Archive for the ‘lens’ Category

JetBlack 24 – MarathonPhotos event…

Tuesday, February 8th, 2011

For the 3rd year running I covered the JetBack24 endurance mountain bike event at Del Rio Resort Wisemans Ferry. The last 2 years its rained non-stop. This year it was 35, humid and mosquito infested. At least I could use my gear to its full potential without it getting wet.

The brief from James Rankin at Marathon Photos was to be creative. However, you need to get saleable shots. This means faces and race numbers. No point getting a super creative shot if no one can buy it. I tried to keep it simple this year, with just one off-camera flash and used the PocketWizard MiniTT1, the FlexTT5 and most of all the AC3 Zone Controller. What is all that? It mean full manual power control over a remote flash. If the light changes, you can change with it, while getting the consistency and reliability of manual flash power.

Location 1 – Shot#1

Camera Gear – 1DMK3, 28-300 – 135mm, OSI1000, f6.3 1/160
Flash – 580EX – Camera right behind a tree – Manual power – 1/64th

Location 1 – Shot#2

Camera Gear – 1DMK3, 28-300 – 50mm, OSI200, f4 1/200
Flash – 580EX – Camera right behind a tree – Manual power – 1/64th

Location 2 – Shot#1

Camera Gear – 1DMK3, 28-300 – 235mm, OSI1000, f5.6 1/160
Flash – 580EX – Camera left – Manual power – 1/64th +1/3

Location 2 – Shot#2

Camera Gear – 1DMK3, 15mm Fisheye, OSI1000, f10 1/40
Flash – 580EX – Camera left – Manual power – 1/64th +2/3
Twist the camera on a slow shutter for the effect.

Conclusion
* The 28-300 is a great versatile lens for mountain bike shooting. Its not too bad across the entire range and means I carry 2 lenses not 3 or 4.
* The PocketWizard Manual system works really well. eTTL fails in these events due to the changing light situations and vastly inconsistent results.
* Remote flash is the way to go. Get the flash close to the subject and it uses far less power. 600+ shots all day on one set of batteries, and 1/64 power.

Posted in camera, Flash, gear, geek, lens, Mountain Bike, Pocket Wizard, remote, Sport, Tech, technology, wireless | No Comments »

Paralysis by Analysis – 2009 EXIF analysis….

Sunday, January 17th, 2010

Using iMatch you are able to get EXIF analysis on how you shot over a period of time. I have analysed 2009 to see what trends are developing.

FOCAL LENGTH

While this is not broken down into great detail, it does show that I spend most of my time at the longer end of the focal length area. This is common in sports photographers and longer lenses get you closer to the action.

APERTURE

This was a little surprising to me, I try to shoot really shallow, so to have f5.6 as the clear winner is interesting. I think the marathon and triathlon images (and their volume) are appearing here. I must admit, that after f2.8, f5.6 has always been my favourite aperture.

SHUTTER SPEED

I would have thought I shot faster on average. Again I think this is the marathon and triathlon events that are mostly shot at Tv=500 for me. All the bigger stadium sports I try to shoot at 800 – 1000. At a guess I’d say all the 250th stuff is from flash work.

ISO

Lots of high ISO used here. Some justification in investing is some good ISO noise removing software. Plenty of ISO3200 which is interesting. On the MK3 this was ok, but on the older cameras it was not too crash hot. MK4 is great so I expect this to go up on average for 2010.

CAMERA USAGE

WOW, that’s a lot of shots. Keeping in mind that this is only the images I have on file, not the ones I deleted on camera. “Sport” cameras work more than the “Commercial” cameras. I’d like to change this in 2010, with more commercial shoots.

LENS USAGE

This one is very interesting. It’s a good demo of what you have sitting in the cupboard and never use. I have a few very expensive lenses that did not get used at all last year. No surprise the 70-200 and 400 f2.8 are at the top of the list. These are the standard lenses for a sports photographer.

It’s good to look back on 2009 and see what I’ve used and how I’ve used it. I would like to move more into commercial and advertising, but finding the time to develop that side of my business is hard.

Posted in gear, geek, lens, Tech, technology | No Comments »

Calibrating Canon Long Lenses….

Friday, January 1st, 2010

As with any new camera, I try to calibrate the lenses I use to make sure they are doing what the camera thinks. With shorter lenses I use the Lens Align Pro which works extremely well.


This product does not work so well from say 200mm and longer. The resolution of the camera and the minimum focal distance make it inoperable. So I decided to make my own long lens calibrations system.

Using the new Mark IV, I first wanted to test the 400 and 1.4 I would be using at the cricket next week. As with the MK III I needed to back the focus back quite a bit to get the FOD sharp. At 10 meters, f4, 560mm (400 X 1.4) the DOF is 0.060229 m (9.969976 m to 10.030205 m), so 6 centimetres. The width of the test cards is 6 centimetres. The sharpest image was with +15 far on the camera.

From here I changes to the 400mm by itself. The DOF for this is even shorter with 4 centimetres to play with. I needed to back this off to the maximum +20 FAR on the camera to get it close.

I might talk to Canon to see if they can factory calibrate the lens a bit better. Sure it’s old, but the may be able to tweak it closer for me.

Posted in calibration, camera, geek, lens, Tech, technology | No Comments »