Category Archives: Gear

Engineers… sigh.

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An old one:

  • Q: What does an engineer use for birth control?
  • A: His personality.

I am constantly amazed when I see how engineers fail to communicate. They assume that ordinary people know or understand things that the engineers take for granted. If I know it, so must others, right?

Wrong. Here are just a few of the constant stream of things that make photography difficult for mortals.

  • Nikon menu spaghetti: The vertical menu tabs in Nikon cameras. And the navigation: “left, up/down, right, up/down, select, up/down, Set”. And then if you forget the final “up, set, press OK”, you lose the setting you have just done.
  • Nikon menus: in addition, most users do not understand that the menus are longer than the screen. The scroll bar is small and unintuitive. So if the vertical menu displays 8 functions but contains 18, most users will never know about those additional 10.
  • Nikon hidden auto ISO. Hide the Nikon auto ISO setting in a custom function, and users wonder why their pictures get all grainy (and their studio pictures fail completely) when they have clearly set ISO to just 200 in the main ISO screen. D’oh!
  • Wakey wakey – that fact that you need to wake up your camera by briefly pressing the shutter before you can set anything. I cannot tell you the number of times I hear “my camera isn’t working: it’s on but when I turn that dial, nothing happens”.
  • 1/1. When I set my flash to full power manual, a Canon flash displays “1/1”. In a world where only one in ten Canadians can tell me that 1,000 times 1,000 equals one million (most think 10,ooo), why do you think that people know that one divided by one is one? And even if they do, that “one” means “full power”?
  • Lens terminology. “ZOOM LENS EF 70-200mm 1:2.8 L USM IS”: need I say more? Instead of “1:3.5-5.6”, why not say f/3.5 to f/5.6, so beginners understand it? Look at that string: one colon three dot five dash five dot six. Clear, not.
  • Auto-focus terminology – We have AF mode and AF point selection, but AF point selection is not called anything like “AF”. So when people look for the word “AF” to select where the camera focuses, they get how it focuses instead.
  • Colour: why call “white balance” after “white”, which is not a colour? If they called it “colour balance” it would be sooo much clearer! Yeah guys, I know. Don’t think science; just think customer!
  • Terminology. Why call it “3D Color Matrix Metering” or “Evaluative metering” when “Smart Metering” would work a whole lot better?
  • Alonzo the Clever Mexican. I have had several people ask me who Alonzo is. Al, that is. Namely Al Servo, the Mexican who invented continuous autofocus. I mean really, do you know how few people know that “AI” means “Artificial Intelligence” (I estimate fewer than one perfect of Canadians)? And that a Servo Motor is a closely controlled electrical motor with negative feedback loop?

The list goes on, and on.

Don’t these companies do any UI testing? Head in the sand! The GTA Nikon rep recently looked at me baffled, and says “but no-one else ever told me this is confusing” – like it’s my fault.  Yeah buddy, that’s because I teach this to ordinary users, day in day out, and you just sell it.

Camera people always get defensive. “But everyone else understands it!”, they say. Um… look up “survivor bias” on Wikipedia, guys.

So if you find yourself confused: it’s not you. It’s the camera and the manual. It is time Apple designed an SLR. But do not despair: take some training and in spite of the camera companies’ engineers’ best efforts to avoid clear communication, you will learn this stuff.

And yeah, I am an engineer.

Pocketwizardry Tip

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Quick tip.

When using Pocketwizards to fire your flashes or speedlites (use Flashzebra cables for the latter if necessary), perhaps for pictures like this:

Evanna Mills by Michael Willems

Evanna Mills, photo by Michael Willems

You get a choice of three settings: local, remote, or both.

Local means “when triggered, fire the device connected to the Pocketwizard”. “Remote” means “when triggered, use your radio transmitter to fire the remote devices that may be listening”. Both means both.

Tip: In any normal situation, set your device to remote on the camera, and to local on the others, that have a flash attached.

