The Photodontist

Smugmug slideshow

2011-02-17T16:51:00.000-08:00

Smugmug show default

smugmug without thumbs and clickability

Flickr Slideshow

2011-02-17T16:50:00.001-08:00

The Android Phone Hit List

2010-06-20T08:53:00.000-07:00

Here's what I would put on anyone's Android phone. To get them, click on Market, then search for them. (*some cost a few bucks, but worth it)

ABSOLUTE MUST HAVES:

Pandora Radio - I hook my car up to my phone, and stream music using this. It's like satellite radio, only with higher quality and no monthly bill.

Astro File Manager - file explorer. A must have if you want to install Android apk's from outside the Android market.

BlueTooth OnOff by Curvefish - great widget to toggle your bluetooth on and off to save battery

Wifi OnOff by Curvefish - great widget to toggle your wifi on and off to save battery

Advanced Task Killer - kills programs to free up phone memory. Must have.

SilentMode OnOff by Curvefish - great widget to put your phone on vibrate, silent, or ring (just tap and toggle)

FOR ORGANIZED TYPE PEOPLE:

SSI gTasks ToDo - if you use the Google To Do List, this gets you to it a bit faster

Pure Calendar* - this widget lays the calendar AND to do list on the home screen of your phone. You can make it any size you want. (I use 4x3) Your week at a glance. Works w/ many different calendars including gCalendar and exchange.

SHOW OFF STUFF:

Star Chase free Live - this is a Live Wallpaper chasing space ships from Star Wars and Star Trek. Live wallpapers slow down most phones

Wave Live Wallpaper

Google Earth - just plain fun to spin the world around. Requires Android 2.1

Google Sky Map - cool showoff app

JustPictures* - if you keep an online album on Smugmug, flickr, picasafacebook, photobucket, a quicker way to see them. There is a free version with ads.

GOING OUT ON THE TOWN:

BuzzOff - if you want your phone to be on vibrate for x hours, then return to ringing mode. Good for church, movies, etcs.

Tip Calculator by Tradefields - there a million of these. Helps you add tax and tip at a restaurant. This one won't split the tab, others do.

Barcode scanner - if you want to read those 2D barcodes with your phone. Otherwise, skip to ShopSaavy

ShopSaavy - scan barcodes at the store, compare prices local and online. I almost feel a little guilty every time I use it.

Urbanspoon - the eating out random slot machine. Made popular on iphone

Where - things to do, places to eat, and cheapest nearby gas

Yelp - restaurant reviews. Some controversy that the reviews are rigged, though.

Mileage - if you're anal about your MPG

Shazam - what's that song playing on the radio? Run Shazam, and it will tell you.

EVERYTHING ELSE:

xScope Browser lite - if you like tabs on your web browser. Otherwise, stick to the stock web browser. The free version adds features I never use.

Listen - if you do podcasts. It's clunky, but it's less clunky than others I've tried

Swype - a decent keyboard replacement, even if you don't end up using the "type by swipe" method. Once you get used to it, you'll never hunt and peck again. It's in beta, and it's a bit of a pain to install.

NubiNews Reader - If you don't already Google reader, this aggregates news headlines over several newspaper sites

My Tracks - if you want to trace your jogging, biking, hiking, sailing trips

EasyTether* - allows you to tether your phone's internet with your laptop via USB cable. ($10) PDAnet is more popular, allows bluetooth tether, but costs $30.

Cadrebible - my favorite offline bible. The reader is free, a few bible translations are free, also. Most of the translations I like cost a few bucks. Installing the bibles is a pain, but it's better Olivetree, which rocks on iPhone and sux on Android.

TV.com - full episodes of CBS shows (Thanks, Vic)

Google Voice - if you have a Google voice account (you can buy invites on ebay), lets you play your voice mails, send free texts. (does require a second phone number). If you have a "fave 5" free calling list, you can combine this with FlexDialer to have unlimited free outgoing calls. (it's clunky, but I'm cheap that way)

Gesture Search - if you had a palm pilot, you'll like this. Write one letter at a time, it starts searching your phone for contacts. You can then call, txt, or email them.

Bible - all bible translations for free, but you have to be internet connected.

Anypost - if you do ping.fm, a must have. If you don't know what ping.fm is, you don't need it.

USA Today, Orange County Register, LA Times - all these newspaper apps run stories much faster than visiting the websites

Epocrates - if you need to look up drugs, or see if they interact

Flex Dialer Pro - only if you use Google voice for free outgoing calls

Droidlight LED Flashlight - self explanatory

Amazon.com - for buying stuff on...

Recommendation Revoked:

Launcher Pro - must have; adds a shortcut bar on the bottom, as well as multiple screens. On the newest version (not sure if it's hit the Market yet), if you go into advanced settings, you can speed up the animations and make your phone seem even faster. UPDATE: subsequent builds have slowed my phone to a halt. Too bad, I really liked it.

Fancy Widget - a nice looking clock. UPDATE: also cripples your phone speed.

Where to find more:
http://www.droidapps.org/
Their RSS feed:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/DroidApps

My Canon 7D gets pregnant

2009-11-21T09:56:00.000-08:00

Here's my latest fusion project, a maternity shoot for my friends, Melissa and Randy. I'm happy to report that I still know how to make a grown man cry.

Watch the video in HD (smugmug, youtube) or check out the stills on Smugmug.

The video was shot in their (very echo-y) living room. Light was reflected from nearby windows, mostly. Shooting video is very exciting, but I'm a still photographer at heart.

The photographs were shot in their balcony. I used gelled flashes and custom white balances to force the sky more magenta and blue. Lighting was with umbrellas and 550EX flashes. I'm happy with a few of the shots, but as always, I can think of a couple of ways to do it even better next time I get the chance.

Ten Dollar Rembrandt Lighting

2009-11-10T14:56:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking a lot about a flash-free (and therefore fuss-free) portrait setup for my dental office. I'd like to have easy, quality patient portraits for our charts, as well as before and afters. So the shot you see to the right was taken with no flash, and no lights other than our overhead fluorescent tubes.

Remember the four points of light that every portrait should try to address:

Main Light - Usually lights up one side of the face. The main light is provided by the overhead ceiling lights to the left. Note that the light is high up and to the side, like Rembrandt did it (more on that later). As you can see by my portrait on the right, this is short side lighting--the broad side which shows the ear is in the shadow. Short side lighting is generally more flattering for most face shapes. If you have a very thin/long face, you can turn the nose into the main light for broad sided lighting, which will round out their face.

I also turned my chest towards the light to make it look larger. Generally speaking, females should have their shoulders turned away from the main light, to make their bodies look slimmer. (I don't care if they weigh 70 or 270 pounds, they all appreciate it)

We also got main light in a semi-Rembrandt, closed loop pattern. The nose shadow merges into the rest of the face shadow, hence the term closed loop. My (camera) right cheek bone is lit up, the rest of the right side is in shadow. If my glasses were off, I'd probably have the right eye lit, also. Rembrandt is generally a very kind pattern to people with round or chubby faces.

Fill light - to illuminate the shadows, reduce the contrast and soften the skin. The strobist blog (admittedly first real source of lighting education) talks about shooting your portraits in a corner because the side wall acts as a reflector. My wall isn't white, so I put a white foam core board there instead. A soft white reflector easily takes care of your fill light. If you want stronger, use a silver car windshield reflector or a mirror.

