blog.burrima.ch

Freezing the Blog

2009-10-12T21:26:00.003+02:00

To all people out there who own a blog: did you ever ask yourselve, who is reading your stuff? - so did I.

Since I support another blog named Basel Strobist Blog which is about the same topic - photography - I decided to stop this blog for the moment. Maybe I'll continue later on, I don't know. Probably not.

The new blog is in German, sad for your English-speaking guys. But for me, it is more probable that it will get read since most of my friends speak German. Some do even not speak English at all.

Sorry guys who do not understand German. If you want to know anything, please don't hesitate to contact me (see contact.burrima.ch).

Bye bye martinphotography.blogspot.com...

Challenging stage shooting

2009-08-20T11:55:00.014+02:00

Last Friday, I was hired by the band Evy & the Bluesjacks to take some shots during their concert. They were playing at “Em Bebby sy Jazz”, an annual Event in Basel where many Jazz and vocal bands give their best for a big audience. The inner city is totally crowded each time.

Of course I was quite nervous since this was my first official engagement and I knew that for good shots I must get close to the stage where I would be exposed to the audience. I was even more nervous as I saw the stage. It was covered by a white tent with walls on the back and on the sides. The lighting was ambient by one single big spot light on the inner side of the tent. Terrible! There was some additional ambient coming from bulb-ropes hanging above the audience.

Thank goodness I had brought some Speedlights with Manfrotto Superclamps with me. I attached one of them to each front side of the tent, pointing to the inner tent side, i.e. the diagonal opposite corner. Therewith I was able to have enough light to get to decent camera settings and also a bit of a hard light to get some more dramatic pictures. The white tent helped me out by reflecting some light as fill light.

(Click to see a bigger version)

But still, there was the white ugly tent and my fear to expose myself to the audience. I was happy when Jens, a Basel Strobist friend (to see on the right side of the stage in the above picture), arrived to support me. This gave me some relaxing. During the long concert of 2 hours we took many pictures (around 200 from my side and I guess about the same from Jens). The attached speedlites proved to be a good idea and they worked reliably during the whole event. I was even surprised about the so-called “low-end Ebay triggers” (Cactus) – they worked flawlessly even at distances around 20 m. Well, I have done some transmitter-antenna modification to increase range. But still, I didn’t expect it to work so well.

So, light was ok, lens was one of the best (borrowed a Nikon 70-200 f/2.8 VR), band was really great, audience was in good mood – but, there was the white ugly boring tent. To overcome this, Jens realized that the best place to shoot the front row of the band (singers and guitars) was from the side at high position. Because then we could have black background from the opposite tent side which was halfway open. But this meant to stand right on the border of the stage. At the beginning I was very afraid of doing so, but as Jens did it, I got more and more encouraged until I overcame my fears and also did it. And it was worth it!

In order to come to an end with this blog entry, here is a list of what I could learn during this unforgettable event:

Don’t be shy, it’s worth it. The audience is not so concerned about you, they want to see the band.
Go close, show heads, emotions.
Black-and-white is sometimes better for stage shots, depending on the available light.
Black-and-white allows higher ISO since the noise is not so distracting then. It event gives the photo an artistic touch.
Don’t be afraid of darkness – allow the histogram to be towards the left side at night.

At this point, it remains to say: THANK YOU!! – to Evy and her band for the engagement, to Jens for the support and to my honey for the patience.

You can find all images in the gallery.

Photo taken by Jens Winkler.

Basel Strobist going public

2009-08-14T12:34:00.005+02:00

Up to now, Basel Strobist was accessible only by it's members. We worked on a private Flickr group basis. But now the time has come to go public. So, Jens suggested to have a public Blog where we can share our lessons learnt to a wider audience. It's good for us to reflect again on what we did each time and it's also kind of a documentation method to store the knowledge for the future.

The blog is still being built up, but you can have a first look at it here: baselstrobist.blogspot.com.

Ensemble Contrapposto

2009-08-14T12:29:00.004+02:00

A couple of days ago, the "Ensemble Contrapposto" asked me if they could use on of my photographs taken at Dance & Dine 2008 for their homepage. Of course they can! I'm very happy that they asked me. See my photo here.
BTW: Contrapposto is the ensemble that played at Dance & Dine. It's a cool formation matching perfectly to that event.

News from Basel Strobist

2009-07-13T20:44:00.006+02:00

It has been a long time since my last post. Sorry for that, I was very busy. In the meanwhile, I went to 3 Basel Strobist meetings. We are now 4 people, namely Jens, the leader, Peter, Max and myself. We meet approx. each 2 weeks. The results from the first time can be found in the previous post.

The second time we focused on head shots. This, because David Hobby (original Strobist) started a new series of assignment exercises whereas the first topic was about mugshots, ehm... headshots. So, we could perfectly combine lighting 102 with the new assignements. The initial ideas was to take part in the challenge to win some photo equipment. But finally, no one of us passed in since the deadline was very taff. For this evening, we invited a model, namely Christian Morf, who potentially needed some photos of himself for job applications. The assignement contract was on time-for-picture, i.e. Christian spending his time and getting some pictures instead. All on a non-commercial basis.

