By chance I met Chris Marquardt of Tips from the Top Floor and HappyShooting podcasts on Twitter, and he kindly provided me with a mini-workshop on fine art printing in 5 tweets. For your enjoyment, here is my translation to English:

1. Image Processing: Only do it using a properly color-profiled monitor.
2. Sharpening: Keep your hands off! [The printer driver will take care of it, usually]
3. Color casts: Profile the monitor, look at the prints at daylight, best in the shade
4. If your images have a red cast after import [and your prints have a green cast!], your profile is wrong
5. While profiling, avoid any extranous light [for example by covering the sensor with a blanket]

I love this guy. Honestly, #2 got me thinking, I think this is the best tip I heard for a while!

And I need to go back and try to check my monitor profile now.

Share this

No related posts.

How nice it is to be able to reach the winter within an hour drive – yesterday, the Bavarian alps were still experiencing remnants of that winter storm Andrea that hit Germany on Thursday. A lot of fresh snow, allowing this intimate photo of a mountain hut near Unterammergau.

Share this

No related posts.

As an example, here is a screenshot of my archive of July 2006, showing me at one glance the 2 week trip to the wonderful Lofot Islands, a premiere landscape photography destination:

This is a feature I really find useful, and prefer anytime over the regular technocratic “browse the calendar” approach other applications like Bridge and Lightroom follow.

Taking the idea to the next level – in nature photography we keep thinking in seasons, as the yearly cycle keeps repeating photographic opportunities. How helpful would be a calendar showing me by example in which week and which day of the year I have chosen which photo opportunity? When exactly was the best time to photograph foliage in the Karwendel mountains? When do we usually see the first snow? The hike to the christmas roses blossoming?

If I could only make a calendar showing me the best photo I have taken at that day in any of the last 7 years!

To exercise the plan – what do I need?

1. Obviously, the “image of the day” for all years in my photo archive, going back to June 2004.
2. A method to layout these images on to a calendar sheet for a high quality print.

Stay tuned for progress reports, and let me know if you like the idea of a seasons calendar or have any helpful tips in getting this done!

Share this

No related posts.

I own an Xperia Neo which one of the posters before listed as one of the phones with the same sensor as the iPhone 4S. Do I use the camera? A lot!

But as always, if this “suffices” really depends on your requirements for a carry-everywhere camera. In the regard that you nearly always have it with you, the iPhone certainly wins. If you will be happy with the image quality largely depends on what you are planning to do with those images, and what the shooting situation is.

Real life example – this summer I stumbled into a staged “fox hunt”, and tried to capture some images as I would have with my DSLR / larger gear. Best photo (click to enlarge):

But, best action shot of the same event (again, click to enlarge):

Ok, I used the sports program of the camera, which didn’t (to my suprise) raise the ISO, but kept ISO at 100 and thus chose a 1/100s at f/2.4. But the wide angle lens (and no zoom) made it hard to get closer (without being trampled), and the shutter lag rendered many shots of jumping horses useless because they were not correctly framed.

Worst problem – using the camera a lot sucks up battery, and after a while of shooting I ran so low I couldn’t even phone my wife to tell her I would be late because I had met the fox hunters…

Do I use it as an everyday camera? Yes, but for, say, ambitous amateur level photography, I even disregarded all compacts for lack of image quality and chose an Olympus Pen with it’s micro four thirds sensor.  Different league in all respects of course. More on my findings with the Pen in my blog article about my solution to the carry everywhere camera problem.

Share this

Related posts:

1. My solution to the “carry-everywhere-camera-problem”

What is it?

The device is not a new invention – the idea to put an eyepiece on a photographic lens is old and has been done a couple of times before by different vendors, e.g. Nikon and Minolta.

Basically it justs consists of an eyepiece, a magnification lens, and a prism – the prism turns the upright-down image from a photographic lens back into the correct orientation, and the eyepiece lets you look through the lens just like through a telescope.

The Lens2scope attached to my Sigma 100-300 f/4

Who needs it?

This device is obviously not for photography – it is for watching the action, not making pictures. A situation I find myself in rather more often than not is that I have reached a certain interesting place, but the action is going on really too far to take any photos that are for more than just IDing the birds. Instead of sitting there frustrated, I could switch the camera for the Lens2scope and watch the action instead.

