PopPhoto Flash

Halloween fun with the Nikon D90 and Lensbaby Composer

This is quick video sample from the Nikon D90 with a Lensbaby Composer and Xactoed Jack O' Lantern creative aperture attached. Notice how the specular highlights look like carved pumpkin faces when the fire is not in focus? When it is in focus, the little faces disappear--which is a bit confusing at first. Maximizing creative aperture effects with Lensbabies takes some experimentation, whether you're shooting still or videos, but it is a fun way to add some funky effects to your photos! Anyways, Have a happy Halloween!

--Jack Howard
Editor, PopPhoto.com

Wandering the floor at the PhotoPlus Int’l Conference and Expo

Coming as it did, just a few weeks after Photokina 2008, this year’s PhotoPlus felt a little anti-climactic. There was a lack of buzz about a super-hot product announced just two or three days ago. For instance, the Canon EOS 5D Mark II and Sony Alpha 900 feel like they’ve been here forever, when they are really just a few weeks old!  But the lack of a supernova product announcement or two overshadowing everything else allowed me to spend a lot more time wandering the edges of the show, scouting for cool products and services from smaller shops, startups, and companies that aren’t yet household names, but hope to be—at least in photographer’s homes…

 

 In no particular order, here’s a list of things that caught my eye at PhotoPlus this year:

 

 

Our Photos, Your Critique: Shadowplay at the US Open

Jack Howard looks for different angles with the Olympus E-3 and a bag full of fast Olympus Glass

Once again, Olympus extended their invitation to PopPhoto.com to test out their DSLRs and top of the line glass at the US Open, and once again, I accepted. (this is rapidly becoming one of my favorite end-of-summer traditions!) This year a small, select group of photography editors had all-over access with full-on photography credentials, meaning we had access to the photo dugouts and Olympus Photo Pit in Arthur Ashe Stadium, alongside sports photographers from all the major players—New York dailies, USAToday, AP, Getty, AFP, SI, and so on. And yes, shooting from the sidelines and photo wells behind the endlines is cool, no doubt about it.

And as we’ve reported previously, the Olympus Four Thirds system has really come into its own with the E-3.  Autofocus was swift and accurate in the daylight conditions with  the lenses I used including the 300mm f/2.8, 150mm f/2, 35-100 f/2, 14-35 f/2 to list just a few of our favorite Oly optics.

And the 2x lens factor at this level of competition—wow, we like it! A 150mm f/2 is a heck of a lot smaller and lighter than a Nikkor 300mm f/2.8 on a D3, but offers virtually identical framing. And that 300mm f/2.8 becomes an effective 600mm or a 1200mm f/5.7 with the 2x telextender—that’s some serious reach in a handholdable package! (Now if the next generation of the flagship Olympus SLR could crank the burst rate up to say, 9 or 10 frames per seconds, we’d be really, really, happy.)

Despite the exclusive access to the photo pits and sidelines and other areas the photo credential offered, I found myself gravitating to the upper decks and catwalks of the stadia—many  of which are accessible to the general admission crowd—to  exploit the long reach of the arsenal of Zuiko glass in my bag. These heights offer clean, crisp, and colorful geometric backgrounds free of distracting elements, which allowed me to focus on a portfolio-building self-assignment I’ve been thinking about without acting on for far too long:

Make the shadow an integral element of the sports action photograph.

Five of the selects (two with varied crops) follow on the jump.

Lexar’s new UDMA card is big and fast. Just like we like them.

I’ve got a secret to share: for the past month, my CF card of choice has been an early production sample of Lexar’s new Professional UDMA 300x 16BG CompactFlash card. It’s so hot off the press that it was shipped to me before the labels were finished being printed! Instead of the usual Lexar branding you’ll see on the shelves, my version of this card is bare metal with a Brother P-Touch Label stating simply Lexar 16GB 300x. Labels schmabels—so long as it works!

 

And indeed it works. After a dry run to ensure read-write-rewrite functions (fire off a few frames, dump to computer via Lexar FW800 UDMA card reader, trash DCIM folder, repeat), I threw this little chunk of big, fast solid-state memory into any and every CF-based camera I happened to be using, including 2 UDMA-speed cameras, the Nikon D3 and Olympus E-3 and fired away.

I’ve shot RAW+JPEG HDR bursts with the Nikon D3, the US Open with the Olympus E-3, and my vacation to Bermuda with the Canon 1D Mark III with no field failures and no transferred data corruptions to report. It’s big—it’ll hold hundreds of RAW files from just about every DSLR, and it’s UDMA-fast, so it’ll never be the bottleneck with any of today’s cameras. And if you’ve got a Firewire 800 port on your computer, you should be able to dump the full 16GBs of digital images to your desktop in just under eight minutes.

 

Big, fast, and worry-free—that’s how we like our memory. So we can forget about it and concentrate on making photos.

 

The new Lexar 16GB card will be available later this month. We're waiting for pricing info and will update ASAP.

For more on UDMA and card speed ratings, check out Speed Racers.

 

 

 

Have a Ball with this Experimental Software

Over at MediaChance, the specialty imaging software company that brought us Dynamic Photo HDR, they've been getting into Orbs lately. The newest version of DPHDR has a "Light Tuner" and a Grayscale Channel mixer that are both Orbs.

