Rob Lamb Photography

September 3, 2019

Upgrade Ingredient List

So here’s what it took to upgrade my working camera system (in chronological order):

Computer: A new camera will produce larger files. To move all that extra data around effectively I needed more processing power and more memory. Otherwise there’s going to be a lot of waiting around. Now this was actually forced on me with my old one dying but in fact doing this first makes a lot of sense so you’re ready for the files when the new camera comes.
Lightroom Upgrade. I was getting by with an older version with one-off purchase. I need an upgrade for a newer camera RAW files.
New Main Body – obviously. I chose a Nikon D850. Second hand from a large dealer in the UK. Reasonably low shutter actuations and 12 month warranty.
XQD and SD cards. New camera takes different cards. And bigger, faster cards to manage those larger files.
XQD card reader. I prefer to download cards from a reader rather than connecting the camera to the PC every time.
Spare cards. So having got one to start off with, I shopped around for spare cards. With the costs of the XQD cards I’m only carrying limited spares. With the D700 I had a bank of CFs available.
Screen protector for the LCD. I use the thin ground glass, stick-on ones.
Spare Battery. I bought a third party spare which came with a USB charger which allows me to charge at home and at work as a bonus.
L-Bracket for the tripod. The ability to mount the camera vertically on the Tripod is really useful. L-Brackets are fitted to each body so you need a new one for a new body.
Upgrade my 50mm. So this was always my weakest lens (although not a bad one) and the higher resolution and faster focusing of the new camera has shown it up to the point where I can justify the upgrade. The others look good for now but the 50 needed to be changed. Again, take advantage of a good second hand market across the EU. Lots of people buy these lenses and end up not using them much (unless they take portraits professionally).
Battery / Vertical Grip. I used the vertical grip the whole time on the D700 but I am enjoying the reduction in weight not using it on the D850. I rarely needed the extra battery. So I wasn’t going to bother. But for jobs when I’m shooting a lot of head shots the vertical grip is useful. Then I got a deal on a third party grip in the US so I got it just for those jobs where it helps, rather than to be permanently attached.
File Backup / Archive. Those larger files are now eating disc space as well. I Archive all the original RAW files as well as maintaining an archive of the finished client files. I made some changes to the way that works to make it more cost effective per GB and bought more disc space.
Backup / Second body upgrade. Initially I just used the D700 but it’s very different to the D850 (and uses different cards and batteries). As I get more used to the new camera, the D700 is a less effectively back-up / second camera. Ideally you’d buy an identical body as backup but that’s a lot of cash. In the end I bought a D500 second hand. Same cards, same charger, very similar functional layout, same focusing system. Crop sensor!
More cards. My two bodies now use the same cards and batteries so I need another spare.
Another screen protector for the D500.

I think that’s it. For now!

Do I need a couple of DX lenses (including a standard zoom) for the D500? Maybe but I’m not yet convinced. I have an old 17-70 DX which will do and the 17-35f2.8 sits quite well on it too – for the uses I have for it.

Otherwise my existing lenses cover me and are all good. Most have a replacement which is ‘better’ but also is going to cost me considerably to upgrade – even if I sell the old one – and realistically the benefits are pretty marginal. The most obvious is my 85f1.4D which is a little battered and not optimised for modern high res digital but it’s not a main lens (I use the 105f2.8 a lot).

August 22, 2019August 22, 2019

Update Complete

After nearly 12 months, my equipment update cycle is pretty much complete.

My old D700 bodies were still going strong but they were reaching end of life and I decided to go for a controlled upgrade in advance, rather than facing failure in the field (even though I have backups for everything) and having to do everything at once in a hurry.

I also decided to go largely second-hand. With Nikon on a major upgrade cycle itself right now, there is an opportunity to get well looked after second hand gear – from reliable sources – from the previous generation of cameras. That’s plenty for me and the savings are significant. The risks are minimal if you’re careful about who you buy from. Worst case it goes back to the seller or needs to go to repair (so some contingency is set aside for that ).

The best second hand buys need patience: waiting for the right one to come up at the right price. So having time to shop around is also good.

