The most exciting of the three lenses is probably the one bearing the name of Mr Carl Zeiss instead of the Sony brand, and this one is the CZ Sonnar T* E 24mm f1.8. See pros, I told you there’d be some nice stuff to perk up that NEX-7 here.

The other two lenses are both Sony branded, and are both “OSS,” indicating they add in-lens stabilization to the mix. The first is the E 50mm F1.8 OSS, which works out to a 75mm 1.8 portrait prime. The other s the more pedestrian E 55-210mm F4.5-6.3 OSS, which exists as the consumer-level telephoto compliment to the 18-55mm kit lens.

If you’ve got a bunch of Alpha or Minolta A glass around, but don’t like the crippled AF functionality offered by the current mount adapter, Sony’s new mount adapter has the solution to your woes. It has Sony’s SLT semi-translucent mirror built in, which can direct a portion of the light to an autofocus sensor, which is also built in. It is named, in a rare moment of lucidity for the camera industry, the LA-EA2, or “Lens Adapater, E to Alpha, revision 2.” Craziness.

For a fancy description of what a polarizing filter does to the light that makes your image see this incredibly boring wikipedia article.  For those of us that cant call MIT our Alma Mater, a polarizing filter allows certain wavelengths (colors) of the visible light spectrum to come through the lens and bounces other wavelengths away.  These filters are very effective at reducing reflections and this is why polarized lenses are used in sunglasses.  Here is the tricky part though, you can purchase $10 sunglasses or $200 sunglasses and there is a major difference in how efficient the glasses are at polarizing the light.  The same holds true for lens filters.  A high quality filter (which will cost more than a few Jeffersons) is going to deliver consistent results across the entire field of view of the lens.  This is especially important when using wide angle lenses.

Wide angle lenses have a very large field of view which means the light that makes that image is collected and bent into the camera lens at a steep angle.  High quality camera lenses are built to correct for optical aberrations that occur as a result of the light being manipulated in this manner.  Low quality filters are not.  A cheap polarizing filter will not provide a consistent effect across the entire field of view of the image.  Instead you will be left with the effect in one area while the rest of the image remains unaffected.  Keep in mind a cheap polarizing filter for an average sized consumer lens can set you back about $50-70 .  Typically you will invest another 25-35% for a pro-grade filter like the B+W or Hoya HD brands.

So, while most photographers think of using polarizing filters for landscape shooting because it produces a rich blue sky with nice contrast in the clouds,  it is also minimizing unwanted reflections and glare in your scene.

The image to left is shot with exactly the same camera settings, lens, camera body, position of camera, etc as the image to the right.  The only difference is the use of a polarizing filter on the image to the right.  Note how the reflection of the sun is not completely hidden.  No polarizer will do that.  Pick your battles.  More importantly, notice how the beautiful color of the classic Corvette comes through with a properly used filter.

Both of the following images were shot with a polarizing filter, but the filter was set to different position in its rotation.  The top image was set to reduce glare on the hood of the car.  In this case the color wasnt being drastically affected by the reflection of the sky, but the reflection was extremely annoying to see.  However, notice the glare on the side of the truck to the right side of the image.  Because  these two surfaces are perpendicular to each other, you cannot polarize to reflection on both surfaces simultaneously.

The image below shows the reflection on the hood of the car but omits it on the truck.

As always, click on any image to see it larger.

If you could be a color, which one would you be? Whatever your choice, you want it to be accurate and true.

If you happen to be in the group of people who own both a Spyder3 calibrator and an iPad or iPad 2, then you’re exactly the sort of person DataColor would like to show their new-ish app to. It lets you calibrate your display… sorta. Obviously it can’t access the root level functions of your iPad, Apple’s toys don’t work that way. But, it can calibrate the screen while it is open itself, and that’s what it does. You run the app, and you access your photo library from inside it, and so long as you’re doing that then you can show your pictures off with accurate color calibration.

It’s a free bit of software, so, it’s worth the try if you’ve picked up a Spyder3 along the line for your other calibration needs. You can grab it from the Apple App Store via the external link.

