As I have mentioned in some other posts I decide to try some film photography. I don’t think that it’s anything more than an experiment. I just want to try. All this vintage feel to it attracts me for some reason. The days before everything got consumed by plastic.

The camera that I’m going to try first is soviet made Zenit-E. It belongs to my dad and I remember it very well from my childhood. Not only the lens focusing is manual, so is the metering. This one has a guide of a kind. It measures light with a built in light sensor on top of the lens and a small wire moves around in a window. You use that to manually calculate the right exposure.

I bought 2 rolls of Ilford HP5+ black & white 35mm film. I loaded up one of them into the camera and I’m ready to shoot. There is a pretty big chance that I’m going to end up with 36 blurry photographs that were not exposed right, but that’s what the experiments are for.

I walk around with my camera a lot and even though the stock strap that comes with a camera was never a huge issue for me I decide to find something a bit more comfortable and functional. I never used to wear a stock strap over my neck and most of the time wore the camera as a messenger bag. Here is my mini-report with pictures¹ on what I ended up getting.

My main issues with the stock strap:

• Too short.
  It’s long enough when I’m wearing the camera over a t-shirt, but during colder months I just can’t fit into the stock strap forcing me to put it over my neck. Nikon D700 with Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 lens will make the neck hurt in no time.
• Awkward angle.
  With a big lens attached the camera hangs in such a way that lens sticks out away from the body. When there are a lot of people around you start bumping into them with a lens. Or in small places you start bumping into objects with a lens. Not good.
• Not comfortable.
  During long hikes the shoulder starts to get soar. Also by lifting the camera to take a shot and putting it back down the strap gets moved along with the camera. This causes the strap to start cutting into my neck with it’s sharp edge.
• All over the place.
  There is nothing holding the camera in place. When doing something it swing around in random directions and when leaning forward it flies down forward as well.
• Camera name.
  Now this is a minor quip, but I don’t always feel comfortable advertising, not so much the make, but the model of the camera — D700 in big, bold, yellow letters.

These are the main problems that I had with it, although there are several more minor ones that are not worth listing.

After a bit of research I decided to go with one of the straps offered by Black Rapid. They offer a rather large selection of these straps which are the variations of the same basic theme. Here is the quick rundown:

• RS-4 — basic straight strap.
• RS-5 — bulky strap with a lot of storage space.
• RS-7 — curved strap.
• RS-Sport — curved strap with under-arm strap.

Since I wanted to get something that was as comfortable as possible and do not need any storage room on my strap it left me with two most ergonomic choices — RS-7 and RS-Sport. RS-Sport was slightly more curved and from reports it was more comfortable. It comes with an additional under-arm strap² (BRAD MOD) which holds the whole thing in place and just does not let it move. The under-arm strap can be bought as an accessory for RS-7 as well, but it comes out more expensive this way. Continue Reading

Over the last 10 year or so I’ve learned a lot about photography. There are two things that I keep doing to grow — experimenting a lot and reading the information that others have chosen to share. It would be good to contribute to this pool of knowledge that is available online.

Some of these ideas are probably very simple and there is no “secret souse” to any of this, but guides like these were helpful to me. Hopefully it will be helpful to somebody else.

For me the process of taking a photograph includes 2 phases — taking the shot itself and post-processing. So that’s exactly what I’m going to do. Post everything from start to finish.

Taking The Photograph

The setup itself is fairly simple. I used a light tent given to my by my wife for New Year — Interfit Pop Up Light Tent, 24″. You don’t have to buy anything and can build something simple yourself.

I used a large sheet of white cardboard to server as the floor and the background for my image. This creates the seamless background, but in this type of photograph when a relatively flat object is involved it would be easy to fix in post-processing.

I placed flashes on each side of my light tent. I used Nikon SB-600 and SB-800 speedlights mounted in the stands that come with them in the box. I reversed one of them so both of their control “eyes” would be facing the camera. I aimed them at the center of each side of the light tent and set them to remote slaves. If you do not have 2 strobes you can either use regular bright lights (preferably tungsten not to get a yellow color cast as you would from regular incandescent bulbs) or put some reflector on one of the sides of the light tent.

I placed iPhone in the center and mounted my D700 camera on the tripod in front of the light tent. Before proceeding to take the shots I used a “device” that I have for blowing the dust off from the camera sensor to get rid of as much dust as possible. You should also use some fiber cloth to wipe all the finger prints from the phone before proceeding. The idea is to fix as much as possible before the photo is taken so you have less to do in post-processing.

Now we’re going to setup the camera. The pop-up flash is set to commander mode. It will trigger both of the flashes, but it will not contribute to the exposure itself — we don’t want any weird glares coming unfiltered directly from the flash. Both speedlights are set to TTL. We’ll leave it up to the camera to figure out how hard they should be fired.

The camera itself is set to manual mode. I used spot metering on the phone to guide my settings. The idea here is to try to blow out (overexpose) as much of the background as possible while not blowing out any of the detail on the item that you’re trying to photograph.