We set up an umbrella from camera left, a silver reflector on camera right and a background flash lighting the white wall from bottom up. Enough writing, here are the results (click on the images to see a bigger version):

The third meeting was about food. Jens knows a shop owner of a very special shop. He sells exclusive stuff from Switzerland, e.g. cheese, dry meat, tea, etc. As Jens one day entered the shop, he saw a really amateur-like looking image of some cheese. So, he decided to offer the shop owner to take some pictures for him on a goods-for-pictures basis, so the shop owner sponsoring some goods to take photos of and then getting the pictures to make advertisement. It took us approximately 4 hours to get the shots.

We recognized that it is challenging to take food shots. But finally we came up with a solution that used no more than 5 flashes and a macro tent. One flash from behind, coming in high, two from the side, snooted, lighting the background and two from the front, one camera left and one camera right. On the second shot, the camera left one was moved to camera top to light the cheese a bit more. Here are the results:

Basel Strobist

2009-06-11T19:52:00.006+02:00

Some of you probably know that I regularly visit David Hobby's webpage called Strobist. Amongst this page there exist a big photo community, attending and actively participating David Hobby's lighting tutorials. These photo communities meet and exchange photos and know-how in Flickr groups. The most popular is for sure David Hobby's Strobist Flickr group. Many local spin-offs exist and so also one for Switzerland, the Swiss Strobist Flickr group.

And the newest baby is the Basel Strobist Group. Jens Winkler, himself a strobist fan, brought this group up. He asked if anybody in the Basel region would have interest in doing David Hobby's Lighting 102 tutorials.

When I saw this announcement, I did not hesitate to sign in. It has been quite a time now since I was looking around for some photo friends in my living area.

Last Tuesday, we met the first time. It was a very cool evening where we introduced ourselves, discussed a lot and finally also took some photos. Thanks guys for that time, I'm looking forward to the next meeting!

So, here is one shot of our first meeting. I will keep you readers up to date about our further work (ehm, better said: fun). You can also find my homework in the gallery.

Photo by Jens Winkler. Strobist info: 430 on 1/32 with Tungsten gel and Kellogs Bag, 20cm away, bending from 9 to 11, Camera on 3500 K, IS0 100, f5,6, 1/200

Techniques used for Kaltern photos

2009-04-28T12:07:00.011+02:00

Many of you TV Wohlen guys will probably see my pictures from the sports camp in Kaltern. Some of you already asked me stuff about why I did certain things while photographing. Here, I will give you some explanations about the techniques that I used during the sports camp.

Inidirect lighting

When I remember correctly, Angi asked me why I pointed the flash upwards to the ceiling and not towards the actual subject that I wanted to photograph. The answer is simple: Direct flash produces harsh shadows and reflections. When you e.g. look at a picture taken with a compact camera, you will see shadows of the face and body in the background. And you will see bright points in the face where the flash reflected (e.g. on the nose or on the forehead).
With indirect lighting, you produce a much bigger light source which provides softer light than direct flash. Studio photographers use big soft-boxes (= white screens) to get soft light. Of course I can't carry a soft-box with me. But I can bounce the light off a wall or the ceiling. Here is an example where you actually see the effect in the window reflection:

Gelling the flash

Somebody asked me (was it Reto?) why I used that orange foil on top of my flash. Well, simply spoken this is to match the color of the ambient (environmental) light. Tungsten light bulbs produce a somewhat orange light where a bare flash produces "white" light. Experts talk about color temperatures where tungsten has about 3500 Kelvin and Xenon flash about 5500 Kelvin.
The goal of the orange foil on the flash head is to match the flash light's color to the tungsten light to get a nice (neutral) colored light in the photo. Of course, with orange light, the image will be orange. But I can easily correct that in the post-production on the computer. Alternatively, I can set the white-balance on my camera correctly.

Spotting out the subject for a more dramatic effect

Look at this image:

Here, I set my camera to fully manual and the flash to automatic (TTL). The ISO, shutter speed and aperture were chosen to underexpose the background for a couple of stops (if you don't understand that, let's just say "underexpose a bit"). And with the flash I exposed Toni correctly. Actually I had not so much to do, since the automatic flash made the work for me.
Luckily, the bounced flash came from a direction where it made a more dramatic look on Toni's face. A bit of luck is always a good thing ;-)

Using flash off-camera

For more special effects or when I don't have a wall or ceiling to bounce the flash, I can take the flash head off the camera and put it wherever I want to. In the following example, I put the flash to camera right, directly on the floor. The harsh light (+- a point source) coming from the side provided a dramatic look on Reto's face.

This technique needed some more fiddling around with the settings since the off-camera flash must be set to full manual mode (because I have no TTL cable which are very expensive). So I had to set the flash power manually which needs some try-and-error.

Using fill-flash in harsh sun-lit scenes

Some of you might have scratched their head when I ran around with my flash on the camera as the sun was fully shining. But the following two images of our super-model Stephan should show you the difference. Of course I dialed down the flash output power since it was not my main light source. I just used the flash to lift the shadows a bit.

Left without flash, right with flash.

What else to say...

I hope you enjoyed my explanations. If you have any questions, please leave a comment, e-mail me, call me or whatever.
Thank you very much for the cool sports camp in Kaltern, I really enjoyed it! I would like to stay in touch with you all!