Rim light - to define the edges of your subject and separate them from the background. This is important for creating a sense of depth and definition in your portrait. I was not able to rim light this portrait with just that light. (though when I figure out how, I'll update this post). Because of that, my hair sort of disappears into the background. Here's three tricks to create more separation if you don't have a dedicated rim light:
1. Use a longer lens (the 105mm macro I use for most dental shots) to create more background separation.
2. Use a larger aperture for shorter depth of field
3. Use a background color that contrasts a lot with your subject. (without being harsh on the eyes or drawing attention)
4. Use a gradient on your background light. If you fade the light in a different direction from the main light, your subject will "pop" out because the shadows will look like they are going the wrong way.

Background light - lights up the background. Because I'm relatively close to the background, the main light provides the background light also.

Here's another shot of the setup from the side view:

One more thing: I shoot all my shots in RAW, because it allows for after-the-fact color balancing, and better correction if I mess up. One more gadget (which I'll be discussing in more detail soon) is my Color Checker Passport. Besides giving me white balance, the software tweaks the RAW converter to give me more accurate color. I'll be talking a lot more about color accuracy in future posts. Stay tuned.

The pros to this setup:

easy setup and breakdown
low cost
low fuss - your camera will generally get the exposure right automatically

The drawbacks to this setup:

not a lot of light. If you look really close, that's an f/2.8 aperture. Not a lot of depth of field, and I'm already using ISO 800. For my intended purposes (web and electronic dental charts) that's not a problem. You have to make sure you lock focus on the eyes, then recompose. If you want depth of field, get your lights out, or find an actual window.
only one side - because I can't move the light (it's built into the ceiling), you've got to hope their good side is facing you. If you turn the person the other way, you'll broad light them. Fortunately for me, there is a mirror image space on the other side of the office.
No rim light - I'm trying to work out some ideas on this. Feel free to leave any suggestions in the comments.
No hair light - Also trying to work on this. Feel free to leave any suggestions in the comments.

Thanks to Crystal, my assistant, for shooting these for me.

Canon G11: The Professional's Small Camera

2009-10-18T01:28:00.000-07:00

Modern infantry soldiers always have two firearms: a high powered automatic rifle, and a small semi-automatic pistol to use in a pinch. Most photographers I know own a big DSLR and a smaller compact camera, which often serves as the spouse's or kid's camera. The smaller camera is often tossed aside for the DSLR whenever there's an important shot. After all, no little camera that's easy-to-use can do serious photography, right? Wrong! The G11 is arguably the best second option any photographer could have. Heck, it's probably good enough to be your primary camera on most days. Kirk Tuck, author of Minimalist Lighting, has posted a review of the Canon G11 here. He's minimized his lighting, and he's minimizing his cameras, too.

I took the photo below with my G10 at full automatic mode. Yup...green square. All I did was hold out my arm, point, and shoot.

All you EXIF peepers will say, "hey, no fair, you used an external flash!" My reply would be, "That's exactly what makes this camera so cool--you have the option to use external flash, studio flash, or built in flash." I screw on the flash, point it straight up at the ceiling, and pull out that little clear diffuser thing for a little forward fill. The rest is just point and shoot. (though to be honest, this camera isn't fast enough to shoot kids reliably)

But what about the built in flash? It's probably one of the strongest built-in flashes I've seen in a "small" camera, and I think it does just fine:

That's my wife and I at the Marriott in Maui staring out over the edge of the infinity pool. The sun was directly in front of us. That's about as tough as it gets for fill flash, and it gave us the perfect shot. And this is taken 15 feet away. At shorter distances, it's more than enough power.

What's more, if you hook it up with a cheap radio triggers and a light stand, you can take that your battery powered flash and make the flash directional. You'll get much greater definition and depth. Here's some outdoor Strobist-style action near the Ihilani on Oahu:

The G10/11's standard Canon hotshoe, combined with a true manual exposure mode, means you can add ANY kind of off-camera lighting to it, from a humble AA speedlight to a $20,000 bank of studio lights. And at ISO 100 and f/5.6 or f/8, this camera will run with the big boys, no problem. You can even shoot in RAW and set custom white balances, just like in your "real" studio camera. All you need is a cheap set of monolights, and it's a legitimate studio portrait camera. Kirk Tuck writes:

"In a studio with a big Octabank plugged into a Profoto air monolight I can use the G11 to make portraits that are wonderful in their own right. If you've been in this business for a while the greater depth of field would give the images away as being the progeny of a small format camera but you wouldn't know it based on quality and color. I'll put it up against a string of Nikons or Olympus cameras I've owned or currently owned. In fact, the instant Live View (no waiting for flopping mirrors) makes it an even more valuable studio portrait camera."

You do need high powered lights (meaning AC powered) to use the G10 as an indoor portrait camera because your little AA-powered speedlights provide just enough lighting power for ISO 400 or 800. That brings me to the only significant beef I had with the G10: the image noise. ISO 80 and 100 are simply gorgeous, ISO 200 is pretty good, but it's just barely presentable at ISO 400, and gets rapidly worse from there. I had to blast out all the detail out of this image below to get rid of the image noise. But even then, it's still above the level that most little cameras achieve.

With the lower image noise, I wouldn't cringe whenever I take the camera into dimly lit places. I've enjoyed my G10 for a good 6 months now, and I'm overjoyed that Canon has lowered the megapixel count to reduce the image noise. I've seen some very good sample shots from the G11 at ISO 800 and 1600. I think that the new G11 is overkill for casual photographers, but for an experienced shooter, the old-school analog ISO and exposure dials make it a retro-joy to use. The new articulated screen (flips out like a camcorder) and the 1/2000 sec flash sync (true sync, not power-sucking pulsed or fp) should open up some new possibilities. You'll be able to shoot ground level and overhead shots better than before. And the higher sync speeds should give your outdoor flash (think portraits) a whole new level of midday power.

The G10 and G11 aren't for anything that moves fast: sports, action, small kids, or wedding receptions. The G10/G11 sensor is twice the size of most small cameras, but still half the size of your cropped frame DSLR Rebel or 50D. That means shorter lenses and longer depth of field. Great for landscape and indoor portraits, but it does mean a bit more footwork to throw the background out of focus. You don't have all the comforts of your high-performance SLR. Like the old-fashioned rangefinder cameras that inspired it, the G10 and upcoming G11 are for those times when you're walking around and have time to tweak things and get them just the way you like them.

It's a thinking person's tool, and one of the best spares you could possibly put in your camera bag. If you're in the market for a serious small camera, (and don't need HD video) don't hesitate to put the G11 on the top of your list. The G10 is going on clearance everywhere right now, (if you can call 10% off a clearance) but the G11 will be worth the price difference. That said, you'll probably find some great bargains on used G10's.

Okay, there's one major feature I still wanted for the G11: HD video. I'm really interested in adding videography to my palette, and that widescreen, HD look is where video is going. We are running out of room for more megapixels, so video capability is where the advancements are happening. While all their competitors added 1280x720p video, G11 is still rolling at the same weak 640x480 resolution as the G10, as well as any dinky $30 webcam from Walmart. Canon, if you're listening, man up and get 720p video before Panasonic and Olympus lap you and put 1080 video on their cameras. Why tease us with a flip out screen and not upgrade the video capability? If HD video is important, you may want to wait until Canon can put 720p into their G series, or check out Panasonic's excellent LX3. But you're serious about your still images, this is the small camera you have been waiting for.

This post originally published at saddlebackpics.com

Bruxzir vs Nothing: Low Clearance, Tooth colored Crown

2009-10-15T18:52:00.000-07:00

Here's a situation where we just did not have a lot of room to work with. The patient was already out a root canal fee for this tooth, and in no mood to do surgical crown lengthening. So I did about 1 mm of occlusal reduction, (1 mm off the top to all you non-dentists) which gave me just enough room for a Zirconia crown.

