Don't blame your gear, think

Christmas portrait season is started already, at least with respect to my yearly assignment I take at Polish school in Hague, The Netherlands. The idea is simple: each year I take portraits of the school pupils and the Parents Council sells the paper copies and creates in this way some extra income which is later spent by parents during organizing some attractions for children.
After some experiments done in the previous years we decided together with parents to take two photos per child: full length portrait and the close-up with upper half of the body.
The whole event is a common effort of parents, teachers and a photographer (I will write maybe later more on the logistics), now some observations about the light setup and why a photographer has to think every now and then.
The light setup is quite standard: main light is provided by Ezybox softbox at the front of the subject, the background is lit by a flash mounted on a boom arm with some help of the reflection from the ceiling. The third light source is coming from a self-made softbox providing narrow beam of light to be used as a rim light to lit one side of the subject. The picture below illustrates it. Note that the setup is not fully fine tuned yet, but the idea is already there.

Basic light setup of the portrait session

Ok, now the session. The close up portraits have been taken with a subject standing 2,5 meters away from the background, which worked nice: the subject lit by softbox and the rim light was obviously lighter than the background, nicely popping out. Just for the records: photos have been taken in Nikon iTTL mode, with background adjusted to -1.7 stops and the rim light to -1 stop.

The full length portrait was more challenging. The subject had to be placed closer to the background (to compose it better with the scenery). The challenge was to ensure the same effect as with the close-up: bright subject clearly popping up from the background. It wasn't working. Tweaking iTTL adjustments of main light, changing the background light strength, switching it off. No way.

 The easiest to blame is the gear (of course) that doesn't work, but at the end there is only one in control - a photographer.
And after giving some thoughts it was clear. The reason of 'failing' iTTL was actually the relative distance between the main light source (softbox), the subject and the background. It is just impossible for a softbox light placed 3 meters from a subject to fall off so quickly that there will be a noticeable difference between the subject (3 meters from a light source) and the background (4 meters from a source).
To deal with it the relative distances would need to be changed. How?
I have some ideas to try next week:

• Keep the subject in the same position for both portraits, take two shots from different positions. May be difficult due to the position of the softbox that would become visible in the full-length composition
• Bring the main and rim lights closer to the subject for a full length portrait. Would work best (probably), but the issue is that during the day I need to take 90 (x2) portraits, which is quite some amount and moving around with the light setup after each photo is rather not an option.

And thinking - yes, it always helps.

After my first Dutch Photo Walk - technicalities

Previously I have shared some thoughts about my participation in the Dutch City Walk. In this post I would like to share some technical aspects of the event. Note that most of my observations refer to the other topics, like "Street photography", "Shooting people", "Post processing".

Before

Check the proposed route in advance. It will help you to identify the potentially interesting spots and to pre-visualize the route.

Check the weather forecast. There is a couple of hours walking and you need to feel comfortable, without hassle of too cold, or too warm clothing. And, if it is going to rain, don't forget to take a proper stuff for protecting your gear. What I take with me is a rain sleeve, a small towel and a lens cleaning cloth. 

Obviously, take enough memory cards and fully loaded batteries.

More tough questions to answer are: which lens (or lenses) to take, to take or not a tripod. Before the photowalk I wasn't sure so I have asked other co-walkers. So learn from each other.
Finally I took the 24-70/2.8 lens (which, by the way, became my workhorse) and as a reserve a 18-200/3.6-5.6 lens. I didn't take a tripod because the interesting indoor places (like churches) were either in renovation or closed.

During

Personally I like to work lately with a predefined theme (and for this photowalk it was Delftware.

So the pictures like these were taken:

But in practice it is a walk and interacting with other people. So the photographic theme evolved during the walk. And it is a city, so I got inspired by a lot of interesting stuff:

My advice is also to look every now and there what other co-walkers are doing. You can learn a lot, and sometimes take interesting shot of them:

On the technical side: I tried to keep the camera settings as simple as possible and as universal as possible. Each moment something interesting can happen and I didn't want to ruin my photo just by having wrong settings. Here's what worked for me: the camera in the Aperture mode with auto-adjust ISO settings and with the second command dial button set for exposition compensation.

