Anyone that knows me is probably sick of me ranting on and on about the Nikon D4 by now. You see, I’ve been waiting for over two years to move to full frame and, with the various disasters in Japan and Thailand, that wait kept getting pushed out and out. When the D4 was finally announced in January, I completely fell in love. It was the latest generation Nikon full frame body, fully pro-equipped, 10 frames per second, 16 MP, ISO 204,000 and change. The specs were amazing, it is the latest greatest, and I convinced myself that it was exactly what I needed. So I ordered one.

Ordering a D4 got me in the queue for an unknown delivery date. But at least I was on the list. The only nagging factor was the rumor of another camera announcement to come, presumably the D800, but that announcement was purported to come with the promise of a 36 (!) MP sensor. I’m not sure that was for me.

I’ve shot with big sensors before. Most notably I had the opportunity to use a Nikon D3X (24 MP) for a short time. I generally loved the feel of that camera (same form factor as the D4) but the sheer image density was a little much to get my head around. The camera felt slow and clunky (~1.2FPS) and managing the huge images was a challenge, especially compared to my 12 MP D300 at the time. Thus, when the D4 announced at 16 MP, I felt like it was right in the pocket. And with it’s exceptional low light performance and ability to shoot like a gattling gun (with a 100 frame buffer nonetheless) I was convinced that this beast, built to shoot action, sports, and photojournalism, was perfect for me.

Only one problem, I don’t shoot action, sports or photojournalism.

I like to think I do. I’d love to shoot more auto racing, and plan to do more aviation photography, but when I sit down and really think about it, I shoot in the studio and I shoot landscapes. Sure the D4 would do the job, but then there’s the D800, and especially the D800E.

Nikon announced the D800/800E in early February, and I read the announcement with baited breath. The D800 offers 36 MP, in a smaller body than the D4 (no built-in vertical grip) albeit still the build of a Nikon “pro” body. There’s no 10 FPS (4-5) and speculation puts low-light performance good, but not nearly in the same cap as the D4 (or even current D3s), but when I sit down, and make a list of what features will serve me best, the D800 fits the bill.

No, it’s not the flagship. And there will be features I’ll miss (ethernet tethering and built-in webserver, for one – perfect for the studio and probably more useful for D800 shooters than D4, frankly). But at 36 MP and half the price of the D4, I can learn to deal with the huge images (and can afford investing in more compy horsepower to do so).

It means I’m going to have to be more careful, more precise. Bit that’s a good thing. This camera is going to be awesome, but at the same time, it’s going to take development of real skills to take advantage of this camera. But I’m looking forward to the challenge.

 

I’m not so sure about the title, but Glamour Photography just ran a piece on me and is showing some of my glamour and art work. A word to those used to my usual Flickr stream, now you’ll know why it’s been quiet for so long. My work shown here isn’t exactly Safe For Work, but I hope that some might find it beautiful, alluring, or at least interesting. I’ve had the opportunity to work with some very talented, creative people and can’t thank my collaborators enough for the great opportunities photography of this style has afforded me.

 

R.I.P. Steve Jobs.

It’s 8pm on a Wednesday night and I’m bawling my eyes out. I just watched TWiT’s coverage of the passing of Steve Jobs and I don’t know what to say. But I have to say something.

It seems silly, but when you think about it, I work in entertainment. I fancy myself a creative. I can’t remember a day that I touched a computer and it didn’t have an Apple logo on it. Apple has made me able to do what I do, to be what I am, to create, and innovate.

I’ve made movies, I’ve edited photos, I’ve written papers, I’ve written apps, I’ve conversed, and shared Christmas with my family from far away, and I’ve said “hello” and “goodbye” and chatted and fallen in love and fallen out and felt connected and been disconnected. All on a Mac.

I saw my first ASCII porn on an Apple II.

I don’t know the guy. I’ve been to the Mother Ship and witnessed the con-trail of Steve. I’ve been a part of a company that sold to Steve. And that sucked.

But I wouldn’t be sitting here, right now, typing this post without Steve.

Thanks, Man.

Watch This.

 

It looks like there may actually be some hope. I’ve been ready for a full-frame camera for some time.I want the added control of DOF mostly, as well as the image quality you see from FF sensors. I don’t know what it it, but there’s definitely a quality that can can be exploited with a full frame (or bigger camera). I’m a Nikon shooter and would have already purchased a D3s or D700 were it not for timing. I’m no McNally, Kelby or Jarvis, and I can’t write off my photo purchases, so I really want to optimize my dollar. With the threat of a new FF camera looming from Nikon, I quenched my retail therapy thirst and picked up a D7000 (more of a cross-grade than an upgrade from my D300 – which I still adore) and got more megapix and a little better IQ. But I still want that full frame. In fact, my desire for big sensor is so acute, that I have actually been shooting a bit of medium format FILM to stop the jonesin’.