The previous two cases I posted were zirconia vs. PFM. In this case, the only alternative is gold. A full gold crown would have the advantage of gentler wear on the opposing teeth. How much gentler remains to be determined...definitive wear ratings for these zirconia crowns are not yet available. Given that equally hard (but not as tough) eMax crowns are gentle on opposing teeth, I'm hoping that the same will hold true for zirconia. But the jury is still out.

Gold crowns, when made with accurate impressions by a good lab, is the best sealing crown technology. It was yesterday, today, but possibly not tomorrow: CAD/CAM crown machines are already getting very close to gold's precision fit. Last I checked, it's a statistical dead heat.

What makes zirconia stronger than most ceramics, however, isn't the sheer hardness; it's the very slight elasticity which makes it tough in a leathery sort of way. Gold also will bend before it will break, though more so. What both these materials have in common is that they are, for practical intents and purposes, unbreakable at 1mm thickness. That makes them appropriate for situations like this, where these is little or no room.

But between a tooth that gives you bling, and one that looks white, which would you pick?

Bruxzir vs PFM Round 2: Full Zirconia vs Metal Ceramic

2009-10-15T14:47:00.000-07:00

As promised in the last comparison piece, we are posting a second case of the porcelain fused to metal crown (PFM) versus the new kid of the block, zirconia. Glidewell Labs markets them under the brand name Bruxzir, and rumor has it that Ivoclar is working on the same thing.

Below are some photos of the case:

If you look closely, you'll see a thin grey line on the PFM pictures...that's the metal lining underneath the porcelain. Any all-ceramic crown, including this zirconia one, will have no metal, and thus, no line. And no surprise, he chose the all-ceramic zirconia crown over the PFM. He will NEVER have to worry about a gray line showing at the seams, even if his gums recede over the years. When it comes to dental ceramics, I sometimes think the color could be better, but the patient is always right. This case did not get as nice of a color match as the prior one, but it was still satisfactory for the patient. To me, this is one of those rare instances where I wish it were just a smidgen more yellow on the top, though it looks really nice from the side.

This is NOT a problem unique to zirconia crowns, (I've seen much worse looking PFMs) but the opaque white nature of the zirconia material makes it easier for labs to overshoot on the whiteness at the top of the crown. You can miss the color mark with ANY material; the important thing is to get the prescription right, and deal with a lab that does the same. For what it's worth, I've had extremely good fit with Glidewell's CAD/CAM crowns. The all-ceramic margins have fit better than most PFM crowns, and a couple were nearly as good as gold crowns.

I've got one more full-contour zirconia case to share, and this one where you truly had to do it. Stay tuned.

Canon 7D: Editing H.264 Video on a PC for under $100

2009-10-08T00:20:00.000-07:00

You can playback and edit the monstrous 1080P video from a Canon 7D or 5D Mark II with a "recent and decent" PC and $100 of editing software. You don't need a $3000 Mac Pro with Final Cut Pro installed. Here's what I've discovered.

Playback: the video bitrate on the video is challenging, because you're basically pushing as much highly compressed video as a full quality blu-ray disc. The video is compressed with the H.264 codec, which preserves quality in a small size, but is a beast (read: computationally intensive) to play back smoothly. All but the most powerful CPU's can't handle it...they're general purpose chips. You need a more specialized combination of tools:

Windows Vista or Windows 7 - I know most love good old Windows XP, but the other two ingredients won't work without one of Microsoft's new operating systems.
Cyberlink PowerDVD Ultra (the more expensive, blu-ray compatible version) - it supports both ATI and NVidia's graphics cards. I've tried VLC player, but as of 1.02 it didn't work
A recent ATI or NVidia graphics card - I know that ATI's HD 3000 and HD 4000 series of cards have optimized H.264 decoder baked into the chips and the drivers. You don't need the $400 graphics card; even our $50 bargain 3450 and 4350 cards handle playback just fine.

When you have all three ingredients, the video files from the Canon 7D play back smoothly and beautifully, even with a bargain basement Pentium Dual Core chip. I've never seen video like this from anything short of a production level video camera. (you know, the big heavy ones that go over the shoulder).

Once you have all that, you're a $100 drive away from a blu-ray playing PC.

You may also need Quicktime Alternative. Apple allows Windows users to playback and edit Quicktime files if you install the bloated Quicktime player, along with some unwanted extras. Quicktime Alternative, which you can download here, gives you the minimum stuff you need to play Quicktime files, with all of Apples bloatware and nagware attached. (do you really want another useless little memory wasting applet in your system tray?) If you are a closet Mac lover and want some more Apple software on your Windows PC, you can always install the official Apple Quicktime player instead. When the "But Quicktime Pro" nag screens come up every time you play a video or open a picture file, don't say I didn't warn you.

The two bargain basement options:

Use the included Canon software to convert the files to a less intensive (though more space consuming) codec. (haven't tried it)
Use MPEG Streamclip (free download) to convert the files to a less intensive (though more space consuming) codec. I have tried this, and while it does have a convenient batch more, the process is slow, lossy, (image quality lost) and very wasteful of hard drive space.

Editing: Here's what you'll need:

Windows XP, Vista or 7. Hopefully included on your computer.
Cineform Neoscene (as of 10/12/2009 you'll need the beta build for the 7D) And Mac users, you still need to download the Mac version. $129
Sony Vegas Platinum Edition 9 (the new AVCHD version may work, but I haven't verified it) - $99 MSRP.
A big fat hard drive (but you're editing high bitrate HD video, what did you expect?). A terabyte is around $99 today, so what are you waiting for?

OK, the editing software is under $100. But if you already have a decent computer, we're talking a total of $330 more for everything...you're still well under the price of Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premiere Pro.

The Canon 7D records videos in the MOV file format, also known as Quicktime. The file container is Quicktime, and the codec is H.264, also known as AVC. (though in technically speaking, AVC is a subset of H.264) Think of video files like a box. The file container is the cardboard box, and the codec as the language of the books inside the box. You need to be able to open the box, and know the language of the books to read them. Codecs (short for COmpressor-DECompressor) are the language translators of video files.

What NeoScene does is very quickly convert an entire folder of Canon 7D (or 5D Mark II or Rebel T1i) videos into the Cineform encoded AVI files. Every modern computer can handle the AVI file container. NeoScene also automatically installs the Cineform codec so that your playback and editing software can understand the files. And though the files take up twice as much space as before, editing and playing them back is MUCH easier, and your computer won't crash doing so. Mac users: wipe that smug grin off your face...iMovie can't handle this, so you'll have to buy the much more expensive Final Cut Pro. And even then, you'll STILL want to buy Cineform Neoscene. It pre-digests your video so that it's easier for editors and playback software to handle. (I'm told that Mac users can use MPEG Streamclip to do the same thing for free, but it's much, much slower)

Sony Vegas was referred to me by a couple of the video production guys at Saddleback Church. Mac users have a lot of video editing options, but PC people are very limited on legitimate HD video editors. Vegas has as much video editing prowess as Photoshop does for photos, and to do so at a $99 price is incredible. I'm not going to go into using Sony Vegas, other to say that there's plenty of tutorials on Youtube. I can do high end things like multi-track editing, 3D and rotational pan-and-scan, chroma key, and so much more. You don't get 5,000 cheesy transitions, but you do get exacting control over every element in your video, and the end result is very polished. However, just like Photoshop, it's incredibly unfriendly and intimidating to beginners. Fortunately, you can search youtube for how to do just about anything with Sony Vegas. Be patient with it, and you can create truly top shelf stuff with it. A lot of manual work is required, but the end results are worth it.

