Entries Tagged 'Things I Use' ↓

If asked about my photography I instinctively use the words landscape or exterior to describe what I do. While that was once accurate, lately it is less so. With the construction of commercial buildings in my part of California pretty much stopped this past year I’ve found my commercial work moving indoors.

My commercial exterior skill set was borrowed from years of shooting the West’s landscapes. Decisive framing, knowing good light from lesser light, and shooting fairly quickly are some of the skills that work just as well while shooting in a National Park or a squeaky new Office Building. Also, photographing the exterior of an office building, like shooting landscapes, is (most often) a solo activity.

In contrast, interior work is far less spontaneous and far more about staging and fussiness. While not necessarily more technical, indoor work definitely uses different set of tools. Unlike exterior work, interior photography is almost always collaborative. While I’m happy looking through a view finder for composition, most interior designers and other interested parties are not.

The solution, and there are several variations depending on the species of camera, involves either tethering the camera to a nearby laptop or talking to the laptop wirelessly. Either way images show up on a nearby laptop and crowds gather. While tethering is cheap and reliable, stringing cables between things that don’t drop or fall without suffering greatly, is an invitation to a bad day. Tethering is for the studio.

I shoot Canon Digital and Canon has a wireless solution, the WFT-E2A Wireless File Transmitter, by all accounts it works well. It is pricey and does lots of things that I don’t much care about. Enter the Eye-Fi Pro Wi-Fi / Airport enabled SD card. The Eye-Fi Pro lets most any camera that has an SD slot (my main shooting camera a Canon 1Ds III has both CF and SD slots) to transfer files via a wireless network. Most importantly it allows for an Ad hoc, aka direct camera to laptop, network setup.

I’ve tested it with my MackBook sitting a full 25 feet away and it pretty much just works… well after the obligatory “new thing not working at all” phase.

Setting Up an Ad hoc Network

The folks at Eye-Fi central have a far more grand vision for this little card than simply transferring files from here to there. While the Eye-Fi is plugged into the computer’s USB port, all these features are enabled and managed in a browser based application. This all goes well until it’s time to set up the Ad hoc network feature. To configure the card you have to be on a network. Let’s pretend you are on a wireless network as I was. To configure the Ad hoc network you have to leave the network and create the computer to Eye-Fi link. This is unfortunate. If you try and do this wirelessly… well I couldn’t. The Eye-Fi browser application complained that it could not talk to Eye-Fi central every time I left the Airport network to configure the Ad hoc feature.

After a couple of rounds of this sort of behavior it became clear that the computer is being used to configure the card needs to be hard wired to the internet. After dusting off a spare ethernet cable and finding a spare port to plug it into, my MacBook and Eye-Fi were properly configured. The MacBook was able to talk via ethernet to Eye-Fi central while the wireless chatter between the MacBook and the Eye-Fi card set up the direct wireless link.

The Eye-Fi Pro allows for RAW files to be transferred. Saving (this is a slow, small capacity card) and sending big RAW seems unnecessary for this purpose. The 1Ds III allows for different files to be written to each of the two internal cards. I set up with RAW going to the fast CF card and a medium JPEG file is sent to the Eye-Fi. From click to transfer time seems strangely variable with maximum time of roughly one minute with less than 20 seconds more typical.

Fun With Folder Actions

While transferring a JPEG from camera to laptop using the Eye-Fi qualifies as a good trick, a real solution would display the resulting JPEG for the gathered crowds. Again, some solutions do this natively and others are home made. Follows is the latter.

As part of the Ad hoc network setup, the Eye-Fi application asks for a folder to load with the transferred JPEGs. Using the Automator application that ships with OS X I wrote a (very) simple action that automatically checks to see if anything has been added to the target folder and, when something arrives, to display it in the OS X native Preview application.

The workflow: Compose, worry about staging and lighting, and fire the shutter. The file is sent to the Eye-Fi Pro and from their to the anointed folder on the MacBook. The crowd stares at as the JPEG appears in Preview. Fault is found in the framing or the staging. Something is fixed, the shutter is tripped again…

The title says it all. Steven Frisching, who really likes flying on commercial airlines¹ , has posted a very handy table that gives the dimensions and weight limits for economy class carry-on baggage for 68 of the worlds Airlines.

