Website Changes

As part of a series of new features planned for the main website this summer, the Client Area has now been renamed My Account. For now, this will be functionally the same and I'll be taking a closer look at what this feature offers in an upcoming post.

Piglets and Poo

 

Part of a series on small scale food production. Nikon 14-24mm @f4, focused on the snout of the piggy in the middle. A seriously sharp lens easily outperforming a bagful of wide angle primes.

Post-Tsunami Price Increases Continue

Barely three weeks after I first noted the sharp increase in the price of Nikon professional equipment there appears to be no slowdown, with some dealers now having raised prices by 20% compared with pre-tsunami levels.

Judgement Day For Apple?

In a twist that appears to have slipped by largely unnoticed, the news that Apple's iPhone and 3G version of the iPad are storing detailed location data for subsequent transfer to synchronised computers, broke, in the UK at least, on 21st April 2011. Fans of the Terminator series will recognise this date as Judgement Day.

Quite why Apple is storing the data and what present or indeed future use they intend to make of it is unclear, and Apple aren't saying. It's also true that mobile telephone companies store the same data, but in their case it's held securely behind firewalls. The location data stored on a synchronised computer is visible to anyone with access to that machine.

Although public opinion appears to be mixed, with many people appearing unconcerned, there are clear implications for anyone with perfectly legitimate reasons for keeping regular routes used and locations visited from falling into the wrong hands.

Here's a trip I made to France as stored by my iPhone and recovered from my Mac, showing the route I took by car. Zooming in reveals with fair accuracy, the location of the shoot itself and the hotel I stayed in. My recent trip to Brussels is also shown in the top right of the picture.

Equipment Price Rises and Short Supply Following Tsunami

As anticipated, the price of some professional camera equipment in the UK has risen by more than 10% in the month following the Japan tsunami with some items now in short supply. This means a Nikon D3S now costs a rather eye watering £3,600 from major suppliers. It's worth bearing in mind that "new for old" insurance cover is often based on the price of equipment at the time the policy was renewed and photographers should check that they have adequate cover at the new prices in the event of a total loss.

If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium

Back from a whirlwind visit to Brussels covering a conference on behalf of a client; shooting speakers, delegates and the accompanying exhibition space. I do a lot of this kind of work and believe me, it's challenging. Over the course of two days I shot, edited, captioned and uploaded more than 2,000 images to supply media outlets across Europe and it's always rewarding to watch the download statistics building in the hours, days and weeks following an event.

Conference lighting directors often use very low levels of light. It's intimate, and running the lights at such low levels makes skin glow. The eye has an affinity for the warm light of an incandescent light source reaching back to the dawn of time. For photographers this can mean working at ISO values which would have been impossible only a couple of years ago. Today, we shoot at ISO 3200 and above, confident that the quality will be there, and able to focus on an eyeball in levels of light where it's barely possible to see, let alone read.

I always like to include a few images like the one below in the coverage. This sort of picture  always finds a home in a design somewhere.

Moving quickly from a windowless room, lit largely by the reflected light from a projector screen, I made the first image using the 3000K white balance I already had set on my D3S before quickly dialing in a more technically correct white balance for the second frame. I prefer the first version.

Texture and Tone

Photographers are attracted to the strangest things. A splash of light against a wall, a patch of peeling paint resembling nothing more than an artist's palette; decay. The reminder that something passed by today will not be there forever. Stop now. Make a picture.

From a technical viewpoint, the tonal range of this picture is enormous and although the internet version inevitably compresses the shadow detail, in the original file you can see all the way into the darkest recesses. This is an ISO 800 image, hand held and without any reflectors bouncing back the light from the window. And although I carefully selected the exposure to retain the highlight detail, it's otherwise straight from the camera. No HDR tricks. This is a level of performance you only see from the high end professional cameras which retain dynamic range as ISO increases.

Nikon D3 24-70mm f2.8 lens 1/200sec F8