on the right has a blue tint to the lettering and the real card on the left appears more gold. Some of the elements are a little different size (like the E.S.P. logo), but overall it’s a pretty decent copy label sticker copy.

8GB real vs fake SanDisk Ultra IV CF cards

Next, lets look at the back of the cards. Again, the card on the left is the real card and the one on the right is the fake. Notice how it is a little dingy looking? That’s about the only difference on the back side. Even the corners of this dingy white label are rounded. It is hard to tell from the back side what makes this one fake, outside of the off-white paper used in making the label.  Again, a lot of work to make a fake card.  We are almost seeing efforts on the level of paper money counterfeiting here with all of the attention to detail in the print work.  Isn’t that another scary issue we have been reading about these past few years coming from China?

6 different CF cards

O.K., looks aside, its time to get down to the real meat of this.  How does the fake card perform in comparison to the real SanDisk Extreme IV cards?  To start, I do not have a real 8GB SanDisk Extreme IV card to test against, but I do have many 2.0GB Extreme IV cards that I bought from an authorized dealer.  This should be fine for our tests as the complete series of SanDisk Extreme IV cards are expected to perform similar to each other, within a small margin of error.  I also decided to throw in a few other generic and non-generic cards for comparison, and I included 2 separate SanDisk Extreme IV 2.0GB cards in the test to make sure that the real SanDisk IV cards perform equally in all aspects. You can see all of the cards (except for a 4.0GB PhotoFast Super card that looks identical to the 2.0GB Fotofast Super card) all in the image to the right.  The results are absolutely fascinating.

The test machine is a Mac Pro tower, 8 Core 3.0GHz Intel Xenon processors, 12GB RAM, Seagate 750GB SATA drive, Mac OS X v10.5.5 and a DELL 30″ monitor with 9in1 USB2 card reader built into it.  These specs are really irrelevant as every read and write was done with the same hardware and data.  That part is equal throughout the test.

The read/write copies were done with a folder containing ~1,000 jpg image files, 500k to 4.5MB each in size, 1.83GB (1,949,350,680 kbytes) total in size. 2 identical reads and writes were performed with this folder of images on each cards to insure consistency. All results were rounded to the nearest second. Margin of error is +/- 1.0 second.

Sandisk cards compared

This first chart is of read and write times for this folder of information to just the SanDisk cards, both real and fake. Notice how the read times are all pretty close, with the real SanDisk Extreme III and IV cards being almost identical, and how far off the 8.0GB fake card is from the others.  This is your first solid confirmation that you did not get what you paid for.  When you buy a card of this class and price, you are paying for speed, quality of build and the reputation of the company standing behind it.  This card is dropping the ball on all of those factors.  Below are the actual numbers from the tests.

All CF cards compared

Now, let’s throw some other cheapo cards into the mix.  The first is a Kingston Elite Pro 50X CF card (not necessarily a cheapo) and the other two are FastFoto Super CF cards, 2.0GB and 4.0GB.  These cards were bought 2 years ago off of an online discount house having a sale.  The interesting thing here is that these cards are really out of whack when it comes to write speeds, but their read speeds are good.  These were really cheap at the time I purchased them, and now you can see why.  However, the fake SanDisk 8.0GB cards are not terrible by comparison to the 2 year old generic CF cards. Below are the actual numbers from the tests.

SanDisk and fake CF cards

So, taking the data from the test and calculating MB/sec, we can see the relative performance each of these cards attains.  Let’s start with just the SanDisk cards and the fake SanDisk card.  Below are the actual numbers from the tests.

Transfer rate of all cards

Here is a comparison of all of the cards for transfer rate in MB/sec.  Below are the actual numbers from the tests.

A note to SanDisk:  Please forgive me for straying from authorized dealers just this one time.  The economy is rough, especially for those of us in photography.  The price was just too tempting.  I have purchased over 10 authentic cards from authorized SanDisk dealers in the past.  I promise not to stray again.  I offer this article to help others not stray either as a peace offering to you.

Maurice Naragon
Digital Creations
Website Development and Marketing
Professional Photography in Orange County, CA

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To put it simply, on a bright sunny day, set your camera on f/16 and set the shutter speed to the reciprocal of the ISO speed. So if you are set to ISO 200, then set your shutter speed to 1/200^th. If you want a faster shutter speed then increase the shutter speed and set the ISO to match. For example, if you want to shoot at 1/400^th of a second, set the ISO to 400.

f/16 - ISO100 - 1/100th

f/16 - ISO200 - 1/200th

To compensate for overcast conditions, simply adjust the f-stop to a more open setting like f/11, and keep adjust down as needed. A good chart of recommended settings is in the following table:

By utilizing the sunny 16 rule you will help ensure that you get the right settings dialed in quickly and easily. It’s always nice to have some frame of reference when getting started. When all else fails and you don’t know what settings to start with, remember the sunny 16 rule and adjust as needed.