- bzzzzzzz

New layout for better readability

2009-04-28T11:35:00.007+02:00

A couple of people gave me the feedback that they don't like to read white-on-black. And I agree with them - it's more exhausting for the eyes to read bright font on dark background (remembering my ergonomics class at ETH Zurich).

So I decided to switch to a white background for more readability. Because I want people to read my blog ;-)

Other new stuff on the page:

Slightly bigger font for even more readability
The domain "burrima.blogspot.com" got free, so I took it. But you can still access my page through burrima.ch which is actually the better way.
The gallery can be accessed through gallery.burrima.ch
New pix added to the gallery (Training camp Kaltern)

How can we not love our nature...

2009-04-11T17:53:00.006+02:00

Hey people out there! Ever thought of what you do to our nature day after day? I don't mean you should not take the car for a trip or the plane for holiday. I'm also not talking about eating fish or tumble-drying. No, I'm not talking about particular situations.

What I want you to do is to switch on your brain and think about it. Where can we take steps to save our nature? Do we want to live with candles instead of electric light? - No! Do we want to stop eating meat? - No! But do we want to go everywhere by car, even 200 m to get some food? - No! Or do we need to take shower of at least 30 minutes a day? - No, for sure not!

I don't want to forbid anything to anyone but I want you to think of what you do and what impact your acting will have on nature. Do we love nature? - Of course we do! And we want also to have our "easy" live that we have now. It's fine to use our nature - but we must do it respectfully and give it a thought! Use nature but don't destroy it! Be respectful!

With those words I wish you all a nice and beautiful Easter! Enjoy it gracefully and take your time to also enjoy nature. Perhaps you'll have the luck to see an (Easter-) bunny.

Here some pix I took in the zoo of Basel (more in the gallery):

Bathroom Impressions

2009-03-30T20:00:00.005+02:00

What do people do with their spare time? Well, some of them go out, doing sports. Cool stuff. Some of them read books or watch TV. Some others go to cinema, to clubs and to bars. And some spend their time practicing Photography. While doing also other stuff I recently took the time to go deeper into photography and to practice a bit.

So, I asked myself: What should I take pictures of? I had the idea to take pictures of things that each one knows and uses regularly but never has watched as being a photographic subject. And so I found myself, grabbing three things from the bathroom and starting an experiment: Can I make something special out of these three objects?

Well, dear readers, take a look at my pictures and make your own opinion. Would be nice if you could leave a comment. Did you find the pics nice? Or not? What could I have done better? (Click on the pix to see a bigger version.)

Here's the setup sketch of the last picture (perfume bottle).
The setup for the first one (hairbrush) was as follows: SB-28 coming from camera left, at high position, snooted with black foam. A second SB-800 coming from right. And the setup for the second one (fingerbrush): Blue paper on the bottom. Snooted SB-28 laying directly on the table, light coming from left. Approx. 20 cm from object. SB-800 coming from camera right, about 1.5 meters away, slightly higher than the viewpoint.

Epilogue: At first, I wanted to call this thread "Bathroom Art". But then I came to the point where I asked myself: what is art...? I think - even when sometimes looking quite silly to me - art is always bound to great names like Michel Angelo, Hundertwasser, and so on. But as my name being very unknown out there, I think I have not the right to call this thread "Bathroom Art". As simple as that.

Panorama Stitching

2009-03-22T19:35:00.021+01:00

Today, it was a very beautiful sunny day. So I took the opportunity and swung myself on my bike - to enjoy the weather and prepare for the hard training camp coming up in mid of April. I'll go to Kaltern, a small village in northern Italy, together with the sports club of Wohlen, the town where I grew up. But that's another story.

Edit: For some reason, Blogger only allows pictures with a maximum with of 1600 pixels. Click here for a full-resolution version of the panorama.

On my ride I went on top of the sun-mountain ("Sonnenberg" in German), a small hill for Swiss measures :-). Half-way up, I took the above panorama picture. Click on the image to see a larger version.

On the left side, you can see Rheinfelden, the town where I live. On the right side, there's Möhlin, the neighbor village. You know, fisheye lenses cost a fortune which I simply don't have. So what I did was to take 7 (!) pictures in series - from left to right.

Back home, I started my panorama stitching software which I really love and can ~~hardly~~ recommend (edit: oops, pitfall! I meant: "really recommend". Thank you Christian Leeb for the hint): Hugin. It was only a couple of clicks to get to this panorama photo. Hugin is an open-source project and is available in binary form for several platforms. It has many options for optimization but also works great with the built-in couple-of-clicks assistant. Go to the website and check it out, it's definitely worth a try!

Here are some other pictures I took on my bike ride:

Dynamic Range

2009-03-17T11:44:00.008+01:00

When reading through the Internet, I very often meet the term “dynamic range”. Sometimes, I am confused and sometimes I learn something. After reading quite some different stuff I think I got the idea (especially after the wikipedia site). And I want to share it with you.
When you look to a scene, e.g. a landscape, you see brighter and darker areas. The difference in luminance between the brightest and the darkest point is called the “dynamic range of a scene”. Let’s keep it a general quantitative name which can be physically measured (in whatever unit).

Amongst the dynamic range of a scene, we must also introduce the “dynamic range of a capture device” and the “dynamic range of a display device”. Each device (in our photographic workflow) has it’s own dynamic range. In other words: Each device has it’s darkest and brightest points. For instance, a paper has a much less brightest point than a screen.

