Boot Camp II, Part 1, Shoot 1

This afternoon I decided how I was going to do the headshot for Strobist Boot Camp II (this one) and had a practice run. My subject was my wife at the computer.

The first frame was shot to get the outdoors behind her correctly exposed. This was shot at ISO 200, 1/250 sec at f11 in manual.

Then I added my main light. I wanted a soft, diffuse source because I wanted a soft light on her face, but also I needed to bounce the light around a little. To avoid reflections from the windows or the white frames, I set up a small shoot-though umbrella about 2 foot off the ground to camera left, about 4 foot from my wife with an SB-900. The SB-900 had a diffuser fitted and was firing at 35mm zoom I think at ¼ power.

I wanted a second light to add something to the side of her face away from the umbrella and to suggest the presence of the computer screen so I put an SB-26 with a CTB gel on the desk under monitor. This was set to 1/64 power.

The only problem I had with this was that the aperture of f11 left the window frames in focus too much, and they’re not pretty. Opening the aperture up to reduce the depth of focus enough meant I need to shoot at over 1/250 which the SB-26 would not play at (not sure the Elinchrom Skyports will either…) so I’ll take the actual shots for this assignment later in the evening. Click Here to Read More..

Boot Camp Part II...stalled

Blogging for the boot Camp II carried the risk of crashing and burning, but right now I've not even got the gear up. The animal charity concerned is, bluntly, utterly disinterested it seems and so I am back to square one on finding a worthy cause.

I was thinking of having the subject person lit by one grid spotted strobe, light fall down the body, and then a line of animal cages stretching back, lit by 2-3 bare strobes from a distance, each spaces around 10 feet apart so I get around 30 feet of light background strechting out of focus.

But we're not going to be in that location so, if nothing comes up by tomorrow evening I'll focus (groan) on the picture alone and not a cause. Click Here to Read More..

Back in Boot Camp

We all get comfortable photographing our favourite things, and sometimes it does us good to Do Something Different. Not least, the Different usually means trying something New and therefore Learning something.

The latest excuse to be Different is here: Strobist Boot Camp II. The challenge revolves around producing a headshot of one subject and the photographer. Deadline is 23rd June. And by pure coincidence I’ve just got a roll of Ilford HP5 out to put into a Pentax Spotmatic. Shooting flash, off-camera on and on film. Just to make it more interesting….

The idea is to blog as I go and first things first means idea creation. I need an idea. Last weekend I was visiting a friend in Valencia. Standing in her exhibition I had one, in fact two moments where I just saw the picture.


So for this Boot Camp Assignment I need a plan, preferably not one involving plonking my wife in the garden and placing a few strobes around the place. David Hobby has made this assignment more interesting by suggesting that the subject be somebody in need of a photograph for their cv. I am thinking (and this is an early thought) about somebody also in need of publicity, but maybe a charity…

A charity for the homeless or maybe an animal charity…ideas are forming. Click Here to Read More..

Mounting M42 lenses on to a Nikon

After reading the article about second hand kit on this week’s Amateur Photographer, and since I am sitting on a pile of M42 lenses which are not often used now, I decided to buy an adapter to let me mount the M42 lenses on to my Nikon D300.

The M42 to Nikon adapter cost about £15 on ebay. I bought one made of black, anodized aluminium to reduce any internal reflections and it came with a small correction lens which is meant to correct the issue that bedevils mounting M42 lenses onto Nikon F mounts. (This issue is that the depth of the mount in M42 lenses is thinner than that for the Nikon F mount. Canon and other users are not affected by this apparently). Without the correction lens, the extra thickness of the Nikon F mount means that the M42 lens cannot focus to infinity, in essence there is a very small extension tube in place between the lens and the film / sensor. The adapter also came with a Nikon end cap which was a nice touch. However, the correction lens is not precisely machined and degrades the lenses optical performance. Since the main attraction of M42 lenses for DSLR users is the availability of prime lenses that perform well at a reduced price compared to today’s primes, using this correction lens is self defeating. On the M42 – Nikon adapter I bought, the correction lens can be removed by unscrewing it.



On the D300, and D200 / D700 / D3 and other Nikons you can tell the camera what the focal length and maximum aperture of any non-chipped (i.e. non D or G )lens is and then meter with it correctly.Since M42 lenses do not communicate with the camera, you can only use aperture priority and manual mode for metering. The auto focus confirm light works on the D300 but it is only able to ‘lock on’ at wider apertures. Given the decrease in focusing accuracy as the aperture decreases I focused at maximum aperture and then stopped down to the desired aperture. I also found that with the longer lensesand with the correction lens removed from the adapter, the focus point was slightly forward of the area I had focused on.