Why not just set them all to “both”?

  1. Many radio signals will be sent each time, leading to an increased chance of confusion.
  2. More power is spent this way too.

Yes, I know, radio all over can even make things more reliable. But in my opinion it is as likely to make things less reliable. And yes I know, radio does not use a lot of power and the PWs last forever on two AAs. But “forever” does not actually mean “forever”. The longer you make the batteries last, the better.

It’s one of those engineering things.

PS: in the menu on the right, you can sign up for email notifications every time I post – which is typically once, or sometimes twice, a day. Handy and recommended so you do not miss anything.

Tip: Making it darker

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Usually, photography is a struggle to get enough light. Fast lenses, high ISOs, wide apertures: we do what we can. But it is sometimes a good idea to cut light.

Like when you want dark backgrounds and have plenty of flash power, or like when you want to create long exposures during the day, perhaps to capture a flowing waterfall.

The way to do this is to go to a low ISO.  But once you have run out of low ISO, you need to use a filter. A neutral density filter (ND filter) is what you use.

Today’s Tip: if you do not have an ND filter handy, use your polarizer. This too cuts a couple of stops of light. That’s one good reason to always carry one for your popular lenses.

Opus

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Fun facts:

  • Number of Opus lights I have ever owned: 9
  • Number that have broken or malfunctioned: 8
  • Number of Opus umbrellas I have ever owned: 2
  • Number that have broken: 2
  • Printed on the Opus lights: For Professional Use Only
  • Said by importer: for light “trying it out” amateur use only
  • Number of Nikon SB-900 flashes I have ever used: 5
  • Number that have overheated or stopped due to overheating: 5

Fortunately I also have excellent equipment. Bowens strobes, Hoodman accessories, Canon 580EX/430EX speedlites, Honl Photo small flash modifiers, Photoflex umbrellas and flash mount accessories, Manfrotto mount accessories, and much. much more. Expect more reviews, and a pick of the month category.

iPad again

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Great news, as I sit here at Philadelpia airport: I notice that the iBooks store in Canada now has actual books. I saw more iPads than laptops on yesterday’s flight from Vegas, and I think today will not be an exception. Older people too.

With a loaded iPad, flying will never be the same, as reader Ed pointed out yesterday. Fantastic. I now have many books, and no extra weight.

Editing photos from Vegas as soon as I get home in a few hours, Deo Volente.

iPad Maxi

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I received my iPad 3G the day it was released in Canada. Time for a quick review of this oh so important device for photographers, i thought.

In short: The iPad (or in apple-speak, just “iPad”) is a great device. Not a general purpose computer: it is limited, in part by physical limitations and in part by Apple’s need for control. But in spite of this you may well need one. In fact I think you do.

But before I explain why you need one, let’s start with the bad.

Many restrictions are clearly designed to give Apple control over what we do. Restrictions like the fact that it is completely locked down. You cannot add apps other than those okayed by Apple: Steve Jobs gives you, as he put it recently, “freedom”, namely the “freedom from pornography”. Big mistake, as it shows his true colours. Apple needs to be careful: Sony became irrelevant because of its media-ownership inspired controlfreakery, and Apple is slowly on its way to do the same.

An iPad is like a car, or a cable company PVR: you’re really just renting it and you get the feeling that tuning it to your needs would be, if it were up to Apple, a criminal offense. In fact in Canada, jail breaking may soon be exactly that.

So you need iTunes, a horrible app designed seemingly only to give Apple control, for everything. Even for simple things like deleting an image from a photo gallery, or moving one, you need iTunes.

This is inconvenient. I recently noticed I had one incorrect image in a gallery I was about to show as a slideshow on the iPad. Alas, I was 100km away from home, and to delete this one image I would have had to drive back to my iMac. This portable device is only portable if your iMac is, too. (And no, you cannot carry the laptop, because you have to sync your iPad either with your MacBook  or with your iMac, not both.)