When it comes to actual numbers physicians talk about lumen, candela, lux, etc. But we just care about ratios of numbers here. Monitor manufacturers e.g. talk about “contrast ratio” 1000:1, meaning that the brightest point is 1000 times brighter than the darkest. Photographers talk about “f-stops”. 1 f-stop is twice the brightness, so a dynamic range of 5 f-stops corresponds to a contrast ratio of 2^5:1 which is 32:1.

The human eye has a very limited dynamic range but is adaptive to scenes. In a bright environment, we cannot see much detail in the dark areas. Same applies to the ear: In loud environments we cannot hear a whisper. The camera is also kind of adaptive namely by adjusting ISO, shutter speed and aperture.

Some examples. A sunlit scene can have a contrast ratio up to about 1’000’000’000:1 or 30 f-stops. The camera CCD sensor of my Nikon D50 has a theoretical dynamic range of 12 bits (=f-stops), meaning a contrast ratio of 2^12:1 = 4’096:1. Computer monitors of newer generation are about 1’000:1 or 10 f-stops. And a paper print about 100:1 or 6.6 f-stops.

There’s the problem: My camera can only capture 12 f-stops of available 30 (in sun-lit scenes). So, when I set ISO, shutter speed and aperture to be able to capture the brightest point I will not be able to get details in the darker areas because everything below a certain level will be captured just as black. And vice versa: When I set the camera to capture the darkest point, everything above a certain level will be white (= blown out).

For this problem there exist solutions. One of them is to make several exposures with different camera settings (=bracketing) and put all together in post production to create a high-dynamic-range (HDR) image. But this works only for still objects and often the effect looks too artificial. But sometimes it’s a really helpful technique.

Another solution I want to point out is to use flash to control the dynamic range of a scene. For outdoor portraits for instance, you can for instance use direct fill flash to lift the shadows. To do so, I usually to put the flash exposure to about -1.5 to -2 stops. Some people think that photographers are silly to use a flash in normal daylight, but now you know why.

Of course, there exist many other solutions which I don’t want to get into right now.

One big topic in photography is color calibration which has the goal to get consistent results between camera, monitor and paper prints. If a picture looks always the same, independent of the output device, a photographer is a very happy guy. But as we have seen, different devices have different dynamic ranges which makes color calibration a challenge.

The main goal of photography for me is to reproduce a scene as best as possible. Not in absolute "physical" manners but such that a human can feel how it was when a photo was taken. But that's another story - what I want to say is that for me it's important to understand this stuff and also to have color-calibrated equipment but I also play a bit with the pictures in post-production. Sometimes I use a small color cast to give atmosphere to a picture. It was difficult with uncalibrated equipment and the results were not satisfying, but with my new hardware (iMac ALU 24", running Ubuntu) the prints look very similar to the screen. And I hope to get better results from now on.

As always: Please post a comment if you have any questions or additional information. Don't be shy, I won't bite you! ;-)

Meeting the butterflies

2009-03-09T07:03:00.009+01:00

Yesterday, Fabienne and I went to the Papiliorama to visit the butterflies. It was great! First, we were in a hall where there are hundreds of butterflies flying freely around. Some of them are really big. The biggest one was approx. 20 cm in diameter. I took some photographs with available light only to not confuse the animals.

After that, we went to the second hall, called the Nocturama. The hall is made with a dark plastic roof which leaves just a bit light in, making it look inside as if it would be night. After our eyes adopted for the dark light, we could see several night-active animals like night-apes, sloths and bats. I did not take any photograph there because it's not allowed and I also didn't want to disturb the animals.

Finally, there was a hall similar to the Masoala Hall in Zurich Zoo containing a primeval forest emulation. There we saw different birds and interesting-looking plants. More pictures of our trip can be found in my gallery.

After our visit we both got members of Pro Natura, a Swiss nature conversation agency. We're convinced that our ecosystem is in danger. So you outside reading this, think of what you can do to save our planet! Signs are there that our nature runs towards a catastrophe.

DIY Shoot Through Umbrella

2009-03-04T21:31:00.007+01:00

You can buy expensive equipment for photography, or you can go doing it yourself. There are for sure things that do not work well for DIY but a shoot-through umbrella is an easy story. Here are the parts you need (click on the image for a larger version):

And of course, you need a white umbrella. First step is to cut the knob off the umbrella. Then, screw the eyebolt with the dowel into the open end. The pipe clamp goes around a normal stand, nothing fancy. Now you can fix the umbrella to the stand with the butterfly nut - you're done!

Here is a setup shot of the completed shoot-through umbrella:

Manufacturing costs are very little (about 20 Swiss Francs including umbrella).

Here is the first shot of myself with the new equipment (taken by my girlfriend):

Talk to the Pro's

2009-02-04T10:44:00.004+01:00

If you look forward to gain knowledge in photography, there’s a really cool way. Many professional photographers out there are willing to share their experience with everyone. They do it just for free. Why? – Well, it’s because these pros are always looking to extend their own knowledge. By explaining stuff to other people, they think again and again about every topic and thereby get more used to it and get more insight. Also, by keeping contact to other photographers, the professionals get more input from all over the world where they can again learn from.

On the right-hand side of this blog, you can find some links to pages which I regularly visit in order to extend my knowledge.

Sports Photography...