To see if the adapter will work in any of my lenses and produce useable results I decided to shoot a series of test frames. This is not exactly scientific but…

Nikon D300, Ebay M42 to Nikon adapter, and the following lenses
Super Takumar 35mm f3,5
Super Takumar 85mm f1,9
Super Takumar 135mm f3,5
Super Takumar 200mm f4
Hanimex 300mm f4



Everything after the 35mm frame WITH the correction lens was shot on a tripod using a remote. ISO varied but tried to keep the ISO down without reaching excessively slow shutter speeds. All images were shot in 14 bit raw, had the levels adjusted in Capture NX and sharpening was left at the camera default levels. Metering was done as the camera’s light meter suggested, i.e. if the meter said exposure was ‘on’, I pressed the shutter. Most pictures were taken using centre-weighted metering

So:
Super Takumar 35mm at f3.5 and correction lens (handheld)...


...and at f3,5 without the filter (but no focus to infinity hence the change of subject)...


...and at f8, no filter, a crop showing the centre of the image.


The Super Takumar 85mm at f1.9 and correction lens...


...at f8 and correction lens...


...and at f16 and correction lens.


The Takumar 135mm f3.5 probably did the best of the lot with the correction lens in place:

At f3.5...


f8...


and f22


The correction lens is a disaster on the 35mm producing soft edges like a 1970’s glamour shoot and not looking sharp in the centre. It was so bad I did not bother testing with the Takumar 28mm f3.5. It is also un-useable on the 85mm wide open but once down to f8 it is OK-ish. With emphasis on the ‘-ish’. All lenses look worse at their smallest aperture with a pale washed out spot appearing in the centre.

Without the correction lens in place, the focus point appears to be slightly forward of the point I actually focused on, this is especially noticeable with the 135mm and upwards.

With and without the correction lens, the accuracy of the metering decreases as the aperture decreases. By the time I got to the 200mm lens, the metering error was causing over exposure of several stops compared to what the meter said was 'on'.

Without the correction lens and the subsequent loss of ability to focus to infinity, the 35mm ceases to become useful as a ‘walk around lens’ and personally I think that without a tripod or suitable solid support and stationary subject, the depth of focus is too shallow at wider apertures to make quick manual focus possible. Although not tested, a session with the Takumar 50mm f1.4 and Super Takumar 55mm f1.8 the day before makes me think that as a close in portrait lens they would work, but again the depth of focus at wider apertures is insanely small.



The 135mm and 200mm are usable since the workable focus range goes to 10 feet or more. The 300mm is bad wide open and closed right down but I threw it for fun rather than real expectations although it is very good on my Spotmatic. After f4, the metering on the second set of photographs, without the correction lens, for the 300mm was so bad I did not bother processing them.

On the web, the images look better than they do on my screen.

This is the Super Takumar 200mm f4 at ISO 500,again, out of the camera other than some tweaks in levels and curves.



And this with some noise reduction/


And compare it to this, taken with a lens some 35 years more advanced, Sigma's 100-300mm f4 EX HSM, again with noise reduction.



The M42 to Nikon adapter is certainly worth looking at, but it depends what you're planning on using the lenses for and what you've got or can buy in the way of lenses. The focus andnd metering issues as aperture and focal length change mean that this is not a good solution for quickly changing situations since by the time you've chimped to check the histogram, for example, the shot may have been lost. http://www.srb-griturn.com/ make adapters and they might provide a better correction lens so that might be worth a look!
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G20 in London

April the first this year was ‘Financial Fools’ day. I was going to be limited in the amount I could shoot because I work there but the office is located close to several potential points including the Climate Camp and it looked as if there would be plenty of opportunity to photograph two opposing worlds as they met.



Two considerations were uppermost when preparing for this. First of all I thought about what the likely conditions would be and what type of pictures I would want. Working from this I elected to take the 70-200mm f2.8 and the 24-70mm f2.8 and an SB-26 strobe. This should let me work at longer range and take candid pictures and then move in closer if the atmosphere was friendly. Second was safety. I’d rather not have to ditch a D300 and lenses if it turned nasty so everything went in the day sack rather than the more organised but more cumbersome shoulder bag and everything was packed in its own protective bag to offer some padding if it got ‘interesting’.

On the way in it was obvious that there was a huge photographic presence, so much so that my worries about potential problems with the Police were banished. At Bank at 8.30 I think there were more photographers / film crews than commuters and outside Liverpool St station a row of police vans offered a good opportunity for some close-ups.