If you're the type who wants drag, drop and click through wizards, Vegas is NOT the software for you. Steer clear of Pinnacle software under $100, after three different versions of their Studio software, I just give up. It's just too unstable. Nothing is worse than editing a project for an hour and having it crash. I will never use another Pinnacle software product again, especially after having used Vegas. I haven't tried Premiere elements yet, please leave a comment if you've used it successfully with H.264 video in HD from your camera or camcorder. Of course, you can also check out the granddaddy, Adobe Premiere, but it's well over $600, as are the Creative suite bundles that include it.

Here's some examples of the more modest $99 Sony Vegas Platinum edition at work:

Wedding Day Love Story - a moving slideshow demonstrating the precision and control you can achieve. Every single crop, pan, zoom and transition was hand done. You can have pictures, video and text, all moving independently, as you can see in several of the shots.

Sunset at Salt Creek - a short film of my photo club's trip to the beach. Features video shot by the Canon 7D. This is a more straightforward video which took me a couple of hours to put together, not counting the rendering difficulties described above.

Now that the basic workflow is in place, I hope to bring out even more projects soon.

Salt Creek: My First Video Fusion Project

2009-10-06T07:24:00.000-07:00

Ever since I went to the last OC Smug meeting, I've been itching to do a fusion project. What's fusion? It's the blending of sound, still photography, and videography into a single project. Here's my first HD fusion project.

Watch it in HD here

I was pretty happy with the still photography part of it. Full res versions here.

Sometimes things don't turn out how you plan; they turn out better. Cooper turned to his right just as I was hitting the shutter. You gotta love that look in his eyes.

Once again, the formula for dramatic sunset photos is simple. First, gel your flash, then fudge your white balance. Jim Sakai taught me a new combo: gel the flash with amber (CTO) gel, then set the camera to tungsten white balance. Set your camera to manual exposure, and make sure the sunset looks right:

Then set your flash to manual, and set it to 1/16th. Take a shot, look at the display, and season to taste. In my case, I had to adjust the ISO and aperture two or three times, but I had very cooperative models:

Instant, dramatic color. BTW, no flash diffuser for simplicity's sake; you can get away with that outdoors. Sunlight is hard, so your eyes expect the hard nature of the flash on outdoor shots. You can soften it a little bit, but too much, and it starts looking like you posed them in from of a background.

Got a sunset shot without enough color? Turn it sepia or black and white, then play with curves until you like what you see:

But videography is relatively new to me, so you can tell I'm still a little out of my element there. Way too shaky, and the focus hunted a little more than I'd like. And don't even get me started with how much computer trouble I had trying to edit it on my Windows machine. The funny thing is that the machine that finally was able to render everything together was an HP running the dreaded Windows Vista. We'll try a few more tricks to get the video part of it down. Got a few more in the pipeline, can't wait to shoot some more!

My first full day with the 7D

2009-10-03T11:53:00.000-07:00

Here's shots from my first day with the 7D:

Tough dingy hotel ballroom lighting, ISO 3200:

For all the dentists reading this, that's Lee Culp, renowned dental ceramist, pitching the e4D dental CAD CAM system in at the Hyatt Huntington Beach.

Then they turned the lights down even more, so I turned the camera up to 6400:

Here's Chris Pescatore, a general dentist who uses this e4D system. (yeah, white balance is all off; you should see what I started with... it must have been 2000K with some serious green cast) It's definitely something I'd like to do, once my practice gets busy enough to finance it.

Of course, ISO 100 does just fine:

Thanks to Chris Bishow for sharing one of his local photo spots with me:

Higher resolution versions of these photos here.

One slight bugger:
Lightroom 2.4 doesn't read the RAW files, and 2.5 does with some significant flaws (don't even TRY to recover an overexposed image)
So I'll be shooting RAW+JPEG for a while until they get it sorted out. In case you're wondering, large superfine is about 6-8MB, and the RAW files are weighing in about 25MB each.

I'm got a bunch of video shot, and fortunately, Sony Vegas seems to handle it. I'm gonna need a bigger hard drive...

Full Time Flash Gels

2009-09-23T11:00:00.000-07:00

Correcting your flash color to the ambient light gets rid of those nasty yellow backgrounds. I use amber gels to match my flash with "soft white" lighting such as incandescent and tungsten halogen. Here's my latest DIY flash gels:

I originally got the basic design idea here. The advantage is that these stay on my flash full time. The velcro is double sided (hook on one side, loop on the other), which makes them stackable with each other, and with many other light modifiers as well, including the Honl Grid. You can attach these gels to your flash using the removable Honl strap (no more sticking velcro onto your flash), or my DIY versions: lite and extra strength.

Why do you even need to gel flashes?

Without gel, the flash is more blue (or less yellow) than halogen/tungsten bulbs. Practically, that means nice looking people with dingy yellow backgrounds

With the gel, the flash becomes the same color temperature as the halogen bulb.

White balance the camera for halogen/tungsten. Now the flash works in perfect harmony with the ambient (background) light.

Here's a "real-life" case: our wedding reception, as shot by my cousin-in-law, Veronica Chew. The small room was filled with soft-white, yellowish light. Your eyes auto-adjust, but the camera does not:

As you can see, the available light is quite yellow. You can call that really warm light. Paradoxically, you could call it really low temperature light, because it's 3000K vs the flash's 5500K. (yes, warmer light is lower temperature...I didn't make the rules, I just play by them) Any flash, therefore, would be blinding blue. So we fitted Veronica's flash with an amber gel, which "yellowed" the flash to match with the surrounding light:

Note that the lamp on the left and the ceiling lights up top are nearly perfectly white, and everything is beautifully color balanced. That's because the flash, the room light, and the camera's white balance are matched at 3200K light. If you didn't know otherwise, you'd be hard pressed to tell that flash was used at all. Well done, Veronica!

Real HDR: Pitfalls and Workarounds

2009-09-20T22:23:00.000-07:00

Ok, let me say it: I don't like about 90% of the HDR images I see. The reasons: the halos, the over-wrought, heavyhanded tone compression, and neon crayola color saturation. Here's an honest look at the art and science of making true HDR images:

http://www.diyphotography.net/introduction-to-high-dynamic-range-hdr-photography

Gavin Philips discusses how to use Photomatx and Photoshop to avoid the common pitfalls and shortcomings of HDR.

Exposure Fusion: HDR Alternative

2009-09-17T15:04:00.000-07:00

Did you ever have to stitch two images together? Back in 2002, I visited my home country of Vietnam. I had a Sony Cybershot F-707, a very good camera for its time. By today's standards, however, the color accuracy was horrific (especially reds), and the mighty 5x zoom only got to 39mm wide angle. You simply couldn't shoot wide angle shots with it.

So I took multiple shots and stitched them together to produce a single wide angle shot:

You can't create a wide angle shot from a 40mm lens, so you take multiple shots and combine them to simulate wide angles. Last post, I talked about the limited dynamic range of our cameras. They are limited in how much range from light to dark that they can take, much like my lens was limited in angle. We can take objects that are relatively close together in brightness, but if something is much brighter or darker, it doesn't get into the picture. Just like you can stitch together pictures to simulate a wider angle lens, you can stitch darker and lighter exposure pictures to simulate a wider dynamic range camera. Or more accurately, to simulate the amazing dynamic range of the human eye.

In true HDR, you combine several dark and bright images to create a high dynamic range image. Most cameras have a bracketing feature than takes a middle, dark, and light exposure of the same scene. The darker images give you detail from the brightest areas (the sky, bright windows), the brighter images give you the detail from the darker areas (indoors, shadows, backlit people). The computer software combines all the data into an HDR image with tremendous range from light to dark. (and tremendous file size, also) And then you "tone map" the image to compress that wide breadth color information down to what your monitor can display, what a web browser can see, or what your printer can put onto paper. Photomatix and Photoshop appear to be the most popular tools for accomplishing this.

