Blog Posts

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Gibbous

A student on my evening class asked about taking pictures of the moon. It’s a facinating subject and I think it’s become current with a prominent mobile phone Ad boasting the ability to take amazing moon photos.

I’ve never really dabbled but I know the theory, and my course notes have been updated with the following about taking photos of the moon:

  • It’s very far away so it is very small. We often think it’s larger than it looks as our brains have the ability to ‘focus’ on the details of small things. But to the camera it’s small. You are going to need a long lens (or a telescope)
  • It’s very bright, especially in the night sky so balancing the detail of the moon and anything lit with ambient light (or moonlight) on earth is tricky.
  • It’s moving faster than you think. So if you are going for long exposures to balance out the ambient darkness then you can’t go too long before the moon itself will blur as it moves.
  • Most of the stunning moon images you see on the internet are
    • Double Exposures
    • Dramatically enhanced in Photoshop
    • Just pure fake (two images mixed: one of the landscape and a completely different photo of the moon taken with a completely different lens – and maybe not even at the same time).

Having recently finally acquired a long telephoto lens (the Sigma 150-600 Sport) I decided that I should really try and see just how hard it is to take a nice photo of the moon. And this weekend I was in the garden and notice a nice Gibbous Moon by twilight. Now I didn’t have a tripod at home so this is hand-held, so I had to tweak up the ISO and turn on the OS to keep it steady but I think it’s quite nice.

However, this isn’t just the a long lens shot:

  • Taken at 600mm
  • With a x1.4 teleconverter
  • On a crop sensor camera (Nikon D500) – which is worth another x1.5
  • And finally cropped about 50%
  • Equivalent focal length, over 2000mm! Or around x40 magnification

Now this isn’t my specialist field. I do understand that the ‘large’ moons that we see on the horizon appear bigger partly because the light travels through more atmosphere (also making it less clear) but my understanding is that a lot of this is still pretty perceived so I stick by my belief that most of those dramatic moon-rise photos are faked!

So the question remains, how does a mobile phone, with it’s tiny sensor and lens package create stunning photos of the moon? It warrants more research but I read something that seems to suggest that the AI in the phone recognises that the moon is in the photo and ‘intelligently’ blends in stock or reference moon photos to your scene to make the moon look great. Don’t hold me to it, but it makes more sense than it being better than all the tech I used to create this simple image.

Now I’m off to find a landscape to paste this beauty in to…

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Old Fish

The New Year brings a time to generally sort things out. I’ve fixed up the web site a bit so it’s all WordPress now and works better on mobile devices (still more to do on the content). It’s also the time of year when I think I need to do more personal work. Previous projects include Shooting Nana which in time has become something that I’m very happy I took the time to do.

So far this year I haven’t come up with anything significant for a personal project but the urge to take some more photos has had me outside with some unusual and unused combinations of cameras and lenses. Just to try out, maybe learn something, add a few strings to my bow.

I’ve always been a fan of the Fisheye lens. I have an old 16mm f3.5 manual lens from the early 70s and it’s served me well when the fad has taken me over the years.

So I put it on my usual work camera (the D850) and took it for a spin on Sunday. The results were … underwhelming. I loved this lens. I love the weird and simplistic point of view. But it looks kinda dull on the D850. I’m not sure if it’s picked up some fungus or the newer, higher resolution sensor is just showing it up for what it is or maybe the subject and lighting just didn’t suit it.

Railway Bridge Fisheye. The intention was to show the unusual construction of this bridge over the old railway: the way that the stones are laid radially with the arch and then slope into the arch underside

More testing required and it may be time to look for a more modern replacement – even though I don’t use it that much (and hardly at all professionally). There are a few new Fisheye being made for the mirrorless cameras that look interesting.

So I went back today with the rectilinear wide-angle. These are more complex (and expensive) wideangle lenses which try to correct for the natural distortion that a simple lens like the fisheye creates.