There is more such evilness. You cannot sync over Bluetooth or WiFi, thus requiring silly cables. You cannot set a default browser other than Apple’s Safari (like iCab, which is a more functional browser). You cannot just save files. The photo browser is very limited, and does not for instance support hierarchical folders. There is no file manager.

Some of the lack of functionality is not evil, but just consists of unnecessary restrictions by Apple engineers who inexplicably do not think this is necessary. Many simple settings are missing: again like your PVR or car, the device is hardly tunable, and this does get in the way.

For example,

  • In an astonishing oversight, you cannot sort images in the galleries. It’s alphabetical or nothing. “Just rename them”, the fanbois say. Oh – any idea how much work it is to rename 100 images in a gallery? what happened to drag-and-drop?
  • You cannot set the day of week to start when you want (apparently an Apple week starts on Sunday, while mine starts Monday), except as a workaround by setting your country as UK. But then you get Google UK searches every time you search in the browser, and new addresses are added in the UK, with silly phone number formatting.
  • If you have multiple calendars, like one for work and one for personal appointments, then you cannot change the calendar an appointment belongs to once you have created it: instead, you have to delete and recreate the appointment.Another astonishing oversight.
  • There is no-good to-do list app that syncs.  Apple is immune to corporate functionality, it sometimes seems.
  • The mail client is limited. If you have two accounts, as I and many others have, it takes many clicks each time to check them both, navigating back and forth through a very laborious interface. You also cannot set a “from” address. When creating mail, you cannot use bullets. Or numbered lists. Or a properly formatted signature file: that alone is a big limitation for me. So yes, you can email, but it is unnecessarily restricted and half the time I go back to my Mac. I am not sure why Apple does not add more functionality where it clearly is needed and does not rely on heavy processing power or memory.
  • Few Apple employees can be bilingual. I keep having the iPad “correct” my spelling when it shouldn’t.  Not to Apple: Some of us speak multiple languages!
  • I cannot edit my WordPress blog on the iPad, or see statistics. The HTML is too complex, I suppose, and the statistics page uses Flash.

Things like that are annoyances, but time-wasting ones. I just wasted five minutes trying to enter an address in Canada, but the device kept defaulting to the UK. Turns out you cannot just enter the country: I had to make up a city and street.

So OK, the iPad is not a general purpose computer. Then why do you need one?

Let’s look at the benefits.  They are mainly obvious ones, but until you use one you don’t really see how changing they are.

Like the big bright LED backlit screen. Many other things that seem too obvious to mention but that are nevertheless huge, like:

  • 10 hours away from a charger
  • No need to open a lid to use it
  • Wireless on the go at all times
  • A useable keyboard
  • Its smaller than a laptop
  • Orientation sensing, with a switch so you can read in bed.
  • Great reader apps ibooks and kindle

The secret, I think, is to look at the iPad as a better mousetrap.

It is all of these:

  • a book reader, but one that plays all your music too
  • a web browser, but one with a touch screen
  • a photo viewer, but one that also browses the web
  • a portable computer, but one that is always wirelessly connected
  • a portable email device, but one with a large enough keyboard
  • a portable computer, but one with 10 hours battery life on one charge
  • …and so on.

This device is like the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy. Obvious benefits like the ones above lift this pad info an entirely new computing device category.

And of course the way it shows off photos, in spite of the limitations, is fabulous. Much better than a portfolio book.

And yes I did write this on the iPad. In bed.

DSLR or point-and-shoot?

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People often ask me: should I get a DSLR or a point-and-shoot?

Of course there is no answer to that that I can give – any more than to a question like “should I buy a Kia or a Mercedes?”. But what I can do is give you pros and cons. So you can decide for yourself.

First, there is the simple point-and-shoot. These are small, simple, light. They have few buttons. These cameras are truly “point and shoot” – except this is perhaps an oversimplification.