So nikonrumors.com has finally thrown down the glove on a D800 announcement in late October. Granted this is a rumor, and nikonrumors.com is notoriously wrong, but they seem pretty confident on this one. I’m both elated and a little apprehensive about the possibilities. First let me tell you what they are saying and then I’ll tell you why.

Nikonrumors.com reports the following Google translation of some info they received from Germany:

• What number of pixels is 3630 megapixels.
• 4 frames per second continuous shooting in body only, about 6 frames per second will be used to DX mode with the optional battery pack.
• A little late to be released by the model resolution sought to eliminate the low-pass filter.
• Full HD video in 1920 × 1080/30p.
• Headphone jacks, can be input from an external device such as a PCM sound recorder. Corresponding to USB3.0. Be available in new small wireless transmitter.
• 86K pixel split control, AF, exposure, white balance, etc. compatible. Face Recognition AF features.
• Larger LCD monitor, automatic brightness adjustment, the structure is not cloudy.
• Two media CF card and SD card slot.
• Shutter durability of 200,000 cycles.
• Market price is about 300,000 yen. The announcement on October 26, released on November 24.

What do I think? Well somehow NR translated “3630 Megapixels” to mean 36MP sensor. That’s a LOT of megapixels.  Now we all know it’s not about the megapixels and Nikon has been loyal to improving image quality and low light performance over the megapixel game for a long time and they are to be admired for that. For the most part I concur, however I did upgrade to the D7000 for exactly that reason. While certainly the D300, at 12Mp, is excellent in terms of IQ and performance, when shooting with my Canon 5DM2 buddies (21Mp) I realized the one advantage of more Mp…crop.

I shoot a lot of sports, especially air shows. Not to mention that I use a wheelchair and often “zooming with my feet” is not an option. I’m perfectly happy with a 12Mp image, but it’s even better if that 12Mp can come out of a bigger image. By going from 12Mp (D300) to 16Mp (D7000) I just gained a 30% crop advantage. That, combined with the 1.5x DX sensor on the D7000 gives me some real reach.

The situation is even more dire with fullframe, where the automagic “1.5x teleconverter effect” isn’t in play, I would love a fullframe sensor with more pixels, just to even the playing field.

BUT 36Mp!?!?! WTF Nikon?

For studio work, that’s awesome, but I’ve used (and lusted over) the D3x (24Mp) and that’s a lot of image to shoot, transfer and edit. More than what I need at the expense of  low-light performance. If 36Mp is going to cost us ISO, I’m not as excited as I thought I would be with this camera rumor.

However, there is hope. This is nikonRUMORS.com after all, and this is all speculation. What if the translation of  ”3630″ really is a longitudinal reference rather than one of area? What if 3630 is the short side of the 2×3 sensor image? That makes the long side 5445 pixels with a resulting image density of 19.7Mp. NOW WE’RE TALKING!

Ok, this is just speculation (peppered with hope), but so is nikonrumors.com. But at about 20Mp, Nikon could still maintain ISO and performance with real image density.

Regardless, I’ll probably buy one.

 

Late last year I got excited about the possibility of shooting tethered to my iPad. Back in December, it seemed that the best solution at the time was to USB tether the camera to a computer on the same network as the iPad and then have software on that computer push the images to the iPad. A little clunky, but I made it work and wrote about it then. I actually tried this method for a shoot, and the sheer inconvenience and trouble of getting the USB connection to work and be reliable just made the matter impractical. I never published that blog entry, mostly because I felt there had to be a better way. Ive posted it below just to demonstrate how far we’ve come.

Ratchet ahead to this spring and my discovery of ShutterSnitch. ShutterSnitch is a fantastic iPad app that will wrangle images over WiFi from to your iOS device from a variety of sources, including an Eye-Fi card transmitting from your camera. Rob Galbraith had an excellent writeup on his blog and I immediately activate Amazon Prime to get an Eye-Fi Pro card on its way to me ASAP.

It was a good idea, but unfortunately the Eye-Fi card, being an SD card, required an adapter to fit in the CF slot of my D300. I gambled that this would not be an issue, but unfortunately the functionality of the D300 and the complication of the CF adapter left the results less than stellar, with intermittent transmission at best. Sadly, the new Eye-Fi card and adapter went back to Amazon and I relinquished.