2009-01-30T20:34:00.005+01:00

...or something like that. You do not have to go out to take sports pictures, especially during winter, when you do not really want to do so. For fiddling around with my equipment to gain more experience, I helped myself out with this small statue:

What I wanted to figure out is three-point-lighting. Acutally, I only have two lights and it showed up that even with only two flashes it is quite hard to find the correct settings. Of course, I could have used the ambient as third light or any reflector to build the fill light. But I was so pleased with what I got already with two lights that I did not want to use a third one. And also I was already a bit exhausted from playing around with the settings.

My setup was as follows:

The statue being located about 20 cm before a wall.
Since I did not want the structure of the wall to show up and also give it more deepness, I have chosen a small aperture.
This showed up to be complicated since the speedlights are much too powerful (even on their lowest setting). Therefore, I used paper and neutral density filters to screw down the flash output power. Furthermore, I used a polarizing filter, hopefully to remove reflections a bit (don't know if it actually worked) and to let less light passing the lens onto the camera sensor.
There was one speedlight on camera right, about 70 cm from the statue with a 1 stop neutral density filter. This was my key light.
Another flash was on camera left, about 60 cm from the statue. It had a white paper attached in front with some sticky tape. This was my fill light.
As alredy mentioned, I left away the backlight.
The white balance was adjusted such that the image looks blue. I know that this is kinda "out" but I just like the look.

I hope you enjoyed today's entry. You can look forward to a report about a DIY shoot-through umbrella that I made recently.

Exposing Snow

2009-01-07T13:39:00.010+01:00

Exposing snow is little more complex than normal landscape photography. There are mainly two problems that I encountered. The first one is that the camera's built-in exposure meter does not take into consideration the reflectance of the scene being photographed. The meter assumes always 18% medium gray. So, if the scene is dark, e.g. a man in black clothes against a black wall, then the picture will look too bright (=overexposed). And the opposite applies to white scenes as snowy landscapes. These will look too dark. But this is the smaller problem since it can be circumvented as explained below.

The bigger problem with snow is that it gives very high contrast to a scene. Sun-lit snow is so much brighter than snow in the shade. This is also because of the high reflectance of that white cold stuff. Even under cloudy conditions there might be high contrast in the scene. And especially, as in my case, a sunlit mountain against a valley in the shade. Normally, landscape photographers work in the very morning or in the evening at sunrise and sunset. Because at this time the light is much softer than during the day. But in the mountains, they sometimes work during the day to show/pronounce the scattered and harsh lines.

So, how to exposure snow? There are the following methods in my brain:

Use auto-mode and rely on your luck. If the image is not what you expected, change your expectation (small joke) :-)
Use exposure compensation on your camera. But how much to compensate?
Use spot metering and meter for an object that looks medium gray, e.g. a rock or a wall of a house. (Maybe your camera offers the option to safe the actual exposure. Mine has a special button, so I press the release button half down and then this special button. Holding both buttons as is, I point the camera to where I want and fully press down the release button.)
Probably the best way is to shoot in manual exposure mode and to check the histogram and the blinking highlights. Then you can exactly estimate the result. The histogram should not be cut on the right side, otherwise part of the image will be overexposed (blown out). And also should it not be cut too much on the left side nor have most part of it on the left, otherwise the image will probably look too dark.

Maybe you allow some parts of the image to be overexposed to allow others to be correctly exposed (for instance a portrait shot against a snow in the background). This is up to you. I personally prefer to not overexpose the snow too much to preserve its structure and 3-D look.

I think snow landscape photography is a very advanced topic. You need good light. A cloudy scene is probably not too bad because it evenly lights the scene (like a biiiiig soft box with a giant flash would). The sun, being very bright and small, gives hard light and also big contrast. Our eye can handle much more contrast than a camera sensor can. That's the problem.

I did not yet talk about white balance here, it is another topic. Since I always shoot in RAW format, I don't consider the white balance settings on my camera. I usually have it on auto. I then correct the white balance in my RAW work flow. This can be done without quality loss.

Now to my pictures: In the examples shown in this blog entry and here, I used the histogram and blinking highlights method. During post processing, I set the white balance to slightly blue to get a cold-looking effect. Most of the pictures appear a bit dark. This is because of the problem mentioned above and because I did not allow big parts of the images to be overexposed in post-production (well a little bit was ok, but not too much). This preserved the texture of the snow and gave - in my opinion - a nice mystical look.

Remark: Interestingly, the scene was actually slightly blue due to the clouds. At some points it was surprisingly blue - nice effect of nature.

Christmas lights of Basel

2008-12-23T23:01:00.010+01:00

No text this time, just images ;-) Click on them to see a bigger version...

Playing with effects

2008-12-21T19:18:00.008+01:00

White balance
Today, Fabienne and I made a second cookie round. We made "Mailänderli" and hazelnut-citron "Plätzchen". I took a shot of the "Mailänderli's" with a flash hold in my left hand on camera left (slightly higher than the camera, so also light from above). Accidentially, I didn't adjust the white balance so it was set to thungsten light. Since I shoot in RAW, this is no problem but I liked the effect so I didn't correct the white balance.

In a second shot, I realized my mistake and changed the white balance to flash on the camera. The folowing image shows what would be the correct setting. It's up to you which pictrue you like more, but I personally prefer the first one because it looks kind of non-usual, so not the photo you would see in a cooking book. That makes it kinda special to me.

