#photobts

[chims97]

220929 yoongi | peace of mind 🎹

[socrat28]

Tag a friend who can relate😂 #portablefilmlights #photographer #nicefoto #strangerthings #sonya7iii #godox #styling #portraiture #instagood #tamron2875 #instaportrait #portraits_ig #westcottlighting #sonyalphaportrait #zeiss55mm18 #tamron #beautiful #blueeyes #photobts #behindthescenes #rgvphotographer #strobist #colorgrading #dopeports #studiophotography #texture #studio #socratesphotography (en Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic) https://www.instagram.com/p/B-m12wKDeY6/?igshid=j5eut19i6nwl

[namgyusoo]

[thementalistthebestserie-blog]

The Mentalist BTS 

[qasic]

Photo Backup to Cloud - Google Drive via Syncovery

I've elected to use Syncovery to perform cloud back up of my photos to Google Drive.

I've been very impressed with Syncovery's support. All inquiries were handled promptly, usually within 24 hours. All bugs with resolved timely, within a couple of days (some were resolved within 24 hours). I've definitely very happy about that.

Google Drive isn't necessarily the fastest platform in my tests (Amazon S3 was) but over the long run, Google Drive is going to much cheaper than Amazon. I currently store over 400GB in the cloud and this is expected to grow year after year.

[qasic]

Lens Rentals Canada Review

An Ultra Wide Angle Nikon 10-24 f/3.5-4.5G ED AF-S DX 

Motivation

For the last year, I've been playing around with basically the same 3 lens in my bag, the Nikon 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 kit lens, the 35mm f/1.8 prime, and the 24-70 f/2.8 lens. I've got 2 other lens (50mm f/1.8, 28-300 f/3.5-5.6) but they're primary function is back up and they stay mostly at home.

The one lens I feel I've been missing out on has been an ultra wide angle. There have been many times when I wish I had such a lens to play with, especially in Yosemite. However, given that I would eventually go full frame, I wondered if it was wise to pony up for a wide angle lens geared for a cropped body (the Nikon 10-24 for $750) or one geared for a full framed body (the Nikon 14-24 for $2000) but would be next to useless on my Nikon D5100 because its field-of-view couldn't even match my 18-55.

I decided to rent a Nikon 10-24 and see how well it holds up. For a the fraction of the cost to buying it outright, I could rent it for a week and see how it went.

Finding a Rental Company

Unfortunately, the majority of people I know in real life shoot Canon so I just couldn't borrow it from a friend ... lol.

There are a few rental shops in Vancouver (e.g., Beau Photo, Camera Rentals Vancouver, FlashPoint, Leo's) but they didn't carry the lens I wanted. Major camera dealers out East also rent. Vistek and Henry's come to mind in particular. However, their prices are again generally higher than their online competitors. Furthermore, these stores will generally perform a credit hold on your credit card for the full retail value of the lens in case you don't return the item.

For online companies, there are Canada Lens Rentals, Lens Lenders, and Lens Rental Canada (LRC). Only the latter carries the Nikon 10-24. For my lens, they weren't as cheap as Henry's but I did have an acquaintance who shared her positive experience with them. After weighing my options, I went with LRC.

Ordering and Shipping Experience

Ordering was easy. Default shipping is Xpresspost. I didn't bother to get the damage waiver. One thing that surprised me was that they charged my credit card immediately; not when the order was shipped. My order was meant to be shipped in about two weeks. Not a big deal though.

My order was shipped on time. The tracking number they sent me was incorrect though. It was the return tracking number. However, a quick chat over their instant messaging system gave me the correct number. No harm done.

From my previous online research, LRC generally tries to ship things so that your rental items will arrive 1 day early. For me, the item did indeed arrive early :-)

The Item

Packaging Material

The lens was packed pretty securely in the box, with the lens sandwiched between two layers of foam, wrapped in bubble wrap.

Lens Cap and Rear Cap

There was no LRC branding on the lens or the hood but there were LRC stickers on the lens and rear caps. The stickers were on the inside though. From the outside, you wouldn't have known that this was a rented lens.

Trying the Lens Out

Field of View

Here's an example of how wide this lens' field-of-view is. This is the front office lobby of SAP Vancouver.

Olympic Cauldron

I'm glad the lens came one day early because on that exact night, the Olympic Cauldron was been lit at Jack Poole Plaza.

Lions

I also got this shot of the lions watching over the entrance to the Port of Vancouver.

To see the photos I've taken with this lens, check this link. There's several more I have in the queue that will be posted up over the next week or so.