I still have not made a true HDR image, partially because I'm not usually happy with the heavily processed look of most HDR software. Many HDR jobs have a signature "halo" artifacts around shaded areas. Things look like they are glowing...if that's your intention, fine, but I'm a dentist, and my goal is always to make my work beautiful, natural, and inconspicuous. If nobody suspects that my patient has had any work done, it means I have done my job very well. Likewise, the object of post-processing, in my opinion, is to create a seamless, natural looking result. Some like a dreamlike, surreal looking HDR photography, and I've seen some great stuff in this vein. But it's not my taste.

The finished product of exposure fusion is much more pleasing to my eye. I first found out about Exposure Fusion from Digital Photography School. Yannick's Photo School then released a great tutorial on how to use Exposure Fusion from within Lightroom. That sold me. I'm all about efficiency, and being able to do it within Lightroom, within two minutes, and within three clicks, is amazing.

Here's a series of images I took in Maui at the Black Sand Beach near Hana. We found a cool little cave opening up to the ocean. The light inside the cave is much, much less than the light outside over the ocean. This first image captures the ocean water well, but the cave looks completely dark:

The next image captures the cave bright enough to catch the right wall of the cave, but now the ocean is too bright.

Finally, the brightest exposure catches the left cave wall details, but EVERYTHING else is too bright.

Then I passed everything through exposure fusion.

Then I ran some sharpening and boosted the blue saturation in Lightroom:

You can see the full sized images here, and a mini library of my Exposure Enfusion projects here.

Exposure Fusion is an entirely different approach to high dynamic range situations. Rather than aggregate the color information, exposure fusion uses a copy and paste approach: the best parts of each image are selected, pixel by pixel, into a single fused image. The stuff that's too bright from one image is discarded, and the areas that are too dark are also blended away. The result is NOT true HDR. It's a standard low dynamic range image like everything else you see on the web. But I never wanted HDR for the sake of doing HDR.

I'm not trying to create something that wasn't there, or create a surreal fantasy image. What I'm doing is working around the limitations of the camera's dynamic range by stitching together multiple images. It's almost exactly the same principle as stitching together several photos to make a wide angle panorama. By joining together pieces of the whole, I'm able to faithfully reproduce what my eye saw that day.

If you want to do this yourself, some shooting tips:

Use a very sturdy tripod. Aim your shot, then LOCK IT DOWN
If possible use a remote shutter release cable so you don't touch the camera.
Commit to a white balance
Shoot in RAW - will give you some post-processing latitude if you aim too light or dark.
Bracket your exposures using the same aperture, but varying shutter speeds

If you still find some misalignment (the tripod actually sunk in the sand a bit between shots), use this HDR Alignment Tool v2.0 to align keypoints in your images. Whether you do Exposure Enfusion like I did, or true HDR with Photomatix, these shooting tips will ensure good results.

Happy hunting!

More reading:
http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/dynamic-range.htm
http://www.hdrsoft.com/resources/dri.html
http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2009/02/dynamic-range.html
http://www.normankoren.com/digital_tonality.html

Dynamic Range: The Eyes Have It, Flash Shortens it

2009-09-15T07:38:00.000-07:00

The human eye has incredible dynamic range: Everything from the glowing ember of a snuffed candle in a dark room, to the blinding white light of the sun, the eye can pick it up, even in the same scene. In photographic terms, an f-stop represents double (or half) the light, and the eye has up to 24 stops of dynamic range. We can see things that are 16 million times brighter (or darker) than another. How often have you taken a picture where it looked fine to your eyes, but the camera just loses things in the shadows or the highlights?

Cameras simply don't have the dynamic range that the human eye does. They also don't have the human brain's auto-corrective abilities; Most people do not understand aperture control, exposure compensation, adaptive spot metering, tone mapping, highlight recovery, black level correction, or white balance, but the brain and the eye do all of these things in tandem. It's all so seamless, we take it for granted...until we realize that few cameras can do all of these things nearly as well.

When you're out and about with your camera, you'll run into a scene where there's very bright light, and very dark shadows. Most cameras aim for the middle, and clip off anything that's very dark or very bright in comparison. Ever taken someone in front of a sunrise or sunset?

Pictured above (poorly) is my lovely wife in front of Haleakala crater at sunrise. This is a very high dynamic range situation: the sun is literally a million times brighter than my poor wife. Your eyes see it correctly, but there's NO WAY your piddily digital camera sensor can handle it. So you end up choosing between the sky and your subject. Neither can look perfect. One will be too bright or too dark. How do you fix it? (photoshop is not the best answer) The first thing you learn as a photographer is to light up the shadows with a flash.

What we do with a flash is we bring the subject in the shadows closer in brightness (luminosity, if you want to be technical) to the surroundings. You therefore shorten the difference between the subject's brightness and the background, and the camera can now catch both the sky and the subject in the same image. I used a flash on a separate light stand, but you can accomplish the same thing with smaller flashes (your pop-up/built-in flash) at close range, or bigger flashes (studio strobes). What outdoor flash does is add light to darker areas, so that they are close enough in range to the background for the camera to get both of them. The goal here is to artificially help the camera see what your eyes see for free.

Think of your camera's dynamic range as a doorway floating in midair. Nothing taller can go through, nothing shorter can go through. Everything in your scene has an imaginary height--the brighter, the taller. Changing your exposure settings (ISO, shutter speed, aperture) adjusts the position of the doorway, but not its size. Higher ISO, slower shutter, larger aperture all lower the doorway for darker scenes. The opposite things--lower ISO, faster shutter, larger aperture--make the doorway higher for brighter scenes. Sometimes, the doorway is high enough for the brightest stuff to get under to top, but the things in the shadows are too low to fit over the bottom. Flash is like a booster than lets something too short get over the lower threshold of that imaginary doorway.

In the case study above, the sky was very bright, f/11, 1/100sec, ISO 400* For our analogy, let's say that works out to 11 feet tall. I have to adjust the exposure, or doorway, so that it's 11 feet tall at the top. Since it's a limited six foot doorway, the bottom of the door is 5 feet tall in brightness. Anything that's shorter than 5 feet gets clipped out of the image as a black shadow. My wife is about 1 foot tall in brightness. To get her over the doorway and into the picture, my flash adds 8 feet in brightness, making her 9 feet tall. Now she sails through the doorway and into the picture, properly exposed.

Take home tips:

always bring a flash. SLR users, don't skimp; the good external flashes start at around $300
if it's a built-in flash, put your subject 4-7 feet from your camera. No closer than your arm, no farther than a couple of yards. Use your camera zoom to make them larger or smaller in the frame to taste.
if there's a bright background (ie, subject's shadow is pointing at you), turn on your flash.
if that doesn't work, move your angle away from the sun so that it lights the side of your subject - the view won't be as nice, but at least you'll get the picture.

Flash is the easiest way to deal with a high range situation, but it has its limits, especially in range and power. In my next post, we'll look at how software can combine multiple pictures to capture all the highlights and shadows in a single image.

*(expert readers: yes, I'm technically underexposing the sky by a stop or two, but that's for artistic reasons, and that's a whole other subject.)

More reading:
http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/dynamic-range.htm

Bruxzir vs PFM: New Zirconia vs Old Tried and True

2009-09-08T17:48:00.000-07:00

This is the first comparison case I am doing to test a new crown technology. Glidewell Labs has a new type of crown for back teeth made out of zirconia, a high strength ceramic. Like gold crowns, they are virtually unbreakable, don't require a lot of tooth height. Unlike gold crowns, they are tooth colored.