Enter D7000. A few weeks ago I indulged myself in a new camera body. With the realization that its going to be awhile before Nikon updates their pro line, I invested in a D7000: Nikons top consumer camera. At 75% the price of my D300 and three years advancement in image quality, it seemed a no brainer. Im very happy with the camera, and Ill write about that at some point soon, but the D7000 has one feature that makes it ideal for my tethering experiment: dual SD card slots.

With two slots and the ability to direct images in various ways to either slot, I set the camera to place the RAW image files on card one and place lower resolution JPEGs on the second card. And that second card is my original Eye-Fi card from several years ago. Old technology, but still functional.

Holding my breath, I launched ShutterSnitch on my iPad and saw it find the Eye-Fi card straight away. One click and about 10 seconds later, my image was appearing on the iPad in all of its JPEG glory. It actually works! No intermediate computer required. Just a common WiFi network and straight from the camera to iPad. Its very cool.

Its not the fastest performance in the world. I can certainly shoots lot faster than the camera can transmit the images, but for portrait and studio sessions, it looks like it will be completely practical and I intend to make this setup a standard part of my kit.

Eye-Fi has announced their own solution that requires their newer cards. I believe these new cards may also be easier to setup as they dont require a computer to bind the card to your WiFi net, but for studio application the old card works fine for me and I am really excited about the possibilities.

From December 2010…how far we’ve come…

This is sort of the holy grail. Popping shots from your camera and automagically having them appear on your iPad for review. I know I want it and so do many others.

There are solutions out there that offer this claim, and for the most part, they work. But none, as far as I can tell, really offer the convenience of cordless operation.

I began investigating the possibilities and, while Im still waiting for the right solution, heres what I did find as far as functionality.

The first thing I tried was OneOnes software, Capture One. Capture One is a full featured RAW processing and developing tool that, for me was redundant with software I already have. I do my RAW developing in Apples Aperture, but other applications, like Adobe Lightroom, Photoshop, Nikons Capture NX and others do the same thing. So, for me, the investment in Capture One wasnt really worth it, however it does offer one unique feature.

Capture One, like Lightroom and Aperture, supports tethering, and offers a free companion application for iOS 4 (iPhone and iPad) that, when Capture One is serving images, can see the Capture One application via WiFi and display the images recently captured. I tried the system and it seemed to work as advertised, although I occasionally had issues getting the iPad app to see my Capture One software. There is one big thing to realize when considering this solution, and this applies to other solutions as well, while the iPad is wireless, the camera is not. This solution still requires a USB cable from your camera to your computer, in my case a MacBook Pro.

So, for a photographer who wants the portability of just using an iPad, this just doesnt really make sense. Also, the images are displaying on your McBook (or whatever computer is acting as the tether/server computer) as well as the iPad. For me, the iPad certainly had some coolness factor, but with the images displaying on my Mac as I shoot, it was a bit redundant.

There are a few cases where I could see this as a useful solution. In a studio it may be convenient to tether to a machine that is out of the way, say a workstation designated for this purpose and then use the iPad as a display as you move around. This would add the convenience of not having to move the computer, however you still have to drag the cord around and are limited on USB run length.

Another advantage might be that you could give your clients the iPad to view as you go. This is probably the most rational reason to use this technique prevents huddled clients crowding your Mac display.

For me, however, with Capture One just shy of 400 bones, it just isnt an elegant enough solution. There had to be a better way. And then I found this:

Tethered Shooting to a Wireless iPad”Tethered Shooting To A Wireless iPad – Very Cool!!!!! « Brent Pearson’s Photo Journey

In his blog post and video, Brent Pearson shows how to use Lightroom and a 10 dollar app called Air Display to display the results of his tethered shooting on the iPad. I use Air Display to use my iPad as a second monitor for my MacBook Pro and it works seamlessly. While I use Aperture instead of Brents choice of Lightroom, both support tethering natively and Apertures control of output to display really makes the combination of Aperture and this little app work nearly as well as Capture Ones solution.

Simply connect your camera to your Mac via USB and select a Project in Aperture to tether to. Select File-Tether and youre set to go. From the View Menu set your Secondary Viewer to to Mirror or Alternate and viola! your tethered imge will appear on your iPad.

Pretty cool, huh?

Now we just gotta get rid of those pesky USB cables.

 

This most likely happens as Aperture converts the image to a tiff, losing the bulk of the image metadata, as it passes the image to the plugin.

