I've never shot a roll of Kodachrome in my life - In fact, the closest I've gotten to Kodachrome is loving the Paul Simon song. But I still have a lot of respect for how groundbreaking Kodachrome has been over it's 74 year life. The numbers person in me is sad they didn't press on for just one more year so they could say that it was around for an even 75 years. Anybody want to take bets on how long Canon's CR2 file format will be around???
Great news out from Eye-Fi today! A new version of their card allows transfers of RAW files! You can read about it at Rob Galbraith. In addition to RAW support, you can apparently transfer files directly to your computer using an ad-hod wi-fi network now, instead of having to transfer to some web service like Flickr. So, for $150 you can transfer your RAW files to your laptop while you're shooting, with no need to pass them through the Internets or somebody else's service. This is getting closer and closer to Canon's $900 wi-fi accessory.
Now I wonder which will happen first: Eye-fi coming out with a Compact Flash version or their cards or Nikon and Canon dropping CF altogether. Mybet is on the second, even though I really like Compact Flash as a format for it's speed, larger physical size, and durability.
My tech-savvy friend Philip with his Digital Rebel (with SD card slot) is probably going to be loving this.
In other news, this Photography Bay article details how easy it is to make a stop-motion video using a Nikon D5000, because it has an interval timer function built in. Stop motion videos are fun to make and having an interval timer mode built in to a dSLR is pretty much a no brainer. Too bad that with Canon you have to buy a bulky, expensive $140 accessory to do this. Why? Canon, why?
Erin and I made a really quick trip to Yosemite National Park this weekend and since the main goal of the trip was to hike Half Dome, I only took a few pictures. Saturday was completely consumed by hiking Half Dome and getting cleaned up and fed afterwards, and then getting to bed pretty early. This morning I woke up at about 4:30 though and got my butt in gear to get somewhere before the sun came up.
A quick look at Michael Frye's Photographer's Guide To Yosemite told me that Cathedral Beach to catch the early sun hitting the top of El Capitan would probably be a good bet. I managed to jump in the car and get there well before the sun rose, to find the area completely deserted, and the "beach" completely under the very-high Merced River. Just as I had staked out my place and started to wait for the sun to hit El Cap, another photographer hiked up and proceeded to set up his brand-new-to-him Fotoman 6 x 17 panoramic camera (See my note about Fotoman below)
We chatted a bit since we had some time to kill waiting for the light and it turns out we have quite a bit in common. He's in software in the Bay Area too, and like me he was shooting with a reduced-frame dSLR and just getting fed up with the limitations of the system. Although he'd never shot film before, he decided the next step for him was medium format panoramic so he bought the Fotoman used last month. Like him, I'm trying to decide what my next step is going to be, and I'm frustrated with the large-print-making ability of my current system. I've often thought that medium format film was the way to go - I'm just not sure how I would deal with the workflow of film, the lack of instant gratification, etc.
While we were chatting he mentioned that the sunset the previous evening had been one of the most spectacular he had ever seen in The Valley. Erin and I had noticed the bright color even though the thick canopy of the North Pines campground but by that time on Saturday neither of us were in much shape for going out photo hunting. We had pre-allocated all of Saturday to be a hiking day and I certainly can't complain about how well our hike went - it's just hard to sit around the camp fire getting ready for dinner when you know there's something spectacular only a few miles away, and knowing that it'll be gone by the time you're ready to capture it.
The light finally hit the top of El Cap and we both got in a few shots - 30 for me, and probably about 4 or 8 for him. He only gets 4 shots per roll of 120, so it's a bit of a pain for him. I'm sure there are plenty of people that will say the patience and precision his equipment demands probably makes him a better photographer. I don't disagree with that.
After I got a shot I was happy with I wandered around and found a steaming log in the sun that looked cool. After that the sun was getting pretty high so it was time to head back to camp for breakfast, now having been out and about for about 3 hours.