• Wide Stance Cross-braced Magnesium Alloy Spider
  provides ultimate core system stability
• Oversized Center Column Lock
  adds vibration reducing structural support
• Matched Precision Unique Three-Way Panhead
  with quick release plate and folding handles that allows precise camera positioning and easy transport
• Non-Rotating Double-Keyed Leg Sections
  advanced new tubing design provides extra strength and permits easy setup
• Quick Lock Legs
  tripod height can easily be set by a flip of the quick lock leg levers
• Reversible Center Column
  allows low angle shooting
• Spring Loaded Weight Hook
  allows additional weight mounting stability during windy conditions
• Adjustable Leg Angles with Lock
  accommodates uneven surfaces and awkward shooting situations
• Grooved Center Column
  prevents unwanted column rotation
• Integral Bubble Level
  allows adjustment to prevent uneven pans and tripod head movements
• Snap-in Quick Release Plates
  interchangeable QR system assures effortless and rapid camera changes
• Closed Cell Foam Grip
  provides comfortable handling during cold or hot outdoor conditions

Also note all three of these new ones are panheads. It looks like the previous generation with ballheads will continue to exist alongside this new strain. They’ll set you back between $164 and $220, depending on how big of one you need, but for that price you get the complete tripod and head set, so, it’s pretty good for those of you starting to get serious about photography. A cheap tripod will wobble enough to actually add shake to your photos instead of lessening it, so, it’s really worth upgrading to a proper quality set of legs for your shooting.

OK, that out of the way, here’s what Tenba has to say about this new collection:

VECTOR is a unique collection of prosumer bags with a striking monochrome design. Every zipper, clip, D-ring, rain cover, lens cloth and piece of fabric is custom-dyed in three of the latest trend colors (plus black) and made to match. Vector bags are extraordinarily lightweight, and constructed of water-resistant fabrics for protection in wet weather conditions. The materials and hardware used in each bag meet the “Crafted Without Compromise” level that has continued to be Tenba’s signature. All bags are available in Krypton Green, Oxygen Blue, Cadmium Red and Carbon Black.

The system will be made of three pouches, two top-loaders, three shoulder bags, and a daypack, all available in Cadmium Red, Carbon Black, Oxygen Blue, or–our favorite–Krypton Green. Tenba makes good bags, and my Messenger has been doing me quite well since I bought it last summer, so, I’m rather excited to see these vibrant beasties start coming to shelves.

“Why, hello sir, do you need an obscene amount of zoom to revel and romp in?”

“Why, actually, I do.”

“Aha! Well, the Olympus Sp-610 UZ it is for you then, sir! Right this way…”

It’ll be about $230ish, and should come out “soon.”

To continue our small flash theme from last week, lets talk in detail about some regular uses of speedlights.  In an effort to keep this simple, i will limit this post to two styles of photography: macro (close-up, high magnification) and portrait photography.

Macro photography offers a view of the world in a way that most people don’t have a chance to see it.  The trouble is you are often shooting into dark places and a little extra light can make a really big impact on your photograph.  In the image above, i used a single SB900 Nikon Speedlight triggered wirelessly with the built-in Nikon CLS control, a Nikon D90 and the AF-S 105mm f/2.8 VR Micro.  CLS is the “Creative Lighting System” and it offers some of the very best abilities in the flash photography market.  Nikon has always been pretty serious about speedlights and the role they carry out in photography.

Its a good thing today’s flashes have a lot of power output, because when you’re this close to your subject with a 105mm lens you need a small aperture to achieve good results in depth of field control.  I shot this image at f/18 and my flash setting was manual at 1/5 power.  Now you might ask me, “why would you shoot manual flash with Nikon’s fancy iTTL (auto flash) ability tied into CLS?”  I’ll tell you; that dark background wasn’t so dark in real life.  I was shooting into the eastern sky in the mid-afternoon.  It was awash with low contrast light and it was ugly.  This also means my image was almost completely back lit.  TTL flash would have nver figured that one out for me.  I could have exposed for the subject’s front side and let the background go a couple of stops overexposed, but then i would have lost all the beautiful color in the flowers and plants.  You could ask, “why don’t you change your composition and put the sun behind you?.  I’ll tell you; bugs don’t like to cooperate and they certainly don’t hold still for very long.  I hand held the flash approximately 3 feet away from the subject.  Shooting at a fast shutter speed kills off as much ambient light as possible.