Author: Kerry Garrison

First off you need to realize that studio flashes like the PhotoBasics StrobeLites are not automatic like the on-board or accessory flash on your camera. A studio light doesn’t know what you are trying to do and will not adjust itself for the camera settings you have dialed in. You also need a means of firing the lights off when you press the shutter, all that and more will be covered in this article.

Connecting the lights to your camera

PC Sync port on Canon 30D

The first thing we need to do is to connect the lights to your camera, for this we are going to need what is called a PC Sync port. On most Canon DSLR’s the PC Sync port is on the left side of the camera under a rubber flap. In the image here you can see the PC Sync port and the end of a PC Sync cable. In my typical setup I will have the main light plugged into the PC Sync port to fire it and the other lights will automatically fire at the same time because they have a built-in optical slave that will fire the flash when another flash is detected. Since this happens far faster then the mechanical shutter, the effect is that all of the lights fire at exactly the same. There is a limit of how fast the lights will sync to the camera but we will address that in a moment.

Weim Hot Shoe Adapter

If you are unlucky enough to not have a PC Sync port on your camera then you will need to purchase a hot shoe adapter. The recommended one is the Weim Hot Shoe Adapter which sells for about $50 at most places. This will got into your camera’s hot shoe (when an acessory flash plugs in) and has a PC Sync output port on it.

As I mentioned, the lights do have an optical slave so they will fire when another flash is used so you may think you can just use the flash that is built into your camera to fire off the big lights. While this will work to an extent, the problem is that unless you know how to adjust your flash’s output compensation, the flash is going to fire at a level that your camera expects will be correct for the given light, when the big lights fire along with the built-in flash, your subject will no be over-lit and the scene becomes overexposed.

Rear view of StrobeLite

The opposite end of the PC Sync cord plugs into the back of the light. In this image you can see the 1/8th inch mini plug port on the bottom right hand area of the strobe head. With the camera and the lights connected, you are all ready to take some amazing images right?

If ONLY it was that easy. Now actually comes the hard part, figuring out how to get the light set right for a proper exposure. Hang in there, it won’t hurt too much.

Getting the lighting right

Output Adjustment Dial

Nice, quality studio lights make your lighting easier right? I wish! In the last section I explained that your on-board or accessory flash will meter the scene and use the appropriate output for the exposure metering, not so with studio lights, at this point you are full manual.

On the flash will be an adjust dial to control the amount of light output. On the StrobeLites this goes from full power down to 1/4 power given you two stops of light output control. If you have a light meter and know how to use it, you have all the tools you need to get the shot right the first time. If you don’t have a light meter then you will need to continue reading.

Since I shoot with he same lights, in the same studio, with the same basic setup the vast majority of the time I know the basic light setup that will work without have to take too many test shots, I can usually get it dialed in within about three shots.  A key thing to note is that your meter in your camera is basically worthless at this point. You are going to want to shoot in manual mode otherwise the camera is going to try to adjust your settings for the metered light. In manual mode you have total control. So where should you start?

For most of my pictures I start with the following basic settings:

ISO: 200
f/Stop: 11
Shutter Speed: 1/200th second

In fact, those are the exact settings I used for the previous pictures in this article so far. Why these particular settings? For one, I like shooting at ISO 200, I like the results I get at that speed, f/11 is my normal aperture setting unless I am going for a particular depth of field effect. That leaves two ways to adjust the amount of light I need. I can either adjust the shutter speed or adjust the light output of the flash. You may think that you may want to go with a faster shutter speed to make sure you dont introduce any camera blur but in most cases you can’t shoot any faster than 1/200th or 1/250th depending on your lights/camera combination. With the PhotoBasics StrobeLites and a Canon 30D, I have never had an issue at 1/250th but I like the extra margin of safety of using 1/200th. Let’s take a look at what happens if you shoot faster.

Out of Sync Image

The image shown here was shot at 1/640th of a second, while this would be perfect safe if I was using the Canon 580 EX flash, the StrobeLites cannot sync with the camera at that speed so what happens is that the strobe went off too late causing the image to be partially cutoff by the closing of the shutter mechanism. Because of this issue we are limited to speeds of 1/200th or less so I usually will stick it at 1/200th and be done. That leaves adjust the light output higher if I need more light or using a lower output or a slower shutter speed if I need less light. Knowing that the only things I will need to adjust are my light output or shutter speed I have really reduced my possible settings from a handful down to basically one, and its either shutter speed or light output.

Since most of my shots are product shots, the lights are generally pretty close to the objects so I will start at a very low power output of the flash, if its too bright at the lowest setting and I am already at 1/200th of a second the only way to cut down on the light being captured is to move to a smaller aperture setting like f/22. If the light isn’t enough I can just reach up and dial in more light or use a slower shutter speed.

With a little practice and a handful of confidence, you will be getting your lighting dialed in within a few shots. Take your picture and then look at the histogram of the image on your LCD of your camera to double-check the exposure. If its too dark, bump up the light, if its clipped out, dial down the light. Nothing will beat just a bunch of practice with your own lights/camera/lenses/environment to get you familair with how your lighting setup will work the best and soon you too will be able to get it dialed in perfectly within just a few quick test shots.