I bought mine in May before my summer vacation, and had planned to use it during several birding trips in Britanny, Western France. My 100-300 mm f/4 Sigma lens would be turned into a 10x-30x magnification spotting scope, or even a 14x-42x using the 1.4x teleconverter.

Use and observations

Sweet and short: The device works as advertised. I found the picture to be clear and surprisingly bright. Lens errors were of no concern, certainly there was a slight chromatic aberration, but much less than with my standard 8×36 Nikon Monarch binoculars. The magnification could clearly be improved by using the 1.4x teleconverter, while adding the 2x converter didn’t seem to improve the situation – I wouldn’t recommend using it.

Focusing is actually quite sensitive, but still very easy with the excellent manual focusing ring of the 100-300. This will be much harder with a lens which cannot be precisely focused manually.

The device is sturdily built albeit a little plasticky, but the advantage is its light weight of just 185 g. More on the quality of the metal bayonet below…

Example – what to expect

As the device is not for photography, I cannot show any pictures of what you can see if you look through the scope. But I can give you an example of where I used it successfully.

Close to Cancale, in Eastern Brittany, Western France, there is a small bird colony of gulls, cormorants, some shags, and common shelduck on the Île des Landes. The island itself as a bird protection area is of course off-limits for humans, but the seabird colony can be watched from the nearby Pointe de Grouin.

The observation distance is actually not that bad, looking at Google maps it’s between 300-400 meters. But photographing the birds? Forget it, too far. With the 8x binoculars? Nice, but nothing really interesting to be seen. Just good enough to identify the birds.

Setting up the scope looking at the Île des Landes

With a dedicated spotting scope – or in this case the Sigma 100-300 mm with 1.4x tele converter and the Lens2scope? Wow! Suddenly you are able to see the gull’s chicks in their nests, and to clearly distinguish the European Shags there from their pretty similar looking relatives, the Cormorants, also present on the island. I enjoyed watching two Shags feed their chick which was hiding behind one of the boulders on top of the island – all you could see from the chick was the beak hungrily opening when one of the parents came back with more fish, and sometimes the near bald head if things weren’t moving quickly enough to its liking .

With my 8x binoculars: Which chick? Which boulder?

The Caveat

So far, so good. Mission accomplished – the device itself has no electrical or moving parts, and the optics are ok. What could go wrong? Well, the bayonet mechanics used to connect the Lens2scope to the lens were so sharp and tight that the use of it damaged my precious Sigma. During the vacation. With no repair service or replacement lens available. Argh.

What had happened was that obviously in one of the many times I exchanged the Lens2scope for the camera, mounting it with the bayonet I was too fast, or too slow, or didn’t hit the right connection spot (red dot to red dot) – and I turned the Lens2scope in the bayonet damaging the first of the electrical lens contacts.

The first pin of the telelens damaged by the Lens2scope

The camera would no longer speak to the lens giving me the infamous fEE error – I knew, the lens was toast. I suspect the Sigma lens to be more susceptible for that damage than an original Nikkor, as the Nikon electrical mounts are little metal balls, while the Sigma has a plastic tongue with an electrical contact, which additionally feels slightly spring loaded, intended to provide active closed contact.

So I warn anybody thinking about using the Lens2scope with Sigma lenses – I think this is a dangerous combination. I certainly will never attach it to my 1000€ lens again. The other brands I cannot judge, but after this experience I would recommend at least high caution when mounting and dismounting the adapter – and honestly, out in the field things sometimes have to happen fast, and I want my equipment to be robst and not have to think about fragile connections.

My vendor offered to take mine back, but of course refused to take over the bill for the Sigma repair. The German distributor I asked relayed my question to the manufacturer in Taiwan, but the disappointing answer roughly translates as “be more careful”.

I “survived” my vacation and many photo opportunities by taping the contacts preventing any electrical error to creep up, and instructed the camera I had attached a manual 300 mm lens. This gave me back the aperture priority mode, at least. No autofocus – I re-learned manual focus over a 3 week period, but that is another story…

Share this

No related posts.

Lightning photography seems either extremely easy, or extremely hard: When the thunder god is willing to show his best side, all you need is a camera and a tripod and some patience. If not, it seems impossible to get a single image with a lightning visible in any corner of the frame.

