HDR. In Lightroom!?

Yes indeed!  Lightroom CC (aka Lightroom 6) was released this week with some cool new features including photomerge functionality for both HDR and panoramas.  Here's a test drive HDR and it looks pretty good!

Center Harbor, NH

Motion

When I photograph a race, a goal is to try to get a strong photo of every competitor.  Strong for me means sharp focus with the person looking athletic against a great background.  Many times because of the logistics of the course layout,  you get one chance and if you miss it, you don't have a photo of that athlete.

At the recent Cranmore Hill Climb, the course layout provided several great opportunities to photograph nearly the whole field.  This allowed me to be a little more creative and as folks ran the home stretch to the finish, that meant making some panning shots and taking advantage of the wonders of motion blur.

I don't use this technique that often.  Honestly, it can be sort of elusive for me and, like I said, you hate to miss getting a usable image of a competitor.  But after a few test shots at Cranmore, I was getting pretty reliable results and I'm pretty happy with the images.  Best of all, the runners seem to love them!

It takes a few shots to dial in the settings when shooting motion blur.  Panning your lens is obviously a key element to these shots.  Twist your body towards the subject and pan your lens it moves by you. The key to the shot is definitely shutter speed.  Start at around 1/200 and tune it from there depending on the light and the look you're going for.  The slower the shutter speed, the more blur you'll create.  All of these images where made with at f/18 and shutter speeds between 1/15th and 1/40th.

Look here!

I'm not one of those people hung up on age, so I don't have a problem telling you that I'm 47.  Getting older really doesn't bother me although there is one thing that is driving me a little crazy.  My eyes just aren't what they used to be.

I've worn glasses since the second grade, so I'm plenty accustomed to not having perfect vision.  But this feels like it happened overnight and now I don't seem to see things up close very well.  If there isn't adequate light, it's gets even tougher.  So, I try to remember to schlep reading glasses around, but more often than not, I forget.  My iPhone has proven it's worth once again as it makes a dandy way to shine some light on a menu in a dark restaurant so I can read the damn thing.

Now why am I boring you all with this on this blog post?  Well, I'm here to tell you that this is no fun for a photographer.  It's made verifying focus, checking for blown out highlights and reading camera settings pretty darn hard.  There are even times when verifying a good facial expression is difficult.  The good news is I'm also here to tell you about an awesome product delivering me from the blur of middle age eyesight.  I give you the Hoodman Loupe!

This isn't a new product, but in my view it had always seemed a bit of a luxury.  One of those must haves for the overly indulgent gear head or the thing to get the photographer who had everything.  But with my 40-something eye challenges, I can also tell you it is making me want to look at my camera LCD again.  I can see!

The loupe features a diopter like you find on a binocular so that you can dial in a sharp view of the LCD.  It has the added benefit of blocking glare to make viewing the LCD a better experience than it's ever been... even when I had the eyes of a 30 year old.  I can easily verify sharp focus, validate a great composition and check for blown out areas and poor exposure.  I have to say that the Hoodman Loupe is allowing me to once again walk away with confidence knowing that I got the shot.  While not technically true, it makes the back of my camera look like high def.  It even has a nifty lanyard to hang it around your neck so you don't lose it.  Which is great because you know what goes after your eyes?  That's right... your memory!

Carbonite is your Kryptonite... Stay away from it!

I like to try to keep this blog on a positive note, but sometimes a story must be told.  This is something you have to know or you'll blow $60 too.

In the spring, I decided I was way overdue implementing a good offsite backup solution for my photo archive.  After reading some positive things, decided to get a subscription to Carbonite.  Ironically, I signed up just about April 1st of 2013.  I had some fits and starts in getting the back-up running, but that was mostly my error.  For example, I didn't realize something that makes total sense... I needed to leave my computer on for the backup to work on the initial upload.  Therefore, at the start, my backup made very meager progress and I started leaving my computer on 24 hours a day.

Once I got that straightened out, I locked into what Carbonite considers normal upload speed... about 20 gigs per day.  I have a note on my desk that at 7:41am on May 11th, I had backed up 88.08 gb of data.  Another note shows 5/12/2013 at 1:43pm... 110.61 gigs.

I resigned myself to let it percolate and checked again on 6/6/2013... 229.83 gb of data had been backed up.  I once again forgot about the slow grind being done on my back up, but this week decided to check again.  On August 11, 2013, 295 gb of data has reached the safety of the beloved cloud hosted by our friends and protectors of data at Carbonite.  Huh?  It's getting slower.

