See the story here

On PDN

Aurora.is

Well winter has hit Victoria, high winds, temperatures under zero and snow – kind of reminds me of Iceland.
Hopefully it will stay white during Christmas, kind of nicer that way.

I’ve been in an experimental phase in the last days and one of the things I have tried is tethered timed shooting. I attached a 5D to an iMac with a USB cable and used Canon Eos Utility to control the camera. You can set the intervals and how many images to be taken total. Actually you can also control the aperture, shutterspeed, ISO, WB, kind of file and the exposure metering.
For my shot I chose a flower in a vase, dying. I shot it during 5 days with 10 minute intervals. It is lit with two lights, a softbox above and an umbrella in front 45 degrees to the left.
After all the photography was done I assembled the movie in Adobe Flash, flash even imports the images in a right order, each on its own keyframe. Pretty handy for this kind of work.

Small but strong

It´s been 9 months since me and 2 friends started our company International Independent Imaging. It has been a crazy time, with exciting things happening and a lot of experience gathered.
We are very pleased with how things are going and look forward to a phenomenal 2009.
During this time we have had very little time for manufacturing promotional materials and our website has been a victim of that lack of time.
No more, as iii-imaging.com has not had a face-lift more of a face transplant. New design, new photos and new content grace our pages as never before so head on over and check it out.

Here is a short slideshow/movie I made from some shots from a local Fair. I had not intended to shoot so sequentially but I guess digital has made me a trigger happy monkey. If you want to see it in a more quality version you can download it here.(18MB)

Went down to Finnerty Cove and Gyro Park to take some shots of the Lunar Eclipse. The first one is a HDR or High Dynamic Range photograph. Made out of 6 exposures with 3 stop increments.

The one below is HDR as well but only 3 exposures. Canon 5d and a 15mm 2.8 Fish-eye, De-fished.

I have been using Aperture from Apple Inc for 1 ½ years now and I have to say that I am hooked. My Apple fetish probably has something to do with it, but I also have an Adobe fetish and Adobe Lightroom is the alternative to Aperture. So my unhealthy adoration of Apple products is not really a factor.
I used Lightroom for a year, was a part of their beta testing and I generally liked it. When I upgraded my computer and got some real muscle and a two-screen system, Lightroom did at the time not have what I needed.


©Apple Inc.

What Aperture has and I need, is a real support to a two-screen system, it also uses the Graphic Cards memory, when at the time Lightroom did not. Those are factors not everyone would think a big deal, but if you have the horsepower and two screens they are paramount to the decision.
Now this week Aperture 2.0 saw the light of day with even more options for Professional photographers. Tethered shooting, a big one. I have never liked the Canon programs, not surprisingly as they are a Camera manufacturer and it shows in the GUI of their software.
Aperture 2.0 has a clone brush that works this time, more reasons not to go into Photoshop. More speed, enhanced RAW processing and other not so useful stuff.
Lately I have even been printing from Aperture. I always used to print from Photoshop but had some problems with the program not saving my settings and etc. In Aperture it´s just easier, something that becomes more and more important in a fast workflow.
So this is my little love song to Aperture. I still like the name Lightroom better though, but although whimsical by nature, I am not that whimsical.

I have been doing Panoramas for the last months, very nontechnically just on a regular tripod and sometimes if the light is good, hand held. This is a big no no with Panoheads and for a real Panorama a Panorama head is the optimal way to go. They are often more expensive than the average tripod so I´ll wait a while with that purchase.
Panoramas are fun and I see potential for exciting things in conjunction with strobes and people.

Port Renfrew

For one thing Panoramas offer a very large file, which is very good if a project needs to be printed Xtra Large. Another perk with Panoramas is how you can give a truer portrayal of a place. More alike what our eye can see in conjunction with our senses and peripheral vision.

Not Fisheye, but the good old 17-40 @17mm

No its not about putting fish back in after catching them, I read on a forum a discussion about normalizing or correcting the fisheye look from photos taken with a Fisheye. I have a 15mm Canon Fisheye and though I appreciate the effect and try to use it sensibly, sometimes I have thought “Hey thats a good photo, shame about the Fisheye look”.

After doing some research on the good old Internet I found several ways of Defishing a photo.
The easiest way is DXO Optics, its a program that has presets for cameras and lenses and “corrects” skewed lines and spherical abnormalities. It does alot of other things that I am not interested in as I use Aperture for my RAW processing. But this lens fixing feature is quite cool and with the Batch process tools of DXO Optics very handy for bulk “corrections”

I have also experimented with Defishing in Photoshop, using the Transform/Warp, Transform/Skew and Distort/Lens correction. This is more labour intensive but I find that it preserves more of the character of the Fisheye lens. Also this method gives more control but at the same time it is a slower process and not something I´d do for a large shoot.

Here are some examples, the same photo – original, Photoshopped and DXO´ed

I like the Photoshopped version the best, the DXO one looses the wideangle feel that I like. Also it is somehow very long.
I liked the fisheye effect on the sky and on the water in the foreground and in DXO Optics the photo looses that effect a little.
Here are 100% crops from each photo first the DXO´ed then the original and then the photoshopped version.

Do not Defish People, this is what happens

If the person is more in the center it works better.

I actually like this version defished by DXO Optics.

My excuses to Byron for distorting his face