Category Archives: Photography

Links to my gallery, when I think things are worthy of having attention drawn to them.

Warwick Folk Festival, and the Great Western Pub – part 1

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It was the Warwick Folk Festival over the weekend just gone, and I decided that I should enjoy summer while it’s here.  Nipped down to the ticket office on Friday afternoon, purchased a ticket for the entire weekend, and then zipped home after work to grab the D80, lenses, flash, and battery packs.  Hopped on my bicycle, and headed over to the Warwick School grounds somewhere around 6 P.M – a nice, easy 3 mile ride, mostly downhill.

Turned out that the main show didn’t start until 8 P.M., so I kicked around a bit, taking a few photos of various stalls and people, growing hungrier by the minute – smart me forgot to stop at a hole in the wall to get some money, and I also forgot to eat dinner before I left.  Once the show started up though, I pretty much forgot that I was hungry, as I was rocking along to the music (if one can rock along to folk music).  Artists for the night were 4Square (a group consisting of 4 young musicians), The Maerlock (a jazz-folk mix), PJ Wright & Dave Pegg (the latter an ex-member of Jethro Tull) and Oysterband ended the show.

Oysterband.  I’ve attended rock concerts before, and I know how manic fans can be.  I never expected to see a folk group get welcomed by screams of adoration.  Except, Oysterband aren’t a folk band, they’re folkrock – a slightly subtle difference.  They’re damn good showmen, and pretty darn good as a band too – the music on their MySpace page is nice, but it doesn’t hold a candle to their live performance.

Managed to wiggle myself into the front of the stage, and shot around 200 photos, all flashless.  Also managed to have a brief conversation with one of the professionals shooting the concert, and got confirmation that all of them were shooting ISO 1600 or higher to avoid flash use.

Comparing print shops

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I finally have the sample prints from Jessops/Snapfish, Photobox, Kodak and BonusPrint.

Of those four print companies, I can observe the following:

  • Kodak and Bonusprint got the greyscale/black and white photo correct
  • Photobox and Snapfish added a green tint to the black and white photos
  • Photobox’s prints are horribly fuzzy
  • Kodak generates a less green-saturated photo than the other three, but may not be an accurate green
  • Due to the above, the Kodak print skin-tones are warmer

I still don’t have a calibrated monitor, so some of the colour distortion can be attributed to the fact that what I’m seeing isn’t necessarily right according to sRGB. The softness/blur applied to the Photobox photos rules out their service for me – I supplied them with very high quality JPEGs (which is probably an oxymoron), with all the appropriate sharpening/blurring applied.

On the plus side for Bonusprint, their Windows client accepts TIF files, which means the JPEG compression artifacts won’t be present in any photos I submit as TIF. However, compared to the default Kodak prints, the green saturation is definitely higher, possibly too high. I scanned in sample images from all four print shops, and comparing a single spot between Kodak and Bonusprint, I get (RGB) 117,127,70 from the Bonusprint print, while the Kodak print says 87,108,73 for the same location.

Decisions, decisions.

Photography practice

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As I wandered through Leamingon on Saturday afternoon, I came across a wedding party – a perfect chance to hone my hobby a bit more. I stayed out of the way of the guy making a living from the shoot, and attempted to get some decent photos. Of the 50+ photos that I shot, there are about 10 that are decent, and maybe 2 that are good – at least when viewed on my LCD. I punted my choices across to Jessops (their online system powered by Snapfish), and ran a single 5×7 of each of the pictures.

I now have the pictures in front of me, and have a few observations.

  1. Despite being pre-cropped to 5×7, the printing process managed to slice a few millimeters off of each end of the photo. Normally not a problem, but I’ve got at least one shot where the top of the groom’s head has been sliced off, as has his elbow.
    1. Lesson: When using Snapfish, leave a few mm extra on the crop
  2. Black and white on my screen looks totally different from black and white prints. The colour cast of the black and white shots is ‘wrong’ for some definition of wrong – the saturation is off, and there’s a greenish cast to the print.
    1. Lesson: Not sure yet, perhaps try Photobox. Probably get a Spyder too, to calibrate the screen.