Point-and-shoot

Point-and-shoot

Pro:

  • Small, light, quiet. You can put one in your coat pocket and forget it.
  • Affordable.
  • Simple macro mode.
  • Simple scene modes (“food”, “party”, etc) for people who do not know photography.

Con:

  • Confusing menus
  • Most functions accessible only through these menus
  • Easy to hit the wrong button accidentally
  • “Noisy” – in the sense that high ISO pictures have grain
  • Slow to react after you press the button
  • Often, no viewfinder, meaning impossible to see in bright daylight
  • No ability to achieve limited depth of field

The simple point-and-shoot is for light, casual users who do not demand much from their cameras. If a simple occasional snapshot is what you want, go for it. Else, look at the next categories.

Next: the advanced point-and-shoot. This category includes the Canon G11, the micro four-thirds cameras, other fixed-lens “pro-sumer models”, and most Leicas, for example.

Pro:

  • Almost as small as a simple point-and-shoot
  • Other advantages too (quiet, light, etc)
  • Much better functionality: more “DSLR-like”.
  • Including all the professional modes: P, A/Av, S/Tv, M
  • Better user interfaces
  • Lower noise (digitally speaking), making slightly higher ISOs possible
  • Often, a viewfinder – albeit small, it’s often there.
  • More buttons. (Yes – this makes it easier!)
  • Can take an external flash
  • Some, like the micro four-thirds cameras, can even take additional lenses.

Con:

  • Still “not quite a DSLR”: higher noise than DSLR, slower focus, slower reaction speed.
  • No interchangeable lenses for many of these
  • Less ability to achieve limited depth of field

This category is great for people who want pro-quality photos, or nearly so, without the bulk. Yes, there are compromises, but these are minor compared to the alternatives. I would carry one of these if I could not carry a DSLR.

Finally, there is the DSLR. From low-end (Digital Rebel, D3000/5000) to medium (7D, D700) and all the way up to high-end (1D MkIV, D3S), these are the “gold standard”.

Canon 7D, by Michael Willems

Canon 7D, by Michael Willems

Pro:

  • Great quality, low noise at high ISO
  • Fast focus
  • Fast repeated shooting, so you can shoot sports
  • Immediate shooting: press the button, get the shot
  • GREAT ability to achieve limited depth of field

Con:

  • Heavy, bulky
  • Costly
  • Need to change lenses for different purposes
  • Need to learn some things.

I called this the Gold Standard – because it is. There is a reason all the pros use these. There is often no way to get the shot you want without them.

My advice is to start with an SLR. If that is not possible, go down to one of the other categories. Even the cheapest SLR will produce professional pictures: no need to spend $5,000 on a camera unless you need the specific features this brings, such as ultra-fast operation, the ability to use dual memory cards, or waterproofing.

Enlarging the moon

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One aspect of wide versus telephoto lenses is how large the background gets. As in “If you want a large moon, use a long lens”.

Huh? What do you mean, Michael?

I shall illustrate with a couple of shots I took of a student during a “Creative Urban Photography” outing the other day. One with a long lens, and one with a wide angle lens.

Ignore the light (I was using a flash with a warming gel on one camera, and no flash at all on the other), and look instead at the size of the blurred-out car in the background:

Here’s picture one:

Student during recent CUP outing, Oakville

Student during recent CUP outing, Oakville

Now look at picture two (where by moving my position I have kept the subject the same size):

Student during recent CUP outing, Oakville

Student during recent CUP outing, Oakville

See how that car magically grew much larger in the second picture?

Do I need to explain which picture was taken with a wide angle lens, and which one with a telephoto lens?

So now imagine the person is a tree and the car is the moon at night, or the setting sun. So what lens would I be most likely to use if I want a large moon or a large setting sun?