At 12.30 I went down to the Climate Exchange in Bishopsgate where again there were more people with cameras than anybody else, Police included. I felt I had to be careful here because if, if, the Police decided to use their kettle tactic here I had no wish to be stuck in it. When the Climate Camp did arrive, and bearing the above in mind, it proved more interesting to watch the watchers, the office workers peering from the windows above filled what were normally boring glass panels whilst the restaurateur’s face watching his source of trade dry up was, literally, a picture. Most of the pictures were taken with the 70-700 which offered a very shallow depth of focus and the stand –off range. Subjects such as lines of police motorcycles, yellow and blue patterned jackets and the thousands of people all offered rich pickings. Just keep looking over your shoulder and hoping that the word ‘kettle’ remains far away.



In the evening it was more ‘interesting’. Events outside Bank having turned sour I went back to the Climate Camp where a row of riot police and a masked ballet dancer made a good picture.



For most of the time I was using aperture priority to let me select an aperture that separated my subject from the crowds. However the crowds of commuters plus protesters meant I was getting jostled more and the longer 70-200mm getting knocked too much so I went back to the 24-70mm. The lens cap stayed off and the camera was always on until I got into the station, just in case am opportunity presented itself. Nothing did, but I did learn that it is possible to knock the WB button and change your white balance by accident when in crowds. Good thing I was shooting raw.
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Budget cuts!

I was hoping that in a few weeks I could write about photographing the construction and then opening of on of the gardens at the RHS Flower Show at Chelsea but sadly this is not to be. I had offered to take some photographs of the garden sponsored by my employers and during the discussions this had evolved into a three stage process.

The first part would be a series of standard photographs documenting the construction of the garden. I envisaged these as being shot in 2 or 3 half day sessions and would have included a range of photographs showing details and the wider context.

The next part was to take a much larger series of pictures to be used in a time lapse sequence. The rough plan was to shoot about 3 hours on two occassions at a rate of 1 frame every 30 seconds. I'd put the D300 on the tripod, set it up at the appropriate shooting rate and then get of the gardener's way.

Finally I would provide coverage of the opening day/evening's events in 'our' garden.

However, with eight weeks to go there was little sign of a pass to gain acess to the site or the opening evening and with six weeks to go I was asked if I could do the time lapse construction myself.

"Maybe I can, but the cost goes up."

With four weeks to go and still no access passes I chased this up only to be told that there seemed to be confusion over the pricing, a line who subtext seemed to be: We want the same for a lot less. Within an hour this had become: We're not doing the time lapse photography and a few moments later there was no photography altogether. As budgets are tightened somethings get cut and in this case it seems that the photography is going in that list.

But, through generally sending the link to my photographs of the G20 protests to friends, a friend of a friend needs some pictures and so do her friends which, if this comes off, will more than compensate for the loss of around 2 days photography. Instead I need to improve the website, maybe buy a few light diffusers and contact the friends.

Now all I need is better weather for the tuition I am offering. Click Here to Read More..

Getting ready to be taxed.

Well the end of the tax year is nearly here and that means we're going to suffer a deluge of reminders to pay our tax by post or by a website that usually crashes or suffers a security breach. As this is my first year as a sole trader I am trying not to make a complete pigs ear of it and have spent the evening getting ready. Yes, I know there are far better ways of spending a Friday night.
The big error was being nice to myself. What I had done was:

1) Define a point in November as the start date but only sort out a bank account afterwards. This account went live on 18 December. In the meantime, I paid for the expenses of a series of shoots that I did from my own pocket, and then partly reimbursed myself when one of the payments came through.

2) In the meantime I'd run a spreadsheet which for each month showed expenditure, income and net position as three seperate columns. Like this:

From Matthew Hunt Photography

The problem is that of course the bank account only starts some 6 weeks afterwards AND I had been slow in logging some items. Because of this I...

3) Have spent three hours with the spreadsheet, receipts, the chequebook to the photography acount and the bank statement reconciling what has been paid for, when and under what cheque number.

The solution has been to add a fourth column so that I now have:

Income, Expenditure, Company position, Bank account, Comments


I also have a correction line dated today in which 5 items which charged in error to my personal account are allowed for. The items show up in chronological order in the spreadsheet and have an impact on the company position column BUT not in the bank account since they did not go through the correct account. Instead, in the bank account column is an entry saying refer to Note 1. Today I have an entry for:

£0.00 Income £0.00 Expenditure £XX Company position £163.13 charged against the bank account and then a comment (Note 1) stating that cheque X relates to the items marked 'refer to note 1'. Then it balances out and most importantly it is transparent. And in future I remember to use the correct account.

When I've tidied everything away again I'll get onto writing about photographing the G20 Climate Camp Click Here to Read More..