Until last month I was strictly subscribed to the latter – I had tried but never made any lightning photo the subject was clearly visible in. This changed when Thor (or pick your favorite one from the Wikipedia List Of Thundergods) showed his muscles as I hadn’t seen before…

The theory to take an image like above is rather easy:

1. Put the camera on a steady tripod.
2. Put it into Manual exposure mode (that’s the M, you heard correctly )!
3. Decide on an exposure time that will be long enough to get some lightning in there – you will press the shutter *before* you see a lightning… I chose 10 seconds here. 30 might do as well, depending on the amount of ambient light. You want your photo to be all black when taken without lightnings’ light.
4. Lightning is very very bright, but it will vary greatly depending on rain and distance. Ideally, you have none or at least not heavy rain. In addition,  you can decide to get only the brightest lightnings correctly exposed, and have the weak ones underexposed. I started with setting the ISO to 100 (or “low” on a Nikon), and closed the aperture down to 8, and later adjusted it to 11 when I saw I was still getting some overexposed images.
5. Take a test image to check the exposure without lightning.
6. Make sure the focus is on the foreground you framed. Focus manually and turn off autofocus. It won’t work in the pitch black night anyway, and slow down every shutter release.
7. And now comes the hard part – if you are lucky, your camera supports an automatic interval timer like my D300 does. Else, you will need a cable release with that feature, or do manual clicks all night long.  Use the interval timer to repeat taking exposures until your flash card is full or the thunder is gone.
   I set my Nikon to do 500 images with a gap of 1 second (the smallest possible). Thus, I would expose 10 seconds, then the camera would wait for a second, and then shoot the next 10 second image. So I could make sure I would have 91% of all lightning on my sensor within the framed part of the sky.
8. For this image, I did not take a wide angle but rather a mild telelens (100 mm on a 1.5x crop camera here). I chose a pleasing (well, you might recognize the building from my earlier teleconverter tests) foreground and framed a part of the night sky where I hoped the lightning would occur, and waited…

The fun part is harvesting the results after the thunderstorm. This one lasted a full three hours, and I kept adjusting the part of the sky I was photographing to the slowly moving “hot spot” of lightning as the clouds were moving as well. The exposure time of 10 seconds allowed to aggregate multiple smaller lightnings into one frame like in the image above.

“Depending on the storm, lightning flashes can last for several hundred milliseconds and contain dozens of strokes each occurring approximately 40 milliseconds apart.” (lightningtrigger.com)

Statistics? Well, I took 303 images, of which 247 showed no sign of lightning at all. 23 were lit by lightning not in the frame or just barely being visible (for those tiny lightnings, the aperture was closed too much). Another 18 showed more promising lightning strikes which were either under- or overexposed, or were just at the border of the frame. This left me with 15 rather decent lightning images.

Of those, I really liked the spectactular above and this one:

So the next time you meet the Thunder God, enjoy the digital age, make sure to have a tripod with you and just shoot away! But stay safe and out of the danger area – read through the safety tips by the NWS before you decide to give it a try! I made these photos through a window from the safety from my home!

If you wonder how our grandfathers did this without the blessing of digital images, have a look at this great page at weatherscapes, with more info on the different type of thunderstorms and more. And if you are looking into daytime lightning photography, you will have to invest in more gear (oh joy!) and have a look at a lightning trigger (more great information about lightning photography there as well!).

Share this

Related posts:

1. How to: Create a sun star in your landscape photo

This weekend everybody is invited to spend one hour counting (and identifying) birds in the garden or a different place, and report the results back to support scientific long term observations on the biodiversity in our “civilized” environment.

Not much content on Twitter yet, though. So for you here is the result of me counting birds in Munich Alt-Bogenhausen, one of the greener corners of this not-everywhere-so-green city.

I am getting better in identifying birds by their song, therefore my list actually is a little bit longer than last year’s

