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#1178. Week Links of Photography (13 Mar 2022)
By pascaljappy | News
Nature photography awards, tilt lenses, easy lighting, easy backups, cine lenses turned photo lenses, Apple Studio, Sony Medium Format, AI photo tagging, ethical wildlife photography, soft proofing … and more 😉
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I am stunned! Disappointed! After my last debacle, claiming I’d gotten off to flying start and based in on a claim that I had “pole position” – then having to cringe, because someone else beat me! – I put this one aside, to see what happened. Except it didn’t. Nothing!
Oh well. Love the wildlife photos (except for the seal chasing the penguin – bully!). The ice crystals is fascinating, but way outside my limited knowledge of physics. I can’t get your gear survey to open.
Tilt – tilt/shift – whatever. I might be wrong, but I think Canon is best at this. I’m stuck with Nikon’s, and jealous of theirs. This one seems to lack “shift”, so you quite rightly called it a “tilt” lens. Unfortunately that’s a fairly severe limitation.
On location lighting. Well – yes – OK – sprung. That’s why I don’t. I rely on the sun or street lighting or whatever I can scrounge from the environment – and justify it by saying I’m shooting what I saw. Of course it doesn’t always work. I do do “studio” lighting – gave up on flash years ago, hardly ever put a flash gun on my cameras these days and resent the ones that automatically pop up out of the camera body in low light. I prefer using panels of LEDs, capable of staying for whatever time I want, and adjustable for both intensity and colour range – they hum!
Mavics – well originally they were just over $1,000 – then just over $2,000 – now, the Mavic 3 is just over $4,000. But it doesn’t stop there – the camera shop wants to send you off on a drone-flying course, so you can get your drone-pilot’s flying certificate, before you get any smart ideas about actually using it. Once you’re past that stage, the sky’s – literally! – the limit! We had a world class image in our weekend paper recently, of an eagle in full flight, wings outstretched, flying upside down! – photographed from a drone a few feet above it! – with the farmer’s own property underneath it, to provide a lush pastoral background for the shot. It was sensational photography! Only with a drone – my tripod isn’t tall enough – neither am I.
Backup – my idea of backup is printing the photos. I’m currently 2 years behind! Thanks for the reminder! Cloud storage seems to be nuts – several of them have gone under, leaving professionals weeping and amateurs devastated – none of the electrical gear seems to last forever. These days, prints can last over a hundred years, and I certainly don’t intend to, so that’ll see me out.
Cine lenses on still cams? Never thought of that one! Cine lenses have quite different characteristics, so I’m told. That could be a fertile field for creative ‘togs. Still lenses on cine cams don’t seem to appeal to the film industry much – which is part of the reason I am puzzled by the flood of cameras claiming to be multi-disciplined, and doing both jobs. I prefer “purpose built”, so I’m ignoring that one.
That said – spots action photos and the like are best captured by still cams with the ability to take successive images at cine rates, so the selection of “the shot for the day” can be made at a more leisurely pace, in the post processing stage. That’s how we’re getting to see dazzling “stills” of “action shots” on the field, during sporting events of all kinds, these days. Could never have done that with a Graflex Speed Graphic press camera, back in the day!
PAUSE BUTTON – now it’s someone else’s turn! Thanks for sharing these articles Pascal – I’m still working through them all, it’s always interesting and sometimes fascinating to look over someone else’s shoulder & see what they do with their cams!
Hi Pete,
You can easily replicate shift through the convergence correction tools in Lightroom for instance. But tilt is still beyond easy digital simulation. I guess that’s why tilt lenses can find a small market.
Cine lenses can be optically close to photo lenses. Their construction is usually more homogeneous throughout a range, though, so that each can be swapped in for another without having to rebuild the rig around it. Optically, they tend to be spherical designs. Unlike photography which has become all about sharpness, cine lenses are all about a distinct and consistent aesthetic. Also, focus breathing is a big no no, so a lot of work is put into correcting this. Cine lenses tend to be designed for workflows, not charts, because it’s a lot more difficult and unimportant to see absolute sharpness in moving images. Particularly when soft filters and anti aliasing filters are almost systematic 😉
Drones. I like the images but regret that anyone can have one. The guy who pestered that eagle should be fed to lions.
Lighting is difficult. I think the most interesting thing we can get from the cine-oriented videos is becoming attuned to good light. In photography, we tend to think that golden hour is good light. But there’s a lot more to it than that and seeing how others do it can make us more sensitive to good natural light 🙂
Cheers
Snigger – I have to confess this – I LOVE natural light – I love the challenge, and when I succeed, I love the reward. If I have to take a hundred shots to get one “good one”, then I will think I’ve done well. Pros do it all the time – they don’t always tell us, but heaps of them shoot a hundred shots, then cull the lot for the one standout shot! And the same goes for shooting natural and/or available light images.