There is no standard size or weight for in cabin luggage. As a result the allowed weight varies from a low of 11lbs (5kg) on Alitalia to “none” (perhaps better stated as “none specified…”) on several domestic carriers. Adding to the chaos… some Airlines ignore their own regulations while others are know sticklers.

Icelandair is missing. So here, as of this date, are the specs:

IcelandAir: Size: total of the 3 dimensions (L+W+H) does not exceed 115cm (45in) – Weight 13lbs (5.9kg.)

As always, these may change so check with your airline before you head to the airport…

¹ And I don’t.

I have rented lens’ from Lens Rentals.com and nothing but good things to say about them.

As I wondered through all the exotic glass, I apparently missed a series of well written and wide ranging articles that date back to September of last year.

With topics ranging from the mundane, “Purchasing a Ballhead”, to the sublime, “Canon’s Error 99: the Man the Myth”, and the important “Lens Repair Data 3.0″ this is a growing collection of well written information that stands out from the opinionated but mostly fact-free crowd. These folks actually buy, test and have folks like me abuse rent a huge number and collection of lenses by all the major manufacturers.

Highly reccommended.

There are many folks, some more reasonable than others, who have faulted Canon for using the same 9-point autofocus layout in the new/real-soon-now 5D Mark II as the current/previous 5D.

This superb image set of Our New President, Our New Vice President and their Families, before and during the Chicago Victory Speech were taken with the original 5D by David Katz/Obama for America. As I write this, over 1.25 million folks have viewed some or all of these 82 images. I will wager that not one of them thought, “boy, if there were more autofocus points and they were more widely dispersed, these would have been even better.” Not one.

But there is always the next toy. The original 5D’s LCD, now nearly three years old, can makes it sometimes seem more like a film camera with histograms. It is not water tight. The frame rate is pitifully slow…

…and it has a sensor that is (still) as good as any and better than most. Despite all the nattering, in the right hands the 5D shines. The Canon EOS 5D is, still, an excellent general purpose tool. It will remain, for some time to come, a better camera than most of us are photographers.

Landscape photography is, as I discovered most of 25 years ago, nothing more than being a good technician, a passable artist and, most importantly, being there, set up and ready to shoot. These are the minimum qualifications. The ideal is to transcend the first two and to work hard in order to do so as often as possible.

f/8 and be there. With some lenses, f/11 and be there… If you hauled in a view camera, f/22 and be there…

A shooting day starts early, silly early, and ends only after the sun has set, the sky has gone dark, and a place has been found to spend the night. The middle of the day, when light is irredeemable, is spent looking for pictures, catching up on paperwork, planning, napping (see getting up early and going to bed late above) and traveling from here to there (the photography is almost always better there than it is here.)

Even as I’ve gone away from film and towards digital, the rhythm of shooting landscapes has barely changed.

A Very Simple Digital Workflow for the Landscape Photographer

1. Shoot exclusively in RAW. There are reasons to shoot JPEG but landscape photography is surely not one of them.
2. A bad memory card will cause heartache. Buy name brand memory cards and buy them in intermediate sizes. I’ve settled on 8 Gb Sandisk Ultra III for both Compact Flash and SDHC cards. No failures after thousands of frames.
3. A lost memory card will cause even greater heartache. Store them in a safe, dry place with two zippers between the card the outside world. Three zippers is better. Four zippers will, sooner than later, piss you off. Open the zippers to get to your card stash and, now this is where some folks get confused, close all the zippers when you are done.
4. As an aside… Cameras that write to multiple cards only seem expensive.
5. Back up your work each and every day.
6. I back up onto two Hyperdrive Space memory card backup devices. The Hyperdrive Space is a simple, relatively cheap and, very importantly, fast device. I use two because every hard drive every made has or will fail. I bought mine as empty cases and currently have Seagate 160 Gb hard dives installed. This is far cheaper than buying them with hard drives pre-installed.
7. One of the Hyperdrives stays with me at all times. The other Hyperdrive is always separate and as well hidden as I know how.
8. I rotate through my three sets of memory cards. This gives me, for a day or two, a third back up for the most recent image files.