De-focus for Christmas lights
In the evening we went down to Rheinfelden centre to see the Christmas lights. It was at about 5 PM and the sky was already becoming dark. But still bright enough to register to the photo. One of my first shots was the following one:

By zooming in I thought that it could look nicely if I would de-focus a bit. I saw this on a Strobist entry recently. The following image shows a de-focussed version:

It's again up to you which photo you prefer. I personally find both images cool but the second one looks more special to me. It depends on what your goal is but it's for sure a good idea to play around a bit taking many shots and then finally take the version you like the most.

Shooting around to gain experience

2008-12-20T12:18:00.011+01:00

Since I still had some holiday on my account and work progressed very well this year, I did not hesitate to take some days off before Christmas. This offers me the time to get some presents stressless and to take some pictures to gain more experience with my new flash system and photography in general.

One nice thing that I found out is that the Nikon SB-800 also reacts on the IR beam coming from the Infraflash Transmitter. Obviously, the Nikon SU-4 remote flash system is IR sensitive. Cool stuff.

Here are some example shots I made in the past few days. They are not yet perfect - but I can learn a lot from being very self-critical :-)

Mjummy! This is the result of hours of baking cookies for Christmas. These are my favorite ones, so I had to take a picture. The light is sourced by an on-camera SB-800 pointed slightly up (at about 60°) to the wall behind the cookies. So that the subjects do not receive any direct light. As simple as that. The cookie in the center is not the nicest one but maybe the most tasty?

This is a present I got a while ago from my girlfriend Fabienne. I used two flashes as shown in the next picture. Black-and-white seemed better for me in postproduction. Interestingly, the bottom part of the background is a little brighter, probably caused by the reflective surface on the bottom. Here's the setup shot:
I used 1/250s shutter speed which is the max sync speed of my camera. This allowed to cancel the ambient. Actually, I like to have the ambient showing up but in this case I wanted flash light only to see the effect of the flash more.

This is our living room. There is only one flash on camera left, about 3 m from the camera and about 50 cm below the ceiling, pointed slightly upwards. The flash has no modifications. I started at 1/250 s to determine the correct aperture for the flash exposure. Then I extended the shutter speed to bring in the ambient from the two lamps shown in the picture. In post production I chose the white balance somewhat warmer than flash to get a balanced color temperature. I actually wanted to have the two lamps being warmer than the flash light that's why I explicitly didn't gel the flash.

These are two shots of our lovely birds Hamlet and Chérie. As bird specialists know, the ones with the blue nose are the males and the ones with the red nose are the females. Since the background is nothing special, I hided it by using 1/250 s shutter speed. The light is coming from camera left. I used a white reflector made of foam rubber to increase the apparent light size (it looks the similar as here but the foam is white and used for another purpose). I personally like these shots because the structure of the feathers can be seen nicely. With flat-looking on-camera flash this wouldn't be possible.

I hope you enjoyed the photos. If you have any questions or suggestions - as always - pleas don't hesitate to leave a comment.

Dance and dine

2008-12-14T22:15:00.005+01:00

Although being a little time ago, I want to present you my very first official assignment. It was the second time that the local sports club of Wohlen - the town where I grew up - organized an event called "dance and dine". This is a special evening where everyone came in beautiful clothing and good manner. Fine food was served in combination with some very nice life music and other acts. Later in the evening, people danced and enjoyed themselves.

The well organized evening was brilliant. I really enjoyed to take pictures there, people were so relaxed and easy going (for Swiss measures ;-)). Thank you TV Wohlen for assigning me!

You can find the pictures here.

Most of them were taken by indirect lighting with on-camera flash. I gelled the flash with an TN-A1 color filter (the orange one that was delivered together with the Nikon SB-800 speedlight) to compensate for the tungsten ambient. The ambient light was about 1-2 stops below the flash light. I knew that the pictures will only be used for the web in a smaller resolution, so I could go to a slightly higher exposure time, allowing for a small amount of motion blur. The speedlight was sometimes a little weak resulting in a small underexposure which I had to correct during post-production. Next time I should use several remote-triggered flashes to support the ambient similar like Neil van Niekerk did here.

InfraFlash 2008 - DIY infrared flash commander

2008-12-08T11:57:00.017+01:00

Here it is: The already announced description of my DIY infrared flash remote control. With it, I can remote-trigger several off-camera flashes at the same time. Using off-camera flash is really helpful when you want to make more professional-looking pictures (remark the term “make” instead of “take” because you have the control of how things will look). You can read a lot about the lighting topic on many different web pages. I personally prefer this and this pages.

So what is the advantage of my selfmade infrared flash control units? Well, compared to other available stuff like radio remote controls my devices are probably not competitive in terms of technical features such as range and reliability (except for the really cheap ones I guess). But definitely my devices are more affordable. I payed about 80 Swiss Francs for parts to build 1 transmitter and 3 receivers, including delivery costs. High end devices cost about 300 Swiss Francs per piece, which makes 1200 in total. Comparing 1200 to 80 does not need any further explanations :-) Even low-end devices cost about 30 Swiss Francs, without delivery, which makes about 120 Francs. Another issue is the fun factor. It's a good feeling if you can build up something that works at the end. BTW: 1 Swiss Franc = 0.82 Dollars at the moment.