And now they've just released "Orbis Luminum."  They call it "experimental software." It will work with RAW or JPEG images, and there's only one control: The Orb. That's it. Spin the orb, see what it does, and click Process if you like the results.

There's a free trial, and if the Orb moves you, the full version is only twenty four bucks.

—Jack Howard
Online Technology Editor

Astro Images

Over in the PopPhoto.com forums , Paul LeFevre of southern California goes by the name "Astroimager" for obvious reasons. Paul's "hobby" is astrophotography. And when we save "hobby" we mean it! As if building his own custom telescopes wasn't enough, he's even built an observatory in his hilltop home!

Paul has been kind enough to share his astrophotography tips for us mere mortals on several occasions, Check out:

• How-To: Astrophotography 101 

• My Project

• Imaging the brightest Supernova Ever

But when it comes right down to it, Paul LeFevre is lightyears ahead of most of us when it comes to deep space imaging, as this recent post in the Reader's Gallery shows. Over 24 hours of capture time. And then more than 100 hours in the digital darkroom to make this deep-space masterpiece!
—Jack Howard
Online Technology Editor

Your Photo: Our Critique

This is a great "learning shot" submitted by Joe Haas. We've all tried some variation of night reflections on water at some point. You've obviously got a stable tripod, and that's a good thing. But the left high tower is totally blown out, along with the reflections in the water on the left of the frame, and it really sucks the eyes there. Exposure on the ship is right-on, and that's a good thing, too. But overall, this feels like a practice shot. Experiment with the exposure for shots like these, and consider an HDR bracketing sequence to balance out the dramatic differences between light and dark.
—Jack Howard
Online Technology Editor

This photo gets two stars on the PopPhoto Flash rating system.

The PopPhoto Flash rating system.
*= This part of the camera is called the lens
**= Don’t quit your day job
***= Good, but not yet great
****=So close you can taste it
*****= Yes, a thousand times yes!

Want us to critique your shots? Send 'em to us!

Your Photo: Our Critique

This photo was submitted by Brian Christopher, he obviously put a lot of thought into this photo, from the angle of attack, deep depth-of-field to keep all the wooden chairs sharp, and the dead-on exposure that shows the wonderful organic textures in the various wood surfaces and creeping ivy. The kicker, obviously, is the "open" sign sitting casually in the planter, which, unlike the side of the building, doesn't actually have any living matter in it. It's a visual punchline, and it works really well as a counterpoint to the moderate decay evidenced in the image. Well seen.

My biggest nitpick? I'd crop a touch from the left of the frame for two reasons--minimize the vanishing point eye-draw to the dead background space, which also gets rid of the distracting hard-edged steel beam.
—Jack Howard
Online Technology Editor

This photo gets four and a half stars on the PopPhoto Flash rating system.

The PopPhoto Flash rating system.
*= This part of the camera is called the lens
**= Don’t quit your day job
***= Good, but not yet great
****=So close you can taste it
*****= Yes, a thousand times yes!

Want us to critique your shots? Send 'em to us!

Your Photo: Our Critique

This photo was submitted by Jay Camus. The irony of the cars parked in front of the no parking warnings is funny, but it's not enough to carry this photo due to the other shortcomings. The exposure is dead-on for the textures and tones of the center building, which is nice. But again, there's just too many small nitpicks with this photo to have it really stand out as more than a disposable one-trick pony. Nothing is level--it's all askew. With architectural shots, something should be at right angles, even if there is keystoning along the other axis, have a defining vertical or horizontal line (or take it to an absurd extreme of disjointedness with a dramatic tilt--otherwise it just feels like sloppy shot-leveling)

Power lines are generally a scourge upon the land--consider re-shooting this tighter, at a different time of the day (for less shadow-throw on the words.)  Try using an ultra-wide lens and stand near the "No Parking" warning in the right of the frame and build this as a forced perspective foreground, with the cars and the rest of the building and other warning falling away. And stop down to keep it all in focus.  Let me know if you resubmit a follow-up shot and I'll make sure I see it.
—Jack Howard
Online Technology Editor

This photo gets one star on the PopPhoto Flash rating system.

The PopPhoto Flash rating system.
*= This part of the camera is called the lens
**= Don’t quit your day job
***= Good, but not yet great
****=So close you can taste it
*****= Yes, a thousand times yes!

Want us to critique your shots? Send 'em to us!

Your Photo: Our Critique

There's a great, distinguished feel to the snowy egret, and we love the catchlights, but we hate the totally overblown highlights. It's a real simple fix. Crop it to a tighter headshot in square format to get rid of the blown highlights and it's a much stronger composition. Remember, there's no rule that a photo can't be cropped, or that it much be rectangular and not square!
—Jack Howard
Online Technology Editor

This photo gets three stars on the PopPhoto Flash rating system.

The PopPhoto Flash rating system.
*= This part of the camera is called the lens
**= Don’t quit your day job
***= Good, but not yet great
****=So close you can taste it
*****= Yes, a thousand times yes!

Want us to critique your shots? Send 'em to us!