When I emailed Carbonite support asking if this was normal, they politely told me that backups over 200 gb are adjusted to be slower than back ups under that threshold.  Now again, user error on my part.  Or buyer beware.  I didn't read the fine print and I didn't do enough math to calculate just how horrible this service is.  While I maybe unique in having over 500 gigs of photo files, I think most people I know now have music and photo archives in excess of 200gb.  At this rate, it will take a full year and I'll be up for renewal before my data is secure and backed up on their servers.

The reply from the folks at Carbonite basically said that's OK with them.  I don't know how that can be.  This is all just bad business.  If someone purchased a stove only to learn that it turned the heat down just as the burner hit the temperature and duration to boil a pot of water, we'd all agree that was a real problem.  Regardless of any fine print from the stove manufacturer, it's betraying the essence of what a stove is and what a stove should do.  It's not delivering on what any reasonable person would consider the purpose of the product.  This is analogous to Carbonite's service.  It's backs up stuff, but not in a way that is a solution for what most people need it to do.

Then they did something I really don't like... and I'm guessing you don't either... they referred me to their terms of service for justification of their performance and the fine print on throttled down back up speeds... as if to say "tough, sucker".  There are hundreds of ways to make people happy in the face of losing a customer.  A coupon code for next year's renewal probably would have made me feel like these people had any concern for me as a customer.  Seeing as my data will probably be backed up by then, it might even have saved me.  Out of curiosity, I followed the link they provided for their terms of service and the screen shot below is what I found.  Good stuff.

In the final email that they sent, they conceded to me with "You are absolutely right, we are not truly designed for use by customers with large video or photo data (archives).... please accept our deepest apologies for any misunderstanding regarding our product".  Take a look at www.carbonite.com and see if there is any attempt to portray their product as having that limitation.  And like I said... who doesn't have a large photo, video and/or music archive these days?

Now I realize this is just $60 and maybe this is all a little over the top.  But, I'm on a roll and I'll admit it's sort of fun to rant.  It's also months of time and months of leaving a computer on 24x7 and it's just plain deceptive.  I think it's what is so often wrong with businesses today... an approach to the customer filtered through policy and defying conventional wisdom.  They have little understanding or concern for how customers really use their product.

I'll keep the backup running on my machine through out this subscription year and commit to keeping my computer on 24x7 so it can continue the process.  Just for fun, I'll let you know what kind of progress it's making from time to time.  But to be crystal clear, I really don't recommend this service to anyone for anything.

The SmugMug Platform Upgrade First Look

Yesterday my website hosting company, SmugMug, announced a major platform upgrade that brought their website designs a big jump forward.  The look and feel is modern and engaging.  The user interface to customize the site is much, much easier.  In the past, you had to either know html and css programming or at least be a really good mimic of other people's code to enhance your site.  Now, the interface has a host of customization options built right in and the predefined templates are a big improvement too.

I started noodling with new options for website design and gallery layout and already I'm seeing some things that look really great.  I probably won't flip the site public for a while yet as I let my design decisions sink in, but I thought I'd share a little bit of what I'm seeing.

I love the new options available for gallery layout.  Particularly something called "landscape collage".  For example, here is my Events gallery today...

Pretty dull huh?  The text is small and hard to read and the previews aren't much to look at.  There is a lot of white space in this screen shot because the gallery doesn't stretch to fill the window.  You can have anything you want as long as it's in two columns!

And now for something completely different... here's my events gallery in configured using the New SmugMug options.

Pretty cool huh!??  Stay tuned.  I'll be tweaking the site over the next couple of days and will let you all know when the new look and feel goes live.  If you have any questions, give me a shout!

You Might Also Like...

Believe it or not, I've been posting to this blog for over five years now.  There's all sorts of stuff sitting back there in the archives and to help you better access it, Joe Blog has one of it's first major formatting changes in looooongggg time!  At the bottom of each post you'll now notice five additional "You might also like" posts that are suggestions from the archive.  I think this is supercool!  And I owe it all to a great blogger widget called LinkWithin!  If you maintain a blog, I encourage you to check out this free blog widget.  Set up was easy and it works like a charm.

I Have a Confession to Make

I've been on vacation with my kids this week and it is entirely possible that I am now addicted to the phone app called Hipster.

It's a darn cool way to post photos to facebook and the templates look pretty swell to my eye. The geo-tagging is remarkably accurate and knows places I never would have guessed. I'm using it on iPhone, but it's available for Android as well.

Check it out...

50 mm of Baltimore

This week I had to make a quick trip to Baltimore.  I wasn't even going to be there 24 hours.  But I was going to be downtown, near the Inner Harbor, and couldn't stand the thought of not bringing a my camera with me.  So, I ditched my camera bag, travelled light and found room for a camera body and one lens in my laptop bag.

