Product Photography

With the autumn coming in the UK, it is starting to get cold and wet.  With some time on my hands, I tried some product photography at home.  What better than photographing my photographic equipment?  This is my attempt at product photography and it proved much more difficult than I first thought.  My early attempts were just not good enough with harsh lighting and burnt out reflections.  I had to experiment a little before the images came out in my vision.

The first photo here is all my Olympus micro four third gears.  They were lit with a Nikon SB26 with a shoot through umbrella left of camera with a large white reflector on the right.  I shot it on my wooden floor to add texture to the image.  Post processing using Capture One involved reducing saturation, increasing contrast and adding -2EV vignette around the frame.  I quite like the outcome.

I also shot a couple of my Canon lenses using very similar lighting.  This time, instead of using a reflector, I had a gridded Canon 540EZ on the right to fill in shadow.  Using my Olympus 45mm F1.8 on my E-PM1 to reduce the DOF, I was able to blur out the background quite well.  These are the results.

Canon 17-40mm F4 L USM

Canon 24-105mm F4 L IS USM

What have I learnt?  The objects you photograph must be immaculately cleaned before the shoot.  Looking at my photo at 100% will show up so much dirt and dust, it is unbelievable!  I am looking to experiment with product photography more this winter when I am not shooting portraits outdoor.  These are nice images, but they are hardly creative.  How to make the images stand out?  That is what I will try to work on.

A Fabulous Day Out Shooting in London with Olympus E-PM1

Sunday 9th September was the last day of the London 2012 Paralympic.  I spent a day shooting the marathon and the streets around central London.  I decided small and light was the order of the day and I used my Olympus E-PM1 with 14-42mm and 40-150mm lenses only.  The E-PM1 with the two MSC (Motion Still Compatible) lenses are recent purchases.  It solved a couple major short comings, slow focus speed and dim LCD screen in bright day light, of the E-PL1 I had before.  Interestingly, the E-PL1 with MSC lens do not focus any faster.

Women's wheelchair race

First off the continuous focus of the MFT cameras are still very poor despite the fast focus speed.  The camera just can not keep up with a marathon runner.  It does not help the LCD freezes and exposure locked once you start shooting.  In the end I prefocused the camera and set it to shoot at continuous high speed at 5FPS and panned the camera blind.  I got some good photos after some practice.  In conclusion, sports photography is no place for MFT cameras.  Working within their limitations, you can still get some good results.  What Olympus and Panasonic need to do is to produce cameras that can continuous focus and the LCD screen do not freeze while shooting.  Unless they do that, they will never displace DSLRs.

Truck carrying photographers

Within the limits of the camera, I shot with both the 14-42mm and 40-150mm lenses to see what they can do.  I also decided early on to try to get some photos of the crowd to get some ideas of the atmosphere and try out some art filters built into the camera.  Here are a few photos taken with the camera and lenses combinations.

I was also interested to see what the bokeh is like from the 40-150mm lens.  I am happy to say it is sort of OK if you shoot at 150mm wide open.  It is never going to be wonderful but it is acceptable and does better than I thought.  Here are a couple of photos showing how the out of focus is rendered.

After shooting the marathon, I had a walk around London to the various events been held there.  Here are a few photos taken during the walk.  Some of the photos were taken using the art filters.  All the photos were taken as jpeg straight from camera without any post processing.

Overall, I am very happy with the results I got.  This is be my light weight camera outfit of choice now.  I am looking forward to trying out a 45mm f1.8 lens in future as I've read very good reports.

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Panoramic Photos Stitching using Hugin

I have always had an interesting in shooting panoramic images for a long time.  In the past I shot using a Horizon 202 film camera, but have not used it for a while.  Now shooting digital it is easier than ever to stitch panoramic images.  Earlier this year, I shot a panoramic fashion shoot using a panoramic head.  Here an image from this shoot.

While working away in the US for 4 weeks, I had the opportunities to see some amazing sights and wanted to them using panoramic.  I did not have my pano head with me and shot the images hand held and used a free software called Hugin to stitched them together.  I was very surprised at it ability to stitch multiple hand held images together.  It has a lot of options to do fine adjustments and the results are very good, especially for a free software.  Here are my favorite images from my trip.