Author: Kerry Garrison

The Math
Feel free to skip right over this part, this is the boring part, its so boring I thought of putting a picture of an artistic nude shot next to it just to keep people awake. Ok, so here we go. Before you can calculate the depth of field you first must know the circle of confusion for your camera.

Don’t get too lost on me yet, for most of us digital SLR users this is going to be one of two numbers. For most of us with APS/APS-C sized sensors this number is going to be 0.019948, for full frame sensors (the big Pro cameras) and 35mm film the number is going to be 0.02501. This represents the sensor size. Again, don’t get all lost on me yet, just remember the number for your particular camera.

The first thing we need to calculate is the Hyperfocal distance, for this calculation you will need to know the focal length of your lens. the aperture you are using and the CoC (circle of confusion) for your camera.

The math to calculate the hyperfocal distance is as follows:

HyperFocal = (FocalLength * FocalLength) / (Aperture * CoC)

Thus, the Hyperfocal distance of a 50mm lens at f/2.8 on an APS sensor (Canon 30D in my case) is 146.85 feet.

Next we need to calculate the near point which is going to be the closest distance that will be in focus given the distance between the camera and the subject. The math here (yes, it gets SO much worse) is as follows:

NearPoint = (HyperFocal * distance) / (HyperFocal + (distance – focal))

This is complicated somewhat because the focal length is in millimeters and those of us in the US are much better with feet and inches still so if you want the end value to be in feet you have to do some more conversions. If we are using the same 50mm lens, at f/2.8 on an APS sensor at a distance of 10 feet (3048mm) then our HyperFocal distance is 146.85 feet (44,749.23mm), giving us a near focus point of 9.37 feet (2,856.66mm). Are we following along still? Did I lose anyone?

Alrighty then, let’s now calculate the far point distance, this is almost the same as before but using slightly different math, so here we go.

FarPoint = (HyperFocal * distance) / (HyperFocal – (distance – focal))

Without changing our values that we used before, we now know that are rear point is 10.72 feet (3,266.81mm). Take note that the near point is actually closer to you than the subject is, typically the focus is 1/3 in front of the subject and 2/3 behind the subject.

The final step is to calculate the total amount of focal distance. This is one I can even do without a calculator, we simply subtract the far point distance from the near point distance.

TotalDof = FarPoint – NearPoint

Giving our example so far we have a total depth of field of 1.35 feet (411.48mm).

Let’s get practical
Why on earth would you want to know this? The simple answer is you may not, nor may you ever care to know it. When shooting portraits, weddings, events, and pretty much anything else it really isn’t going to matter much. However, if you are the type that wants to set up a shot and have it be EXACTLY what you want, there is simply no other way to know what the camera is going to do. This can be important in macro, food, and product photography. By knowing exactly where you focus points begin and end you can more accuratly design and execute precise shots.

Ok, how about the easy way?
This is kind of like taking a digital photography class and having to spend a semester cooking your own B&W film, its good to know the theory before taking on the practical application. So how can we do this much easier than having to pull an scientific calculator each time you want to setup a shot?

• f/Calc Spreadsheet (download) – This is an Excel spreadsheet that will do all the math for you. This was development by me and it free to use.
• f/Calc Windows and Palm App (website) If you want a simple but powerful Windows or Palm based pplication, f/Calc does Field of View, Angle of View, Magnification, Spot Meter, f Numbers, Depth of Field and Hyperfocal distance
• PhotoCalc for iPhone (website) – This application makes me want to have an iPhone or iTouch. Not only does it do everything for DoF, it also incorporates a sunrise/sunset function, flash exposure calculator, and Exposure Reciprocation calculator

I know this has been a doozy of an article to read through just to get to some free or almmost free (PhotoCalc is $2.99) tools to make it dead simple to perform these calculation. Hopefully this will help you perfect your images help you to use depth of field to its full extent.

Author: Kerry Garrison

Often we try to use the fastest shutter speed possible to help avoid blur but when shooting a moving object you sometimes need some amount of blur or it can look like the subject of the image is sitting still. In many cases you want to have the sense of movement in order to help convey the story of the object.In the case of the ceiling fan we want to show a little movement of the blades since the moving blades is going to be more typical of what you would see by looking at the fan once installed. We also want to show that this is a five-bladed fan so we have to be careful not to have too much blur that we loose all the details.

Let’s take a look at a series of shots taken at different shutter speeds:

1/6th Second - Way too much blur

1/10th Second - Way too much blur

1/25th Second - Better but lacking detail

1/40th Second - Looking good

1/100th Second - Not enough, just looks fuzzy

1/200th Second - Almost no movement

As you can see the images taken at the two extreme ranges show either far too much blur or not enough blur to make for a good image. The image taken at 1/40th maintains a little more detail than the images shot at 1/25 making it a more suitable image for our use.

Summary

The whole point here is to get you to experiment more with shutter speeds in order to capture a sense of movement, action, or speed. By adjusting the shutter speed you can control how much or how little the blur effect will have.