Every now and then I have switched the bracketing on, but kept it very simple (just 3 shots, under-, normal-, and over-) exposed with the F-stop distance between them set to 1. One important note,

I learned to switch bracketing mode off practically after each shot taken. For very simple reason: I wanted to be prepared for the next shot, starting from the stable set of settings. Forgetting to switch off bracketing can cost you unexpected under- and overexposed images.

So I kept the camera settings actually quite basic and simple and was able to focus more on the composition of my photos and on looking for the interesting places.

After

Generally first thing that I wanted after the event was to share the photos with the rest of the group and see what other did. And because group was so enthusiastic about the photography, first results were published the same evening. Discussions about the photos started, +1 on G+ were given.

For me it was important to see how others see the same places I saw through their camera. Again: a great learning moment.

After my first Dutch Photo Walk

Today I have participated for the first time in a Dutch Photo Walk event, organized by +Nikola Nikolski. It was a very nice day. A group of 18 people walking through the Dutch city Delft taking pictures and looking for a composition for the main theme, which was "Delftware" (or, in Dutch: Delfts blauw).
Since a city walk was for my a new photographic activity, let me share some thoughts of 'a newcomer'.
First of all, take part of it if you have a possibility! You will meet other people sharing your passion (photography) and will be able to learn from each other. The last one is a funny part of the experience: I have learned a lot just by watching what and how people take their shots. Suddenly I have noticed today many interesting subjects on the way that I probably would skip if I were alone. And by having conversations with the co-walkers I got some insights in their approach to photography.
More on some technical aspects in later post, now I want to work on the photos from the walk.

D800E - autofocus issue: confirmed after the tests

As mentioned in previous post, I suspected that my D800E might have an autofocus issue when using autofocus points located at the left side of the viewfinder. I have decided then to perform more thorough test to see if the issue is real. I can say that there is a problem with my camera (left focus points don't work well, but on the right side the results are not so great as well). If one is interested in the technicalities of the test, read on.
The test I have conducted is based on the setup as described by Nasim Mansurov on his blog here and here.
It is pointless to repeat the test procedure in my post. So let me point out just a few aspects I have gone through when testing my camera:

Test approaching the autofocus point from both sides (low and high distances)

It means that for a given focus point I did two tests. I made the exposure initially unsharp by setting the lowest available distance for the given lens. So I turned the lens focus ring manually to the lowest possible distance and did the test. Then I turned the focus ring to infinity and redo the test again.

Why is it important? It turned that for both lenses I have tested, my D800E performs better when setting autofocus starting from low distances. When the exposure distance of a lens was set up to infinity, the autofocus performance was much worse (i.e. the autofocus didn't work). 

So by taking only one side one might not notice the problem.

Speed up the test by using tethered mode

I have connected my camera to the laptop and to 40'' TV set to see the results in a big format. Tethered mode for D800 is available in Adobe Lightroom 4.2. It is not officially released yet, but the release candidate version works pretty nice.  Having the results immediately on the big screen speeds up the procedure

So, what's next?

I have contacted Nikon Netherlands and they are aware of the issue (as a matter of fact they expect quite some more calls with respect to the issue). They claim to be able to fix it in one week. Let's see.

Project D800E - left focus point issue?

There are several months since I started using D800E. With a very big pleasure and fun. However, I also read a lot about this camera and of course have noticed reports about the issue with autofocus when using focus points located at the left side of the viewfinder (more about it here and here).
Unfortunately, my camera is apparently affected as well. Unlike the test shots posted by others I have discovered it while taking a picture during my holidays:

Don't look at the quality of the photo (I know, composition is between horrible and bad). It is a snapshot. But it is about autofocus. The focus point is marked with the red rectangle (thanks to Nikon ViewNX software getting this data was very easy).