I set the aperture to f/10 to widen the depth of field to get the object as sharp as possible. I also set my ISO to a low value — no reason to add noise when the camera is tripod mounted and the exposure will not be very long anyhow. The value that you play with is shutter-speed. Using a dSRL makes it easy to take experimental shots and look at the end result to check for overexposure. Again, overexposure around the object is good, while on the object itself is not so much. If you can’t get all of the background to overexpose we’ll fix it in the post-processing.

Post-Processing

Our photo straight out of the camera doesn’t look so hot. The background is grayish, there is still visible dust on the phone and the whole thing is crooked.

I usually start by putting the photo through Lens Correction filter. I will fix geometric distortion, straighten it out and slightly adjust the perspective. After that is done we will crop it and remove the visible dust with Spot Healing Brush.

At this point I grabbed a Brush and roughly painted with white color the areas around the phone not to deal with different specks of dust.

Now we’re going to add a Levels Adjustment Layer and overexpose all the highlights by dragging the white pointer to the left. Hold down Alt button while doing it and you will see all the areas that are getting overexposed. Now we got our pure-white background and we’re getting closer to what the final result should look like.

Add a Curves Adjustment Layer. We’re going to bring the shadows down slightly to make the black areas “blacker” and bump up the contrast slightly by doing so.

At this point I pulled the highlights to the cold side slightly and bumped up the Saturation. Don’t overdo the Saturation though.

I wasn’t happy with the yellow cast that was still visible on the bezels of the phone. I used Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer to pull the color down close to black & white photo. Then I put a mask over the screen to bring the color back.

At this point you can hit Ctrl + Alt + Shift + E to end up with a single layer by summing up all the previous ones and apply some sharpening to the final image. I prefer to use Smart Sharpen filter. You should also try to stick to Lab mode for your sharpening step and apply sharpening on the Lightness channel.

Summary

There you have it. A finished product. Now the above steps are not law of the land and nothing is set in stone. That’s what I do personally. There might be better ways to reach certain objectives and you should always experiment yourself. But maybe these pointers will give you some ideas when you’re working on your own projects of one or another kind.

Let me know if I can clear something up or if you found any of this helpful. Your feedback is always appreciated.

I was planning to do a yearly summary before the year ended, but never got around to it, so I’ll just leave a couple of words about our celebration and the last year itself.

Obviosly the most important and life changing thing that happened to us last year was a birth of our son Arosha. When we were greeting 2010 a year ago we already knew how important this year is going to be. Now we can safely say that the pregnancy went well, the birth went well and now Arosha is growing fast and we can see how he is changing and developing new skills on a regular basis. Hopefully in 2011 things will go as well as they did last year.

With respect to our travel — we had 2 great vacations. Even though both of them will stay in our memories for a long time the road trip through California was amazing. We wanted to visit that beautiful state for quite a while now and I can honestly say that I’m in love with its National Parks and San Francisco area. Alena has been almost 5 months pregnant then, but she did as much hiking as walking as the rest of us.

Another big thing for us is Alena’s citizenship. It’s been a long journey and it’s nice to finally put all that behind us. Now we’re a full family of citizens with ability to travel the world. It’s also great that Alena’s mom is currently staying with us until March. They haven’t seen each other in a long time and it’s great to finally have her see how our life is, not to mention all the help we’re getting from her.

The celebration itself was our biggest in a good number of years. Last year there were only 5 of us, this time there were 9 of us. Papa, mama, Alena’s mama, Alena, Arosha, Lina, aunt Lilya, Lenny and I. It made the New Year celebration better.

We had a huge dinner — there is no way without it in my mom’s house and this year we had 2 moms. I probably gained 10 pounds at least during these days. We remembered last year — mostly good things, and we all wished the next one will be good to us as well. Family, health and a little bit of stability is all that matters.

After New Year itself my dad took up his traditional role of Ded Moroz. Everone has gotten tons of gifts as always. Ded Moroz was good to me with my wishes.

You see, in the beginnning of the evening I had an elaborate setup going for family portraits. Photography has become even a bigger passion for me this year than before. This year I made a wise descision to get Nikon D700 and it’s been a great one at that. The timing was perfect and the camera itself is amazing. Ded Moroz though added a second flash to my arsenal — Nikon SB-600 (a good companion for my SB-800), MC-36 remote control for the camera and a light-tent.

In conclustion I will just repeate again that all one needs for happiness is family, health and some stability. I wish it for all of us and all of you. Happy New Year!

I haven’t really posted anything in a while now — it’s an interesting time — there is really nothing going on yet there is so much going on.

Aroshka is growing. He’s clearly gaining weight — our biggest worry from the first month. We have a scale which is not very precise, the with each day arrow keeps climbing further and further away from 0. For the most part I stopped worrying.