Thanks again for the week (in no way weak!) links. I really appreciate all the work you put into researching and gathering everything in one place – DS! I especially liked the World Nature awards images – even though I’m not a wildlife photographer, I can appreciate and enjoy all the effort that goes into a well crafted & unposed image. The Bellatrix video and Craig Colvin landscapes were also fascinating. The links on creativity will always grab my attention, guess I can’t help that!
I forgot to mention your wonderful images! Especially the statues in the window and the Tuscan Lion – what a handsome fellow.
Oh well – deathly silence, apart from the pair of us, Pascal, so I’ll pick up from where I left off.
AI to tag stuff – good idea – my catalogue system is hopeless – artificial intelligence would undoubtedly do it better.
MACs – I’m a full screen iMAC devotee – dunno what the rest of the stuff is like.. I am however increasingly finding that spending more isn’t always better. An extreme example is printers – I was hoping when I bought mine that I could do decent size panoramas on it, after all they mentioned a paper roll attachment was included. But then I found you can’t get suitable rolls of paper! EEEEEEKK !!! And anyway, there’s a guy with a zoo full of printing machines who can do the odd pano for me, no fuss, reasonable price, and because he does nothing all day except printing other people’s photos on high-end machines, he does a better job than I could possibly do here. Have fun relating that back to your Macbook Pro!
Sony going where? I love the article – every camera manufacturer who wants to dart off into the bushes and come up with some incredible new game-breaker ought to be forced to read this article first! How many times have you/I heard serious ‘togs say “If ONLY they would fix X, Y, Z before they go trying to reinvent the universe!” “Why can’t they make a better version of what I AM using, already?” “Can’t they fix A, B, C, just using a software update?”
But no – they all want to “innovate”. Instead of listening to what their customers really want! Anyway, GAS is nuts – 12 of the best landscape pictures I’ve seen in the past 2 years were taken at Lake Eyre, in the far north of South Australia – in flood, a reasonably rare occasion – even though the Lake is roughly 30 metres below sea level. And they could have been taken with lenses made out of the bottom of jam jars. An 1880’s plate glass camera would have gotten sharper shots! The mantra is – it’s not WHAT you use, it’s HOW you use it.
Safe wildlife research – yes – I saw the video, and I’ve seen another, about treating insects with respect – try to do your macros on insects that are already dead when you find them – stop killing them to get your shot! Why do humans HAVE so little respect for the things they want to look at?
Soft- proofing. Well for a start I’m no great fan of Adobe – Lightroom – Photoshop. I use LR rarely, and although I use PS often, the functions I use it for are much more basic than this. And almost NEVER use either of them to send something to the printer.
But we can always learn, if we want to – there’s a lot in this article, and I am keeping it for later.
Women photographers – well, pardon my bias – the least interesting days of my life were passed when, as a child, I was sent off to sexually segregated schools from the age of 5 till I left schools behind at the age of 17. My impression of women as photographers takes me into another space – a space where I keep coming across women who “see” things men don’t (or anyway, didn’t) – whose photography is ace-high, and worthy of an exhibition to make the point. In short, a lot of them are very fine photographers. Even though they don’t always seem to be aware of it.
Anyway – women are roughly half the population of the planet, and anyone who thinks they can’t learn from that pool of skills and knowledge is just plain nuts!
Donations to worthy causes – we already do, so I’ll skip those two – word of warning, though – watch out for scalpers, exploiting charities – we actually found a professional fund raiser charging a set fee which ended up being 130% of the funds they ended up raising, for the charity – making the charity WORSE off.
But faces on screens – I’ve “had” action movies, most of them don’t do a thing for me, storyline and “acting” have disappeared, images change way too fast for human brains – just flashing from one thing to another – plots are altogether too bizarre. I’d rather go backwards, and watch a Donald Duck cartoon! I don’t think I can actually “remember” any films made in the past 3 decades – partly because the ones I saw were boring, actually – and partly because that put me off going to see any of the others. This guy’s notion of “faces on screens” would be totally different. For BIG screen, their acting would have to be superb! So much so, they’d be able to create an empathetic connection with the audience!
Towards the end of your article, Pascal, you mention the Ukraine – and people in need.
Were/are you aware that Skylum/Luminar is based in the Ukraine?
Many people are heavily reliant on their software. Just another example of why I think “war” is a bloody stupid idea, and only complete morons start wars!