Finally I decided to upgrade and not switch. There’s a lot of talk amongst photographers about switching camera brands – especially to Sony mirrorless.

There’s a lot of good tech there but nothing really I need that I can’t get from the current (and previous) iterations of Nikon DSLRs.

The biggest reason not to switch is the cost of replacing the supporting equipment: I have a lot invested in lenses, flashes etc. The new ones and ones from different manufacturers may be marginally better in specific circumstances but again, is it really worth spending a considerable amount of money to change everything?

Remember this is a business that fundamentally needs to feed my kids. A lot of camera gear is bought on a ‘want’ basis. Much is bought on a ‘might be useful’ or ‘if X happens then I’ll need this’. These days I look at everything from a Return on Investment basis. If I spend €1000 on an upgrade which makes no tangible difference to my client or my workflow, then that’s money I can’t spend on my family.

In the next post I’ll go through the full itemised list of what the upgrade took.

June 28, 2019

See Me

More product photos in the office today. They can be tricky: balancing out white / shiny / transparent materials on a 255-white background.

As usual, the trick is to get as much done in-camera and not rely too much on post production for whiting out the background, controlling / eliminating shadows etc.

But sometimes there just isn’t anywhere to hide – especially when you’re photographing curved shiny things.

In the surface of this bottle top, you have: my main light, the pack which is alongside it and all of the office around the other side. Now I screened off most of the office junk with some black card but in post I noticed this weird reflection.

On closer inspection: it’s ME!!! – my shirt and my hand on the shutter release.

Now I could go back and reshoot with the cable release or the self timer but I think in this case photoshop will do.

Although part of me wants to be immortalised with the product.

May 14, 2019May 14, 2019

Tech or Technique

The last couple of years we’ve had these guys nesting in the roof (no idea what they are!). For the last three weeks the parents have been diligently supplying food to their brood, at times coming every 2-3 minutes to the nest at high speed, banking late and popping into the hole between the gutter and the roof.

It’s amazing to watch. And it happens so fast it’s very hard to photograph.

But could my fancy new camera with it’s super new auto-focus 3D tracking system handle it. Would I be able to work it sufficiently well to make it work. Well worth a try.

Indeed, sometimes they come down the length of the garden, so you get a good look at them coming. It should be possible to pick one up and track it into the nest and fire the shutter when it starts to bank. How hard can that be?

Impossible. When you actually watch them, they don’t come straight in very often. And the vantage point from the bedroom window doesn’t give you direct line of sight down that flight path anyway.

So forget the tech, experience and technique are going to make this happen. Time to start turning off:

Trap Focus.

The AF isn’t going to pick them up early enough to track them. Or at least, I’m not able to get it to and then zoom and hold the frame. But their destination is fixed so I know where they will be when they finally open their wings to bank just before entering the nest – within a certain degree.

So I can manually set up a zone of focus just beyond the nest, reaching back as far as I can and take the shot as the bird enters that zone. That’s called trap focus.

So higher F-stop the more depth to the zone. But it turns out the birds are moving really fast and I need at least 1/1000th of a second of shutter speed to stop the wing movement. So compromise is needed – and a boost to the ISO to make that happen even though it’s broad daylight.

Manual Exposure

I’ve set pretty tight constraints on the exposure now – I need as much depth of field as possible and I need a high shutter speed. And I have a dark bird against an open sky.

So I’m not going to take any chances of the camera not noticing the bird and making the wrong choices. Fix everything with manual exposure and ISO. Keep an eye on the lighting in case it changes (sun coming out or denser cloud) but otherwise manual will do

Tripod

There’s a lot of waiting around here. They are busy but sometimes they do disappear for 5 minutes foraging then come back unexpectedly. This is the 70-200mm lens and it’s getting heavy. But again, they are coming back to a fixed position – albeit from different directions. So stick everything on the tripod and use the cable release to just sit any wait for a bird to come into the frame.

Crop

Having fixed the frame, I need some latitude of error so I can catch a bird no matter where it appears from (they don’t just come up the garden but from both sides and behind sometimes). So widen the frame a bit to give me some margin of error.

Now this is where my new tech finally buys me something: all that resolution means I can crop heavily and still get a decent image.