Sending it Back

Return Package

It was a sad day when I had to send the item back. LRC makes it really easy to send back. I just had to take off the old shipping label and slap on the return one.

For the shipment back, it's considered to be a "product return" so although you get tracking as to where the package is, there's no formal ETA for the item. It was shipped back using Xpresspost though so it did get back to Owen Sound in 3 business days :-)

Overall Experience

So was the rental experience was great? It certainly was. I definitely loved the lens. Would I go out and buy it though? Probably not. I'm going to wait until I go full frame. If I need a wide angle lens (for example, for when I go on vacation), I'll just rent it again :D

My next rental item will likely be the Nikon D610. I just need to clear my backlog of photos to process. And LRC, if you're reading this, I would really appreciate if you could carry the Sony A7R for rent :-)

[qasic]

Proud and Tall | CRAB Park at Portside

Two lions sit at the north end of Main Street, near CRAB Park at Portside. The Shanghai Port Authority gave these lions to the Vancouver Port Authority in commemoration of their sister port relationship.

This photo is a combination of 3 exposures, with one being a long exposure to get movement in the skies and another removing the light streaks from cars. Final color adjustments were done with Topaz Adjust.

As featured on Miss 604.

[qasic]

Vistek Online Shipping Experience

This post is about my shipping experience with Vistek. If you're interested in just my photo posts, I recommend that you simply just ignore this post :-)

Vistek had some awesome prices for Wacom tablets during Black Friday so I ordered one online. It didn't meet the threshold for free shipping so I paid for Canada Post Expedited. I didn't realize until AFTER I had completed my order that Vistek wouldn't release package tracking numbers to users until the provided shipping time had expired. However, when I give them a ring about a week later, they gave me a tracking number.

So I assumed that when you call, they'll give you a tracking number. It turns out that this wasn't the case.

During boxing week, I ordered some MeFoto tripods. I wanted to compare them to Manfrotto setup (For those interested, I was looking into evaluating whether or not an Arca Swiss head would be more firm/stable than my current RC2 setup). I waited for the shipping notice and then sent a polite e-mail request for a tracking number. No response whatsoever. A tweet to @vistek gave me the silent treatment as well :(

@Vistek How come tracking #'s aren't automatically e-mailed to customers when a package has been shipped?

— K Fung (@LaQVrai) December 30, 2013

So I call two days after to ask for the tracking number. This time they wouldn't give it to me*. Apparently, management instituted their current tracking number policy because Vistek had security/theft issues in the past. I've heard about these type of scams. The scam would work like the following: 1) order a high value item to a 'real' address where the building is either abandoned or the resident isn't typically at home during work hours; 2) monitor the tracking to know when the items would be delivered; and then 3) swing by this location to pick up the item shortly after delivery. This makes it that much harder to recover the stolen items when the credit card transaction is eventually rescinded.

Despite this scam though, big companies like Amazon and Future Shop still give out tracking companies. Even Henry's gives out tracking numbers. I'm not sure why Vistek stubbornly sticks to this policy when all these other companies don't.

If they had researched me a little bit longer, they would have known that I was shipping my items to my day job. That should be low risk. Apparently, it isn't.

So be aware. When shopping at Vistek, don't expect to get a tracking number, even if you PAID for shipping that ALREADY INCLUDES TRACKING.

*In the interest of full disclosure, although the lady on the phone wouldn't provide me the tracking number, she did tell me the scheduled delivery date. Kudos to her for doing that. However, I did want to enter the tracking number into my packaging tracking application.

[qasic]

Learning Photography

Here's a list of what online resources I used over the last year to learn photography. It's not a complete list by any means but should cover the many things I use/follow on a regular basis.

Short Form Videos

Digital Photography 1 on 1 with Mark Wallace

Matt Granger (formerly ThatNikonGuy)

Serge Ramelli Lightroom and Photoshop Tutorials

Dom Bower

In Person Seminars and Workshops

Vancouver Photo Workshop Open House Sessions

Online Seminars and Workshops

Rob Grimm / Gary Martin / Aaron Nace on CreativeLive

Andrew Scrivani on CreativeLive

Sal Cincotta on CreativeLive

Mark Wallace on CreativeLive & workshops

Zack Arias on CreativeLive and Kelby Training

Seminars from B & H Event Space

General Photography Websites

DIY Photography

FStoppers

Lens Rentals Blog

SLRLounge

DVDs

Language of Light by Joe McNally

OneLight 2.0 by Zack Arias

Magic Lantern Guides: Nikon D5100 Multimedia Workshop

Podcasts

Rawtalk with Jared Polin

Books

The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 5 Book for Digital Photographers by Scott Kelby