The image is lit entirely by flash, but doesn’t have the look of a standard flash photograph.  The flash was up high over the subject and the size of the flash is quite a bit larger than our flying friend.  This means it will appear to be a fairly diffused (soft) light source.  By comparison, if we used a 6 foot tall light source to take a picture of a person, we would achieve a similar diffused value.  Small subjects are perfect for small flashes.

Portraits are my mainstay in photography.  Its the subject i first learned to shoot and it is what drives my passion for this labor of love.  In general, most people take pictures of people.  Family and friends, young and old, pictures provide memories of those we care about.  I remember sitting next to the living room window on this delightfully tacky, blue ottoman while my dad snapped frame after frame of my siblings and me.  The pictures are fun.  Cheesy smiles, gapped teeth, it was us.  I look at those pictures today and fondly remember it happening, but i don’t see the people i know as much as i see a couple of good looking kids.  It is said the eyes are a window to the soul and for a portrait to have life you must see the soul.

This image is a very basic setup in a studio environment, but could have been shot practically anywhere.  Essentially there is one light on the model (SB800 Speedlight inside a small softbox, a Lumiquest Softbox III would also work nicely) and one light on the background (SB800 bounced inside  a 45″ umbrella).  Here is where the control of CLS plays a major roll.  Using Nikon’s built-in control you can shoot multiple lights at different power levels and control everything from your camera or the master flash connected to your camera’s hot shoe.  By controlling the power levels of my flash units independently i can make the ratio between the two lights as even or contrasted as i want.  I can make the background go black or an extremely crisp and high key white.  The softbox was in very close providing a very diffused light.  This is a nice effect of softening skin and helping to reduce the appearance of blemishes or lines on a face.  If you light this image properly, you can avoid wasting way to much time touching up your image on the computer.  Grab this PDF FastTrack To Wireless Speedlights (open the link in a new tab or window and right-click for windows users/control-click for Mac users to download the file) for a Nikon guide on how to setup CLS with different cameras and flashes.

The image to the left is a very simple portrait shot during the afternoon in direct sun.  Even though the top half of the subject’s face is still shaded, you can see the catch light in the eyes (if the eyes are completely shrouded then the portrait has no life).  The setup was a Nikon D80 and 50mm 1.4D lens shot in aperture priority and a flash mounted on the camera and set in iTTL.  Basically, everything was set in near automatic.  Heck, i didn’t even look through the viewfinder and shot this one from the hip to have my camera well below the subject’s face.  This perspective eludes to a sense of strength or power from the model.  Using a speedlight outdoors helps to even out the brazen sun light and illuminate portions of an image that would otherwise be near black in shade.  If i hadn’t used a lens with a big aperture, i wouldn’t have been able to shoot this image very well.  Big apertures (commonly f/2.8 or greater) on your lenses will increase your flash power.  Each stop of your aperture i.e.  f/4.0 to f/2.8  gains double the power of a flash.  A simple 50mm from Canon or Nikon will allow not only for shallow depth of field rendering and great separation from the background, but also a much more capable flash unit.

In the final image to the right, I shot with a 4 speedlight setup.  A single SB800 in a 24×32″ softbox one on each side of the model provides a simple rim light to show contour and shape of the subject and the chair.  They are mounted up high with the middle of the box at nearly head level allowing for a nice falloff of light towards the bottom of the frame.  This keeps the attention up towards the face.  The other two SB800′s were bounced into 45″ umbrellas with black covers as background lights.  The black cover keeps the light from spilling forward into the scene which would  contribute to the exposure of the subject and cause lens flare reducing the contrast rendering of the lens.  Contrast is extremely important in this style of image because of the subtle shift of whites to light grays in the shirt and background.  I shot this image with a Sony A900, Zeiss 24-70 f/2.8 and  Pocketwizard PlusII’s to trigger one SB800.  I only needed one receiver connected to a flash because the SB800 and SB900 (newer version) have built in slave eyes.  A slave eye will trip the slave flash when it sees another flash fire.  This is an extremely handy feature and i refuse to purchase a flash without it.  Sorry Canon users, since your speedlights don’t have this capability, i guess you’ll just have to settle for using Pocketwizard’s incredible Flex and Mini radio triggers.  The only catch to the using the slave eye on the SB units is you lose your remote control ability.  Essentially your flashes turn into standard studio strobes.  However, once your ratios are set for the lighting pattern you want you don’t have to adjust anything.  Manual flash control provides consistency.  My lighting pattern here was in the ballpark of 1 to 1.5 stops up on the background to where my key lights (sb in 24×32″ softboxes) were metered.