1. Blackbird – three. Actually they were everywhere, but you ought to only count those you can see at the same time (they might fly behind your back to the next corner and continue singing there… not probable? Who knows…)
2. Great Tit – Two. They confused me without end because I actually saw two juvenile first, already big enough for me to think “hey, this is a different type of swamp tit!”. Embarrassing enough, but you don’t see the little ones that often!
3. Blue Tit – One. Very busy very high up in a tree, no time to loose to collect food for the chicks.
4. Chaffinch – Three, a complete family with a chick being fed by Mom. And I saw a second lonely chick trying to “climb” a huge tree with a trunk diameter of certainly more than two feet without success. I hope it did not fall from the nest. While I watched, it tried again and again to climb that wall that must have seemed like the Eiger Nordwand from its perspective. But probably it helps if you have two wings, even if they were not flight functional they seemed to provide some stability when beaten fast enough. When I passed by the same tree 20 minutes later again, the little one was gone. I like to think he made it
5. Great Spotted Woodpecker – One. They are quite common around here, and I got a good and long look at this individual.
6. Carrion Crow – One. You can’t leave the house without seeing them around here.
7. European Greenfinch – Two. These had eluded me the prior years, but maybe only by now I have learned to look at the highest tree tops to find them.
8. Eurasian Collared Dove – One. Beautifully colored bird.
9. Common Swift – Eight. My current favorite species, I keep watching their aerial maneuvers from my balcony in the evenings
10. Common Chiffchaff – One. At least, I kept hearing one, I didn’t see it.

Oh, and as usual you can see the online results of the bird census over at the LBV. Will be interesting to see the trends in bird population.

To learn more bird-songs, I bought the – German language only, sorry – book Grundkurs Vogelstimmen: Heimische Vögel an ihren Stimmen erkennen, written by Hans-Heiner Bergmann and Uwe Westphal. Not sure on my success with that book, though, I will report in a later post, so stay tuned and subscribe!

Share this

Related posts:

1. Summer bird census
2. Bird Census 2010
3. Bird Census 2009

When coming back from last weekend’s landscape tour, I knew I had a keeper with me: The brilliant yellow field of rapeseed with a dark blue sky of a passing thunderstorm makes for a simple, but really effective landscape image. Rule simplify for better photos applied at its best. Nothing special, but I certainly like looking at it again.

And suddenly, I saw it: A hot pixel. Hot pixels (or stuck pixels) can occur on any image sensor, and usually get mapped out in the camera – after the mapping, the pixel or subpixel will no longer contribute to the final image, and the value for it will be interpolated from its neighbouring pixels. So what really is a hardware defect, even if its a small one as there are 11,999,999 other pixels left, gets corrected in software. It is not very dramatic as well, but once you see it you see it in every picture – and reviewing older photos it got stuck already a month ago, and therefore is on all photos I took since then with the Pen.

Here is a 100% crop of the image above with the hot pixel in all it’s beauty:

Panic! I will need the camera for my vacation in 4 weeks! If I send it in, how long will Olympus need for the repair?

I wrote an email to the Olympus support (it’s di.support@olympus-europa.com in Europe, in case you need it) asking where to send it to. I confess, I have underestimated the Olympus engineers. Won’t do it again, promised. It is Nikon who asks to send the body in for such a fix.

Olympus support replied within 90 minutes of opening their hotline on Monday morning, and politely hinted I should try the “pixel mapping” function. Blush. Ok, RTFM – the camera already has the self-healing function built it. I triggered it using the procedure as described in the camera’s manual on page 129 – menu button, “gears” menu, sub-item I, function Pixel Mapping. Some seconds wait, problem gone!

Kudos, Olympus!

Share this

No related posts.

On a rather cold day some weeks ago in the Chiemgau mountain range, I was backcountry skiing, the weather being rather boring with high fogs hiding the sun from view throughout the day, providing a very flat light (which is, with snow, normally not a good thing photographically speaking).

On my way home I was still looking for a chance to get some nice sunset light, but the light was very dispersed and I had nearly given up and moved into a valley running from north to south, knowing I would not get any direct view of the sun should it decide to show itself before sundown.

So I was not in a position to get the sun itself into the picture when it send its rays toward me – but the high fog of the day provided a very nice medium for the sun rays. I like especially the peaks’ shadows in the foggy air. The image above was taken with my little Olympus Pen E-P1, cropped to a Panorama. Colors and contrast have been enhanced in post production. I hope you like it anyway

Share this

No related posts.

Did it work? Well, yes and no. Despite adding the Olympus E-P1 Pen to my gear which produces fairly large RAW files, I have photographed (and kept) pictures worth of 94 GBytes in 2010, after 96, 73, and 96 in 2007, 2008, and 2009 respectively.

How come I need ~96 GBytes a year for the third year now? Strange, but at least I exhibit a somewhat consistent, or even linear, behavior

Here is the graph plot of my disks getting filled over the last 7 years:

Wondering how your byte photography trend is? Check out my download section with a script that can calculate the data for a plot as above. Let us know about the results here in the comments!

Share this

Related posts:

1. Move to Texas?