Adobe Lightroom 5 - The Missing FAQ by The Lightroom Queen

Books on Flash Photography (and weekly blog posts) by Neil van Niekerk

The Hot Shoe Diaries: Big Light from Small Flashes by Joe McNally

Adobe Photoshop

Phlearn

HDR

HDR Photographer Blog by Wojciech Toman (presets, videos)

[qasic]

Lessons Learned from a Menu Tasting

Last week, I attended a menu tasting at Parlour. You can see the full write up here. What you didn't read in the article was all mistakes I made that night. Now you get to read all about them :-)

Food Descriptions. This really was my biggest mistake of the night. Normally, I jot down food descriptions by taking a picture of the menu. It's a lot harder to do at food tastings when there is no menu. I need to remember to bring ink and pencil to jot down descriptions myself. Luckily, W was there to help out but I can't rely on that when I'm flying solo. VanFoodies did this very well but Joyce has been doing this a lot longer than me :-)

Keeping Track of The Food. I missed a shot that night of the New York Rye. I had meant to take a photo of it after processing the food photos but it just slipped my line. Next time, I'll make a listing of all the dishes that come to the table (even while I am taking a shot) so that I don't miss having a photo of everything.

Clutterless Shots. People who normally eat with me know that I like to whip out a DSLR and get a clean background for all my food shots. It's basically impossible at a food tasting when everyone is sharing dishes because a lot distractions get in the way. Either you need to edit away all the distracting elements or you need to focus on getting tight shots.

Know Your Gear. You have to really know your gear forwards and backwards. There was a period at time during the night when my shutter wouldn't work. I recalled that in order to my camera to focus in low light, the sensor needs to detect some contrast. That resolved my issue. Also, by using on-camera bounce flash with the black foamie thing, I was able to get some workable lighting on the food :-)

Let me know if you have any tips for me to do better at my next menu tasting :-)

[qasic]

Meetup Report: Fun with Strobes and SpeedLights (How To and DIY Survival Photography)

Our host, Andres Vargas, and his AlienBees B800

Introduction

So one of the issues of being a photographer is gas - gear acquisition syndrome. It's very tempting to acquire gear without mastering stuff you already own.

Over the last few months, I've acquired a lot of strobist gear (flashes, pocket wizards, light modifiers, etc.). I've also done a lot of reading/watching in this area - Neil van Niekerk, Matt Granger, Zack Arias and Joe McNally. But despite all this, if you don't go out and practice, all this is worth nothing when you need to go out and nail the shot in very little time.

I'm also naturally an introvert. If I'm going to get more into portraiture, I need to become more extroverted and be comfortable with interacting with strangers. I'll have to get out of my comfort zone if I want to progress further as a photographer and be able to capture non-stiff images of people.

The Meetup

So I signed up for a Strobist meetup. There are several Meetup portrait groups but most of them are hands off. You're responsible for your own learning. This Meetup seemed to have a bit more guidance behind it so it aligned better with my goals.

Initially I was worried that no one else would show up so I roped in a colleague from work. However, it turns out my concerns were unfounded as there were people who attended who weren't formally signed up on Meetup. Furthermore, Andres had made arrangements for models and a make up artist outside of the Meetup environment.

First Set

So the first look we tried was on camera bounce flash angled against a white wall. This should should have been easy since I've experimented with the black foamie thing to avoid direct flash flash on the subject. Nope. I got caught up by trivialities - the Nikon SB-800 didn't rotate in the angle I wanted, the Nikon SB-910 had TTL BL (fill flash) chosen instead of TTL. In the end, I simply ran out of time but I was able to salvage enough of the photos in Lightroom to give the Kristy, the model, a usable photograph (albeit in black & white so I didn't need to deal with color cast issues).

Second Set

In the second look, we applied bounce flash against a reflector held behind the camera. It's like on camera flash but it's more diffused because the light source has become bigger.

Break Time

After this, Kimberly, the makeup artist arrived, so all the photographers got a break while a new look was applied to Kristy, our model.

In the mean time, Andres asked us to figure out how to make the room black. For once, I didn't mess this up. I chose my maximum flash sync speed at the widest aperture - f/2.8 @ 1/200. Done. Unfortunately, not everyone can use those settings since the max sync speed varies depending upon your camera model.