The one lens?  The mighty Nikkor 50mm f/1.8.  The first year and a half that I owned a DSLR, I shot almost exclusively with the 50 mm.  It was sharp and performed so well in low light compared to anything else I owned that once I saw the results, I couldn't bear to shoot with a lesser optic. 

Of course using a fixed 50 mm lens brings constraints and limitations.  No zoom, no wide angle and no poaching street shots from the comfortable distance and autonomy provided by at 200 or 300 mm.  And yet there is an elegance in the simplicity of this light weight, $120 wonder lens.  The limitations drive creativity, making you zoom with your feet or use a new angle.  Get close to your subject and, gasp, maybe even talk with a stranger and admit you are a photographer and taking their picture.  Depth of field is your friend with the lens' fast 1.8 aperture.  Backgrounds can blur and you can render bokeh like a master.  Night time city streets offer new opportunities with such a fast lens in hand.  I've accumulated other optics since my days of 50 mm exclusivity, but it was great fun to force myself back into the 50mm mindset and re-learn all that it taught me. 

The Lesson of Tag and You're It!

This blog typically isn't about photography advice or instruction, but today I sold an image and it was a great lesson to not be a lazy photographer.  You see we all love to go to interesting locations, make beautiful pictures and play with cool gear.  Some of the geekier among us even like to spend hours in the software that has become the bane of the digital photographer.  After all that, it's awfully easy to forget about an important housekeeping task... tagging your images with captions and keywords. 

Captioning and keywording is electronically assigning descriptive words to your image.  The who, what, where of an image as well as the attribute, emotion or feeling it evokes are all keyword examples.  It isn't exciting, it doesn't make you say "wow" or give you that rush you get when you've made an image you love.  But, if you're putting your images on the web, tagging is one of the strongest tools you have to get your photos seen because keywords are part of the secret sauce that make the Google world go round.  I've sold two images in the last couple of months thanks to keywords, captions and good old Google images.  Check your website and your blog and make sure you're doing everything you can to help people can find your good work!

Inspiration, Influences and Instinct

There's a saying I hear a lot... "If you want to be a better photographer, study the work of great photographers". Turns out this is a minor obsession of mine. I spend way too much time looking at photography websites. Browsing books and magazines pondering what makes a photo great and what the photographer was thinking. But I've often wondered if it really matters. How do you incorporate all of that into what you are trying to express with the camera? How does it not become completely derivative?

This past weekend I photographed the first race of the 2011 USATF New England Mountain Running Circuit at Northfield Mountain, Massachusetts. On this course, I'd have only two chances to shoot the field... once on the way up the mountain and once on the way back down. Where you choose to shoot from is always a calculated risk, especially if you haven't taken photos on the course before. Once the race started, I quickly realized I was in the wrong place. The runners were still too close together coming out of the start making it difficult to isolate runners into clean compositions. Because of the tight pack, this round of shooting was over in literally a few minutes.

Trying to adjust to a better position, I did make the image below and while it isn't technically the best of the several hundred frames I shot that day, I liked it. To me, it showed movement and how the pack advances as one. The trees in the background were compelling and, along with the curve shape in the pack of runners, they gave the image depth.



Hand in hand with contemplating the work of other photographers, I also contemplate my own and something about this image made me particularly thoughtful. Why do I like it better than any other image I made during the first leg of the race? Why did I take it? Was it as simple as this was all I could capture in the mad scramble? I started the race shooting tighter. Why did I pull out to a wide angle and shoot the pack from the side?

Then I had a thought and went to the Internet to find an image I've admired many, many times by the legendary Paul Caponigro. Paul is the father of noted contemporary digital artist John Paul Caponigro. The elder Caponigro made this image called Running White Deer in 1967. He was in County Wicklow, Ireland on a private estate to photograph a rare herd of white deer. As they fled, he made one image and this was the result. Below Caponigro's image, I've posted a black and white version of my shot from the race.





Let me say clearly that I'm not directly comparing the fine art made by Caponigro to my race grab. But there are interesting similarities that I'm not sure are coincidental. Who would have thought fine art photography could influence sports shooting? Maybe this explains why I chose this shot when I needed a fall back plan to my poorly chosen shooting location. Maybe the pack of runners connected with some iconic component of Caponigro's image that I carry around in my head. Maybe not. But I'm going to keep my habit of tucking my kids in to bed and then passing the evening browsing websites of important photographers. It's more interesting than television and maybe something rubs off.