These days I worry more for Alena — the whole thing is really hard on her. I’m trying to help with what I can and hope that I’m at least slightly useful. I know that when I’m at work, at home or anywhere else — I don’t have to be nervous about anything. I just know that she’s been a mother for only 2 months, but she’s already really great at it. I know that as long as Arosha is with her all is and will be well. Continue Reading

Apple has decided to surprise us all with an early delivery of iPhone. A lot of people got their pre-orders delivered on the 22nd instead of 24th and I think the majority got their pre-orders delivered on 23rd. Maruk and I were among the latter group.

I was fearing from the start that even if I get mine on 24th the activation tools would be plagued by the huge lines in all the stores and I wouldn’t be able to get it going on the same day. And that was in addition to the fact that I would be in the office on Thursday (24th) and would probably miss FedEx. Wednesdays I work from home office.

Last year I got FedEx delivery at 10am. Also FedEx tried to make a delivery to us a day before and that was at 3pm. So when by 4pm there was no sign of them and my tracking page started showing delivery exception saying that shipper requested to delay the delivery until a future date I was starting to get really upset. But luckily I was wrong and FedEx guy simply ignored the exception. I had my iPhone ten minutes to 5.

The activation went through in 3 or so minutes. I had the phone up and running, fully synced at 5:15. The screen is amazing. To really see how great it is one should put an older iPhone next to it. Then the difference become very dramatic. I was actually surprised how I never noticed all the blur on the old phone before.

The phone feels good in hand although it is more of a finger print magnet than the older ones — maybe because I used to use white iPhones. I’m waiting for Vaja to come out with a case¹ — I’ll get one as soon as they become available. FaceTime works great — you just make a call. No software to install, nothing to configure. Although this is a feature I don’t see myself using very often if at all.

I’m very happy with camera upgrades. If before I was considering of maybe getting a point and shoot for the situation when I don’t want to lug my dSLR along now there is no need. And I do always have the phone with me. 5 mega-pixel photos, 720p video and a flash — what more could I need?

Overall I’m very happy with my purchase. Although it’s subjective, I strongly believe that iPhone is still the reigning king of smartphones.

When we travel I end up lugging around a lot of gear. Most of the bulk comes from the fact that I have 2 bags — one for laptop, one for camera and lenses. I wanted to merge them together and the arrival of D700 kind of forced me to. The older SlingShot¹ bag that I used for camera gear couldn’t fit D700 with 24-70mm lens attached.

Here is a short list of things that were a must:

• Notebook compartment for 15 inch MacBook Pro
• Good sized camera and lens compartment
• Additional compartment
• Ability to take out the camera body out of the bag easily without a fear of anything else falling out
• All of the above in the smallest possible package

I had good experience with my current bag and I liked the idea of taking the camera out without taking the bag off. Naturally the first thing we looked at was Lowepro SlingShot 350. In my opinion that thing is just hideous and just too huge. After that I read up on a lot of different stuff and in the end we had two main contenders — Tamrac Aero Speed Pack 85 and Lowepro Fastpack 250. I actually realized that when you have so much weight it better be a full backpack as opposed to a sling shot type bag, to distribute the weight better.

Both of these bags meet all of my criteria including the fact that you can take out the camera without exposing any of the lenses. Judging purely by design I would probably give slightly higher marks to Tamrac bag, but everything else went for Fastpack.

Fastpack has a lot more pockets and it really comes in handy when you’re carrying trip plans, passports, filters, wires and so on. Another huge plus for me was the flap that goes over the lens compartment. While traveling you can put put all the zippers under it and thus prevent anyone from trying to pull a fast one on you. We tried both of them on at B&H and Fastpack just felt more comfortable and more secure to me. Overall they are both very good bags and it will probably come down to your own preference.

This past weekend I tried walking around with it having several heavy lenses and a camera inside. It felt very good. I was able to take the camera out without taking the bag off and I think I’m going to be pretty happy with it. The real test comes at the end of April, during our California road trip. I’ll have it fully loaded for the plane and will remove non-camera gear for hikes.

As you know, I enjoy my hobby of photography. I’m nothing, but an amateur, yet I think over the past years I’ve come up with a number of really nice photographs.

However there is a certain type of scenery that always gave me trouble – landscapes on a bright day. Usually you see beautiful sky with detailed clouds and nice shadows on the land from the mountains and trees. You take a picture only to find out later that it didn’t capture any of the beauty that you could see. Either the sky comes out great with all the details on the land lost to underexposure, or all the land details come through to have all the clouds and sky colors lost to overexposure. Continue Reading

I wanted it for a long time now. Finally I have it. Bought it today at Best Buy.

The battery is charged. I took about 40 pictures of misc stuff already. It feels awsome.

A cool discovery: when you decrease the aperture the depth of focus increases.

The first picture is taken with aperture of f/5.6 and ISO 200. Second is taken with f/22 and ISO 800. The hairy cactus is focused on both of them, but on the second picture 3 other cactuses are also focused!