Third Set

The second-to-last look took advantage of what we learned above to make the room black. Even though we were shooting against a white wall, by 1) placing the AlienBees sufficiently away from this wall & feathered to avoid light spillage and 2) setting our aperture/shutter speed/ISO to the appropriate value, we let the background fade to dark. This means all the light on our model is coming from the strobe.

Final Set

The last look was a 2-light set up, with one primary and another as fill. Kristy was posed on the couch and you were encouraged to get multiple perspectives. Some examples: 1) standing up high on a chair, 2) lying flat on your stomach and 3) standing in front of the primary light source.

Post Production

Now there's the time spent in post production to clean and polish the images. In Lightroom, I tweaked the base exposure, applied lens corrections, adjusted the curves, cleaned skin blemishes and whitened the teeth and eyes. Let's just say Lightroom 5's Advanced Healing Brush rocks. In Photoshop, I removed unnecessary elements from the background and then applied Neil van Niekerk's approach to portrait retouch as a final layer.

I sent my selects to Kristy. She requested more images of a certain style. As I worked on those, I saw one that I felt would look better in black and white. So I brought the image into Silver Efex Pro and processed it. I really liked how it turned out and will definitely be using this program more in the future.

Lessons Learned

Incorrect focus. One thing I struggled with during the first two looks was that I was capturing images that were out-of-focus. I was shooting @ f/2.8 on a 24-70. My best guess for what wrong is that I have yet to master the focus-and-move technique for portraits. This problem was only magnified when I was shooting at f/2.8. My Nikon D5100 only has 11 AF points so whenever I take portraits, I often have to move my focus to an area that doesn't have an AF point. I'll need to practice this focus-and-move technique more to workaround my camera's limitations.

Reading the histogram. Even though I'm supposed to know how to interpret a histogram, when I took the photos into Lightroom, I was surprised to see that all the photos were underexposed by at least one stop. That means that I should have let some of the highlights accumulate more on the right side. Lesson learned.

Remove distractions. I had to do too much Photoshop to distracting elements (e.g., couches, wall corners, etc.). If I can remove those elements before I hit the shutter button, I should.

Get more behind the scene (BTS) content. I love BTS content and during the first half of the meetup, I forgot to take these type of shots (e.g., applying the makeup, getting a picture of Kimberly, etc.). I was too focused on nailing the photo and was getting frustrated with not being able to do so. Oh well. I just need to remind myself on future shoots :-)

Final Thoughts

Even though I was the only Nikon shooter at this Meetup, it was plenty of fun. I got to network with some very cool and interesting people. I wouldn't hesitate to do it again :-)

That's about it. It looks like I wrote up an essay. I'm not sure if I want to write this much for future Meetups ... lol.

[qasic]

Making smaller JPGs/JPEGs in Adobe Lightroom

I learned this tip from SideCarPost's CreativeLive presentation...

It turns out Adobe Lightroom can't create JPGs compressed as well as Adobe Photoshop, even when the exact same settings are used in Adobe Camera Raw and the output is set to the same compression level.

So being a coder, I decided to script this. You can also do this via a Photoshop Action but Photoshop is big, bulky program so I opted instead to use ImageMagick, ExifTool, the Run Any Command Lightroom plug-in, and some scripting to get smaller JPGs.

Note that you will need a lot more working space on disk because you will first export the files as TIFF before converting to JPG.

So the recipe is as follows:

Configure Lightoom to export the files as TIFF

Call ImageMagick to convert the files from TIFF to JPG using the Run Any Command

After the export is complete, delete the generated TIFF files.

Here's the ImagMagick script:

@echo off PATH=C:\Program Files\ImageMagick-6.8.6-Q16;%PATH% SETLOCAL SETLOCAL ENABLEDELAYEDEXPANSION FOR %%X in ("%~2") DO ( SET DESTFILENAME=%%~dX%%~pX%%~nX.JPG ECHO !DESTFILENAME! convert %%X -quality %1 "!DESTFILENAME!" > NUL 2>&1 exiftool -overwrite_original -tagsfromfile %%X "!DESTFILENAME!" REM DEL %%X ) ENDLOCAL

Here's what the command looks like in the plug-in:

"C:\Program Files\ImageMagick-6.8.6-Q16\tif2jpg.bat" 90 "{FILE}"

Then I delete all the generated TIFFs with a batch file that has the following contents:

@echo off DEL %*

Note that these scripts are for Windows. If you're on MacOS, you'll need to create sh scripts.

Hope this helps!