A new collection of images from the past year. Full size panoramas will be available for order shortly.
Jan 312012
Jan 242012
Whether it’s traveling for leisure or taking part in a photo expedition or workshop, packing the appropriate gear is always going to be a give and take. In a perfect world, every lens combination for every possible scenario, numerous camera bodies and every accessory to make sure you get the right support and lighting would be awesome. In reality, you’d either require a bag so enormous it would hinder your ability to move around and you better be prepared for a non-stop workout.
Packing the right gear should focus on two things which will retain your sanity, the health of your back and most importantly, give you the best cross section of equipment to capture the most likely of scenarios you might run into. Here’s some tips on critical, recommended accessories and finally, your actual gear. Note that I’m going to skip the fundamentals of batteries, chargers and the bag is truly a personal choice.
The Critical
No it’s not camera equipment just yet. Here, we focus on the items which will make the experience easier for you.
- Lens pen or wipes – critical for any season or condition you might shoot in as dust or debris buildup on glass elements can ruin pictures and result in hours of post processing work due to artifacts and dust spots. I recommend the LensPen branded screen & glass element cleaner along with a microfiber cloth gives enough cleaning flexibility to deal with anything that might find its way onto your lenses. Another side bonus – keep your LCD screens and viewfinders free of smudges and face oil!
- Sensor cleaner – for those shooting with interchangeable lens cameras (SLRs, mirrorless), this is essential kit when traveling. Much like dust on your lenses, dust on your sensor can ruin an image and might be harder to correct after the fact. A sensor cleaning kit is a god send whether it be in hot & humid or cold & dry climates.
- Silica Gel – glasses and lenses fogging up due to the extreme changes in temperature and humidity? Prevent mold issues and minimize fogging with silica gel packs in your bags to better equalize the humidity you expose your gear to. Light to carry and invaluable protection for your gear.
The Recommended
- A sturdy tripod or camera support system – I use carbon fiber tripods for their light weight, holding strength, weather resistance and portability. Joby flexible tripods are another great travel option for something compact but still situationaly flexible to meet various shooting conditions you might run into. A light weight travel support pays dividends the longer your shooting day goes. Whether it’s climbing ruins or running around the Canadian Rockies, light weight support systems have to first and foremost deliver stability and safety for your precious equipment. Saving the stress on your back is a nice bonus that doesn’t seem to be a priority until you find yourself asking for a bed and pillow halfway through the day. Invest in quality support products and your pictures and body will thank you. Side Note – I use Induro 8X Carbon Tripods for their lightweight, strength and most importantly resistance to hot and cold environments. Nothing is worse than grabbing your tripod and burning or freezing your hand as the metal has picked up the surround temperature.
- A strong and comfortable camera strap – Before reading any further; throw out the strap that came with your camera!! Nothing causes more neck strain and tires you out faster than having a camera hanging from your neck all day with little padding and support. Check out some camera alternatives such as camera slings which go over your shoulder and fully support the weight of the camera. At the very least, Tamrac offers neoprene padded and stretchy conventional camera straps which will help better balance the load on your neck compared to the cloth straps included with many SLRs.
My current camera harnesses and tripod
The Gear
- Bring a second camera (body) – whether it’s a 2nd SLR body or a high quality compact (I use the Panasonic LX-5), a second body allows you great flexibility to have a telephoto like the 70-200 on my SLR while I cover wide angle and street shots with my compact which is more discreet. A second body also serves as a backup should the unthinkable happen and your primary goes down (a mountain, trail, into the ocean) or gets stolen.
- Lenses – I tried to cover the entire range of lenses I have at my disposal once. I regretted it. Or, more appropriately my back regretted it. On a trip to Hong Kong a few years ago, I packed a 10-22, 24, 60 macro, 17-55, 50, 70-200 & 400. My backpack weighed almost as much as my check-in luggage once I had my camera bodies and other gear in there. In the end, when I reviewed over 3000 shots taken during the trip, most images landed (and by most, 96%) in the 17-200 range. I could have cut out almost 5lbs from my bag and still walked away with the same photos. 17-200 covers almost every scenario short of a full blown safari. Even my specialist 50mm F1.4 and 24mm F1.4 lenses didn’t deliver anything that the 17-55/70-200 wouldn’t have been able to. These days, it’s the 17-55 and 70-200 that travel the world with me, while photo workshops have these two with me and the rest in the vehicle until I require them for a specific shot/teach out.