Many people know about 3M's Lava crowns. They are porcelain fused to zirconia. They are beautiful in the front, but they are expensive to produce, and the porcelain is relatively fracture prone. Few problems on front teeth, but using them on high-load molars is risky; I've actually had a couple of them break myself. In every documented case of failure, (I'm talking the published clinical studies) the outer porcelain breaks off, leaving the inner zirconia intact. So the folks at Glidewell decided to make the entire crown out of zirconia.

The benefit is a lower cost, more conservative tooth reduction (dental colleagues, they're claiming 1mm occlusal reduction), and better appearance than a gold crown. The tradeoffs: harder for the dentist to adjust, harder for the dentist to repolish, and poor translucency. (which is why they are meant for back teeth) I decided to ask my friends at Glidewell to make me two crowns: a PFM, the tried and true porcelain fused to metal crown, and a new Bruxzir, the all-zirconia crown.

Here's the photos:

As you can see, the zirconia crowns hold up very well to the PFM crowns that go on 90% of my patients. And compared to a gold crown, they are hugely better. As a matter of fact, this patient chose the zirconia crown. She said it fit like a glove, and she loved the appearance much better. We agree. We're doing another case to confirm our very positive initial findings.

Putting Light on Real Life: Brian Vander Brug

2009-09-06T20:35:00.000-07:00

The economic downturn is downright ugly. Brian Vander Brug, in a series of photographs for the LA times, uses minimalist lighting to portray economic hardship in a very subtle, deep way.

Photojournalists have to portray life in a way that is compelling, and do so under very tight deadlines. I wish the rest of the photographs from the newspaper article were published here, as I really enjoyed them in black and white form. If you can get your hands on the LA times, Sunday, September 6th, read the front page article "Vegas Dreamers Go All In". (the good photographs are in black and white on page A12)

Vander Brug's photographs use several techniques to bring the economic hardship to life:
1) background: he shows the cluttered, disheveled kitchens and living rooms, giving them just a small amount of blur and a little bit (we're talking a third stop or a half stop) of underexposure. This allows you to see the context of the subject, yet still gives you draw towards the subject

2) expression: no smiles here. The folks in the picture have a very despondent look. They are looking away from the camera. People don't look you in the eye when things get tough. If you want to convey happiness, sincerity, or intimacy, have people look at the camera. When you want to portray sadness, despondency, or grief, take the photo with people looking away from the camera.

3) composition: the faces are placed right where your eyes go to them first - the eye lines are at the upper third. If you look closely, you'll notice that the man is warmer than the background. I don't know if it's intentional or not, but the color shift warms up the man, and cools the background. The result of the color shift is a mood shift.

4) lighting: the photographs are shot in the homes of distressed residents. There's no photo studio here. Vander Brug relies very heavily on the ambient light for the background, and uses some very subtle off camera flash to accent his subjects. The off-camera flash is restricted (only lights the people), diffused, and above all, very subtle. I love it when lighted photos don't look lit. The photographer is taking backlit situations and putting in just enough light so that the camera sees what the mind wants to see.

When I saw these photos, I was very impressed with how well executed they were. They really sold the story of economic hardship in Las Vegas. My wife's expression when I showed her the photographs was "so what?" Maybe I'm making a big deal about nothing. Maybe they'll be forgotten by Monday's newspaper. It's an obvious story in a weekend without bigger news to report. But that doesn't make it any less real, and it certainly shouldn't take away from what are some really good "real life" photographs.

Read the LA times story here.
(though as I said before, the best shots are in the Sunday print edition)

White Spot Removal: MI Paste, No Drilling

2009-07-16T18:07:00.000-07:00

Here's a successfully finished remineralization case. We started with non-decayed teeth with white spots. We were going to do veneers, but we thought we would try this conservative non-surgical approach first. This is what they looked like before the treatment:

Lots of white spots on the cervical third of the tooth (that's the part near the gumline). The reason you get congenital (born with it) white spots is simple: there wasn't quite enough calcium right there to form strong, clear enamel. The weaker, hypocalcified enamel is frosty white in appearance, and often appears in bands or spots. You can also get white spots from too much plaque or too much acid in your mouth. The plaque contains bacteria that make lactic acid, which dissolves the calcium out of the enamel, causing it to break down and turn frosty white. (neglect it longer, and the enamel breaks down completely, leaving a hole we call a cavity)

I'm not a big fan of cutting down well shaped teeth if I don't have to. So we decided to try a protocol by GC America. The idea is simple: if the tooth is missing calcium, add it back in. MI paste is calcium phosphate (what your bones and teeth are made out of) wrapped in milk proteins that make it easier to absorb. You just have to soften the surface of the tooth a little bit to get it to soak in deeper. On the first visit, we acid-etched the teeth, and then polished them with pumice. This breaks down the outer layer of weak enamel. Then we applied MI paste, a white calcium phosphate cream made from dairy proteins, to the teeth for five full minutes. We instructed our patient to apply this creamy white paste to her teeth every night after brushing. We repeated the whole process for four visits, over a period of about two and a half months.

Coffee staining was the only complication. Even though we told her not to drink it, for some, the urge is just too strong. The treatment makes the teeth relatively porous and permeable to the MI paste, but it also makes them more susceptible to staining beverages like coffee and red wine. We had to spend a couple of weeks whitening and polishing to under the coffee. For future cases, I will strongly recommend Ultrabrite Advanced Whitening toothpaste during the treatment period, because it's a strong stain fighter--Consumer Reports said it is the best stain remover of all toothpastes. And it's a buck a tube at Walmart.

Here's what the teeth looked like after four treatments. I blew them dry to show the detail of the enamel. If they are wet (which they usually are), they look just about perfect.

After all was done, I applied a clear coat to the teeth (which should hopefully allow her to drink. There's a tiny little white spot on the right central incisor (#8), but it's usually hidden under her lip, and she really wanted to be able to drink coffee again. If we gave it a few more treatments, we probably would have gotten it all out.

All in all, this was a very successful re-mineralization case. We got rid of the white spots, and saved her from two very expensive (and difficult to match) veneers. A lot of dentists will read this case and think "I could have made a lot more money and been done much quicker if we did veneers." My philosophy is if you drill less, you might make less, but patients appreciate conservative care. After all, it's what I would want done in my own mouth.

Simply Lit Staff Portraits

2009-07-08T16:47:00.000-07:00

So my good friends and neighbors at Foothill Oralmaxillofacial Surgery needed some portraits. I had some time to kill. It was a win-win situation, as far as I'm concerned.

Wanted to keep it simple, so I tried to do the one-light specular shot as described on the strobist blog. I used their cherry wood doors as a semi-reflective backdrop, with hope that the specular reflection off the door would create background separation for me. It kind of did, though it was a little too high, and I wasn't in the mood to fix it.

For inquiring minds, here is the setup shot. The reflector is pinched into the doors of the cabinet. It's a single 550EX flash with a 43" white shoot through umbrella. Metering was a non-event, thanks to my Pocket Wizards, which maintain TTL flash metering wirelessly. If that sounds complex, it isn't: turn em on, hook em up, and point and shoot. It was a breeze! From duffel bags to captured shot in about 20 minutes.

So that took care of the compulsories. Then my friend Dr. Vaughan asked me to do one with the operating light in it. I really like the idea of taking portraits out of the studio look and into the "natural" environment. You give a portrait context. For an oral surgeon, that's the operating room. And nothing says operating room better than a big old operating light.

When you look at this portait, the first thing you should think is "friendly neighborhood surgeon." The setup is the exact mirror of the previous shots: umbrella to the left, reflector to the right.