Call me anal retentive, but that really bugs me. I like the fact that Aperture remembers what lens I used, just like my exposure settings. This is useful not only for judging the quality and usefulness of my equipment, but certain applications like Photoshop CS5 can even do lens correction for popular manufacturer’s lenses (as well as based on lens data submitted by users for more obscure glass). Unfortunately, Aperture loses this data when round-tripping an image through a plug in or editor, my guess in the process of generating a working file (tif) (which in itself is a pet-peeve – see my previous post).

Well, I discovered a wonderful thing today. When using my “export Master” Applescript technique to get an image to Photoshop and back, the image retains the lens information just fine. Just another reason why my new workflow kicks more ass than I thought.

 

Had a fantastic shoot today. Leveraged the ringlight extensively and loving every minute of it. Maybe it’s a bit cliché but it definitely makes a statement with the shadowless fill and telltale shadow. Fun stuff.

 

I’ve been wanting one for quite a while and have used one of the popular speedligh ring flash adapters, but nothing replaces the real thing. No it’s no Profoto, but it didn’t require a payment plan and I’m really happy with the price/performance ratio of my beloved AlienBees.

So I had the opportunity to give the ring flash a go today with a young model in a quick impromptu photo shoot. I also found myself trying some new processing techniques inspired by some of my favorite photographers.

Funny how that works. You see a look that you like, in this case I was inspired by a tutorial I watched by commercial photographer Joel Grimes who has a unique style of combining lighting techniques with post processing to get really dynamic images. I set off on that path but found my own way, stealing a little of Grimes’ contrast technique and adding a bit of my own propensity for high saturation and depth of color.

I don’t know if the look will stick, but I Iike it for now.

 

Don’t get me wrong. I love Aperture. It is my application of choice for cataloging and storing my photos, and for the most part, editing and finishing too. However, lately I’ve been finding myself doing interesting things in Photoshop that require layers, compositing multiple images and such, and have been frustrated with getting my RAW .NEF (Nikon’s RAW format) files out of Aperture and into Adobe Camera RAW for use in Photoshop CS5.

I also am finding a distinct advantage to using Adobe Camera RAW in certain cases for RAW processing (especially when that result is going to go into PShop as a smart object and be part of a bigger workflow) instead of Aperture’s excellent RAW processor. Aperture 3 changed the way that the database is organized and while you can right-click an image and show the RAW file in the Finder (and subsequently drag it to PShop or ACR) the Aperture Export command does not support exporting the NEF (or CR2 or whatever RAW file you use) directly to PShop (or whatever editor you have selected as default). It converts it to tiff or PSD first, baking in the RAW conversion.

So I decided to add a feature to export the Master to a temporary location and then pass that to PShop as a Smart Object. As a Smart Object, the NEF file layer can be double-clicked to open in ACR and viola! ACR processing in one click from an Aperture Library selection.

To install the script, right click and download the following file: Export RAW to PShop

Unzip the script (if it doesn’t automatically) and place it in ~/Library/Scripts/Aperture (that’s the Library directory inside your home directory – if there isn’t already an Aperture directory inside “Scripts” feel free to make one.

To make the scripts menu show up in your menu bar, you must activate it if you haven’t already. Open “Applescript Editor” (/Applications/Utilities/Applescript Editor) and select “Show Script menu in menu bar”

Once you’ve turned on the Script menu and installed the script, you should be good to go. Launch Aperture, select an image or images and from the Script -> Aperture menu, select Export RAW to PShop.

Simple as that, the Master file will export to a location you select and the image(s) will open in PShop as Smart Objects via ACR.

The rest of my workflow involves doing my Photoshop editing and then saving the resulting PSD file and reimporting that as a new master into Aperture. Perhaps I’ll automate that next.

Incidentally, once you have saved your edited file (assuming you’ve saved as a new file) your exported master can be deleted. Again, only if you’ve Saved As… (as I do).

 

It’s been a whirlwind few weeks. New job, no time, too much to do. Fortunately, the stress was mitigated last weekend when I discovered one of my favorite models from Model Mayhem was in town from the East coast. A few emails and phone calls later and she agreed to a concept shoot that I had been wanting to try for a long time.

I’ve long been inspired by Los Angeles photographer Brooke Shaden. Ms. Shaden constructs the most amazing conceptual images, using a technique of multiple exposures and compositing and really generates some amazing artwork. I’d love to take one of her workshops one day, but in the mean time I was inspired to try her techniques myself to create an ethereal and evocative image of some sort of abduction. The viewer can decide what is happening in the image – extra-terrestrials? spiritual entities? or is it simply a dream?

Leah Hilton was a great sport, and an amazing athlete and really made this image work in very quick order. I hope we can work together again in the future.