What are your favourite items to bring when you’re working out of your bag? Sound off on my facebook page and let me know as I would love to hear your feedback. Happy shooting!
Hey gang – clearing out some equipment as we make room for some coming additions. Everything is in excellent condition, fully functional and available for viewing. For more information or to arrange a viewing, feel free to contact me.
Lowepro Toploader Pro All Weather – Designed for the pro photographer inside and out, our Toploader Pro AW Series is made for action. The Toploader Pro AW 75 is an ideal fit for a pro DSLR with grip and 70-200mm lens attached. It features a contoured, asymmetrical shape that follows the lines of a camera for a snug protective fit. A side opening with easy-grip access lets you capture the shot in a flash. During inclement weather, you can gain complete access to the main compartment while protecting your gear, thanks to our built-in 360° All Weather AW Cover™. Other hardworking features include: large, U-shaped zipper pulls that are easy to grasp even in wet and cold conditions; 3-point harness system for a custom, comfortable fit; top pocket with space for sunglasses and personal gear; adjustable divider system to secure grip, plus allow storage of smaller items in main compartment. Use with optional Topload Chest Harness; sold separately. Toploader Pro 75 AW may be used with a belt or belt system, such as our Street and Field™ modular carrying system.
Asking $50
Professional Canon EOS-7D Battery Grip with AA battery tray – offers vertical shutter/exposure and autofocus controls. Excellent for extending battery capacity and body stability. Asking $50
Velbon Sherpa 435 Travel Tripod with Case - Strong and versatile tripods for both professionals and advanced amateurs. Velbon SHERPA tripods are equipped with the 4-way panhead PHD-41Q with Quick-release platform system that incorporates some clever features such as a one-touch handle that allows locking of both pan and tilt movements with one twist. The handle is mounted on the left which allows the user to keep their right hand free to operate the camera. Asking $120
Jan 192012
After numerous inquiries regarding the last article post, here’s the follow up with some tips to processing a RAW file and helping get the most detail from it.
Our beginning image is the Prince of Wales Hotel, Waterton National Park Alberta. More pictures from this set can be found here. This is a postcard style image showcasing the landscape of Waterton and one of the iconic structures most seen in vistas and photographs of the region – the Prince of Wales hotel. The original image below has good tonal range, excellent detail in both highlight (sky) and shadow (hills and hotel). With this image, we want to maximize the impact of the scenery by highlighting the hotel and framing it in such a way that it showcases brilliantly in the surrounding environment.
Click on the images to expand and fill your screen.
Step 1 – Our starting image; Canon EOS 7D / 17-55mm @ 35mm / ISO100 / F9.0
Step 2 – Choose the white balance which appropriately reflects the vision we have for the image. You can use different white balance presents to better tune warm and cold feelings in the image then refine it by using the custom slider available in Lightroom. For this particular image, the light falling onto the hotel was the most welcoming with the “shade” setting. It eliminates the blue hue of the original image making the entire frame look warmer and more inviting instead of cool. We can see that the auto expsoure settings of Lightroom have also darkened the overall image due to the program choosing to recover detail in the sky. This is ok as we will balance the light in the next step.
Step 3 – We balance the light in the image during this step. Playing around with the Recovery slider, we find the best balance of retaining detail in the white clouds without going too far and creating artifacts in the brighter portions of the image. Fill Light is used to bring detail back to the shoreline and hill sides. This helps to expose detail which was previously lost in the shadow of the mountains. Balancing the sky and foreground like this gives us a very even tonal range which doesn’t leave things too bright or too dark maximizing the depth of our image.
Step 4 – The focus of this step is to bring back the contrast and black levels to give the image depth and scale. The human eye sees contrast most strongly as objects are closer and less so when objects are further away. We bright the Blacks slider higher until we have a comfortable starting point that brings good shadow depth to the recovered areas of the hill directly below the hotel. Moving onto the contrast slider, we edge it up until there is further definition in the mountains behind as well as small details such as the overall crispness of the near treeline and hotel windows.