Nifty Fifty

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Everyone should own a fast 50mm lens, I keep saying. “Fast” meaning a prime, large aperture lens (like a 50mm f/1.8, or even a 50mm f/1.4, like this one:)

50mm fast lens, product photo by Michael Willems

50mm fast lens, by Michael Willems

One student asks a good question about this:

“I recently attended your travel photography and Nikon Pt. 2 classes. You spoke about the value of a 50 mm lens. I have a Nikon D90, which is not full frame therefore I am wondering if you still recommend the 50 mm over a 35 mm.”

Good question.

As you know, a small sensor camera (like most of today’s DSLRs) appears to “lengthen” the lens (search this blog for “crop factor” to see why). So a 50mm lens will work like a “real” 80mm lens.

In “real” terms,

  • 50mm is a “standard” lens;
  • 80mm is a great portrait lens for half-length portraits and headshots.

So presumably we should all start with a “real” 50mm lens? On a regular (non-“full frame”) DSLR, that means you need to buy a 35mm lens.

So is my advice really “buy a lens marked 35mm” or “buy a lens marked 50mm”?

Ideally, both. But if you have to choose, start with the 50, because:

  • You’ll want to do headshots sooner or later;
  • Sometimes you’ll use it for product or detail-shots, too;
  • Above all: it is very affordable.

Most manufacturers make a 50mm f/1.8 that costs around $150 or less.  A bargain, and something you just need to put in your camera bag.

What mode should I use?

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The most common question I hear is “what lens should I buy?”.

Boy, that is a tough one – a bit like asking “what car should I drive”. The answer: “It depends”!

Almost as often, I hear “what exposure mode should I be on?”. That one is much easier.

Photographers taking photos in Oakville, photo by Michael Willems

WHAT MODE? Photographers taking photos in Oakville

I should start by saying that here too, of course the answer is “it depends”. So instead of giving you a canned answer, I am going to explain a bit about what modes I use in my daily photography practice.

And these are:

  • The green “Auto” mode: never – but I could use it if anyone asked “let me take your picture with your camera”. The green auto mode turns your expensive SLR into a point-and-shoot.
  • Scene modes (portrait, landscape, sports, etc): never. None of my cameras have these, but even if  they did, I would not use them. They are useful learning tools, and good for people with little experience, but they take a lot of power away from you, and you should learn how to do it yourself. Use them while learning, but as soon as possible, free yourself from these “canned” modes.
  • Program mode (P): occasionally, when I am in a hurry. Like when shooting while driving a car, or when covering a rapidly unfolding even where “get the shot” is the essence. P mode means the camera sets aperture and shutter, but you can override it in this and in many other aspects, like white balance and flash use.
  • Aperture Mode (A/Av): Almost always in many situations. When I am in an environment with changing light, I will likely use aperture mode. Because of what I shoot, I am in this mode maybe 70% of the time. Aperture is very important to me.
  • Shutter Speed Priority (S/Tv): when covering some sports. When I want to freeze or blur motion. Sure, those are obvious. But also when shooting flash outdoors and I want to be sure I do not exceed the flash sync speed. In those cases I often set my shutter to 1/250th second (the fastest flash sync speed, depending on which camera I am using) and I know that I will not be needing “Fast/Auto FP” flash, which reduces my power by at least half.
  • Manual (M): Always in studios. Always when shooting indoors flash. And usually when in a controlled environment. Manual (often combined with spot meter, incident light meter, and grey card) is my second most common mode.
  • Bulb: when shooting fireworks, or other events that take a long time and cannot be metered or timed.

So that means typically I might do this – a few examples:

  • Outdoor event: A/Av mode
  • Outdoor event with flash: S/Tv mode
  • Indoor event with flash: M
  • Studio: M
  • Outdoors rugby game: S
  • Indoors hockey game: M
  • Family snaps: A/Av
  • Product: M
  • Panning shots: S/Tv

Try them all, and learn how each mode works. Especially, do not underestimate Manual, where you get full control. You need to know what you are doing, but it pays to learn.