Pikes Peak, Colorado

Pikes Peak, Colorado

Dillon Lake, Colorado

Grand Canyon, Arizona

Loveland Pass, Colorado

I highly recommend this software for stitching panoramic images together.  It has served me very well on this trip.

Shooting on The Rock

I am working in the US at the moment and managed to shoot Neil (a co-working) in Dillon Colorado.  He wants some photos of him standing a rock.  This is a business trip so I did not carry a lot of stuff with me.  I fitted my Nikon SB26 a monopod and it was held by hand with a helper.  I use on my PT04 radio trigger to trigger the flash.  For this shoot, I used my 50mm f1.8 lens on my Canon 550D.

One evening after work, we went to a couple of rocks I saw a few days before with Neil and our assistant Peter.  The location is steep and full of rocks.  There was no way a light stand can be used.  Peter will have to had hold the flash attached to a monopod.

Peter holding flash attached to monopod

The condition was overcast which made it easy to under expose the ambient condition.  I shot at 1/200s at f8 and had the flash zoomed to 24mm at 1/2 power.  IThe shoot was very short and only lasted 30 minutes, but we got some great shots.  I am very happy with the results.

Postcards from Phoenix Arizona

For the last couple of weeks, I've been in Phoenix Arizona working in the heat of summer.  It is very hot and I did not push myself to shoot out in the heat.  However, I did managed to go out a few time to shoot in downtown Phoenix and a couple of attractions.

I've to say, there are not a lot of interesting stuff to shoot in the city itself.  Most of the interesting stuff are out in the desert which I did not have the time to go out to.  Here are a few photos I shot which I think are worthwhile.

The Hole in The Rock Phoenix

View from The Hole in The Rock

Civic Space Park

Interesting structure in the park called "Her Secret Is Patience"

View from below.  The sculpture is by Janet Echelman 

View from another angle

I am hoping to take more photos from this trip very soon.

Summer Shoot in Russell Square

I had a quick photo shoot with the lovely Ali Valenzuela in a park near Russell Square in London at the weekend.  The idea was to shoot some summer type images.  The weather was unpredictable with wind, rain, sun and cloud.  It made accurate exposure more difficult as lighting was changing all the time.  I’ve decided to shoot the images with my 85mm f1.8 lens at f1.8 as much as possible for shallow DOF.  At times I had to put a polarizing filter on the lens to reduce the shutter speed below 1/250s.

Shooting at f1.8 made focus critical.  With the model moving between poses, it resulted in quite a few out of focus images.  I had to shoot a lot more images than normal to make sure there were a good enough selection of images in focus to choose from.

Again, I used my Strobeam DL4 lighting kit with my 43” umbrella softbox for lighting.  I was using very low power so I could have used my speedlites, but decided I was to large modifier.  This is the second time I created this shallow DOF over exposed look.  I think it has its place but don’t want to over use it.  I am going to wait a while before shooting in this style again.

A Shoot in the Park

The British summer have yet to really start this year, but at least the temperature is starting to warm.  I made use of a break in weather this week and did a shoot with the beautiful Ema Sol.  She is originally from Slovakia.  I wanted to do a shoot in the park in late evening.

We met up in St James Park near Buckingham Palace for this shoot.  I decided to shoot with my 85mm f1.8 lens as wide open as possible while keeping my flash sync speed to 1/200s.  I was in luck as it was a cloudy evening and under the tree, I was able to shoot at f1.8 at 1/200s at ISO 100. This mean the images were over exposed by 0.5 stop and some highlight was blown out.  I had a polarizing filter with me in case I had to reduce the ambient light level, but did not use it.  When I saw the test image on the LCD, I was very happy with the results.  By shooting at f1.8, the bokeh was dream like and beautiful which complemented the slight over exposure.  I was traveling very light and I only took my camera body, flash trigger, 50mm f1.8, 85mm f1.8, a light stand and a Canon 540EZ flash with me.  I didn't even take any light modifier with me.  Ema needed the smallest amount of fill flash which I think was 1/64 power.

Ema was a delight to work with.  She arrived in immaculate make up and hair styled as agreed before hand.  She needed very little help with posing and I was very happy with the resulting images.  Here are a few of my favorite photos from this shoot.  I must use the 85mm f1.8 lens much more and wide open.