On our way out of the park we got lucky and found a young bear grazing in a meadow near the turnoff to Toulumne Meadows, causing a "bear jam" of spectators. He was pretty far away given his size, so even the 70-200/4.0 with the 1.4x tele-extender didn't bring him very close. There was a guy behind me with a 300/2.8 and a 2x tele that was letting random passerby look trough the viewfinder at the bear. Could I look through your lens too? With my CAMERA??? :-)
Overall, we had a great weekend trip. I think I got three or four nice pictures - which is pretty good for not really planning to take many pictures.
Note about Fotoman: According to their company news blog, they've apparently gone out of business as of April. I hate to see small makers of neat equipment go under. Apparently they made over 1,000 cameras over their entire career.
I was talking to a friend about workflow and I realized that I've typed the same set of steps a few times for different people recently, so I might as well post it here. I'm coming to digital photography with a fair amount of experience in the Information Technology area so I have a fair idea of how to safely and efficiently deal data. I also have an eye towards longevity of my data regardless of what software comes and goes. Above all, I don't want to be tied to any particular tool since I've been burned by that before.
First, a couple of key points:
So, having said that, here are the steps:
Wow - It looks like a lot (and it is when there are thousands fo images from a shoot) but the process is sound. Doing a good job takes a certain amount of work and shortcuts don't pay off in the long run.
I'm sure something will change and there will be a new version of this document next year or the year after. This is just a snapshot of how I do things now. You're mileage may vary, and I'm not going to get into any arguments about how your way is wrong, or my way is better, etc. It works for me and matches my needs - it might not work for you.
Take a look at this cool quiz hosted by Autodesk, the makers of the most popular Computer-Aided Design (CAD) software in the world: Autocad. There's a mixture of real photos and CG photos of objects and scenes and you have to guess if each one is a real photo or CG. I missed two of the ten. (Thought a photo was CG and thought a CG one was a photo.) For those unfamiliar, Autocad is what designers of manufactured products use to design things. They draw up the plans and send them to the factory and the stuff gets made according to the plans. There's also a mode where you can render what the object will look like and this rendering has been getting better and better as the years go by. Now Autodesk is challenging you to tell the truth apart from their renderings.
Do you see where this is going, photographically?
As I've mentioned before, I do some product photography work. Most of this work is for small objects for companies that manufacture stuff and they want a clean shot of their product with nothing else going on in the background. They draw it up in Autocad and have it manufactured and then they take a picture for the box and for the website, etc. So much time goes into making the picture look perfect with no blemishes, no dust, perfect color, shading, etc. that you end up working hard to make the photo look almost too good to be true. Almost fake, you might say. If Autocad can do such a great job, why pay a photographer and go through all that trouble? Why deal with all the hassle of art-directing a photo shoot to get just the right angle, lighting, etc., when you can just let the software do it for you? No dust, perfect lighting, perfect surfaces, etc.
I've actually lost a client because of this, since they plan to use generated artwork in a lot of places they used to use photos.
This is an obvious choice for manufactured products that get designed this way but luckily not every product is done that way. There are still unique, hand made items in the world. There's still the need for shots of products in situations that can't be modeled/generated/fabricated. There will still be a need for product photography - It's just that the low-hanging fruit of plain product shots may be withering away.
Now, if companies start modeling and rendering their executive headshots, then we'll have real trouble! (Yes, I know they actually do this in Hollywood and video games...)
Sorry for the quick entry without all the hyperlinks I normally put in, but I'm about to have breakfast in Hawaii and I just wanted to get this off my chest. First off, let me say that I'm a huge Lightroom fan. I use it for almost everything. I'm thrilled that Adobe has made it easier to use Lightroom with third-party software through their "plug in" architecture. I use Photomatix myself and I like the ease of integration.
But these so-called "plug ins" are not really plug ins - they're more like "export presets". You select an image (or images) in Lightroom, select "Edit In Photomatix", and then Lightroom renders TIFFs of your images and sends them to Photomatix, and then imports the resulting TIFF that Photomatix creates. I presume the newly announced Nik Silver Efex "plug in" does the same thing.
But what if you want to change something about the source image? What if you want to change the crop, or do some dust removal, etc? Then you've got to start from scratch with the plug in with your new source images.
I'd really like to have a true mechanism for adding new functionality to the develop module in Lightroom. I wonder how the layer/plugin architecture of Photoshop could be re-used to pull something like this off.