Next time: Product photography and working outdoors and on location with strobes.  Stay tuned…

Camera sensors are rated for a range of sensitivity and my Nikon D700 shoots from 200ISO through 6400ISO. Then you have the option of pushing beyond the sensor’s ratings into “High ISO” or, essentially, push processing (remember that?).  Push processing was rating film at your camera for underexposure then “pushing” the film back to its original rating during the processing of the negatives. This was tricky to get just right, unless you did the math.  Let’s be honest though, the math sort of ruined the fun and sometimes I’d rather just guess and see what came out the other end. This was akin to shocking your film with a cold water rinse just before the fixing stage or cross-processing chromes in color chemistry. All these options, with so much left to the unknown, often resulted in undesired results, but every once in awhile strange and happy photographs would greet you on the other end.

I know a lot of photographers that wont budge over 800ISO on their fancy pro DSLRs.  Three years ago I was more inclined to agree with them as the loss of detail through noise reduction or the overwhelming amount of noise produced in the image made it near impossible to see what was what.   Put simply, as a photographer, all we do is chase the light around.  Today, however, if you’re not venturing down the higher ISO road, you’re missing out on some great light.

I love night photography.   The color cast from lights at night are anything but normal.  The strong shadows and eerie light patterns are a draw to my photographic eye. Normally higher ISO ratings aren’t a necessary tool with night photos, a sturdy tripod is, however, a must have piece of equipment.  My daily tripod is the Manfrotto 3021BPro which is the earlier version of the 055XProB.

The image above (click for a larger view) was shot without a tripod because I can’t find my quick release plate for my tripod head.   I know, I know… =/  so the thought enters my head, lets see what light is out there.   With my D700 and my 70-300VR lens hand-held (lens hood pressed against a glass door) I looked across the backyard, dialed the ISO to High 2 (25,600 ISO, this is two stops above 6400 with each stop acquiring two times as much light), set the aperture to f/11 (the sweet spot on that lens) and the shutter speed to 1/2 seconds.  This metering set is equivalent to 200 ISO, f/11 at a 60 second exposure time (shutter speed).  Keep in mind VR in your lens can compensate the same 2-3 stops regardless of what shutter speed you start from.   I braced myself against the back of a chair for a little extra stability.

B/W picture control was set at the camera. The image was processed through Nik Capture NX2 for sharpening only. NO noise reduction was applied (NR was off in the camera, also).

I don’t normally venture above 6400 ISO on my camera, but i didn’t often cross-process slides either. Some days it just feels right to be a little abnormal.

Go shoot something differently tomorrow.

Get outside your comfort zone.

___________________

John Scott

Nikon Coolpix S1100pj

Nikon today has announced the update to last year’s novelty S1000pj, the first camera with a built in projector. This year’s model ups the ante, and adds a lot of features to this concept that help to make it a much more appealing package. And then they made it cheaper. Hard to complain about that, isn’t it?

Key changes include an upgrade to a 14 megapixel sensor and a switch to a 3″ touchscreen LCD with twice the pixel resolution. And, on the projector front (you know, that big honky lens on the front that makes this thing unique), we’re looking at 14 lumens, up from 10, and it can now be used as an ad hoc projector for any JPEGS on the memory card, or can be hooked up to your computer and used as a projector for that.

And, let’s not forget these slick new colors on that much nicer looking body there, yeah? It’s good to see someone else taking visual cues from those nifty Olympus Tough cameras, which the design on this is admittedly very reminiscent of (*cough cough Stylus 750SW cough*).

It’ll be available yet this year, and it’ll debut at around $350, or about $80 bucks less that its predecessor did, and not much more than the S1000pj is currently at. Impressive.

So, luckily, these new C-Pols will be 1/3 stop brighter, which will of course matter so some and be irrelevant to others, but it’s still a nice new offering. And, apparently the new film has UV cut-off filters on its own, so they’re UV filters, too, for those of you with no or weak cut-off filters built over your sensor (or, for those of you nuts using this “film” stuff I hear about).

Pricing and availability still unknown.