Step 5 - Our final step takes us into minute corrections to fix the lens abberations using Lightroom’s Lens Corrections module, fixing horizon lines ever so slightly to correct uneven landscapes and cropping it to a more panoramic format. All the changes we’ve made are small in scope compared to what is available for RAW tweaking in Lightroom, for more extreme examples, check out my previous post. For more photography & processing tips, check out the previous posts in this series available here.
If you have any questions about this tutorial, feel free to contact me and if you haven’t had a chance yet, check out my Facebook Page and hit the “Like” button to help support this site.
Final Image Comparison
Jan 132012
Most cameras today have the option of shooting pictures in RAW format. RAW format is equivalent to a digital negative, a direct copy of the image captured at the given moment. Compare this to the JPEG where the camera’s internal processor tweaks and renders the image for you and saving the doctored file to your memory card. JPEG is excellent for its small space requirements, decent picture quality and ready to share nature for social networks and e-mails. For enthusiasts looking to preserve the most image quality and have the most flexibility to tweak their image, RAW is the best format. As a digital negative, RAW allows you endless tweaking, exceptional latitude in pushing the image to its limits and best of all, this is all accomplished in a non-destructive manner.
Here’s my primary reasons for shooting RAW;
- Non-Destructive Editing – Photographer has complete control over the “development” of the image much like the film days. This allows endless processing, tweaking and changes all without affecting your ability to return the image to the original. All without any quality penalties, loss of the original image and most importantly, the ability to re-edit with different skill sets down the road should you choose to revisit the images. When you make adjustments to a RAW file, you’re not actually doing anything to the original data. What you’re doing is creating a set of instructions for how the JPEG or TIFF (another file format) version should be saved. You can always reset your adjustments, and start over again. JPEG files lose quality every time you open them, make adjustments, and save again. True story. It’s what is known as a “lossy” file format. So if you’re making edits to JPEGs you always have to be duplicating the image and saving out a new version if you don’t want to lose file quality.
- Flexible Image Parameters – since the camera is not making predetermined processing selections for you, everything from white balance, contrast, saturation and image noise are all at your disposal for tweaking and finding the balance which best reflects the image in your mind. This extensive flexibility gives you the highest level of image quality available. With the image below, RAW has allowed me to retain details in the dark forested areas in the bottom of the frame and bring them back. The RAW data has also nicely preserved the detail of the downtown buildings which still show excellent levels of sharpness when they are lightened. These changes would be far more limited had I been working with JPEGs instead.
- Greater levels of brightness and shadow are recorded – Levels of brightness are the number of steps from black to white in an image. The more you have, the smoother the transitions of tones. JPEG records 256 levels of brightness, and RAW records between 4,096 to 16,384 levels! This is described with the term “bit”. JPEG captures in 8bit, and RAW is either 12bit or 14bit. Those additional steps of brightness let you make more adjustments (expoosure, blacks, fill light, recovery, contrast, brightness) to your image without a significant reduction of quality, because there’s more levels to work with! It’s also easier to avoid or correct posterization in your images when you shoot in RAW. Posterization is the banding that you often see in bright skies. The images below highlight the ability of the RAW file to retain details in both the dark and light areas of the image which can be recovered and tweaked to produce the final vivid image.
Example 1 - Recovered detail in foreground forest, restored detail in sky, retained sharpness and resolution in downtown.
Example 2 - Recovered detail in clouds, balanced exposure for foreground and background details, corrected color cast for foreground.
RAW files have been my main format for a number of years. The flexibility of the image, scalability of processing (based on your growing skill and return visits to old images) and the ability to start from ground zero without losing the original digital negative far outweigh the main benefit of JPEG which is small file size. At the end of the day, I might pack an extra memory card or two, but that’s a small price to pay for the ability to maximize my captures especially if they happen to be once-in-a-lifetime opportunities. Besides, at less than $50 for 16 or 32GB SD Cards, memory is cheap and isn’t really an excuse not to archive your images in the best possible way 
fym photo recommends Adobe Lightroom for your RAW processing and camera workflow needs.