Again the aim here is to try and bring out the unusual structure of the bridge by using the extreme wide angle to exaggerate the geometry.

Railway Bridge at 14mm, fully corrected. The wide angle gets you in to the arch and shows up the shape while the rectilinear lens hold the horizontal lines as straight as possible. The black and white conversion brings your attention to the geometry of the stone work.

Hopefully it’s easy to see the different characteristics of these two lenses. Although the are very similar focal lengths, their rendering is quite different. The Nikon 14-24f2.8 has done a far better job of rendering the details and contrast of the image (in fact this was taken on the Z6 as an experiment and to take advantage of the maximum dynamic range).

I still like the Fisheye. I might put it back on the D700 and do some more testing before replacing my 16mm f3.5 AI-converted lens (which is nearly as old as I am!)

Freshwater Steps. The glory days of the 16f3.5 fisheye: paired with the Nikon F4e
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Work in Progress

I’m in the process of migrating the whole of my web site to WordPress.

And I’m doing it live, in phases so it might look a bit weird over the next few weeks. Please bear with me, it’s getting there. But there were sections that looked pants on your phone and I need to fix that.

So the main site is now be hosted on WordPress. I am steadily moving all the old content over to new pages and a new Gallery plug in. I then need to refresh some of the content – especially the images which go back some years now (but still look good!)

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Gentle Reminders

A reminder of how things were once

I’ve been sending out a few reminders to families who had sessions but not ordered prints.

I’ve never really done that before. I never want to put people under pressure. In fact I try to turn around a proof gallery as quickly as possible and then leave it to clients to come back to me. As with most things in life, everyone is different: some people come back straight away and want it sorted; for by far the majority of people with young families, life takes over and they put it to one side, fully intending to come back it. And in fairness most people do get around to it sooner or later.

Christmas is usually a trigger. Or the anniversary of the event. Or the next child’s communion or confirmation.

And look, I know what it’s like. You should see my ‘to do’ list. So I really don’t mind, as long as they eventually do come back. The one thing I don’t like is lovely pictures taken and forgotten forever.

But I do think that for some people, if they leave it too long, they are reluctant to come back to me for the sake for pure embarrassment. Please don’t feel that way.

So if you are one of the lucky clients who got an email this week, I hope you don’t think I’m nagging or badgering or trying to make a sale. I haven’t sent out reminders before because I don’t want to come across as pushy.

I just got that ‘disc full’ warning and had to kick off my periodic archive process: moving files from my working drive to the archive drive. Generally I keep images not yet printed handy on the working drive so I came across a number of sessions not yet printed.

But every session is kept on archive. It’s a time-consuming process but one which I think is vital for a professional service. Your images are always available, whenever you need to come back to them. Going back to 2008.

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Small and wide

What kit do you take on holiday? Do you just go with the phone and try to do justice with the semi-wide angle and reasonable image quality? Do you bring ‘all the gear’ and have to deal with getting on as hand luggage and lugging it around all the time?

I think I’ve finally hit on the best compromise (for me, for general holiday stuff anyway): I picked up the wide angle lens for my trusty, compact Nikon J5. It’s a very capable 1″ sensor and a pretty neat lens. The camera community never really loved the Nikon 1 series but neither had they anything bad to say about the image quality (or the focusing system – which was pretty ahead of itself). The biggest issue was price – and the second hand market has resolved that one!

So I pretty much took all my holiday snaps with this one combination. I’m a lover of the wide angles anyway and it suits most scenic work and it gives a different perspective to the standard views of most well-known places.