The problem becomes visible when looking at the photo zoomed to 100%:

See the person that is supposed to be in focus? She isn't. But the person right behind her is.

I think it is start to perform a systematic test of the issue. I'll use most probably the prescription published on the Mansurovs blog. 

Why is it worth doing the test? Well, the photo has been taken using the AF-S mode and I am not sure if the persons were moving at the moment of capture. So I am going to check it in the repeatable conditions.

Project D800E - how much money extra do I need?

Today's post is kind a intermezzo on exploring the D800 options and possibilities. Instead I am going to present a short resume of my expenses next to the new camera body, which are related to switching to a new gear. Since I have made a rather big jump (by going from Nikon D80 to D800E) my case can be seen as a 'worst case' scenario where only a very few accessories from the old gear could be re-used with the new one.
Of course completing the set of photo accessories can be an endless process. But I will focus instead on a bare minimum that is in my opinion a 'must have' set for the kind of photography I do.
So here is the list of the accessories I always take on location with me:
- An extra memory card,
- A spare battery,
- A tripod's ball head plate (to mount the camera on a tripod),
- A shutter release cord.

In case of D800 I needed to start from scratch, i.e. to buy everything from the above list:
- I didn't have a CF memory card (only SD) and high resolution of D800 would require fast memory card (and CF is faster than SD),
- With D80 I used EN-EL3 type batteries, D800 uses EN-EL15,
- Ball head plate used with D80 didn't fit on D800
- D800 requires the 10-pin slot to connect the release cord, in D80 a different type was used.

So the first "must have" set of accessories ended up with the following budget:
- Extra memory card: 32GB 1000x from Lexar: 179 EUR
- Spare battery EN-EL15 from Nikon: 70 EUR
- Ball head plate (for Markin's ball ball-head it's P800U): 40 EUR
- Release cord (Hahnell HRN 280): 22,50 EUR

All together it is 311,5 EUR.


Of course, your mileage may vary but in a 'worst case scenario' it takes roughly 10% of the body price.

Project D800E - after first serious assignment

It was a while since my post about preparing for shooting with D800 in low light conditions. Short after publishing it I was able to test most of the ideas described there. The occasion was the end of school year gala at the school where my wife teaches. Because it was my first shooting assignment with D800 I played safe and prepared the setup for low lighting conditions.
Then the event started as my assignment did. Very quickly it turned out that I don't have to boost the light. D800 was able to produce the images with acceptable noise (more about it in a second) using only the ambient lighting:

I will not write about the fantastic dynamic range of the D800 and the autofocus possibilities. It is already written more than enough about it. What I'd like to do instead is to discuss the workable limits of the sensitivity in such conditions. By workable I mean a combination of shutter speed vs ISO (assuming constant aperture) allowing to take the sharp pictures. The 'safe' shutter speed minimizing the risk of motion blur I set to 1/125 s or higher. After doing initial tests my first bet was to go with ISO up to 4000 but no higher. Here there is an example explaining why.

When looking at the image in 1:1 scale one can see the significant noise in the background curtain as well as on the faces of the persons. Using ACR or Lightroom the problems can be helped to some extent:

The noise is reduced, but I started to loose the details in the picture. Explainable, because I needed to stretch noise reduction quite significantly in Lightroom:

So at this level of ISO one needs to start making compromises between the overall sharpness and the acceptable noise. My final touch on this picture was to use the "Sharpen for screen" with the "Amount" option set to "High" when exporting the image to JPEG. That improved the picture even further.

Final note: of course the value I have chosen is not an absolute truth, far from that. It is rather a guideline for this particular type of lighting (a moderately lit stage) and the type of scene (limited group of people on the stage). When one is going to shoot a close-up of somebody's face and the face would fill the frame, ISO 4000 might work just fine. 

If one wants to see more photos taken with D800E, please visit the school photo gallery. It is in Polish, but it is easy to start browsing through the photos just by clicking on the gallery thumbnail and then go back with the web browser's 'back' button. Or, by using the Google Translator.