Since I’m not a professional, my self made devices fully satisfy me. I did not test them excessively yet but so far I can tell that the range and reliability are exciting and more than I ever expected. In indoor environments it is even possible to hide the flashes behind edges. And my flat was not long enough (about 10 m) to reach the maximum range. I did not yet test outdoor reliability but I think it will be significant worse since outdoor environments provide almost no reflecting surfaces (like white walls). At least in theory, according to the data sheet of the IR receiver, the maximum range should be about 35 meters. Well, I think this is quite theoretical and only reachable when the IR beam is well directed towards the receiver which is normally not the case. But fur me 10 meters will still be very good. Hopefully, it can fulfill this expectation. I will provide you further information as soon as possible.

Please read further on if you are interested in how I made the InfraFlash 2008. You can also only enjoy the pictures if you don’t understand anything. And in case you need more information or have any suggestions for improvement - please leave a comment! I will provide you with sample shots also as soon as possible.

Transmitter V1.0

This picture shows the infrared transmitter. Honestly, it looks a bit fancy with the IR diodes coming out of the case. But it still looks professional enough for my purposes. I have chosen to use four diodes, each pointing to another direction to cover a bigger area with the IR rays.

The plugged cable is the sync cord input. I can attach it to the camera or any other sync source. But there is also a hot shoe flash connector built into the bottom of the case. This is nothing else than a standard hama hot shoe sync adapter from a photo store. Unfortunately, the hot shoe adapter is not connected through from the bottom to the top, so I still have to connect the shown sync cord to the hot shoe adapter which is hidden on the picture behind the hot shoe adapter. This is quite sad. Maybe I'll find a better solution later on. But I'm very happy that I can connect the transmitter on top of my camera. It makes it just so more useful than would it be if hold by hand or connected to another unpractical place.

This image shows the circuit diagram (it’s getting more detailed now ;-)). The transmitter works with a 9V power supply. This relatively high voltage is needed since the four IR diodes are in series in two pairs. Each diode is powered by approx. 250 mA peak current. So, the resulting current is 500 mA which is quite high - so high that even a brand new battery cannot hold the voltage and drops down to about 5 V...

For this reason two big 1500 uF capacitors are connected to the voltage source. They store enough energy to power the LEDs for a few microseconds which is sufficient to trigger the receiver.

Since the receiver is sensitive for a 56 kHz modulated IR signal, a timer is used in the transmitter. The ICM7555 is a CMOS version of the well known 555 standard timer IC. It has some improvement to the older 555 series. For instance it has a power consumption of only a few micro-amps. And it does not need supply power stabilization and produces even more accurate frequencies. Enough advertisement, the rest can be read in the data sheet :-).

The 470 pF and 18 kOhm determine the frequency to 56 kHz and duty cycle to 0.6. Since the 7555 timer can only produce duty cycles in between 0.5 to 1, I had to chose 0.6 and invert the signal by a standard pnp bipolar transistor (BC558C) to get a duty cycle of 0.3. This duty cycle of 0.3 allows to let higher peak current pass the diodes (since the on/off ratio is smaller). For those who do not know what duty cycle means, read this.

MOSFET transistors are used to switch the LEDs. I have preferred those instead of normal bipolar transistors since they are switched by voltage instead of current (well, actually a small current is needed during switch operation but this doesn’t matter). Therewith, I can minimize the current flowing through the camera since I do not know the camera specifications and don't want to destroy my baby. The 470 Ohm resistors on the gates are only for protection purposes. The 10 kOhm resistor, also connected to the gates, is needed to discharge the MOSFETs. Since the gate of such a transistor behaves like a small capacitor, it must be discharged to switch the current off. In a pre-version I have chosen 100 kOhm but this turned out to be too high, the MOSFETs didn’t switch off fast enough.

The inside of the transmitter box still looks (ehm, a little) unprofessional - but ey, it works! As you can see, the 9V block battery takes a lot of space which leaves some options for improvement. Since those batteries have a high voltage but also a high internal resistance (as mentioned above), I had to attach two big capacitors (blue cylinders), each of them having 1500 uF, to stabilize the voltage during transmission.

On the left side there is a small on/off switch. I attached it with glue. Hopefully, it will hold for a while ;-) And on the right side, right behind the battery, there is a 2.5 mm mono plug where the PC sync cable gets connected to.

Receiver V1.0

The receiver is much easier to understand. Basically, it it built by an intelligent infrared receiver, namely the TSOP31256 from Vishay Semiconductors. This part has already built-in everything necessary to filter and amplify a received 56 kHz infrared signal. Usually, it is used for more complex infrared remote controls where in fact data is transmitted. Here I only use it to detect the presence of a signal.

The housing still looks a little funny with the big hole in the front. Actually, I wanted to use an infrared-transparent front plate but the smallest amount to order is 20 pieces... Maybe I'll find another solution at a time. The box has - similar to the sender - a PC sync cord connector and an on/off switch. The connection between the cable and the box is also realized by a 2.5 mm mono audio plug (they're really cheap).

This figure shows the receiver circuit diagram. As mentioned, the main component is the IR receiver. As soon as a couple of periods of the IR signal are received, the TSOP’s output changes from logical high to logical low. We need it the other way round, thus the output signal must be inverted which is done by the pnp transistor.