In fact, I realise that if I set the camera to DX Crop Mode, I still have a handy 20MP but I can now zoom back a little and use shorter focal length (105 instead of 200mm)- and buy myself some more depth of field.

That seems to work well – now it’s the same thing as just pulling back and cropping the larger image but it also saves me some image size.

Timing

Just like good comedy, wildlife photography is about timing.

So now I have everything tied down: when a bird enters the frame in the zone of focus it will get focused, frozen in time and correctly exposed. I just need the bird in the frame doing something interesting.

That takes patience and time and patience and a bit of practice to get the timing of the exposure right.

Just sit and click…

March 14, 2019March 14, 2019

The Right Stuff

Times were tough as a 1980’s Lego Spaceman. Long before Benny shot to cinematic fame, mini-figures where out there surviving against all odds.

In those days, if your head got stuck on tight, taking it off with someone’s teeth was the only way to go. And you proudly bore the scars from finally getting it off.

Fun Fact: in the 1980s we didn’t actually have blue spacemen on this side of the Atlantic: only red and white.

Testing the macro set-up for a product shoot next week: Nikon D850; 105f2.8 macro @ f5.6; single SB-800 flash off-camera with shoot-through umbrella; SB-700 Master unit; Nikon CLS. All Manual.

March 12, 2019March 12, 2019

Detail

I’ve just been updating the slides for the last week of the Photography Classes and I thought I’d share. Last night’s class covered digital images and the whole mega-pixel-mega-shmixel thing: does a larger image mean more detail?

Well no. Having a higher resolution sensor gives the opportunity to capture more detail but only:

If the sensor sites are independent of each other
Your lens can resolve an image to the precision of the size of each sensor site
There is detail in the image you are trying to resolve.

And then you have to ask yourself if you need that much detail. Does it help tell your story? Is it, in fact, distracting?

Anyway, with some data we generated on the course last week, an interesting comparison is now available:

So there are a number of variables at work here: the sensor resolution, the lens (and settings) and even the crop – these are all 300×300 100% crops but the variation in size of sensor makes the crop different in each case. And I would expect the phone in particular to do a little better in brighter lighting.

But the trend is clear and the point is just that putting a 13MP sensor on my phone doesn’t make it a great camera.

I particular in this case compare these to the 12MP of the D700:

This last example has least actual resolution of any of the examples here but much more actual detail compared to the smaller sensors and the crappier lenses.

But also remember that having a great camera doesn’t automatically make you a great photographer.

March 7, 2019March 7, 2019

Going Back

After the thrills & pains of 45MP, I got the impulse to pull out the 6MP D70. Mine has been modified to filter everything but Infrared light. With the sun out and a few light clouds it was perfect IR weather.

And the D70 is still a nice camera which is capable of taking lovely images.

March 4, 2019March 4, 2019

Wants and Needs

So I’m still experimenting with the new camera. It passed last week’s jobs with flying colours – no lost images, so lots to choose from. The colours out of the camera are very good and needed a lot less adjustment to get them to proofing stage.

Lots of image to choose from, so I’m now cropping with no concern for data shortage.

My big concern with all that extra resolution was that my older lenses wouldn’t be able to resolve to the detail of the sensor.

Indeed only one of my current lenses is on the ‘best lenses for’ list of the new camera. Two of my main lenses are on the ‘just about OK but think about upgrading to the newer one’ list.

And there is no 50mm lens on either list. The new Sigma will definitely cut it but not any of the older ones and none of the Nikons.

But rather than going off and splashing on new lenses as well. I decided to try it and see.

Not withstanding this article, which makes a lot of sense (and the reason I upgraded in the first place was that my expectations of my body had supassed my old model). Remember I shoot portraits, most of which end up on web sites, that much detail isn’t really necessary.

In fact I recently had a client asking for lower resolution images to hide all the skin detail on their staff.

So I’ll upgrade the 50mm(s) in due course (might sell some stuff first). For now they are still much better than expected – especially stopped down a little.

The big unknown was the 85mm f1.4 AF-D. Formerly the ‘cream machine’ of pro film glass. I have moved to the 105 for headshots these days because it’s sooo sharp and has VR. But the 85 is handy for some circumstances and the really wide open look is stunning.

