eric_boutilier_brown1

Personally I use a tripod for almost all the images I make, digital or not. I find it hard to compose accurately without a tripod, and if I am perfecting the exposure for an image with a histogram check, having the camera on a tripod ensures that the composition doesn't shift while I work. And this of course leaves out multi-frame stitching...

I've used B+W ND filters for almost a decade, and have never been disappointed with them. I havea Hoya 3-stop filter which does alter the colour a little (slight green tinge)...if you are using digital, it is easily corrected, and likely wouldn't be visible with auto white balance, but if you work with film, or use manual whtite balance, I'd recommend the B+W.

I wore out a D70 at 65,000 frames (Nikon Canada replaced the shutter under warranty), and I was told the shutter block in the D80 is similar, so I would guess 50-75,000 frames before serious issues would arise.

I own this printer and use it for class material etc. It will work nicely on heavier (67lb) paper specifically designed for colour laser printers. It is NOT a photo quality printer though, so it will not look photographic, just like a good laser print of a photograph...

If you are only merging two images, you can do it easily manually with two layers, using transparency to align the two layers, and a mask to blend them.

For myself (who has worked primarily with the nude for the past 18 years), I work with the nude as a subject because of its challenges, and its universality.

 

By universality, I mean that the body is something people can relate to. Whether people are comfortable with it or not, the nude is a body, and everyone has one of those. When I photograph flowers, or architecture, or whatever, there is always going to be a segment of the viewing public who don't connect - they don't get it, as they have no relationship with the subject. But the body, there is always a connection, however comfortable, or uncomfortable that is for the viewer.

 

Then there is the challenge. Every model is different, and brings something new to a session. Even modesl with whom I have worked with for 8 years or more, each session is a new discovery, filled with unrealized potential. This I am sure exists with other subjects (flowers, landscapes, bugs), but then you get back to the relationship between the subject/photographer and the viewer, and the question of the connection between the two parts, and it all makes things work.

 

A chaotic rambling of sorts, but sill, my ideas in a nutshell!

Your only option would be Vistek in Toronto, and that would be expensive...or buy...unless you can find someone on the ground there to borrow gear from.

I you are refering to a card like this http://tinyurl.com/25pksx, then you should notice that it doesn't have the Sandisk logo on it, so while the listing does say Sandisk in the heading, the product doesn't. I only noticed this when I recieved my card, and while it works, it is nowhere near as fast as a true SanDisk card...

I'll do some comparison images for you tomorrow or Tuesday, and e-mail them to you - send me an e-mail at ericbb (at) evolvingbeauty.com and I'll send you some JPEGs! What focusing distance were you thinking of?

I have the 80mm Hartblei, and was VERY impressed with the build of it, and with the flexibility. The small frustration is that the performance wide open is only fair...and for what I plan to use it for (shallow selective focus) I plan to use it wide open. When stopped down to f/5.6 it is quite nice, not up to top of the line glass, but the price isn't either. You can use tubes with it, but it does get somewhat limited by the movements then...

I've been doing multi row stitching for about four years now (2003-7), and while a little labour intensive, I view it as very much worth the effort. While many of the images use 2-6 images, I also have frequently made multi-row stitches using 20-50 frames, with the largest image I have made being in the 80mp range.

 

Stitching is easier with longer lenses and panoramic tripod adaptors (I use a Nodal Ninja for some of my stitching - www.nodalninja.com), but I have stitched with lenses as wide as 10mm, and even hand-held (not recomended, but in an emergency, it will work. On my website, I have a short blurb on stitching, but it does involve nudity, so it might not be of interest. The direct URL is http://www.evolvingbeauty.com/general/tech/digital_res_stitch.htm

I frequently use a 10 stop ND filter on my DSLR, with great sucess...however, you have to check your math.

 

If you are photographing on a sunny day @ 100 ISO, your exposure would be around 1/400 @ f/8 (assuming you do not want diffraction to lower you image quality) - so 13 stops from that would give you 8s exposure...3 full stops shorter than your 2 minute exposure. Now if you want to take the photo on dull days (total cloud cover) you'd be able to hit a minute...or if you stop down to f/22, but the loss of sharpness from diffraction will be noticable...

I replaced the filter with a $10 filter from Fisher Scientific, with great results (the conversion was actually done by Nikon Canada). The resilts were WAY above what I expected, so I doubt a super expensive filter would be necessary!

Depth of field is largely controlled by your focal length, and your aperture, with movements being used to adjust where the depth of field falls within the three dimensional space of your image. The idea situation would be to start with a long lens with a larger aperture (so on a 4x5, perhaps a 300mm lens, with an f/5.6 lens). Then, if you had a row of trees from left to right, and wanted one in focus, you'd work at f/5.6 or f/8, and use a lens swing to issoloate one tree in focus. The area in focus will move across the foreground infront of the tree though...

Your web designer should be able to tell you exactly what he wants, but the real issue is that you are confusing print images and web images. There is no DPI online, so you could set your images to 10 dpi, or 2000 dpi, and they would still display the same size.

 

The real issue is that you are sending your designer images that are too largher (4.5x6 @ 300 dpi gives images that are 1350x1800 pixels in size). These the designer is resizing (down to something that will fit in one screen online, perhaps 800x600 or smaller), and then resaving, and that is where your quality loss is happening.