For the group shot, I put everyone in the conference room. I used Canon wireless ETTL. (because I don't have enough pocket wizards) Master flash on camera and pointed up, back, and left. One slave flash pointed up, back and left. This creates the effect of a gigantic softbox to camera left. Notice the nice soft shadows. I also stuck a flash on the shelf as a rim light, but it looks like it only hit the Dr. Vaughan. Just as well--he's the star, right?

For post process, I did some light massaging in Lightroom. I like the post-crop vignetting for that finishing touch. You can view the rest of the set here.

Thanks for reading. --Vu

Compact Cameras: Bring It

2009-06-06T16:35:00.001-07:00

Compact camera rule #1: bring a camera, any camera
Well, the truth is that you can get great shots with compact cameras, by virtue of the fact that you can carry them with you much easier. My most lightweight SLR and one light setup is still a good duffel bag full of stuff. After my very cumbersome honeymoon (where I brought 20+ lbs of photo gear), I was ready to travel light. I brought just my smaller Canon G10 to Dallas to celebrate my brother-in-law’s MD/PHD graduation. Yes, that’s one more doctorate than me, and no, I’m not envious.

Compact camera rule #2: soft white really means yellow
A lot of times, we forget that when the sun goes down, so does 90% of your light. Our eyes do a great job adjusting to indoor lighting, which is much less bright, and often much more yellow. Such was the case at Myerson Hall, where my brother in law was graduating. It's funny how I can just look at a room and tell you what light balance to use now. You get a smell for tungsten halogen lighting after a while.
If your viewfinder looks yellowish, it's because your brain has adjusted for the yellower light, but your camera has not. Set your camera's white balance to tungsten (it's the light bulb symbol), and watch your photos get magically better looking. For Canon digital elph series cameras, you have to set your camera in manual mode (hit the Func button) to change the white balance. (to me, Canon’s manual mode on their Digital Elphs is really like Program mode on any Canon SLR; it’s not really that manual at all) You get bonus points if you can figure out how to get an amber gel (CTO for photoheads) on your flash, because then your flash will blend with the ambient light, rather than fight it. (that's a whole other blog)

Indoor light is almost always soft white. Here’s a shot taken at the wrong white balance. It’s passable, but it’s just a bit too yellow, and a bit too green.

One defense against wrong white balance is to shoot your photos in RAW. You’ll need more storage space, more memory cards out in the field, but you’ll have more savable photos.

So here’s the next image in tungsten white balance. It could still use a little more color tweaking, but you can see that it’s much more close to natural colors and skin tones.

Compact camera rule #3: brace yourself
On my SLR, I have a great big, low noise sensor, so I can crank my ISO (light sensitivity) to 1600 with very modest noise or grain. On small cameras, you just don't have that luxury. So you have to figure out how to pull off an indoor shot with much slower shutter speeds. There are several ways to skin this cat: tripods, monopods, the empty lung technique. But the simplest is to simply brace your body and/or your camera against a hard surface. The shot below was taken at a very slow shutter speed, with the camera held flush against an armrest.

Compact camera rule #4: pack the charger and battery
I didn't bring the charger. That was a big mistake, because even though the battery read full before I packed it, the camera ran out of batteries within twelve shots. What they don't tell you about handy point and shoots is those super big LCD screens eat up batteries like nobody's business. SLRs have larger batteries, and aiming through an optical viewfinder uses almost no batteries. So it's not uncommon for me to get 1000+ shots from my Canon 40D, and fewer than 200 shots from my compacts if I'm using flash. An extra memory card or two wouldn’t hurt, either…heck, they’re $20 now.

Compact camera rule #5: let your legs do the walking
So I ended up using my dad's camera, the Canon SD1000. It's not a bad for something smaller than a deck of cards. Walking more often, and often getting up close and personal, addresses many of the shortcomings of ultra-small cameras.

Limited focal lengths--so walk more: 80% of cameras are 3x zooms starting around 40mm equivalent at the widest and going to 120 mm. So step back further for wide shots, step in closer to the action for close up shots.
Very slow autofocus when fully zoomed--so get closer: every camera lens, from your $100 blue light special to $3000 professional super telephotos, autofocuses slower at full telephoto. So if you want to autofocus faster, don't zoom all the way forward. Optically speaking, most lenses are at their best in the middle of the range.
Weak flash – the little pint sized flashes aren’t anywhere near as powerful as what people seem to believe. Repeat after me: my pocket camera flash will not light a concert hall. Your flash is only good between 5 and 12 feet. Too close, you wash people out, and too far, and things get dark. Here’s a nice shot close up against a semi-reflective painting.

Compact camera rule #6: anticipate

Slow autofocus--so slow things down: Don't try to shoot soccer, basketball, or moving children with a compact camera. Use them for landscapes and things that stay still. You can do candids if you're out in the daylight. If you're at night, it's best to pose people rather than go for candids. If you're trying to get kids or pets at play, just put that compact down, and buy yourself a cheap SLR at Costco. It's not worth the frustration. The very worst SLR on earth will do a better job capturing motion than the very best compact cameras on the market.

Shutter lag--so learn to time things. You really have to learn to time things. Because there's a second or two to focus , and another half second or so to actually take the picture, anticipation becomes mandatory. Visualize what you want the final shot to look like. Walk around and/or zoom the lens to make it look like that image in your mind. Pre-focus on the person of interest. Shoot just before the moment happens. If you're trying to shoot a moving object, remember to aim slightly ahead of it. Your camera will lag, but your chances of catching the perfect shot increase dramatically when you shoot ahead of time. I have to confess, I was a little slow on the draw on this one.

Compact camera rule #7: practice

The greatest barrier to getting really good in the old days was the cost of film and processing. You also didn’t know how good your shots were until you were back from your trip. Digital cameras create instant feedback AND zero cost for additional shots. Your only cost is time, and a little bit of battery and memory.

So keep shooting, and be sure to evaluate your shots to figure out ways to shoot even better the next time similar situations happen. OK, since it was a family trip, I’ll hope you’ll entertain one obligatory big family picture.

Thanks for letting me share!

--Vu

Diffusers: Size Doesn’t Matter

2009-06-06T11:16:00.001-07:00

It’s about time that someone that challenged the conventional “my diffuser is bigger than yours” myth. While it’s true in studio lighting that larger modifiers (softboxes, umbrellas) produce softer shadows, most small flash attachments cannot hope to soften flash on their own. Softening of light and shadows come from a very large apparent light source; we’re talking window or door sized.

Consider that Gary Fong’s hugely popular Lightsphere, at 6” has about 20-30 square inches of forward facing light surface. A 2x3’ softbox, which is small by studio standards, has 860 square inches—over forty times more diffusion. The only reason that flash diffusers work at all is because they bounce off a MUCH larger ceiling; over 2000 square inches are used easily.

Repeat after me: it’s not my diffuser, it’s the ceiling bounce. This article from the folks at presslite has shot tests to prove it. (warning: they are selling their own clever flash attachment, but it’s more like a mirror than a diffuser) So all you need is a very small white card on your flash, like the better bounce card or my variation, the Versabounce. (pictured left) All the bounce card does is give a small proportion of forward fill. The ceiling bounce does most of the softening work. Lightspheres work wonderfully in small rooms with white walls because it scatters light over the ceilings AND walls, for true wrap-around light. But put it in a big tent or outdoors, and most of your light spills out into the universe, but not your photo.

For that same reason, diffusers in high ceiling areas (or black painted ceilings) often don’t work. And yet, I saw “pro” photographers using ceiling bounce (with no color correction, but that’s another blog post) in an 80 foot high theater.