Mine is pretty beaten up cosmetically but perfect inside. It produced beautiful images at 12MP but it’s an older body focus model and at f1.4 focus is pretty critical (in fact I generally shot it at f2). The newer 85f1.8G would probably serve me well but before I go spring for that, how exactly would the old 85 get on at 45MP?

Pretty good. Still lovely to use. Still lovely and creamy in the backgrounds.

But is it sharp? Does it focus accurately?

Yep, pretty good. It is possible to pick on this and certainly the 105 is a tad sharper but hang on – who wants or needs all this detail in a portrait image?

I’ll keep the 85f1.4D for now and keep saving for a new 50mm.

February 26, 2019February 26, 2019

New Tech

Technology posts are pretty rare on the blog. Deep down there is a camera geek somewhere and we all love a new toy. But having to make a living as a photographer forces you to examine every potential new purchase and decide whether a new toy is going to earn it’s crust.

And as anyone who’s been on my evening class will tell you. The camera is just a tool to get a good image.

But after a long, faithful and very reliable service, my trusty Nikon D700 bodies are starting to show their age.

Camera technology has moved on considerably but most of the new additions, although impressive, weren’t anything my clients were going to pay for.

But the time has come to move on. After much ummming, ahhing, googling and agonising, I am the proud owner of a Nikon D850.

What I got that I wanted:

Faster, more accurate autofocus (including reliable 3D tracking). Which for me means a tangible decrease in the number of good images that need to be rejected because they are a little soft. Which is great when shooting wobbly kids with blurry backgrounds.
More dynamic range. So already it seems a lot easier to pull back very bright and very dark areas in the images. So shooting in difficult lighting situations gets easier. Again, more keepers in more locations.
More image resolution. Which means more options for cropping in post production. As much as you try to get it right in camera, at times a crop is stronger. But if you want a decent print of a crop, you need more data.
A newer, stronger, more weather resistant camera body. Much less chance of it failing when I need it to perform.

But as well as the cost of upgrading, there are other implications:

More image = more storage required. Realistically I don’t generally need all that extra image but that’s what I now have. Now my workflow needs to cope with much larger files. Putting a session of images on a single DVD for backup isn’t going to work anymore.
More data = slower processing. So the camera upgrade came on the back of a PC upgrade but even then those big files need a little longer to load in all their glory.
Software upgrade. OK I’m a bit lazy/stingy with my software upgrades (but at least I pay for my software). But new RAW files need up to date software.
Lens upgrades. All of my lenses are compatible. The higher resolution sensor pushes them to the limits of their ability to resolve an image. Now I still don’t need all that detail and most of my lenses have actually performed pretty well (despite the web telling me they wouldn’t). But the 50mm lenses were always a little ‘weak’ (I have 4 different versions) even though they take lovely images. I might need to upgrade here.
New fingers. After 10 years of using identical cameras, I need to learn some new tricks to get the settings I need.
New cards & batteries – just more stuff to buy (and have spares)
New L-bracket. I love the L Brackets for my tripod but each is fitted to the specific camera body so I need a new one.

And some other stuff:

Features I don’t (yet) need – and may or may not ever get around to using. Like video (4K no less) and time lapse. Very cool but no idea if I’ll ever use it.
Different colours. I think I like them better. Until I do some more printing I’m not sure.

It’ll get it’s first commercial outing this week. My clients won’t really notice but my life will hopefully be easier. And the D700 will be in the bag just in case…

Better tracking of active kids. Better pulling back of highlights.

January 8, 2019January 8, 2019

More Photography Classes

After the success of the first running of my Photography Class in Ashton, it will be running again in the spring term – commencing 28th Jan 2019.

The course is more focused on images than cameras and aims to help people take better photographs with whatever camera they have in their hand: mobile phone, compact camera or something more fancy.

We’ll cover basic techniques that will improve your photography but much of the course if aimed teaching you to look at images more critically and learning to create stronger images yourself.

Info and sign up is on the Ashton Adult Ed web site https://ashton.ie/adult-education/