 

You should ask your designer what size in pixels he wants the images, and then resize your images to that size. And then experiment with what size file (KB) you will accept as good enough. Always saving at best quality will yeild very large files, whihc will slow down viewing the images. You want to use compression to decrease the image size, but you want to do it carefully to avoid compression issues.

 

When I save work for my site, I do not post anything larger than 30k in size (600x450 pixels max size), but I also manually adjust the compression of each image to yeild the best quality image (up to 30k in size).

There are several photographers using IR converted 5D cameras, with great sucess. THey can be converted through Life Pixel http://www.lifepixel.com/

As long as you focus carefully (and for aerial shots, this wouldn't be much of an issue), you should be fine working wide open. Some of my favorite images were made with some of the lenses you mention at wide-open...if fact I bought the fast Nikon f/4 explicitly to use wide open...and G Clarons are nice and sharp wide open, if I remember correctly.

 

And, as you point out, you nee much less coverage on 6x12, so that issue also is minimized.

 

Best of luck!

If you would e-mail me at ericbb at evolvingbeauty dot come, I will send you an IR RAW file, or several if you wish.<div></div>

I use CS2 with a AMD Athalon processor...

I have printed through both Lulu and Blurb, and can make a couple of comments.

 

Lulu's product is larger (8.5x11) but only (unless things have changed) softcover. They are quite reasonable in price, but their quality reflects this...reasonable. Not photo book quality, not magazine quality, but definatly good enough...for the momey. I have sold several hundred Lulu books for a resonable price ($25), and have only recieved one complaint about the quality, which was addressed by Lulu. There are specific issues about printing B&W photos through Lulu, and their colour accuracy is not...the image quality is just nothing to rave about, but for the price, it is a good value.

 

Blurb is definately a cut above Lulu. They print smaller (8x10), but the actual print quality is quite good - I have some photo books that are lower in quality than Blurb books, though I also have some higher. They do both hard and soft cover, but for the $5 difference, I wouldn't bother with the soft cover. The issue is price. To make the same % margin as I do with the Lulu book, I have to charge about 2.5-3x as much. This is because a) the Blurb book is more expensive ($35 for a book that would cost $15 through Lulu), and b) Blurb does not have a bookstore that permits mark-up by the seller - this means to sell a book with profit, I have to buy it myself, pay to ship it to me, and then ship it to the buyer...thus double shipping. >>> I stand corrected - apparently now you can mark up your books in the Blurb Bookstore, so this issue MAY have been done away with...until I try it, I can't say how it works...

 

So, I plan to use both Lulu and Blurb for my productions; Lulu for a series of larger (200-300 page) books, just for the lower price ($45ish), and Blurb for smaller (120-160 page) high-quality books at a higher price ($60-75ish).

 

Hope this helps in making your descision...

Hmmm...I find this a most interesting question, as an overcast day is (in my opinion) the perfect lighting for portrait photography. In fact, I would (if one had a choice in these things) never photograph on any day BUT an overcast one, almost regardless of the subject.

 

But setting that asside, how do you get sharp images with delicate light? Sharp lenses, accurate focus, selective depth of field. If your subject is in focus, and the background out of focus, than the image will have life, and your subjects will look sharp. If you have a fast lens (f/1.8) you can get wonderful differential focus, and working with that to show both in and out of focus in the same image is definately the way to emphasize sharpness.

 

Fashion photography takes places in LA, Miami and Milan...why? Warm all year round, lots of sunshine...and what do they do, use diffusers all around the models to soften the light - 3/4 of the Sports Illustraded Swimsuit Issue photos are made with soft light, because it is the most flattering light to work with!

 

Take a look a classic fashion photos - they frequently are with soft light (be it from overcast light, or reflectors...to show but two classic examples (both famous images):

 

Richard Avedon, 1955 - overcast - http://www.garfnet.org.uk/new_mill/spring98/jpegs/avedon.jpg

 

Peter Lindbergh, 1989 - overcast

http://www.garfnet.org.uk/new_mill/spring98/jpegs/lindberg.jpg

I have a D80, and have experianced something odd on the memory card side. I have a 2gb Ultra II card, and when the buffer is full, it takes about 5 seconds until I can take the next image...but I also have a small TransFlash 1gb card from my cellphone...and it is more than 2x faster, when in the Transflash adaptor in the camera...about 2 second to the next image with a full buffer. This drives me crazy, as the 1gb transflash cost me less than half the Ultra II, and it's faster...go figure. You can get 4gb transflash, but a) it is more than a 4gb SD cardm and b) I can't imagine dropping one in the field (especially on grass) and ever finding it again...SD cards are small enough already...

Wow can you tell I'm tired...sorry for all the typos...

I can's offer you a solution to the problem (I too have this issue with two of my monitors - I have basiclaly had to not calibrate them, as the brightness), but there is something else that you should know about LCD monitors. Almost all LCD monitors available today are 6 bit, meaning that they render only 262,000 colours, and only simulate 16.2 million colours through dithering. Compare this to a CRT which can show 16 or even 323 bit colour.More information abotu this can be found at http://compreviews.about.com/od/multimedia/a/LCDColor.htm

 

The only true 8 bit LCD monitors on the markert are prohibitively expensive and ONLY 8 bit, meaning that a $200 CRT still out permforms them for colour...

 

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news...the real issue is how hard it is getting to get a good graphics CRT...eeks.

Thanks for taking the time to create these, there are excellent and most useful!