I’ve now shunted the same photos over to Photobox, Kodak and Bonusprint and will see how their printers handle the same images. Of those three, Bonusprint are the only ones who seem to offer the colour profile of their printers.  The other possibility is that I need to switch to AdobeRGB instead of sRGB – I would hope that Lightroom is embedding the profile data. Once I’m happy with the printer output, I’ll try to get a set of the photos sent to the bride and groom – hopefully by going down where the wedding was held, and asking them to please forward the prints.

Nikon SB-600

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Given that I have been designated the official photographer for my grandfather’s 80th birthday bash (a small gathering of family and friends in the middle of Dartmoor), I decided it was in my best interest to shell out on a flash other than the one built in to the D80. I looked at the Nikon offerings for a few days, and eventually settled on the Nikon SB-600. It’s placed between the SB-400 and SB-800 Speedlights, but appears to be a good compromise of features for the money (and getting it quite a few £ below retail certainly swayed my decision).

I’ve been shooting some test shots tonight with it, and I’m starting to wonder how I ever managed without an off-body flash. The flexibility that it’ll give me is incredible – I just need a dim room and some test subjects to get my flash-work down pat. I’ve also worked out how to get the D80 to act as a commander unit when the 600 is sitting on a stand, which is great – my initial trials made me think that it wouldn’t work. I’ll need to build a diffuser for the on-board flash, but that’s actually remarkably easy, I’ve already got a spare white film canister from Jessops (just walked in and asked if they had any :).

Of course, this means that I now have another item to pack in my camera bag, along with a spare set of rechargeable triple-A batteries, but it’ll be worth it. I think the only other items I want now are a good tripod, and perhaps a 50/1.4 or 50/1.8 prime. Oh, and having seen this, an eyecup for the D80 might not be a bad idea either, given I wear glasses. It’s also time to start reading the Strobist blog a lot more. One more link – I love the second comment on this photo, made by the owner of the camera; he’s got a good point, I never use anything other than MASP either (with a slight hit of Auto when I just don’t care).

I lied, one more.

RAW Workflow, and a rant about Lightroom

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Now that I have a computer that can deftly handle my gaming and photography needs, I’ve started looking at Windows applications for doing RAW workflow.  I need said application to handle both MRW (my old Konica-Minolta RAWs) and NEF (the new Nikon RAWs).  Bonus points for handling JPEG and PNG.  More bonus points if it has a library type functionality with meta-data support.  Adobe’s Photoshop Lightroom deftly covers all of these aspects, and has a non-horrible user interface.

However.

It’s horribly slow, even on a dual-core 2.13 GHz machine with 2 GB of RAM.

  • Scrolling through my collection (14K photos) is a case of scroll and wait for it to fetch data from the disk to display the next row of thumbnails. The overlay of the relative image number is also slow.
  • It constantly chews 10 – 25% of CPU time, even when it’s just sitting open and not doing anything.
  • It’s laggy. I can double click on a picture, and move my mouse to another picture, and it registers the double-click against the second picture, not the one I wanted.
  • My disks don’t stop going when it’s open. I’m not doing anything (did a ‘build all previews’ to ensure they were done), just have Lightroom sitting open, taking 300 MB of RAM. The disks just keep getting hit. I popped open FileMon, and Lightroom is just constantly reading through the image library, even though I’m not asking it to do anything!

Point 2 I could live with – I’m not going to be playing EVE and using Lightroom at the same time.  Points 1, 3 and 4 are show-stoppers.  It doesn’t have to have all 14,000 photos open at once (and I’d expect it to run out of memory long before it could load that many), and it certainly doesn’t need to be running through the catalog and images constantly.  I’d be happier if there was a little status window or something saying ‘Updating thumbnails’ or whatever it might be doing, but there’s nothing.

So while it scores highly with me for the cataloging and meta-data aspects (and a not-too-shabby editor), the constant disk access and slow UI mean I’ll be looking at other software applications to find something that comes closer to my ideal application.