Nikon J5 + 6.7-13mm – the happy walk-around. Image straight out of camera
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Not just me then

Browsing fstoppers I found this post

https://fstoppers.com/landscapes/joys-infrared-landscape-photography-608505

Nice to see someone as enthusiastic about IR as me. Maybe time to dust off the converted D70. I did mine myself a long time ago and is very low-tech by comparison to his Fuji. The big difference with converting a more modern camera is that you can get live-view to show you what the IR is doing. My D70 is more trial and error. The Fuji also has a black and white mode which gives you live preview of what it’ll look like in mono (though there is something fascinating about the colour IR)

St Anne’s at Shandon in Colour IR. Took a bit of perspective adjustment in LR (and still not sure it’s right). Shame the fish doesn’t stand out more.
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Happy New Year

After an nice quiet Christmas Break, it’s nice to be taking photos again. I had a very lovely, short portrait session yesterday in the Hayfield Manor (great location as always and even nicer – or me anyway – that it too is quiet at the moment). And today, with the sun out, I just wandered out of the office with one of my less used cameras and walked the Marina.

I have realised that it’s easy to disappear into the Internet when you are stuck at home: too many gear sites; too many photos of exotic locations; other people’s ‘interesting’ lives.

It’s easy to forget that I actually just like taking photos, and the camera is just a tool that enables that (and one camera or lens might do that better than another).

And most of all, we are blessed to live in Cork. If you care to look, there is something interesting to photograph all over the place!

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Cork in Infrared

St Vincent’s Bridge and Bachelor’s Quay, Colour Infrared

Nice sunny morning yesterday and cloud was forecast for later in the day so I went out early with the infrared converted D70. This camera has a opaque filter installed over the sensor instead of the normal AA filter, so it only uses the part of the sensor that’s sensitive to the infrared end of the spectrum.

Green foliage tends to reflect more IR, blue skies block out a lot so they go extra dark. And the D70 sensor colour sites tend to get a bit confused. Most notably, the jpegs do this browny-black / blue / white feel but the RAW images have a distinctly red hue (of the same capture). Normally I’d do a black and white conversion to normalise all that but the colours are often interesting.

Everything looks kinda spooky. Love the really dark skies.

But although the IR-effect can make everything look more interesting, the image still needs to be interesting to make it work. It’s tempting to take some very simple compositions just to enjoy the IR-effect but really you still need to work the composition.

It’s just that certain elements are different. For example. you can’t let the white grass take over, whereas you’d often leave a good bit of green grass in a shot to balance things out.

Also using the ancient D70 is fun. You’ll constantly read about how new models make older cameras into trash but that’s nonsense. The D70 was a great camera in it’s day. Sure it’s lower res, lower DR, has a tiny screen, is slow and less effective autofocus. But it is by no means unusable and actually works really well for scenic images. It has a very satifying ‘clunk’ to the shutter and there’s something nice about having small files to work with for non-critical work.

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Still Here

Just an update on the current state of Lockdown 3.0

I’m here if you need me. A lot of what I normally do isn’t possible under the current restrictions but like many small businesses I’m trying to keep trading as much as I can.

I have some Commercial work still on: Product Photography, Digital Reproduction and Fine Art Printing can all be done safely without contact.

I am still processing print orders from Family, Communion and Confirmation sessions from last year (and the year before, and the year before that!)

So it’s a good time to look out those proofs and think about finally getting prints.

But I’m not in the office full time. I’m here when I need to be – generally mornings after the school drop (or after I make sure my home schooler is out of bed). So if you want to call in it’s best to phone to make sure I’m in the office when the time suits you – 087 683 8511

It’s no problem coming in to do something or meet you.

Otherwise I’ll be in my pink chair, drinking coffee in my garden – which is starting to spring to life again
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Family Portrait Gift Vouchers

Just in time for Christmas, Family Portrait Gift Vouchers are now available direct from the web site at https://roblambphoto.com/?product_cat=gift-vouchers

I have put the three most popular values up on the site but you can also customise your voucher by adding value in €10 units.

Vouchers are effectively a pre-pay for the a session and include products up to the value selected. Or they can choose to take the value of the voucher as a credit against another product like larger Framed prints, Tryptichs, Storyboards or Albums.

You can of course still phone or email me to get more info on vouchers and purchase them direct from me: 087 683 8511 rob@roblambphoto.com