Since I do not know the exact speedlight flash sync protocol, I decided to use an opto-isolator between the flash and my circuit – just to protect both devices against each other. The PC sync protocol basically needs the plus and minus poles being interconnected to fire the flash. And that’s what the opto-isolator mainly does.

A small R-C filter has been attached to the input of the opto-isolator since first tests have shown that the IR receiver also reacts to other flash lights. The filter works well because flash transients are very short (about smaller than 1/1000s) and the IR signal much longer. Tests have shown that the R-C delay is still short enough to trigger the flash. So fast that no camera-flash sync problems occur. I pointed the flash against a white wall, canceled the ambient (by switching the room light off) and chose my maximum camera sync shutter speed of 1/250s. The result looked exactly the same as with 1/20s or even less. This was unexpected since the time constant of the R-C filter is quite high (about 1/10 s).

Open Issues
Well, nobody’s perfect and so also not the InfraFlash 2008. Even though working very well, there are still some small open issues or “room for improvement” (like you say to managers). These are:

Each cool device needs a cool labeling. So, I should print some stickers and attach them to my devices.
It would be nice to have a battery “healthiness” indication.
It would also be nice to reduce the amount of needed batteries. Three for the receiver is definitely too much since it needs only a small amount of power.
The 9V battery takes a lot of space and has little energy stored. Furthermore, 9V batteries are not very cheap. It would be nice to use standard AA or AAA batteries instead. I have already ordered some DC/DC converters to play around.
The sync cable at the transmitter (from hot shoe adapter to transmitter body) should be omitted. It looks unprofessional.
Purify the R-C time constant mystery in the receiver. Why does it sync fast enough even with a time constant of about 1/10 s?
My dream is to have 4 potentiometers at the transmitter to control 4 different IR channels. With the potentiometers, I could turn the flashes brighter or darker. This would be very cool to play with different flash compositions in a short time (instead of walking to each device and adjusting the power there). But for such a solution, a complete IR protocol would be necessary which again needs more complex electronics. I think this should be handled as a complete new project. Maybe I’ll find the time at any point in the future. But so far, I want to get some experience with the InfraFlash 2008 first.

Closing Words
I hope you enjoyed my explanations. If you need some additional information or have any suggestions, please leave a comment. It would also be nice if you’d leave a comment in case you copy my devices (what are your experiences, improvements etc.).

Example Shot
Here is an example shot where I used my brand new devices. It shows perfectly that I still have a lot to learn :-) But I like the insane touch that is caused by the overexposed part. Please ignore the mess on my desk in the second image.

Connectivity Problems are solving...

2008-11-30T20:42:00.002+01:00

Hello everybody! It took me a while until I had time to write this post. And unfortunately I still can't provide you any pictures (what a shame!). But I promise there will soon be pictures on this page. Because the connectivity problems have now been solved: By a do-it-yourself (DIY) Infrared remote flash system. I am working on the presentation of this thing for you (taking pictures, drawing circuit diagrams etc.) - you won't be disappointed. So hold on and come back.

Additional light

2008-11-03T16:53:00.003+01:00

Today, I bought a second flash device (SB-28) that I auctioned through Ricardo. I was very lucky to find a good offer. But the one who sold it to me is a very unlucky guy. A serious disease makes it impossible to him to continue photography. I wish him all the best at this point!! If there's any God, may he help him!

My better side already asked me: "Why did you buy this? You already have one..." - This is no bad question. But having two flash devices opens myself a whole new world of possibilities. Now I can for instance use one flash from one side and the other one from another side. By choosing appropriate flash power settings, I can for instance enhance the 3D-look of my objects this way. And there are many other options to use 2 flashes in parallel.

This is the point where I want to link you readers to my favorite site: Strobist. The owner of this site, David, wrote a whole photo-seminar named "Lighting 102". This is the place where I learned about 80% of my photographic skills. Thank you David!

You can also find other cool links on the right hand side. I will steadily update this list as I learn more about photography.

I will also provide you some photographs taken with 2 flashes in parallel, as soon as I'll have solved the connectivity problem... :-) So far, stay cool and sign in if you are following this blog. Would be nice if at least anybody would read all the stuff I am writing.

About me

2008-11-03T13:04:00.001+01:00

It's time to write about me: I am an ambitious shutterbug (hobby photographer). My skills are still under development. At the moment I have quite a big theoretical knowledge from many internet sites but so far I only had little time to earn experience.

Photography is for me a very interesting topic and a great hobby to - in addition to my job - use also the left side of my brain :-)

My biggest aim at the moment is to make photography self-paying, meaning to earn some money for new gear.

In addition to photography, I spend a lot of time with my girlfriend Fabienne. We also have a common blog.

My first blog entry

2008-10-31T20:06:00.002+01:00

Hello out there. What is this blog about? - It is about my hobby - photography. I will lead you through my experiences, will write about techniques and where I learned them. This should help beginners to find a way to get into photography. I do not want to re-invent the wheel, there are already many cool sites out there. Instead I will provide links and mainly concentrate to write about my own experiences that I encounter during practicing my hobby. Please enjoy!

If you ever have any questions or want me to take any photos for you, please don't hesitate to contact me under info@burrima.ch.

Best regards,
Martin