Take home tips:

Make your own bounce cards. Gary Fong will find someway to fuel his Lamborghini without you.

Point the flash at nearby walls and ceilings for soft light on the go.

Point the flash directly when in wide open spaces – if there’s no wall or ceiling within fifteen feet, you’re probably better off pointing your flash straight forward.

One wire portrait setup: shopping list

2009-06-03T11:20:00.001-07:00

If you want the look of a studio portrait, but the point-n-shoot simplicity for your flash, then this is the setup for you. This magical off-shoe cord allows you to use the flash on a stand with an umbrella, yet you can use TTL flash for brainless shooting. Here's a shot of my wife using this setup:

Shot with a 40D on a tripod, off-shoe cable, and a bare 550EX flash on a Bogen nano stand. I always use manual mode to get the background just right. The flash was set manually, also. Automatic flash is most reliable at close range, and/or when your subject is a large percentage of the picture. The smaller the flash-lit person is in the frame, the less accurate TTL flash becomes. For "waist up" and "head and shoulder" portraits, TTL flash works just fine:

Shot with my Canon G10, a 550EX, and a 43" white shoot-through umbrella.

Here's the cord that makes the magic happen:

Here's exactly how to make your own cord:
http://vutooth.smugmug.com/gallery/7840418_BudHA

But wait, there's more:

At minimum, you will also want a compact light stand, umbrella holder, and shoe mount. If indoors, you'll want an umbrella, too.

Light stands

Light stands provide support and elevation for your flash. For hot shoe flashes, you only need a light duty one. Ideally, it should be durable, but lightweight. It should expand to at least 6' tall and also compress as short as possible.

Bogen 5001b nano stand: - $60 - (pictured) This is the one I use, and it fits into a carry-on suitcase or duffel bag easily.
Buy from mpex | from BHphoto

Lumopro LP-604 stand: $40. Nearly identical design to the one above, generic brand. Buy from mpex.

Umbrella holder:
These sit on top of the stand, and hold both an umbrella and a flash. It also provides swivel and tilt for your flash, even if you aren't using an umbrella every shot.

Lumopro umbrella holder and shoe mount: $15
http://www.mpex.com/browse.cfm/4,9426.html

Photoflex umbrella holder: (pictured) this is the one I use, basically because my local camera shop had them in stock:
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/42160-REG/Photoflex_AC_BSWCP_Multiclamp_with_Shoe_Mount.html

Shoe mount - this is the little block that has a flash hot shoe on one side, and a 1/4" threaded hole on the bottom. Most of the umbrella holders I listed above include a shoe mount.

Umbrella
You can often get away with no flash modifier at all in broad daylight. That's because sunlight is very hard, so your flash can be hard, also. But sometimes you want softer light with that soft falloff. Umbrella is probably the best in terms of low cost, high efficiency (least light loss), easy setup, easy breakdown, and portability. They are relatively poor in terms of control, meaning that the light from umbrellas often spills all over the room, which is why pros still use softboxes. They also have a tendency to blow away in windy conditions. (another reason I don't use umbrellas outdoors so much) A couple of factors to consider:

Size: The larger the umbrella, the more diffused the light will be.
Type: you can have shoot through white/silver umbrellas, or white/silver bounce umbrellas. Bounce is more efficient (less light loss), shoot through is softer looking. There are convertible umbrellas that have removable black outer linings.

Here's a great writeup on the strobist blog on choosing an umbrella.

My umbrella of choice right now would be the Westcott 43" convertible. But you can get the more durable 45" version; it just doesn't compress down nearly as much. My largest is the 60" Eclipse black/silver, which is huge, and definitely for indoor use only.

Smugmug Tools for All Tasks

2009-05-29T21:37:00.000-07:00

Need to move large numbers of photos to or from Smugmug? There are many noteworthy tools that take some of the drudgery out of it. I recently had to download an entire album to my hard drive, but Album Fetcher made it easy, and free. Several months ago, when I decided to migrate from Flickr to Smugmug, another freeware app called Smugglr also made things easy. A complete list of Smugmug apps is available here.

Pocketwizard Mini TT1 and Flex TT5 hotshoe tests: Canon G10 and 40D

2009-05-26T08:24:00.000-07:00

Got the new hotshoe pocketwizards: one each of the MiniTT1 and FlexTT5 (wish I had gotten one of each, knowing what I know now--wife has made me promise no more new toys for a while)

For wireless range, the 550EX is the flash of choice to use with these Pocket Wizards:

http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/content_page.asp?cid=7-9884-9966

"As you can see, of current Canon Speedlites, the 430EX II offers the longest range, but the older 550EX is actually the best of the bunch, owing to the lack of RF noise on either US/Canada or Europe PocketWizard frequencies. Bringing up the rear is the 430EX, which as the table shows - and our own frustrating experience confirms - is a PocketWizard range killer."

Sync speed tests:

The 40D worked out of the box great; I'm getting 1/8000s (yes, you read that right, eight thousandth) sync in 40D's M and T modes, with TTL working! (it's probably pulsed, but still, that's pretty impressive compared to my 1/160s eBay triggers) More shutter speed = free flash power, as I can use bigger apertures. Manual power flash is working, just as fast, too.
The G10 works now, too, but only with the flash in manual mode; G10 doesn't use ETTL protocol at all--it uses focal distance, not preflashes to meter. Getting 1/640s sync, slightly better than the standard 1/500

Canon or Nikon? Which Camera to Buy?

2009-05-23T11:37:00.000-07:00

In the Canon world, the 40D (my personal workhorse) is the best value for body alone for around $1000. The 50D is not worth the extra $200, IMO--that's another lens.

The Rebel T1i (just hitting the shelves) gives you most of the 50D's features (except the rapid fire speed), and adds HD video capture. It's gonna be about $850-900 WITH a basic lens. Be aware that Rebels are not as rugged as 40D/50D class cameras. (but they're also much lighter and a little smaller)

You're going to want to save most of your pennies for a good lens. Canon's midgrade 70-300IS goes for about $600; the pro-grade 70-200mm lenses ($600, $1100, $1200 or $1600) are gonna cost you as much as a date with Jessica Simpson, with much faster auto-focusing, and significantly different maximum apertures.

If your budget is tighter, the 55-250mm lens is a decent bet for under $250
Here's a review comparing the three major Canon telezooms.

The best evening soccer camera probably isn't a Canon at all; it's probably the Nikon D3 - faster autofocus, lower image noise at high ISO:

"Which one do I love more? Can’t say. Can’t say at all. I will tell you this though… when it comes time to shoot the reception tomorrow night I bet you the 5d goes back in the bag because the auto focus is useless in low light. You’d think they could do something about that. The D3 can focus in just about any dark environment I find myself in. The 5d requires you to be standing on the surface of the sun to have enough light to focus. Ok, maybe not right on the surface but pretty close. The AF system on the Canon can not even be compared to the Nikon. In this area Canon sucks and Nikon rocks. The rest seems to be up for debate." source: Zack Arias

Ken Rockwell has some very interesting comparisons of image noise between the Nikon D3, D3X and Canon 5D mark II:
http://www.kenrockwell.com/nikon/d3x/iso-6400-5d-mark-ii-d3.htm
If you don't have any Canon lenses or flashes, and want to spend $2500 on a camera body, pay serious attention to the D700:
http://www.kenrockwell.com/nikon/d700.htm
It can't beat Canon 5DmkII's resolution, but the autofocus and low light sensitivity are in a different league. If I wasn't so invested in Canon stuff, I would seriously consider it.

With that said, my friend Mark owns a 5D mark II a loves it.